CHAPTER 66: _ AWAKENING CEREMONY (WALKING GODDESS)

The air punches out of the room at Grayson’s absurd declaration. For one surreal second, the students are caught between laughter and terror, not sure which direction to lean. The idea is absurd to them. But also terrifying. Because how else do you explain the impossible?

Morgan’s grin splits wider. He slaps his brother’s shoulder like Grayson just unlocked a chest full of gold. "Yes! Exactly! Don’t you see? It makes sense. She never fit. She never made sense. She’s been the puzzle piece nobody wanted to touch because it didn’t belong to the box we thought we were building."

The back rows echo like parrots.

"The Goddess walking among us?"

"Morgan Bellamy is a genius!"

"He’s so right, how else can you describe this?"

Amias rolls his eyes, unable to believe everyone is buying into the reverence.

"If she were a goddess," Morgan continues grandly, "then we’re in very deep trouble. Because we’ve been bullying her." His grin is wolfish, but there’s a shadow there too. "And you don’t bully a goddess. Not unless you want your lineage burned out of the history books."

Grayson hits his own chest, feigning collapse. "I bullied a goddess!"

Amias tears his gaze away from his ridiculous brothers and stares at Heidi who stands frozen. Since everyone on the stage seems too dumbfounded to do a thing, the speculating students wouldn’t stop throwing the assumptions around.

"Don’t be ridiculous." A voice suddenly interjects, loud and clear.

Daphne stands with her chin tilted at an angle of righteous fury. Her lips curl as though the very suggestion of Heidi being special is an insult to her bloodline.

"She’s not a goddess," Daphne snaps, and her voice is pitched just high enough. "She’s not special. She’s a fraud, and you’re all so desperate for a spectacle you’ll lap up anything."

Amias arches a brow. There goes Darien’s intolerable sister rambling again. As much as Amias likes Isolde, he can’t stand Daphne. She’s every shade of annoying. The girl is a bloody snitch, and Luna Inés’s literal spy.

She reports everything she sees and hears to her no matter how much she promises not to—which makes Amias’s contempt for her even greater. Isolde on the other hand, is a sister given to him by Darien’s mother.

Now, Daphne’s words fall like stones into the churning crowd. Students twist in their seats to see her and listen. Her followers, the ones who orbit her like bees around sugar water immediately straighten.

"The machine must be faulty!" Daphne declares, pointing toward the wreckage. "That’s what happened. It’s faulty. Do you hear me? It’s faulty!"

The word faulty spreads like a virus. Faulty.Rigged.A trick.

"I mean, look at it!" Daphne continues, gesturing dramatically. "It’s already falling apart. You saw it rattling. You saw the way it exploded. That’s not strength, that’s cheap craftsmanship!"

Her school fans leap onto the chant like it’s the only raft in a storm.

"Rigged! Rigged! Rigged!" they bellow, their voices rising, bouncing off the walls and creating a rhythm that drowns out the whispers of awe.

Amias doesn’t move.

His fingers are still clutching the edge of his seat, knuckles pale against the velvet armrest, but otherwise he looks carved from stone. His face remains stoic. His countenance remains detached. Inside, however, his mind is anything but calm.

That machine can’t just... break. Not like that.

The striker isn’t a toy. It isn’t some cheap carnival test of strength, the kind where village men flex their arms, swing a mallet, and try to prove who’s the bigger idiot. This is enchanted steel, reinforced with layers of wards and runes old enough to outlast packs. It was formerly purchased from a group of sorcerers decades ago.

History had it that the Alpha who purchased the striker gave his mate to the sorcerer who was obsessed with her as a price. That’s how valuable and magically infused it is.

Generations of Alphas have relied on it to measure their warriors, to remind every trembling pup where they stand in the hierarchy. It isn’t supposed to budge—let alone rupture into shards of molten fire like it’s just witnessed a star being born.

Unless...

His jaw tightens. Unless it’s faulty.

That’s the first rational thought that fits. It must be faulty. A crack in the runes. A miscast enchantment. Because the alternative, that a girl barely two weeks into her life as a wolf, a girl who still stumbles over her own feet when confronted by seniors, a girl whose heartbeat races like a frightened rabbit’s every time he looks at her... could shatter it?

Impossible.

Not unlikely. Not improbable. It’s Impossible.

He closes his eyes for the briefest moment, but the afterimage still burns there; Heidi with her hand still stretched, her body lit by the glow of the striker’s demise, eyes round as if she can’t believe it either. He can’t scrub it away.

Amias exhales slowly. Faulty. It has to be faulty.

Because he knows power. He knows what it takes to even dent the striker. The striker wasn’t something men could break since it was not enchanted with manly power but that of the Otherworld.

Not men, wolves, or even Alphas can break down the machine.

And yet... Heidi. He exhales slowly, forcing his lungs to move against the crushing suspicion that weighs on his chest.

If Darien, with his brilliant wolf-fire, and Amias himself, with his physical might, hadn’t been able to do more than hit the highest point of the machine like that boy earlier with the Alpha’s wolf, then how does a girl who has barely awakened her wolf reduce it to rubble?

It doesn’t compute. Unless... Unless the striker was faulty.

He forces that explanation into the forefront of his mind like a shield. Faulty. The runes must have worn thin. The enchantments must have faltered. Magic is powerful, yes, but even magic has cracks if it’s not renewed.

Because the alternative?

The alternative is that Heidi—the girl who, two weeks ago, couldn’t even shift, has more raw power than the Alpha himself. The thought is so absurd he nearly laughs. A low, humorless sound slips from his chest. No. Impossible.

He shifts in his seat, deliberately mimicking Darien’s casual posture. His hypocrite of a brother has already relaxed on his chair, with fingers stroking his beard and wearing that annoying faint grin screams: I’m enjoying this circus more than air itself.

Fine. Let him.

Amias folds his arms across his chest and decides to wait. To sit back and see how this storm ends. Because that’s the thing about storms. They always end. Whether they leave wreckage behind... well, that’s the part he’s interested in.