Chapter : 627

She sat slightly apart from the others, her posture straight, her focus absolute. The simple, navy-blue Academy uniform could not diminish the quiet dignity that radiated from her. She was listening to Master Horatio’s lecture with an intensity that set her apart, her brow furrowed in concentration, her lips slightly parted as she absorbed every word. She was, he recognized with a professional part of his mind, a truly gifted student.

A familiar pang, a dull and heavy ache of grief and guilt, resonated in his chest. It had been nearly a week since their tense, awkward apology in the tea shop. He had replayed the conversation a thousand times in his mind. Her initial fear, his clumsy explanation, her hesitant empathy, and then, her final, quiet admonition. “Your focus belongs to your living wife, Lady Rosa.”

The words had been a slap of cold, hard truth. She was right, of course. He, a man wrestling with cosmic threats and political intrigue, had been schooled in basic decency by a teenage vegetable seller. The thought was both humiliating and profoundly humbling. He had resolved to keep his distance, to be nothing more than the impartial professor she deserved, to never again let the ghost of Anastasia cast its shadow upon her.

Yet, he couldn’t look away. Watching her now, so focused and so alive, he saw not just the face of his lost love, but the fierce determination of a young woman striving to build her own future. He felt a strange, protective pride in her. He had inadvertently endangered her by making her a vulnerability; the least he could do was ensure she had the opportunity to flourish in this place.

“The bond between a user and their spirit is a sacred trust,” Master Horatio’s voice drifted up, thin on the wind. “It is not a tool to be commanded, but a partner to be nurtured. The first step is not power, but control. You must learn to manifest a stable, low-energy form. No flashes of power, no dramatic displays. Just a quiet, steady presence. Show me a wisp of your spirit’s essence, no larger than your thumb.”

A few of the students, the scions of powerful noble houses, managed to summon small, flickering motes of light or shadow. Most struggled, producing nothing more than a faint shimmer in the air. Airin closed her eyes, her face serene. A small, perfect, and intensely pure sphere of golden-green light, the color of new spring leaves, bloomed above her palm. It was stable, calm, and radiated a palpable aura of life and healing.

Master Horatio gasped, his professional calm breaking for a moment. “Magnificent, Scholar Airin! Perfect control! A textbook example!”

Lloyd smiled faintly. A prodigy. Valerius and the King had chosen well. Even if she thought him a creep, he had to admit her talent was undeniable. He felt a flicker of satisfaction, a sense of rightness in the world. Here was a girl with a true gift, being given the chance to nurture it. His world of secret wars and soul farms felt a million miles away. For a moment, watching the peaceful lesson unfold under the warm sun, he felt a sense of normalcy, a quiet hope that perhaps not everything in his life had to be a conflict.

It was precisely at that moment that the world went wrong.

It wasn't a sound, not at first. It was a feeling. A wave of profound, unnatural cold washed over the garden, a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It was a psychic chill, a spiritual pressure that was the antithesis of the life magic Airin had just manifested. The vibrant green of the lawn seemed to gray slightly. The brilliant red of the rose bushes dulled. A wave of crushing, debilitating weariness settled over everyone in the garden, a bone-deep exhaustion that made even breathing feel like a monumental effort.

Then came the sound. A low, discordant hum, like a thousand broken tuning forks, that vibrated not in the ears, but directly in the soul. It was a sound of wrongness, of decay.

Lloyd’s blood ran cold. The professor, the industrialist, the haunted widower—all of them vanished. The Major General snapped to full alert. His eyes, now cold and hard as flint, scanned the perimeter of the garden. He knew this energy. It was a curse. A powerful, wide-area debilitating curse. This was not a random event. This was an attack. And it was aimed directly at the class on the lawn.

Panic erupted on the training lawn. The first-year students, moments ago basking in the sun, were now pale and shivering, clutching their heads as the dissonant hum intensified.

Chapter : 628

“Stay calm, children!” Master Horatio shouted, his voice strained. He raised his staff, its crystal tip glowing with a faint, protective light, but it was like holding a candle against a tidal wave. The curse magic was too potent, too pervasive. It seeped into everything, a toxic fog that his simple warding spells could not repel. “Form a circle! Focus on your cores! Resist it!”

His words were futile. The students were too young, their control too fragile. They were like seedlings in a hurricane, their fledgling spiritual energies flickering and threatening to be extinguished by the oppressive, life-draining aura.

Lloyd remained at his window, his body perfectly still, but his mind was a whirlwind of cold, tactical calculations. He tracked the source of the curse, his enhanced senses cutting through the chaos to pinpoint its origin at the far edge of the garden, near the old stone wall that bordered the Whisperwood.

Amateurish, a part of his mind noted with disdain. A wide-area curse is a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. It announces your presence to every powerful mage in the vicinity. This isn't an assassination; it's a declaration.

His gaze swept back to the lawn, his focus narrowing with chilling intensity on one person: Airin. The curse seemed to press down on her more than anyone else. The vibrant, life-giving aura she had projected moments before was gone, replaced by a pale, trembling fear. Her face was ashen, her breathing shallow. The attack wasn't random. It was targeted. The entire class was just collateral damage. The true objective was her.

Why? The question burned in his mind. Was this related to him? Was she being targeted because his enemies had discovered his weakness for her, the ghost of his past? No, that was arrogant. His public breakdown was recent; this attack felt more planned, more deliberate. Then it was about her. The Princess’s Scholar. An attack on her was an attack on Princess Isabella, a direct insult to the Royal Family.

The pieces began to click into place with terrifying speed. This was political. This was a message. And the messenger was about to make his entrance.

As if on cue, a figure materialized from the shadows of the old wall. He didn't walk; he seemed to coalesce from the oppressive darkness itself. He was tall and clad head to toe in black, interlocking plates of armor etched with jagged, glowing runes of a sickly purple hue. The armor was angular and cruel, designed to inspire fear. On his chest, emblazoned in blood-red, was a crest Lloyd recognized with a jolt of ice-cold fury: the stylized, snarling wolf’s head of the Altamira dynasty, the ruling family of the rival kingdom of Eldoria.

The Curse Knight. A legendary and feared tool of the Altamiran military, a warrior whose very soul was bound to a powerful curse spirit, making them a living plague on the battlefield.

The knight took a slow, deliberate step onto the pristine lawn. The grass beneath his sabatons instantly withered, turning black and brittle. He moved with an unnerving, silent grace, the debilitating aura rolling off him in palpable waves. He ignored the cowering students and the struggling Master Horatio. His helmeted head, a featureless visor of polished black steel, turned and fixed its unseen gaze directly, unequivocally, on Airin.

“I have come for the vessel,” the knight’s voice boomed, a deep, resonant sound filtered through his helmet, carrying an echo of grinding tombstones. It was a voice that promised pain and despair.

Airin let out a small, terrified cry and stumbled backward, her legs giving way beneath her. She fell to the grass, her eyes wide with a primal terror that lanced through Lloyd’s heart like a shard of ice.

Lloyd’s hand clenched into a fist, his knuckles white. The urge to act, to summon Fang-Iffrit and incinerate this monster where he stood, was a roaring inferno in his gut. But he couldn’t. He was Professor Ferrum. To reveal his power here would be to destroy his cover, to expose himself to the King, to the Headmaster, to everyone. He would become a bigger anomaly than he already was, a problem that would invite scrutiny he couldn't afford.

He was trapped by his own persona, a prisoner in a cage of his own making, forced to watch as a predator stalked its prey. He gripped the stone windowsill, his Void power pulsing just beneath his skin, a caged beast rattling its bars. He had to wait. He had to trust that the Academy’s own defenses would respond. He had to wait for the right moment, the perfect moment of chaos, to intervene.