Chapter 79: Cold ---Kael sat in front of the fire, staring into it as if the flames could explain why the silver-haired woman across from him wouldn’t stop staring at him like a particularly interesting ghost.‘She’s still staring at me,’ he thought, trying not to meet her eyes again.The cave was quiet except for the occasional crackle of burning wood. Night had fully claimed the forest outside, leaving only the trembling halo of the campfire. Orin seemed calmer now, the madness in his eyes cooled into something that almost resembled rest.But Astraea... she was something else entirely. A presence that shouldn’t exist. A fragment of his past wearing human shape.Kael could feel the connection between them — not imagined, not metaphorical, but stitched through the soul like a needle through scar tissue. The memory she awakened in him was too vivid to dismiss, yet too incomplete to understand.When he finally looked back, sh

Chapter 81: Coffin Beneath the DirtKael moved through the uneven hills with the careful irritation of a man who knew exactly where the problem was and deeply resented that it existed at all, his awareness stretched across the terrain as clusters of hostile red marks burned patiently on his mental map, all of them gathered together like idiots waiting to be scolded, and he made absolutely certain that no curious soul or well meaning hero was tailing him because this was personal, messy, and very much a one man inconvenience that he intended to finish without witnesses.The land itself seemed wrong the closer he drew, the ground rising and falling in shallow waves as if the earth had once tried to escape and failed, and when the first shapes revealed themselves, crawling out of shadow and rot, Kael felt that familiar, tired click of recognition settle into place because these things were not shadows, not truly, but imitations stitched together from death and bad dec

Healing SystemC83: Sunlight“She seems a bit weird,” Kael thought with the quiet exhaustion of someone who had long since accepted that reality around him had a habit of behaving like a smug cunt with a sense of humor far sharper than his own, as he walked at the front of the path while Astraea followed a few steps behind him, her presence light yet impossible to ignore, like a thought that refused to finish forming.She had watched the entire fight earlier with an expression so casual that it unsettled him far more than panic ever could, because indifference in the face of impossible violence usually belonged to gods, monsters, or systems that pretended they were not enjoying themselves.“Astr,” Kael started, turning back toward her with the intention of asking something harmless, something human, only to stop mid breath when he noticed that her eyes had once again lost their focus, drifting past him and through the world as if she were looking at so

C85: Falling Red[Jace’s POV]Four days had crawled past like a bad joke that refused to reach a punchline, and Jace felt every miserable second of them as he stepped into the classroom with the same bored stride he used for everything that failed to surprise him anymore, because Kael had not shown his face once during that time and, while being late was practically a personality trait for him, vanishing entirely crossed the line from annoying into unsettling.It sat wrong in Jace’s head, like a spell miscast by an amateur who forgot a sigil, because Kael hated this place with the same passion Jace did, yet he always came anyway, if only to glare at the walls like they personally offended him.What made it worse was the silence from Maren, who usually leaked concern through her posture even when her mouth stayed shut, and that quiet pressed against Jace’s nerves as he dropped into his seat and stared ahead while the classroom filled with the low b