From Trash to Their King

He was Called, 'Master'

He threw his entire body straight through the narrowing two-foot gap of the giant iron gates, just as the heavy anti-trespass runes flared to seal the lock. He tumbled violently across the courtyard stone, crashing onto his knees right at the feet of the shocked perimeter guards.

The surrounding students, who had just begun to disperse back to their warm dormitories, halted in utter disbelief.

“Did he just come back?’ Noah shouted, pointing at Kelvin and breaking into a loud, mocking laugh.

“The trash actually crawled back inside. Did he miss the taste of my boot?” Alaric scoffed 

“He really is a brainless pest” Seraphina giggled, shielding her mouth with her silk-gloved hand as Chloe laughed hysterically beside her.

Dean Martins stopped dead in his tracks, slowly turning his tall, crimson-robed frame around. His sharp facial features contorted, transforming from mild boredom into pure, terrifying indignation

 “You dare step foot inside these sacred gates again, insect?” Martins spoke, his voice carrying a suffocating pressure.

“Pay me, please” Kelvin bellowed, his voice trembling violently with a volatile mixture of unshed tears and unadulterated, raw hatred. He pushed himself up, pointing a bloody, trembling finger straight at the grand Arch-Mage.

 “It is the 27th of the month and you owe me three months of cleaner's wages. Give me my money so I can leave”

The entire courtyard went dead silent for a fraction of a second due to the shock his words sent to their bodies, the sheer absurdity of his demand hanging thick in the heavy air. Then, the silence exploded into a deafening, hysterical chorus of collective laughter from hundreds of noble students.

“Wages? The non-magical parasite wants a salary? That's amazing!” Seraphina shrieked, clutching her stomach as tears of laughter leaked from her eyes. 

“He thinks his wretched, useless existence was worth money. He had no idea that he supposed to be paying us for letting him breathe our air” Chloe mocked, clapping her hands in delight

Dean Martins’ face turned an unhealthy, dangerous shade of deep crimson. His amber eyes flared with lethal causing the air around his head to visibly warp. To have a non-magical worm, a creature lower than a street rat publicly demand coin from an Arch-Mage in front of the entire student body was a catastrophic humiliation to his pride.

“You insolent, worthless, arrogant worm, you dare demand coin from me? You dare insult the ancient honor of this academy with your filthy existence?” Martins whispered, his voice dangerously low, vibrating through the cold stone beneath their feet. He swept his arm out, his glowing wooden staff whistling through the air as he pointed it directly at Kelvin's face.

“Guards!” Martins commanded, his voice echoing off the high stone towers like a death sentence and two guards rushed to meet him almost immediately 

“Strip him! Tie him to the judgment pillar in the center of the open courtyard. Give him fifty lashes with the heavy-dappled cane! Let every single student watch the violent price of insolence” he commanded, with his voice sounding brutal as ever 

“No! Wait…” Kelvin screamed, but before he could retreat, two massive, armor-clad guards seized his arms in iron grips.

They brutally tore his frayed, blood-stained shirt from his upper body, shredding the fabric until he was left exposed in nothing but his ragged, dirty shorts. They dragged him across the courtyard and slammed his bare chest against the cold, unyielding iron of the ancient judgment pillar, binding his wrists tightly above his head with heavy, anti-magic chains. Kelvin struggled helplessly, his bare skin pressing against the freezing, frost-covered metal, his chest heaving as tears of absolute, crushing helplessness finally spilled down his bruised cheeks.

The head guard stepped forward, his heavy iron boots crunching on the stone as he uncoiled a nine-foot-long cane woven from hardened dragon-hide and infused with crackling lightning runes.

“One!” the guard barked, raising his muscular arm and swinging the heavy cane through the air with a terrifying, whistling screech.

“Gbami!”

The strike was meant to rend skin and shatter bone but the second the tip of the cane brushed the air an inch from Kelvin's bare back, the sky directly above Academy violently shattered.

A monstrous, unnatural roar of thunder ripped through the heavens, so immensely powerful that every remaining glass lantern and window across the entire academy complex instantly exploded into fine dust. The bright, cloudless afternoon sky turned pitch-black in a microsecond, swallowed whole by swirling, violent vortexes of cosmic purple clouds. A hurricane-force tempest whipped up out of nowhere, howling through the spires and snapping ancient stone banners like twigs.

Then, the sky split open. A torrential downpour of heavy, unnatural rain slammed down onto the earth with the force of a falling ocean.

Students screamed in terror, ducking for cover as the sheer force of the storm drenched everyone instantly. 

Dean Martins hastily raised a massive, golden Arch-Mage barrier charm over himself, but even his legendary magic sputtered as the storm's raw, chaotic pressure tore through the academy's ancient defensive wards as if they were made of damp paper. Yet, amidst the roaring, apocalyptic tempest, a bizarre, terrifying anomaly manifested directly at the judgment pillar.

The torrential rain poured down in solid sheets all around Kelvin, hammering the obsidian floor mere centimeters from his feet but not a single drop of water touched Kelvin himself. The torrential rain parted around his bare, shivering frame in a perfect, invisible, three-foot dome. The freezing hurricane winds roared past him without ruffling a single strand of his damp hair. The flashing purple lightning struck the surrounding stone tiles with deafening cracks, yet the blinding heat and explosive shockwaves completely dissolved into absolute nothingness the exact microsecond they neared his skin.

He stood completely dry, untouched, and unbothered by the cosmic wrath tearing the rest of the world apart.

“What the heck is happening?” The guard holding the cane gasped, his eyes wide with primal terror as the lightning runes on his weapon instantly sputtered out and died. He dropped the heavy cane into the mud, staggering backward until he tripped over his own boots. 

“W-What is this? What kind of demon is he?” The second guard also whispered not wanting to believe what he was seeing.

Dean Martins’ amber eyes widened to the size of saucers. His heart hammered frantically against his ribs as an ancient, long-buried terror seized his very soul. He looked at the dry dome, at the way the natural laws of reality were bending and breaking around the boy.

“N-no No, it can't be. That legend was a myth” Martins shrieked, his aristocratic composure shattering into sheer, unadulterated panic.

Abandoning his precious staff, completely ignoring the heavy rain soaking his grand crimson robes through to the bone, the Arch-Mage blindly sprinted across the flooded courtyard. He shoved terrified guards and screaming noble students out of his path until he reached the edge of the bone-dry circle surrounding the judgment pillar.

With trembling, bloodless hands, Martins dropped violently to his knees in the dry dirt behind Kelvin. He reached out with shaking, terrified fingers, frantically wiping away a layer of dried blood, ash, and floor dirt from Kelvin’s bare, unblemished upper back.

There, stamped directly between Kelvin’s shoulder blades, revealed under the storm's unnatural glow, was an ancient mark a faded, six-petaled black lotus flower tattoo, completely devoid of magic yet radiating an undeniable, primordial, and terrifying authority over reality itself.

Martins’ breath hitched violently in his throat. Every drop of color drained from his face, leaving his skin as pale as a corpse. The ancient, forbidden histories of the realm, the hidden scrolls locked in the deepest vaults of the royal capital, the lost legends of the Primeval Zero-Core, the ancient ruler who commanded the non-existence of magic all flooded back into his mind like a crushing tidal wave.

His legendary Arch-Mage staff lay discarded in the mud. His grand pride was smashed into fine dust. Before the horrified, rain-drenched eyes of hundreds of screaming students, before Noah, Alaric, Seraphina, and Chloe, who stood frozen in utter horror, Dean Martins slammed his forehead violently against the dry stone floor right at Kelvin’s bare feet.

He didn't just bow instead ,he cowered, his entire frame trembling uncontrollably from head to toe, his voice sobbing pathetically into the roaring storm as he cried out:

“M-Master!”