2025-12-15 20:32:19The whole hall went dead quiet.
Every eye wide in surprise.
Cassian’s cold face slowly turned into a dark smile as unclenched his fist and folded his arm.
‘What is happening…I…don't understand,why isn't the crystal ball glowing, what does it mean?’
Asta Xavier muttered to himself, his face building up sweats as his hands began to tremble.
The students began to murmur.
“What is happening?”
One female student asked.
“I don't actually know, but I think the crystal ball might be broken or something, right?”
Another female student asked.
“Asta, are you sure you laid your hands as I instructed you to do?”
The teacher asked, her tone thick with curiosity as she stepped closer to Asta.
“Uhmm, yes ma'am, I placed my palms on the crystal ball as you instructed and…”
“Teacher!”
The Empress voice cut in, attracting the attention of everyone in the hall, Asta stood frozen and trembling as his sweats began to drip down to his clothes and hands.
The Empress got up from his seat and then walked towards Asta and the teacher. She then stood right in front of the teacher and gazed at her, giving her sign to step away.
“Okay, Xavier, right?”
“Yes, Empress.”
Asta responded with a gathered courage.
“Place your palm again on the crystal ball.”
She spoke, her tone thick with order.
“O-okay ma'am Empress.”
He then turned and swallowed hard.
‘Please glow! Please glow, please glow!! You stupid crystal ball!’
He muttered to himself as he closed his eyes and placed his palm, but the result was still the same, the crystal didn't glow nor did it spark a light.
‘What…does this mean?’
He muttered to himself.
“What does this actually mean?”
A male student from another school asked.
“It seems that Asta Xavier isn't feeling the family heat.”
Lucien Pyre spoke out, his tone thick with sarcasm as everyone in the hall burst out in laughter.
The Empress then raised her staff and everyone kept calm. She then gazed at Asta, whose gaze was now gazing at the floor.
“It seems that you didn't inherit any flame from your family, not your clan, you disgusting little worm.”
She spat, her voice dripping venom.
A girl from the crowd then spoke, breaking the silence.
“Look at him. Completely useless.”
The whispers slithered around the hall as dozens of students crowded behind Asta. He stood alone in front of the sacred crystal ball, his palms open, waiting for even the tiniest spark of his family’s flame, but nothing came.
“He didn’t inherit a single ember.”
Someone sneered.
“Not even rookie-level fire. What a joke.”
Another laughed, loud and cruel.
“I heard he killed his own mother. Ate his way out of her stomach like some monster.”
“Yeah, who even is this freak?”
Asta’s shoulders shook. His voice barely escaped his throat, cracked and trembling.
‘It’s not true… none of it. I saw him. That man in the black cloak… he was at the hospital that night. He cut her open himself. I remember the knife. I remember the smell of the blood.’
He muttered to himself.
“No flame, no worth, Get out of my sight before you taint the air I breathe.”
Head bowed, fists clenched so hard his nails drew blood, Asta turned and walked. Past the laughing students in their sleek crimson-and-gold uniforms. Past the crystal ball that had rejected him. All the way to the back of the academy.
He slowly gazed up in search of Elara, his eyes widened as he fell on her as she was now with Lucien Pyre.
‘What is she doing with him?’
He asked as he walked over to her.
“Hey, Elara,what is going on here?”
Asta asked, his tone low and laced with curiosity.
“Ohh, it is the flameless Asta Xavier, Elara babe, please I think you should tell him the truth.”
Lucien Pyre spoke as he held Elara’s hands and kissed it right in front of Asta, whose fist immediately clenched on his side.
“Tell me what, Elara, what is he talking about?”
Asta asked.
“Are you blind, Asta, can't you see I have moved on, you don't have any flame meaning that you are not going to be the head of the Xavier clan, I can't stay with a dead weight like you, If I do, you will be a stai
n on my beautiful future.”
Her words hit so hard that Asta stood frozen z his eyes now dripping with tears as the moment that he shared with her flash past his memory…
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Chapter 596
The forest at this hour was its own thing.Not the daytime forest, not the layered light and the visible depth of it. The night forest, the closed-down version, the one that operates on different senses because the visual ones have been mostly removed. The specific sounds of it. The specific smell, the cold version of the forest smell, the one that comes when the temperature drops and the damp rises from the ground and the trees breathe their different night-breath.Asta moved through it with Flora on his left and Mira on his right.They moved in the specific way of people who need to be quiet and know how to be quiet,not the slow, overcautious movement of people trying to be quiet, the practiced movement of people for whom quiet was a thing they had learned to do properly. The camp behind them was still. Nothing had shifted. Nothing had called out.The trees thickened.And then, in the small clearing that the thick trees made between themselves,the specific organic clearing of a for
Chapter 595
The space that was not quite dark and not quite light but had its own specific quality of illumination, the source of which was the dragon himself, the vast, scaled presence that occupied the far end of it the way certain things occupy far ends, with a completeness that made the far end feel closer than it was.The Emperor Dragon was looking at him.Not the patient look. Not the measured look of their usual conversations, the look of something that has been waiting, that has been in the specific frustration of a thing that cannot move on its own and has been waiting for the thing that can to become available again."You're awake.” The dragon said."What happened." Asta said."What happened." The dragon said. "Is that a man put his hand on your throat and spoke seven words of the Dimming Incantation into you, and your body received those words and acted on them because that is what bodies do when the Dimming Incantation is applied correctly, which it was." He looked at Asta with t
Chapter 594
Not running to get there, simply there, the arrival so fast that the between had not been visible, the specific movement of something that had been given its full expression and the full expression was this.His hand found Asta's throat.Not the grip that Asta had used on Eren,something more deliberate than that, more positioned, the hand of someone who knows exactly where they are putting it and why. The specific placement of fingers that has been practiced until the practice has become automatic.And then his lips moved.Low,barely above breath, the volume of something that was not meant for anyone standing at a distance, only for Asta at the distance of the grip. The words were not language in the conversational sense, they were the older version, the incantation version, the words built for function rather than meaning. Ancient and rhythmic, the cadence of them specific, the specific cadence of a technique that required the words in a specific order at a specific pace.They took
Chapter 593
He stopped. "When I made contact with Loki directly, when I tried to reinforce Jabber's resistance and give him the leverage to push back…" He looked at his hands again. "Loki looked at me. That is all. He looked at me. And he told Jabber,in the voice that things use when they speak inside someone's consciousness, the voice that is felt rather than heard, he told Jabber to remove me."The clearing was quiet."And Jabber.” Eren said, his voice going lower."Threw me out. Not because he wanted to. Because when Loki said it with the full weight of what Loki is, the full ancient weight of a god-class dragon speaking to the vessel it has possessed,the vessel does not have the capacity to disobey. Not at this stage of the possession. Not yet."He looked at Asta."I'm sorry." He said.Asta stood there.He looked at Eren for a long moment. At the expression on his face, the genuine, specific sorrow of someone who has tried and has not arrived at the outcome the trying was for and is stan
Chapter 592
The pallor of it. The eyes, not red, not wet, not any of the conventional expressions of grief, just hollow, the specific hollow of someone who has had something taken from the inside rather than the outside, the particular empty quality of a space that was occupied recently and is not occupied now.He was looking at Eren.Eren was looking back at him.The Elf Chief's expression had the quality of someone who has been waiting for this arrival and has been carrying the weight of the waiting in the knowledge that the arrival was going to be this. The specific expression of someone who knows that something that happened was partly a consequence of their involvement and is standing in the presence of the person who has paid the most for the consequence.Asta looked at him.And then his hand came up.Fast, the specific speed of something that had been building in him the whole walk back and had arrived at the expression of itself without the mediation of decision, the body acting on what
Chapter 591
He looked at Jabber's name the same way everyone looked at Jabber's name when they said it now, with the specific quality of a word that used to mean one thing and currently means something else and the transition between the two meanings had not been clean.Flora looked at him.Something moved in her face.Something that knew, the way certain parts of a person know things before the knowing has been delivered properly, that what came next was not something she was going to want to receive.………………….Cassian told them.He did not build to it, he did not arrange the telling for effect or find the gentle approach. He looked at Flora and Elara and Sera and Garrett and he told them what had happened in the forest the same way you tell people things when the things do not have a version that is easy to deliver and you have decided that the slow version is not more kind than the direct version, only slower.He told them about Jabber.About the clearing and the crater and the smoke and Jabber
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