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 858
They didn't have the luxury of celebrating the bridge's outcome for long.Word reached them two days later, carried by a rider Sera's remaining trusted contacts had sent ahead, Emberfall, the border city they'd once saved from a single feral Choir fragment weeks earlier, was burning again, and this time the scale dwarfed anything the squad had faced there before."How bad." Asta asked, already moving toward the horses before the messenger had finished catching his breath."Bad." The rider said. "Whatever hits the city isn't one fragment anymore. Reports describe multiple sources of uncontrolled flame, civilian casualties climbing by the hour, and Council forces either unable or unwilling to intervene effectively.""Unwilling." Roderick repeated, sharp. "Why would they be unwilling?""Because the soldiers on the ground are saying it looks exactly like what happened at the bridge." The rider said, grimly. "Except nobody stabilized this one. It's still spreading."Vex's expression
Chapter 857
The light and dark flame collided in a violent, churning column above the shattered carriage, and Mira, thrown backward by the shockwave along with half the squad, watched in horror as the eleven fractured voices continued screaming, no longer coordinated, no longer speaking as one, a cacophony of grief, confusion, and raw, remembered pain pouring out of eleven bodies that no longer knew how to be a single harmony and hadn't yet remembered how to be separate people again."It's destabilizing." Emrick shouted over the chaos, having insisted on accompanying the strike team despite his weakened condition, his eyes fixed on the churning light with grim, focused intensity. "Exactly as theorized, but faster, more violent than I predicted. The resonance broke all eleven bonds at once instead of gradually.""Is that good or bad." Roderick shouted back, blade raised against the chaos while trying to keep the reeling, disoriented Council soldiers from regrouping around them."I don't know ye
Chapter 856
They reached the convoy's projected route on the fourth day, cresting a ridge that overlooked a long, winding stretch of road cutting through a narrow valley, the kind of terrain, Yuki noted grimly, that made for excellent ambush ground and equally excellent killing ground, depending entirely on who controlled the higher elevation first."This is it." Lucien confirmed, studying the road below with the particular certainty of a man who'd memorized this exact route during his months of forced service. "The convoy passes through here tomorrow morning, assuming the schedule hasn't shifted. There's a narrow bridge crossing about two miles further along, the only viable route through this section of terrain. Everything funnels through that point.""A bottleneck." Roderick said, already assessing the tactical shape of the ground with a soldier's eye. "That's our best chance to isolate the transport carriage from its full escort.""It's also the most heavily guarded section of the entire
Chapter 855
The next two days blurred into a grinding cycle of riding, planning, and stolen hours of sleep, the squad pushing hard toward the convoy's projected route while Yuki and Emrick refined their theory into something that might actually survive contact with reality."Resonance isn't a weapon." Emrick said, for what felt like the third time, sketching another diagram in the dirt as the fire burned low around them. "It's a condition. You can't simply throw fire at eleven merged voices and expect coherence to shatter. You need something that speaks to what's holding them together in the first place.""Which is what, exactly." Roderick asked, patience visibly thinning after two days of theory without a clear plan of execution."Shared trauma." Emrick said. "That's the foundation every successful bond I studied was built on. The Choir isn't eleven separate people cooperating. It's eleven fractured identities that found it easier to stop being separate at all. The harmony holds because sep
Chapter 854
They rode through the morning in near silence, the weight of Emrick's revelation pressing down on the whole company harder than exhaustion or the dwindling clock on the convoy ever had. Kael rode near the back, alone, refusing the company even Asta offered, and Emrick kept his distance at the opposite end of the line, watching the old man's back with an expression Mira couldn't quite name, not forgiveness, not yet, but not pure hatred either. Something unsettled in between.They made camp at midday out of necessity, the horses needing rest and Seris still weak enough that Sera insisted on a proper stop rather than pushing straight through toward the convoy's projected route.It was Yuki who finally broke the uneasy quiet, approaching Emrick with the same careful, methodical curiosity she brought to every piece of the puzzle they were still assembling."You said you studied for twenty years." She said. "Do you know what they were trying to learn? Specifically?"Emrick considered her
Chapter 853
Roderick's blade met the first guard's with a screech of metal, driving the man back into the second before either could raise a full alarm, and for a handful of desperate seconds the narrow corridor became nothing but steel and breath and the grim, practiced economy of a soldier who'd learned, the hard way, exactly how to make three seconds last as long as thirty.He dropped the first guard with a strike to the temple, disarmed the second before he'd finished raising his blade, and was already turning to follow the others when a third voice, not a guard's, called out from a cell further down the block, low and urgent."Wait. Please. Whoever you are, wait."Roderick hesitated, torn between the escape already underway and the desperate plea echoing off stone, and something in the voice's raw, worn quality stopped him from simply running past.He found the source in the block's last cell,an older man, gaunt, scarred along both forearms in patterns that looked disturbingly familiar, eyes
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