2025-12-15 20:32:51The grand hall felt like it was shrinking around Asta.
Every laugh, whisper and fingers pointed at him felt like a needle stabbing straight into his chest.
Elara stood there, her arm now looped through Lucien Pyre’s, her perfect smile turned sharp and cruel. Lucien kept his hand on her waist like she belonged to him now.
Asta couldn’t move. His feet felt glued to the marble floor.
“Elara… what are you saying?”
His voice came out small and broken.
Elara rolled her eyes, like he was a child who didn’t understand simple words.
“Asta, be serious. You have no flame. Zero flame, meaning you have nothing to offer me.”
She flicked her hair.
“Do you really think the Veyron family will let their only daughter marry a boy who can’t even light a candle? A boy who will never be clan head? A boy who is… useless?”
The word useless echoed in the hall.
Someone behind Asta laughed out loud.
“Useless Xavier! Haha!”
Another voice joined in.
“Guess the great Fire Lord’s bloodline ends with a dud!”
More laughter. Louder and Crueler.
A group of girls near the front covered their mouths, pretending to be sad, but their eyes were shining with joy.
One of them spoke loud enough for everyone to hear.
“I feel bad for Elara. She wasted years on that trash.”
Another girl giggled.
“At least now she can be with a real man. Lucien is Class S. Asta is… Class Nothing.”
Asta’s hands shook at his sides. Tears burned in his eyes, but he refused to let them fall.
He looked at Elara, searching for the girl who used to sneak into his room at night, who used to hold his hand under the table, who promised they would be together forever.
That girl was gone.
Now she looked at him like he was dirt under her shoe.
Lucien leaned down and kissed Elara’s cheek, slow and showy, right in front of Asta.
“Don’t worry, babe,” he said loud enough for the whole hall to hear. “I’ll keep you warm tonight. No need for dead flames.”
The crowd roared with laughter.
Someone started chanting.
“Use-less! Use-less! Use-less!”
More voices joined in. The chant grew louder and louder.
Asta’s knees felt weak.
He remembered every moment with Elara.
The first time she kissed him under the cherry blossom tree.
The night she whispered, “When you become clan head, I’ll be right by your side.”
The promise ring he was planning to give her tomorrow.
All of it… lies.
Asta’s voice cracked when he finally spoke.
“So… all this time… you were just waiting to see if I would be strong enough?”
Elara didn’t even blink.
“Yes,” she said coldly. “Love is nice, Asta. But power is better.”
She turned away, pressing herself closer to Lucien.
Lucien smirked over his shoulder.
“Run along now, little flameless boy. The adults are talking.”
Asta stood there, alone in the middle of the laughing crowd.
His heart felt like someone had ripped it out and stepped on it.
He turned slowly and walked.
Every step felt heavy.
The students parted like he was a disease.
Some spat on the floor as he passed.
Some made fake crying noises.
“Poor baby Asta… no fire… boo-hoo…”
He kept walking, eyes on the floor, tears finally falling.
He didn’t see Cassian standing at the side of the stage.
Cassian watched him with cold, satisfied eyes.
A tiny, dark smile on his lips.
Asta pushed through the big doors and ran.
He ran past the gardens, past the training fields, all the way to the back of the academy where no one ever went.
He collapsed against an old tree, breathing hard, tears running down his face.
“Why…?” he whispered to no one. “Why me…?”
He punched the tree with his fist.
Once. Twice. Three times.
His knuckles bled, but he didn’t care.
“I was supposed to be the strongest… I was supposed to protect everyone… I was supposed to make Father proud…How are my going to find the man in the black clorck?”
He slid down the tree and sat on the ground, hugging his knees.
The sun was setting. The sky turned blood red.
A shadow fell over him.
Asta looked up, his eyes red and wet.
Cassian stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking down at him.
Cassian’s voice was quiet, but it cut like a knife.
“Feeling sorry for yourself?”
Asta wiped his eyes fast.
“Leave me alone, Cassian.”
Cassian didn’t move.
“You know what the funny part is?”
He crouched down so they were eye to eye.
“Everyone always said you would be the strongest. The real son of the strongest Flame mage.The true heir. And look at you now.”
He laughed, soft and cruel.
“No flame nor power. You have nothing.”
Asta looked away.
Cassian leaned closer.
“From today, I am the head of the Xavier clan. Not you. Me.”
He stood up.
“And tomorrow… I’ll make sure the whole kingdom knows who the real Xavier is.”
He turned and walked away, his footsteps slow and proud.
Asta stayed under the tree as the sky turned dark.
Night came, a cold wind blew, he didn’t move a muscle.
Hours passed.
Then… something strange happened, he had a strange burning in his heart as he crouched to the side of his heart.
‘I can't believe a heart break and humiliation can cause so much pain.’
He muttered to himself as his vision became blurry and he lay and passed out
A deep, ancient voice whispered inside his head, like thunder from far away. He then found himself in a world that seems to be another realm, he got up and walked around and then stumbled on a big gate with a hands print as a key hold. As he gazed at the gate, a big lizard-like red eye immediately snapped open.
Asta stumbled backwards,
keeping his distance from the gate.
The eye then drew near and nearer to the gate and Asta's eyes widened as he saw the creature that had those eyes.
“You…you are a dra…dragon.”
“Child, let me out…let me out of here!!”
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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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