2025-12-15 20:33:18Asta’s eyes snapped open.
His chest was rising and falling fast, like he had been running for hours. He sat up so quickly the thin mattress on the bunk bed creaked loud. The room was small and gray. Bare walls. A tiny window high up let in cold morning light. The air smelled of dust and old wood.
An old man sat on a wooden chair beside the bed, watching him with calm eyes.
“You okay, boy?”
The old man asked, his voice rough but not unkind.
Asta blinked, rubbed his face.
“Yeah… I think so.”
He looked around again, confusion written all over his face.
“Where the hell am I?”
The old man gave a small smile.
“No need to be scared. You’re in the Labourers’ Unit. Bottom floor of the academy. This is where flameless students work now.”
Asta’s heart dropped.
“Labourers’ Unit…? How did I get here?”
The old man stood up slowly, joints cracking.
“You ask too many questions.”
He said, turning toward the door.
“When we were rounding up the flameless ones after the ceremony, we found you passed out behind the academy. You were burning with fever. We carried you here and gave you some medicine.”
He looked over his shoulder.
“That's enough for you?”
Asta swallowed hard.
“Oh… yeah. Thank you, sir. And sorry for my manners.”
The old man nodded.
“It’s alright. Get up. Come register. From today, this is your new school.”
Asta climbed out of the bunk. His legs felt heavy, like they were made of stone.
As they walked down a dark, narrow hallway, the dragon’s huge red eye flashed in his mind again. Scales. Fire and Chains burning with flames.
His step faltered. His eyes went wide.
The old man noticed.
“You okay, boy?”
Asta shook his head fast, like trying to throw the picture out.
“Yeah… yeah, I’m fine.”
“Walk faster then.”
They reached a bigger room with long tables. A few older students sat there, wearing gray work clothes. When they saw Asta, whispers started.
“Isn’t that Asta Xavier?”
“The one with no flame?”
“Even the Fire Lord’s son ended up here…”
The old man slammed his hand on the table.
“QUIET! All of you!”
Everyone shut up fast.
He pushed a dirty register book toward Asta.
“Write your name. From now on you work with us. Clean floors. Carry coal. Fix things. That’s your life.”
Asta stared at the page. His hand shook as he wrote his name in black ink.
The old man watched him, his voice softer now.
“Don’t look so sad, boy. You’ll get used to it. Some even say they like it here.”
Asta forced a tiny smile. It died the second it appeared.
He finished and walked toward the exit.
The hallway to the outside was long and cold. His footsteps echoed.
Then,bump!
He walked straight into someone wearing a long brown cloak. The hood hid their faces.
“Oh! I’m sorry.”
A soft girl’s voice said.
She stepped around him quickly and disappeared down the hall.
Asta blinked.
“Wait… a girl? What is a girl doing down here?”
He shook his head and kept walking.
An hour later, he stood in front of the huge iron gates of Xavier Mansion
The golden lions looked the same, but everything felt wrong.
Two new guards in black armor blocked the entrance.
“Stop right there.”
One said, his voice hard.
“By order of the new Clan Head, Cassian Xavier,you are forbidden to step foot inside this compound.”
Asta froze.
“You’ve got to be kidding me… really?”
From the left side of the fence, near some trees, a familiar voice called softly.
“Young master Asta!”
Butler Grogerry stood there with a few maids and housekeepers. They were wearing normal clothes,no uniforms. Their eyes were red from crying. Some carried small bags, like they had been thrown out.
Asta ran over.
“Butler! What happened? Why are you all out here? Where are your uniforms?”
Grogery’s old face was full of pain.
“Young master… Master Cassian fired every one of us this morning. Anyone who was close to you… he said we had to leave. The mansion belongs to the strong now. Flameless have no place inside.”
Asta’s heart stopped.
“He… fired all of you? Because of me?”
The maids nodded, some crying quietly.
One whispered.
“He changed the locks. Threw our things in the street. Said the Xavier clan has no room for weakness or anyone who supports
weakness.”
Asta looked up at the mansion.
On the top balcony, Cassian stood watching, his arms folded and a cold smile on his face.
Asta stood there in the cold wind, his fists clenched and his eyes burning.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
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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