2025-12-15 20:33:50The small safe-house was quiet except for the soft clink of teacups.
Asta sat on the old brown couch, his knees pulled up a little,his shoulders hunched. Across the low wooden table, Butler Gregory sat straight but tired, the lines on his face deeper than Asta had ever seen them.
A young maid (Lina, the one who used to braid flowers into Asta’s hair when he was small) came in carrying a tray. Her hands shook a little, but she still managed to set down two steaming cups of black tea without spilling a drop. The smell of bergamot filled the room.
“Thank you, Lina.”
Gregory spoke, his tone gently.
Asta wrapped both hands around his cup and took a slow sip. It was hot enough to hurt, but the pain felt good. It was something real.
Gregory sighed.
“Master Cassian gave the order this morning. Every branch family, every elder, every guard,anyone still loyal to the old lord’s bloodline,has been told to stay away from you. He called it ‘cutting dead wood.’”
Asta stared into the dark tea.
“He really hates me that much.”
Gregory gave a sad little smile.
“Good thing your father bought this house many years ago. He said he had a dream… a feeling something like this might happen one day.”
Asta’s head snapped up.
“Wait. Father knew I would be… flameless? Why didn’t he ever tell me?”
“No, no, Young Master.”
Gregory shook his head quickly.
“Lord Ignatius never believed you would be flameless. Never. He said the opposite. He told me, ‘If my son’s flame turns out stronger than mine, Cassian will never accept second place. That boy doesn’t know how to bow.’ So he bought this house quietly and put it in your name alone. Just in case you ever needed a corner of the world that was still yours.”
Asta’s mouth opened, then closed again.
“This house… was supposed to be for Cassian?”
“Exactly.”
Gregory said, taking another slow sip.
“Your father thought you would be the one sending Cassian away one day,not the other way around.”
Asta laughed once, short and bitter.
“Looks like Father got it backwards.”
He stood up fast, his fists clenched.
“I’m going back. I’ll talk to Cassian and make him listen.”
Gregory didn’t move.
“He won’t listen, Young Master. The guards have orders to break the legs of anyone who tries to force entry. I’m old, but I’m not useless,I checked.”
Asta stood there a moment, breathing hard, then dropped back onto the couch like all his strength had leaked out.
“If only I had inherited even a little of Father’s flame… none of this would be happening.”
Gregory looked at him for a long time. His lips moved, barely a whisper.
‘Oh, Young Master Asta… if only you knew who you truly are.’
Asta didn’t hear it.
Outside, the afternoon sun slid lower and lower until the sky turned purple, then black. Stars came out, cold and far away.
Inside Asta’s new room (small, plain, nothing like the huge bedroom he grew up in), he rolled from side to side on the narrow bed. Sleep wouldn’t come. When it finally did, it dragged him straight into a nightmare.
Red-black fire everywhere, people are screaming,a sky burning upside-down.
And that voice,deep as mountains, shaking the world inside his head.
“Free me, boy… free me…”
Asta woke up gasping, his forehead wet with sweat. He sat on the edge of the bed, his heart hammering so hard it hurt.
‘What the hell are these dreams?’
He muttered into the dark.
Morning came too soon.
The underground mines beneath the academy smelled of dust and sweat and old fire that never quite went out. Torches hissed along the walls. Dozens of gray-clad laborers swung pickaxes in rhythm,clank, clank, clank,like a slow, angry heartbeat.
Asta swung with them. His hands were already blistered, but he didn’t stop. When his wheelbarrow was full of broken red stone, he pushed it to the checkpoint, dumped it with a loud crash, and went back for more.
Clank!
Clank!
Clank!
Hours blurred together, then a scream. A high and scared girl's voice was heard.
“Let me go, you bastards!”
Asta’s head snapped up.
Twenty meters down the tunnel, two older students in proper crimson uniforms had a girl pinned against the wall. One held her wrists; the other was laughing in her face. Her hood had fallen back,long fiery-red hair with gold streaks spilled out.
Asta dropped his pickaxe and walked over, boots heavy on the stone.
“Hey.”
He said, his voice calm but loud enough to echo.
“Didn’t you hear her? She said, "Let her go.”
The two boys turned.
“Oh, oh, oh,look who it is!”
The taller one sang.
“Asta the Flameless! Come to save the day?”
The second one doubled over laughing.
“Yeah! What are you gonna do, huh? Burn us? Hahaha! You can’t even light a match!”
They laughed louder, slapping each other’s backs.
Asta stood very still. His fingers closed around the wooden handle of the pickaxe he had picked up again. The metal head was cold… then warm… then hot.
Little wisps of black smoke curled from the iron.
Far behind, the old man from the laborers’ unit,Old Man Kael,watched with suddenly wide eyes.
Inside Asta’s head, the dragon voice came again, low and hungry.
‘Don’t be afraid, boy.’
‘Use the pickaxe’
Asta looked down. The axe head glowed dull red, then darker,like blood seen through smoke.
‘Use it on them.’
‘Kill them boy.’
‘KILL THEM!’
The voice rolled like thunder.
Asta’s knuckles went white on the handle. Heat raced up his arms, into his chest, into his teeth. The air around the pickaxe shimmered.
The two boys stopped laughing immediately when they saw his face.
Asta looked up slowly.
A devilish smirk spread across his lips and not entirely his own.
The taller boy took one step back.
“W-what the hell is that look for…?
”
The pickaxe head flared black-red, so hot the air itself screamed.
Asta took one step forward.
The tunnel went dead silent except for the soft hiss of melting stone beneath his boots.
And the dragon inside him laughed…
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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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