Chapter 143: Malice Rune Realm [ 8 ]
Leomaris’s POV:
A few days earlier, in the abandoned town of the real world, Leomaris found his attention pulled in too many directions at once.
Instructor Moon lingered at the edge of his thoughts. Did the man genuinely want him dead, or was this just another test with a blade hidden behind it? And if so, when would it come down?
He pushed the thought aside for something simpler, something that could dull the edges of it.
While Lucius, Alfred, and Warner were in discussion elsewhere, he moved through the ruins, leaping from broken slabs of concrete and half-collapsed walls, searching for someone, anyone, to pass a moment with.
Raine came to mind first.
Where else would she be but at the centre of whatever was falling apart?
He exhaled lightly. ’Follow the sound of mayhem, then.’
It was not even really a question. He picked his way through the ruined town, the ground still occasionally shuddering beneath him. Even so, it was hard to tell what was worse, the instability of the world or Raine’s tendency to tear through it.
When he finally spotted her at the far end, she was exactly as expected and completely inconvenient. Black vest soaked through with sweat, moving with relentless focus as she brought down sections of wall without pause.
Leomaris slowed.
’Such a shame.’
There was no point in interrupting that. His boredom returned almost immediately, sharper for the brief hope of distraction. Charlotte would be next, then.
He had barely formed the thought properly when a voice slipped in beside him.
"Is Leomaris bored?" Charlotte said enthusiastically.
She was perched comfortably atop a partially collapsed building, one hand idly waving a book as though she had been expecting him all along.
The structure beneath her was held in place by carefully wedged slabs of concrete, her own quiet engineering keeping the ruin from finishing its collapse.
Leomaris landed beside her with a light leap, casting a glance at the unstable footing.
"Isn’t this dangerous?"
Charlotte gave a small, unbothered giggle.
"So long as it doesn’t kill me, I will be fine."
His eyes drifted to the book in her hand. The cover showed a knight beside his horse, the animal drinking from what looked like a glass jar filled with endless water. The title read The Watchman. It had a curious weight to it, the kind that promised more than it revealed.
"Can you lend me that later?" he asked.
That earned him a slight shift in her expression, not quite displeasure, but something more cautious.
"I could," she said slowly, "but I will have to return it to the library soon."
Leomaris eased himself down, carefully testing the uneven surface before settling cross-legged. Even in ruin, the building groaned faintly beneath them.
Not every cadet was allowed to take books beyond the library. Calamities like himself and Charlotte could, though, even that privilege came with a running cost, tallied against every extra day spent outside its walls. Leomaris still owed the librarian more than he cared to think about and had no intention of going near the place to settle it.
"That’s a shame, Charlotte. I was going to offer you something rather interesting."
Her curiosity sharpened immediately.
"Oh? I would like to know what it is."
He tilted his head with an easy smile. "I can’t reveal my cards, can I? Not unless someone is kind enough to lend me their book. Then perhaps... no, I would. With the full enthusiasm of the world behind it."
Charlotte let out a soft laugh, shaking her head slightly.
"Alright. Show me."
A confident grin spread across his face. "This is my little magic."
With a subtle flick, he started making a few deft maneuvers with his hands while clothing them in his innate ability, Conceal.
When he stopped, the book had vanished completely from Charlotte’s hand and materialised in his own.
She stared at him, genuinely taken aback, confusion threading through her expression as her dark eyes caught the light and seemed to deepen with it.
"I... I want to see it again," she said.
Leomaris simply handed it back. "No. A magician doesn’t repeat his tricks."
Charlotte looked as though she might argue, but before she could, a voice drifted up from below.
"That was a very pretty trick, Leomaris."
Lucius stood there, wearing a faint, sharp smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
"However," he added, the smile fading, "can I have a moment with you?"
Leomaris glanced at him, slightly puzzled. It wasn’t like Lucius to interrupt like this, not when something else was already unfolding. Still, he gave Charlotte a brief nod and dropped down from the structure, following Lucius into the ruins below.
Lucius led Leomaris away from the scattered remains of the town, into a stretch where constant noise felt strangely reluctant to travel. The constant tremor of the ground was still there, but even that seemed muted.
He stopped near what must have once been a tree line. Now there was only broken earth and splintered stumps, the forest stripped away by the Rune Realm’s appearance. Lucius stared out at it for a long while without speaking.
He did not look at Leomaris, and it felt deliberate, as though meeting his gaze would have required more effort than he was willing to give.
Leomaris broke the silence first.
"Are you worried about the raid?"
Lucius gave a small shrug, almost absent-minded.
"Not really. Fear is... not quite how I function anymore. I understand what it is supposed to be, but I haven’t felt it properly in a long time."
Only then did his eyes shift, finally meeting Leomaris’s golden gaze. There was something flat in the way he looked, not cold exactly, but emptied of certain edges most people took for granted.
"That was what I wanted to ask you," Lucius said.
"I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Do you think it is a bad thing, not feeling anything at all?"
Leomaris understood more than he immediately showed. Lucius’s contract with the Timeless Entity had taken its due payment, stripping away emotion and even parts of his perception.
It had not been conditional like Leomaris’s, It was instant and perhaps... irreversible.
He took a moment before answering.
"I would not like it," Leomaris said honestly.
"Not feeling anything. What is the point of living if there is nothing you can actually feel?"
Then he hesitated, his gaze drifting back to the broken horizon.
"But... is it really that simple? Sometimes you do not need to feel something to understand it, and you do not always need to understand it to feel it. Pain, kindness, betrayal, love, even happiness. Do you always need the sensation itself? Or can you see something, someone, and just know it matters? That it is beautiful, or worth keeping close?"
He lifted one shoulder slightly, as if he had not quite decided where the thought ended.
"Emotions are not always something you can explain cleanly. People struggle to put them into words or to act them out properly. But even if someone does not feel them in the usual way, I think they can still reach them. Just in a different form."
Lucius let out a soft laugh at that and gave Leomaris a firm pat on the back.
"You are strangely well-versed in emotions," he said.
"I am glad I asked you."
Each one of those words had left Leomaris’s lips in an attempt to change Lucius’s mind. Lucius might kill him someday, after all, and he just wanted the poor soul to see him in a new light.
At the time, it had felt like a simple question, a quiet curiosity from someone trying to understand what had been taken from him.
Only later did it settle into place properly, when the truth had begun to surface. Then it became clear that Lucius had not been asking without reason.
