Harem Training System: Every Girl I Train Makes Me Stronger!

Chapter 49: 49. Walked to the Lounge for Paperwork, Left With a Secret Than I Came In With

Kaela waved that off with the confidence of someone who genuinely did not consider it a serious point, then turned her attention back to Catherine, who had used the distraction to compose herself back into something resembling professional dignity. "Anyway... I came to find Instructor Wade because I want an extra session today... even though it’s a rest day."

"The ambush drills were good, but still... I’m feeling hungry for wanting more so that I can get even stronger than before!" Kaela clenched both her fists. "I want to actually get better at reading someone before they move, the way you read that reaver, apparently."

"Good news then... we already have sessions scheduled for this afternoon," William said.

"I want a morning one too."

"Kaela, don’t be greedy..." William sighed. "Besides... I just told you I fought a monster yesterday and slept on a couch that was actively hostile to my spine."

"I need at least a little bit of a morning before I start throwing punches."

Kaela considered this with visible reluctance, the way a starving animal might consider being told dinner was delayed by an hour. "Urgh... fine! But I’m coming to the afternoon session early, and I’m claiming first spar."

"No one’s stopping you because you always claim first spar."

"Because I’m in the right position that I deserve it." She flashed a grin, then turned and, rather than using the gate a second time, simply vaulted back over it with the same ease she’d used to get in, calling back over her shoulder as she went. "Alright, smell you both later."

She then showed her smug smile for the last time before leaving. "And... don’t keep him too long, Vice Headmaster; some of us actually need training today!"

The silence that settled over the yard once she’d gone was almost comedic in its abruptness. Catherine stood very still, staring at the spot where Kaela had disappeared, an expression of profound, weary resignation settling over her features.

"That princess," she said eventually, "has absolutely no sense of boundaries at all..."

"Well... She DOES have plenty of boundaries," William said. "But they’re just all about combat, and none of them apply to anything else."

"Small comfort... I needed that, William." Catherine finally set the practice swords down against the low garden wall, pressing two fingers briefly to her temple. "I should get to the academy today..."

"There’s paperwork from yesterday’s incident that needs filing before rumors start circulating on their own, and given that conversation, I suspect they already have..."

"I’ll walk with you," William offered.

She glanced at him, something cautious in the look, like she was checking whether the offer came with an expectation attached to it, another attempt to pry open the conversation about her shaking hand. When William simply waited, unbothered, hands in his pockets, some of the caution eased out of her shoulders.

"Alright," she said. "Let me get my coat first..."

...

They walked back toward the academy in the kind of easy quiet that had become surprisingly comfortable between them over the past several days, a fragile, unspoken truce forged in the aftermath of chaos.

With every step that brought them closer to the imposing stone gates of the academy, Catherine seemed to physically reassemble herself. Her spine straightened, her chin lifted, and the raw vulnerability she had displayed over breakfast was folded back beneath layers of practiced, impenetrable professional composure.

William let her have the silence. He was content to simply observe the city waking up around them: the rhythmic screech of merchants raising their wooden shutters, the distant, hollow clatter of a cart echoing down a cobblestone side street, and the occasional flutter of a small winged mail creature darting overhead, its tiny talons gripping a wax-sealed letter.

But while his body moved in sync with the morning stroll, his mind was elsewhere. That part of him, the part that had survived too many battlefields and trained too many soldiers to ever truly know how to relax, was circling back to the tremor.

He couldn’t shake the image of her hand shaking, the way her fingers had betrayed her despite the iron will in her voice. Even more troubling was the flicker in her eyes.

It wasn’t fear... It was something older, something buried beneath decades of propriety and position.

’That wasn’t a nervous twitch,’ William thought, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly. ’That was muscle memory... closer to a traumatic experience, I suppose...’

He had trained enough recruits to recognize the exact shape of a wound that had scarred over incorrectly, a wound left untreated for so long that the person carrying it had built an entire identity around never touching it, never acknowledging its existence.

He knew that look. He had seen it in soldiers who had survived ambushes they shouldn’t have and in survivors who had lost everything but their ability to pretend they were fine.

Catherine Blackwood. She’s an elf vice headmaster and also a brilliant administrator. She’s competent enough with a blade, but by the academy’s elite standards, she is more of a bureaucrat than a warrior.

But that shake in her hand... that came from somewhere deeper than a simple cramp, other than from the bone.

’What happened to you, Catherine?’ he wondered, his gaze fixed on the horizon but his thoughts tunneling inward. ’Who taught you how to hide something that obvious from someone as trained as I am...?’

He filed the observation away with the same deadly precision he once used to catalog every minute tell a recruit gave off before a mission went catastrophically wrong. He made a quiet, dangerous decision: he would find out what that tremor meant.

Not by pushing her; she would only retreat further behind those walls of etiquette, but by probing. He would ask around, carefully, with the same cautious deliberation one uses when approaching the edge of a minefield where you know the explosives exist but haven’t yet mapped their boundaries.

’One wrong step, one poorly timed question, and I’ll blow her entire world apart,’ he mused grimly. ’But if I don’t find out, how can I protect her when whatever caused that tremor decides to come knocking again?’

But then...

He got his first chance sooner than he expected.

The instructors’ lounge was tucked away behind the main administrative wing, a cramped, low-ceilinged room that smelled of old parchment and stale magic. It was filled with mismatched armchairs that had seen better decades and featured a perpetually half-empty pot of something that was technically coffee but tasted more like burnt ambition and regret.

William had gone there that afternoon to retrieve a stack of scheduling documents. Catherine had asked him to review, expecting the room to be empty given the late hour. He needed the quiet to focus, to think, and to dissect the pieces of the puzzle Catherine was so determined to keep hidden.

But as he reached for the heavy oak door, he paused.

The air inside didn’t feel empty. The magical resonance in the room was off-heavy and agitated.

Turns out... it wasn’t empty.

Two senior instructors sat near the far window, heads bent together over cups of the burnt coffee substitute, voices pitched low in the particular register people used when they were discussing something they didn’t want overheard but hadn’t quite mastered the art of actually staying quiet about.

William recognized them vaguely from faculty meetings, an older human man with a greying beard and a stocky dwarf woman with braided hair threaded through with small metal rings.

He wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. And yes... He genuinely wasn’t.

But the moment he caught the name Blackwood drift across the room, followed almost immediately by a phrase that stopped him dead in the doorway, his priorities shifted rather dramatically.

"...still can’t believe nobody’s ever told the zero-instructor," the dwarf woman was saying. "Man’s been here what, two weeks, and he’s out there training with the White Sword of Astoria like she’s just some paperwork pusher."

"Keep your voice down," the older man muttered, though he didn’t sound particularly convinced of the need himself. "You know she doesn’t like that name mentioned."

"I know, I know... Just strange, that’s all."

’Watching her out there swinging a practice sword like she used to, back before, well..." The dwarf woman trailed off, shaking her head. "You remember what she was like at the tournament in her prime..."

"Fastest blade in three kingdoms," they said. And now she’s filing paperwork and running parent meetings."

’What...?’ William thought. ’Catherine... did she really hides something from me?’