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

Chapter 54: 54. Whatever Happened Is Hers to Tell

Olivia found him that evening in the small courtyard outside the instructor housing, a folded piece of parchment held slightly behind her back in a manner so obviously suspicious that William almost laughed out loud at the sight of it.

"You’re being extremely subtle," he said, "in the way that a person carrying a lit torch through a hay barn is subtle."

"I found something..." Olivia glanced around the courtyard once, twice, with the theatrical caution of someone who genuinely believed she was being watched by unseen enemies, and then produced the folded parchment with a flourish that undercut the previous caution entirely. "Took some doing... a lot of doing, and yes... I’m not exaggerating things."

"The archive’s restricted section doesn’t exactly hand out royal knight records to junior instructors on request."

"How exactly did you get in there, though...?"

"I told the archive keeper I needed old curriculum records from a decade back for a lesson plan on academy history." Olivia’s smile carried a faint, proud edge. "Which is technically true... I just didn’t mention which specific section of the archive I actually needed."

"Olivia," William sighed.

"He believed me completely... and I’m a very convincing liar when it’s for a good cause."

"That’s not remotely reassuring."

"Well, hotshot, it worked, didn’t it?" She unfolded the parchment, revealing a page covered in dense, official-looking script, several sections of which had clearly been redacted with thick black ink, entire paragraphs simply blotted out of existence.

"This is what I could find about Catherine Blackwood, well, formerly... Catherine Astoria, an elf that was ranked Grand Knight candidate at age twenty-three," Olivia said while explaining. "She has some kind of service record with something called the Silverline Vanguard."

"The Silverline Vanguard...?" William asked. "What’s that?"

"An elite royal knight unit... well, it doesn’t exist anymore, according to the records, disbanded roughly eight years ago." Olivia traced a finger down the parchment, stopping at a heavily redacted section near the bottom. "And then, right here, look... her official record just stops."

"No transfer notice, no formal discharge explanation, and nothing...." Olivia held her chin. "Just a note that her active service ended... followed by an entire paragraph blacked out completely."

William took the parchment carefully, studying the blotted ink like it might yield its secrets through sheer force of staring. "Someone redacted this deliberately..."

"Recently, maybe, or a long time ago, but deliberately."

"That’s what I thought too." Olivia’s expression had gone serious, the careful academic curiosity from earlier hardening into something closer to genuine concern. "Whatever happened to end her career with that unit, somebody with real authority decided it needed to disappear from the official record."

"That’s not the kind of thing that happens over an ordinary transfer or resignation..."

"An incident," William murmured, half to himself, echoing the word he’d overheard from the instructors that afternoon.

"An incident significant enough that eight years later, senior faculty still whisper her old title instead of saying it out loud." Olivia folded the parchment back up, sliding it into her sleeve with the same theatrical caution she’d used to produce it. "I couldn’t find anything more specific..."

"Whatever happened... it’s buried deeper than this level of clearance can reach."

"Ehem!"

They were interrupted by a low, gravelly cough from somewhere behind them, and both William and Olivia turned to find the archive keeper, an elderly gnome with spectacles perched precariously on the end of his nose, standing at the courtyard entrance with his arms crossed and an expression of deep, weary suspicion.

"Instructor Gracewell," he said, his voice carrying the particular tone of someone who had been doing this job far too long to be fooled easily. "That curriculum research you mentioned..."

"It wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the restricted knight service files, would it?"

Olivia froze for a fraction of a second, and William, recognizing an emergency when one presented itself directly to his face, stepped smoothly into the gap with the easy, unbothered confidence of a man who had talked his way out of far worse situations.

"Wait! Actually, that’s on me," he said. "I asked her to look into some historical academy structure for a training program I’m developing!"

"It’s about... uh... an old knight unit organization, chain of command, that sort of thing..." William chuckled. "Purely academic interest, nothing to do with any individual’s personal record!"

The archive keeper’s suspicious gaze shifted to William, narrowing slightly. "Hmmmm... Is that so...?"

"Absolutely! Very boring, structural stuff that could make you fall asleep in an instant!" William laughed even more. "Chain of command diagrams... I find it helps when designing group training exercises to understand how historical units organized their hierarchy."

William delivered this with such earnest, mild-handed sincerity that even he was faintly impressed by his own commitment to the bit. "You wouldn’t believe how much modern training theory borrows from old knight unit structures."

"Wouldn’t I...?" the gnome said, in a tone that suggested he believed absolutely none of it.

"You really wouldn’t."

There was a long, tense silence, during which the archive keeper studied both of them with the particular weariness of a man who had caught considerably more clever liars than these two over the course of a very long career and eventually decided that whatever they were actually up to probably wasn’t worth the paperwork required to escalate it.

"Return anything you’ve borrowed," he said finally, "or I’ll report it to the headmaster myself... understood?"

"Completely understood," Olivia said, with the relieved enthusiasm of someone who had genuinely believed for a moment that this was going to end very differently.

The gnome shuffled off, muttering something about instructors and their endless historical curiosity, and once he’d disappeared fully around the corner, Olivia let out a long, shaky breath.

"What the hell do you mean by chain of command diagrams?" she said. "Is that even a really good excuse?!"

"Don’t blame me other than my mind because it was the first thing that came to mind that delivered it to my mouth instantly, so I had to spill it out!"

"To be honest... It was surprisingly convincing."

"I’ve had a lot of practice lying about things that are much more important than this..."

Olivia gave him a curious look at that, the sharp, analytical attention she seemed to bring to everyone and everything, but William deflected the implicit question with a small shake of his head before she could turn it into an actual line of inquiry.

"We should let this sit for now," he said instead. "We know enough to know there’s something real underneath all of this, but pushing harder tonight isn’t going to get us the rest of the picture."

"It’s just going to get you banned from the archive."

"Probably true..." Olivia handed him back the folded parchment, apparently trusting him with it more readily than she trusted her own sleeve at this point. "What are you going to do with it?"

William looked down at the paper for a long moment, thinking of Catherine’s shaking hand, the flash of old pain across her face when he’d said the name out loud, the way she’d shut the door on the conversation with such practiced, brittle efficiency.

"Nothing... for now," he said. "I’m not going to corner her with this because it could damage our relationship and partnership."

"Whatever happened... it’s hers to tell when she’s ready, not mine to drag out of a redacted file and throw in her face for the second time."

"That’s surprisingly patient of you."

"I contain multitudes," William said, echoing the line from that morning, and Olivia’s mouth twitched into something that was almost, but not quite, a genuine smile.

Olivia then realized something with what William just said, so she shouted at him. "WAIT! YOU TELL HER?!"

"Yeah... it’s faster that way!"

"Can you really be that stupid?!"

"That’s not stupid... it’s more like being honest, and honesty hurts... doesn’t it?"

"I can’t believe you did that..." Olivia sighed. "How did it go for her?"

"Not that good, but at least I know that her past is something that shouldn’t be talked out of the blue." William looked at his fist. "But still... some instructors gossip about that a lot."

"Yeah... it’s not entirely your fault about that."

"You get it."

...

He found Catherine later that evening, not through any particular plan but simply because his feet carried him toward her house without conscious direction, the same way they’d carried him toward every training ground and every student who needed him over the past several days.

She answered the door in the same plain robe from that morning, hair loose, an expression of mild surprise crossing her face at the sight of him standing on her doorstep for the second time in as many days.

"William...? I wasn’t expecting you today.

"I wasn’t really expecting myself either," he admitted. "I was going to head back to my room, and then I just sort of ended up here instead."

Something in Catherine’s expression softened slightly, wariness giving way to something warmer, though a trace of the earlier tension from his interrogation about her old title lingered underneath it. "What’s wrong?"

"Is everything alright?"

"Everything’s fine... I just thought, after this morning, maybe you’d want some company that isn’t going to interrogate you about things you don’t want to talk about."

Catherine studied him for a long moment, and William watched her weigh the offer carefully, some old instinct clearly checking for hidden angles before finally, visibly, deciding to accept it at face value.

"I have tea," she said. "It’s not wine, so hopefully the evening stays considerably less eventful than the last one."

"I would genuinely appreciate an evening with fewer summoned monsters and fewer accidental hickeys."

Catherine’s laugh, sharp and surprised, escaped before she could stop it, and the sound of it seemed to loosen something in her posture, the last of the earlier tension finally draining out as she stepped aside to let him in.