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

Chapter 59: 59. A Man Who Recognizes That Grief Has Probably Paid for That Recognition

Finally, he prepared for the one Grock craved. He planted his feet wide, feeling the ground beneath him.

"Cannon Mode."

The sword didn’t just change; it transformed into something alien. The blades retreated entirely into a reinforced barrel assembly, the hilt expanding into a sturdy grip designed to absorb massive recoil.

William felt the mana flooding the weapon, not as a cutting edge but as explosive pressure. With a guttural shout, he triggered the mechanism.

BOOM.

A concentrated lance of pure Aetheric energy tore through the courtyard, the shockwave rattling William’s teeth and sending a cloud of dust billowing into the air.

Grock let out a howl of approval, slapping his thigh. "There it is!"

"That’s the sound of breaking bones and shattered pride right there!"

For twenty minutes, William ran through the configurations repeatedly, his muscles burning and sweat stinging his eyes. Grock was relentless, barking corrections like a drill sergeant.

"Your grip is too loose on the split!" "

More mana flow on the extension; you’re choking the mechanism!"

But William couldn’t deny that the old dwarf was right. Each time he ran the sequence, the weapon felt more like a part of his own body.

By the time he finally left the forge, his arms felt like lead and his sword was freshly oiled and thoroughly recalibrated; the sun had begun its slow, bloody slide toward the horizon, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and crimson.

His mind was no longer on the steel, but on the old man with the secrets. His next destination was clear... the Academy.

...

Headmaster Albert’s office sat at the top of the administrative wing, a tall, narrow room lined floor to ceiling with books and old academy relics, the kind of space that felt like it had accumulated decades of history simply by existing long enough.

Albert himself sat behind a heavy oak desk when William knocked, quill paused mid-signature, and the old man’s sharp eyes tracked William’s entrance with the particular alertness of someone who rarely got surprised by anything anymore.

"Instructor Wade," he said. "Later than your usual visits, this is... something wrong?"

"It’s nothing urgent," William said. "But... I wanted to ask you about something. Wait... more like someone, actually."

Albert set down his quill slowly, folding his hands atop the desk, and something in his expression shifted, the easy welcome cooling into a more careful, measured attention. "You want to know about Catherine, I see..."

’Wise old man... he fucking knew.’

"You already know why I’m here then," William smiled.

"The moment you walked through that door with that particular look on your face, I suspected..." Albert leaned back in his chair, studying William with the weight of a man who had spent decades reading exactly this kind of intent on the faces of people who walked into his office. "This is not information that belongs to me to share, William."

"Whatever happened to her... it’s hers to tell, in her own time, if she ever chooses to tell it at all."

"I know that, but I’m not asking so I can confront her with it or force anything out of her."

"I’m asking because I’ve already seen enough to know something is genuinely wrong, and I’d rather understand it properly than keep stumbling around it blind and accidentally making things worse."

Albert’s gaze sharpened, weighing the sincerity of that statement with visible scrutiny. "And what exactly have you seen...?"

William considered how much to disclose and decided that half measures weren’t going to earn him the trust this conversation required. "Her hand shakes when she holds a sword for too long."

"She’s got an entire room in her house full of old blades, kept clean, kept maintained, never touched."

"I heard two instructors whisper a name in the lounge yesterday that made both of them go quiet the second they realized someone might overhear."

"I’ve spent enough of my life around people who’ve lost soldiers under their command to recognize what all of that adds up to."

Something in Albert’s posture eased slightly at that, the guarded wariness giving way, gradually, to something closer to consideration. He rose from his chair, moving toward the tall window at the back of the office, and stood there a while in silence, hands clasped behind him, watching the last of the daylight fade over the academy rooftops.

"You’ve lost people yourself, then," he said finally, without turning around. "In whatever life you had before joining this academy as someone that has been underestimated by a lot of people."

William didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

The question hung between them like a living thing, something coiled and dangerous. He simply stared at Albert, his jaw set, refusing to deflect or lie.

He let the silence stretch until it became uncomfortable, until the only sound in the office was the faint, rhythmic ticking of a grandfather clock that felt like a countdown to something inevitable.

Albert didn’t flinch. He seemed to read the emptiness in William’s expression with the practiced ease of a man who had spent decades deciphering the unspoken.

He didn’t press and he also didn’t demand. Instead, he gave a slow, solemn nod, as though William’s silence had been the only honest answer he could have received.

The guarded formality that had armored the headmaster since William entered the room began to crack, revealing something raw and ancient beneath.

"I have watched Catherine carry this for eight years," Albert said.

His voice wasn’t the booming authority of an educator now; it was the quiet murmur of a man who had witnessed too many funerals. "I have watched her construct an entire existence out of paperwork, endless administrative meetings, and bureaucratic minutiae."

"She has calibrated every hour of her day to ensure she never again finds herself in a position where the steel in her hand means the difference between survival and the slaughter of those under her command."

Albert looked toward the window, his gaze fixed on something far beyond the academy walls. "I have wanted, more times than I can count, to simply speak the truth..."

"To shatter this silence so she wouldn’t have to carry the weight of what happened on top of the weight of everything else..."

"And to let the world know that she didn’t fail, that the world simply broke her."

He paused, his fingers drumming absently on the mahogany desk. "But I never have..."

"Partly out of respect for what is hers to share... the right to own her own trauma."

"And partly," he added, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper, "because I was never entirely certain anyone else would understand it."

"Not the real understanding nor the kind that lives in the marrow of your bones."

William felt a cold shiver trace its way down his spine.

’The marrow of your bones.’

He knew that feeling. He knew the way grief could become a physical presence, a phantom limb that throbbed when the weather turned cold.

"And you think I would?" William asked, his voice rougher than intended. "You think some kid who’s just trying to survive an academy understands the horrors of a dungeon conquest?"

Albert turned his head, his eyes locking onto William’s with an intensity that felt like being pinned to a wall.

"I think," Albert said, settling back into his leather chair with a weary, deliberate slowness that seemed to age him ten years in a single motion, "that a man who recognizes the shape of a grief like hers without needing me to paint it in blood and screams has probably paid for that recognition somewhere along the way himself."

The accusation wasn’t an attack because it felt more like an observation. It was a recognition of shared scars.

Albert’s eyes searched William’s face, seeing past the bravado, past the muscles and the newly forged steel, straight into the hollow spaces where the pain resided.

"That’s not nothing, William," Albert continued, his voice thick with unexpected emotion. "That’s not a small thing to bring into a room with someone as guarded as she’s become."

"Most people see a knight who lost her unit..."

"She sees herself in the mirror, and she sees a ghost."

William felt the walls of the office closing in. The tension was suffocating, the air thick with the unspoken history of blood-soaked stone and screams that never ended.

He couldn’t walk away now.

He couldn’t retreat into the safety of ignorance.

The truth was a wound, and he needed to see how deep it went.

"Then tell me," William said, leaning forward until he was almost touching the desk, his eyes burning with a desperate, hungry need for clarity. "Please..."