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

Chapter 60: 60. Survivor’s Guilt Has a Shape... I Recognized It Because I Know It

Albert studied him a moment longer, some final internal calculation resolving itself behind his sharp, weary eyes, and finally, with the air of a man setting down a weight he’d carried alone for far too long, he began.

"Eight years ago, the kingdom sanctioned an expedition into a dungeon classified far beyond anything a unit of that age and experience should reasonably have been sent into."

"Officially, it was framed as an opportunity... a chance for the crown’s most promising young knights to prove themselves against a challenge worthy of their reputation."

"Unofficially, I have always suspected there was considerably more politics involved in that decision than anyone at the time was willing to admit."

"Politics...? But how?"

"The Silverline Vanguard had grown popular, William. To the point that they’re beloved, even, among the common people, in a way that made certain factions within the nobility uncomfortable."

"A unit of young knights led by a prodigy who answered to merit rather than birthright threatened the established order more than anyone in power was willing to say aloud."

"I have never been able to prove it, but I have always believed that expedition was arranged, at least in part, to either elevate that unit into untouchable legend or remove them from the picture entirely." Albert’s fists tightened. "As it happened, the outcome served the second purpose considerably better than the first."

William felt something cold settle in his stomach. "You think it was sabotaged...?"

"I think it is a possibility I have never been able to disprove and one that has haunted me for eight years without resolution." Albert turned from the window, his expression grave. "The dungeon they entered collapsed from within during the expedition."

"Not naturally... from what limited reports survived the chaos, but through some manner of destabilization that opened rifts throughout the lower levels, tearing holes between that dungeon and something considerably deeper and worse."

"Monsters poured through those rifts in numbers no unit that size should ever have been expected to handle, regardless of skill."

"And the unit got separated."

"Scattered, in the chaos, across multiple collapsing levels, with no reliable way to regroup and no clear path back to the surface. " Albert’s voice had gone quiet, careful, each word chosen with the precision of a man handling something fragile. "Catherine carried critical information about the rift’s origin point, information the crown desperately needed if they were ever going to seal it and prevent whatever was down there from spreading further."

"In the final moments before all contact was lost, her unit made a decision."

William already knew, on some level, what was coming, but he waited anyway, letting Albert say it in his own time.

"They ordered her to retreat," Albert said. "Every one of them... together, in what I understand from the fragments of the report that survived to have been their final coordinated communication."

"She was the fastest among them, the only one with a realistic chance of making it back to the surface alive with the information intact."

"They held the line so she could run."

The silence that followed stretched long and heavy, and William found himself sinking into his own memories, unbidden and unwelcome.

He thought of the old life... the life he had tried to bury under layers of muscle and a new purpose. He remembered the cold calculus of command: the moment you look at a formation of soldiers and realize that to save the objective, you must send half of them to die.

He remembered the specific, hollow ache of being the one who survived the survivor’s guilt that gnaws at your insides like a parasite, whispering that your life was bought with the currency of someone else’s blood.

He knew that weight. And he knew it intimately.

"She made it out," Albert said finally.

His voice was quiet, almost reverent, as if he were reciting a prayer for the dead. "All alone... as the last survivor."

The word alone reverberated through the room.

"The intelligence she brought back, the raw, desperate information she clawed out of that hellhole, allowed the kingdom to seal the rift before it could spread beyond the dungeon’s lower levels," Albert continued, his eyes tracking a nonexistent point on the wall. "If she hadn’t made it back, if she hadn’t survived long enough to deliver those coordinates, this entire city wouldn’t be standing."

We wouldn’t be sitting here in this comfortable office... We would be corpses choking on corruption."

Albert let out a bitter, humorless breath. "Officially... she is a hero."

"The Crown’s reports framed it as a legendary sacrifice, a knight who gave everything to save countless lives."

"The public sees her as a paragon of courage." His fists tightened. "But she doesn’t see it that way."

"She has never once... in eight years, referred to herself as anything other than the coward who ran while everyone she loved stayed behind to die." Albert’s voice carried a grief of his own now, an old, weary sorrow that had been worn smooth by time but remained as sharp as a blade beneath the surface. "To her, every life saved by that sealing was another life she had failed to protect in that tunnel."

"I requested her placement here specifically because I could not stand to watch the Crown parade her through ceremonies," Albert said, his fingers gripping the armrests of his chair until his knuckles whitened. "I couldn’t bear to watch her stand on gilded stages, smiling hollowly while nobles toasted to a survival she experienced as an unbearable... shameful failure."

He looked at William, his expression raw. "She needed somewhere to simply exist."

"Somewhere she could be a person rather than a monument to tragedy..."

"This academy was the only place I could offer her a place where she could hide in plain sight, surrounded by students who know nothing of the real world’s cruelty."

William absorbed it all in a stunned, heavy silence. The full shape of Catherine’s wound finally lay bare before him.

Suddenly, the memory of what he had seen through the gap in the curtains last night burned behind his eyelids with terrifying clarity.

He saw it now: the woman standing motionless in a room filled with the only physical remnants left of those she had loved.

He saw her staring at that white-hilted sword, the weapon that had likely been the last thing her comrades ever touched, unable to even reach out and brush her fingers against it. Because touching it would be too real.

Touching it would mean confronting the unbearable truth that she was alive, breathing, and warm, while they remained cold, broken, and buried in the dark. It wasn’t a failure of skill or courage; it was the cruel irony of survival, an act of love she would never forgive herself for accepting.

The room felt smaller now, charged with the residual energy of Albert’s confession. William needed to steer them back, to find the thread that connected this personal tragedy to the larger conspiracy brewing in the shadows.

"You mentioned earlier that you suspected sabotage," William said, his voice cutting through the melancholy like a blade through silk.

The shift in tone was abrupt but necessary. "You never said whether that suspicion ever went anywhere."

Albert’s expression closed slightly, the particular guardedness of a man treading a line he’d walked many times before without ever finding solid ground on the other side.

"I raised it once... formally, in the months following the incident."

"I was told the investigation had already concluded, that the collapse was a natural instability in the dungeon’s structure, unfortunate but unremarkable."

"I did not believe that conclusion then, and I do not believe it till now, but I was never able to produce anything beyond suspicion... and suspicion without proof accomplishes very little against people determined not to look too closely."

"You think it connects to what’s happening now...? The operatives, the reaver in the dungeon?"

"I think," Albert said carefully, "that an academy experiencing a suspicious pattern of accidents and a knight’s unit destroyed under similarly convenient circumstances eight years apart is either an extraordinary coincidence, or it isn’t."

"I have no evidence linking the two... I want to be entirely clear about that, William, because I will not have you chasing a theory I cannot substantiate and calling it fact."

"But I have learned, over a long career, to distrust convenient coincidences involving people who are inconvenient enough to certain interests."

"That’s not exactly reassuring."

"It isn’t meant to be." Albert’s gaze steadied on him, weighing something. "It’s meant to be honest, which is considerably more useful to you than reassurance would be right now."