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

Chapter 61: 61. Most Devastating Conversation of Either Life, Then Ellie Blew Up a Hedge

William nodded slowly, the words sinking into him like molten lead. He filed Albert’s admission away alongside the other fragments of the dead unit, the survivor, the broken knight, feeling the edges of a much larger, much older pattern beginning to form in the periphery of his mind.

It was a shape he recognized: the pattern of a wound that refused to heal because it was being kept alive by the very system that claimed to honor it.

"Thank you," William said quietly, his voice carrying a weight that matched the gravity of the confession. "For trusting me with this... and also for telling me."

The moment of vulnerability evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. Albert’s features hardened, the weary philosopher retreating behind the iron-willed headmaster.

His gaze turned razor sharp, protective in a way that reminded William uncomfortably of his own protective instincts, the kind that drove a man to stand alone against an incoming tide of steel.

"Make me regret it, and you will regret everything," Albert warned, his voice dropping to a dangerous register. "Whatever you intend to do with this knowledge, William... or whatever path you choose to walk tread carefully."

The old man leaned forward slightly, his eyes burning with a warning that was both paternal and severe. "That wound has had eight years to scar over."

"Eight years to create a fragile crust over something that is still raw and bleeding underneath... and wounds like that don’t respond well to being reopened carelessly."

"If you poke at it without purpose, you won’t find truth; you’ll only find more pain, and you might drown her in it."

William didn’t flinch at the threat. Instead, a small, grim smile touched his lips, not one of amusement, but of understanding.

"I don’t intend to reopen anything, Headmaster..."

"I’m not here to play at being a surgeon." His expression turned serious, almost clinical. "I just needed to understand what I was looking at."

"And I needed to make sure I wasn’t misinterpreting the silence... Because if I’m wrong about what she’s carrying, I’m wrong about everything else."

Albert studied him for a long moment. He searched William’s eyes for any sign of recklessness, any trace of the naive hero who would charge into a tragedy without considering the fallout.

Finding only a cold, focused clarity, the Headmaster finally gave a single, slow nod. The tension in his shoulders eased fractionally, though the exhaustion remained etched into every line of his face.

"Then I trust you’ll know what to do with it better than I have managed," Albert said, his voice carrying a note of bitter resignation. "I have spent eight years watching from a distance, hoping the storm would simply pass her by."

"Perhaps watching from a distance was my mistake..."

William turned and walked toward the door. As he stepped out into the hallway, the cool air of the academy corridors felt different, sharper, more deliberate.

He left the office with considerably more weight on his shoulders than he’d carried when he walked in, each step feeling like he was dragging the accumulated grief of a decade behind him. But beneath that weight, there was something else: a cold, piercing clarity that had been absent for days.

The shadows were moving, the sabotage was real, and now he finally understood the human cost of the secrets being kept.

...

The walk back toward the instructor housing took him through the academy’s quieter grounds, past darkened lecture halls that stood like silent sentinels and empty courtyards where the moonlight pooled in silver stains across the cobblestones.

William moved with purpose, but his mind was far from present; it was locked in a relentless, analytical spiral. He turned Albert’s confession over in his thoughts with the slow, methodical patience of a man trying to fit a jagged puzzle piece into a picture that refused to resolve.

’Eight years,’ he thought, his jaw tightening as he stepped through a patch of shadow. ’Eight years of pretending the ghost isn’t standing right next to her.’

’How does a person even function like that?’

’How do you wake up every morning knowing you’re the only one who gets to breathe because everyone else paid the price?’

He could almost see Catherine’s face with that practiced, hollow neutrality. It wasn’t just grief; it was a fortress.

And Albert was right: poking at that fortress without knowing exactly what you’re trying to dislodge would be suicide. Not just for William, but for her.

But as the melancholy settled, the colder, sharper instincts of the soldier took over. His mind shifted from the tragedy of the person to the mechanics of the conspiracy.

’Sabotage...’ The word tasted like copper in his mouth.

’Albert suspects sabotage, but he hasn’t named a target or a timeline.’

’Yet, the pieces are already moving on the board...’

’The operatives, those bastards who seemed to know far too much about Catherine’s administrative access.’

’The summoning of a Reaver in a Tier One dungeon wasn’t an accident... it feels more like that was a test, or a provocation. ’William held his breath. ’And then there’s the Crown.’

He paused for a moment, leaning against a stone pillar as he stared into the darkness. The implications were sickening.

’A kingdom that rewards heroism with medals but punishes inconvenient truth with erasure...’

’If Catherine knew something that threatened the narrative, something that made her survival more complicated than a simple tale of sacrifice, then she wasn’t just a survivor.’

’She was a liability... And liabilities get removed.’

’First their reputation, then their position, then... everything else...’

’Am I walking into a trap? ’ The question flashed through his mind like lightning. ’Am I being drawn into this because I’m the only one who can see the pattern, or am I being drawn in because I’m the next convenient casualty?’

He shook the thought away, forcing himself to focus on the present. He couldn’t afford to spiral into paranoia, even if paranoia was the only rational response to this situation.

He needed to maintain his composure.

CRACK BOOM.

A sudden, violent flash of blue-white light detonated in the darkness ahead, searing his retinas and casting grotesquely elongated shadows across the courtyard. The magical discharge was sharp, uncontrolled, and followed almost immediately by a small, undignified shriek, the sound of someone losing their footing and their dignity simultaneously, and the unmistakable, wet thwack of someone falling backward into a thick hedge.

William’s hand instinctively flew to the hilt of his blade, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. His pulse spiked, adrenaline flooding his system.

’Magic? Here? Now?’ his mind screamed. ’Was that an attack? An experiment gone wrong? Or is someone trying to draw me out into the open?’

His muscles coiled, ready to spring. The silence of the academy had been shattered, and in the sudden ringing in his ears, he could only think one thing: ’Whatever that was, it wasn’t supposed to happen tonight.’

William broke into a jog, rounding the corner just to find Ellie sprawled half inside a decorative shrub, hair smoking faintly at the tips, while Clara stood a safe distance away with her journal already open, scribbling notes with the calm, detached focus of someone documenting a phenomenon rather than reacting to an emergency.

’Oh... it’s just these two...’ William sighed. ’What the fuck are they even doing at this hour?’

"Ellie?" William called out. "You alive?"

"Mostly," Ellie’s muffled voice came from somewhere inside the hedge. "I think..."

"Everything smells like burnt hair, which is concerning, because it’s probably my hair."

"What happened?"

"We were experimenting," Clara said, without looking up from her notes, "with a controlled illumination spell."

"And it was Ellie’s idea. She wanted to see if she could scale a light spell up gradually using the same increment technique you taught her for combat control."

"I told her forty percent was too much this morning," William said, already crossing over to help pull Ellie free of the hedge, twigs and leaves tangled liberally through her pink hair.

"I know... and I was being so careful," Ellie said, emerging with as much dignity as a woman recently launched backward into shrubbery could manage. "I went up by exactly ten percent each time, just like you said."

"At first... It was working beautifully. And then I got to the sixth increase, and apparently my mana decided ten percent of a much bigger number is still a much bigger number than I accounted for, and things got, well."

She gestured vaguely at the singed hedge, the faint smoke still curling from a scorch mark on the nearby path. "Things got bright."

"That’s an understatement," Clara said. "I could see the flash from the library."

"You could not."

"I absolutely could... It’s why I came to find you in the first place."