Chapter 93: Heartbeat
Huf, huf, huf...
A small green will-o’-the-wisp floated lazily around my head.
Dammit. Dammit, dammit.
God dammit.
My chest heaved violently.
Every breath felt like inhaling shards of broken glass.
The one hundred and fifty kilograms of simulated mass pulling at my shoulders and calves felt heavier with every step.
I must be close now!
Surely, I must be close to a hundred laps, right?
"Check yourself," Verde teased in her telepathic voice.
With trembling fingers, I hooked my thumb into the collar of my tight combat suit and peeled it back just enough to catch a glimpse of the glowing digital readout on the shoulder bracer.
#430
Dammmmiiiiiit!!!
Only forty laps?
I had only done forty laps?!
I fell into the synthetic turf.
Huf, huf, huf.
How do I even do this? My body was already screaming at me to stop.
"Why are you in such a ridiculous rush anyway?" Verde asked, her orb buzzing closer to my ear.
"You just need to do half of the count today, rest your pathetic muscles, and then finish the rest tomorrow before the deadline.
"There is no tomorrow! I screamed back in my head, my teeth gritting so hard they ground together.
The green orb suddenly paused mid-air.
"What do you mean by that?"
The murder of those Holy Inquisitors is going to happen tomorrow night, I thought back.
If I don’t finish this today and free up my time to intervene, the timeline is going to lock into the canon ending.
Finster will be framed. He will be labeled as a wanted man across the empire.
The buzzing light stopped circling me entirely. It drifted downward, gently settling on my weighted shoulder pad like a resting bird.
"Having seen the absolute truth of the world is a cruel fate, even for beings like us," Verde murmured, her voice losing its usual playful edge.
"The more you see of the tapestry, the more powerless you feel against its threads. This is precisely why I urge everyone around me to flourish. That includes you, Schwarz, even though we represent entirely different concepts."
The green light flared.
"BZZZZT"
The particles rapidly expanded and materialized into a familiar, shifting silhouette right beside me on the track.
A glitchy green outline of a woman.
"Schwartz..."
She gently rubbed her palms on my head.
"Thinking about the future is entirely futile when you are failing to live in the present."
...
Verde, the person standing on this track right now, isn’t Schwartz, I thought back.
I am Matthew.
"You are missing the point."
With a sharp, static pop, her glitchy silhouette dissolved back into a cloud of glowing green particles.
The light surged forward, rushing straight into my face and disappearing back into my eyes, returning to my sea of consciousness.
I locked my jaw and stood up to run again.
I was fully focused on the track
Slowly, the world began to drown out. The distant shouts of the training field, the booming laughter of Tasora, and the worried calls of Finster.
All of it was drowned.
The only sounds left in my ears were the ragged, desperate bursts of air from my lungs and the wet, rhythmic squeak of sweat shifting inside my compression suit with every grueling stride.
I must help him.
I need to help him.
I won’t be like my past life.
I won’t just sit there and watch everything fall apart from the sidelines.
I will find a meaning to this life.
I need to make a meaning to my life. Otherwise...
What is left of me?
My vision narrowed to a single patch of white line on the track ahead.
I didn’t care about the pain anymore.
I didn’t care about the weight.
I just kept moving.
And in the distance, a pair of sharp, aquamarine eyes watched my mechanical, zombie-like progression around the loop.
____________________
Solaris’s POV
I stood by the edge of the track as I locked onto Matthew.
He looked completely ghastly.
His skin had gone a sickly, ash-white.
Sweat saturated his entire combat suit, making the fabric cling to his shuddering frame.
He was moving on absolute zero fuel. There was completely nothing left within his tank, yet his legs kept lifting, hammering into the track desperately.
He really is different...
But at that rate, he is going to make himself completely bedridden again. Just like on that island.
The moment the thought crossed my mind, a violent memory flashed vividly behind my eyes.
I remembered the excruciating pain of being systematically tortured by the Aberrant in under our makeshift shelter.
The Aberrant would stab me, slicing through my flesh, fully knowing that I would be forced to use my own ice magic to freeze my gaping wounds shut just to keep from bleeding out.
It was a futile effort. It was a disgraceful, pathetic state—me, a proud daughter of royalty, desperately clinging to survival just to breathe for a few more agonizing seconds.
And when the Aberrant finally decided that it was time to end my life, a crushing despair took hold of me.
Why did I even suffer?
Why did I even try this hard?
I had molded myself since childhood to be absolutely perfect.
I believed myself to be perfect.
I lived every single day acting like I was perfect.
And yet, look at the state I was reduced to in the end: a pathetic, powerless piece of scum who was internally begging just to live.
...
Until he appeared out of nowhere and caught me safely in his arms.
He had that ridiculous, messy bedhead. He possessed a completely below-average face and a notoriously opportunistic, sly personality.
Thump thump thump.
What is that noise.....
Thump thump thump.
Strangely, in that single, fleeting moment... he looked like the most handsome man I had ever seen in my entire life.
Even the pristine princes of neighboring nations who had traveled across borders to offer their hands in marriage to me couldn’t even begin to compare to him.
"Too late, idiot..." I had whispered back then, desperately trying to hide how clearly shaken I was by his sudden rescue.
Deep down, I had wanted him to greet me with his usual arrogant grin and that slimy, playful smile of his.
I wanted him to crack a joke to break the terror.
Instead, he just looked down at me, his eyes filled with a heavy, uncharacteristic sorrow.
"I’m sorry..." he had murmured.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
My heartbeat suddenly spiked and was hammering violently.
I could feel a sudden, intense heat rushing straight up to the tips of my ears, completely defying the blood-riddled frozen, cold constitution of my own body.
...
hah.....
After that moment on the island, everything else in my memory had become an incoherent fuzz.
My gaze drifted back to the present, comparing his bloodied, heroic image from the island to this ragged, futile effort on the track right now.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Again with that noise...
Thump. Thump. Thump.
I tightly clutched the fabric over my chest
My fingers were trembling against my uniform.
"Tsk..."
This won’t do. At this rate, he will overwork himself.
I need to help him.
Breaking away from the rest of the running group, I turned my heels and marched directly towards Professor Heather.
"Hello, Professor Heather."
"What do you need, Student Apparecio?" Heather replied smoothly, his eyes never leaving the bright screen of his device.
"Why are you forcing Matthew to complete nearly five hundred laps when you already know he is an Astute weaver?" I demanded, crossing my arms.
...
He didn’t even look up at me.
"I calculate training based on data, not assumptions," he half-assedly replied.
"You can tell me the truth, sir," I pressed, stepping closer to block his line of sight.
"I am technically one of his personal magic mentors. He told me his specific weaver type willingly during our sessions."
Heather finally stopped tapping. He dropped his tablet onto the metal table beside him and stood up to his full, imposing height.
"Then that makes things much simpler," Heather said, his voice dropping to a serious, low tone.
"I gave him that specific load because he is actively walking a completely different path from traditional Astute weavers."
I blinked, thrown off by his tone.
"Sir? What exactly do you mean by that?"
"I meant exactly what I said. Normally, Astute mages like yourself are physically weak and feeble. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. That is because no one is born perfect. We all have our own hyper-specialties. Cruelly enough, this specialty is determined not by our own personal will, but by our predetermined fate."
"The system..." I whispered."
"Solaris, let me ask you, how many laps did I assign to you for your weekly quota, and how heavy were your magnetic bands in total?"
"Three hundred and twenty laps with sixty kilograms bracers," I answered.
"I gave him four hundred and seventy laps with one hundred and twenty kilograms," Heather noted, pointing a scarred finger toward the track where Matthew was still dragging his feet.
...
"Are you saying you are actively trying to make him give up, sir? That you are trying to crush his dreams of impossibility before he realizes that it is futile?"
He slowly waved his head from left to right.
"No. Excellia Academy never turns a blind eye to a jewel in the rough. Especially one as insanely, ridiculously talented as him," he said in a grim smile forming on his stoic face.
"Then why?!"
"Why push him to the point of literal breaking down?!" I asked, my frustration bubbling over as I watched Matthew stumble across the track again.
"Simple, that is because if he truly dares to defy the very norms of this world, then he needs to be able to survive at least this much... right?" Heather said, his eyes locking onto Matthew’s ragged silhouette.
