He didn’t remember walking into the Crimson Wing training yard.
Not the wind brushing his face.
Not the cold stare of the cadets.
Not the laughter behind cupped hands.
The world moved. He just moved with it.
This was Eidral Academy’s blood field. The place where names were carved—or erased.
And Caelan stood in it wearing nothing but his uniform, bruised resolve, and the invisible weight of survival.
But even now, three pairs of eyes watched him.
Three monsters disguised as mentors.
Each from a different world.
Each sensing something buried in the dirt-born boy who refused to stay buried.
The Berserker of Salvmire arrived first.
Lucan Dras Varro didn’t walk. He stormed.
Even in stillness, he gave the impression of a man mid-charge.
His scarred arms were crossed like a fortress over his barrel chest, and the cursed pauldron on his right shoulder—blackened from old blood and melted steel—still hummed like it wanted war.
His Aura was not shown. It leaked.
Leaked like a knife pressed to the neck of every cadet in range.
Cadets fell silent.
They had studied his name in books: Lucan, the butcher who ended the Battle of Salvmire not by leading troops, but by solo-ramping through six squads and a bonded wyvern.
Lucan, the former Aura Executioner who once shattered the spine of a mana-imbued golem with his bare hands.
Lucan, the man who had not trained a single cadet in three years.
He had no patience for weakness. No tolerance for mediocrity. No hope left for prodigies that glittered but didn’t grind.
And yet, today, he showed up early.
Because of one boy.
Because the boy had revealed nothing. Not even a glow.
Just a posture. A stance. A silence.
The stance of a killer—not trained, but shaped.
Lucan watched Caelan without blinking.
“Look at how he stands,” he muttered to no one in particular. “Feet spaced for recoil. Not form. That’s a boy who expects every Aura burst to be a fight with himself. Not the enemy.”
He scratched the scar over his left brow, a relic from an old blade that never healed.
“I’ve seen that stance once before. In a warzone. A kid with the same weight in his bones. That kid died grinning with a dagger in his ribs.”
Lucan’s gaze darkened. “This one? He’s waiting for someone to stab him. So he can bury them with it.”
From the far balcony, someone else observed in silence.
Elira of House Veilnare.
Eyes like frostfire. Hair braided in ceremonial loops only noble daughters wore.
She leaned against the marble rail, arms draped in a silk-trimmed cadet cloak, her left hand tracing the bite scar on her palm—a scar Caelan gave her.
She’d never forgotten the duel. Not the pain. Not the shame.
But most of all—not the look.
He had locked eyes with her while bleeding from three ribs, his weapon snapped in half.
And he smiled.
Not cocky. Not taunting.
Smiled like he had seen her soul. Like he already knew how she’d fall.
He had dodged her final move without stepping.
He had dropped her without effort.
And when she woke up staring at the infirmary ceiling, her first thought wasn’t I lost.
It was:
He didn’t even try.
Now she watched him train alone in the yard, taking basic Aura forms and distorting them.
Mixing them. Breaking them. Reinventing them with a vicious logic only someone unbound by doctrine could invent.
He wasn’t wielding Aura. He was folding it into his body like a blade finding its sheath.
She clenched her teeth.
“He’s hiding something,” she whispered. “And I hate that I want to know what.”
Her twin brother, Aerun, came up beside her, snorting.
“You’re still obsessed with that mudblood? He caught you off-guard once.”
“No,” she said flatly. “He watched me fight. Learned me. Then dismantled me.”
She looked down again.
“He’s not like us. And he’s not like them either. He’s something else.”
Elira’s blood ran noble. Her ancestors tamed beasts of flame. Her father trained with phantom steel.
But when she watched Caelan?
She felt like a student again.
Across the yard, inside the Crimson Wing observation hall, a figure sat alone in the shadows.
He didn’t clap. Didn’t speak. Didn’t blink.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Eryx Varn Eidral.
Official title: Homeroom Instructor of Crimson Wing.
Unofficial title: The Bastard of Eidral.
He was the black seed of a Supreme One and a pleasure maiden, unclaimed by either.
He grew in the halls of monsters and emerged not as a mage or knight—but as something colder.
A mindbreaker.
Eryx read emotions like maps. Built mental traps inside his lectures.
Half the cadets feared him. The other half had nightmares about him.
And he loved it.
But today, he didn’t play his usual games. He didn’t pace or smirk.
He watched the slum boy.
Caelan had not shown Mana. Had not radiated Aura.
But he survived the Pressure Trial.
Eryx had pushed him to 6.8—dangerous even for nobles with fully developed cores.
Caelan had not only endured it…
He met Eryx’s gaze while drowning in it.
Bleeding from seven orifices. Knees trembling.
And smiled.
Not defiance. Not pride.
But hunger.
Eryx felt a chill crawl up his spine for the first time in years.
So now, he watched.
Not for data. Not for fun.
But to understand.
Who—or what—was inside that boy?
Because Caelan wasn’t hiding his strength.
He was hiding the source.
And Eryx, who once dissected the minds of Supreme blood heirs just to test the limits of trauma, knew one truth better than anyone:
Power born from pain… was the kind that never left scars on the skin.
It carved the soul instead.
And Caelan’s soul looked like it had been carved a hundred times.
The air had weight now.
It wasn’t magic, not in the traditional sense. Not Aura. Not Mana. But something else—pressure that came from presence. The kind only killers carried, the kind that crept into the spine like a ghost whispering you are prey.
Lucan felt it first.
He was standing at the upper overlook above the Crimson Wing training ground, arms folded, cloak slung loosely over one shoulder. His eyes didn’t blink. Didn''t even shift.
Caelan was below, silent as always, surrounded by first-years running formations. Most failed to match rhythm. Most tripped over their own breath trying to execute the drills Lucan barked out ten minutes ago.
But Caelan?
He moved like he wasn’t trying to follow the drills—he was correcting them. Refining. Internalizing.
There were no wasted steps. No excess movement.
Lucan narrowed his eyes.
This wasn’t muscle memory.
This was muscle instinct.
“Third form, again,” Lucan shouted down, and his voice cracked like thunder across the stone yard.
Students groaned. Some wiped sweat. A few cursed under breath.
Caelan didn’t even flinch.
He just shifted stance, dropped lower, and pivoted like a blade drawn from silk.
Lucan stepped back, out of view.
And that’s when it happened—when the thin layer of control cracked for a second.
Caelan’s foot skidded wrong. A misstep.
It wasn’t major. No one else would’ve noticed. But Lucan did.
And the correction Caelan made wasn’t human.
His body snapped back into form using a motion Lucan had only ever seen on the frontlines during the Siege of Falruhn—a half-conscious twitch reflex of soldiers who''d seen death so many times they could feel it behind them like gravity.
Lucan’s jaw tensed.
That wasn’t learned here.
That wasn’t learned at all.
It was remembered.
From something old. Or somewhere else.
Or maybe—
Lucan clenched his fist and whispered, “Who the hell trained you, boy?”
He didn’t know it yet, but that whisper carried down.
Caelan heard it.
And for a split second, his lips curved—not a smile, not quite.
More like a warning.
A growl.
<hr>
Across the courtyard, Elira watched too.
She was seated beneath the shade of a high arc near the Mana Fountain—where elite students from Azure Halls usually congregated. She didn’t belong here. Not strictly. Her House was Aura-aligned.
But no one dared tell her to move.
Not even the Azure brats with platinum blood and arrogance soaked in generations of palace funding.
Elira sat with legs crossed, crystal tablet in hand, pretending to study tactical spell structures.
But her eyes?
Always drifted.
Back to the training yard.
Back to him.
She hated it. Hated how her stomach twisted every time he moved with that brutal efficiency. Hated how her brain screamed to ignore him, to laugh like the rest, to dismiss him as a fluke.
But she couldn’t.
Because she saw it.
During the Trial.
That look in his eyes.
When they fought, she had opened with double-blade strikes—flawless, honed over eight years.
He didn’t even block the first.
He let it slice into his shoulder, twisting into the wound to lock her arm, then disarmed her with a backstep and pivot that threw her to the ground.
And the worst part?
He apologized. Silently. With his eyes.
He didn’t hate her. Didn’t even see her as an enemy.
He pitied her.
And that… that was what kept her watching now.
Every breath he took was a paradox.
He moved like a beast, but never with rage. He fought like a noble, but never with pride. He endured like a martyr, but never asked for pity.
And above all…
He kept his Aura locked tight. Too tight.
Aura was supposed to leak. Spill. It was pride made visible.
But Caelan?
His was caged. Leashed. Muzzled.
Why?
She’d asked herself a thousand times.
And every time, her instincts screamed the same thing:
It’s not to protect others. It’s to protect himself.
<hr>
Eryx stood alone on the uppermost spire, the wind dragging his coat like wings from his shoulders.
He didn''t watch Caelan.
Not directly.
He didn’t need to.
He could feel him.
Not Aura. Not Mana.
Something colder.
Older.
He''d known killers. Trained them. Broken them.
He could sniff out potential like rot in fruit.
But Caelan?
Caelan was a paradox that reeked of controlled catastrophe.
Every time the boy was pushed—cornered—pressured—he didn’t crack.
He compressed.
Tighter. Denser.
Until he became something you couldn’t read.
That’s what terrified Eryx.
The day of the Pressure Trial still looped in his head.
He had raised the levels out of spite. Out of curiosity. Out of his own twisted fascination.
But he hadn’t expected the boy to last past 4.0.
Let alone 6.8.
Let alone with blood leaking and eyes blazing like they’d seen gods fall.
He had wanted to prove a point.
Instead, Caelan proved something else:
He could suffer like a monster… and still choose silence.
Eryx stared at the sky and whispered to the wind,
“Which hell spat you out, kid?”
<hr>
That night, the three of them met.
Not formally.
Not planned.
But some currents couldn’t be avoided.
Eryx had summoned Lucan for drink. The old warrior rarely accepted—but this time, he came.
Elira, chasing rumors of an unauthorized duel in the Obsidian Floor, arrived late and found them by accident.
She didn’t leave.
They didn’t tell her to.
And the three sat around a single silent bottle of crimson firewine, in the old war hall of the west wing. No students. No eyes. Just memory and instinct.
“Dras Varro,” Eryx said, tapping a knuckle on the wood. “You saw it too, didn’t you?”
Lucan didn’t answer. Just poured the wine.
Elira sat. Crossed arms. Then, finally:
“He bleeds wrong.”
Eryx raised a brow. “Wrong?”
“He bleeds like it’s not pain—it’s payment.”
Lucan took a long sip, then set his cup down hard.
“That boy… isn’t here to learn.”
They all looked at each other.
And in that unspoken moment, something was decided.
Not protection.
Not admiration.
Observation.
Surveillance.
Because monsters like Caelan?
They didn’t belong.
But they couldn’t be ignored either.
And whatever path he was walking…
They needed to know before he reached the end of it.