By the end of the first week in academy all cadets in Unit 12 need to bring their own swords and after that they can finally start duel with each other. As you know our Caelan has no sponsors and has no strong family that backup for him. A nd he have to rely on his own . While other crybabies receive their golden shit from their sugarfamilies he didn’t expect a package. Not from them.
Cadets were told to retrieve their issued practice weapons before dawn. Most came early, dragging blades behind them like banners, all etched with ancestral pride. Swords of lineage, polished to blindness. Axes shaped with jewel cores. Spears inscribed with house scripts in old dialects no one dared mispronounce.
Weapons that screamed, “I am worthy.”
Caelan came with silence.
No name worth engraving. No sigil to offer.
Just silver scraps saved from two years of fixing carts, carrying corpses, and lying through clenched teeth to survive the Slums of Estar. Just enough to buy a blade sharp enough to cut through air, if swung hard enough.
But when he walked the crooked merchant line along the outer academy walls, pushing past vendors with weapons better suited for theater than war, he saw it:
Wrapped in rough cloth, stained by soot, knotted with chakra-stitched rope so tight it could only have come from one place—
Home.
He didn’t touch it at first.
He just stared.
Because that binding? It was his father’s way. Three knots. One hidden loop to lock the core. The rope itself—worn leather from their old forge bellows. Something his father swore he''d bury with him when he died.
But he’d given it away.
For this.
Caelan took the package to the side alley between the rune-towers. No one followed him. No one noticed him. He was good at that.
He sat with it in his lap like it was alive. He didn’t breathe until he opened it.
And then—
He forgot how to.
It wasn’t a weapon. It was a resurrection.
The blade was short—closer to a bastard sword than a proper knight''s. Rough. Uneven in polish. The edge shimmered, but not cleanly; it caught light like it remembered fire. The metal near the base was twisted, reforged from something broken.
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Junk steel.
But in its spine—just beneath the hilt, embedded where a noble would place their aura core—was a black shard. Deep, obsidian-black. Not glass. Not onyx.
Something… else.
A fragment of a Supreme Guard’s sword. Caelan knew that material. Rare. Illegal. Used only by the Highest.
How the fuck did his father get it?
He knew.
He knew it the moment he saw the folded lines beneath the obsidian. The way the handle was bound—not with thread or aura fiber, but leather. Burnt, darkened, but familiar.
His mother’s old satchel.
She’d stitched it herself, years ago, during the winter that nearly killed Edena.
And carved into the blade guard, nearly missed under the grime—
A flower.
Not any flower.
Edena.
White bloom. Five petals. Rooted in ash. His little sister once called it “the flower that grows from dirt.” She used to draw them in chalk on their door before the rain washed them away.
The blade wasn’t forged for war.
It was forged for him.
There was no note. No declaration. Just that sword. That weight. That memory.
And in the handle, if he focused—
He could feel it.
His father’s chakra. Crude, but persistent. Rough spiritual pressure shaped through years of hammering bones for coin, not glory.
And beneath that?
A trace of his mother’s mana. Faint. Fragile. But present. Pushed into the metal like a prayer.
He gripped the hilt and it burned.
Not with heat.
With memory.
With pain.
He remembered the day he left. No goodbye. No promise. Just a whispered sorry to the night.
And still—
They sent him this.
He named it without thinking:
“Virael.”
Born from Ruin.
It wasn’t a blade blessed by gods.
It wasn’t pure.
It wasn’t right.
But it was real.
It was him.
That night, when the cadets gathered in the training halls and unsheathed their polished weapons, Caelan walked in last.
Virael strapped to his back.
Wrapped not in velvet, but in truth.
Heads turned. Not because it was beautiful—but because it wasn’t.
Because no one carried something like that unless they meant to use it.
And Caelan? He didn’t carry it to prove he belonged.
He carried it to cut a path where none existed.
Even the instructors paused.
Eryx, watching from the upper balcony, leaned forward and whispered:
“That’s not a weapon. That’s a fucking gravestone.”
And Lucan, arms crossed, watching through his battlefield-glare, murmured:
“No. That’s a soul. Steel given memory.”
Caelan stood on the dueling platform that night for evaluation.
His opponent—a boy from House Rellin—drew a twin-edged aura blade, humming with calibrated force.
“Where’d you find that trash?” the boy mocked.
Caelan didn’t answer.
He drew Virael with a single motion.
It didn’t sing.
It howled.
Rust scraped the air. The black shard pulsed once.
The duel lasted three seconds.
Caelan dodged low, feinted right, and slammed the hilt into the noble’s jaw. Cracked his aura guard. Laid him out flat.
No cuts. No flair.
Just violence shaped like silence.
No one clapped.
But no one called his blade trash again.
That night, alone under the training tower’s shadow, Caelan rested Virael on his lap. Ran his hand along the jagged edge. It bit his finger. Drew blood.
He smiled.
He whispered:
“You and me now. Just us.”
Virael pulsed again.
And somewhere, far away, a pair of broken hands reached for a forge that no longer burned.
And a woman who could barely stand smiled at a candle she couldn’t light.
They’d given him a gift.
No.
They gave him a future.
One cut at a time.