Chapter 97: Temporary Act End

Isabella crouched slightly, studying his face for a moment.

"Alright. We take him to the Palace. The Ruler and authority of this kingdom decides what happens to someone who killed the heir."

"Agreed."

The system notification blinked once in the darkness behind Alden’s closed eyes.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[Act VI Ended]

[Emotional State: Controlled]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Then nothing.

______

"Alden was restrained?!" Leon asked it twice. The first time to himself. The second time to the room, like maybe the room would give him a different answer.

"He’s being sent to the Palace for judgment," Darius repeated, his voice carrying something in it that wasn’t his usual controlled authority. It sounded like fury being held at a very specific temperature so it wouldn’t boil over. "I contacted the Upper Academy to protect him. Not to arrest him." He turned to Helena. "What exactly did he do out there?"

Helena’s fingers tightened around the crystal. "There is more in the dispatch, Headmaster."

"Then say it."

She looked at the scroll. Took a breath. "Alden single-handedly annihilated the entire vampire army."

The whole room became so quiet you could have heard snow hitting the ground outside.

Nobody moved or even took a breath while the heavy words hung in the cold air of the hall refusing to become real to the crowd.

Leon opened his mouth and closed it again before trying one more time. "By... himself?"

"Yes." Helena’s voice had dropped to nearly a whisper. "And he also executed Crown Prince Augustus Solaris."

Absolute silence settled over the room.

Somewhere in the middle rows, a student swallowed and the sound was audible.

"The whole army?" A senior’s voice came out trembling. "And the Crown Prince as well?"

Leon felt cold from the inside out. His mind tried to build the image and failed completely. The mountain pass. The endless wall of vampires. Augustus with that mutated frame and those red eyes and the mana pressure that had pushed all of them to their knees. The sheer scale of what he had watched unfold from the dragon’s back as they flew away.

"He did all of that... alone?" Leon said, not a question. Just the words coming out because his brain had finally processed them and needed somewhere to put them.

Roselle wasn’t looking at anyone. Her eyes had gone somewhere else entirely. She was back on the mountain, feeling the terror of that first arrow and the blood rain and Augustus landing in the snow in front of Seris. She was remembering the moment everything had looked like it was going to end and then Alden had arrived, and the dragon had come through the clouds, and the pressure coming off him had made the vampires step back without meaning to.

She was remembering him walking past Augustus like the man didn’t exist.

Just to check if Seris was breathing when they weren’t even able to slip past the Vampire army.

Her hands were shaking and she hadn’t noticed until now.

’He stood in the middle of all of that,’ she thought, and then after we left, he stayed and finished it. ’Alone?’

Nicholas had gone completely still.

Around him, the auditorium was starting to fill with noise again as the shock cracked and everyone started talking at once. He heard it distantly. His mind was elsewhere.

A year ago, he hadn’t known Alden’s name.

That wasn’t an exaggeration. When they had both been first-years, Nicholas had been the one everyone watched. He had been the benchmark. The top-ranked student, the academy’s measuring stick, the person everyone else was trying to reach. He had never needed to look sideways because no one at his level had ever appeared at the edges of his vision.

Alden hadn’t even been at the edges. He had been somewhere much further back than that.

Then came the accusation with Sierra. And despite being publicly branded as the one responsible, Alden had did many things and solved mysteries of whatever had happened in the academy recently.

First the Helion Core incident, then the tournament. Nathan going down in under three minutes against a student ranked 248th.

Then came the four-on-one squad match. Everyone expected him to fall, but he fought smart and outplayed all four of them, taking the victory by cleverly filling the mana crystal to win the round exactly as required.

First was Augustus in the corridor, then the duel itself. He took the punch and surrendered on purpose, watching Augustus get suspended while Nicholas stood there trying to figure out his goal, only to realize the plan was to get Augustus suspended all along.

Every time Nicholas had thought he understood where Alden stood, Alden had already moved further forward.

And now this.

An entire vampire army. The Crown Prince. Alone on a mountain pass after sending the rest of them to safety.

Nicholas looked at the floor.

He had looked down on him. That was the honest truth of it. The automatic dismissal you give someone before you’ve understood who they are, and then the slow, uncomfortable process of revising that understanding as evidence accumulates.

But the evidence had accumulated, and he had kept not quite revising all the way. Kept thinking that he understood the ceiling now. Kept thinking that the next thing Alden did would be the last surprising thing.

He had been wrong about him every single time.

Nicholas looked up at the hall around him. At Leon, who was staring blankly ahead. At Roselle, whose hands were clasped together too tightly. At the hundreds of students processing an impossibility.

’What are you, Alden?’ he thought.

’How far have you gone while I was looking somewhere else?’

His fingers closed into a fist at his side. Not with frustration. With something closer to resolve. The kind that comes when you’ve finally finished arguing with a truth you’ve been avoiding.

Somewhere on the road to the Palace, unconscious and being carried by the Spires, was the most dangerous person any of them had ever stood next to.

And none of them had fully understood that until now.