Chapter 46: One Week

A full week passed under the temporary suspension of classes.

The academy never truly went quiet. Hammers rang from the east wing, healers moved in shifts, and barrier specialists worked in teams along the sky bridges. But for the students, the usual pressure of lectures and evaluations was gone. What filled the gap was something Arthur had not expected.

Every morning he arrived at the Dawn training grounds just after sunrise, and students were already waiting.

On the first day it had been only a dozen from House Dawn. By the third day there were forty. By the fifth, students from Nova, Dusk, and Star were sitting on the low wall with practice swords across their knees, waiting for him to show up. The attack had burned away most of the old laziness and house rivalries. What remained was a quiet, stubborn hunger to become less helpless.

Arthur fell into a clear rhythm.

Mornings belonged to the grounds.

He moved between groups the same way he had on the first day, but now with more structure.

A boy whose Grimoire produced living chains was his first problem of the week. The boy kept trying to throw them like nets.

"They’re not rope," Arthur told him, catching one chain mid-air and letting it coil around his own forearm. "Feel the weight at the end? Your Grimoire gives them their own momentum. Don’t throw. Whip."

"Like this?" The boy snapped his wrist. The chain cracked, whistling.

"Better. Again. Tighter arc. Make it cut, not just bind. If you can make it bind and cut at the same time, no one wants to get close to you."

Nearby, a girl with a spore-based Grimoire sat cross-legged, frustrated. Her book released faint green clouds that made everyone drowsy.

"I can only make people sleepy," she muttered. "It’s useless in a duel."

Arthur knelt beside her. "Can you compress them?"

"What?"

"Don’t let them spread. Crush the cloud into a ball, as small as you can."

She tried. The green haze shivered and condensed into a dense, wobbling sphere the size of a marble.

"Now step on it."

She stared, then carefully placed her foot on the sphere. It held. Like a solid foothold made of air.

Her eyes went wide. "It... it’s solid?"

"If you compress it tightly enough, your paralysis spores become temporary platforms," Arthur said. "You could walk in the air for three steps. That’s three steps your opponent can’t predict."

She spent the next hour giggling every time she managed to hover for a second.

A quiet student whose book controlled temperature differentials had been wasting mana trying to freeze entire sections of ground. Arthur stopped him.

"You’re trying to winter the whole field. Don’t. Make a blade." He showed him, drawing a thin line of super-cooled air across his palm. "One line. A centimeter wide. It costs almost nothing, and anything that touches it sticks and tears."

The student practiced until he could make a faint, shimmering knife of cold that hung in the air for five seconds.

One particularly strange Grimoire allowed its holder to store kinetic energy from impacts and release it later. The owner, a nervous boy named Lyle, kept absorbing every bump automatically and then yelping when it discharged randomly.

"You have to choose," Arthur spent nearly an hour telling him, having Lyle stand while Arthur gently pushed his shoulder. "Don’t store that. Let it pass. Now — this one, store it. Feel the difference?"

By the end of the session Lyle could take a full shoulder charge, hold the force buzzing in his knuckles like a trapped bee, and return it in a single explosive palm strike that sent a training dummy skidding back three meters.

Arthur watched all of it carefully. Many of these books had far more potential than their official tiers suggested. The limiting factor was almost always the user’s understanding, not the Grimoire itself.

But none of them compared to Iris Blackthorn’s Dream Grimoire.

Over the week Arthur observed her closely during the friendly matches and the private practice she sometimes allowed him to watch after everyone else had left. He finally asked her about it on the fourth afternoon, while they sat on the edge of the platform sharing water.

"How does it work?" he asked.

Iris wiped sweat from her forehead, her Grimoire floating closed beside her.

"I can record any dream I experience," she said in her usual calm, matter-of-fact tone. "Not the story. The feeling. The core sensation. Once it’s recorded, I can cast that feeling onto an opponent — or onto myself. It’s like... saving a texture."

"So the falling sensation you used on Ragna..."

"I dreamt it two nights before," she said. "I was falling from a cliff in the dream. Endless falling. I woke up with my heart racing. I recorded it the next morning. When I cast it, I gave her nervous system that exact memory. Her body reacted before her mind could stop it."

Milo, who had been listening nearby, choked on his water. "You can give people your dreams? That’s terrifying."

Iris nodded. "I can give myself them, too. When Ragna increased gravity around me, I applied a different dream. One where I was floating in a deep void, warm water everywhere, no weight at all. My body remembered floating better than it remembered being crushed, so it obeyed the dream instead."

Arthur realized how broken the ability set was in that moment.

At only Level 2 mana pool, Iris was already able to rewrite short moments of physical law for herself or her target. If her pool grew to Level 4 or 5, the duration and complexity of the dreams she could impose would become terrifying. A long enough false awakening could end a fight before the opponent even understood they were in one. A carefully chosen nightmare could disable an entire group without a single wound.

And Mimi’s earlier warning about a book spirit beginning to form refused to leave Arthur’s mind.

Evenings belonged to Selene.

She came for him after the public training ended, usually with a brief glance and a quiet "Come." They went to a private training chamber reserved for high-tier instructors, lined with frost-resistant stone and monitoring crystals that recorded mana fluctuations.

There Selene taught him the Frost Sovereign ability with the same precision she once used in formal lectures, only now more direct.

"At early Level 3 you cannot create absolute zero fields like I do," she said, standing behind him and guiding his wrist. "Don’t try. Focus on density, not size."

He learned to form razor-thin ice needles that cost almost no mana but could punch through wood at ten meters. He practiced coating his own Mana Skin with a freezing layer so thin it was invisible, but anything that touched him slowed instantly. He discovered how to create a short-lived ice mirror, no bigger than a buckler, that could reflect a single low-to-mid tier projectile if angled perfectly.

"Again," she would say whenever he got it right. "Until you don’t have to think about it."

Every improvement in control fed back into the Eros Codex. The Frost Sovereign seal’s mastery ticked upward in small, steady increments whenever they finished a session. The constant shadow of pain that once lived behind Selene’s eyes was almost entirely gone by the sixth night. Her own Ice Queen Grimoire moved smoother, colder, cleaner.

They would stay in the chamber long after the crystals dimmed, reviewing forms, talking about circuit theory, or simply sitting in the lingering cold while their mana settled.

On the morning of the eighth day the academy announcement boards updated with a crisp chime that echoed across all dorms.

CLASSES WILL RESUME TOMORROW. ALL STUDENTS REPORT TO THEIR HOMEROOMS AT 08:00. REPAIR CREWS WILL CONTINUE IN RESTRICTED AREAS.

Arthur stood on the empty training ground just after dawn, the black book warm against his side, and looked out at the repaired platforms and sky bridges. The stone where Iris had been crushed and had floated away was already replaced. The scorch marks Julian had left were scrubbed clean.

The week of chaos and recovery was ending. The routine of lectures, practicals, and formal evaluations was about to return.

Somewhere above the clouds the Grand Magisterium Tournament still waited, nearly a year away.

He had work to do.