Chapter 18: Noticing
The concealment enchantments collapsed in silence, like veils cut loose from a rig.
The arena no longer looked like a ring of training. It looked like a crater. The scent of scorched stone lingered, and the glow of Crownlight—lingering, leaking from where the Brood had stood—finally began to fade.
Kael stood upright, breathing through his teeth.
His ribs ached. His arm was shaking. Not from pain—he'd been hit harder before—but something worse. The kind of shaking that came when your mind hadn't caught up to your body yet.
They hadn't won, and it wasn't even close.
Across the yard, students started paying attention. Some peered down from walkways above. Others leaned on steel bannisters, whispering among themselves. The surge of Crownlight earlier had caught attention. Too much energy at once. No faculty around. They knew something unnatural had happened.
Kael didn't look at them.
He couldn't.
Beside him, Veyna knelt by her Voltarm, checking its armature. Her eye twitched, though her hands moved steadily. "…We didn't even scratch it."
Soahc sat cross-legged on the floor, shirt still half-torn from where the Brood's claws grazed his side. "Things moved fast, and speech is its main weapon, so cool," he muttered. Then he winced, pressing stim-gel to his ribs. "Still lost, though."
Sol was quiet.
Too quiet.
He hadn't moved since the veil had dropped. His curls were damp with sweat, his fists still slightly clenched. Even now, Kael could feel the aftershock of his Crownlight buzzing in the ground. Crimson threads of it still shimmered faintly in the cracks of the arena.
Then came some humming.
A medical construct rolled in—clunky, silver, aged. It beeped as it scanned their vitals. One by one, it patched them with stim-pads and gel. Its voice droned cheerfully, a too-happy tone for the bruises it tended to.
Kael ignored it. His shoulder still throbbed, but his mind was elsewhere.
And that's when it happened again.
A skip.
He blinked, staring at the ground, and the memory hiccupped. For half a second, he could've sworn they fought a different Graven. Something with feathers. Not antlers. Not bone. Not that many eyes.
He swallowed.
No one else noticed. Or at least, no one said anything.
His fingers curled tighter into his palm.
Ah, this again.
Sol finally spoke, not to anyone directly. "Even if I summoned two… I couldn't maintain both. Not for long. I thought I could."
He sounded more like he was explaining it to himself than to them.
Kael exhaled. "Well, it's not called the Deathzone for no reason."
No one laughed. The silence felt colder than the air.
Then—footsteps. Sharp ones.
Lysian.
He passed by with his squad. One of the thousand girls by his side, another being Alren, and the third Kael hadn't seen before—broad, quiet, with a scar under her lip.
Lysian slowed.
He didn't say anything. Just looked at them lying there.
Kael caught his gaze.
He seemed curious, probably drawn to the crown light, but felt a bit different. Maybe it's the nerves of the death zone kicking in, but a man in a clan such as him probably has more graven experience than they would like.
Alren paid no attention to them again. Kael couldn't shake off a weird feeling about the sud American man before Lysian spared them a simple smile and walked off.
Kael, curious about what they had thought of the situation, had more pressing matters to think of; he had many issues and only a few days to fix them.