Chapter 37: We Fall, We Rise — Remember the Name of Humanity
The crash hit me all at once, like a wave of metal and voices.
The Academy’s gates had opened, and from every corridor figures burst forth—hundreds, thousands of students. Their steps hammered the black stone; their shouts filled the courtyard still saturated with Azur’s roar.
They screamed, they whistled, they sang.
The dwarves chanted, pounding their fists against steel-plated chests, each blow resounding like a forge drum.
The elves, for their part, whistled clear, haughty songs, carried by a melody that sounded more like mockery than encouragement.
The dragons literally roared, their throats spewing blue or red flames to show they were there, that they dominated.
And the humans... the humans clapped. Sharp, nervous, awkward claps, as if trying to imitate the sound of war with brittle bones.
The air stank of sweat, wet leather, sun-baked dust. Torch smoke mixed with hot sand filled my nostrils—acrid, suffocating. My eyes stung. So did my gut. Not from the heat. But because I felt what all this meant: we had become a spectacle. Not students. Not heroes. Sideshow beasts thrown into the arena to excite the crowd.
I lowered my eyes for a second to Aurelia. The spear hummed softly, as if she too sensed this latent hostility. I breathed slowly, trying to soothe the drum bashing in my chest. Impossible. The noise wasn’t only outside. It came from me.
Then Sahr’Veyra. The headmistress. The ancient dragon. She stepped to the center of the courtyard, and instantly the tumult fell silent. As if an invisible hand had crushed every student’s throat.
Then, with a slow, almost lazy gesture, she lowered her claw. The ground screeched, then split under the pressure. A clean line cleaved the black paving stones, a fresh scar traced across the courtyard. A sacred line.
She raised her head, and her voice burst forth. Not a human voice. Not an ordinary cry. It was the muffled roar of a speaking volcano—deep, hoarse, covered in embers. Each word vibrated in my ribcage, made my bones tremble.
— "Cross this line when you’re ready."
Total silence. Even the wind seemed to stop.
— "I will not use my blessing. Be at ease... little heroes."
Her eyes swept the crowd. Her thin lips twisted into a cold smile. No promise, no comfort. Just a raw truth: this wasn’t a school test. It was a culling.
Reina spoke before the din could swell again. Her voice wasn’t made for shouting, but when she spoke, even the wind sat down to listen. She stepped forward, hard gaze, aura held tight like a blade in its sheath.
— "Listen to me," she said. "We can’t charge Sahr’Veyra head-on. You feel her like I do: her aura alone would shatter us. Alone, we won’t hold. We need a strategy, now."
An elf flashed a smile too beautiful to be honest. Varis Caelond. He lifted his chin, disdain pouring from his lips like overpriced wine.
— "Team up, with other races? That’s cute, Reina. But we don’t need human crutches."
A low laugh answered, round and metallic. The door-shouldered dwarf, Dvarim Brôkhund, slammed his fist against his runic breastplate.
— "Well said, elf. Come on, lads—let’s show ’em what a real battle line looks like—no bottles or babysitters."
They moved ahead, dwarves and elves scattered in a pseudo-formation that looked more like an ego parade than a maneuver. Banners snapped, incantations streaked, hammers lifted, waiting for their grand moment. Beautiful, yes. Pathetic, mostly. An orchestra of virtuosos without a conductor, each playing louder to drown the other out. And all that against an ancient dragon.
The realization bit inside me: being born "strong" is only an advantage for those who know how to keep their pride on a leash. They weren’t stronger—just louder. Five-year-olds with millennia-old artifacts.
I peeled myself away from the spectacle. I already knew how it would end: dazzling, useless, costly.
The Dragonides waited aside. Four scaled shadows, disciplined, the weight of the world resting on their trapezius. I went straight to them. The woman with the feline step came half a pace forward, gold eyes hooking mine like a fishhook. Sylvara’Khareth. Her very way of breathing told of the swiftness of a breath, the brutality of a strike.
— "You want to team up?" I asked, flat.
She gave that thin smile that belongs only to predators. A shade of interest... drowned in contempt.
— "We are not as foolish as those dwarves and elves: we know we cannot defeat the Headmistress. But that does not mean I will ally with pitiful humans," replied Sylvara’Khareth without even blinking.
It hit. Not like a spear strike: like a click inside, sharp, irritating. What is wrong with them all, damn it? Always that same haughtiness as if the world owed them a bowed neck. I felt the cable tighten in me, a tightrope between my patience and my anger. It heated my tongue. It birthed a laugh deep in my throat—a laugh that only wanted to bite.
I pivoted toward the girls. Ayame, straight-backed, arms supple around the invisible scythe she carried everywhere. Miyu, jaw clenched, a flame ready to burst at the corner of her lips. Hikari, focused, pupils ready to swallow the slightest movement. Reina, cold, her brain already two moves ahead of everyone. They knew. They had seen Duskfall from the inside—and you don’t come out of that unscathed.
I smiled. Wide. A bit too wide. And I felt them, smile without smiling.
— "We’re going to sweep this trial," I said softly. "Let me think of the best way to make a fool of them. They’re playing at being adults with ancient toys. We play to live."
The noise swelled along the line. The first clashes rang like badly tuned gongs. And in the middle of it all, the taut cable in me waited for only one thing: that someone pull. Hard. And that it snap—but not on our side.
After a few minutes discussing our plan, there they were, the elves and dwarves, sprawled to the side like puppets that had been shaken too hard. Not dead, no—the Headmistress didn’t need corpses to collect for her demonstration. Just broken, panting, covered in blood and bruises, their weapons scattered around them like abandoned toys.
I watched them in silence, and a twisted smile crawled up my lips.
So these were the ones who claimed to embody ancestral strength? They were just running toward their deaths. And it was written from the start. With egos like that and so little cohesion, how could they have stood? Their defeat had happened before they even crossed the line.
They’d condemned themselves. That’s why three of their heroes had already fallen: they never understood that war isn’t won by shouting louder than your neighbor.
Heavy footsteps made the courtyard tremble. The Dragonides finally advanced. Four massive shadows, four draconic heirs who, by themselves, silenced the crowd’s clamor. It looked like the ground was preparing to give way under their steps.
The first to move was Sylvara’Khareth. Her azure wings snapped and her body vanished in a gust. She was nothing but a blue flash, a hiss in the air, a blade-glint crossing space to lacerate stone. At every dash, she sliced the air like an invisible guillotine, and the paving stones burst under the pressure. I tracked her movement from the corner of my eye, but my body trembled: impossible to truly follow.
To her left, Garrum Thalbruk drew a deep breath. His chest swelled like a forge, and I saw his skin marbled with metallic sheen. His arms became steel, his fists blocks of granite, his shoulders a bastion of basalt. Each step he took rang like a hammer on an anvil. He struck with his fist, and the black stone floor shattered into fragments that he absorbed at once to further reinforce his carapace. He had become a living fortress.
Kaelthys Dravos, meanwhile, bent down, palm to the ground. His red aura spread like a fissure, and the courtyard thrummed beneath our feet. Seismic waves burst, crevasses zigzagged through the stones. Each movement of his arms pulled shards of rock; each strike heaved the terrain like a docile weapon. He wasn’t fighting an opponent: he was making the earth dance to his will.
Finally, Talyra Voln raised her hands. Her white hair stood on end, threaded with arcs of lightning. A crack sounded, sharp, metallic, and the air itself bristled with filaments of electricity. She hurled a bolt at the Headmistress, who brushed it aside with a lazy backhand, but the sound alone made my eardrums vibrate. Then she wove her arcs like a web, linking the metallic debris on the ground, creating a sparkling field that sealed the area in an electric grid.
They struck together. And it was beautiful, yes. Sylvara shredded the air, Kaelthys opened chasms, Garrum blocked like a moving wall, and Talyra chained each breach with her lightning. For an instant, I almost felt they might make her bend, that millennial dragon, that Headmistress crushing us with her gaze.
But after a few minutes, I saw it. Their rhythm broke. Their strengths collided more than they harmonized. Each sought to shine in their own way. Sylvara burned through her mana at full tilt, already gasping from chaining her dashes. Garrum, too slow, couldn’t keep up with the mad tempo she set. Kaelthys fissured the terrain, but his waves also threw his own allies off balance. And Talyra, too busy saturating the field with her lightning, was nearly frying the air they were breathing.
It stagnated. No more progress. Just a clash of frozen prides.
I turned to the girls. Ayame, jaw tight, hands resting on her invisible scythe. Miyu, eyes blazing with bridled impatience. Hikari, dagger clenched nervously in her hand. Reina, motionless, but her look warned me: she already knew where I was going.
I exhaled, a smile too wide glued to my face:
— "It’s time."
Their eyes met mine, and in their silence I read the same hunger I carried in my gut.
The hunger to show all these overconfident heirs what a human who learned to survive in mud and blood was really worth.
Then everything happened very fast.
Miyu leapt, not to wound but to constrain. She placed herself under Sylvara, offered a feint, then burst in an arc of fire that forced her to dodge, breaking her chain. Sylvara had to cut her rush, lose an impulse. Second exchange: Hikari, silent, slid beneath a beating wing and grazed the gutter of a joint—a near-ritual dagger tap that didn’t kill but diminished mobility. Sylvara’s speed became a burdensome asset—she overcompensated, tripped on the wind she’d made, skidded, slammed into Garrum who, stepping back, damaged his own carapace by absorbing a stone already weakened. Garrum spat sparks; his plates cracked with a jolt.
Kaelthys, tense, sought the counter, and his waves opened a fault... right beneath Talyra’s feet. The lightning field she sustained bounced off the new geometry of the ground and climbed in wild arcs, striking her own conductive threads. Talyra squeaked, surprised, and returned a discharge that made Garrum’s thigh tremble. The four of them found themselves, for an instant, paying the price of their own rhythm. They hadn’t planned for the intrusion of another tempo—ours, smaller but sharper.
We didn’t seek annihilation; we sowed bramble. Every gesture of the girls targeted a joint, a breath, a point of leverage. The Headmistress, opposite, kept her height, deflecting and correcting; but the fight had slid from demonstration into purge. Forced to compensate, the Dragonides began to bump into each other, step on each other’s feet, burn their mana in sporadic excess.
Pride turned into vulnerability.
That’s when Sylvara, in a movement too quick to be perfectly controlled, reappeared in my blind spot. Her claw split the air, and pain took me like a tide. I felt the point sink in, the cold of metal in my guts; the taste of blood rose to my mouth. I staggered, but I didn’t fall. The smile I sketched wasn’t mockery: it was a signal.
— "As planned," I rasped, voice rough. "Ayame...Your power is definitely the most useful."
The pain still ran through me, but I stood tall. My breath was heavy, yet my head was clear. I hadn’t spent all those nights meditating for nothing. Every second I’d studied the flows of mana, every instant spent breaking down matter, feeling the world’s heartbeat down to my bones... it had all led to this.
I saw. Truly. As if my eyes had been ripped free of the veil. Flesh, metal, stone—everything was nothing but a dance of particles pressed tight against each other, a vibration of atoms bound by invisible threads. And beyond... the flows of mana. Veins of light, fine as spider silk, running from the Dragonides’ hearts into their arms, feeding their blessings.
I raised my hand. Aurelia thrummed, but it was my mind that forged.
— "Genesis," I breathed.
A dry snap answered, metallic, brutal. The threads crossed, knotted, densified at my will. I had learned their design. I knew the architecture of every bond, the weight of every atomic linkage. And from that knowledge, the chains sprang forth.
Four shackles burst from the void, black and cold as the night before creation. They leapt for the Dragonides’ wrists like grappling shadows. Turstegen—the metal I had dissected in thought, grain by grain, until I understood why nothing could bend it. The hardest material in the world. I didn’t need a block of it: I had memorized its structure, atom by atom, until it was printed in my blood.
The rings snapped shut, crisp, final. A sharp, irrevocable sound, like a sentence. White light pulsed, raced along their arms, and the blessings slammed into that perfect barrier. Sylvara suffocated in her own momentum, Garrum felt his carapace lock, Kaelthys lost his footing, Talyra swallowed her lightning and her muscles seized.
They understood then. It wasn’t brute force that had stopped them. It was my mind. My Genesis.
At this sight the Headmistress drew a great breath, a surge that was about to fall on us like a sea. I saw her mouth split; her gaze searched for the flaw—long, irrevocable. She did not hesitate. She was testing, as always. Her breath struck—a blade of air and brazier meant to erase everything standing before her.
Miyu planted herself before the blaze and roared; her flame wasn’t protest, it was an answer.
— "In this world, fire belongs to me alone!" she cried.
Her flame reared and crashed against Sahr’Veyra’s. Two columns collided, wringing the courtyard with steam and sparks. Miyu didn’t try to beat the Headmistress by overpowering her; she seized her breath, cut it, fissured it like slashing a sail in a storm. Where the great flame should have consumed us, Miyu imposed her note: precise, clean, untamed. The dragon’s jet unraveled, the heat stalled, and centuries-old power was amputated by an incandescent stroke.
At the same moment, above us, heat met the frost Reina had called. Spears of ice—long, sharp, tomb-cold—fell from the sky and drove into the Dragonides’ shoulders, into the ancient dragon’s body, and into the courtyard itself. They weren’t there to kill; they petrified hips, pinned wings, immobilized footing. Talyra screamed, Garrum cracked, Kaelthys sought the ground and found only fractures unable to bear him.
Hikari set her dagger to Sylvara’s throat, Ayame raged with her scythe, Reina closed the field with her runes. We were the needle that had thrown the world’s compass off.
And at the center of it all, the light settled on me. Not a frail spark, not a distant glow—a torrent. It washed through me like a white tide, burning and gentle at once. My wound closed instantly, flesh stitching without a scar. My breath, which I thought lost, returned with a violence that almost made me laugh.
But it wasn’t just healing. It was more. My body, every fiber, vibrated as if my blood had been replaced with liquid fire. My skin prickled, my muscles cried with newfound strength, my senses lit beyond the real. The pain vanished, swept away by an almost inhuman clarity.
Hikari. Her blessing. She hadn’t just repaired me—she had transcended me. I was stronger than ever, every movement charged with more speed and power than at the start of this fight. It was like being reborn—but reborn better.
I tightened my grip on Aurelia. The spear thrummed in my hand, resonating with this new force. I was ready. More than ready.
The crowd held its breath. No sound, save the crackle of ice spears and the low groan of shattered scales. The heroes present, the stone spectators, even the princess perched on her balcony—she who looked down like a judge in azure robes—had fallen silent. I caught her profile, an elegant shadow, and I lifted Aurelia toward her perch. I pointed it for a long time; she felt the steel like an accusation. The world seemed to contract.
— "Listen well. Engrave this truth in your bones."
My voice cut through the courtyard like steel dragged across stone.
— "You believe strength is born in bloodlines, in relics, in the weight of ancient wings. But strength rots when it feeds only on pride. Pride blinds. Pride shatters."
I leveled Aurelia, its tip trembling with light.
— "We humans? Yes, we break. We bleed. But we learn. We adapt. We rise. And every fall makes us sharper."
The silence thickened, suffocating, as my gaze swept from the shackled Dragonides to the Princess above.
— "So remember this name. Let it haunt you like a scar that never heals."
I breathed in, voice a thunderclap:
— "I am Kaito. I am the one you will never crush. Tremble—not at my strength, but at the mind that will unmake yours."