30. You Are Not Empty-Handed

The mid-morning sun did absolutely nothing to chase away the freezing chill of the campus.

Arion hadn't slept. He hadn't gone to his room.

Instead, he had isolated himself in an overgrown, abandoned training ground on the far eastern edge of the Academy.

The hollow exhaustion from the night before had boiled over into a suffocating, deeply ingrained frustration. And because his emotions were fraying, his usually firm control over his abnormally dense internal pathways was slipping.

He sat on a cracked stone bench, staring blankly at the dirt between his boots.

Raw, violently heavy mana was actively leaking from his skin, crackling invisibly in the morning air.

He wasn't trying to cast a spell. He was just angry. But his sheer, passive presence was so heavy that the morning frost on the grass around his boots was rapidly withering into dry, dead ash.

Groan.

The stone bench beneath him let out a low, agonizing sound as hairline fractures spread across its surface under the pressure of his aura.

He was a hammer. He couldn't fix a fragile, bleeding core. He could only break things.

"You are straying from your room."

Arion didn't even look up. He recognized that perfectly flat, clinical voice instantly. "Go away, Kara."

Kara stepped out from the tree line, stopping a few feet away. She didn't flinch at the oppressive, suffocating weight of his mana. She just looked at him, then down at the cracked stone.

"Your emotional volatility is leaking into your mana," Kara stated calmly. "You are currently fracturing the foundation of Academy property."

"I don't care about the bench," Arion muttered, dragging his frostbite-mottled hands down his face.

"I have a shattered core to fix, and traditional magic is a logical impossibility. You can't build a bridge without a foundation. I'm completely empty-handed, and my patient is locked behind a noble fortress."

Kara tilted her head the slightest degree.

"That statement is demonstrably false," Kara said flatly. "You are not empty-handed."

Arion frowned, finally lifting his head to look at her. "What are you talking about?"

Kara didn't point. She simply shifted her gaze downward, looking directly at his left hand.

"You did not wear that silver ring during your practical entrance exam," Kara said smoothly. "You cast an enormous, chantless output without it. Yet, since your official enrollment, you have never taken it off."

Arion looked down at his left hand. The simple, dull silver ring glinted in the sunlight.

Kara took one step closer. "You yourself admitted that it tightens when you overexert your own density. You require a failsafe."

Kara's pale, whirlpool eyes locked onto his.

"It is a physical, forged safety net," Kara stated. "It is a surrogate anchor, designed to catch your chaotic pathways before they can shatter."

Arion froze.

The sheer, terrifying logic of Kara's words finally clicked into place.

If traditional magic required a twelve-word chant foundation to act as a bridge... and Sebastian had ripped his foundation out... then traditional magic was indeed useless.

But the silver ring wasn't traditional.

For the first time since his terrifying master had practically ordered him into wearing it, Arion deliberately pushed a microscopic sliver of his consciousness inside the silver band, instead of just letting it blindly eat his mana.

He gasped.

Inside the dull metal was a microscopic, impossibly complex labyrinth of ancient geometric threads.

It wasn't just a trinket. It was a perfectly woven, continuous loop designed to hold an impossible amount of pressure.

His master hadn't just given him a leash. She had given him the solution.

"He doesn't need a healer," Arion breathed out, his heart hammering against his ribs. "He needs a substitute anchor."

Kara blinked. "Your reasoning?"

"If I can alter the geometric resonance of this ring, I can force it onto Sebastian's finger," Arion said, standing up.

The heavy mana around him instantly snapped back into his body.

"It will act as a temporary lifeline. It will forcefully bind his bleeding pathways just like it catches mine."

"There is a fatal flaw in your logic," Kara analyzed instantly. "That artifact is forged to withstand your ancient, highly destructive density. If you apply it to Sebastian Ambrose in its current state, the sheer pressure of the ring will instantly crush his fragile pathways."

Arion’s brief wave of triumph faltered.

She was right. He was a hammer. If he tried to delicately modify the inside of the ring with his own raw power, he would just shatter the artifact.

"I can't modify it safely," Arion admitted, his jaw tightening. "I need an architect. Someone who actually understands geometric theory."

He didn't hesitate. He marched straight out of the training ground, heading directly for the faculty building in the middle of school hours.

Kara followed silently in his wake.

They bypassed the crowded main floors and climbed straight up to the abandoned seventh floor. Arion didn't bother knocking. He shoved the rotting wooden door at the end of the hall open, stepping into the luxurious, lavender-scented suite.

Teacher Sophia was exactly where she always was—sprawled out on her white velvet couch.

"Teach. Wake up," Arion said, marching over to her.

He pulled the silver ring off his left finger.

Sophia jerked awake, blinking groggily. "Arion? Kara?"

"You said magic is architecture," Arion said deadpan, leaning over the table. "You said you needed a solid cliff to build a bridge. I brought you the cliff. I need you to modify this."

Sophia blinked away her sleepiness. She instantly sensed the sudden, dangerous shift in Arion's aura now that the ring was off.

She looked down at the dull silver band sitting on her table. All the remaining color drained from her face.

She didn't need to study it. She remembered exactly what that ring was.

"Arion," Sophia said, her lazy demeanor vanishing completely. "I already tested that ring in the field. I fed it my mana, and it ate it like water into a crack in the desert floor. It felt like a vault door closing in a deep, dark room."

"I need you to open the vault, then," Arion demanded. "Tune the vibration down so it won't crush a normal human's pathways. We're going to use it as a temporary anchor for Sebastian."

Sophia slowly shook her head, pulling her gaze away from the ring to look at him with wide, entirely serious eyes.

"I told you it felt hungry," Sophia warned, her voice trembling slightly.

"To safely unravel and rebind a continuous, devouring loop like this without it shattering—or eating my own core in the process—we need the absolute highest level of restricted resources this Academy has to offer. And clearance I don't have."

Arion's golden eyes narrowed. "Then where do we get it?"

Sophia grabbed the ring and tossed it back to Arion.

He quickly slipped it back onto his finger, instantly suppressing his suffocating aura.

Her face was set with absolute, grim determination. "Follow me."

Ten minutes later, Sophia, Arion, and Kara marched straight up to the heavy, gilded double doors of the Principal's office.

Sophia pushed them open.

Inside, the Principal was furiously pacing behind his massive mahogany desk, sweating profusely and muttering about political fallout, House Ambrose, and the impending doom of his career.

Sitting calmly at the corner desk, sipping tea and efficiently stamping paperwork as if the world wasn't ending, was the Secretary.

The Principal stopped pacing, glaring at the three intruders. "Sophia! What is the meaning of this? I am in the middle of an absolute political crisis!"

Arion stepped past his teacher.

He walked right up to the mahogany desk, pulled the silver ring off his finger again, and slammed it down onto the polished wood.

The sheer weight of his unsuppressed, ancient aura instantly made the temperature in the room spike.

The Secretary paused mid-stamp, her sharp eyes lifting to look at him.

Arion placed both hands on the desk, leaning in to look at the two most powerful people in the Academy, deadpan.

"Stop panicking," Arion commanded smoothly. "I have the solution right here to fix the unfixable."

He smirked, his lazy, arrogant confidence fully returning to his face.