Chapter 799: A Great Teacher (1)
Chapter 799: A Great Teacher (1)
It had been a long time since Ariana and Liam had shared a space alone like this.Ariana realized it with a strange, almost aching clarity as she sat across from him. The last time had been nearly a year ago, weeks before the Gaia War had changed the shape of everything around them.
Back then, things had been different. Liam had still been distant, of course. He had always been distant. But the academy had felt less heavy then. Their lives had not yet been dragged through war, Nalim, political tension, and everything else that now seemed to gather around him like a shadow that refused to detach.
Since then, they were almost always with others. Dylan talking too much. Charlotte teasing. Maxwell laughing. Sheila carrying her quiet responsibilities. Asher turning every shared silence into an unspoken competition. There was nearly always someone nearby, some noise, some interruption, some reason Ariana could not simply sit with him without feeling watched or teased.
Now it was just them.
And it felt good.
Ariana knew that was a dangerous thing to think, not because anything was actually happening, but because her heart had a habit of treating small moments with Liam as if they mattered more than they probably did to him.
Still, she allowed herself to enjoy it. There was no Charlotte nearby to notice the way she looked at him. No Dylan to make some unbearable comment. No Maxwell to grin knowingly. Liam was focused on his work, and she was supposed to be focused on hers, and for a little while, that was enough.
She wanted to talk to him more.
Several times, the urge rose to ask about his assignment, about his classes, about whether Tactical Espionage was as awful as everyone said, about whether he had been resting enough, about whether the cold bothered him as much as Charlotte claimed it did.
Each time, she stopped herself. She did not want to ruin the quiet by pushing too hard. Liam did not like unnecessary conversation, and this moment felt too rare to risk breaking with awkwardness.
So Ariana returned to her notes and stole glances when she thought he would not notice.
For some time, they worked in silence.
The library breathed around them. Pages turned. Pens scratched. A student somewhere deeper in the stacks whispered a curse after dropping something heavy. Outside the high windows, pale noon light softened against the glass, making the dust in the air visible whenever it drifted through the lamplight.
Liam read through a section in his Core Myst text, then slowed.
His eyes remained fixed on one paragraph.
The explanation was not wrong, but something about it felt incomplete. The topic itself seemed simple at first glance, one of those foundational principles students were expected to understand before moving into more advanced control exercises.
But the more Liam examined it, the more the wording became irritatingly vague. He could understand the conclusion, but the path toward it felt poorly explained, as though the book expected students to accept the idea rather than truly grasp why it worked.