Chapter 801: The Attention Seeking Shadow
Chapter 801: The Attention Seeking Shadow
By the final night of the weekend, Dark Knight Academy had grown quiet in the way it only did when most students had finally surrendered to exhaustion.It was a few hours before midnight, and the second-year dormitory building had settled into a low, muffled stillness. Though there were still sounds here and there. Outside, the late-autumn wind moved against the windows in steady pushes, dragging dead leaves across the stone paths below with a dry, scraping sound that came and went like a whisper.
Inside Liam’s room, the air was warmer than the corridor, though not because of the heating stones built into the dormitory walls. Liam had made a habit of keeping the space comfortable through quiet use of his own fire-aligned Myst, not enough to waste reserves, but enough to make the room far less miserable than the world beyond the glass. His desk was covered with open books, half-filled notes, a Core Myst reference volume, the Tactical Espionage assignment notebook, and several loose sheets arranged in an order that would have seemed too strict to anyone else.
Near the desk, his bag had been placed neatly beside the chair. His coat hung over the back of it, dried and warmed after the day’s chill. The document case from Tactical Espionage rested close to the edge of the desk, sealed properly this time.
The washroom door opened, and Liam stepped out wearing only a pair of dark pants, a towel in one hand as he dried his damp hair.
His upper body was marked with bruises.
They were not severe, but they were visible enough to tell a story. Faint purple and red blotches rested along his ribs, one shoulder, and the side of his torso. Another darker bruise stretched near his lower abdomen, just above the waistband of his pants. There was a narrow line of swelling across his upper arm where a sheathed blade had struck him with too much precision to be accidental.
If not for the fact that Mabel had trained with her sword kept inside its sheath, several of those marks would have been cuts instead.
Mabel Arkwright sat atop Liam’s wardrobe like it was a perfectly normal seat.
Over the past few weeks, that place had somehow become one of her favorites in the room. She perched there with the casual balance of someone who could have sat on the edge of a roof during a storm and called it relaxing. Her Royal Corps uniform was immaculate as always, the dark material fitted neatly to her body, and her half-mask covered the lower portion of her face.
Tonight, she held a different book from the one she had been reading days earlier, something small and leather-bound with worn edges. One leg was folded lightly over the other, and her posture made the top of the wardrobe look less like furniture and more like a chosen lookout point.