Do You Want to Save Her?

The clubroom was quiet, most of the academy asleep, and yet, Soren couldn’t follow.

Soren lay on the sofa with his back half twisted, one arm thrown over his eyes for a minute before he dropped it again, restless, shifting, trying to find a position that didn’t make his spine complain.

The cushion dipped under him, warm where he had already been, while the air drifting in through the open window was the opposite, cold enough to keep the edge of wakefulness hooked in his ribs.

Something small rolled between his fingers as he stared at the ceiling, a mindless fidget he hadn’t even noticed he had started, thumb pushing it, fingertips catching it, over and over.

Night had long settled over the academy, quiet enough that the rest of the clubroom fell away, and with nothing else pulling at him, his mind started turning over its own thoughts.

Louise’s voice kept coming back to him, not in random fragments, but in the same steady order she had said it, serious first, eyes holding his like she wanted to make sure it landed.

The academy would be open to the public during the festival, not just students’ families, not just merchants and visitors, but anyone who could pass the initial inspection, and that was the part that mattered, because it meant anyone from the Arden family could walk in if they wanted, even without his permission.

She hadn’t tried to scare him with it; she had even softened after, careful rather than pitying.

And then she had tapped his knuckles, a quiet grounding gesture before she had moved straight into what to do about it: stay with people, don’t wander off alone, and if he saw anyone he didn’t want to deal with, he left, he didn’t owe them a conversation.

Then, like she always did when things got too heavy, she had let her expression ease and made that little joke about the people he hung around with, as if she could smooth the edge back down before he carried it away.

It had worked then.

Now, it didn’t.

Soren exhaled slowly, then shifted again, dragging his heel along the sofa as though that would scrape the thoughts off.

‘She’s not wrong,’ he admitted, and the plan was simple enough.

The problem was that his mind didn’t stop there.

The problem was that Louise’s warning wasn’t about them sneaking in; it was the opposite, they wouldn’t need to, they could walk through the gates openly, pass the inspection like anyone else, because there was nothing illegal about them being there.

And once they were inside, ‘public’ stopped meaning festival and started meaning chance encounters, corridors he couldn’t control, crowds that made it easy to appear beside him without warning, easy to corner him with a smile and a quiet voice, easy to turn a normal afternoon into something he had to endure.

The seed rolled once more between his fingers, smooth, familiar, pointless, and his thumb pressed a fraction harder than it had a moment ago.

Arden.

The name didn’t arrive gently; it never did.

His stomach tightened first, then his jaw, the muscles in his neck pulling taut as though his body had decided it needed to brace before his thoughts caught up.

The seed shifted in his grip, the edge biting into his skin just enough to register, and for a second his fingers were too tight, too sharp, as if someone else had borrowed them.

Soren’s eyes narrowed at the ceiling, not because there was anything to see, but because his focus had snapped into a narrow point all the same.

If they were there.

If they showed up.

Not to make a scene about his engagement, not to posture about names or titles, not even to parade in front of people and pretend they were proud, that sort of theatre was optional.

It was never the point.

The point was leverage, the tie they were using, the fact that he was within reach and therefore controllable, useful when it suited them, punishable when it didn’t.

He didn’t know what they might do to him.

And that was the problem, the part that fed the anxiety, because he didn’t know.

He didn’t know what shape it would take at a festival, with people around, with rules, with eyes, but he also couldn’t say, with any honesty, that he would put it past them to try something anyway.

Some things didn’t change just because the setting was prettier.

Maybe she would wait until he was alone, catch him in a quiet corridor, block his path with nothing but her presence, and speak in that calm, even voice that never raised, every sentence neat, venom tucked inside the wording because she didn’t need to pretend for anyone.

Maybe they would use the crowd as insulation, not to get close, but to make it harder for him to move, easier to keep him in place with etiquette and eyes, a polite greeting delivered at the worst possible moment, a pause that demanded he respond, a conversation forced on him because walking away in front of strangers would make him look rude, unstable, ungrateful, whatever label suited them.

Or maybe it would be simpler, uglier, the kind of thing he couldn’t predict because it wasn’t logical, it was habitual, it was cruelty done for its own sake.

A breath caught in his throat, shallow, and Soren forced it out, slow, controlled.

The seed rolled again, and for a moment his fingertips felt too aware, too keyed up.

He hated them.

He hated them, not as something he said to vent, not a dramatic line meant to sound good in his head, but as a fact that sat low and steady, bitter at the back of his throat, there whether he acknowledged it or not, turning every thought of them into something sharp he couldn’t quite swallow.

He was still an illegitimate child.

That hadn’t stopped being true.

It didn’t get rewritten just because other parts of his life had changed.

It was a precarious status, a technical weakness tucked into the foundation of his name, something they could use whenever they wanted to remind him what he was, without ever needing to get rid of him.

And yet, right now, that same disgusting family couldn’t simply toss him away, because they were greedy, because they liked the tie to the Rupindolfs too much, because disowning him would mean losing the very connection they were currently exploiting.

That shield didn’t make him feel safe, however.

If anything, it made the entire thing feel more poisonous, because it meant they were keeping him for their own benefit, not because they had changed, and not because they had learned anything, but because he was useful.

Useful.

For now.

Soren’s fingers tightened again, then loosened as he caught it, forced the tension out of his hand, and rolled the seed once more with more control.

The cold air drifted over his face, and he realised he had been holding his shoulders stiff, braced, as though he expected someone to walk in and drag him off the sofa.

His gaze slid toward the window without him moving his head, the darkness beyond it deep and flat, and he reminded himself that the festival was still weeks away.

Weeks away still felt too close.

He swallowed, throat tight, and the thought shifted, dragged itself sideways into the next inevitable weight.

Esper’s father.

Not the Ardens.

Not a known monster with a known shape or a set of behaviours he had memorised through pain.

This was different, which was almost worse, because there was nothing to grip, nothing to predict, nothing to prepare for beyond guesswork.

A duke.

And not just any duke, a man who had raised Esper, who had shaped her, who had taught her that smiles were armour and masks were strategy, a man who could decide he didn’t like Soren in a single conversation and then make that dislike matter.

Soren didn’t know what he valued.

He didn’t know how he tested people.

He didn’t know whether he was blunt or slippery, whether he was the type to interrogate with a polite tone or the type to smile while setting traps.

He didn’t even know what his first move would be, if he would pretend the engagement was fine and then pressure them later, or if he would address it immediately, cold and sharp.

And the worst part was that he couldn’t even hate him properly yet, because hatred required certainty, required a target.

All he had was unease, a shallow sense that he was about to step into a room where he didn’t understand the rules, and the person across from him would.

Soren shifted again, dragging his arm over his face, pressing the heel of his palm against his eye for a second, then dropping it with a rough exhale.

‘This is stupid,’ he thought, and it wasn’t denial, it wasn’t bravado, it was simply a recognition that he was running simulations without data, that he was burning energy on a problem that had no shape yet.

His fingers rolled the seed again, thumb tracing the surface, the motion steadying.

Another thought dropped into place behind it, almost lazily, as though his mind had been saving it for later and decided now was a good time to remind him.

Winter break.

Meeting Amelia’s parents.

The king and queen of Einhardt.

Soren stared at the ceiling for a moment longer, then let out a quiet, disbelieving breath that was almost a laugh, almost.

‘Oh right,’ he thought, and the words weren’t sarcastic, they weren’t resentful, they were simply stunned in the way someone was stunned when their life kept stacking increasingly impossible responsibilities on top of each other.

This was different, however; he wasn’t forcing himself into it.

Amelia had asked, and that mattered.

It meant it wasn’t an obligation pinned to him by strangers; it was a request from someone he cared about.

Which somehow made it feel both easier and more absurd.

Like, of course he would do it.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t have any thoughts on it.

‘I mean, how can I be calm when I think about meeting her parents?’

Soren rolled onto his side, then onto his back again, the sofa creaking softly beneath him.

His eyes slid to the window again, to the cold darkness, to the sense that the outside world was waiting patiently for him to get up and resume being a person.

His thoughts had begun to circle.

Ardens.

Duke.

Festival.

King and queen.

Ardens.

Duke.

Festival.

It was the same stack, rearranged, as though if he shuffled it enough times, he would find a version that didn’t feel heavy.

His grip on the seed tightened, then loosened, then tightened again, and his foot tapped once against the sofa, restless.

The loop tightened.

Soren dragged his hand down his face, fingers catching on his cheek, then let his head fall back into the cushion with a low, irritated sigh.

“Ugh, whatever, let’s just stop there,” he muttered into the room, voice rough with annoyance.

The words landed with a strange satisfaction because they were blunt and real, and, most importantly, final.

No more.

Not tonight.

Not because the problems weren’t real, not because he was pretending they would vanish, but because chewing them to death in the dark was a waste of time.

His mind resisted for half a heartbeat, like a dog still straining at the leash, and then he yanked it back anyway, shoving the entire festival stack into the mental category he titled “later”, the same way he had learned to shove other things aside when they threatened to swallow him whole.

A dry part of him almost found it funny.

He couldn’t fight a duke tonight.

He couldn’t predict his family tonight.

He couldn’t time-travel to winter break and get it over with tonight.

So what?

Was he going to lie here and rotate the disasters like a menu until dawn?

No.

He was done.

The seed rolled between his fingers again, calmer now, and his breathing eased as though his body had decided it could unclench once his mind stopped throwing threats at it.

Something else surfaced in the quiet that followed, something more immediate, something that belonged to the next few days instead of the next few months.

Midterms.

Soren’s eyes narrowed a fraction, not with fear, but with the practical focus that always came when something was in front of him instead of looming at the edges.

The written portion barely registered as a concern.

With [Library of Memories], it was simply… information, and information was the easy part.

He didn’t need to spiral about it.

He didn’t need to rehearse it.

He only needed to show up and not do something stupid.

The practical, though…

That was the part where things could get annoying.

Not dangerous, not truly, not the way real fights were dangerous, not the way dungeons were dangerous, because this had rules, structure, protective measures.

Besides, he had his memory of this world from when it was a game, his knowledge of what did and didn’t happen here, and that told him nobody was getting maimed in the midterm practical.

Still, it was messy.

It involved other people.

It involved group dynamics, teamwork, egos, the kind of variables you couldn’t brute-force by swinging harder.

His fingers rolled the seed again, thoughtful, and his mind drifted to the one thing he actually cared about regarding the practical.

‘Please let there be someone I know on my team,’ he thought, the request quiet and unadorned, not a prayer, not desperation, just preference.

Someone normal.

Someone predictable.

Someone who wouldn’t turn it into a personal competition.

Someone who wouldn’t try to fight him just because of rumours.

A brief flicker of memory surfaced alongside his thoughts about the midterms, clean and sharp, the way his memories always were.

The protagonist’s team won the practical.

The thought was matter-of-fact, a remembered fact-file from a time when this world had been menus and routes and outcomes, when “the protagonist” was not a person he ate lunch with, but a role stamped into the story’s spine.

Soren lay still for a second, eyes on the ceiling, and the faintest thread of concern tugged at him.

It wasn’t that he wanted to win, or even that he thought he might.

It was just the small awareness that if he moved wrong, if he acted too loudly, outcomes would shift.

The thought hovered, then he exhaled, and it slid away again, not with drama, not with some grand internal vow, simply with the quiet ease of someone who had already learned, through living, that worrying about every ripple was a good way to drown.

Midterms were midterms.

He would do fine, aim for satisfactory results, maybe get into a few fights here and there.

He didn’t need to make it more than that.

Not with the festival coming right after.

And, more importantly, the system still hadn’t given him a quest for it.

If there was no quest, there was no reward, and if there was no reward, there was no reason to burn himself out trying to squeeze the best result out of something that did not matter.

It wasn’t laziness; it was common sense.

It was knowing where effort actually paid off rather than wasting energy on things that didn’t matter, then being weak when he needed strength.

Louise would still scold him for that line of thinking.

The image rose easily, her eyes narrowing, her voice sharp, calling him stupid for even considering conserving energy when he could be preparing, as though the concept of “good enough” offended her on a moral level.

A faint curve tugged at the corner of his mouth, brief, and then he let it fade again, but the tension in his chest had loosened a little more.

His fingers kept rolling the seed, steady and thoughtless, and as his mind ran through the last loops of midterm logic, the mana he fed into it shifted and increased, not on purpose, but because his thoughts had tightened again, and his mana always followed his emotions.

The pressure grew without him noticing.

A little more.

A little more.

Then something in his fingers changed.

Then something in his fingers changed, subtle at first, like a mismatch in the motion he had repeated a thousand times, and the sensation turned sour in an instant, wrong in a way he couldn’t explain.

His thoughts cut off mid-rotation.

Soren brought the seed closer to his face, squinting in the dim light, turning it between thumb and forefinger until the angle caught enough to show the surface clearly.

A crack.

For a second, he just stared at it, blankly confused, as though the object had violated an unspoken agreement by doing something after two months of doing nothing.

He rotated it again, checking whether it was a trick of the light.

It wasn’t.

His brow creased, and he pushed a measured thread of mana into it, controlled, deliberate, the way you tested a door to see whether it was locked or merely stuck.

Nothing.

He pushed again, slightly more.

Still nothing.

Soren’s lips pressed into a thin line, not anger, not disappointment, more the mild irritation of being given a question without an answer.

“What the hell,” he muttered under his breath, then paused, as if waiting for the seed to do anything in response, to twitch, to warm, to prove it hadn’t just decided to break for no reason.

Nothing.

With a quiet exhale he loosened his grip, rolled it once more, more gently, then let his hand fall to his chest with it still held loosely in his palm.

A yawn rose up suddenly, stealing his face before he could stop it, the kind that pulled water into his eyes and reminded him his body was still human, still tired, still in need of normal maintenance.

Soren blinked, then pushed himself upright, shoulders cracking softly as he sat.

“Still need a shower,” he mumbled, voice thick with exhaustion.

He stood, still holding the seed, and crossed the clubroom without urgency, not dragging his feet, not defeated, simply moving on because he had decided to.

At the window, cold air brushed his face once more.

Soren reached out and closed it.

The latch clicked, and the night outside was shut away.

• ••✦ ♡ ✦•••

Morning air bit at Soren’s lungs in a way that only early light could manage, cold and clean and sharp enough to make every breath feel deliberate.

He stood on a patch of grass with his hands braced on his knees for a moment, sweat darkening the collar of his uniform and clinging to the hair at his temples.

His chest rose and fell in steady, controlled pulls, not panicked, not ragged, just heavy with the kind of exertion that left heat in his muscles and a faint tremor in his forearms.

An exhale left him, long and slow.

Then the system cut in, abrupt and unmistakable, as if it had been waiting for him to finish breathing.

Ting-♪

.

▶ Quest Received! ◀

.

For half a second he simply stared, eyes fixed on the window as if it might blink away if he didn’t pay attention.

Then the tension that had been sitting under his skin, coiled tight without him even realising, finally loosened.

His legs gave out like someone had cut the strings.

Soren dropped backwards onto the grass, arms splayed for a moment before he let them fall properly, the ground cool against his back as he lay there staring up at the pale morning sky.

A breath that was almost a laugh slipped out of him.

“…Finally.”

————「❤︎」————