Chapter 32: One Old Bastard’s KPIs
Oswald Rutherford had spotted the girl the moment she walked through the doors.
He'd been scanning the incoming class from the podium, expression composed and ceremonially grave, when his gaze snagged on a face and simply stopped. Something else surfaced in his memory — another face, overlaid on hers like a transparency.
This generation's Hero candidate.
The eye spacing. The bridge of the nose. The hairline's curve. Those eyes.
A match.
Bloodlines don't hide. She had to be family.
Nobody in that hall knew that behind the podium, the venerable Headmaster of the Royal Capital First Senior Academy had been quietly digging his thumbnail into his own thigh to maintain a ceremonially appropriate facial expression. The moment the ceremony ended and his office door locked behind him, he dropped into his chair like a puppet with its strings cut and exhaled for what felt like the first time in hours.
And to think I’ve been tearing the kingdom apart looking for a trace.
She was right under my damn nose.
The dark circles under his eyes were deep in the evening light. The kind that settle in and stop pretending they'll leave.
His desk held two stacks.
The left stack: administrative work. Course approvals, budget reports, faculty allocation plans for the current term. A parent complaint letter sitting on top, the tone immaculately courteous, the substance hard as rock — some disputed historical citation in last semester's course materials, demanding a written response from the school.
He didn't even glance at it.
The right stack was different.
Plain covers, no markings, paper stock chosen specifically to leave no trail. He pulled it toward him and opened to the first page.
Quarterly task progress report. Due the first of next month. Standard template. Fill in the blanks.
He stared at the empty progress field for a while.
…Still far short.
He ran the numbers in his head. The weight of them settled in his chest, a dull pressure he'd carried so long it had stopped feeling like pressure at all — just the shape of things now. Compared to it, the stress of running this academy was practically a vacation.
The Cult's KPIs were no joke. Miss them, and there was no bonus, no promotion. Worse, no access to the compound — the Veril's Elixir.
The name of the drug surfaced in his mind and his thumb moved without thinking, pressing down on his right wrist. Through the fabric of his shirt, the old wound was right there. Wrist bone. Deep enough that even now, years after it had closed, it ached when the weather shifted.
He was fifty-three years old.
Fifty-three, and his last combat assessment had come back at fifty-two. Mithril-rank. Same as twenty years ago. That was his ceiling. That was all he was ever going to be.
He still remembered the morning he'd first noticed it. Woke up and the vitality that had filled every joint and muscle since he was young was down by the thinnest margin — barely perceptible, less than a fraction. He'd been called a one-in-ten-thousand talent. A prodigy. The bright future of his generation.
And that was where it ended.
Then the years after. One by one. Gradual, like a tide going out, and nothing he did slowed it. Reaction time softening. The body beginning to argue back.
I was forty. Forty years old. It shouldn't have been like this.
That was when the Cult found him. They showed him the compound. Explained what it did. Showed him the documented cases — people who had taken it, people who had broken through.
He had no faith. The Cult's grand vision of transcending the boundary between humans and demons, of remaking the world — he couldn't have cared less. He had never wanted any of that.
He wanted the drug.
Just that. Just to get back what he'd been.
---
He had gone to the club recruitment fair in person.
Not because he cared which clubs the students joined. He went to confirm the girl — the one named Seraphina.
Oswald stood at the outer edge of the crowd and let his gaze move across it until it found her face.
There. Found you.
He held her in his sightline and studied her without expression.
He'd already pulled her student file. Cross-referenced the photo. Confirmed the match. Then he'd read the profile.
Combat assessment: twenty-nine. Respectable for this incoming class, mediocre by noble standards, the kind of number that disappears in a crowd.
Bearing: composed, well-bred. An earl's household. She carried herself with the calibrated restraint of someone raised from childhood to be exactly this.
Escort status: no guards. One study companion. Light security. Poor awareness.
And the name.
Waldrich. Same family as the candidate. No question.
Good.
Hero bloodline — a branch line, diluted, but more than sufficient. Her combat rating made the approach easier. She only needed to serve as a bloodline conduit. That was all the Cult required.
Oswald settled on it.
Her.
For my KPIs.
For the Elixir.
He turned and walked back toward the administrative building at the same measured pace he always used. Anyone watching would have seen the Headmaster completing his routine rounds and returning to his paperwork.
---
That night, his office lights burned at full brightness.
He spread the Cult's documents across the desk and began working through the problem.
Direct action was the simplest option.
He was strong enough. But the Waldrich name carried weight, and the girl was never without her study companion. The academy had constant foot traffic. Any operation with visible scope would leave traces. The Cult wanted secrecy, not spectacle — not an incident that would drag the capital, let alone the crown, into it.
And his own power was the problem too. Mithril-rank in a room full of students didn't go unnoticed. The moment he acted at full output in this building, he would be identified.
Direct extraction. No.
He crossed it out before the thought finished forming.
He reviewed the Cult's available personnel. Aside from Klein, the senior operative assigned to assist him from central command, the rest were roughly equivalent to the academy's own students in terms of raw ability. A limited asset pool.
Klein is reliable. But he's one person. That's not enough.
He rubbed his temple. Turned to a fresh page.
What he needed was noise. The right kind of noise.
Loud enough that every eye in the building pointed the wrong direction. Loud enough to pin down the academy's security staff, the faculty, the kingdom's knight detachment, all of them simultaneously occupied. Loud enough that nobody noticed one student quietly disappearing from a corner of the chaos.
It also needed to keep the students pinned down. The Cult's foot soldiers weren't going to win a straight fight against academy students — he had no illusions about that.
And it had to have nothing to do with him.
He needed to be the Headmaster responding to a crisis — not the instigator, not a suspect, just the man everybody expected to see standing in the middle of the mess, calm and authoritative.
Oswald set the pen down and sat with the silence.
An attack on the academy.
He wrote the words. Looked at them.
A strike large enough to generate real chaos. Klein handles the extraction during the peak of the disruption — moves the girl, transfers her, vanishes her into the noise. The Cult commits their full manpower to the operation's cover layer.
Clean.
No trace led back to him.
And the Headmaster — naturally — would be the first to discover the attack, the first to organize the response, the first to rush out and reassure the frightened students.
Yes. Good.
He circled the words.
Timing. Speed mattered. He'd internalized that as an adventurer — the longer a plan sat, the more that could go wrong. The Cult's barrier preparation would take two to three days. Coordinating personnel, one more. All in, the operation could move before the week was out.
The pen moved steadily. Timeline. Personnel assignments. Extraction routes. The layout was cleaner than anything in the administrative stack on his left, more precise than most of the faculty meeting agendas he'd signed off on this semester.
He looked at what he'd written and made a dry sound somewhere between a breath and a laugh.
"Spend three decades doing paperwork for two different bosses," he said, to nobody. "and yeah... your formatting gets pretty damn immaculate."
He folded the page, slid it under a book, and leaned back.
The pulse at his temples throbbed. The shadows under his eyes had deepened through the course of the evening, or maybe he'd just stopped pretending not to notice them.
Hold on a little longer. Once I have the Elixir — once I have it — everything comes back.
The strength. The edge. All of it.
Outside, the academy had gone completely dark. Somewhere down the corridor, the wind moved through the trees in slow, unhurried waves.
Oswald sat motionless in his chair. In the lamplight, his hairline had quietly retreated another fraction of an inch from where it had been that morning.