Chapter 262. I Taught Her to Fight, But I Couldn’t Teach Her How to Survive Him
The silence that followed Valestria’s ultimatum was not peaceful; it was the charged, deadly stillness that precedes a lightning strike. William could feel the blood hammering in his ears, a rhythmic drumbeat that matched the fury clawing at his insides.
He saw Lia pale and bleeding, her eyes fixed on the sand as if she could disappear into it, and something inside him finally shattered. The restraint he had fought so hard to summon didn’t just slip; it burned away.
He didn’t wait for permission. He didn’t wait for the guards to react.
William vaulted over the stone railing with a fluid, desperate motion that drew gasps from the students above. His boots hit the sand with a heavy thud, the impact sending a spray of blood-soaked grit upward.
"With respect, my lord," William said, his voice cutting through the arena like a whetted blade.
He strode forward, his shoulders squared, each step deliberate and defiant. He didn’t hesitate.
He stepped directly into the space between Lia and her father, placing his body as a physical barrier between the broken girl and the man who was systematically dismantling her spirit. "I think you’re choosing to ignore what actually happened here."
The temperature in the arena seemed to drop twenty degrees. Lord Valestria’s head turned, his neck moving with the slow, mechanical precision of something inhuman.
When his gaze snapped to William, it wasn’t just anger; it was a cold, predatory fury that could freeze a man’s blood in his veins.
"And you," Valestria said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper that somehow carried to every corner of the stadium, "would be the instructor responsible for producing this level of failure."
William felt the insult like a physical slap, but he didn’t flinch. He could feel Lia’s unsteady breathing behind him, the smell of her blood metallic and sharp filling his senses.
It fueled him.
"Failure?" William’s voice rose, controlled but edged with a dangerous tremor. "I’d be the instructor who watched your daughter force a Grand Swordmaster to stagger, to bleed, and to take real, visible damage after only a few weeks of dedicated training."
"That isn’t failure, Valestria... That is remarkable, unprecedented progress by any reasonable standard in this kingdom."
"Reasonable." Valestria repeated the word as if it were something foul he had found beneath his boot.
A contemptuous sneer curled his lips. "You speak of ’reasonable’ standards as if we were teaching children how to bake bread."
"You clearly have no understanding of what this family requires..."
"This academy has apparently spent weeks and considerable resources producing exactly this." He gestured dismissively toward Lia with a flick of his wrist. "A daughter who still, despite all your... unconventional methods, cannot manage to defeat her own sister."
"Her sister is the youngest Grand Swordmaster in three centuries!" William roared, the carefully maintained dam of his patience finally cracking.
The anger was no longer a knot in his stomach; it was a fire in his lungs. "That isn’t a measuring stick; it’s an impossibility!"
"You’re asking her to climb Mount Celestia in a week and then punishing her because she hasn’t reached the stars!"
Lia flinched at his volume, a small, broken sound escaping her throat. William wanted to turn, to hold her, to tell her he was proud, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the monster in front of him.
Valestria’s face contorted, his composure finally fracturing into something ugly and raw. His voice rose, booming across the silent field like thunder cracking overhead, commanding the attention of every noble, student, and guard present.
"This academy has clearly wasted my family’s time and resources! "Valestria bellowed, each word punctuated by the sheer force of his authority. "I should have known better than to trust my daughter’s development to instructors who apparently believe encouragement matters more than results."
"You teach them to feel good about their effort while they drown in their own inadequacy."
He stepped closer to William, his shadow swallowing the younger man whole. "Results are the only currency that matters in this world, Instructor."
"And today, your student is bankrupt."
The atmosphere in the arena curdled. What had begun as awe had transformed into something poisonous, a thick, nauseating tension that made the students in the stands shift uncomfortably, their murmurs rippling through the air like wind through dead leaves.
The cruelty of the exchange was so naked, so devoid of human empathy, that it felt like watching a public execution of the soul.
William felt Catherine’s fingers dig into his arm, her grip painful and desperate. It was a silent, urgent warning.
’One more word, and you will destroy everything.’
But Valestria wasn’t finished. He wasn’t there to argue; he was there to reclaim what he considered his property.
"Lia is coming home," Valestria announced.
The words didn’t carry anger; they carried the flat, unshakable finality of a death sentence. It was a decision that had been carved in stone long before he had ever stepped foot on this field.
"She will train properly, under my direct supervision, stripped of these pathetic distractions..."
"We will cease this pointless waste of resources on methods that produce nothing but spectacle instead of results."
The word ’spectacle’ hung in the air like an insult to every drop of blood Lia had spilled.
Without so much as a glance toward his daughter, without acknowledging the girl who stood before him bleeding, broken, and staring at him with hollowed-out eyes, Valestria turned. His cape snapped behind him like a whip.
He walked off the field with the same rigid, unhurried certainty he had carried onto it, leaving behind a trail of devastation.
"Damn you!" The words burned in William’s throat, tasting like ash and rage.
His muscles coiled, every instinct screaming at him to sprint after the man, to grab him by the collar, to force him to look at the wreckage he had created. He took one stumbling step forward, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
"You can’t--"
Catherine’s grip tightened with bruising force, yanking him back.
"Don’t," she hissed, her voice a desperate whisper. "William, look at her... Look at Lia."
William froze. His gaze involuntarily snapped to the center of the arena.
Lia hadn’t moved. She stood frozen in the center of the bloodstained sand, a broken statue. Her breathing was shallow and wet.
Blood from a gash on her temple had begun to trickle down her cheek, stark crimson against her deathly pale skin. She didn’t cry and she didn’t scream.
She simply existed in the center of a crater of silence, while the weight of thousands of sympathetic, horrified eyes pressed down on her like a physical burden.
She looked smaller than she ever had, not like a warrior who had challenged a legend, but like a child who had realized the world was infinitely colder than she had imagined.
’I failed her,’ William thought, the realization twisting in his gut like a knife. ’I taught her to fight, but I couldn’t teach her how to survive him.’
"William, please," Catherine pleaded, her own eyes swimming with tears. "She needs you here."
"Right now... She doesn’t need you chasing a monster who has already decided he is untouchable."
William forced his legs to stay planted. He forced his lungs to draw air. He stood there, chest heaving, watching Valestria’s retreating figure disappear through the iron gates.
The victory of the Grand Swordmaster felt hollow; the arena felt poisoned.
He wanted to reach her. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, to shield her from the judging stares of the nobility, to tell her that she was more of a lion than her father could ever comprehend.
But the moment passed. The crowd began to disperse in a stunned, hushed shuffle.
The faculty moved in to tend to the wounded, and the students began to filter out, their conversations hushed and reverent.
By the time William managed to break through the gathering crowd, pushing past the gawking nobles and the concerned faculty, Lia was gone.
There was no note. No trace.
No bloodied footprints left behind. She had vanished into the shadows of the academy like a ghost retreating from the light.
Every door he knocked on, every dormitory he searched, every corner of the training grounds he scoured that evening yielded nothing but empty hallways and the mocking echo of his own footsteps.
She had slipped through the cracks of the world he had tried to build for her, leaving him alone in the silence of the aftermath.