Chapter 96 96: Private Study
At the tail end of November, the gates of the Leyndell Royal Private School officially clicked open, bringing together the seven adolescent demigods and the premier noble scions of the capital under a single, highly scrutinized registry. The administration of the initial day's curriculum had been clutched by Chief Chancellery Knight Ordovis himself, the spatial coordinates for the class anchored across the sprawling, mist-shrouded limestone paving of the Phantom Tree Square in the city's outer perimeter.
This specific coordinate scored over eighty miles away from the high-backed marble estates lining the Upper District on the north bank of the Leyndell River. The morning roster dictated an absolute launch watch of six o'clock sharp, yet the formal administrative notices detailing the location parameters were hand-delivered to the students' residential libraries at precisely four o'clock across the midnight watch. To compound the tactical friction of the directive, Knight Ordovis had appended an permanent executive rider to the parchment: every single candidate was legally forbidden from deploying the private carriages, gilded litters, or ancestral horses provided by their houses, conformed instead to clear the distance to the classroom entirely on their own signatures.
By four-thirty, the elderly commander of the Crucible paladins was already encased within his iconic, axe-shaped bronze heavy plate armor, his weathered gauntlets resting against the massive crossguard of his greatsword as he kept a silent, un-blinking watch over the northern archway of the square.
Less than ten minutes down the clock, his tracking vision logged the silhouettes of Prince Radahn and Prince Rykard clearing the low mist, the two Carian brothers executing a steady jog through the gates. The eldest prince preserved a perfectly calm, un-bracketed physical composure after logging those initial miles, his respirations level, while Rykard's ribs were lifting with a slightly frantic, out-of-breath cadence. Two minutes behind their trail, Prince Miquella and Princess Ranni cleared the turn. The two Empyrean minds had clearly deployed a sequence of low-frequency mobility incantations and starlight sorceries to neutralize their somatic friction, appearing in a vastly more optimized physical condition than the red-haired siblings.
Ordovis extracted a masterwork, gilded pocket watch from the interior lining of his bronze breastplate, his hawk-like eyes scanning the dials before he closed the distance to Miquella's flank, his deep baritone dipping into a quiet, respectful inquiry. "Your Royal Highness... does the registry confirm that Princess Malenia will concurrently attend today's field lesson?"
The underlying subtext anchoring his question was an entry-level expression of knightly concern for the girl's volatile internal stability. After all, distinct from the remaining six demigods who commanded high-tier active combat attributes, Queen Marika and the King Consort had merely signed Malenia's enrollment scroll out of pure, protective consideration for the little girl's personal feelings. Given the radioactive parameters of her underlying rot disease, zero ministers across the High Court genuinely believed her fragile frame could achieve a verifiable progression milestone within the sector of heavy martial arts.
"Her boots will undeniably clear the marker," Miquella said, a soft, completely helpless sigh escaping his lips as his golden head shook against his mantle. "Ever since that child's biology cleared its gridlock last week, unlocking her capacity to move without the iron brackets, her consciousness has been thoroughly, fanatically obsessed with parsing combat methodologies and basic swordsmanship tracks. Across the past few suns, her fingers have been chasing Shirley around the library carpets, wildly swinging a wooden training sword through the air. Her center absolutely insisted on registering for today's field drill. Forcing her spirit to execute a quiet rest watch within her private chambers is currently twice as difficult as deploying a triple-factional seal to suppress her rot!"
"But," the veteran paladin murmured, a microscopic hesitation catching his tongue, "this old minister has explicitly engineered a sequence of exceptionally grueling entrance tests across this opening watch—a tactical filter designed specifically to crush the un-bracketed vanity of those pampered ministerial young masters. Given the delicate limits formatting the Princess's physical chassis..."
Hearing the warning, Miquella offered a relaxed, entirely secure smile. "The layout alters zero parameters of the match, commander. Has your tracking network failed to log the data point stating that the specific entity who should have anchored the absolute vanguard of this square has failed to show his silver hair?"
Knight Ordovis went momentarily still, his analytical processors turning over the prince's vocabulary before the lines of his weathered face crinkled into a dry, deep chuckle. "An absolute bullseye. The executive rules my pen drafted across the ledger do not explicitly prohibit the candidates from executing a multi-factional cooperation play."
The exact watch the syllables cleared his teeth, a roaring, storm-like aerodynamic howl violently tore through the high clouds, and a massive, silver-white draconic shadow aggressively cut through the low fog banks. The precise microsecond before its immense weight intersected the stone flags, four massive wings wreathed in a blinding, incandescent coat of pure Erdtree grace flapped with an immense kinetic payload, effortlessly arresting the drake's momentum to drop his massive draconic mass onto the pebbles with absolute stability.
Perched securely atop the ridge of the dragon's neck, her small hands locked tightly around the base of his pearl-tinted horns, sat the little princess. She looked down at the cavernous square, her clear eyes blinking away the residual sleep as she executed an excited slide down the smooth curvature of the silver wing plating, her fingers touching the glintstone-hard dragon scales with an un-fused childhood ecstasy.
"Lucia, your velocity out-registers every fleet horse in the stables!"
The moment Malenia's handmaids had delivered the administrative dispatch at four o'clock, her heart had been eager to sprint past the palace arches. However, Lucia's gauntlet had checked her mantle, commanding her system to preserve her rest for an extra half-hour, hand-delivering the absolute assurance that so long as his scales managed the transit, their boots would intersect the Phantom Tree Square at an identical microsecond to the main column. As the math revealed, her boots had cleared the grass strictly to audit her elder brother Rykard holding his knees, his lungs panting for oxygen against a limestone pillar.
Hearing the innocent, child-like compliment clear her teeth, Lucia's jaw suffered an involuntary, microsecond twitch beneath his mask. Fortunately, his facial symmetry was thoroughly insulated beneath the absolute density of his draconic bone armor, rendering it mathematically impossible for the external spectators to decode the subtle shifts of his expression.
His mass dissolved, shifting back into his silver-haired human morphology as his leather boots tracked the flags to approach Knight Ordovis, his right arm plate executing a crisp, flawless military salute which the veteran commander returned with a warm smile. Ever since the terminal conclusion of that apocalyptic cross of steel across the Rodel Basin, the Crucible Master's internal assessment regarding Lucia's position had undergone a total, permanent restructuring; the structural respect his office extended to the Dragon Prince now scored perfectly equal to the deference he hand-delivered to Miquella's Empyrean chair.
Across the subsequent watch of the clock, Lucia and Radahn remained anchored to the perimeter of the square, casually exchanging their latest analytical data points regarding the structural variations of the Eternal Swordsmanship, while their visors monitored the chaotic influx of the capital scions as they staggered through the outer checkpoints.
To cover a raw geographical distance of over eighty miles and complete the entire trajectory on foot within a tight two-hour window comprised a milestone that would historically register as an elite-level operational achievement for a fully trained Rodel Knight. However, the exact watch Ordovis forced that identical physical filter across the pampered, undisciplined descendants of the ministries, the qualitative differences dividing the lineages became instantly transparent.
The initial vanguard clearing the arches comprised a tight cluster of premier noble children representing the high-ranking founding houses, candidates who had been conformed to rigorous baseline physical drilling since their cradles. The fastest operators among their line dropped their anchors a brief twenty minutes behind the arrival track established by the demigods. Behind their boots followed a massive, disorganized wave of ordinary provincial aristocrats commanding above-average kinetic statistics, interspersed with a handful of commoner candidates who had secured their entry slots via the restricted recommendation signatures of the capital heroes.
Across the final half-hour of the watch, the elements dragging their masses into the square belonged almost exclusively to the most decadent, hyper-indulged sectors of the bureaucracy. These scions had aggressively harvested their enrollment certificates by leveraging strictly the historic weight of their family names and hereditary land titles, their own physical chassis having spent their existence insulated within velvet cushions, entirely bankrupt of operational experience in the sector of physical hardship. The closer the dials traveled toward the terminal boundary of the clock, the more thoroughly spent, panting, and structurally bankrupted their systems scored against the pavement—and the more un-disguised, venomous resentment burned within their pupils as their eyes tracked Chief Chancellor Ordovis standing motionless beside his greatsword.
At precisely six o'clock sharp, Knight Ordovis's gauntlet snapped the lid of his gilded pocket watch shut, his deep baritone cutting through the gale with a flat, chilling finality. "The clock hits zero. Archive the timeline."
The microsecond the command cleared his teeth, the twin veteran Crucible Paladins enforcing his flanks wove their boots through the stones, guiding a deployment of hundreds of heavy Rodel Knights to execute a rapid tactical run toward the primary thoroughfare linking the outer plaza to the inner walls—forcefully erecting an impenetrable iron wall of shields to close the vector against any candidate still dragging their boots across the distant avenues.
"Every independent candidate whose name fails to register inside this perimeter across this watch is legally barred from participating in today's curriculum... and their tracking file will automatically record an absolute failure across the first assessment node."
The old man turned his massive bronze helm to survey the chaotic, un-aligned pack of noble scions standing before his boots, his expression as cold, un-yielding, and pitiless as a glacier crag locked beneath a midwinter freeze. "My processors assume your libraries wove the structural rules of this institution into your memory before your signatures cleared the registrar: logging two consecutive failures across the assessment ledger triggers an immediate, absolute executive expulsion from the Royal Private School. My office expects your centers to preserve this initial penalty as a permanent warning."
"Concurrently... those individual candidates whose names are called from the ledger, advance your boots through the line," Knight Ordovis commanded, his left hand extracting a thin parchment roll call list from his armor.
"Vallands."
"Present!"
"Hiroh."
"Present!"
After articulating nearly twenty independent aristocratic names across the plaza, the old paladin raised his hawk-like eyes, his piercing focus scanning the row of young nobles who had stepped forward to align their boots before his greatsword. Among the candidates arrayed across the stones, the individual commanding the absolute lowest social registry scored as the second legitimate scion born to a powerful hereditary Count administering the central ministries.
"Now... does a single intelligence standing across this line command the data required to identify why my tongue isolated your names from the master roster?"
The dozen or so young aristocrats exchanged a sequence of brief, casual looks through their perimeter, their heads shaking with a lazy, indifferent courtly composure.
Verifying their reactions, the old master remained silent across a vast watch, his helm executing a slow, heavy nod. "Superb. Your systems have officially exhausted the final operational window granted by my office."
"Levin... disclose the ledger data across their ears," he commanded, his face shifting toward the rear guard.
A physically robust, leather-clad Rodel Knight immediately stepped through the line, un-clapping a thin parchment file from his breastplate to read the active tracking logs in a loud, resonant pitch:
"Candidate Vallands: wove his person into a private house carriage, evacuating the transport at a coordinate precisely twelve miles outside the south gate of the inner city walls, before mapping a circular foot-path to enter the assembly zone."
"Candidate Hiroh: mounted an ancestral stallion to clear the east gate of the inner city, riding the beast to a marker ten miles removed from the venue before processing the remaining distance on foot."
"Candidate Padcas..."
One by one, the explicit, un-chipped records of systemic rule violations were systematically read aloud before the entire assembly. The dozen or so young nobles whose names had been isolated from the ranks initial registered a brief, flustered microsecond of internal panic, but the emotion was swiftly swallowed and suppressed behind their deep-seated baseline breeding—the hereditary courtly mandate dictating that an aristocrat must never permit his features to broadcast his internal calculations. They simply forced their spines straight, their faces hardening into rigid, un-blinking masks of courtly detachment as they quietly awaited the final administrative summary.
In their private philosophical dictionary, even if their actions had violated the technical constraints of the rule, their pride was mathematically forbidden from ever admitting a deficit, let alone executing a corrective mutation—across their narrow horizons, this specific tier of un-bending, un-confessing vanity comprised an permanent quality that every high-born nobleman was conformed to possess.
"The reading of the surveillance files is finalized," the knight named Levin stated, compiling the sheets to step back behind Knight Ordovis's shoulder plate.
The old commander nodded slowly, his calm, ancient focus sweeping across the line of young nobles standing before his greatsword. His voice emerged in a nonchalant, flat, and entirely relaxed murmur. "Now... under the absolute manual of authority clutched by my signature as the Principal Sovereign of the Leyndell Royal Private School, I announce that your names are permanently erased from the registry. You are expelled."
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