Chapter : 641

Leaning against the doorframe, as if he had been waiting there all along, was Headmaster Valerius. He held a delicate porcelain cup of steaming tea in one long-fingered hand, his posture one of perfect, unconcerned calm. The ancient mage’s eyes, which usually held a spark of grandfatherly amusement, were now sharp, ancient, and impossibly perceptive. There was no surprise on his face. No panic. Only a deep, knowing serenity that was far more terrifying than any accusation could ever be.

Lloyd’s mind, his brilliant, strategic mind, raced, desperately searching for a plausible lie, a convincing excuse for his absence from the scene. But one look at the Headmaster’s calm, all-seeing face told him it was utterly, completely pointless.

He slowly straightened up, abandoning the pretense. He gave a slight, formal bow. “Headmaster. I was just… securing my classroom assets.”

Valerius took a slow, deliberate sip of his tea, his eyes never leaving Lloyd’s. “An admirable display of professional duty. Though I suspect the greatest threat to this Academy today was not outside your classroom door, but perhaps standing right inside it.” He set his cup down on a nearby table, the soft clink of porcelain on wood echoing in the silent room. He looked directly at Lloyd, his gaze cutting through every layer of carefully constructed pretense.

“You are a dual-spirit user,” the Headmaster stated, his voice a quiet, conversational tone that carried the weight of absolute certainty. “A feat considered mythical. And both of your spirits are, if my senses do not deceive me, at the Transcended level. You wield fire with the conceptual force of pure annihilation. And you move and fight with the cold, brutal efficiency of a veteran of a hundred wars.” He paused, and a slow, almost conspiratorial smile spread across his ancient face. “Truly,” he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, “Lord Roy Ferrum was hiding his most precious and terrifying treasure in plain sight.”

Lloyd’s world tilted on its axis. The secret he had risked everything to protect, the very foundation of his strategy for survival in this new, hostile world, had been laid bare with a few, simple, terrifyingly accurate sentences. He hadn’t fooled the Headmaster for a single, solitary second.

He let out a slow breath. The persona of the flustered young professor fell away like a discarded cloak. He straightened to his full height, and the presence in the room shifted. He was no longer the student; he was the soldier. “How did you know?” he asked, his voice now flat, cold, and devoid of its earlier warmth. It was the voice of one professional assessing another.

The Headmaster chuckled, a dry, rustling sound like ancient parchment and autumn leaves. “My dear child, listen closely,” he said, affectionately tapping his long, flowing white beard. “My beard did not turn white from mere age or simple boredom. I was your father’s teacher. And before that, I was your grandfather Malachi’s teacher. Their particular brand of Ferrum will, the unique, unyielding signature of the Steel Blood, is as familiar to me as my own reflection. I sensed its potential in you the moment you first stepped into my office, hiding beneath a veneer of mediocrity.”

He took another step into the room, his eyes twinkling with a profound, ancient amusement that was both comforting and deeply unnerving. “The fire and the mask were a clever, even brilliant, bit of theatre. A fine misdirection. But you cannot hide the very essence of your soul from a man who has watched it flow through your family’s veins for three generations. My dear boy,” he concluded with a final, gentle pat on the air, “it is simply not possible to fool my eyes.”

---

The Headmaster’s calm, irrefutable words hung in the silence of the office, each one a perfectly placed stone that walled Lloyd in completely. There were no accusations, no threats, just a simple, unadorned statement of fact that was more devastating than any attack. Lloyd felt a chill that had nothing to do with magic or fear. It was the cold, stark realization that he had been so focused on the grand strategy—on the King, on Altamira, on the ghosts of his past—that he had committed a classic soldier’s mistake: he had underestimated the wisdom of the terrain on which he was operating. Headmaster Valerius was not just a piece on the board; he was the board itself, ancient, aware, and deeply rooted in the history of this world.

“So you knew,” Lloyd stated, his voice quiet, devoid of inflection. It was not a question but a concession. The game was up.

Chapter : 642

“I suspected,” Valerius corrected gently, his tone softening. He was no longer a grand inquisitor but a patient teacher. “The King’s sudden and quite frankly bizarre interest in you was the first significant clue. Liam Bethelham, for all his charm and theatrics, is a pragmatist. He does not gamble with the future of the kingdom’s elite. He does not appoint a ‘disgraced heir’ to a professorship out of mere whimsy. He must have sensed, as I did, that you were far more than you appeared. The… pyrotechnics in the garden today merely provided a rather dramatic and irrefutable confirmation of our shared hypothesis.”

The Headmaster walked further into the small office, his ancient presence seeming to fill the entire space, making it feel less like a room and more like a confessional. He regarded Lloyd not with the stern eye of a disciplinarian who had caught a student breaking the rules, but with the fascinated, analytical gaze of a master scholar who had just discovered a new, impossible species.

“The power you wield, young Ferrum… it is a magnificent and terrifying paradox,” Valerius continued, his voice a low, contemplative murmur. “The fire of your second spirit is wild, absolute, a power of pure, conceptual annihilation. And yet, you control it with a will of cold, tempered iron. You fight not like a mage, flinging spells from a distance, but like a soldier. A commander. Pragmatic. Efficient. Brutally, wonderfully ruthless.” He paused, his gaze intensifying, seeming to look right through Lloyd’s eyes and into the eighty-year-old soul hiding behind them. “It is a maturity of spirit, a battlefield wisdom, that does not match your physical years. It is the spirit of a man who has seen the end of a world and has decided, with quiet, unshakeable resolve, to build a new one on his own terms.”

Lloyd remained silent, his own defenses utterly breached. Every word the Headmaster spoke was a perfectly aimed dart, piercing through the layers of his carefully constructed personas and striking at the very core of his secret identity: KM Evan, the Major General.

Valerius seemed to sense he had pushed far enough, that he had stripped his student bare. He sighed, and the piercing scholarly curiosity softened into something more paternal, more weary. “Do not fear, child. Your secret, whatever its true and fantastic nature may be, is safe with me. I have no interest in exposing you. On the contrary,” he said, a slow, genuine smile spreading across his ancient face, “I find your presence here to be the most exciting, the most wonderfully chaotic thing to happen to this stagnant old institution in a century.”

He leaned forward slightly, his eyes twinkling with a conspiratorial light. “The King brought you here to be a disruptive force, to shake the very foundations of our complacent, self-satisfied nobility. I see now that his assessment was, if anything, a profound understatement. You are not a disruptive force, young man. You are a cataclysm in a teacher uniform.” He chuckled again, a dry, papery sound. “And I must confess, I wholeheartedly approve.”

With that, the Headmaster turned to leave. At the doorway, he paused, his back to Lloyd. “A final word of advice, from an old man to a young god who walks among mortals. Power like yours attracts attention, not all of it as… appreciative as my own. The Altamiran knight was a blunt instrument, a message sent by a clumsy, arrogant hand. The next threat may not be so obvious. Be wary of shadows, young Ferrum. Especially the ones that wear friendly faces.”

And then he was gone, leaving Lloyd alone in the sudden, ringing silence of his office, his mind reeling. He had been seen. Truly, deeply seen, by someone other than his enemies. The feeling was equal parts terrifying and, to his own profound surprise, strangely, wonderfully liberating. The crushing weight of his secrets was no longer his alone to bear.

He sank heavily into his chair, the adrenaline of the past hour finally giving way to a profound mental and spiritual exhaustion. His mind, no longer focused on the immediate threat, began to churn, to connect the dots. The Headmaster’s words had triggered something deep within him, a memory from a life he tried so hard to forget, a life that was becoming increasingly, dangerously intertwined with this one.

The war between Altamira and Bethelham.