The Strongest Student of the Weakest Academy-Chapter 463: The Heavens Shall Fall (IV)

I turned.

Thaliel reached me first, which was always how it went.

She was tall, with the kind of presence that occupied more space than her physical frame technically required.

Her hair was black with a depth that didn’t behave quite like normal black, changing at the edges into something closer to the void between stars when the light caught it at certain angles.

Her eyes were a deep, depthless violet that shone when caught by, almost looking like two beautiful pieces of amethyst.

Her skin was pale in the way that things are pale when light doesn’t reach them often.

She wore the academy uniform, and that only seemed to cause her curves to be explicitly shown.

She was, and I say this with full acknowledgment that the observation is inconvenient, genuinely stunning.

Emyria beside her was a different kind of stunning entirely.

Where Thaliel read as depth, Emyria read as beginning.

Her hair was the white of something that hasn’t been touched yet, pristine and luminous, falling past her shoulders in a way that seemed to generate its own faint light rather than reflect anyone else’s.

Her eyes were a soft, warm gold that shouldn’t have worked alongside that much white but still did somehow.

Her skin carried a faint luminescence that wasn’t exactly a glow, more like the suggestion of it, the way the air looks just before something is created inside it.

She was slightly shorter than Thaliel and held herself with a composure so complete it read less as personality and more as nature.

The Goddess of the Abyss and the Goddess of Creation.

Standing side by side, they looked like the opening and closing of something vast.

"Thaliel and Emyria."

Neither of them returned the greeting.

They looked at me the way they always looked at me, which was with an enormous hate etched on their eyes, as if I had truly stolen something precious to them.

Well... I didn’t exactly steal Lunara, but they think I did.

"Where is Lunara?" Thaliel spoke first.

"Student council office," I replied, barely holding the urge to get the fuck out of here.

"Competition preparation."

Thalied nodded slighly at my words, humming thoughtfully while Emyria’s warm gold eyes stayed on me with their usual complete steadiness.

And surprisingly, it was Emyria who asked the next question.

"When are you leaving her?"

The announcement hall continued its noise around us as I barely registered his words. I mean, who would ask someone to when they would leave her?

Like, at least give me something precious to make me leave her!

"Oh!!!" Kael, beside me, stopped breathing.

And Tyrian became very interested in a fixed point on the wall to his left.

I looked at Emyria.

"I’m not."

I mean... It’s not like I can leave Lunara. She’d probably follow me to the end of the Divine Realm, but well... I quite like her.

...Maybe even sprouted love for her.

Her gold eyes didn’t waver.

"You will eventually," she pressed on, with the specific confidence of someone who believes they’re stating something inevitable rather than something desired.

"You always leave."

"That’s an interesting thing to know about someone you’ve spoken to a handful of times."

"I’ve paid attention to your actions... and I also know about Selindra, who’s been missing for over a year. But it was said that you were the last one seeing her..." her eyes narrowed slighly.

Selindra...

I know that she’s alive since she gave me her life meter. But I guess... the mission that I gave her to find the Primordial Court’s main base was simply too hard.

She was just taking longer than expected.

That was the version I was going with.

"Selindra makes her own choices."

I looked to the other side and noticed that Thaliel hadn’t moved.

Her depthless violet eyes were on me with the patience of still water, which was considerably more unsettling than open hostility would have been.

I remember that the first time I met her, she tried to duel me for Lunara’s hand. Lunara was with me at that time, and simply outright refused her for me.

"You collect women as trophies!" Emyria stated, pulling my attention back to her. Her tone had changed, and even gained a colder edge.

"Selindra. The ones at your base. The ones who follow you into things they shouldn’t survive... Lunara will become another one of them."

"Lunara is not a trophy- She makes her own decisions about where she stands."

"She made that decision before she knew the full picture," Thaliel mumbled.

First words she’d spoken in a minute.

"The full picture...?"

"Mm."

And then she reached into her uniform.

What she took out was not something I had been expecting.

A stack of photographs, held together loosely, printed on what looked like high-quality divine paper that suggested someone had put genuine effort into the documentation.

She looked at me for exactly one second with those depthless violet eyes.

Then she threw them at my face.

FWAP!

They scattered.

Dozens of them, catching the air and spinning outward in every direction, some fluttering to the floor, some sailing past my shoulder, several hitting my chest and face before I could register what they were.

Students nearby turned to look.

I caught one and looked at it.

Vivian and I, her hand in mine, walking through the capital. Taken from a distance with a good composition, actually.

The light had been doing something interesting that afternoon.

I caught another.

Rose, at the café, was leaning across the table toward me with that small smile she had.

Another.

Lilith. I wasn’t going to describe that one.

Another.

Christina, her golden hair catching sunlight, her arm through mine, somewhere I didn’t immediately recognize.

I looked at the spread of photographs now decorating the hallway floor around my feet.

Kael had gone completely still beside me.

Tyrian was looking at the photographs on the floor with the expression of a man counting inwardly and arriving at a number larger than he’d thought.

"...Aestrea," Kael called out.

I bent down and picked up one of Rose at the café.

The angle had genuinely caught something good. The way the light came through the window, and the way she was leaning forward.

I slid it into my breast pocket.

"That was a good angle," I nodded with a faint smile.

The hallway fell into silence.

Kael looked at Tyrian.

Tyrian looked at the floor.

The floor had nothing to offer either of them.

"How many?" Kael asked lightly, with the voice of someone who needed a number to finish processing.

He didn’t even sound jealous or accuse me of something.

I didn’t answer him.

Thaliel stepped forward, closing the distance between us by half, her voice dropping even colder than it already was.

"This is what Lunara doesn’t know... yet," she stated, gesturing at the photographs still scattered across the hallway floor.

To those words, my lips curled up lightly.

"Lunara has met all of them."

The hallway went very quiet in our immediate vicinity.

Thaliel’s violet eyes didn’t move from mine.

"...Excuse me?"

"She’s met all of them," I repeated, keeping my voice as neutral as ever. "She knows who they are. She knows that they currently live with me... She knows everything."

Emyria, who had maintained her composure through the entire exchange with the serenity of someone whose authority was literally the concept of creation, blinked.

Once.

It was the most expressive thing I’d ever seen her do.

Thaliel’s jaw tightened instantly.

"And she accepted that?!" Her voice actually got louder.

"You’d have to ask her," I smiled, deciding to mock her because of how annoying they truly were.

"But she’s in the student council office, and you’d be interrupting competition preparation, so I’d wait until after the announcement if I were you."

Thaliel stared at me.

"A person like you doesn’t deserve her," she mumbled almost to herself, but I obviously caught it and quickly replied.

"Probably not."

That stopped her again.

"But she disagrees," I added.

"And it’s her opinion that matters."

I bent down and picked up one more photograph from the floor. Looked at it briefly. Put it in my pocket with the other one.

Then I straightened, looked at both of them one last time, and turned toward the announcement hall.

"The bracket’s up," I said to Kael and Tyrian.

"Let’s go."

Kael stepped over a photograph carefully, as if it might react to being stepped on.

Tyrian fell into step beside me with the specific silence of someone who had several hundred questions and was deciding which ones were survivable to ask.

"...How many?" he finally asked, as we walked.

"Tyrian."

"I’m asking as someone who considers himself reasonably informed about your life."

"You’re not."

"Clearly!!!" he uttered with remarkable composure.

"HOW MANY?!!!!"

"...Seventeen."

Both Kael and Tyrian stopped at my words, looking at me with the look of someone who practically wanted to commit murder right here and now.

"SEVENTEEN?!"

"SEVENTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN?!!!!!!"

The two of them shouted loudly, gathering the attention of everyone. But since I was already expecting this, I instantly teleported away, leaving the two idiots there.

Phew...

Now, onto this damned competition.