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Glory to my bum ass proofreader: Solare.
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John laughed openly at the two men's panicked shouting as they kicked and wriggled in the air like hooked fish. Their boots swung uselessly above the flooded stones, their hands clawing at his wrists, his scaled fingers, the empty air, anything at all that might persuade reality to become kinder than it currently was.
Reality, for its part, seemed entirely content to let them dangle.
One of them had lost his helmet somewhere in the shallows. The other's spear had vanished behind him with a splash some seconds ago, abandoned in favor of the far more urgent task of not becoming the first Cuckoo soldier in recorded history to be carried around like luggage by a laughing demigod.
Marika, drifting beside him in a wash of gold, let out a helpless giggle that only barely softened into reproach.
"Thou hast been left unchecked for far too long when it comes to being a demonic bully," she said, trying and failing to sound truly severe. "'Tis a poor look for one meant to be my champion."
John only grinned wider.
'And yet you're laughing.'
"I am laughing at thee, not with thee."
'That still counts.'
He adjusted his grip minutely, eliciting two more pitiful noises from the men in his claws, and started walking again.
The Academy Gate Town opened around him in drowned stone, leaning roofs, and broken old streets half-swallowed by Liurnia's waters. Ancient buildings stood in crooked ranks beneath hanging moss and damp banners gone stiff with age.
Bridges and walkways connected raised islands of masonry above the flood, while collapsed courtyards and submerged alleys vanished beneath silver-blue shallows. Beyond it all, looming over the town like a sharpened thought, the Grand Academy of Raya Lucaria watched from its rise with cold glintstone dignity.
John strode into it like he owned the road.
He did not hurry. There was no need.
He had two screaming soldiers in hand, a demigod's presence rolling off him in quiet, oppressive waves, and the sort of confidence that made caution in other men start to taste like fear.
He went looking, in his own words, for the most important person available.
He did not have to search long.
The town saw him and the alarms began ringing.
They rang from watchposts and half-collapsed towers in shrill, staggered peals that bounced across the flooded settlement like birds taking wing.
Voices rose. Boots hammered across stone. Commands were shouted from walkways and balconies. Magic flared to life in pale blue circles. Crossbows and longbows were dragged into place.
Even a few siege emplacements further back turned with creaking purpose, their crews scrambling to angle iron and wood toward the impossible invader walking calmly into their layered kill-zone with two men clutched like groceries.
Within moments, dozens of soldiers had formed a tightening perimeter around him.
Cuckoo knights in blue-and-silver mail advanced through the shallows with shields raised and spears leveled. Sorcerers in Academy robes stepped up behind them, staves glowing with the cold brilliance of gathered glintstone. Archers took positions along broken roofs and high stone ledges.
Farther back, he saw the silhouettes of larger engines settling into place, ballistae or some Academy variant thereof, and felt more than a few spell signatures gathering in the air with all the subtlety of a loaded firing line.
Everything around him was aimed inward.
Everything pointed at him.
John stopped, if only out of courtesy.
Melina might have found the moment worryingly dramatic. John found it vaguely flattering.
The crowd before him shifted, and from its center emerged the woman he assumed was in charge of the outpost.
She stepped forward with measured, deliberate calm that did not quite hide the tension beneath it. Her robes marked her as a senior Academy sorceress, blue and pale gray trimmed in gold thread gone damp at the hem from the flooded streets.
She wore no glintstone crown, which made John suspect this was a field command rather than a purely scholastic station, but the staff in her hand hummed with enough restrained power to make the point moot.
Her face was beautiful in the severe, intelligent way Raya Lucaria seemed to produce by the dozen, though hers carried a few harder lines than most. A woman used to command, then. Or forced into it often enough that the difference had stopped mattering.
Her eyes flicked once over him, his draconic arms, his molten-scaled chest visible through the loose white shirt, the two terrified men hanging from his hands, and the water still running off him in sheets from whatever fresh disaster he had come from.
When she spoke, her voice carried well, though nervousness lived under its discipline.
"Name yourself, and release your hostages."
John perked up faintly at that and raised both men a little higher, as if to better inspect them.
"These two?" He asked brightly.
The men yelped.
The sorceress' jaw tightened.
"Yes."
John tilted his head.
"Well..." He smiled. "Ask nicely first, and then I'll consider it."
That did not improve the atmosphere.
If anything, it made the tension around him spike harder. Spears lowered. Bowstrings tightened. The sorcerers' glintstone circles brightened. A few of the soldiers he held began to squirm harder, both because they were terrified and because they could quite literally feel the tips of his claws pressing into the backs of their necks.
"My lady, please!" One of them blurted. "Do as he says!"
"I can feel his claws!"
"I do not wish to be a cautionary tale!"
The lead sorceress' eyebrow twitched sharply. She drew in a measured breath, visibly forcing herself back into control.
"Very well…" She said through teeth that wanted to be grinding harder than they were. "Would you please release those men–"
John cut her off by lifting one finger on the hand holding the helmetless soldier.
"And before all that..." He smiled even more pleasantly. "Aren't people also supposed to introduce themselves before they start demanding names?"
A vein bulged at her temple.
Marika laughed.
She tried not to. She very clearly tried. But the laugh slipped out of her anyway in a warm, delighted burst that only encouraged him further.
"There is something deeply wrong with thee." She informed him between soft, traitorous amusement. "You possess a compulsive need to aggravate everyone who crosses thy path."
'Not everyone.'
"Enough of them that the distinction no longer matters."
The sorceress closed her eyes for the briefest moment, then opened them again with all the composure of a woman deciding that strangling a demigod in public would likely create more paperwork than it solved.
"I am Preceptor Elyse of the Academy's outer ward." She called out, each word clipped into obedience by necessity rather than goodwill. "Now, please. Release the men."
John chuckled.
"These aren't prisoners, though. They're my friends."
He tried very hard to keep a straight face.
He failed.
Around him, the collective expression of the Cuckoo line shifted into one of unified, horrified disbelief. Several soldiers looked at the men in his hands.
The men in his hands looked like they wanted to personally refute that claim before dying, but neither seemed willing to risk the consequences of speaking too suddenly while their necks rested in a draconic grip.
Marika kept giggling.
"Moron…" She said fondly. "Absolute moron."
Preceptor Elyse stared at him like she had just watched a wolf insist it was part of the shepherding staff.
"That… is not what friendship looks like."
John glanced down at the two dangling men.
"You hear that~?" He asked them conversationally. "She's trying to define our relationship for us."
One of them made a sound suspiciously close to a sob.
The other attempted bravery and failed immediately. "M-My lord, if friendship is what this is, I humbly request less of it!"
John barked a laugh.
That laugh did nothing to calm the ring of soldiers around him. If anything, the moment stretched so tightly that it almost became visible, one wrong twitch away from turning into a storm of arrows, spears, and glintstone.
Elyse raised her staff slightly.
"Enough games! I will ask you one last time. Who are you?"
That question changed the air.
Not because the soldiers did not already suspect. They did.
But suspicion, rumor, and battlefield certainty were three different things. One could fire on a dangerous unknown and later claim confusion. One could not so easily explain launching a doomed attack on a confirmed Demigod if said Demigod then walked through the carnage and fed your superiors their own spines.
John saw it in their faces.
They knew. Or thought they knew.
But they needed him to say it.
The spells around him brightened another shade. More bows drew to full tension. Even the siege crews in the distance braced, not because they believed they could kill him, but because soldiers often preferred action to waiting helplessly for history to choose them as collateral.
John's smile softened into something easier. More genuine.
He answered.
"My name is Johnathan Pendragon." He declared, voice carrying cleanly through the drowned square
That was all it took.
The name moved through the line like a shockwave, a subtle break in posture here, a sharp intake of breath there, a glance exchanged too quickly to be hidden. A few of the younger soldiers visibly paled. One of the sorcerers in the second rank lowered his staff by an inch before remembering himself and jerking it back up.
Elyse's grimace deepened.
So her hunch had been correct.
This was him.
The man who had killed Godrick the Grafted.
The Tarnished who had taken a Great Rune.
The storm out of Limgrave.
The half-draconic horror the south had begun speaking of in equal parts awe and panic.
And everyone standing here knew, in that same instant, exactly how little confidence they had in stopping him if he decided he wanted the road behind them badly enough.
A dozen men, two dozen, fifty, a hundred. It would not matter much if the stories were even half true. Killing Godrick and awakening a Great Rune at Limgrave's Divine Tower was already beyond the reach of normal military solutions. Whatever else he could do, whatever other rumors were lies or exaggerations, that much was enough.
John saw that understanding settle across them all and, because he was who he was, decided not to make it worse.
He let the two soldiers down very slowly.
But he did not release them. Not fully.
As their boots splashed back into the shallows, John's claws shifted to rest atop their heads instead, broad scaled palms settling lightly across their hair and helmets with the kind of casual touch that somehow made the threat more obvious rather than less.
Everyone there understood the arithmetic instantly.
If he squeezed, they died.
Their skulls would burst like grapes beneath a demigod's claws.
The men knew it. Their comrades knew it. Elyse knew it most of all.
Her fingers tightened once around her staff, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter.
"What do you want?"
John turned his head toward her.
It was only a small motion, but she flinched back on instinct before visibly forcing herself to hold her ground. To her credit, she did hold it. Barely.
John chuckled softly and patted the two soldiers on the head.
"What I want is actually pretty simple." He called out, and then paused just long enough to let the line tense again.
"I seem to have lost my key into the Academy behind you."
Elyse blinked.
That was not the answer she had expected.
Before she could recover, he winked at her.
The gesture was shameless, easy, and so wildly out of place amid the standoff that for one humanizing moment it punched straight through her command mask and left behind brief confusion and the faintest, traitorous touch of color at the edge of her cheeks.
John smiled wider.
"So~..." He said, as if asking directions rather than requesting passage through a heavily guarded magical fortress. "Would you be so kind as to guide me through your wonderful Academy~?"
Marika sighed in rich, exhausted amusement.
"And there it is…" She murmured. "A mere hour out of mine daughter's sight and thou art back to thy foolish womanizing ways."
John did not deny it.
He only kept looking at the sorceress with that same impossible mixture of danger, humor, and confidence, while all around them the Cuckoo host remained drawn, aimed, and one trembling heartbeat away from learning whether they were about to become witnesses, corpses, or unwilling escorts.
John kept the easy smirk on his face while the entire courtyard of the Academy Gate Town looked one bad twitch away from detonating into sorcery and arrows.
Inwardly, he answered Marika with lazy confidence.
'I'm not planning to do anything with her. I'm just having fun and following Melina's advice for once. Diplomacy first.'
Marika made a long, suffering sound in the back of his mind.
"Thou dressest indecency in softer words and expectest me not to notice."
'And yet I'm still being diplomatic.'
"That word means less and less each time thou usest it."
John's grin barely shifted.
Then, to the horror of half the Cuckoo line and the fascination of the other half, he let the two soldiers go.
They stumbled away so quickly they nearly tripped over themselves, scrambling backward through the shallows with the shell-shocked movements of men who had just been allowed to continue possessing skulls.
Around them, the soldiers and sorcerers did not relax in the slightest. If anything, the tension grew sharper as John started walking forward on his own, heading straight for Elyse as though he were crossing a courtyard to greet an acquaintance instead of stepping through a kill-zone.
Every bow followed him.
Every staff tracked his chest and throat.
Every Cuckoo knight he passed looked like they had been ordered to stand still by men who did not have to be the ones standing there.
John did not hurry. He moved with infuriating nonchalance, water rippling around his boots, shoulders loose, and arms still twisted and black-scaled with savage strength.
He crossed the line into the inner defenses.
And one of the bowmen near the left flank lost his nerve.
The twang of the string snapped through the flooded square like a scream, everyone there thought they had just watched history make the worst possible decision.
The arrow flashed toward John's head.
He caught it without the slightest bit of effort. Not even with speed dramatic enough to impress him.
He merely lifted a hand, plucked it out of the air between two fingers, then paused mid-step to examine it with mild curiosity. The whole square went dead silent as he pressed the head of the arrow against the hardened scales of his palm and watched the shaft splinter and crush itself uselessly against him.
John chuckled.
"Bit rude, don't you think?" He said mildly.
He let the broken arrow fall, then stepped over to the bowman.
The poor man had already dropped to one knee in pure survival instinct, face white, hands empty, breath coming in and out of him so fast he looked on the verge of passing out. John rested his draconic hand atop the man's helmet in something that might have been a pat if one ignored the size difference and the complete terror involved.
"There, there~..." John said. "Deep breaths."
Then he left him there hyperventilating in the shallows and kept walking.
By the time he reached Elyse, even she looked slightly stunned.
Not because he had survived. Everyone present had known, somewhere deep down, that an ordinary arrow was not about to solve this problem.
But because he had chosen not to retaliate.
That, more than any display of power, seemed to wrong-foot them.
John stopped before her, close enough now that she had to tilt her head slightly to keep proper eye contact with him.
He did not ask permission.
He took her hand.
Elyse's breath caught at once, and the flush already living at the edges of her face deepened so quickly it nearly looked painful. She resisted, but only weakly, fingers tensing in his grasp more from shock than any real attempt to wrench free.
"M-My lord, p-please do not overstep. Even if you are a Demigod, I still possess my pride as a Preceptor of the Academy."
John's mouth twitched with amusement.
He bent slightly, lowering himself to her eye level with easy, shameless confidence, then brought her hand toward his face and pressed a soft kiss to her knuckles.
Elyse went scarlet.
The reaction was immediate and catastrophic. The composure she had been clinging to simply collapsed under the weight of the gesture, and the moment he let her hand go she snatched it back to her chest as if it had become dangerously hot. Her gaze darted away. She could not meet his eyes anymore.
Behind him, somewhere in the golden reaches of his soul, Marika groaned.
"Oh, for pity's sake. It is actually working on her."
John giggled inwardly, dark and delighted.
'Of course it is. I'm a charming, handsome bastard. How can you blame her?'
"You truly are going to become unbearable from this."
'Going to?'
That earned him only another long-suffering sigh.
Outwardly, he let some of the teasing soften into something gentler. He smiled at Elyse, not mockingly now, but with enough warmth to keep her off-balance.
"My apologies, I mean no insult."
That was, in a sense, true.
His eyes drifted toward the great magical seal beyond the town, the massive glimmering gate leading toward the Academy proper.
"I'll ask again." He said, voice calm and pleasant in a way that only made the threat beneath it clearer. "Open the path for me into the Academy. I'm only here for a tour, after all." His smile sharpened just a fraction. "I'd prefer not to need to kill anyone, but..."
Elyse shuddered.
The statement was quiet. Casual, even. Yet every soldier around them heard it for exactly what it was.
It was, evidently, not a boast or a tantrum.
It was a simple explanation of the options available.
The square behind her erupted into frightened muttering at once, several Cuckoo soldiers half-raising shields or staves as if panic might form a better defense than discipline had. Elyse closed her eyes, inhaled once through her nose, then turned abruptly on the gathered line with more force than John expected from her current state.
"Quiet!" She barked.
The word cracked across the flooded street hard enough to make even the sorcerers flinch.
The muttering died.
Elyse looked over them all with visible exasperation and no small amount of stress-induced fury. "Would any of you truly rather fight this Demigod?!"
No one answered.
The silence that followed was immediate and absolute.
John chuckled softly and, as a gesture of goodwill, retracted the transformation in his left arm. Black scales rippled and receded. Claws drew back into fingers. The monstrous limb softened back into human shape, leaving only the right arm still draconic and terrible.
Then, with deliberate elegance, he extended the now-human arm toward her.
"Then, would you do me the honor of leading me to the gate and into your great Academy?"
Elyse looked at the offered arm as if it were some sort of arcane trap designed specifically to ruin her day.
"T-This..." She swallowed. "This is not appropriate."
John raised an eyebrow.
"F-For a lord of your stature to engage in such gestures with a m-mere Preceptor i-is..." She continued, visibly trying to gather what remained of her dignity, and clearly failed as she trailed off.
The phrasing caught his attention immediately.
A moment ago, she had invoked her pride as a Preceptor of the Academy.
Now she was calling herself a mere Preceptor.
John's smile twitched with private amusement.
Marika, meanwhile, sounded outright flabbergasted.
"Did this woman never know a man a day in her life?!" She demanded. "She foldeth as though thou wert the first bastard ever to kiss her hand!"
John nearly laughed out loud at that one, but kept it under control.
He focused back on Elyse and let the smile in his face warm further, smoothing out the sharpest edges of his teasing into something that felt, to a woman in her current state, almost unfairly sincere.
"I think that a guide should be treated with proper respect~..." He said softly.
Elyse's lips parted.
John did not rush her. He simply held the offer there and let the silence do the work for him while half the town stared in disbelief and the other half quietly died inside.
At last, she exhaled.
Then, with the careful reluctance of someone aware she was making a terrible mistake and not quite capable of stopping herself, Elyse placed her hand on his arm.
John's grin did not widen visibly.
Only because he had just enough self-control left not to gloat in public.
She led him forward.
If the hand-kiss had unsettled her, actually escorting him arm-in-arm through the inner defenses was doing active damage. She walked with the stiff-backed caution of a woman trying very hard to pretend this was all formal and politically necessary rather than mortifyingly intimate. The blush in her face refused to cooperate with that fiction.
The Cuckoo line split around them.
No one dared object.
As they passed, John tilted his head slightly and asked in a tone far too conversational for the circumstances. "Have you ever been in a relationship before?"
That nearly killed her.
Elyse stumbled half a step and caught herself so quickly it would have gone unnoticed by anyone with less enhanced senses than John. Her face burned even hotter, and for one dreadful second he thought she might actually vaporize herself from sheer embarrassment.
"My lord…" She whispered, clearly aghast. "...please do not play with an old woman's heart like that."
John blinked once.
"Old? You don't look a day over twenty." He said, with perfect sincerity weaponized for evil.
Elyse almost walked directly into a low broken pillar.
She caught herself at the last possible moment, making a tiny strangled sound that Marika interpreted, quite correctly, as confirmation enough to be spiritually exhausted for the next week.
"That answers that…" The goddess muttered. "Stars preserve us..."
John kept his face calm.
Mostly.
By the time they reached the gate, Elyse looked like she was navigating a battlefield inside her own skin. Ahead of them loomed the massive magical seal barring passage into Raya Lucaria proper, a wall of old Academy sorcery cast into a grand archway and threaded through with pale blue light.
Great sigils rotated slowly within its surface like star-charts made vertical, and the air around it hummed with enough restrained glintstone power to set the hairs along John's neck on edge.
Elyse stopped before it and finally dared to look back up at him, though only briefly.
"When it opens, do not let go of my hand." She whispered, voice nervous and thinner than she likely intended.
John leaned down slightly, close enough that the warmth in her face threatened a second collapse.
"I wouldn't dream of it~..." He whispered.
That was almost too much for her.
Almost.
But to her credit, Preceptor Elyse somehow held herself together long enough to lift her free hand toward the gate.
Blue light bloomed at her fingertips, then spread into the massive sigils before them in widening rings. The glimmering barrier answered at once, humming louder as ancient sorcery stirred, and the teleportation matrix began to wake beneath her touch.
One heartbeat he was wrapped in the cool, humming blue of the Academy's gate-sorcery with Elyse's hand still clutching his arm like it had become the only stable thing in the world. The next, the magic released them onto a high stone intersection suspended over Liurnia's flooded vastness, and the air changed all at once.
It smelled cleaner here.
Colder, sharper, richer with glintstone and old enchantment.
The place where they emerged was not quite a courtyard and not quite a bridge, but a broad meeting-point of pale stone built to funnel all roads toward learning and exclusion in equal measure.
Two grand bridges stretched away from it like deliberate statements: one running back toward the lake-country and the drowned reaches of Liurnia, the other rising onward toward the Great Academy proper.
Carved balustrades framed the edges, their old marble worn smooth by rain, age, and generations of sorcerers walking upward with ambition in their chests and stars in their heads. Blue sigils glimmered faintly in the seams of the stone beneath his boots, old magic laid into every block and arch as naturally as moss into the ruins below.
Far beneath them, Liurnia spread in silver and blue beneath the late morning light, half-drowned chapels and old roads cutting pale lines through the shallows. Ahead, however, the Academy pulled the eye away from all of that with almost offensive ease.
John looked around without hurry while Elyse, still blushing hard enough to count as a fire hazard, guided him forward across the meeting-point and toward the main Academy gate and the massive lift that rose into the heart of Raya Lucaria.
The bridge leading inward was long and stately, its stones dry despite the mist curling through the heights, protected by layered enchantments and old care.
Great statues stood at intervals along the sides, robed scholars and grave preceptors cast in marble, their faces hidden by glintstone crowns or smooth helms, as though the Academy had long ago decided that its students and masters were merely passing shapes but learning itself should be remembered in stone.
Elyse did not speak for a while.
She led him with a stiffness that made the hand on his arm feel louder than words. At first she had only touched him lightly, the way one might touch a noble out of duty and distance.
But somewhere between the teleportation point and the grand lift, her hand had shifted upward, inch by nervous inch, until it settled against the thick line of his bicep.
John felt it happen.
And felt, too, the tiny involuntary squeeze of her fingers.
The way her grip tightened for one treacherous second, almost in awe, as if she had not expected his arm to feel quite so hard and so terribly, unfairly real beneath the loose white cloth of his shirt.
Then the poor woman seemed to realize what she was doing. Her hand recoiled instantly, sliding hurriedly back down to a safer place on his forearm while her face burned red enough to rival glintstone fire.
Marika groaned in the back of his mind. "Wipe that look from thy face, please."
John's mouth only twitched wider.
They stepped onto the grand lift together. It was less a simple platform and more a rising dais of old Academy craft, circular and broad, ringed with engraved glyphs and anchored by towering stonework carved with stars, moons, and geometric sorceries beyond the grasp of common men.
The mechanism beneath them hummed awake with deep magical resonance rather than gears, and the platform began to rise with stately smoothness through the stone throat of the Academy's approach.
For a few breaths, only the low hum of sorcery and the whisper of wind through the open arches accompanied them.
Then, with clear effort, Elyse found her voice again.
"So…" She asked, keeping her gaze fixed resolutely ahead while the lift climbed. "Why are you truly here, my lord?"
John turned his head toward her with a pleasant little smile, the kind that only worsened her situation.
"I'm just here to visit my wife's mother."
That broke her.
Elyse's entire body jolted as though someone had struck the thought straight into her spine. Her hand flew from his arm so fast it might have been burned there, and she turned to him with a mortified, bewildered stare that made it abundantly clear the statement had found no shelf in her mind to sit on.
"Y-Your… your what?" She stammered. "You truly have a wife? And who in all the stars is it that you would come all this way to visit her mother?"
The lift gave a soft, final click as it reached its height.
Before them, the archway opened.
John stepped through it at once and out onto the upper bridge, where the full breath of Raya Lucaria finally rolled over him.
It was beautiful.
Not in the warm way of the Erdtree's lands, nor in the rugged way of Limgrave's open hills, nor even in the bruised, tragic way Caelid still sometimes was beneath the rot. The Academy's beauty was colder than that.
The very air felt saturated with sorcery.
Azure glimmer lay so thick over the heights that it seemed to stain the daylight itself, turning the sky above and around the Academy into a luminous blue-white vault threaded with magical haze. Glintstone motes drifted through the air like dust caught in sacred light. The stone beneath his boots seemed to hum with old intelligence.
Towers rose in elegant, impossible layers beyond the bridge, connected by walkways, arches, domes, and spires that all seemed to climb not merely upward but inward toward some greater concentration of thought and moonlit obsession.
John held his hands behind his back and clasped them there, admiring the sight for one long moment before he looked back over his shoulder.
His grin came wide and toothy. His fangs showed plainly. His crimson-gold eyes stood out all the more against the overwhelming azure flood of magic behind him.
"Why, of course I am."
Elyse stood at the threshold of the lift, still visibly trying to recover from what he had just told her.
John's smile sharpened.
"And where else would I be able to visit Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon?"
Elyse stared. The horror did not arrive all at once, it built up slowly.
First confusion, then dawning recognition. Then the terrible, slow internal collapse of a woman forced to process several impossible things in the wrong order.
He watched it happen in real time.
Then he winked at her and turned back around, continuing onto the bridge as if he had not just casually detonated her understanding of current political and familial realities.
Behind him, he heard the sound of her finally catching up to the statement.
"W-Wait…!" Elyse exclaimed, scandalized beyond measure. "Y-You are saying your w-wife is—!"
John cut her off with a laugh before she could finish the sentence out loud.
"Yeah, I am." He said over his shoulder. "Ranni the Witch is my wife. She's quite the incredible woman, isn't she?"
Marika rolled her eyes with such force John could almost hear it.
"Thou art back on this nonsense with my daughter."
He chuckled under his breath. He remembered that night in the church of Elleh too. Remembered calling Ranni his wife the night he met her. It had been ridiculous then. It was still ridiculous now.
That did not make it any less enjoyable.
He stepped farther onto the bridge and lifted his gaze fully to the Academy again, taking in the endless expanse of it. The scale felt even larger from here. The main causeway ran ahead over a gulf of blue-shadowed depth toward the central gatehouses and inner courts.
Great towers pierced the sky in layered tiers of white stone and azure glow. Glintstone lanterns burned without flame. The heavens themselves seemed denser over Raya Lucaria, crowded with sorcery and study until even the clouds looked touched by intellect.
Behind him, the blustering finally began.
It took Elyse several seconds to find enough breath and outrage to speak properly again, but when she did, it came in a rush as she hurried after him.
"Are you truly serious?" She demanded, nearly tripping over the force of her own disbelief. "You are speaking of Lady Ranni? The lunar princess? Carian royalty? T-That Ranni?"
John laughed and nodded.
Elyse looked actively distressed by the answer.
Ahead, two sorcerer-guards stood at the next post along the bridge, both clad in Academy colors and stone helms, staffs in hand, their posture rigid with the specific discomfort of men who had already been warned a Demigod was entering and were now trying to decide whether that meant they should stand straighter or simply make peace with death.
John's eyes narrowed just slightly, though the broad, fang-baring smile on his face remained.
The line of his shoulders shifted.
Resolve settled in him with almost cheerful weight.
It was time.
Time to walk into the Great Academy of Raya Lucaria, home of glintstone, scholars, arrogance, ancient sorcery, and one very unstable queen.
Time to take the place by storm.
And not, ideally, by actually setting half of it on fire.
Though he was always willing to keep his options open.
On the other hand, Elyse had, apparently, done more than panic prettily.
As they made their way deeper through the Academy approach, she cleared her throat, gathered what remained of her dignity, and informed him in a voice that tried very hard to sound professional that she had taken the liberty of sending word ahead of his arrival so the inner guards and certain ranking faculty would not react with quite so much immediate hysteria.
John turned to her with open approval.
"That was smart." He smiled. "And pretty impressive, too. You managed all that without me noticing right away."
At his side, Marika spoke with airy disinterest.
"She did no such thing without thy noticing. I noticed. I merely chose not to say anything."
John ignored her so smoothly it would have been art in another life.
"Well then, well done, Preceptor." He said warmly to Elyse.
That earned him another bashful look from the poor woman, though she tried to hide it by stepping ahead and speaking with the two stone-helmed sorcerer guards waiting at the next threshold.
They exchanged a few tense words. The guards glanced at him, his arms, his eyes. Then, seemingly deciding that the correct response to a visiting Demigod was not to become a stain on the Academy floor, they nodded stiffly and stepped aside.
John walked in through the front doors of Raya Lucaria.
The interior swallowed him in azure light and old stone.
The first great hall opened into the Church of the Cuckoo, though calling it merely a church felt inadequate.
It was a sanctuary, lecture hall, archive, and monument to magical arrogance all at once.
Pale columns rose in disciplined rows toward a vaulted ceiling webbed with glintstone filigree. Hanging chandeliers burned with cold blue witchflame instead of candles. Stained windows cast muted pools of star-colored light across old tile and worn prayer-steps. The place felt less like a house of worship than a declaration that knowledge itself had once demanded kneeling.
John's boots echoed softly as he walked.
Sorcerers, students, and a few armored Cuckoo soldiers scattered across the great chamber paused in open disbelief when they saw him. Some stared. Some visibly paled. Some straightened with automatic offense. Most simply watched with that mixture of awe, fear, and gossip-hunger people reserved for disasters that had learned how to smile.
Elyse led him on.
Beyond the church lay the outer graveyard, sprawling and far larger than the game had ever suggested. It spread across a series of terraces and ruined walks outside the church proper, cluttered with leaning gravestones, broken statuary, half-collapsed arches, and old magical debris left from battles and experiments alike.
Claymen wandered there in slow, mournful clusters, their heavy little bodies and lamp-like heads drifting through the old grounds like stubborn funerary thoughts given form. John walked around them without hurry, taking in the place, watching the way glintstone light reflected in puddles pooled among the graves.
Elyse guided him toward one of the Academy's inner lifts.
This one was older-looking than the grand approach lift, narrower, nestled into old stonework and framed by intricate sorcerous mechanisms built more with runes than with gears. It carried them upward into the academic heart of the place, toward where John remembered the Schoolhouse Classroom being in the game.
The ride gave him a clearer look at just how much larger Raya Lucaria truly was.
Corridors branched in layers. Stairways folded over libraries. Balconies overlooked lecture-halls and observatories. Rooms with open doors flashed glimpses of laboratories, collections, student dormitories, recitation chambers, glintstone stores, and narrow little studies drowned in books and diagrams. The Academy was less a single building than a magical city folded vertically into itself.
When the lift opened, dozens more sorcerers and students turned to stare as Elyse escorted him through.
The reactions were glorious.
Shock, outrage, awe, fear, fascination, scandalized curiosity; most wore several at once. Whispers followed him like a wake.
"That's him…"
"The one from Limgrave…"
"He's taller than they said…"
"Is that really a Great Rune's aura?"
"Why is Preceptor Elyse holding his arm like that?"
That last one made Elyse go so red John feared she might actually trip over nothing and die of embarrassment.
He walked into the schoolhouse proper a moment later and found it, unsurprisingly, much bigger than he remembered from the game.
The Schoolhouse Classroom was not a single room but an entire educational wing. Long galleries full of desks stretched away beneath arched ceilings. Side chambers housed smaller study circles.
They had shelves that climbed from floor to ceiling in every direction, packed with texts, scroll-cases, astrolabes, glintstone references, diagrams of lunar movements, and enough theoretical magical writing to kill lesser men from sheer volume.
Students bent over desks in rows, some working in ink and parchment, others practicing tiny controlled sorceries under supervision. Instructors stood among them like patient carrion birds in scholar's robes, their glintstone crowns and masks lending them the air of overeducated ghosts.
Marika's presence stirred beside him.
"Wouldst thou have a Site of Grace here?"
John's answer was immediate.
"Yeah."
The grace answered him a moment later, golden and utterly out of place amid all that azure scholarship. It gathered near one side of the schoolhouse with quiet authority. John anchored it without ceremony.
Several nearby students noticed.
A few instructors noticed too.
No one liked it. That much was obvious.
Yet no one did anything, either. Because what, exactly, was the protocol for telling a Great Rune-bearing dragon-blooded Demigod that he was not allowed to place a checkpoint in your school?
John kept walking.
Elyse, now reduced to standing off to one side with the air of a woman trying to convince herself she had not permanently derailed her life this morning, watched while he freely explored the wing.
He browsed without a hint of apologeticness or reserve. He simply moved from shelf to shelf and table to table, picking up scrolls and reading them where he stood.
Some he skimmed with quick interest and returned when they failed to impress him. Others he rolled up and tucked into his inventory without shame. The act caused visible distress among the more aristocratic-looking sorcerers nearby.
One student made a tiny scandalized sound every time he took something.
One older noble sorcerer finally lost his nerve, marched forward, and demanded in a shrill, indignant tone that the barbaric interloper remove his thieving hands from Academy property.
John looked at him once.
Then bitch-slapped him through a wall.
It happened so fast most people only understood it after the sound came. There was a single meaty crack, a blur of motion, then the sorcerer flew sideways through the partition in an eruption of shattered wood, plaster, and very expensive dignity. His stone mask broke on impact.
The entire schoolhouse froze.
John looked at the hole in the wall, then at the stunned students, then back to the shelf he'd been browsing.
"Anyways…" He said mildly, and went back to reading.
Not even Marika defended him that time.
Elyse hurried up beside him a little later and spoke in a strained whisper, pleading with him to please not be too rude and, if possible, to be thoughtful about what he took.
"The common scrolls are one thing, but the private collections and more advanced conspectus chambers belong to… more difficult people." She murmured nervously.
John glanced down at her and chuckled.
"All right. Since you asked nicely."
He actually indulged her, mostly.
In the side room she nervously pointed out, he rummaged through a series of more dangerous-looking and clearly more valued scrolls, humming to himself the whole time, then stole only a single Conspectus Scroll before stepping back out.
Elyse let out a long, defeated sigh. "You are going to give me grey hairs at this rate."
John exhaled softly through his nose, leaned over just enough to pat her once on the back, then gave her a flirtatious wink.
"I love pale hair on a woman."
That did not help.
She huffed and turned her face away, though the flush returning to her cheeks undid whatever dignity the gesture was meant to recover.
He laughed quietly and kept moving.
Together they made their way deeper into the schoolhouse and toward the twin staircases that rose toward the Debate Parlour.
The architecture changed subtly as they climbed. The classrooms gave way to older, more ceremonial stonework. The halls broadened. The decorative glintstone inlays became more intricate. Windows opened up onto breathtaking views of Liurnia below, the drowned region looking dreamlike beneath the magical blue cast of Raya Lucaria's skies.
As they neared the upper corridor, Elyse finally spoke again, this time with real caution in her voice.
"We shall need to take a detour from this route. The Queen's… former spouse's pet sleeps beyond. It does not take kindly to visitors."
John glanced toward the far corridor, where the entrance to the Debate Parlour lay beyond.
He chuckled. "I'll be fine. It's my wife's childhood pet. How could it not like me?"
Elyse short-circuited so visibly that he almost worried she might fall over.
John, meanwhile, continued forward at a leisurely pace, taking the liberty of plucking another few scrolls and texts from side tables and shelves as he went, examining titles, skimming contents, and keeping anything that looked especially interesting.
When he reached the top of the final staircase, he slowed.
At the far end of the corridor stood the entrance to the Debate Parlour.
He hummed. Then, inwardly, asked Marika for another Site of Grace.
She obliged him with a soft little sound, and a fresh point of golden Grace bloomed nearby. He, again, anchored it without ceremony.
The nearby sorcerers noticed that too.
They also, just as awkwardly as the first group, accepted it in silence.
John turned back to Elyse with a smile.
The poor woman's heart all but leapt into her throat when he looked at her like that, though to her credit she managed not to show it too obviously.
"...What is it you want now?" She asked, trying for sternness and landing somewhere around wary maiden.
John chuckled. "I'll be out of your hair for a little bit. But I'll be back. I just need to consult my mentor for a minute."
Elyse blinked.
"Your… mentor? And why–?"
Before she could ask anything further, Grace swept around him in a sudden golden coil and carried him away.
…
John reappeared within the Roundtable Hold just a few steps from Sellen's new quarters.
He landed smoothly, smiled to himself, and immediately started toward the door.
Marika appeared beside him in a shimmer of pale gold, looking somewhere between curious and offended.
"She asked the same thing I would ask." The Goddess muttered. "Why dost thou seek this witch's guidance when I could teach thee sorcery better than she?"
John laughed under his breath. "You're my one and only Goddess, don't get me wrong. I couldn't dream of replacing you."
That got her attention quickly.
"But Sellen's my mentor in sorcery." He continued. "Wouldn't feel right cheating on her and getting my lessons somewhere else. There'd have been no point in bringing her here then."
Marika grumbled at that, though the logic was solid enough that even she could not meaningfully attack it without sounding petty.
Which did not stop her from sounding petty anyway.
"Thou art insufferably loyal in the strangest directions."
John smirked and knocked on Sellen's door.
He waited a few seconds.
Then, just as he was about to knock again, her voice drifted from within.
"Enter, Johnathan."
He opened the door and stepped inside, grin already tugging at one corner of his mouth.
"How'd you know it was me?"
The room beyond had changed since her arrival.
Sellen had already begun making it hers.
Shelves filled one wall from floor to ceiling, though several were still half-organized, books stacked in temporary towers across tables, crates, and rugs. Scroll-cases lay open. Glintstone instruments caught the warm Hold-light in blue gleams.
Her stone mask rested off to one side atop a cluttered desk, and without it the room felt far more intimate; less like a witch's den and more like the personal study of a dangerously brilliant woman settling into a new home.
Sellen herself stood partway up a long ladder leaned against one of the taller shelves, one hand braced lightly above her while the other held a thick book she had apparently been reshelving.
She looked down at him and smiled.
She was dressed more casually than usual, and the difference was devastating.
Gone was some of the severe, layered witchlike formality she wore in the ruins. In its place were softer, more domestic scholarly clothes: dark fabric fitted closer at the waist, looser at the sleeves, lighter layers gathered with elegant practicality. Her long black hair fell freely around her shoulders. Without the stone crown and full sorceress regalia, she looked younger somehow, though no less dangerous.
And very much more approachable.
Which was its own danger entirely.
"You are the only man in these halls who would have the audacity to come to my door unannounced, little tadpole~" She said playfully. "That, and I can sense your presence a mile away. You are practically a burning furnace of Grace. An inferno, really."
John's eyes traveled over her with zero subtlety whatsoever.
Sellen noticed.
She chose, for now, not to address it directly. Only an amused little smile tugged deeper at her mouth as she climbed down the ladder with unhurried grace.
"What can I help you with?" She asked when she reached the bottom. "Our lessons do not begin until tonight, and I am rather busy organizing my books and planning your curriculum."
He lifted both hands in mild surrender.
"Can't a man visit his beautiful teacher?"
That won him a real laugh.
Sellen moved to a large fluffy rug laid near the center of the room and sat down side-saddle upon it, long pale legs folded elegantly to one side. Then she motioned for him to join her.
"I am flattered, truly. But I know that is not entirely why you are here."
John walked over and sat before her cross-legged.
She regarded him with a slight tilt of the head, waiting.
He exhaled once, decided there was no point dressing it up, and simply said it.
"Well… I'm gonna tame Radagon's abandoned Red Wolf. Wanna help me?"
For a moment, both Sellen and Marika were too caught off guard to answer.
Sellen recovered first.
She turned her face partly aside, one hand rising to her mouth while her dark hair slipped over her cheek, and a soft giggle escaped her. When she looked back at him again, she wore an absolutely breathtaking grin; amused, disbelieving, and very clearly delighted by exactly how unreasonable he continued to be.
"My, my~…" She murmured. "Little tadpole, you never fail to surprise me. I suppose that is the perk of taking a man such as yourself as my treasured pupil~…"
John's grin matched hers at once.
"Yeah, you sure are a lucky woman, huh~?"
That made her break into softer laughter still.
"Pfft–! Fufufu~… Yeah…" Sellen admitted, eyes bright with dangerous amusement.
"Maybe so, Little Tadpole."
----------------------------
Author's Note:
Yaho! We're at Raya Lucaria proper now! I guess this is what Johnny boy considers diplomacy, huh? What a dickhead…
Power stones
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Next Chapter Title: How to Tame Your Red Wolf.
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