Professor Orin's gaze didn't move an inch.
He repeated himself, but this time his voice was quieter than before.
Which made it even worse.
"Kael," he said, "did you think I wouldn't notice?"
I held his gaze and made sure not to answer too quickly.
But that was easier said than done.
My first instinct was to deny everything.
Then, my next instinct was to determine whether denial would even help in this situation.
Soon after, annoyingly, I realised I was in a conversation where every second of silence could be read as an answer.
So, I chose the safest path of uncertainty I could.
"Um, Professor, I think," I said carefully, "that you might be misunderstanding something."
Professor Orin immediately tilted his head in interest.
"Oh? Am I?"
"Yes, Professor."
"Hm."
'What do you mean "hm", at least agree or disagree with what I said, what am I supposed to make out of that vague response?! '
Deep down, I knew what he meant with his response. Professor Orin sounded like a man who would give me exactly one more chance to insult his intelligence before he started treating the conversation as an obstacle rather than a discussion.
So.
Naturally, I kept blabbering.
"Professor, I'm just a commoner," I said. "A commoner from the Basin. I don't even know what would compel you to think that I would qualify for that sort of suspicion you're implying."
Professor Orin didn't blink once; he sharply retorted. "You think your birthplace determines how many affinities you have?"
"I think," I said, choosing each word more carefully now, "that commoners from the Basin are not usually the sort of people that teachers of the great Aetherion Academy confidently accuse of possessing multiple affinities."
The faintest change passed through his expression.
Not frustration.
Realisation.
As he had finally heard the actual shape of my defence, and found it exactly as flimsy as he had expected.
"Interesting," he said.
I stayed quiet.
He pushed off the desk and began walking slowly around the room, not circling me and just moving, as he thought better when the rest of the world wasn't still.
"So, that's how you're going to defend it. You're trying to build distance with context," he said. "Background. Class. Origin. Geography. All that nonsense"
He stopped near the window, one hand in the pocket of his robe.
"But, you see, Young Arin, none of those excuses actually addresses the question."
I didn't respond.
"They just sound more reasonable than flat out saying no."
"Maybe because 'no' is an incomplete answer to an incomplete accusation."
That got something close to amusement out of him.
"Accusation?"
"Would you prefer the word implication?"
Professor Orin let out a soft breath through his nose.
"I'd prefer honesty."
I almost laughed.
Not because it was funny.
But because the whole situation felt like a scene out of a comedy script, all these fast responses, yet that word sounded the cleanest of all, especially in a room where one person had significantly more power than the other.
I tried my best to keep my expression still.
"With all due respect, Professor," I said, "I can't see what exactly it is you think I've done."
He turned fully then, leaning one shoulder lightly against the stone beside the window.
"See, that's the problem," he said. "I think you do."
Silence followed.
Not the reflective kind.
The loaded kind.
He was waiting for me to crack the moment apart myself. To say it. To save him the effort of saying it again.
I didn't.
And because I didn't, he did.
"I've seen you use two different types of affinities," he said.
The words landed clean and direct.
There was no room left to hide inside any abstraction.
I forced myself not to react visibly.
Or rather, I forced myself not to react more than a normal person would when someone said something impossible and incorrect.
"But Professor, I've only ever used Ventus magic in class," I said. "I've never been able to use any other type of magic. I fail to see when you would've been able to witness me use another affinity of magic."
Professor Orin's eyes narrowed very slightly.
"I see," he said. "Yes. Yes. That certainly could be true."
I waited.
But, he didn't continue right away.
Instead, he watched me in that maddeningly calm way of his, as if he were less interested in the statement itself than the microscopic adjustments I made to my posture after it.
I became very aware of my breathing.
Of the weight of the chair arms under my hands.
Of the fact that the Codex still had not said a single useful thing.
'Fantastic Codex. Thanks so much for abandoning me just when I needed you.'
Professor Orin took a step forward.
"Alright. I've had enough. Let's take a different approach."
I blinked once.
"What do you mean by a different approach?"
Professor Orin went still.
The air in the room shifted, not physically at first, more like the pace of it, as if everything around me felt quicker. The temperature of the conversation. The sense that whatever came next would no longer be guided by politeness.
When he spoke again, his tone was flatter.
"Kael."
I said nothing.
"You're very good at narrowing the shape of a conversation until only the parts you can control are left in it."
'Damn. That's... weirdly accurate.'
I still said nothing.
He nodded once.
"I see."
Then, after a beat:
"If you're not going to say it willingly," he said, "then I suppose I'll just have to make you."
There it was.
!!
The first thing I noticed wasn't the shining light.
It was the pressure radiating off of it.
Not some weird magical pressure in the structured sense. Not the sort you feel when a spell forms near you and the air shifts around its formation.
This was something else.
It descended.
Imposed.
That was the only word for it.
Something invisible slammed into the room and turned the space between one pulsation and the next into a weight I hadn't agreed to carry. My body reacted before my thoughts did. My shoulders locked and stiffened. My lungs seized. Every instinct I had screamed that something vast had just entered the room and decided I was a very, very small component when compared to it.
Then the colour came.
A thick orange-yellow light.
Not bright in a torch-like sense, but heavy, like the room itself had been suffused with the warm edge of a furnace too large to see directly. The glow didn't come from one source. It bled through the air around Professor Orin in slow, oppressive bands, clinging to the outlines of his body and filling the office with a presence that felt less like light and more like a command.
My chest tightened.
I tried to inhale and got half of what was needed.
The rest refused to come.
My hands gripped the chair arms harder than they should have. My pulse went uneven. Something primal and humiliating moved through me all at once: the instinct to bow, to endure, to make myself smaller so that whatever force had noticed me might decide I was no longer worth crushing.
Professor Orin hadn't moved.
And that was the worst part.
He didn't look like he was straining.
He didn't look angry.
He just stood there, wrapped in that imposing orange-yellow aura, while the entire room obeyed him.
I swallowed, barely.
The pressure deepened.
It felt like standing at the bottom of a splintering sea.
My thoughts started to fray.
Not from pain exactly, although there was pain, it was sharp and felt like a needle was constantly pricking behind my ribs, but from the sheer physical insistence of this new sensation I was currently experiencing. It was too much. Too direct. It pressed against every instinctive part of my body that still associated power with survival.
Professor Orin saw it.
'Of course he did.'
My breath had become shallow. My shoulders had gone rigid. Sweat had started at the back of my neck and along my spine.
He watched all of it with a calm focus and said, "Kael. Wouldn't it just be easier to tell me the truth instead of enduring this pointless struggle?"
I wanted to answer.
'I really want to fucking answer.'
Not because I trusted the man before me, but because the pressure made honesty feel characteristically easier than resistance.
'The easiest way to end all this would be to open my mouth and tell him everything.'
'The dual affinities.'
'The Codex.'
Parts about myself, even I still don't fully understand. Like how I died and reincarnated—no, reintegrated — into this world.
The thoughts arose with calamitous clarity.
My mouth parted ever so slightly.
And then—
[USER PROTECTION PROTOCOL INITIATED]
The Codex cut across everything.
For one split second, even in my suffocating state, my confusion overrode the pressure.
'What?'
[TEMPORARILY CUTTING OFF USER PERCEPTION TO AETHER]
Everything around me changed instantly.
Not just visually, but structurally.
The crushing pressure vanished.
Not reduced.
Vanished.
My lungs were able to breathe in a full breath of air so suddenly that it almost felt like it would burst. The orange-yellow glow that had just been imposing its pressure onto every part of me became... nothing. I could still see the glow around Professor Orin. I could still see that something was happening, something he tried to make me feel, but whatever it was, it had gone silent.
The room felt ordinary again.
My body was recovering from the pressure it had just received, still trembling from the aftershock of what had just happened.
It felt like the wires that carried the sensation to me had just been cut.
Instantly, the only thing I could think of was, 'Codex, did you do that?'
The Codex responded immediately.
[YES]