Ding!
The school bell rang, its sound echoing down the hallway and settling the usual pre-class chatter into something closer to order.
"Alright, class, today we're moving into trigonometry."
The math teacher stood at the front of the room, a middle-aged woman whose heavy makeup did little to soften the tired lines beneath it. She was unremarkable in every way that mattered, the kind of teacher students forgot the moment they left her classroom, and she carried herself with the flat, practiced patience of someone who had taught this exact chapter more times than she cared to count.
Adrian sat in his usual spot, the last bench in the far corner beside the window like he was the protagonist. Mr. Clown sat in the empty chair next to him, invisible and unbothered as always. Adrian was sixteen, halfway through the tenth grade, and sitting in a room about to tackle the single most dreaded chapter of the entire year.
Trigonometry had a reputation. He'd heard the horror stories long before this class started, older students groaning about it in the hallways, warning him it would break him the way it had broken them. He'd been dreading this exact lesson for months, ever since he'd caught a glimpse of it in an older sibling's textbook and felt his stomach drop at the sight of all those sines and cosines crammed onto a single page.
But now, oddly, none of that fear remained.
He'd read through the entire chapter in one sitting the night before, the words settling into his mind and staying there, clean and permanent, the way ink settles into paper. He'd worked through a stack of practice problems afterward almost as an afterthought, and gotten every single one right on the first try.
The reason wasn't a mystery to him anymore. Becoming an Aura user had done more than change his body. It had also given rise to one of the two inner realms tied to his mind, the world of consciousness and subconsciousness now fully formed inside him.
He could comprehend almost anything now, provided he read it with real focus. His memory held onto details it used to lose within minutes. His recall was now instant, effortless, and his ability to actually process what he read had sharpened to the point where dense material no longer felt dense at all. It was like staring down into a clear river instead of murky water, able to see straight to the bottom and pick out exactly what he needed.
No exam is ever going to scare me again, he thought, and had to fight down a small, satisfied smile.
He'd still need to practice, still needed the repetition to build real fluency, but forgetting was no longer something he had to worry about. Whatever he learned now stayed learned, retrievable whenever he needed it.
The only real limit, as far as he understood it, was pushing too far too fast. Trying to comprehend knowledge well beyond his current level, or cramming too much in at once, he would risk overwhelming his world of consciousness and subconsciousness entirely. Mr. Clown had warned him about that specifically, and Adrian had no intention of testing it firsthand.
For now, though, the classroom looked exactly as ordinary as it always did. Students sat scattered across the room, half-listening, half-doodling in the margins of their notebooks, pens scratching out notes in that particular rhythm of forced attention. Adrian sat among them, appearing to do the same thing.
The teacher moved to the whiteboard and began sketching out a right triangle, chalk squeaking faintly against the surface. "Let's start simple. If we have a right triangle with an angle of thirty degrees, and the length of the hypotenuse is ten centimeters, who can tell me the length of the side opposite that angle?"
Silence spread across the room, the usual kind, heads dropping slightly, eyes drifting toward desks in the universal language of please don't call on me.
The teacher's gaze swept the room and landed, almost out of habit, on the back corner by the window. "Adrian."
A few muffled snickers rippled through the class. Everyone knew Adrian and math had never gotten along, least of all in a chapter this notorious. Someone near the front audibly whispered, "Oh, this is gonna be rough," followed by a poorly hidden laugh.
Adrian stood up, and for exactly half a second, old muscle memory kicked in, the phantom flicker of dread he used to feel whenever a teacher called his name during a math lesson.
Then it passed, and something calm and certain took its place instead.
"Using the sine ratio," he said, his voice steady, "sine of thirty degrees equals the opposite side divided by the hypotenuse. Sine of thirty is one half, so the opposite side equals ten times one half, which is five centimeters."
The room went quiet in an entirely different way.
The teacher blinked, chalk paused mid-air against the whiteboard, clearly caught off guard. "That's... correct." She said it slowly, like she was double-checking her own hearing. "Very good, Adrian."
Behind him, someone whispered, loud enough for half the room to hear, "Wait, did Adrian just answer that right? Like, correctly, right?"
"No way," someone else muttered. "This is the same guy who failed the pop quiz on basic ratios last month."
Adrian sat back down, doing his level best to look unbothered, though a small, satisfied warmth spread through his chest anyway. He could feel a dozen eyes still lingering on him, equal parts confused and suspicious, as he'd somehow pulled off a magic trick in front of the entire class.
Beside him, in the chair no one else could see, Mr. Clown leaned slightly toward his ear, voice low and dripping with amusement only Adrian could hear.
"Careful," he murmured. "Keep answering questions like that, and they're going to start whispering that you found yourself a cheat code."
To anyone glancing back at the last row, Adrian looked like any other student, hunched slightly over his desk, pen moving, eyes tracking the teacher at the front of the room.
In reality, the boy sitting there was busy working through the middle chapters of a thick, red-covered book titled The Legends of the Nine Meditation Masters, utterly absorbed and paying the actual lesson no attention whatsoever.
Beside him, Mr. Clown sat perfectly still in the empty chair that officially didn't exist, invisible to every eye in the room, including the teacher's. The trick was simple enough in principle. His Fooling Aura had settled over the entire classroom like a fine mist, quietly convincing every mind present, and every mind that would walk through that door for the rest of the period, that nothing sat in that chair at all, and that the Adrian they saw diligently taking notes was the only Adrian that existed.
Should the teacher call on him, that same illusion would rise smoothly from its seat and answer with flawless, practiced precision, while the real Adrian never once looked up from his book.
"A flawless performance, if I do say so myself," Mr. Clown murmured to no one, admiring his own handiwork with the quiet satisfaction of an artist stepping back from a finished painting. "Truly, the greatest role I've ever cast. Shame the audience will never know how good the reviews would be."
He let his gaze drift lazily from the blackboard toward the window, then back again, the picture of idle boredom.
Then it landed on the girl seated at the front of the third row, and stayed there.
Dark blue hair. Light pink eyes. A round, expressive face currently locked in fierce concentration, pen scratching across her notebook, nodding along to whatever the teacher was saying with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely enjoyed the subject.
Mr. Clown's easy expression didn't shift, not outwardly, but something behind his eyes sharpened considerably.
"Ah, and there she is," he said lightly, tone still playful, though the words that followed in his mind carried none of that same humor. Right on schedule.
Her name was Marie. As far as Mr. Clown could tell, she was the only real friend Adrian had in the entire school, a fact that should have pleased him and instead sat in his mind like a splinter he couldn't quite work loose.
A girl, going out of her way to be close to a boy like Adrian? Nothing about that is a coincidence.
He didn't need to guess at what was happening. One look at her face, the particular softness in it whenever her eyes drifted toward the back corner of the room, told him everything. As an Aura user of the Deceiver Pathway, reading intention and emotion through speech and posture came as naturally to him as breathing. Marie's feelings toward Adrian weren't subtle. They were written across her in a language Mr. Clown had spent centuries learning to read fluently.
Adrian, for his part, remained hilariously, tragically unaware. Whether from genuine obliviousness or some quiet, private conviction that a girl like Marie could never actually be interested in someone like him, the boy hadn't picked up on a single one of the signs Mr. Clown had been cataloguing for weeks now. The shy little glances. The forced casualness whenever she spoke to him. The deliberate cuteness that only ever seemed to surface in his presence and nowhere else.
"Young love," Mr. Clown said under his breath, shaking his head with mock solemnity. "Truly, the most dangerous pathway of all. Wars have been started over less."
The joke landed and faded, and underneath it, his thoughts kept working, colder and far more methodical.
The real problem isn't the crush itself. It's everything that grows out of it.
Time was the first cost, and not a trivial one. Every hour Adrian spent chasing this girl's attention, texting her, planning to see her, worrying about her, was an hour stolen from training, from studying, from becoming strong enough to survive what was coming for him. And that was only the beginning. Relationships bred questions eventually, and questions had a way of circling back toward things Adrian couldn't explain. Why he never got sick anymore. Why he sometimes vanished for days at a time. Why his grades had rocketed overnight in a subject he used to fail spectacularly. Suspicion would come, sooner or later, and evasion only worked for so long before it curdled into distance or resentment.
Worse than that, she made a target. Anyone close enough to Adrian to matter to him was, by definition, close enough to be used against him.
And worse still, should it all eventually fall apart the way these things so often did, the fallout wouldn't stay contained to heartbreak. Adrian's mental state was still young, still forming, still tied closely to the stability of his domain of emotions. A bad enough break could ripple through all of that in ways Mr. Clown had no interest in testing.
For one brief, clinical moment, he considered the two cleanest solutions available to him. Removing her from the situation entirely. Or simply erasing the relevant memories from her mind and letting the friendship quietly dissolve on its own, painless, untraceable, gone.
He discarded both almost as quickly as they'd formed.
She's his only friend. That single fact undid every clean solution he could construct. If she vanished, Adrian would eventually notice, would ask questions, would dig, and the answers he found would not leave his mental state intact. If her memories of him simply disappeared one day for no reason, Adrian would watch his only friend forget him entirely, right in front of him, and that particular kind of quiet devastation could break something in a person just as thoroughly as any tragedy could.
And if he ever discovered I was behind either outcome...
Mr. Clown didn't finish that thought. He didn't need to.
Adrian's path forward was a bright one, full of real potential, the kind Mr. Clown had seen only rarely across his long, strange existence. His entire purpose here began and ended with protecting that potential and helping it grow into whatever it was meant to become. Nothing about eliminating a sixteen-year-old girl's harmless crush served that purpose. If anything, it threatened to unravel it.
So, for now, he did nothing at all. He simply watched, filed the problem away for later consideration, and let his outward expression settle back into its usual easy, painted grin as his gaze drifted back toward the window.
"Something to keep an eye on," he murmured, mostly to himself, the joke in his voice thin enough now that it barely covered what sat underneath it. "Just not with a blade. Not yet, anyway."
Adrian kept turning pages until he reached the end of the chapter, then closed the book with a soft thud, resting his palm flat against the cover.
He looked over at Mr. Clown. "The first nine Meditation Masters were actually insane. Like, legitimately, I get why people still talk about them like they're myths. I picked up a ton about the founding families of Lumenia too."
"Oh, is that so?" Mr. Clown said, not opening his eyes, hands still folded neatly over his chest. "Why don't you walk me through it, then? Explaining it out loud tends to cement it better than just reading."
"Okay, let me try." Adrian sat up a little straighter, clearly pleased to have an audience. "So the first Meditation Master was born on this absolute hellscape of a planet with war everywhere, constant fighting, barely any food, the whole thing. He had to fight and kill just to survive, sometimes even eat people, which, yeah, awful. He hated every second of it and just wanted off that rock. And then right when he was basically about to die, his Aura awakened, and he ended up wiping out everyone left on the planet by the time it was over."
"He called that planet Hell every single time he ever mentioned it afterward, according to the book. So naturally, his whole life's ambition became building the opposite of that. A Heaven. That's literally why Lumenia exists. But before any of that, he spent years just traveling the universe, and that's how he slowly ran into the rest of the future Meditation Masters, one by one. They ended up traveling together after that, seeing basically everything the universe had to offer."
"The longer they stuck together, the stronger they all got, helping each other climb through the ranks. Practically family by the end of it. Fortune, disaster, all of it, together. And then, right as the Dystopian War was about to kick off, the first Meditation Master finally made the call and founded Lumenia on this totally barren planet that's now, well, Lumenia. In the Auralis Solar System." He grinned. "Kind of poetic, naming the planet after yourself, honestly."
"By that point, every sun and moon in the system had already hit True Supernova rank. With that kind of backing, they pulled together the strongest Aura users they could find and built this massive force basically overnight. And that force is the one that actually fought the gods and utopians from the other two regions during the war. Protected their people. Lost a lot of people doing it too."
"After the war finally ended, the ones who survived came back and spent whatever life they had left building Lumenia up properly, taking turns running it. They all died eventually, obviously, but Lumenia never fell apart after that. It just kept standing, and ended up becoming the strongest of the three great regions at the time. And apparently every generation still tends to produce at least one True Supernova who becomes the next Meditation Master." He paused, frowning slightly. "Oh, and here's a weird detail. After the original nine died, it looks like at most only two True Supernovas were ever alive at the same time in any given era. There have also been times when there has been only one."
"And as of now? A hundred and seven Meditation Masters total."
Mr. Clown's eyes stayed closed, but he nodded along steadily through the entire summary, a faint, genuine smile tugging at his painted mouth by the end of it. "Truly excellent, Adrian. It hasn't even been long since your awakening, and you're already absorbing the foundational history this cleanly and laying it back out in proper order. That's no small thing."
Adrian's cheeks went visibly pink at that, and he rubbed the back of his neck, grinning despite himself. "Hehe, it's not that deep. Anyone smarter than a monkey could probably get through this stuff." He tapped the side of his head. "But yeah, it's way easier to actually think now than it used to be. Being an Aura user is honestly kind of broken."
He flipped back a few pages, chasing something that had caught his attention earlier, and his grin faded slightly into something more focused. "Okay, but this next part is what actually got me. The individual write-ups on each of the first nine."
He tapped the page. "The first one. Everyone just calls him the greatest leader in history, flat out, no competition. Makes sense, honestly; the guy built an entire civilization out of a barren rock and somehow held nine insanely powerful people together as basically a found family the whole way through. That takes something else."
He flipped the page again. "Second one's apparently the strongest Aura user to ever exist. Like, period, full stop, nobody's ever matched him since. That's an actual quote from the book, not even me exaggerating."
His finger landed on the next entry, and something shifted in his expression, a flicker of recognition. "Third one's the smartest of the bunch. And okay, this part I actually already knew a little about, because Eric mentioned him once." He glanced up at Mr. Clown. "Apparently he's the one who set up basically everything structural after the first Master founded Lumenia. Like, the actual systems, the governance, the long-term strategy behind holding a whole civilization together instead of just building it and hoping it worked out. He was also the main strategist for the entire founding generation. Guessing that's not a coincidence, given, y'know." He gestured vaguely toward the empty air where Mr. Clown insisted the third one factored into all of this somehow.
He turned the page once more, and his eyebrows shot up. "And then the fourth one." He read the line twice before saying it out loud, like he wanted to make sure he wasn't misreading it. "Most talented of the nine, and he ended up as the actual war leader for the entire Aura region during the Dystopian War." He paused. "And apparently he killed the God of Fate. Like, killed him. Cut the actual strings of Fate in half with his own hands."
Adrian sat back, staring at the page like it might rearrange itself into something less insane if he looked hard enough. "Okay, that one kind of broke my brain a little. You just casually kill a god who controls fate itself? That's not even a power level anymore; that's just an entirely different category of existence."
Adrian set the book down on his lap and looked over at Mr. Clown, doubt flickering behind his wide, carefully confused eyes. "Okay, I actually do have some questions, though."
"Ask away." Mr. Clown didn't so much as shift from his relaxed position, eyes still closed, hands still folded neatly over his chest.
"Two main ones." Adrian held up a finger. "First. I noticed the book barely says anything about the other eight Meditation Masters. Like, there's an entire chapter on the first guy, backstory, childhood trauma, the whole tragic-hero arc. And then the other eight just kind of get a paragraph each. Why's that?"
This kid really does have a future in theater, Mr. Clown thought idly, watching Adrian's expression shift into something that could pass, quite convincingly, for genuine confusion. Out loud, he simply said, "Nothing unusual about that, really. Of the original nine, only the first one ever wrote an autobiography. None of the other eight bothered. Everything you're reading about them has been pieced together secondhand, ancient scriptures, urban legends, rumors passed down for generations, and whatever the first one happened to mention about them in his own book."
Adrian nodded slowly, processing that. "Huh. Okay. So why didn't the other eight just, I don't know, write their own?"
"I don't know."
Adrian blinked. He waited a second, half expecting a follow-up, some deeper wisdom to come trailing after that flat, unbothered answer.
Nothing came.
"..."
He decided not to push it. "Alright, sure, cool, very helpful, thank you." He cleared his throat and moved on. "Second question, then. There's tons of stories about them in here, but literally none of them ever get named. No names, no descriptions, nothing about what their Aura even looks like. It's just 'the first Meditation Master,' 'the second one,' all the way down like some kind of extremely powerful boy band nobody's allowed to identify by name. Why?"
Mr. Clown let out a long, theatrical sigh, the kind that suggested he'd been asked this exact question a hundred times before and found it only slightly less tedious each time. "Ah, yes. That one's actually normal too, believe it or not. The families each of them founded made a decision, generations ago, to seal away any real information about their founders. Names, faces, Aura signatures, all of it. Nobody's entirely sure why the decision was made in the first place, only that it was, and the families have honored it ever since with an almost religious level of stubbornness."
"That's why you'll never find their actual names or appearances written down anywhere official. People have made their own guesses over the centuries, of course, based on old descriptions and whatever traits show up in their bloodlines even now."
"Take the second Meditation Master, for instance. Some accounts swear he had blond hair and purple eyes. Others insist it was the exact opposite. And that pattern repeats for basically every single one of them, all the way through the ninth. Every last one of them wrapped in about a dozen contradicting legends." He spread his hands helplessly. "Truly, thoroughly clouded in mystery."
"As for me," he added, voice dipping into mock humility, "I'm just a lowly Auri Nova with absolutely no ties to any royal bloodline. I know exactly as much as you do at this point. Which is to say, practically nothing." He punctuated the line with a long, dramatic sigh, one hand pressed to his chest like a man mourning his own tragic ignorance.
Adrian squinted at him, deeply unconvinced but choosing, wisely, not to comment on it. Instead he leaned forward slightly. "Okay, actually, real question now. I keep seeing these 'families' mentioned everywhere in the book. What even are they?"
"Ah, now that one I can actually answer properly." Mr. Clown's tone shifted, settling into something closer to genuine explanation. "These families descend from the Supernovas and True Supernovas who fought in the Dystopian War. Once the war ended, the survivors collectively established thirty royal families and divided up the entire Auralis Solar System between themselves. They've held that same territory and control ever since, generation after generation."
"The first Meditation Master's surname was most likely Blackbell. He founded the Blackbell family himself, and even now, they're still considered the strongest of all thirty families by a fairly wide margin." He paused, a faint, knowing smile crossing his face. "And going by current trends, they'll probably stay that way for a very, very long time yet."
Adrian let out a low whistle. "Man, imagine your great-great-great-however-many-times-great-grandpa just casually founding an entire civilization and your family's still riding that clout thousands of years later." He shook his head. "Meanwhile my family's proudest achievement is that one time my uncle won a regional hot dog eating contest.
Mr. Clown's head lolled back dramatically as he dragged out the word "long," his whole body swaying as he might genuinely topple over. Adrian actually half rose from his seat to catch him, arms already reaching out, when Mr. Clown suddenly snapped upright and lunged his face inches from Adrian's, stopping just short of contact.
"Booh!"
"AHHH!"
Adrian shrieked and toppled straight backward off his bench, landing in an undignified heap.
Mr. Clown pointed a single finger at him and burst into loud, unrestrained laughter, the sound echoing off the empty classroom walls as he'd just witnessed the funniest thing in the entire universe.
Adrian sat there on the floor for a moment, chest heaving, deeply and thoroughly betrayed. He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw something. Instead, curiosity won out, the way it always seemed to with him, and he hauled himself back onto the bench, brushing himself off with as much dignity as he could salvage.
"Why," he said, voice still a little unsteady, "are they going to be the strongest family for a long time?"
His brows knit together, eyes suddenly sharp and serious, the earlier scare forgotten in favor of the question that actually mattered. Mr. Clown's laughter tapered off gradually at the shift, and he straightened up, his tone settling into something more measured.
"You've heard the name Sasaki Alberich before, haven't you?"
Adrian's furrowed brow eased into confusion. "Yeah. I have. What about him?"
Something in Mr. Clown's expression shifted, some private amusement rising back to the surface. "You'd assume he's simply from the Alberich family, and technically, you'd be right. He descends directly from the fourth Meditation Master, the strongest swordsman the universe had ever produced during the entire Dystopian era. But due to certain circumstances, certain mishaps, Sasaki was adopted at the age of four by three Master-student Supernovas from the Blackbell family, and trained under all three of them for the rest of his life."
"His mother, before she passed, made one request. That he never drop the Alberich name. The three Supernovas honored that wish completely. They didn't erase it; they simply added their own name alongside it. His full name now runs Sasaki Blackbell Alberich." Mr. Clown let that sit for a moment before continuing. "For all practical purposes, he belongs to the Blackbell family now, and he reached the absolute peak of Supernova rank at fifteen years old. Fifteen. He's been sitting there ever since, fully capable of advancing straight to True Supernova the instant he decides he actually wants to."
Adrian's mouth had slowly fallen open somewhere around "peak of Supernova at fifteen," and it stayed that way.
"And here's the part that actually matters," Mr. Clown went on, voice dropping slightly, almost conspiratorial now. "The current Meditation Master, the hundred and seventh, is very close to death. Do you understand what that means?"
Adrian's eyes went wide as the pieces clicked together all at once. "That means he could become the next Meditation Master. He'd have the highest authority in the entire family."
"Precisely." Mr. Clown spread his hands like a magician revealing the final card. "A prodigy blessed with the bloodline of the strongest swordsman in history, raised from early childhood by three Supernovas of the strongest family in existence, sitting one death away from inheriting the single most powerful seat of authority in all of Lumenia." He shook his head slowly, something between admiration and disbelief coloring his voice. "Honestly, at this point, calling him talented feels almost insulting. The man is less a person and more a walking inevitability."
Adrian sat there, quietly stunned, turning the name over in his head, and a memory surfaced slowly to meet it.
"Wait." He snapped his fingers. "Eric mentioned him once. Back when we were talking about strong Aura users I should watch out for." He frowned, trying to recall the exact wording. "He didn't say much, just kind of went quiet for a second and told me if I ever heard the name Sasaki Alberich, I should be very, very careful. I remember thinking that was weirdly ominous for Eric, since he barely reacts to anything."
"Sounds about right," Mr. Clown said mildly. "Mr.Eric doesn't hand out warnings for free."
Adrian let out a long breath, shoulders sagging slightly under the sheer weight of everything he'd just learned. "Great. Cool. Awesome." He rubbed a hand down his face. "So somewhere out there, there's a fifteen-year-old who peaked at a rank most people never reach in their entire lives, adopted by literal Supernovas, one inheritance away from basically running an entire royal family, and apparently intimidating enough that even Eric goes quiet talking about him."
He slumped forward onto his desk, groaning theatrically into his arms. "Yeah, no, I've officially decided. I would like to never meet this man. Ever. In this lifetime or the next. I'll just admire him from the safest possible distance, thank you very much."
Adrian fell silent for a second.
His head jerked as he suddenly sat up from his slump, one more loose thread from earlier still nagging at him. "Wait, actually, hold on. Something's been bugging me since the book."
Mr. Clown raised an eyebrow, still riding the last of his laughter. "Oh? Do tell."
"The second Meditation Master." Adrian flipped back through a few pages, scanning until he found the section again. "The strongest Aura user in history, right? Okay, but I noticed the book keeps flip-flopping on whether he's a 'he' at all. Like, half the passages call him 'he,' and then randomly a paragraph later it's 'she,' and then it just goes back to 'he' again as if nothing happened. I thought I was misreading it at first, but it happens like six different times."
Mr. Clown blinked, the amusement on his face fading into something closer to genuine confusion. "Huh."
"Huh?" Adrian repeated. "That's it? That's your whole reaction?"
"Give me a moment, I'm processing." Mr. Clown tilted his head, actually looking mildly bothered now, which was rare enough on its own that Adrian sat up a little straighter just to watch it happen. "Now that you mention it, yes, I have noticed that before. In older texts, older scriptures, accounts from actual eyewitnesses during the war, the pronouns shift constantly. Some records insist the second Meditation Master was unquestionably male. Others are just as insistent it was a woman. And it isn't a translation error either, before you ask. I've checked the original Lumenian phrasing myself, more than once."
Adrian narrowed his eyes. "Okay, so what's the actual answer?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I don't know," Mr. Clown said again, spreading his hands helplessly, and for once there wasn't a trace of theatrics behind it. "Nobody does, as far as I'm aware. No portrait survives. No physical description agrees with any other physical description. Even his own family's records contradict themselves depending on which generation wrote them down."
Adrian stared at him for a long moment. "So the strongest Aura user to ever exist, a guy who apparently curb-stomped the entire concept of competition, might have also just been a woman this whole time, and nobody bothered to write down which one it actually was?"
"When you say it like that, it does sound fairly absurd."
"It is fairly absurd!" Adrian threw his hands up. "How does that even happen? You'd think someone that powerful would have, I don't know, a face. A recorded voice. Literally anything."
"You'd think." Mr. Clown folded his arms, genuinely thoughtful now instead of performative about it. "My best guess, and it is only a guess, is that it was deliberate. Some Aura users of certain pathways are capable of obscuring even something as fundamental as their own gender presentation, whether through Aura, through illusion, or through methods far stranger than either. If the second Meditation Master wanted that detail hidden from history entirely, he or she would have had more than enough power to make it happen."
Adrian slumped back down onto his desk, staring blankly at the ceiling. "Great. So now I've got a possibly gender-ambiguous, definitely terrifying immortal legend to add to my growing list of things I never want to personally encounter."
"A very reasonable addition to the list, I'd say."
Mr. Clown nodded along with a satisfied smile, clearly pleased with his own answer.
That smile was exactly what set Adrian off.
"You know what? No. NO." Adrian shot up from his seat like a man possessed, eyes narrowing into a look of pure, long-overdue vengeance. "You scared the actual soul out of my body twenty minutes ago, and you're just sitting there smiling as if nothing happened. Get over here!"
He lunged.
Mr. Clown, moving with the unfair grace of someone who had clearly seen this coming from a mile away, simply sidestepped and bolted, robes flaring dramatically behind him like a man fleeing his own crime scene.
"Ah, the student turns on the teacher!" he called over his shoulder, sounding far too delighted for someone actively being chased. "Truly, betrayal runs deep in this generation!"
"You're not my teacher, you're a MENACE!"
Chairs scraped. A stack of someone's papers went flying off a desk. Adrian vaulted clean over a bench with a battle cry that echoed straight down the hallway, and Mr. Clown cackled the entire way out the door, robes billowing, entirely unbothered, as the two of them tore off through the empty school in a full sprint.