The school where Luna studied and Damian had once studied was named after their city.
Norrington School.
In the current Earth Federation, every city had at least one school backed directly by the Government.
These weren't just educational institutions, they were symbols. Safe havens where the children of the powerful and the poor alike could be raised under the Federation's protection, with the hope of one day moving on to an Academy.
The children of military officers, Noble subordinates and the Federation officials... They all studied together under one roof before the Academies separated them by talent.
So when news broke that Norrington School had been attacked by a terrorist organization –
The city lost its mind.
Parents abandoned work and traffic laws in the same breath, tearing through streets to reach the campus.
Powerful awakeners materialized at the school gates without bothering with transport.
Federation security forces were deployed within minutes of the first alert, flooding the building with armed personnel and neutralizing every terrorist they came across.
By the time Damian finished what he'd been doing to the leader in the seminar hall, the rest of the school had already been cleared.
****
BAM!
The seminar hall doors burst open with a bang loud enough to make the traumatized students flinch.
A line of armed security personnel flooded in, weapons raised, followed closely by several high-ranked awakeners who had clearly arrived as parents before they were anything else.
Their eyes scanned the room desperately, searching for faces they recognized.
When the students realized who had arrived, the panic that had been held in check for the past hour finally broke.
Sobbing, screaming, names being called across the room as parents spotted their children and ran to them.
The weight of suppressed terror, grief, and relief crashed through the hall in a single overwhelming wave.
The security forces at the front were mostly high rankers, B rank awakeners with combat experience, plus one who radiated the pressure of an A rank.
They moved with professional precision, securing the perimeter, herding the wounded toward the medics who were already rushing in behind them.
Then… their eyes found the bodies.
Seven terrorists, completely dead.
And one of the terrorists, the leader, by the look of his positioning, lay in a pool of his own fluids, still twitching faintly. What was left of his face and hands didn't belong on a living body.
Even the veteran officers paused at that one.
They'd seen combat, they'd seen torture used by enemies and they'd seen the aftermath of portal creatures tearing through civilians.
But this was… different.
This was personal.
Their eyes followed the trail of blood back to its source where a boy, maybe fifteen, stood.
Still holding a sobbing girl against his chest, one arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders. His uniform was soaked through with enough blood that it was hard to tell the original color. His crimson hair was plastered to his face.
Nobody approached him to say thank you.
Nobody approached him at all.
Except one.
Mrs. Ariel, Luna's homeroom teacher, had recovered enough to step forward. Her uniform was wrinkled and bloodstained from where she'd shielded her students, her face pale, her hands still shaking faintly.
She had also been Damian's homeroom teacher back when he'd attended this school.
And right now, she was looking at him with the most complicated expression in the room, relief warring with something she couldn't quite name.
When the security forces finally turned their weapons toward Damian and Luna, standard procedure for any unknown combatant covered in that much blood, Mrs. Ariel rushed between them.
"Don't!" Her voice was sharp and protective. "He was the one who saved us. He took them all out alone!"
The security forces hesitated.
One of them, a massive man who looked more like a bear wearing a uniform than an actual officer, stepped forward.
He had to be nearly six feet tall with thick arms, wide chest and a face carved from years of hard field work.
His uniform barely fit his frame. When his eyes met Damian's, he didn't look hostile, just careful.
"…We can see that." His voice was gravelly. "But the way he handled it…"
His gaze drifted toward the leader on the floor.
Then toward the severed tongue a few feet away, the empty eye sockets and the hands that had been carefully disassembled instead of destroyed.
Even a man who'd spent his career dealing with violence felt something cold crawl down his spine.
Then he looked at Damian again.
'He's just a kid…'
Still, protocol was protocol. And the protocol for any unregistered combatant at a mass-casualty event was very clear.
He reached for the Aura-suppression cuffs clipped to his belt and stepped forward.
"I understand you were the one who saved the hostages. But given the nature of the situation, I have to take you into temporary custody. It's standard procedure. Please don't resist while I place these on you–"
"You will place no such restraints on my son."
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once.
WHOOSH
Out of nowhere, Alaric Valcor was suddenly standing between Damian and the bear-like officer. Nobody had seen him enter and nobody had tracked his movement across the room.
One second there had been empty space. The next, he was there, one hand resting gently on the officer's shoulder.
The officer froze.
Not from surprise but from the fact that the moment Alaric's hand touched him, every muscle in his body refused to respond, his Aura wouldn't mobilize, his legs wouldn't move and his breath was caught in his throat.
'What the… since when was there someone this strong in Norrington? I can't even move my fucking Aura–'
Sweat beaded at his temples.
Behind him, the other security personnel raised their weapons at the man who had just materialized in their midst.
"Stop!"
The bear-like officer's voice came out low and steady. His men hesitated, then slowly lowered their weapons at his signal.
He turned his head carefully, just enough to see Alaric's face without triggering whatever was keeping him immobilized.
"…Sir. It's just protocol. We need to take testimonies from everyone present at the scene. Your son's case is a bit… unique. We need to bring him to the Special Forces Department for questioning and his own formal testimony."
He swallowed.
"We won't harm him…. You have my word."
Alaric's expression didn't shift.
"I don't give a damn about your protocol. I'm taking my son home."
"It's alright, Dad."
Damian's voice was quiet but firm.
Alaric turned his head slightly.
"I'll go with them on my own. No need for the Aura blockers, though–"
Damian stepped forward, gently guiding Luna toward her father. She clung to Alaric's coat without letting go of Damian's sleeve until the last possible moment.
"–I'm just an F rank."
Without waiting for anyone to respond, Damian walked past the officer and toward the exit.
"Let's go."
****
Special Forces Department
Inside a sealed investigation room, Damian sat alone.
The room was the standard setup for SFD interrogations – reinforced walls, a single metal table bolted to the floor, two chairs, and a mirrored observation wall that Damian could feel was two-way glass without needing to be told.
The air was cold and sterile, carrying the faint chemical smell of whatever they used to clean blood out of these places between uses.
He'd been waiting for a while now.
They were probably still collecting testimonies from everyone at the school, checking CCTV footage, cross-referencing stories and building a timeline.
It would take hours... Maybe the whole day.
'Fine. I could use some rest.'
He leaned back in the chair, closed his eyes, and let his exhaustion settle into his bones.
He hadn't slept last night. He'd trained through the entire night and then he'd been thrown into a bombing, killed dozens of people, and dismantled a man one piece at a time.
His body was injured too. Nothing critical, the bleeding had stopped thanks to his improved Vitality, but the wounds still needed proper treatment.
The stab wound in his side pulsed dully every time he breathed too deeply.
But… None of that stopped the flashes of memory from surfacing behind his eyelids.
The keys driving into the first terrorist's throat, the weight of the knife as he cut teachers' killers apart with increasing brutality, the silent way the leader had gurgled while Damian worked on him the fear in the hostages' eyes…
The way every single one of those deaths had felt… natural.
'It was the first time I killed someone in this life… And yet, it came easier than anything else I've done since waking up.'
He turned the thought over carefully in his mind.
Did he regret any of it?
He searched for the feeling, tried to summon some trace of remorse.
'…No! It was either them or me… them or Luna… I made the right call.'
'Did he regret the torture?'
That one didn't even need thought.
'Not even a little! I only wish I'd had more time with that son of a bitch before Luna stopped me!'
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
That was the part that should've bothered him, and didn't. Alessio had been a cold man, a calculating one. He'd used torture when it was useful, and only when it was useful. He'd never enjoyed it for its own sake. It had only been a tool.
But the way Damian had felt while carving into that terrorist leader hadn't been calculated.
It had been a need to make him suffer for the single act of pointing a gun at Luna!
It was just pure and personal rage made physical through methodical violence.
'I was a psycho in my past life. I see that clearly now… But in my past life, the violence was always purposeful. It served something. The current me…'
He frowned slightly.
'The current me is worse in some ways. I'm more emotional and less controlled. The torture in Luna's classroom earlier today… that one was clean and purposeful. That was like Alessio… I needed information and I got it with the minimum necessary effort.'
'But the leader? That was something else entirely... That was me wanting to hurt him because he scared Luna.'
He wasn't sure how to feel about that.
He wasn't sure he disliked it, either.
'Anyone who threatens my family should die a horrible death… That part of me isn't going away. And maybe it shouldn't.'
'But I need to stay controlled… Emotions get people killed. Seeing those bodies in the classroom made me lose my focus for a second, and I got stabbed because of it. That can't happen again.'
He thought about that moment in the classroom, the stack of corpses he'd been checking, the fear that had flooded through him when he'd thought one of them might be Luna.
The relief when none of them were and the critical second where his guard had dropped because the relief had been so overwhelming.
If that terrorist's knife had been a few inches to the right, Damian would have been dead and Luna would have been killed on the spot by the terrorists.
All because he'd let his emotions slip for two seconds.
'Never again… If I'm going to carry both Alessio and Damian inside me, I need to keep Damian's love and Alessio's discipline... Not Damian's panic and Alessio's cruelty. That's how I stay alive… That's how I keep them alive.'
The mental exercise of sorting through his own psychology was the last thing his exhausted mind could manage.
Within a few more breaths, he'd drifted off to sleep.
What he didn't care about, was that every second of this had been observed.
Through the two-way glass and through the cameras in every corner of the room.
The officers gathered on the other side had been watching him carefully ever since he walked in.
And what they'd just witnessed didn't match the file they had on Damian Valcor at all.