From the center of their vanguard, a tall, narrow-shouldered youth stepped clear of the line.
His high collar was cinched to his throat with razor-straight geometry, trimmed in the silver braiding of the Honor Class. Beneath his left arm, he cradled a brass-bound folio; in his right hand, he balanced a fine-point drafting stylus of tempered steel. Fastened over his chest, catching the pale mountain sun in a cold, mirror-bright flash, was a silver insignia:
Rank One.
Julian of House Terrence.
Julian's lips were pulled into a taut line, his gaze sweeping over the School of Magic with clinical distaste. When his eyes finally locked onto Arthur, the disdain sharpened into an open, immovable sneer.
"Saint Cedric," Julian said. His voice was brisk and clipped, carrying easily through the high-altitude air with the practiced cadence of an orator lecturing an assembly. "A quaint spectacle, isn't it? Gathering like cattle around an obsidian slab to celebrate which animal has learned to bite the hardest."
Scattered chuckles broke out along the green ranks behind him.
Across the courtyard, the magic students bristled. Several swordsmen reached instinctively toward their belts, and a volatile spark of crimson mana flared near the front of the Core Class crowd. Arthur did not flinch. He stayed perfectly centered, hands loosely clasped behind the small of his back, his posture an unstudied display of gentle, unruffled patience.
Julian took two measured strides into the circle, the iron plates on his heels clicking sharply against the stone.
"Look at yourselves," Julian said, gesturing with his drafting stylus toward the glowing runes on the board. "You celebrate a hierarchy forged on brute kinetic violence and convince yourselves it represents supremacy. You dilate a vessel, channel an erratic surge of mana, swing a sharpened rod of steel, and believe the world bows to your feet. But what does the School of Magic actually produce? What do you invent?"
Julian paused, tilting his chin upward with cold, aristocratic pity.
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You do not design the gravity-defying aqueducts that suspend this island ten thousand meters above the earth. You do not calculate the seasonal grain tariffs that keep five sovereign kingdoms from starving through the frost, nor do you draft the commercial covenants that allow the Mage Association to exist in the first place. You are attack dogs. Tools bred for destruction, conditioned to bleed whenever the governing boards point you toward a trench."
Julian tapped the brass spine of his folio with the steel stylus. Clack.
"Cedric Drevayne. You stand at the summit of your class, yet stripped of your holy parlor tricks, you possess zero value to the machinery of civilization. You have no future in the intellectual world. You are utterly incapable of creation. Academics build the empire. Academics engineer industry, medicine, diplomacy, and the sovereign laws of tomorrow. You are merely the hound guarding the gate—and a dog is never greater than the master who pens its ledger."
Silence settled over the courtyard.
It was a heavy, suffocating quiet, thick with the mounting fury of hundreds of awakened students whose pride had been savaged in broad daylight. Dozens of eyes turned toward Arthur, searching the face of Rank One, waiting for the Saint to draw his blade or unleash the crushing radiance of divine authority.
Deep behind Arthur's ribs, cold fury stirred. His processor dissected the historical and structural bankruptcy of Julian's diatribe with venomous precision: it was the hollow conceit of a cloistered child who had never smelled pulverized stone or watched unawakened flesh melt in a monster's maw, intentionally voiding the reality that two millennia of awakened blood had bought the peaceful libraries where his theories were penned.
He wanted to shred the argument to pieces. He wanted to look Julian in the eyes and ask if the dead archivists had bargained with primeval beasts using parchment, or if compasses had ever turned a claw.
Yet the impulse was quarantined before it reached his vocal cords.
To unleash that condemnation would satisfy raw pride, but it would shatter the delicate peace he had labored to construct. An open verbal assault would create lasting administrative friction, alienate the unawakened scholars whose systemic goodwill he required, and drag him into a public ideological war. He was not a belligerent dog defending his yard. He was a shepherd—a disarming, gentle presence who resolved division with humble, effortless grace.
Arthur did not tense. His shoulders stayed low and loose, his amber eyes reflecting only soft, empathetic sorrow. Taking a half-pace forward, his boots settling gently onto the flagstones, he offered a warm, disarming smile that caught the morning light.