ShadowBound: The Need For Power

The next day, Knight Combat ended with the kind of silence that came only after an entire class had been beaten into regretting someone else’s existence.

The training hall doors opened, and the students of the second-year Knight Combat class began spilling into the corridor with none of their usual noise. There were no sharp complaints at first, no immediate arguments, no laughter from the more shameless ones trying to pretend they had not been pushed near collapse. Most of them were too busy breathing.

A few moved with their hands pressed against their ribs or shoulders, while others dragged their feet with the stiff, resentful gait of people whose legs had been forced to remember every mistake they had ever made. Sweat darkened collars and training shirts beneath academy uniforms hastily thrown back on, and more than one student looked as though they would have happily murdered the person responsible for the session if their arms still had the strength to lift a blade.

The cause of it walked somewhere near the back, looking smaller than usual beneath the collective hatred aimed his way.

Some student from the middle ranks had decided, halfway through drills, that muttering something under his breath about the instructors "overestimating themselves" was a survivable choice. The comment had not been loud, but Knight Combat instructors possessed the kind of hearing that became supernatural whenever a student said something stupid.

What followed was not punishment in the simple sense. It was worse than that. It became "corrective endurance training," which meant the entire class spent the remaining hour and a half running formation transitions, weapon-disarm sequences, shield recovery drills, and paired movement under weighted restrictions until even the students who had done nothing wrong wanted to confess to crimes just to make it end.

Liam walked out beside Asher, his expression calm but his body carrying the same dull strain as everyone else’s. His shoulders were sore, his forearms carried the lingering ache of repeated blade impact, and there was a faint sting along one side of his abdomen where a practice spear had caught him during the final rotation. None of it was serious. It was simply annoying. His breathing had already settled, though his muscles still felt the echo of the session with each step.

Asher, however, had no intention of suffering quietly.

"That," Asher said, voice tight with fury as they stepped into the corridor, "was complete nonsense."

Liam adjusted his grip on the strap of his bag. "It was avoidable."

"Exactly," Asher snapped. "Avoidable. Entirely avoidable. All that idiot had to do was keep his mouth shut. That was it. That was the entire challenge placed before him by the gods, the academy, and basic survival instinct, and somehow, he failed."

A student walking ahead of them glanced back, then quickly faced forward when Asher’s eyes sharpened.

Asher continued, undeterred. "Every day, Knight Combat already feels like the instructors gather before class and ask themselves how close they can bring us to death without paperwork. That is normal. I have accepted that. I have made peace with that. But no, apparently normal hell was not enough today. Today we had to experience enhanced hell because one walking accident decided he had something worth saying."

Liam said nothing.

He did not need to. Asher had enough words for both of them.

They walked down the corridor with the rest of the class dragging around them. The academy’s stone halls were cooler than the training hall, and for once, the chill was not the first thing Liam noticed. His body still carried enough heat from the session that the air felt almost useful against his skin. That would not last, but for the moment, he allowed it to exist without complaint.

Asher rolled one shoulder and winced slightly, which only made him angrier. "And what bothers me most is that those damn instructors enjoyed it."

"They usually do."

"No, not like this," Asher said. "There was joy in that room. I saw it. That one assistant instructor smiled when we started the weighted shield drills. He smiled like watching twenty people suffer because of one fool was a holiday gift."

"It was probably efficient for them."

Asher turned his head and stared at him. "Efficient?"

"They punished him and trained everyone else."

"That is the most disturbing way you could have agreed with them."

"It was accurate."

Asher clicked his tongue, looking offended by accuracy itself. "You know, sometimes I forget you are not normal, and then you say something like that."

Liam glanced at him. "You forget?"

"No. But it sounds better than saying I constantly remember and still choose to speak with you."

"That sounds like your problem."

"It is. I carry many burdens."

The corridor opened into one of the broader paths leading toward the dining hall. More students from other classes were moving in the same direction, though most looked far less destroyed than the Knight Combat students.

A few glanced at them with curiosity, likely noticing the exhausted silence and stiff movements. One first-year made the mistake of laughing softly at the sight of an upperclassman limping, and the limping student turned such a murderous look on him that the laugh died instantly.

Asher saw it and pointed vaguely. "That is what I’m talking about. Even first-years are looking at us like we crawled out of a war pit."

"We did not."

"It felt close."

"It was drills."

"It was a crime wearing the mask of drills."

Liam almost considered that a fair description.

They reached the dining hall a few minutes later, joining the flow of students entering through the wide doors. The dining hall was already loud with the midday rush. Long tables stretched beneath hanging lamps, filled with students eating, arguing, studying between bites, or leaning across benches to speak over the noise.

The scent of warm bread, roasted meat, steamed vegetables, soup, and brewed tea filled the air, along with the sharper smell of wet coats drying near the entrance after being carried through the cold. Servants and kitchen aides moved along the side counters, refilling trays and directing students who crowded too long in front of the food.

Liam and Asher moved toward the serving line.

As they collected their food, Liam’s eyes began scanning the hall.

Not the tables generally. Not the usual places where his group sat. His gaze moved across the clusters of students with deliberate attention, passing over first-years seated near the eastern side, second-years gathered closer to the middle, and the occasional third-year eating quickly before disappearing again into whatever schedule consumed them. He was looking for one face.

Asher noticed after a few seconds.

"What are you looking around for?" he asked, shifting his tray in one hand. "The others are right there."

He jerked his chin toward a table several rows away, where Dylan, Maxwell, Ariana, Charlotte, and Sheila were already seated. Dylan appeared to be explaining something with far too much hand movement, while Maxwell looked torn between laughing and correcting him. Charlotte leaned back with lazy amusement, Ariana listened with a small smile, and Sheila seemed to be following the conversation while occasionally glancing at the surrounding hall in that newly habitual way of hers.

Liam saw them.

Then he looked away.

"I need to find someone," he said.

Asher frowned. "What?"

Liam moved out of the serving line with his tray. "I’ll be there later."

"You’ll be—"

Liam walked away before Asher finished.

For a moment, Asher stood in the middle of the dining hall with his tray in hand, staring after him in genuine disbelief. The audacity of Liam simply abandoning the conversation, after letting Asher vent all the way from the training hall, seemed to stun him more than the Knight Combat session had.

Then his expression soured.

"Tch. Unbelievable," Asher muttered under his breath. "Walks off like a corpse with priorities."

He turned and made his way toward Dylan and the others, still cursing Liam quietly enough that only a few nearby students heard him and wisely pretended not to.

Meanwhile, Liam continued scanning the crowd.

He moved through the spaces between tables with the ease of someone used to being noticed and ignoring it. Students glanced at him as he passed, some briefly, some with visible caution, a few with lingering dislike. He paid none of them much attention. His gaze swept over table after table until it finally found the person he had been looking for.

Edith Roswell was moving through the dining hall with a tray in hand, clearly searching for a place to sit.

She was not alone in the sense of being isolated, but she was not walking with a group either. Her dark blue hair was cut in a neat bob that slanted slightly toward the left side, framing her face in a way that gave her features a firm, composed sharpness. Her blue eyes moved calmly across the hall, assessing available seats and the clusters around them without seeming desperate for an opening.

Her uniform differed slightly from many of the girls’, closer in structure to the boys’ version, clean-lined and practical, giving her presence a balance of masculine directness and feminine poise that suited her more than decorative tailoring would have. She carried herself with quiet confidence, the kind that did not demand attention but earned it from those who knew what to look for.

Edith noticed him approaching halfway across the aisle.

Surprise flickered across her face.

It was small, quickly controlled, but visible enough.

Liam stopped in front of her. "Hey."

Edith blinked once. "Hey."

The word came out slightly confused, almost questioning. She adjusted her hold on the tray, looking at him as if trying to determine whether this was accidental, intentional, or the beginning of something troublesome. With Liam, those categories had a habit of overlapping.

She opened her mouth, then closed it.

"Did you..." she started, then stopped. "Were you...?"

Liam waited.

Edith exhaled lightly through her nose, visibly annoyed with herself for failing to form a proper sentence. "Sorry. I just didn’t expect you to walk up to me in the middle of lunch."

"I need to ask you something," Liam said. "Do you have time for a quick chat?"

That caught her even more off guard.

Her eyes searched his face. Whatever she expected to find there, she did not seem to find it. Liam looked exactly as he usually did, calm, unreadable, and impossible to judge by expression alone. That did not help her.

"A quick chat?" she repeated.

"Yes."

Edith hesitated.

Immediately, her mind began moving through possibilities. Liam Hunter did not approach people without reason. He did not seek casual conversation for comfort, did not ask empty questions for politeness, and did not involve himself in other people’s business unless he saw something useful, necessary, or irritating enough to address. If he wanted to speak with her, something had prompted it.

’What came up that makes him want to talk to me?’ Edith thought.

The possibilities were not immediately comforting.

Still, refusing would only make her wonder longer.

"Sure," she said after a moment. "I have time."

Liam glanced toward a table near the side of the hall, one that had recently emptied and had not yet been claimed. "There."

Edith followed his gaze, then nodded.

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