The class ended at last.
“Today’s lesson will stop here,” said Ziel, his voice calm but carrying the kind of finality that made the room exhale all at once.
At once, several students collapsed where they stood, gasping like stranded fish. Two hours of tension had drained every drop of strength from their bodies and minds.
“Ugh, I’m dead,” one groaned, sprawling across the floor. “Think I should drop this course?”
“Sure. And next year you can take it again—with the first-years,” another said dryly.
The groan that followed was half despair, half acceptance of fate.
There were five general-education courses this semester, and luck—or perhaps misfortune—had placed two of them under Professor Ziel Steelheart’s charge. Students had fought tooth and nail to win a place in his class, convinced it would be an easy ride.
They no longer thought so.
“Can’t even drop it now…” someone muttered.
“I’m actually dying,” said another, too exhausted to exaggerate.
Not everyone was miserable, though.
“I don’t know,” said one boy, flexing his shoulders. “I feel kind of good, actually.”
His friend blinked at him. “You’ve completely lost it.”
“I’m serious! Tired, sure—but better than I expected.”
Nearby, one poor soul merely wheezed for breath. A few, like Dellev and Celia, stared at Ziel with determined eyes, waiting for the verdict.
“From now on,” Ziel said, his expression unreadable, “you’ll keep repeating this exercise until you can successfully defend yourselves against me.”
That earned a collective look of horror. Against him? Against the man who had just spent two hours attacking forty students without breaking a sweat?
“Is that even possible?” asked Yurio, raising a trembling hand.
“It is,” Ziel replied simply. “If you don’t give up, you’ll improve. Bit by bit.”
Something in his tone made Yurio believe him. The boy nodded almost despite himself.
“Yurio Harmattan,” Ziel went on, “that final movement was good.”
“R-really?”
“Yes. Your reflexes are getting sharper.”
Yurio’s eyes brightened, pride washing away fatigue. To be praised—by Ziel Steelheart himself!
Dellev, meanwhile, sank lower in his seat. He had practiced until his legs trembled, and yet—nothing. No praise, no progress he could feel.
“Lucky you,” murmured Karen beside him. Yurio just grinned.
“Go wash up and rest,” said Ziel, cutting through the chatter. “Recovery is the most important part of training.”
Students groaned their assent and began dragging themselves to their feet.
Then Ziel added, almost offhandedly, “Ah, and since no one managed to block my attacks today, I won’t be giving out the praise cards.”
Collective deflation. You could almost hear it.
“But,” he continued, “I did promise a card to whoever showed the most improvement.”
Hope flickered in tired eyes. Not Dellev’s—he had already written himself off.
“The student who showed the greatest progress today…” Ziel paused, scanning the group. Then he lifted his chin toward the corner. “Dellev Kundel.”
“W-what?!”
Dellev blinked, utterly bewildered.
“From the start of class until now, you’ve shown the best growth. Your responses are faster, your sense sharper.”
Dellev sat frozen. Had he?
“It’s a small change,” said Ziel, “but greater than anyone else’s.”
Then came the words that hit harder than any blow.
“Well done, Dellev Kundel.”
The boy’s chest swelled. For the first time, his heart felt light.
Murmurs rippled through the room.
“Kundel again, huh?”
“Can’t deny he’s been working hard.”
“I thought he’d quit after the first class.”
He heard none of it.
“Come forward,” said Ziel. “Collect your card.”
Dellev rose awkwardly, legs stiff, and took the white card Ziel held out.
It looked ordinary enough—plain, with a smiling face stamped in the center.
“A… praise card?” he asked.
The professor gave no hint of irony.
Dellev squinted at the round, symmetrical smile. “Do we get something if we collect them all?”
“No,” said Ziel. “Just keep it.”
“Oh. So… symbolic, then?”
“It’ll protect you,” the man said matter-of-factly, “when you’re in danger.”
“…This will?”
He examined it again. No glow, no enchantment—just paper. If it was meant to block arrows, it was doing a poor job of looking the part.
“When you’re in danger,” Ziel said, “throw it. At your enemy.”
“Throw it?”
“Yes.”
Dellev swallowed. “It won’t… kill them, will it?”
“It won’t.”
Apparently the man could read minds now. Dellev nodded quickly and tucked the card into his pocket. The truth was, he didn’t care what it did. For once, he’d been recognized.
And then, as he turned to go, Ziel added one last thing.
“Collect five praise cards,” he said, “and there will be a prize.”
He’d read it somewhere—motivation came from desire, not obligation. Let them want to improve.
“What kind of prize?” someone blurted.
Eyes shone all around. Dellev’s most of all.
“You’ll find out,” Ziel said, smiling faintly.
Dellev grinned back, heart thrumming with new energy. Whatever the prize was, he’d earn it—and maybe, just maybe, figure out what kind of magic hid inside that smiling card.
***
Assassins are trained in a thousand quiet ways, and magic sits among them like a blade hidden in a sleeve.
You learn to thread power into trinkets and steel. You learn to breathe it. To shape it. To send it where it needs to go.
Every discipline has its own “breathing” for power—swordsmen, mages, even the odd artist with a temperamental muse. Assassins have theirs, too.
Ziel’s was called the Breath of the Long Night.
A legend in the old “Black Sky” syndicate, it was so intricate, so impossibly knotted, that no one had ever mastered it. No one but Ziel, the brightest blade the syndicate had ever sharpened.
And now that the organization lay in ash, he alone remembered it.
Lately, fragments of its techniques slipped out of him without permission.
Once, everything had been strictly governed—pulse, gaze, heartbeat, thought. Now something new tugged at the reins.
A self.
The Breath of the Long Night came with gifts and dangers. The most practical trick was the eye—lacing a look with magic, sending intent across a room the way a bow sends an arrow.
Useful. Powerful. Dangerous if he forgot where he was and who was watching.
He would have to be careful.
“Selfhood,” he murmured.
He hadn’t had much of one when they dragged him away. The mind they’d left him with had been scrubbed and sanded until it didn’t make a sound.
But after the deprogramming, after freedom, something had started to grow back—quietly, stubbornly.
Feeling.
He closed the book in his hands. What Is Emotion? The librarian had pressed it on him with a knowing look.
According to the author, emotion was mind and mood and sometimes provocation. Ziel wasn’t sure he understood. Hard to, when you’d been turned into silence at a very young age.
Still, one entry stood out: fear.
Ziel had none.
Training had buried it deep and laid stone over the grave. Perhaps other feelings might return in time. Fear, he suspected, would not.
Fear: an emotion of dread, aversion, and revulsion in the presence of a perceived threat.
It didn’t sound pleasant.
“Fear,” he repeated, as if tasting a foreign word. “Will I ever feel you again?”
He set the book down with a soft tap and left the library.
Eyes followed him. None belonged to Dellev this time, and none trailed him far.
Stay cautious, he told himself. The instincts were still sharp; the senses, keener than most knives.
“Did you see him? Who is that?”
“Sword School? Arcane? Or Arts?”
“Arts, surely. That face is a masterpiece.”
He kept his ears open, as he always did—corners, bins, benches, hedges. An assassin’s habits do not loosen quickly.
“…I’m sorry, senior.”
“Life at the Academy’s easier now, isn’t it?”
“N-no, sir!”
That wasn’t idle chatter. The voices were ahead, in the direction he was already walking.
Curiosity—a new, unruly tenant in his mind—tugged him onward.
He turned the corner and found familiar faces.
“Hey, where’s Aswan from again? Which forgotten house?”
“Eastern backwater, isn’t it?”
“Figures. Never heard of them.”
Karen Aswan stood rigid, jaw tight.
“And you’re what again? Yu…?”
“Yurio Harmattan, sir!”
“Should’ve been born to a proper house. Never heard of yours either.”
“It—It was once well known…?”
“When?”
“Two hundred years ago…”
“And now?”
“Now” didn’t need an answer.
My students, Ziel thought.
The other three were strangers. Second-years, by the look and smell of them. The meeting place was a narrow strip behind a building, shaded and mean—the sort of ground assassins chose when they wanted witnesses to forget what they saw.
They didn’t feel like assassins. Just boys with borrowed bravado.
Ziel slipped against the wall and listened.
“First-years really are a mess, huh? Don’t even recognize your seniors? Where are your manners?”
“S-sorry!”
“Sorry ends your Academy career, does it?”
“We just haven’t memorized everyone’s names—”
“Pathetic, isn’t it? Back in our day we had all hundred down in two days, and still got yelled at for being slow.”
Sword School admitted about a hundred per year. Memorizing them all in two days was nonsense.
“Third-years and up go easy on you, but not us. Get it?”
“Y-yes, sir…”
“Do your best. Okay? Oh, right. There’s going to be a grade exchange match soon, right? See you later?”
They shoved past Karen and Yurio, light as taps and heavy as insults, and sauntered away.
Something tightened under Ziel’s ribs. He did not yet have a label for it.
He stepped into view.
“P—Professor Ziel?” Karen blurted.
“H-how did you…?”
“What was that,” he asked, voice level, “just now?”
“Ah. That was…”
“Second-years?” he prompted.
Karen flinched. She knew his tone—flat, uncolored. But today there was a shadow in it. A weight.
It was—frightening.
“Y-yes,” she admitted.
“It’s nothing, Professor,” Yurio said quickly, elbowing Karen. “Just our elders offering advice—”
Ziel ignored the performance. “It looked like harassment.”
“Sir, it’s… just how things are between years—”
“Why did you stand there and take it?”
They both stared. The question had never occurred to them.
“Because…” Yurio began.
“Does a ‘senior’ require your absolute obedience?” said Ziel.
“No, but…”
There was a deeper reason. In the Empire, some names carried iron. Others, paper.
Those boys wouldn’t lay a finger on Dellev Kundel or Celia Rihardt. You didn’t pick fights with Kundels and Rihardts if you planned on breathing comfortably for the rest of your life.
Aswan and Harmattan? One from the far east, one from the cold north. Noble by courtesy, not by consequence.
Harmattan had shone five centuries ago. Now the name survived the way old paint clings to a doorframe.
“You two aren’t helpless,” Ziel said. “Not against those three.”
They blinked. He had measured their skills in the time it takes to breathe.
“Why were you cowed?”
“B—because they’re seniors,” Karen whispered.
“If that is enough to shrink you,” said Ziel, “you will shrink before almost everything.”
Karen felt something thump in her chest. Aswan. Harmattan. Small houses. Small voices. She had been bowing all her life out of habit.
“So,” she ventured, “should we fight them?”
“No.”
“Then what—?”
“What you felt looked like fear,” he said thoughtfully. “The book describes it as dread, revulsion, and horror in the face of a threat. Is that right?”
“For most people… yes,” Yurio said.
“Then you will need to learn how to master it.”
In the old days, even with conditioning, fear seeped in.
When the knife had to fall. When the walls closed. When the enemy ringed you like wolves.
Fear came. Training taught you to kill it. And when that wasn’t enough, they killed every other feeling with it.
“I’ll teach methods for mastering fear in our next lesson,” Ziel said. “Read as well. What Is Emotion? Central Library, B-24, fourth shelf, sixth from the left.”
They could only gape.
“Also,” he added, “what is this ‘exchange match’ the senior mentioned?”
Karen explained. The Exchange was part of the Academy’s Open Day, when parents descended in a parade of fine cloaks and sharper opinions. The biggest draw was the inter-year contest.
“Years pitted against years,” Ziel summarized.
“Yes, and… a lot of parents come,” Karen said faintly.
“A good opportunity.”
“Opportunity?” she echoed.
“The sun’s down,” he said. “Back to your dorms.”
“Good night, Instructor.”
“Rest well, sir…”
They watched him go, stunned into silence—yet both of them felt something stirring, an ember waiting for air.
Ziel rounded the building toward the front and paused. A strange sensation pressed against his chest—a feeling he had never been permitted.
Karen and Yurio.
My students.
The pressure sharpened into intent. On the paving stones: scuffs heading east. In the air: the second-years’ scent, still fresh.
“That way,” he murmured.
His face had shifted without his noticing—drawn tighter, edged thinner. He did not yet recognize the expression, nor the emotion warming to a slow boil beneath it.
There they were, up ahead.
His chest tightened again. It was… unpleasant. Heavy.
Was it because his students had been harassed?
Within the unnamed weather of his mind, something rose.
According to the book… this is…
He considered. He decided.
Not much, but unmistakable.
Anger.
Cliche Novel 