The hallway swallowed us into its morning rhythm, and I let the current of students carry us toward Building A while my brain ran damage assessment at full speed. Cassandra Davenport had spoken two words to me.

Two words, delivered with the same casual authority that her sister wielded like a weapon, except Cassandra’s version came without the theatrics.

Blair would have made a scene, thrown accusations, maybe set something on fire. Cassandra just said my name and let the weight of it do the work.

That was worse. That was so much worse.

Belle kept pace beside me, her blue hair catching fluorescent light as we navigated the crowd. She had her phone out, thumbs moving fast.

"Texting Naomi?"

"Texting everyone. Aurora needs to know about the visual confirmation. Misato probably already knows but confirmation doesn’t hurt.

Jordan needs a heads-up so he doesn’t do something stupid like wave at the Diamond-tier investigator and ask how her morning is going."

"Jordan would absolutely do that."

"Which is why I’m texting him first." Belle’s fingers never stopped. "Also telling Addison to keep her head down. If Cassandra sees Aurora’s best friend covered in hickeys the same morning she’s scoping you out, that’s a connection nobody needs her making."

I hadn’t considered that angle. Belle’s paranoia was a genuine asset sometimes.

We climbed the stairs to the third floor, merging with other Obsidian and Amber students filtering toward Nishimura’s classroom. The normalcy of it felt absurd.

Twenty minutes ago I’d been eye-to-eye with a Diamond-tier hunter who could probably identify what I had for dinner last Tuesday from the way I blinked, and now I was heading to a lecture about fungal spore distribution in cave-biome fracture spaces.

The whiplash between mortal danger and academic tedium was becoming a defining feature of my existence.

"Belle."

"What."

"Thanks. For having my back."

She didn’t look up from her phone. "Don’t get sentimental. It ruins the dynamic."

"What dynamic?"

"The one where I’m the smart one and you’re the one who keeps almost dying."

"That’s not a dynamic, that’s just a description of reality."

"Same thing." She pocketed her phone as we reached the classroom door. "Different vocabulary."

Inside, the room had already half-filled with the usual distribution. Amber students on the left in their gold-trimmed uniforms, relaxed and chatting with the easy camaraderie that came from belonging to a house that actually liked each other.

Obsidian on the right, because of course we sat on the right, maintaining the territorial instinct that made our house simultaneously impressive and exhausting.

I dropped into my usual middle-row seat and Belle claimed the chair to my left. Naomi’s seat on my right sat empty, her bag already positioned there with the deliberate territory-marking of someone who had arrived early and then left.

Probably the bathroom. Probably checking the library for supplemental reading that Nishimura had casually recommended at the end of last class. That was Naomi.

She heard "you might want to look at Chapters seven through nine" and interpreted it as a binding contract with the university’s entire print archive.

Jordan materialized from somewhere behind us, sliding into the row above with all the grace of a bag of wet laundry being dropped from a moderate height.

"I got Belle’s text." His voice carried the raspy quality of someone who had been awake for less than forty minutes. "Diamond lady spotted. We’re all going to prison."

"Nobody’s going to prison."

"You say that now. You said that before the crystal thing too."

"The crystal thing worked out fine."

"The crystal thing worked out fine because a teacher who can bend reality saved our asses. I don’t think Vale’s going to intercept a Diamond-tier Davenport for us."

Belle reached over the seat back and flicked Jordan’s ear. "Keep your voice down. And stop saying ’crystal thing’ like that. Someone’s going to hear you."

Jordan rubbed his ear and gave Belle a look that communicated deep personal suffering. "I want you to know that I’ve updated my will. Everything goes to my cousin Marcus. He’ll know what to do with my sneaker collection."

"You don’t have a will."

"I’m writing one during lecture."

Naomi appeared at the end of our row, her pink and black braid swinging as she squeezed past Jordan’s legs and settled into her chair beside me. She had three books stacked on top of her notebook, each one bristling with color-coded tabs.

Her shell necklace rested against the collar of her uniform, and she smelled like my soap because she’d used the last of her own bottle two days ago and hadn’t replaced it yet.

"Morning." Her smile was genuine but her eyes searched my face for something. Damage assessment. She’d gotten Belle’s texts and wanted visual confirmation that I wasn’t actively being interrogated by federal authorities.

"Morning. I’m alive and unincarcerated."

"That’s a low bar."

"It’s the bar I’ve got."

Naomi opened her notebook to a fresh page, wrote the date in her precise handwriting, and underlined it twice. Her version of a deep breath. "Belle said Cassandra knew your name."

"She said ’Mr. Monroe.’ Two words. Very professional. Very terrifying."

"Did she seem hostile?"

"She seemed like someone cataloguing data points. Which is worse than hostile because hostile means she’s already decided something. Cataloguing means she’s still gathering information, and I have no idea what conclusions she’ll draw from whatever she finds."

Naomi absorbed this with the quiet focus she brought to everything that mattered. Her hand found my thigh under the desk and squeezed once before returning to her notebook. The contact lasted maybe two seconds. It said more than any conversation could have.

Nishimura walked in at three minutes past nine, which for him qualified as practically early.

Same rumpled jacket, same uncombed silver hair, same dead-fish-eyes expression that suggested he’d been awake for either thirty hours or three, with no middle ground available.

He set his coffee on the desk with the reverence of a man placing a sacred artifact on an altar and pulled up the day’s holographic display without greeting anyone.

The lecture covered fungal contamination in cave-biome gates, which should have been boring but somehow wasn’t, because Nishimura had a talent for making genuinely terrible information sound conversational.

He explained how certain cave fungi produced spores that bonded with human mana channels and created feedback loops, essentially turning your own abilities against your nervous system.

The holographic display showed footage of a hunter whose barrier ability had inverted after spore exposure, trapping the hunter inside their own defense while cave crawlers picked apart the team around them.

"The barriers held perfectly," Nishimura observed with bone-dry delivery. "They were excellent barriers. World-class defense. Just pointed in the wrong direction."