The Villain Who Seeks Joy-Chapter 82: Iron Rations

Winter Term began with a bell that sounded thin in the cold air.

Breakfast was watery porridge and tea that had been steeped too many times. The dining hall was quiet. The radiators were cold; the mana furnace was running on minimum output to save fuel. Students ate with their coats on.

Gareth stared at his bowl. "I miss eggs," he said.

"Eat the grain," I said. "It’s fuel."

"It’s paste," he corrected, but he ate it.

Aldric sat three tables away. His entourage had shrunk. Without the Foundation’s gold flowing freely, his gravity was weaker. He wore a coat with a fur collar that looked too expensive for the room. He caught me looking and sneered, but there was no heat in it. Just habit.

Pierce stood at the front of the hall. He didn’t use a speaking cone—mana conservation. He just projected his voice like a drill sergeant.

"Schedules are posted," he barked. "Electives are cancelled. Tournament prep is cancelled. All tracks are now consolidated into three streams: Combat Engineering, Resource Management, and Field Defense."

A murmur went through the room. No one liked change, especially when it meant less glory and more digging.

"First period," Pierce said. "Senior Seminar. Yard One. Instructor: Valcrey."

The murmur stopped. Heads turned.

I put down my spoon. "He didn’t tell me."

"He’s telling you now," Gareth said, grinning. "Go get ’em, Professor."

I walked to the yard. The wind cut through my coat. The ground was frozen hard enough to ring under my boots.

Fifty seniors waited. These were fourth-years. They were older than me—or at least, older than the body I wore. They had expensive swords and polished wands. They looked cold and unimpressed.

Pierce stood by the weapon rack. He held a clipboard.

"They’re yours," he said. "Teach them how to fix a gate when they don’t have a spare pin."

"I need a prop," I said.

"Use the yard."

I stepped into the center of the circle. I didn’t bow. I didn’t introduce myself. They knew who I was. The guy who broke a wand. The guy who scavenged trash.

"Throw your weapons in the pile," I said.

They stared.

"I said throw them," I repeated. "Swords. Wands. Daggers. Put them in the mud."

A tall boy in the front—Valerius, a duelist with a good record—crossed his arms. "Why?"

"Because in a siege, you lose things," I said. "You break your blade. You drop your wand. If you can’t fight without your favorite toy, you aren’t a soldier. You’re a target."

I pointed at the pile.

Reluctantly, they unbuckled belts. Steel clattered onto the frozen earth. Wands rolled away.

"Good," I said. "Now. Attack me."

Valerius laughed. "Unarmed? All of us?" 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

"Just you," I said. "Come at me. Kill intent."

He stepped forward. He was big, fast, and annoyed. He threw a punch aimed at my jaw.

I didn’t block. I stepped—Anchor pulse to the heel—and slipped inside his guard. I grabbed the lapel of his expensive coat.

I didn’t hit him. I used his momentum to swing him into the wooden fence post behind me.

He hit the wood with a thud. I pinned him there with my forearm.

With my free hand, I reached down and ripped a loose splinter of oak from the rail. It was six inches long, jagged, and hard.

I held the point to his throat.

"Dead," I said.

I let him go. He rubbed his neck, looking stunned.

I held up the splinter.

"This is a weapon," I said. "So is a rock. So is a belt buckle. So is the ground, if you hit them with it hard enough."

I looked at the class. "The Foundation cut our budget. We don’t have new steel coming. We don’t have mana crystals. We have what is in this yard. Today, we learn to scavenge."

I spent the next hour teaching them how to see.

We pulled nails out of old crates to make caltrops. We braided grass and torn fabric into cord that could hold a man’s weight. We used rust from the gate hinge to make a paste that blinded eyes.

At first, they were insulted. By the end, they were dirty and interested.

"It’s ugly," Valerius said, holding a shiv made from a sharpened spoon handle.

"It works," I said. "Ugly keeps you alive. Pretty gets you buried."

Pierce nodded from the sideline. He wrote something on his slate. I didn’t ask what.

Lunch was broth. No bread.

I went to the workshop. Mira was there, staring at a mana relay box. The crystal inside was gray—depleted.

"It’s dead," she said. "And we don’t have spares. The heating in the East Dorm is out."

"Can we recharge it?"

"Not without a source," she said. "Unless..."

She looked at me.

"Unless what?"

"We can chain it," she said. "If we wire the dorm relay to the main gate surplus, we can trickle-charge it. But we need wire. Lots of it. Copper or silver."

I thought about the rivets I’d given Lyra. They were copper. But we needed wire.

"The old comms lines," I said. "In the basement of the library. They haven’t been used in fifty years. They used copper cabling."

"We can’t strip the library," Mira said. "The archivists will kill us."

"Not if we only take the dead lines," I said. "Come on."

We spent the afternoon in the crawlspace under the library stacks. It was tight, dark, and smelled of ancient paper.

We found the cables. Thick, braided copper insulated with rot-proof silk. We stripped fifty yards of it.

My hands were black with dust. Mira had cobwebs in her hair.

"This is glamorous," she muttered, cutting a length with pliers.

"It’s heat," I said.

We ran the line through the service ducts to the East Dorm. We spliced it into the relay.

Mira adjusted the flow regulator. She tapped the crystal.

It glowed. Faintly at first, then a steady, warm amber.

"It holds," she said. She smiled. It was a bright, sharp thing in the gloom. "You’re good at crawling, Armand."

"I’m good at finding things people forgot," I said.

We climbed out into the evening. The sun was setting.

A commotion at the main gate drew our attention.

A wagon was stopped outside the portcullis. It was piled high with sacks of flour. The driver was arguing with the gate warden.

I walked over, wiping my hands on a rag.

"What’s the problem?" I asked.

The warden looked frustrated. "Delivery. But he says he can’t leave it."

The driver, a thick-set man with a scar on his chin, spat on the ground. "Contract’s cancelled," he said. "My boss sold the debt. New owner says no deliveries to Valmere. Breach of contract penalties are cheaper than the fine for delivering."

"Who is the new owner?" I asked.

"A trust," the driver said. "Ashen Gate, something like that."

The Foundation. They weren’t just freezing accounts. They were buying the supply chain.

"We have gold," I said. I didn’t, but I could get it from the students if I had to.

"Not about gold," the driver said. "It’s about blacklist. I drop this flour, I don’t work in the city again. Sorry, kid."

He climbed back onto the seat. He turned the wagon.

I watched the flour roll away.

Gareth walked up beside me. He looked hungry.

"That was dinner," he said.

"Yeah."

"What do we do?"

"We starve," I said. "Or we find a new source."

I looked at the city spreading out below the hill. The Foundation controlled the merchants. They controlled the docks.

But they didn’t control everything.

"The Undercity," I said. "The black market. The smugglers."

Gareth looked at me. "You want to buy stolen grain?"

"I want to eat," I said. "And smugglers don’t care about blacklists. They only care about coin."

"We don’t have coin," Gareth pointed out. "Accounts are frozen."

"We have assets," I said. "We have skills. We have copper stripped from dead lines. We have labor."

I turned back to the yard.

"Get Lyra," I said. "And Cael. War council in the kitchen. We’re going to start a trade route."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight," I said. "Before the hunger sets in."

I walked toward the dorms. The wind was biting. The Brass Token on my collar felt cold against my neck.

The siege was real. The walls were high.

But rats knew how to get in and out. And I was learning to be a very good rat.