"I did," Val said coldly.

The twenty elite Vanguard soldiers didn’t lower their rifles, but some of them trained their weapon on her, with their fingers hesitating on the triggers.

The Inquisitor’s scarred face twitched.

He remembered the girl perfectly from the courtyard the day before. He remembered the suffocating killing intent, and more importantly, he remembered the Tier-One Domain Ruler VIP Crest she carried.

"You," he said, his voice losing a fraction of its booming edge. He held up the datapad. "You don’t have to lie to defend him. The footage clearly shows your squadmate kicking a steel projectile into the primary lens."

"He was acting on my direct orders," Valeria stated smoothly, stepping forward to completely shield Zen from the Inquisitor’s view.

"A B-Rank Void Beast spawned in an F-Rank exam zone," she continued. "When the sector’s spatial matrix failed to pull us out, I invoked a Class-7 Containment Protocol. I ordered him to blind your surveillance array to prevent unclassified, panic-inducing footage of a Void anomaly from leaking to the student audience which might then leak to civilian GE Network."

Zen watched her from the floor, hiding a smirk through the pain of his broken ribs. It was a flawless lie, perfectly covering his physical action with her authority.

"And the S-Rank pulse?" the Inquisitor pressed. "My satellites recorded ancient magic."

"A side-effect of the Void tear violently collapsing when my partner manually rewired the extraction beacon," Valeria lied, gesturing down at Zen. "Unless you are suggesting that one of these bruised, terrified F-Rank students is secretly an ancient god in disguise?"

The Inquisitor glanced down at Zen, who lay bleeding on the floor while clutching his fractured chest. According to yesterday’s test, his mana core was practically non-existent. He then turned his gaze toward Jax and Maya, both of whom were trembling in their cracked armor.

It was an absurd idea.

The Inquisitor knew the girl was hiding something.

But she held Tier-One clearance.

Pressing on a technicality, when she had a completely valid legal excuse for breaking the cameras would get him reassigned to a frozen weather station in the Northern Wastes before sunset.

He was legally checkmated.

"Lower your weapons," the Inquisitor commanded tightly.

The Vanguard soldiers immediately dropped their rifles.

"My apologies, Miss," the Inquisitor said, bowing his head slightly, though his eyes remained furious. "Your quick thinking prevented a network panic. Medics! Get these students to the infirmary immediately!"

As a team of academy medics rushed forward with a stretcher for Zen, the Inquisitor turned away. He walked over to his technical officer, who was standing by the control consoles.

"Sir?" the officer whispered. "Do we close the file?"

"No," the Inquisitor murmured, keeping his back to the room. "Increase the satellite sensitivity for this entire district. Flag any anomalous mana readings, day or night. I don’t care who is legally protected. Something is here. And it is not a student."

Across the staging room, Kaelen Thorne stood frozen behind a group of upperclassmen.

He was sweating profusely. He had watched the entire exchange. Arclight hadn’t just survived the Aggro-Lure... he was being actively shielded by a transfer student who could command the Vanguard Inquisitor to back down twice in two days.

Kaelen realized with a sickening twist in his stomach that his sabotage wouldn’t stay hidden forever.

The Viper’s Den black market would eventually burn him to save themselves, or worse, that terrifying girl would find out what he did.

He needed protection.

Kaelen waited until the medics had wheeled Zen out of the room and Valeria had followed them.

Taking a deep breath, Kaelen slipped away from his friends and quickly approached the Inquisitor’s blind side.

"Sir," Kaelen whispered nervously.

The Inquisitor turned, his eyes narrowing with immediate disdain. "You wasted my time with false accusations yesterday, boy. Give me one reason I shouldn’t have you detained for breathing near me."

"Because I want to prove myself, sir," Kaelen swallowed hard, standing as straight as he could. "I want a future as a Vanguard officer. And I know something is wrong with Zen Arclight. He hides his strength. He isn’t what he seems to be. I can be your eyes and ears inside the dorms. I can watch him. I can watch the girl."

The Inquisitor stared at the noble.

He recognized a desperate, cornered rat when he saw one. The boy was obviously terrified of something... likely his own involvement in whatever caused the dungeon malfunction, and was trying to buy the Vanguard’s protection by playing informant.

But a rat placed inside the enemy’s walls was exactly what the Inquisitor needed.

"Keep your eyes open, Thorne," the Inquisitor said quietly. "Bring me undeniable proof, and perhaps the Vanguard will remember your loyalty."

—

Later that evening, the townhouse in District 7 was completely quiet.

Zen lay in the massive silk bed. His chest was tightly wrapped in medical bandages.

Maya’s involuntary blood pact tether was passively doing its job; a faint, dull warmth circulated through his veins, numbing the worst of the pain from his three snapped ribs.

Valeria was in the bathroom across the hall, washing the dungeon ash and blood out of her hair.

Zen reached under his pillow and pulled out his terminal.

He needed to handle his finances. Nyx had dumped a million credits into his Ghost Scrapper account two nights ago. If he was going to survive the escalating heat at the academy, he needed Kaelen Thorne’s crippling private loan off his neck permanently.

He booted up his proxy network.

His total public debt was hovering right around 450,000 credits. A large portion of that was his backlogged academy tuition, but the most dangerous chunk was the high-interest private loan he owed Kaelan Thorne.

He had paid 10,000 credits toward Kaelen’s back-interest after his first raid, which meant his combined total liabilities should still be sitting around 442,000 credits.

Moving a full million into an F-Rank student account would instantly trigger a Vanguard financial audit.

So, Zen initiated a laundered transfer for exactly 450,000 credits, moving just enough from the ghost scrapper account down to his public academy ledger to kill the debt entirely and leave a little extra for supplies.

Once the credits cleared into his public account, Zen opened his student banking app, preparing to manually wire the payoffs to Kaelen and the Academy billing department.

He tapped the ’Liabilities’ tab.

He froze.

[Outstanding Academy Tuition: 0 Mana-Credits.]

[Outstanding Private Loan (Kaelan Thorne): 0 Mana-Credits.]

Zen blinked, thinking the app was glitching. He refreshed the page.

[Total Liabilities: 0 Mana-Credits. Account Status: Settled in Full.]

"Weird," Zen muttered, his brow furrowing deeply. He quickly tapped over to his primary checking balance.

The 450,000 credits he had just transferred were sitting there completely untouched. His transfer hadn’t accidentally auto-routed. Meaning the debts were already gone before he even logged in.

"System," Zen thought. "Probability that Kaelen Thorne suddenly grew a conscience and dropped his private charges?"

[Probability: 0%. Furthermore, Kaelen Thorne does not possess the administrative authority to alter the academy’s foundational tuition ledgers. The debts were not dropped. They were paid.]

"Then let’s see who paid them."

Zen closed the banking app and opened a secure command line on his terminal. Using his dark web proxy network, he aggressively back-traced the settlement receipts attached to his student ID.

The encryption on the incoming payment was incredibly high-tier military grade, at minimum, but the routing architecture was distinct.

It didn’t come from a local District 7 bank, and it definitely wasn’t from the Vanguard military budget. So it wasn’t Valeria.

Zen cracked the final proxy layer and stared at the origin point.

The payment had been routed through a massive shadow account in the Crown Domain’s central financial sector. Along with the payoff, the origin server had hard-coded a permanent administrative freeze on any future academy penalty fees being applied to Zen’s ledger.

Zen went perfectly still.

The Crown Domain.

That was Aurelia’s territory... The Empress.

Based on what he’s gathered, she controlled the global economy and the banks.

But why would the ruler of the Crown Domain personally intervene to wipe a random F-Rank student’s slate entirely clean?

"Does she know for sure that he’s alive or just suspecting?" Zen thought, his pulse quickening despite the blood pact’s soothing magic. "And if she does... what is she waiting for?