While the others laughed, bantered, and dipped bread into thick stew or spooned mouthfuls of spice-rich broth, Astron observed in silence.
His chopsticks moved with quiet precision—delivering another bite of crisp-glazed fish to his mouth. His expression remained neutral. Unbothered. The sa collected stillness he always wore at group als.
But beneath that stillness, his thoughts narrowed, tightened.
His gaze drifted once more—briefly, naturally—toward Leonard.
Not obvious.
Just peripheral.
The kind of glance that could be mistaken for a slow blink or a pause between sips of tea. Not even Sylvie would notice, and certainly not Leonard.
But Astron noticed everything.
And sothing about Leonard…
Didn't match the script.
He wasn't trying to be suspicious, not yet. But his instincts had been sharpened through too much silence, too much watching. He had trained his mind to draw faultlines between what should be and what was.
And this?
This man?
He wasn't in the ga.
Not even once.
In Legacy of Shadows: The Hunter's Destiny, Sylvie was part of the academy's B-route. A radiant support type, often misunderstood. Her growth arc was tied to a mix of faction conflict, divine awakening, and guilt for her inability to protect sothing of the past.
Her brother was never ntioned.
No family. No past connection. No field agent from Solstice Dawn who ca to visit.
Nothing.
And that was… wrong.
Because this Leonard wasn't just a background detail. His presence carried weight. Not just with Sylvie, but with the others. They listened to him—not deferentially, but willingly. That mattered.
And it made things complicated.
If he's not from the ga…
Then he was either a new variable introduced by the divergence—or sothing hidden from the original narrative entirely. A ghost from behind the curtain. A wildcard.
Astron's hand hovered briefly over his tea.
He forced himself to move casually, not letting the flicker of tension reach his face. He had been rged with the world long enough to recognize when reality diverged.
But this?
This could be big.
Too big to ignore.
He took another sip, hiding the shift in his thoughts behind the taste of greenroot.
Leonard was powerful. That much was obvious. From his entrance, his bearing, the montary stillness when he'd walked through the door—sothing in him reacted to mana the way trained soldiers responded to enemy movent.
To Astron—who had long since learned the art of observation, of reading between breaths and silences—Leonard's strength wasn't just evident.
It was loud.
Not in posture. Not in words.
But in absence.
The absence of tension in his stance. The absence of hesitation in how he moved, how he spoke, how he let his gaze sweep across the table with the confidence of soone who had walked through fire and rembered every step.
Leonard didn't try to command the room.
He already did.
And that, to Astron, was the most dangerous kind of power. The kind that didn't assert. It simply existed.
He can rival most high-rank Hunters, Astron thought as he took another small bite of fish. Easily.
Maybe not in raw mana output—Astron hadn't felt any flare, any aggressive pulse that could be asured. But that ant nothing. The strongest didn't always burn brightest. Sotis they burned deepest.
Leonard had that depth.
The weight behind his silence, the way his eyes moved just once when Irina spoke—not to interrupt, not to challenge, but to asure. To understand.
He fought the sa way Astron did.
By seeing.
By knowing.
And that alone would've been enough to raise flags.
But it wasn't the worst part.
No—the worst part was that feeling.
That strange discomfort that had coiled in Astron's chest the mont Leonard walked into the room.
It hadn't co from recognition. There was no mory to pull from. No emotional response.
It ca from the inside.
From his mana.
He rembered it clearly. The soft chi of the door opening, the polite sound of boots against the floor—and then, a shift.
A ripple.
His mana had flared. Not sharply, not enough for anyone else to notice—but it had twitched. Buckled. Like sothing foreign had brushed against it for half a breath.
He'd caught it.
Barely.
He'd stilled it the way he'd trained to still a blade under the skin—no breath, no movent, just will.
But the sensation remained.
Not hostile.
But unsettling.
Astron's mana didn't respond to just anything. It was conditioned, tempered through his relentless discipline, through Reina's trial illusions, through isolation and restraint.
And yet the presence of Leonard had disrupted it.
Sothing clashed.
Not with his thoughts. Not with his instincts.
With his essence.
That was the part he couldn't explain.
It wasn't a matter of power levels. It wasn't fear.
It was resonance.
Mismatch.
That's what he would call it, if he could na it.
A resonance error. A distortion in the weave. The kind of internal recoil that happened when sothing touched too closely on the edge of truth—without revealing what that truth was.
But why?
Why would Leonard—a man he had never seen, never heard of, soone completely absent from the original structure of the ga's narrative—trigger such a reaction?
It wasn't instinctual distrust. Astron had been around killers. He had fought monsters that blurred the line between sanity and hunger. Leonard didn't feel like that.
This was deeper. Stranger.
His mana—usually still, controlled, silent like the calm between heartbeats—had twitched. As if one of the anchors inside his core had been montarily unseated.
Was it my traits?
Astron's gaze didn't lift from the table. His chopsticks remained still, resting beside his bowl. But his thoughts drilled downward, toward the architecture of his own body.
Voidborne? Shadowborne?
It was a reasonable assumption. The energies that ford the basis of those traits were not natural. They were older. Primordial. Traces of deeper alignnts—things that didn't fit cleanly into the world's current mana taxonomy.
They weren't elental.
They were foundational.
And foundational forces clash.
In the past, it had happened before—twice.
Once during Reina's resonance chamber trial, when he'd nearly passed out from trying to stabilize both [Void] and [Shadow] affinities simultaneously under artificial mana storms. The clash hadn't been visible—but internally, his mana had scread.
The second ti…
Oh.
His pupils narrowed slightly.
It did happen once more.
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