< [Greed Task Progress: 61,000 / 100,000 CNT] >
< [7 days left...] >
---
Axel stared at the numbers in the system’s interface for a while.
Winning all three fights at the Nexus Field had earned him a total of fifty thousand CNT. A ridiculous amount, which was enough to make most people celebrate. Enough to make most people feel like kings.
Dasha had expected that reaction from him. She had paid him off with a smile, clearly thinking he would be excited or proud. After all, he had just beaten the self-proclaid king of the second years, Drax Tan. Soone people feared.
Axel didn’t feel proud. He felt uneasy.
Things were starting to go wrong. Not loudly. Not all at once. Just quietly stacking on top of each other.
That night, Axel returned to his room. His body was sore from the fight. His mind was worse. Fighting, sweating, jumping through shadows, getting slamd around... it had all finally caught up to him. He needed his rest.
He dropped onto his bed and let out a long breath.
< [You have 3 pending contracts] >
< [15 days left until soul claiming] >
Axel stared at the ssages, and they stared right back.
"Damn it..." he muttered under his breath. "Where are you, Ares?" he asked quietly.
He turned his head slightly and saw Rick on the other bed, calmly reading a book like everything was peachy over there. Nothing was wrong, at least not for him... Not yet.
Axel sighed and spoke inside his head. "Aurora... what happens if I don’t collect their souls?"
"There would be consequences," she responded without hesitation. "You might encounter a drop in demonic strength. Maybe worse. You might even have a temporary or permanent loss of one of your cores."
"What about an extension? Can the contract be extended?" Axel asked. "Just until Ares gets back?"
Aurora explained calmly that contracts didn’t work that way. They were already signed. To extend them, sothing had to be offered. A bargain that equates to an equal exchange.
That was how contracts worked.
Axel lay there for hours, staring at the ceiling.
He had the Greed task, contracts, demon slayers, Ares being gone. Too many things pressing down on him at once. It felt like his thoughts were tangling together.
By the ti he finally slept, it didn’t feel like rest, and morning ca imdiately.
The school alarms blared loudly through the halls. It was a new system the Oval Academy had put in place to encourage punctuality. It didn’t really work. So students slept straight through it like nothing was happening.
Classes went by slowly and boringly as usual, and after they ended, students flooded toward the cafeteria like always. Axel walked beside Rick, keeping his head down.
He wasn’t doing that for no reason.
First, there was a chance so students had been at the Nexus Field the night before, and they might have seen him fight. Might have seen him beat Drax. The problem wasn’t just winning. It was how he won.
Two abilities. Infernal and umbra were used there.
Axel had already started thinking of excuses. If anyone asked, he could say the infernal energy ca from his sword. That he had infused mythic shards—four of them being the Ruin Echo, Fire Infusion, Energy Burst, and Infernal Energy—but that explanation fell apart fast. The problem with that was that he had fired Infernal Bullets from his fingertips. He had also used Hellrand Slash with his bare hand, which ant that the energy ca from within him.
No matter how he explained it to people, it made him dangerous and interesting. Soone people would watch. He was basically a dual mutant.
The second reason he kept his head down was simpler. He was no longer just Axel, he was the Shadow Imp.
Luckily, no one reacted when he entered the cafeteria. There were no stares or whispers. No sudden silence. No one recognized him.
’What?’ Axel blinked, surprised. ’Do people even know the Nexus Field exists?’ he wondered.
He and Rick sat down and started eating quietly. A second later, soone slid into the seat across from them.
"Good to see you two," Kinsey said, tapping her fingers against the table as she glared at Axel.
---
Axel noticed the way Kinsey was staring at him. It wasn’t very casual. Her eyes stayed on his face a little too long, like she was trying to confirm sothing. Axel shifted, slightly confused. He was about to ask what was wrong when Rick suddenly spoke up.
"Have you guys heard the news?"
Axel broke eye contact with Kinsey and looked at Rick. "What news?" he asked.
Rick stared at him like he had just said sothing stupid, then shook his head. "You seriously need to take your mind off fighting for once and actually follow the dia."
Axel frowned but said nothing.
"There was a small battle on one of the outer planets. One of the empires’ territories."
Axel raised a brow. "Which empire?"
"Frostfall," Rick replied easily.
That na made Axel pause.
Rick continued, unaware. "Apparently, the Lord of Frostfall went there himself to deal with the Skavverns. They said it was just a group of two-tailed Skavverns, nothing serious. It was easy work, I guess."
Axel found that strange. "If it was that easy, why would he go himself?" he asked. "Couldn’t he have just sent one of his top fighters?"
Kinsey answered before Rick could. "Sotis people like that just want to show off," she said flatly. "It’s not always about necessity. Sotis it’s just about proving sothing."
"I kept wondering, what if he actually died? I an, what would happen to Frostfall?" Rick asked.
Kinsey paused.
"I don’t really care," she said after a mont. "To hell with his empire."
Her tone was sharp and cold.
Rick blinked, surprised, then laughed awkwardly. "W-Well... I guess one of his kids would take over or sothing. I heard he has two daughters. Not completely sure, though."
Kinsey scoffed again. "He shouldn’t have any children," she said. "He doesn’t even seem like a good father to !"
There was real disdain in her voice this ti, and Axel picked up on it.
Axel finally spoke. "You sound like you’ve got personal beef with the Lord of Frostfall."
Kinsey turned to him instantly in a defensive bid. "Why would I?" she snapped. "Why would soone like have any kind of beef with Forsen Frost? I’m nothing to him. He wouldn’t even notice if I existed."
Rick laughed loudly. "Yeah, that’s true. A guy like that wouldn’t give a crap about anyone at this table."
Axel stayed quiet, but he noticed sothing about the way Kinsey spoke. The tightness in her words. The emotion she tried to hide.
’Yep. She’s hiding sothing,’ Axel thought.
Rick finished the last bite of his food and stood up. "I’ve got training," he said. "So Hydrokinetics agreed to teach a few water tricks."
Axel nodded, and Kinsey waved him off. Rick left the table soon after.
Kinsey rested back slightly and looked at Axel. "How many days left?" she asked.
Axel didn’t ask what she ant. He just answered. He already knew what she was asking about.
"Fourteen," he answered. "Fourteen days until it’s ti."
Kinsey went quiet for a second. Then suddenly, she turned to him sharply.
"What the hell was that yesterday?" she asked.
Axel blinked. "What are you talking about?"
She leaned closer, her voice low. "Why didn’t you tell you were a Shadow Demon?"
Kinsey hadn’t followed Axel into the Nexus Field yesterday. That much was obvious. She had other things to deal with. Things involving a certain soone, but that did not an she was ignorant of what happened there.
That night, while Axel was lying on his bed staring at system ssages and stressing himself half to death, Kinsey had been watching sothing else entirely.
Clear footage of the fight with Drax.
She had no intention of spying on him at first, but information had a way of finding her when she needed it. By the ti she sat on her bed and stread the recording, the fight between Axel and Drax Tan was already being replayed from multiple angles. How she got the footage was a mystery.
She saw Axel disappear into his shadow and saw him step out of soone else’s shadow like it was the most normal thing in the world.
And by the ti the fight ended, Kinsey already knew that he was a shadow demon.
"Why didn’t you tell ?" she asked, repeating the question.
"Well, because I only recently beca one."
Kinsey stared at him for a second, then almost facepald.
"You’re unbelievable," she muttered. "Do you even understand what you did yesterday?"
"I won the fight?"
"That’s not the point!" she snapped. "You used two different demonic powers in front of thousands of people. Infernal abilities and umbra abilities. Do you know what that makes you look like?"
Axel hesitated, then he smirked. "...Strong?"
"It makes you look like a dual mutant," Kinsey said flatly. "And people love dual mutants. They love studying them, watching them, and best of all, controlling them."
"You’ve officially put a spotlight on yourself. Anyone with influence who was there last night is going to rember your face and probably your na."
"Listen, Axel. You can’t go back to the underground pits."
"What?" Axel blurted out.
"And the Nexus Field too. You go back there, and soone you really don’t want noticing you will notice you."
"I need money," Axel said imdiately. "I can’t just stop fighting."
"Fighting is only one way to make money."
"Then what other ways are there?"
Kinsey looked at him, her lips curling slightly.
"Ever heard of the school casino?"
****
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