The academy grounds had been declared safe, which apparently meant everyone was now free to see how unsafe they had been.
Kez sat on a bench near the edge of the schoolyard with one arm pressed against his side. The medic had called it heavy bruising and told him not to make any sudden movements.
That ruled out running away before Cera remembered she had expelled him.
He shifted slightly and winced.
Around him, the schoolyard had become a meeting point for students and their families. Guards admitted parents through the main gate after checking their names, but most of them stopped listening to instructions the moment they spotted their children.
A woman pushed past an academy worker and grabbed a boy whose uniform was torn across one shoulder.
"Why didn't you answer your phone?!"
"The network was down."
"You still should have answered."
The boy opened his mouth, reconsidered, and accepted the hug instead.
Nearby, a father examined a cut on his daughter's forehead while she repeatedly told him it was nothing. He disagreed with increasing volume until a medic came over to inspect it.
Kez watched them for a moment before looking toward the administration building.
No sign of Cera.
That was becoming a problem.
He had spent most of the evacuation thinking about what he would say when he found her. His original argument had been simple. The door incident was an accident, the mana reader had been poorly designed, and punishing someone for missing one class seemed excessive.
Admittedly, the argument became weaker whenever he included facts.
Now, however, he had new material.
He had survived a Devil Sect attack. He had helped an instructor escape. He had fooled two cultists, reached a secured shelter, and suffered injuries in the process.
That was practically heroism.
Dan had witnessed most of it too. If Kez could convince him to describe the situation generously, Cera might reconsider.
Unfortunately, Dan did not seem like a man who described anything generously.
Kez leaned back against the bench, felt another sharp pain in his side, and immediately sat forward again.
Across the schoolyard, academy workers cleared debris from the main paths. Broken sections of stone rose under controlled streams of mana and floated into heavy carts. Other workers swept shattered glass away from the buildings while instructors inspected the damaged wards.
Closer to the eastern hall, several bodies lay beneath white coverings.
Recovery workers checked the identification attached to each one before carrying them toward the vehicles waiting beyond the gate. One of the sheets had slipped enough to expose part of an academy uniform.
Kez looked away.
He had remembered the attack as an important early event in the novel. A few chapters of fighting, several dead students, political outrage, and a sharp drop in TROP's value.
It had been much easier to think about when the dead students were only a number.
His phone was still in his hand.
Kez opened his broker account.
Trading in TROP had been suspended.
"Cowards," he muttered.
The price displayed on the screen had already fallen considerably before the suspension. His put contracts would be worth far more than what he had paid for them once trading resumed.
At least the plan had worked.
It had been a rushed plan, but Kez had not been in a position to wait. He needed money quickly. Training resources cost millions of AP, and forty-eight thousand was nowhere near enough unless he took a large risk with it.
Opening a new account and putting nearly everything into one position had been the fastest option. He could have bought unrelated assets, placed a few bad bets, and spread the money around to make the account look more natural, but he did not have enough capital for that. Every AP spent covering his tracks was an AP that could not go into the puts.
Diversification made sense for people who already had money and wanted to keep it. Kez needed to turn what he had into enough money to stop being helpless.
Besides, the contracts did not expire for several months. He had bought them after TROP released its freshman enrollment numbers and the stock reached a new peak. Expecting a correction after that was perfectly reasonable.
The attack had merely made the correction much larger.
Still, the account looked worse now than it had when he created it. One new account, one overwhelming position, and one very fortunate outcome.
He would have to be more careful next time. Once these contracts paid out, he would have enough money to scatter his investments, take a few deliberate losses, and build a transaction history that did not look like it belonged to someone who knew the future.
Kez refreshed the page.
The suspension remained.
He closed the app.
One problem at a time.
First, he needed to reverse his expulsion. Then he could collect his money, buy enough resources to stop being pathetically weak, and figure out why the story had already begun changing around him.
He glanced toward the administration building again.
Still no Cera.
More students crossed the schoolyard toward the gate. Some left with their parents. Others were met by guild representatives or academy staff.
Kez looked around once, then checked his phone.
No calls.
Were his own parents even going to check whether he was alive?
He considered the question for a few seconds.
Kaiden had once hung up on the people who kidnapped him, so the expectations were already underground. Nora might call eventually.
They were probably busy dealing with the effect the attack would have on their guild.
Kez placed the phone beside him and returned to reorganizing his defense.
The destruction of the mana reader could be blamed on unclear instructions.
The door was more difficult.
Maybe he could argue that Dan's injuries had already been resolved through their mutual participation in a life-threatening event. Shared trauma had to count for something.
His phone began vibrating against the bench.
Kez glanced down.
Kaiden Jolkev.
He stared at the name.
The phone vibrated again.
"Ah, fuck."
For one horrible moment, he wondered if the academy had already sent an expulsion notice. Then he remembered that Cera had expelled him seconds before the attack began. Unless she had stopped to complete the paperwork while the Devil Sect invaded, his parents could not know yet.
That meant they were actually calling to check on him.
Somehow, that possibility made him even less prepared to answer.
Kez picked up the phone.
"Hello?"
"Are you alive?"
Kaiden's voice came through cold and direct.
Before Kez could answer, Nora spoke somewhere in the background.
"Give me the phone. That is not how you ask him."
There was a rustling sound before her voice came closer.
"Kez, are you hurt?"
He looked down at his ruined uniform and the arm pressed against his side.
"Nothing serious."
Nora released a breath.
"Why didn't you call us?"
Kez glanced at the recovery workers carrying another covered body across the schoolyard.
"I was a little busy."
"You could have called after the shelters opened."
"They opened fifteen minutes ago."
"And you spent those fifteen minutes doing what?"
Kez looked at the broker app behind the call screen.
"Recovering emotionally."
"He sounds fine," Kaiden said in the background.
Nora ignored him. "Sounding fine does not mean you are fine. What happened inside?"
"The Devil Sect attacked."
"We know that."
"Then I feel like you already understand the important parts."
"Kez."
He sighed. "I got trapped in one of the buildings with an instructor. We ran into some of them, but we escaped and reached a shelter. That's it."
He decided not to mention the dead cadets, the stolen identification card, pretending to join the Bell-Bearing Covenant, or being ordered to murder Dan.
Those details would only distract from the reassuring nature of the story.
"Which instructor?" Nora asked.
"Dan Kessarin."
There was a brief silence.
Kaiden seemed to recognize the name, though Kez could not tell whether that was good or bad.
"Where are you now?" Nora asked.
"Outside the main administration building."
"Go back to the infirmary if the pain gets worse. Have they finished questioning you?"
"Nobody has questioned me yet."
"Then stay available. They will want statements from everyone who encountered the attackers."
Kez frowned. That sounded inconvenient, especially considering how difficult it would be to describe his encounter without admitting to several questionable decisions.
"I wasn't planning to leave," he said.
That was technically true. He could not leave until he found Cera and convinced her that expelling him would be a historic injustice.
"I have a few things to handle first."
"What things?"
Kez looked toward the administration building.
"Minor academic matters."
Nora went quiet.
Kaiden spoke from farther away. "What did he do?"
"Why does everyone immediately assume I did something?"
"Because you called it a minor academic matter," Nora said.
"That proves nothing."
"It proves that you don't want to tell me."
Kez decided the expulsion could wait until he had successfully reversed it. There was no reason to tell his parents about a problem that would soon cease to exist.
Most likely.
His phone vibrated against his palm.
A notification appeared at the top of the screen.
TROP-linked derivatives remain restricted under emergency market review. Contact your financial institution for further information.
Kez stared at it.
The notification disappeared, leaving the call screen behind.
His parents managed a major guild. Major guilds had lawyers, financial departments, and people who knew how to make inconvenient restrictions disappear.
Kez sat straighter.
"Actually, since I have both of you here, I need help with something."
Nora sighed. "What is it?"
"Some of my financial contracts have been restricted because of the attack. I need someone from the guild to contact the broker and get them released."
"What contracts?"
Kez hesitated.
There was little point in lying. If he wanted their help, the guild's financial department would see everything anyway.
"TROP puts."
Silence followed.
"How many?" Nora asked.
"Around sixty."
"Total cost?"
"Forty-eight thousand AP."
The silence returned.
Kez felt the conversation beginning to turn against him.
"Before you react, I would like to point out that the trade was based entirely on public information."
"You put forty-eight thousand AP into TROP puts two weeks before the academy was attacked."
"When you phrase it like that, you remove all the financial reasoning."
"When did you open the position?"
"Right after TROP released the freshman enrollment numbers."
Nora did not respond, so Kez continued.
"The announcement pushed the stock to a peak. Everyone saw the higher enrollment and started buying without considering whether the increase justified the price. I expected the excitement to die down and the stock to correct. I also took some profit last week."
"When do the contracts expire?"
"A few months from now."
"Strike price?"
Kez gave it to her.
Another brief silence followed.
"The position would have made money from an ordinary correction," Nora said.
"Exactly."
"It did not require the stock to collapse today."
"Exactly. Stop making me sound like some evil mastermind."
"That does not explain why you put almost all the money in a new account into one position."
Kez's relief disappeared.
"It was a high-conviction investment."
"It was reckless."
"Those are not mutually exclusive."
Nora let out a slow breath.
Kez knew how the account would look once the guild examined it. He had created it shortly before making the purchase, transferred almost everything he had, and bought nothing that could support the appearance of a balanced strategy.
At the time, he had accepted that risk. He needed the money sooner rather than later, and he had not possessed enough capital to waste any of it on believable losses. The trade only looked disastrous now because it had succeeded far more violently than any ordinary investor could have expected.
The reasoning was still sound.
Mostly.
"Why did you use a separate account?" Nora asked.
"I wanted to keep my personal investments separate from the guild."
"You have never cared about that before."
"I've become financially responsible like you wanted. Maybe take this as sign to continue my funding?"
Kaiden gave a short, humorless laugh in the background.
Kez chose to take it as encouragement.
Nora continued, "The broker will review when you opened the account, when you funded it, and whether you made any other trades. If they believe you had prior knowledge of the attack, this will not be treated as a normal restriction."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Of course. That's why I need the guild's financial department to explain that I bought long-term puts after a public price surge."
"You need them to determine whether that explanation is enough."
"Same thing."
"It is not."
Kez glanced toward the administration building again.
Still no Cera.
"Can they get the contracts released or not?"
"You nearly died this morning, and this is what you want to discuss?"
"The contracts are worth considerably more now than they were this morning. Waiting seemed financially irresponsible."
Nora did not answer.
Kez pressed on before she could decide to end the call.
"I am not asking the guild to give me money. I am asking it to help me recover money that already belongs to me. This is probably the least unreasonable financial request I have ever made."
"Do not contact the broker yourself," Kaiden said.
It was the first time he had spoken in several minutes.
Kez frowned. "Why?"
"Because you will make it worse."
That was unfair.
It was also possible.
Nora spoke before he could object. "Send me the account information and the purchase records. I will have the financial office review them."
Kez blinked.
"So you'll get my contracts back?"
"I will have someone determine why they were restricted and what can be done."
"Good enough."
"You will answer every question they ask honestly."
"Of course."
"The complete truth, Kez."
He looked at the damaged buildings across the schoolyard.
"Every financially relevant part of it."
Nora was silent long enough for him to suspect that she was reconsidering the offer.
Before she could withdraw it, the doors of the administration building opened.
Cera Verin stepped outside.
Dust covered her coat, and dried blood marked one sleeve. She spoke briefly with an academy guard before looking across the schoolyard.
Her gaze stopped on Kez.
His remaining problems had found him.
"I have to go," he said.
"What happened to your minor academic matter?" Nora asked.
"It's approaching."
Cera started walking toward him.
"Kez, what did you do?"
"I'll call you later."
"Kez!"
He ended the call and slipped the phone into his pocket.
Cera continued across the yard at the steady pace of someone who had not forgotten the conversation interrupted by the attack.
Kez pushed himself to his feet. His side protested, but he forced a welcoming smile onto his face.
Getting his contracts released had gone surprisingly well.
Now he only had to convince Cera Verin that his expulsion should not count because she had declared it verbally a few seconds before a terrorist attack.
Compared to the contracts, he suspected this would be the difficult negotiation.
Cera stopped in front of him.
"Kez."
"Instructor," he replied. "Before you say anything, I believe surviving a Devil Sect attack should invalidate all disciplinary decisions made immediately before it."