Angelica Astoria Godfrey did not hand over the medication.
She stood frozen at the foot of my cot. Her knuckles turned bone-white around the edges of her silver medical tray, clutching it against her chest like a riot shield. Her face burned a catastrophic crimson. Her cerulean blue eyes darted nervously toward the torn curtain, then back to my wrinkled hospital gown, completely overwhelmed by her own unfiltered imagination.
"I... I swear on the Architect's name, I won't tell a single soul!" She aggressively smoothed the front of her oversized white apron with frantic hands. "I know upper-tier nobles have very complicated and intense private relationships! But doing something like that in an emergency triage ward while your vitals are practically flatlining is unbelievably irresponsible!"
My head remained anchored to the stiff pillow.
"She was violently interrogating me," I stated. "My skeletal structure was actively being crushed against the mattress. There was absolutely no romance involved."
Angelica froze. Her pale hands hovered awkwardly over a roll of bandages.
"Interrogating you?" She swallowed hard, the red flush crawling all the way up to her hairline. "But... the sound-ward was up! I couldn't hear anything! The silhouettes pressing against the fabric just looked so aggressive! And when she finally dropped the ward, she just smiled at me! She looked completely elegant!"
"Yes." My eyelids drooped, the exhaustion finally pulling at the edges of my vision. "She is a deeply terrifying person. My ribs are currently threatening to detach from my sternum. The painkillers. Now."
A highly stressed, flustered exhale escaped Angelica's lips. The teenage embarrassment finally cracked, overridden by the sheer panic of an overworked first-year trainee. She snapped a pair of sterile medical gloves onto her hands, the rubber popping loudly in the quiet ward.
"Hold perfectly still." She stepped forward, forcing her healer's authority to take control. "I need to run a deep-tissue diagnostic thread through your primary circuit before I give you anything. If the frostbite from your arena match hit your inner channels, standard painkillers will just crystallize your blood."
She raised her left hand. As an officially drafted emergency triage nurse, she possessed full institutional clearance to manifest her Shard and cast diagnostic magic inside the ward.
The diagnostic thread slipped into my circuit.
Wait.
It didn't carry the sterile, freezing bite of standard Odia-Prime medical magic. It felt impossibly warm. A quiet, pristine golden light flooded my Odic channels. It had absolutely no business existing in a blood-soaked, aristocratic military Academy.
Unclassified, high-tier divine magic. She isn't just running a triage scan. The future Saintess is actively bypassing Academy medical parameters to practice miracles on my chest.
I am keeping my mouth absolutely shut.
The warm light traveled deeper, illuminating the structural damage in my nodes.
Angelica stopped breathing.
The flustered, blushing trainee nurse vanished entirely. All the color drained from her face. Her cerulean eyes blew wide open, locking onto my chest with a look of pure, unadulterated medical horror.
"Architect's mercy..." Her hands shook violently against my ribs. "Arzane... what the actual hell did you do to yourself?!"
My gaze remained anchored to the ceiling.
"This isn't a nodal cramp." Her voice cracked in genuine terror. She stared at my chest like it was a ticking bomb. "Your circuit is just... hollow! The nodes aren't even holding mana anymore—they're held together purely by friction and momentum! It looks like a dying tower block! If I push standard regenerative mana into the wrong channel, the pressure shift won't heal you. It will literally collapse your entire skeleton!"
A dying tower block.
An exceptionally accurate architectural diagnosis for a body running entirely on spite, fragile body, and stolen skills.
"Then skip the standard mana." I kept my voice an immovable flatline. "Just wrap the joints tightly enough so my arms don't fall off when I stand up."
"You are absolutely not standing up!" She slammed a fresh roll of gauze onto the tray, her healer's authority violently overriding her panic.
She didn't reach for the standard medical vials. Her hands glowed with that pristine, warm light again. Working with blinding, frame-perfect efficiency, she wove her unauthorized, unclassified holy magic directly around my frayed muscles. She reinforced the dying tower block without adding a single ounce of internal pressure.
The agonizing trace of burning friction in my shoulders slowly faded into a dull, manageable ache.
She tied off the high-grade stabilization wraps around my chest with a sharp tug. Then, she shoved a small paper cup containing two chalky white pills against my lips. I swallowed the bitter medicine without complaint.
Angelica stepped back, gripping the edges of her silver tray. She wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist, looking profoundly exhausted.
"Drink. Sleep. Do not move," she ordered, grabbing her clipboard. "I haven't even had a break to eat. Ever since House Orientation ended, people just keep coming up to me. And then the faculty drafted me into emergency triage for the afternoon sparring casualties."
She let out a long, tired sigh, her shoulders dropping under the oversized apron.
"I don't know what it is. People just... talk to me. They dump their problems on me, they ask me to heal their minor bruises, they ask me for directions. I can't even sit on a bench for two minutes without someone walking over to start a conversation. I am so tired."
She stopped abruptly. Her cerulean eyes widened as the sheer hypocrisy of her own statement caught up with her. The faint, lingering flush on her cheeks immediately darkened with genuine guilt.
"Architect's breath, I'm doing it to you right now," Angelica whispered, frantically rearranging the empty vials on her silver tray to avoid looking at my face. "You are lying here with a collapsing skeleton, and I am using you as a therapy wall to vent about my afternoon. I am so sorry, Arzane. Please forget I said anything."
It is your aura. You are the endgame Saintess of the One Architect. You literally radiate pure, unadulterated sanctuary energy. In a school full of sociopaths, every single human being with a pulse is instinctively going to flock to you like moths to a lamp.
I also do not have the caloric energy to navigate a teenage guilt trip.
"You went to House Orientation?" I shifted my head slightly to look at her, pivoting the conversation entirely as if her apology had never reached my ears. "Did you meet your housemates?"
Angelica blinked, completely derailed by the sudden pivot. "I... yes. But... not all of them."
"I missed mine." I stared blankly at the far wall. "I was busy playing a hide and seek with several ghost doctor in a restricted forest. Who didn't you meet?"
Her cerulean eyes clouded with genuine sadness.
"There was one girl during the Symbiode orientation." She gripped her tray tighter, looking down at her sterile gloves. "She was sitting completely alone in the corner. But the seniors stopped me before I could walk over."
She stopped talking.
Her mouth clicked shut. The absolute absurdity of my previous sentence finally bypassed her exhaustion and hit her conscious brain.
Her head snapped up.
"Wait," Angelica squeaked, her cerulean eyes blowing wide open. "Did you just say ghost doctors?"
"A coping mechanism," I stated, not blinking. "I use morbid surrealism to deflect from the fact that my ribs are currently threatening to detach from my sternum."
Angelica stared at my completely vacant, unbothered expression for three full seconds. Then, she let out a long, highly stressed exhale, relaxing her shoulders.
"You have a terrible, terrible sense of humor, Arzane," she scolded gently.
"Syevira Sinclair," I said, pivoting the conversation smoothly back to the lonely girl.
"Yes." She looked surprised I knew the name. "They said her circuit leaks toxic mana. They told me she hurts anyone who gets too close. It must be awful. Having everyone absolutely terrified of you, and just sitting there all by yourself. I really wanted to say hi, but I didn't want to cause a scene."
She didn't see a walking biological weapon. She just saw a lonely girl who needed a friend.
I can work with this.
"They warned you because their circuits are fragile garbage," I stated effortlessly.
Angelica frowned, looking up at me in pure confusion. "What?"
"Your diagnostic thread just stabilized a collapsing circuit without adding a single ounce of internal pressure." I met her eyes, delivering the clinical facts of what she had just done to my chest. "Your baseline resonance is overwhelmingly pure. Her ambient pressure won't suffocate you."
Her eyes widened. The logic caught her completely off guard. She didn't realize I was referencing her hidden holy resistance; she thought I was just evaluating her medical prowess.
"Are you serious?" Her voice pitched up with sudden, unfiltered hope. "I won't get sick if I sit next to her?"
"You won't," I confirmed. "And her isolation radius is exactly three meters. No aristocrat will dare step inside that boundary. If you sit next to her, no noble will demand you heal their bruises. It is the only impenetrable, aggro-free sanctuary in this entire Academy where you can actually take a nap without being bothered."
Angelica froze.
Her brain, built on pristine medical theology and an exhausting desire to help people, violently tried to reconcile the terrifying image of the untouchable deadzone girl with the sudden, overwhelming temptation of an uninterrupted lunch break.
"…How do I approach her without scaring her off?" she asked, the sheer physical exhaustion in her voice entirely overriding her basic self-preservation.
"Processed sugar." I let my eyelids finally slide shut as the heavy chemical weight of the painkillers dragged me down into the mattress. "The cheaper and sweeter, the better. Spun-sugar tarts. Frozen bitter-bean steeps. Bring something sweet, sit down, and don't make a big deal out of the air quality. You'll be totally fine."
The silence stretched.
I didn't open my eyes, but the weight of her stare was palpable. Her teenage brain, fueled by triage gossip, the shadows she had just seen on the curtain, and sheer physical exhaustion, began rapidly cross-referencing recent events.
"Wait." Her voice dropped into a deeply suspicious whisper. "You sat next to her in the Grand Hall yesterday. You literally slept inside her deadzone during Alchemy class today. Half the cohort was whispering about it."
Fabric rustled sharply. A trembling, gloved finger pointed toward the torn privacy curtain.
"And just now, Nova, that girl from house of Glyphron had you locked inside a soundproof ward, practically pinning you to the bed..."
A sharp gasp pierced the quiet ward.
"Architect's breath." She took a physical step back from my cot, her boots scraping against the stone. "You're in the middle of a massive aristocratic love triangle!"