The hand bypassed my chest entirely. It landed on the top of my head.
Her fingers sank into my messy, unwashed hair. She ruffled it. Slow, deliberate, and deeply, terrifyingly familiar.
My brain completely, violently blue-screened.
What is happening?
The Headmaster of this Academy is currently petting me like a slightly problematic golden retriever.
I do not have a flowchart for this.
Her gaze dropped back to the glowing blue interface floating near the desk. "I will arrange your escort. You have my direct line on ODICIOS, Arzane. Five messages a day. Use one of them to inform me when you are ready to depart."
The pale fingers threading through my hair slowed, pausing near the crown of my skull.
"The integration in your palm node is settling." The White-Static eyes dropped to my wrapped right hand. "That gauze is completely unnecessary now."
The thick, sterile medical gauze Angelica had frantically wrapped around my knuckles a few hours ago was still stained yellow with alchemical salve and dark rust from my dried blood.
My right fingers twitched against my thigh.
The sharp, necrotic throb of frostbite that had been radiating up my arm since the sparring dome was gone. Not muffled. Entirely absent. A strange, painless warmth hummed beneath the blood-stained fabric.
Angelica's high-grade alchemical salve must have finally kicked in. Or my central nervous system has simply severed communication with my right arm out of sheer self-preservation.
I am too tired to unwrap it and find out. If my fingers are currently rotting off, they can do it in the privacy of my dorm room.
A perfectly vacant canvas anchored my expression, offering absolutely zero confirmation to whatever she thought she saw.
Her fingers stopped moving entirely. The pale hand resting on my head shifted. The fingers curled inward, folding into a loose, casual fist.
Thwack.
"Ow."
The single syllable escaped my throat before my survival instincts could violently censor it. My uninjured left hand instinctively flew up to cover the stinging point of impact on my crown.
Did she just... bonk me?
The Headmaster of Endstoria just bypassed all of my heavily calculated tactical defenses to deliver the exact physical reprimand of an exasperated aunt dealing with a stubborn toddler.
I was bracing for a localized orbital strike. She gave me domestic discipline. My threat-assessment algorithm is completely, irreparably useless in this room.
Her knuckles withdrew. The absolute, crushing authority bled right back into the air, instantly erasing the bizarre, terrifying warmth.
"Take better care of yourself out there." The cadence left absolutely zero room for negotiation. "You are walking a very thin edge. Don't make me regret leaving that door unlocked for you."
She dropped her hand, turned around, and walked back behind her desk.
I stood completely frozen, my left hand still hovering awkwardly over my head.
Slowly, I forced my hand down.
I turned my back to the impossible window and the Headmaster. Every single step toward the exit demanded a conscious, agonizing negotiation with my tearing calf muscles. My heavy boots sank into the plush carpet, dragging the absolute dead weight of my exhausted E-Rank frame across the vast office until the massive oak door finally loomed in front of me.
My uninjured left hand reached out. My fingers wrapped around the cold, heavy brass latch.
The spot on the top of my head where her knuckles made contact throbbed with a terrifying, domestic familiarity I absolutely did not possess the context for.
I could ask. I could turn around, look at the Headmaster, and demand to know exactly how we knew each other.
My hand pushed the brass latch down. "I'll try not to trip on the threshold."
Like hell I am doing that.
I stepped out into the quiet, mundane safety of the administrative corridor, letting the heavy oak door click shut behind me.
The sheer volume of history I had just blindly dismissed immediately caught up with me.
I leaned my back against the cold stone wall of the corridor and closed my eyes.
Don't make me regret leaving that door unlocked for you.
My rebooting brain snagged aggressively on the phrasing. Not 'approving your enrollment'. Not 'forgiving your penalty'. Leaving a door unlocked implied a physical space. A specific, deliberate boundary intentionally left open so someone could walk through it without setting off the alarms.
Sector Three was a restricted quarantine zone. Outbound Ward 04 was a sealed black-site. The Primordial Fringe was guarded by automated defense arrays.
If the Headmaster of Endstoria was the one leaving doors unlocked... what exactly did the original Arzane ask her?
And more importantly, why did she agree?
I ran a frantic, exhausting search through fifteen thousand hours of game data and three separate readings of the novel. The lore was absolute about this. Malenia Sandhipath Alarictsa did not have personal relationships. She managed the Academy like a detached architect. There was absolutely zero mention of her possessing a soft spot for anyone.
Let alone a completely undocumented, garbage F-Rank student from a declining family whose name did not appear on a single page of the novel.
The caffeine-fueled gears in my head ground together violently, desperately trying to patch the massive hole in my meta-knowledge.
Arzane Vornelius Astarte was supposed to be my own creation. My custom build. He wasn't supposed to be an unknown extra with a secret, established dynamic with the Headmaster of Endstoria in the novel.
Unless he wasn't just a custom build.
My rebooting brain violently snagged on a memory before I arrived in this world. The void. The character selection screen. The glowing, blood-red text that stripped my Max-Level stats down to F-Rank.
[ Background: Chosen One ➔ Randomize ]
A cold sweat broke across my back that had nothing to do with the ambient mana.
Randomize.
What if the name 'Arzane Vornelius Astarte' never existed in Odia-Prime before yesterday? What if this body originally belonged to an entirely different person? A nameless, suicidal extra who walked into this office at seven in the morning to ask the Headmaster for permission to die in Sector Three.
And then, at 1:00 PM, the system needed a vessel for my transmigrating soul. So it grabbed this designated Day One casualty, hollowed out his identity, and forcefully pasted my custom character data directly over his existence.
A literal, biological overwrite.
The silence inside my head stretched into a heavy, suffocating weight.
Malenia wasn't talking to Arzane.
She was talking to the ghost of the boy whose body I just hijacked.
The math was violently incorrect. The actual protagonist of the novel didn't even receive this kind of treatment. A massive, undocumented piece of world-building was currently sitting right behind that oak door, actively threatening to give me a catastrophic migraine.
My gaze lowered to my bandaged right hand resting against my side. The sharp, oxidized ache of my E-Rank circuit vibrated in my chest, a physical reminder of a body that was currently running on an empty ORG slot.
I pushed off the stone wall and started dragging my boots down the corridor, actively refusing to acknowledge the existential nightmare I had just inherited.