Balik left the courtyard without looking at anyone. The noise behind him didn't matter. Limia's voice didn't matter. The blood on his hands didn't matter.
What bothered him more was the silence in his head.
The place where Tejas's voice used to sit felt… scraped. Like someone had taken a knife and hollowed something out. When he reached the washroom, he washed his hands slowly. His fingers looked thinner today. The water felt cold on bone.
He stared at his reflection.
His golden-brown eyes looked washed out. Not bright. Not warm. More gray around the edges. The brown fading into something duller.
He tried to think: Tejas?
Nothing.
Only a faint pulse somewhere deep, like a half-asleep memory. It didn't speak. It didn't guide. It didn't answer. Balik felt his jaw tighten, but not from fear—just habit.
He let the silence stay. He didn't try to pull the purse closer. If it wanted to disappear, let it.
There was no one left to hear him anyway.
The next days were the same. People watched him, expecting something—anger, guilt, or fear—but he had none left. A trainee shoved him in the hall. Balik didn't even react. He only turned his head slowly and stared. Not threatening. Not angry. Just… empty. The boy backed away like he'd touched something wrong.
The instructors saw everything. They wrote notes. They whispered. "His emotional layer is thinning." "He's adjusting to silence faster than projected." "Let it continue."
Mira watched too, always from a distance. Her eyes followed every small change—his slower blinking, the tiny tremors in his fingers when memories slipped, and the way his shoulders lowered more every week as if carrying less of himself. Ishan watched with a different expression—measuring, calculating, concerned but not enough to act.
Balik's training changed before he noticed it. His movements grew cleaner. Less hesitation, less confusion. When he fought, he didn't think of pain or winning or fear. He just reacted. His punches were straight. His steps were light. His techniques are sharper. His body grew thinner—arms narrow, ribs more visible, shoulders a little sharper—like the emptiness inside him was eating space.
Sometimes in the mirror, he noticed the color of his skin shifting. A faint gray creeping under the normal tone. Not sick, not dying—just drained.
Like his body matched his mind.
He felt slower emotionally but faster physically, a strange trade where everything heavy inside him was being squeezed out and replaced with cold focus. When someone insulted him, the words didn't land. They slid through him like wind through a cracked wall.
At night, he lay on the bed and waited for Tejas's presence. Nothing came.
Only that fading pulse. Weaker each week. Sometimes he wondered if the pulse was his own heartbeat pretending to be someone else.
He let it fade. He didn't fight it.
By the time he reached thirteen, the changes were obvious. His eyes weren't the same color anymore. The gold dimmed so much it looked like it belonged to someone older, someone tired. Brown turned muddy, almost gone in poor light. The gray under his skin darkened a little, especially under his eyes and around his jawline.
He didn't look like the other trainees. He didn't even look like a normal kid. He looked… lighter, but not healthy—as if part of him had been scraped out each month.
Training intensified. Not because they trusted him—but because he completed every task without complaint or emotion. They pushed him harder. He didn't break. He didn't even slow down. His breathing was always even. His steps were always measured.
Mira and Ishan watched from a distance as instructed. They didn't speak to him. They didn't guide him. They only monitored his decline with quiet eyes. They reported his shifts—how rarely he blinked, how he talked less, how he ate slower, and how he didn't react to pain.
By mid-year, even his thoughts grew thin. He didn't question things. He didn't argue with himself. He didn't wonder if this was wrong. He simply listened and did what he was told. From the start the thought of what is right and wrong was not his; he simply thought after the voice in his head told him, and now no one tells or listens, so he doesn't know.
So he just moved as they told him.
If he was told to kill an animal, he would simply kill it and not feel anything. And the same goes for beating; they told him to beat someone brutally, so he will because there is no one to stop him.
In one way it is making his life more simple. He doesn't have to deal with others after that act because it can happen again because it happened right after the next monthly pain endurance.
And he is getting stronger, but still there is no change in body; it gets thinner, yes, but I don't have anything to call that. I am starting to feel awakened; on the contrary side, I feel more empty than before.
So he copied others' coldness easily. He learned efficiency like a reflex. He began anticipating attacks not from instinct, but from emptiness—a hollow clarity that formed only after losing something important inside.
He didn't hate it. He didn't like it. He just lived with it.
The faint pulse inside his chest appeared once a week now. Then once in two weeks. Then barely at all. When it flickered, it felt weaker than a dying memory, like a whisper underwater. Balik stopped checking for it.
Near the end of the year, the instructors measured aura density. Balik felt something new—thin stability. A cold, stretched tightness around his core. Not awakening. Not excitement. Just structural change. The final stage of Tier-2.
They took notes:
"Tier-2 ending. One month until Tier-3 potential. Mental quietness is near absolute. Physical fading matches psychological decline."
Balik stood outside the training hall, thin shadows falling across his sharper features. The golden-brown of his eyes was barely visible now unless the light hit perfectly.
His skin looked a little grayer. His body was lighter, and his bones were slightly more defined from the inside-out hollowing.
The pulse inside him flickered once, faint enough to miss.
He didn't miss it.
He just breathed out, steady and calm.
One month left. Then Tier-3.
Where emptiness becomes the only thing he can build on. Where whatever little is left of him will either harden…or disappear forever.