The sound of stolen breaths silenced the room as Julius left the room.
The students' eyes followed Julius's retreating figure with newfound gazes of respect and astonishment, so shocked to see someone who was so brazenly impertinent to the son of Zeus.
Julius surprisingly opened the door gently, the door slowly shutting behind him, where the metal suspension above the door frame was slowing the door to a gentle still.
Julius's hand was similar to a lump of meat stung up for wolves to gnaw; no one in the room had seen such an injury, so the memory of Julius's horribly disfigured hand had stuck with the students.
"Did you see that?"
"Julius hit the new kid so hard his knuckles popped out..."
"His neck didn't even turn an inch. Is the new guy really that strong?"
On the other hand, Adrian's seemingly unfazed resistance only solidified the rumours of his strength, earning him newfound gazes of fear and admiration.
The students' gossip travelled around the room like a wraith in the night.
The students had assumed that Julius at least had the strength of three times more than that of a human.
This wasn't an unfair assumption, considering that the only students to attend the academy were half-bloods of some god or creature, meaning the students would be physically strong naturally to a very visible degree.
Hence why, students were further impressed with Adrian's show of strength.
Unbeknownst to the class, Julius did not have that level of assumed strength; to assume Julius even had the level of peak human strength would be slightly incorrect.
This misconception added to Adrian's perceived abundance of strength, not knowing that Adrian had felt barely a flick, whilst Julius felt his fist meeting an unmovable force.
The only person who knew of Julius's status as a mortal was Thurid.
She now stood across from Adrian, with a desk in between them, even after the door remained closed.
Her gaze lost all its playful antics, turning to wary steel.
Thurid predicted that Adrian was maybe half as strong as her, which was still impressive, though the way Adrian's light blue gaze indifferently met hers told her that he had something other than physical strength...
...
The walk through the halls was daunting; the only sound to accompany Julius's footsteps was the occasional drip of blood leaking onto the linoleum floor.
Julius's injured arm hung loosely toward the floor, the skin of the back of his unghastly hand was peeled off at the knuckles to expose blood and crushed bone.
The only other sound, impossible to hear, was the sound of Julius's facial muscles pulling taut together like iron wires as he resisted the searing pain.
Each step was tense with restraint, Julius's chest visibly expanding and falling with concealed huffs of anger through his nose.
"Zeus." He thought to himself coldly before reaching a door past the corner of the hallway.
"Adrian Zephyr." Julius mulled the name in his mind, like shovelling charcoal over his shoulder, and into the flames of a train engine.
The door was plain white; above the door frame, spelt in boring black bold font, "infirmary" was labelled on a plastered white sign.
Julius stared blankly at the door, the surface so polished he could almost see his reflection staring back at him.
Even though his cold exterior remained unchanged, his hand was still burning with searing pain.
He raised the knuckles of his unharmed hand, rapping his knuckles against the door sharply once.
At once, Julius heard a startled sound like a yelp.
"Just a moment!" A voice squealed in a high-pitched squeak.
A silence.
The shift of crumpling paper.
Another moment passed.
"Come in!" The bubbly voice called again, in the same high-pitched hiss, from inside the room.
Julius curled his unharmed hand around the glossy silver door handle, pulling it down and silently stepping into the room with the same grace as smoke.
Julius was immediately introduced to a bright scenery of a spacious office, lined with bookshelves, with messy pages scattered over the desk placed against the back wall of the room.
Above the desk sat a wide window, letting crisp golden light grace the room to warmly illuminate it.
A woman with thick blonde strands, like vibrant-golden whips, stood with her back to Julius in front of the desk in the back.
A long white open jacket trailed from her shoulders, down past her white skirt, hanging to her shins.
At the nape of her neck, there seemed to be this black ailment on her skin, it was sharp like obsidian and glossy like diamond.
Above these scales, Julius noticed her blonde strands seemed to be...moving?
Yet Julius's gaze never became obsolete, unfaltering as he aimed a bland look at the rest of the scenery.
"Sorry, I really wasn't expecting a visitor..." She nervously chuckled, her voice carrying a pink voltage of harmless hesitance.
Her hands worked fast over the desk, hurriedly clearing away a flood of pages that had seemed to have been unmoving for a long time.
Julius was still silent, his eyes drifting to inspect what seemed to him like a nurse's office.
The woman didn't take notice of this silence, too busy folding away books and pages, filling the room with her bubbly innocence instead.
"Just take a seat, dear. I'll be with you in a bit." She giggled sweetly; part of her words came out in a rush from some excitement.
It was quite rare for there to be an injury at the academy, after all, students were monsters or gods.
Normally, with such strong bodies, either with vast amounts of mana or unbreakable scales, why would they ever get actually hurt?
Julius didn't think about that, not that he wasn't aware of it; he just naturally didn't waste his precious processing power on such trivial subjects.
Not to mention, the pain of his mangled hand made it harder to think about irrelevant things.
Instead, his eyes continued to roam the room's surroundings, making out a dusty metal flat bed, placed in the corner, held up high by metal legs with wheels.
To Julius's left was another desk, with a boring light grey surface, designed to sit in an L-shape with one side running along the wall adjacent to Julius and the other facing past Julius.
The woman slid a stack of pages to the far side of her one desk at the back, placing both hands around something as she finally spun to face Julius.
"Right, I'm almost-"
CRASH!
The ceramic in her hands slipped and shattered to the floor with a loud sound like a glass splash.
The woman stood still, her eyes absently meeting Julius's blank gaze.
Julius imperceptibly shivered once in reaction to the unexpected smash of ceramic.
Then his eyes narrowed as they took in the woman's figure.
Her long, open jacket revealed a white blouse underneath, her visible collar featuring more obsidian scales on either side of her collar, trailing diagonally up.
Julius could now notice her blonde strands literally hissing, with beady golden eyes on each snake darker than her own, spitting out black forked tongues as they subtly danced around her head in wavy motions.
Below her hair, thin obsidian scales outlined from her forehead and down either side of her face to her cheekbones.
Though that wasn't why Julius narrowed his gaze.
The woman froze, lost in a trance upon meeting the cold indifference in Julius's eyes.
Her innocent daffodil yellow eyes, now softly widened, absorbed in a world of her own that reflected at her from Julius's naturally cautious gaze.
The woman felt a familiar feeling, as if she was being observed under a glass screen.
It was like looking at a sporting participant who looked back at you, their own gaze like a spectator.
Both an active participant and an audience member at the same time, staring cautiously at her.
Drip...
Drip...
Drip...
The sound of blood, dropping from Julius's busted bones, snapped the woman out of her trance.
She blinked blankly, slowly registering reality before dropping her gaze to Julius's disfigured hand.
She didn't register the sight of the injury yet, nor the ceramic that clattered to the floor.
She clearly had been shaken up quite a bit, until finally her awareness came flooding back as if it were previously lost in some distant part of her mind.
"Oh, my goodness!" She finally gasped with panic exploding from her holy golden eyes.
"Why didn't you say anything?" She questioned in a worried squeak, immediately stepping forward to reach for Julius's hand.
Julius immediately pulled his hand back, his eyes narrowing harder with vigilance, just as the woman's weight settled over a shard of ceramic and made it shatter into pieces.
The woman's head snapped down, forgetting entirely about the broken ceramic until she heard her white heel splinter the piece underneath her.
She looked back up, her eyes softening over Julius's visible caution.
The sight brought back familiar memories, making her heart ache terribly as she softly asked, "What's wrong?"
Julius didn't answer immediately; his eyes narrowed at the snakes on the woman's head.
"Is it the snakes?" She questioned uselessly; most students, upon seeing a gorgon, would immediately think they would turn to stone and run away in terror.
Julius was not one of these students; instead, his eyes narrowed further with vigilance.
"What are you going to do to me?" Julius asked in a steeled voice, his tone flat yet carrying perceptible wariness.
The caution, as much as it pained the woman to remember a long-forgotten past, made her lips curl warmly.
"I'm just going to bite your arm, sweetie; it makes my magic easier to use." She assured Julius in a soft and quiet voice.
She felt as though she were talking to an old friend.
Now that she had an understanding of Julius's character, she understood she had to approach carefully.
In this moment, Julius may as well have been a wolf, with a person attempting to tame the wolf.
Julius's narrowed eyes scanned her face for any sign of deception, internally questioning her before allowing her access to his arm.
This woman was supposedly the academy nurse, though that didn't matter to Julius; he had learnt that anyone can be anything at any time.
He slowly hovered his arm out from his side, extending the horribly maimed hand toward the woman.
The woman smiled warmly, her golden eyes glinting softly as she spoke in a quiet and gentle tone.
"Thank you." She breathed carefully before adding, "It'll hurt just a bit."
Then she reached out just as slowly, accepting the horribly twisted hand into hers and lifting it slightly to her chin as the golden snakes on her head began to descend.
Their jaws opened, revealing teeth like needles, inserting transparent fangs into Julius' skin.
A dark blue mist, a rich sapphire colour, with the visible appearance of flame, poured through these fangs just as they inserted into Julius's arm.
Julius recognised the mist to be the woman's own mana supply, currently being infused into his injured hand in order to remould his hand.
At once, Julius felt an intense discomfort as the disfigured frame of his hand began to reconstruct itself.
His forearm felt strangely tingly, like the feeling of a limb slowly numbing.
Meanwhile, his wrist felt an intense itching like his entire hand was surrounded by a solution made from melted fire ants turned personified.
"Good, good, you're doing wonderful." The woman praised smoothly, keeping her voice soft like cotton, her lips widening into a pleased smile.
Protruding from the creases of her lips, the tips of her two sharp fangs jutted past her lips as she smiled.
Then the woman's smile suddenly faltered, noticing something irregular.
Her mana poured into Julius, though she focused the supply toward his arm to the best of her ability; the dark blue mist still residually drifted up Julius's arm.
The mist continued, flowing and flowing until eventually Julius's body had traces of the woman's mana mapping his entire body.
This let the woman, with her healing magic experience and medical knowledge, get a feel of Julius's body.
The woman normally used this residual effect to monitor the patient.
She could sense the faint mana, using it to minutely detect any drastic changes in the body, like a rise or drop of heart rate.
Because she could map out his body, she could literally explore the pathways of arms like tunnels, drifting the trickling mana weakly through Julius's limbs.
Though as she learned about Julius's body, she suddenly noticed an irregularity between his kidneys.
Nothing.
Not the expected black veil of the aperture walls.
Not a pocket space to hold Julius's own dark blue mist.
But nothing.
Just an empty space between the two kidneys.
The woman felt her heart suddenly drop, her breath catching as the world around her faded from her awareness.
A curtain of darkness, made from the discovery, pulled around her and blocked her attention from reaching anything outside of herself.
Her focus narrowed into her faint blue mist scanning the limbs, her awareness draping over Julius's body to check again, just in case.
The woman's face immediately paled, her eyes widening as she blinked blankly.
Suddenly, her mind became incapable of conjuring another thought, too busy trying to process the impossible discovery she had made.
In this world, every lifeform had mana, no matter how imperceptible; even plants contained a speck of residual mana.
Humans had the lowest amount held on average, sometimes close to nothing, but even they had hints of mana.
This woman had seen human skin on Julius's body; considering they were attending an academy for half-bloods, she had assumed Julius was a demigod.
Demigods had a vast amount of mana, almost on the level of elves and dark elves.
Though regardless of whatever race you were, anyone existing in this world meant...
They had an aperture.
Yet nothing of the kind was found in the boy's body.
The woman tried to register the shocking discovery, realising that this boy's life defied the laws of existence.
Her eyes shone absently before she finally blinked awareness into existence, almost making the process of her realisation visible.
Her eyes jolted to Julius, her soft gaze now enchanted as it absorbed the sight of Julius with a newfound tint of fascination.
Julius's expression remained unchanging, enduring the pain quietly as he huffed a soft breath through his nostrils.
His eyes, however, were like canons.
Each pupil aimed at the woman with severe tension.
Julius, although allowing the woman to treat his arm, would never trust someone so quickly.
Julius's freehand slithered into his cream blazer pocket, tightly squeezing a star-shaped token through the fabric with anticipation, all whilst his expression coldly faced the woman.
The cracks in the bones of Julius's injured hand could be seen visibly resealing, the structure of Julius's wrist involuntarily shifting to settle firmly into place.
Though all the while, Julius's grip on the token, inside his blazer pocket, had never eased up.
His skin began patching over the wound, after the ruptured muscle had been repaired, until finally Julius's hand was seemingly unscathed as if nothing had happened.
When the tiny snake released Julius, there were two tiny red drops of blood on Julius's forearm.
"There, all done." The woman had finished.
Julius had silently withdrawn his hand without acknowledging the woman.
His free hand holding his other forearm up, his gaze dropped down to inspect his hand like a merchant examining the quality of goods.
Then he spun away, abruptly turning to leave without saying a word.
The woman blinked, surprised at first by the distant behaviour.
Though quickly, a warm smile settled over her face, as if she were looking at an old photo that gave her a sense of nostalgia.
"Wait!" She called out in a soft voice, her nervous jitter now nowhere to be seen, instead replaced with warmth.
Julius paused as he reached the door, his hand freezing by the door handle as he stood without turning back.
"Your name..." The woman breathed, the warmth in her voice fragile with hesitance.
She felt that these types didn't like to make themselves known.
"...I need to report the incident to the headmaster." She finished.
A small silence.
Julius quickly mulled over how much this would affect him or not.
"Julius Sparrow." He breathed in a monotonous tone, pulling the door open.
"Julius?" The soft voice called out from behind him again, making Julius freeze in the half-open doorway.
He finally turned his chin over his shoulder.
"I'm Miss Hestia. If you ever get hurt again, I'm here if you need me." She offered sincerely with a warm smile.
Julius stared at her from over his shoulder, his dull gaze sharply tugging away from her as he turned forward.
The door closed behind him right after.
end of chapter 14