The next morning, the breakfast table was a rare sanctuary of calm. The Grey Cloak was likely still at the Academy, cross-referencing my forty-page "Poison Gas Report" and developing a headache that no medicine could cure.
Arin leaned forward, his elbows on the table, ignoring his porridge. "Father, yesterday was... brilliant. But how did you know he'd believe you? How do you map someone's mind without them realizing you're even looking at them?"
Lysa adjusted her glasses, her notebook already open. "Query: How do you identify a target's psychological load-bearing walls without structural testing?"
I took a slow sip of my tea, looking at them. "It's simple, really. You don't look for what they say; you look for their Internal Alignment. You blueprint a person the same way I blueprint an estate. You look for the tension."
I gestured toward Avaris, who was currently humming while she plated a fresh set of eggs.
"Take your mother, for example," I said, a playful glint in my eye. "Look at her right now. She's hummed three different bars of that Northern song, and her movements are fluid. She's watching the heat of the pan and glancing at us with a slight curve to her lips. That is a 'Happy Alignment.' It means she is doing this out of her own free will—because she loves this home, and she loves us."
Avaris stopped mid-flip, her back to us, but I could see her shoulders go still.
"If," I continued, "your mother were doing this because she was forced or because she was playing a role she hated, her expression would be 'Deadpan.' It would be a mask of stone. The movements would be efficient, but there would be no 'hum.' There would be no 'glow.' When a person's face doesn't match the warmth of their actions, that is a structural crack. That is where you strike."
I looked back at Arin. "The Grey Cloak? He is 100% ambition and 0% imagination. His 'weakness' is that he wants to be a hero so badly that he'll believe a lie if it makes him look important. I didn't have to trick him; I just had to build a 'Hero's Pedestal' out of junk, and he climbed right onto it."
Avaris turned around, her face a vibrant, deep shade of crimson that I'm fairly certain would be categorized as "High-Heat Thermal Signature" in a textbook.
"Ilyas Verne," she stammered, pointing a spatula at me, her eyes darting between me and the kids. "Are you... are you using my breakfast habits as a tactical lecture? I am standing right here!"
"And you look lovely doing it, my dear," I said, undeterred. "See, kids? That blush? That is an 'Authentic Emotional Overflow.' It's impossible to fake. It tells me that my assessment of her happiness was accurate to within a 0.01% margin of error."
"Stop it!" she laughed, half-hiding her face behind the spatula as she hurried back to the stove. "Eat your eggs before I decide to give you a 'Deadpan Expression' for the rest of the week!"
Arin and Lysa were in awe. They looked at their mother, then back at me, finally realizing that their "frizzled" father saw the world in a way that made everyone else look like they were playing checkers while he was designing the board itself.
The lesson is learned: The strongest armor is a smile that's actually real.
"Now," I said, standing, "go. The Academy is a battlefield disguised as a classroom, and you're already late for your first skirmish."
Arin grinned, Lysa adjusted her glasses, and moments later the door closed behind them—taking the morning's calm with it.
The academy
At the Academy, the atmosphere was thick with the usual academic dust, but in the private training hall of the "Special Class," the energy was different. Arin and Lysa had gathered Cyrus and Mira in a corner, whispering the morning's lecture like it was forbidden scripture.
"So, you see," Arin whispered, gesturing wildly with a charcoal pencil, "it's all about the 'Internal Alignment.' If they don't hum while they work, they're a threat. If they blush, they're safe. Father calls it psychological blueprinting."
Cyrus looked at his own hands, his eyes wide. "He mapped your mother's happiness to a 0.01% margin of error? Your father is either a saint or the most terrifying man I've ever heard of. Most people just say 'good morning.'"
Mira, who was standing so still she was practically merging with the stone pillars, let out a tiny, soft hum of agreement. "A man who builds with hearts as well as stones. No wonder the Grey Cloak is losing his hair."
The heavy oak doors creaked open, and Instructor Kael stepped in. He looked weary, the kind of tired that comes from trying to solve a puzzle that keeps insisting it's just a pile of blank cardboard. He tapped his cane on the floor to call us to order.
"Today," Kael announced, his voice echoing in the vaulted room, "we move from observation to physical engagement. We will discuss Defensive Kinetics. Specifically, how to absorb and redirect the force of an opponent's strike by aligning your skeletal structure."
"Arin," Kael said, pointing a finger. "You will be the aggressor. Cyrus, you will defend using the structural bracing I just demonstrated. I want to see a clean, direct engagement."
The stage was set. In any other special class in the Empire, this would have been a display of high-speed reflexes. But we were the Verne Academy for the Professionally Mundane.
Arin stepped forward, his face a mask of intense, "boring" concentration. He took a heavy breath, wound up for a punch that looked like it would take three to five business days to land, and then—at the exact moment of peak tension—his left boot "accidentally" caught on a slightly uneven floor tile.
THUD.
Arin went down in a heap of tangled limbs and dusty robes. It was a masterpiece. To a master like Kael, it looked like a clumsy boy losing his balance. To those of us who knew the Verne family secrets, it was a perfectly calculated fall, executed with the grace of a falling skyscraper.
Cyrus didn't even flinch. He didn't move to help; instead, he dropped to one knee and began intensely staring at the floor where Arin's chin had bounced.
"Interesting," Cyrus muttered, pulling a small ruler from his pocket. "Based on the sound frequency of the impact and the displacement of the floor-dust, I calculate the localized mass of the impact zone to be approximately sixty-two kilograms per square inch. The limestone is surprisingly resilient today."
Mira, meanwhile, had managed to become so non-existent that Kael actually blinked and looked around to see if she had left the room. She was standing three feet away from him.
Lysa adjusted her spectacles, her pen flying across her notepad. 'Subject A (Arin) has achieved a 15% increase in "Accidental Velocity." The facial expression remained 100% vacant during the descent. High-level professionalism. Father would be proud.'
Instructor Kael stood there, his hand over his eyes, rubbing his temples as if he could physically push the headache away.
"Arin... you fell. Again. Before you even launched the strike."
"The friction coefficient of the floor was unexpectedly low, sir," Arin said from the ground, sounding genuinely apologetic. "I'll need to write a report on the wax density used by the janitors. It's a safety hazard."
Kael let out a long, slow sigh. "Just... get up. All of you. Cyrus, stop measuring the floor. Mira, please make a sound so I know you haven't been kidnapped. We're going to spend the rest of the hour discussing the history of... shields. Stationary, non-moving shields."
The "Boring" reputation is now an impenetrable fortress, and even Kael is starting to give up on finding the warriors beneath the robes.