Henry leaned back against the podium, tapping a piece of chalk against his chin. The bored, hungover haze was still there, but a sharper, more clinical edge had started to bleed through.
"Alright," he said, his voice reaching the back of the hall without effort. "Since you've decided to make me earn my keep, let's talk about the world outside. You've all seen the news—Nightmare Apertures tearing open like wet paper. We rank them so we know exactly how much trouble we're in."
He turned to the board and wrote the list with quick, efficient strokes:
Glimmer, Echo, Blight, Hollow, Terror, Anomaly, Singularity, Oblivion.
"The textbooks say these are danger levels," Henry said, turning back around. "I prefer to think of them as a scale of how many mistakes you're allowed to make before you don't come home. Most people spend their lives avoiding anything past an Echo."
He scanned the room, his gaze resting on the expectant faces. "Experience is the only thing that doesn't lie. Have any of you actually stood face-to-face with something from an Aperture? Tell me about it—if you think you can talk about it without shaking."
In the back row, Arthur stood up. There was a spark in his eyes, a mix of youthful pride and a shadow of something older. "I've seen more than a few."
Henry gestured for him to continue. "Name first, then the story."
"I am Arthur Pendragon," the boy said, his voice steady. "Of the Pendragon royal family."
The room went quiet. The Pendragons were a name that carried weight even in the farthest reaches of the continent. Henry's tired eyes flickered with interest, and he actually managed a small, lopsided smile.
"Pendragon, huh? So you're Mordred's little brother. How's that workaholic doing? It's been about a year since I last had to drag him out of a tavern in the North."
Arthur blinked, caught off guard. "He's... alright. Always busy, as you'd expect, but he's doing well."
"Good to hear," Henry chuckled, waving off the distraction. "Alright, let's get to it. Tell us about your first encounter. No embellishments."
Arthur cleared his throat, his expression turning serious. "I was young. My father took me hunting in the deep woods. We found a cave tucked away in a ravine. Before we even saw it, we smelled it—thick, metallic, like a butcher shop left out in the heat. We went inside to investigate."
The class was leaning in now. Even the Remington twins had stopped whispering.
"There were bodies," Arthur continued, his voice dropping slightly. "Hanging from the ceiling like grisly decorations. My father told me it was a Wendigo."
"An Echo rank," Henry noted. "Nasty, persistent things. Did you get a look at it, or did you stay by the entrance?"
"I saw it," Arthur said, his jaw tightening. "It was easily seven feet tall, gaunt and grey, with jagged antlers that looked like they were made of bone and rot. It came out of the dark, and I watched my father take it down. It didn't go easily."
Henry nodded slowly. "Seeing an Echo-rank kill at that age... that'll either make you or break you. Most kids would have been too busy screaming to notice the antlers."
He looked back at the rest of the class, his expression unreadable. "Anyone else? Or is the Prince of Pendragon the only one here who's seen what happens when in the dark"
Henry sat back on the edge of the mahogany table, the wood creaking under his weight. He scanned the room, noting the tight jaws and averted eyes.
"I get it," he said, his voice softening just a fraction. "Most of you aren't ready to talk about it. Trauma isn't a show-and-tell project. Let's move on."
He turned his focus to the board, his finger hovering over the word Singularity.
"There have only been eight Singularity-rank Apertures recorded in human history," Henry said, his tone dropping into a hollow, jagged register. "Calling them 'disasters' is like calling a hurricane a light breeze. They are existential erasures."
He paused, the silence in the hall becoming heavy enough to taste.
"The most recent one opened two years ago on the continent of Mnemos. You've all seen the updated maps. You've noticed the massive 'Void Zone' where a thriving civilization used to be. No one could save Mnemos. It wasn't a battle; it was an eviction of humanity."
The Mnemos Incident (Year 4337)
Henry leaned forward, his eyes clouded by a memory that seemed to age him a decade in seconds.
"The textbooks won't tell you the sequence of events because the truth is too demoralizing," he continued. "The first thing that crawled through that gate wasn't a scout. It was a vanguard of hundreds of Terror-rank creatures. Entire cities were leveled before the first distress signal reached the mainland."
He looked at the class, his gaze lingering on Serena, then Arthur.
"And then came the entity that opened the gate. We call it The Guest In Yellow. The continent's strongest Ascenders couldn't kill it. Every Dominion-tier powerhouse, and every army they had was turned into ash or worse. In the end, The continent was taken over. We performed a desperate, global-scale containment. We locked a continent behind a barrier and prayed it was enough. We hope it never leaves."
"We didn't defeat the Singularity. We just built a cage for it."
Henry stood up slowly, his shadow stretching long across the podium. For a moment, the lazy, hungover student was gone entirely, replaced by a man who looked like he was wearing the weight of a thousand ghosts.
"Thousands of soldiers and Ascenders were deployed to Mnemos before the seal went up," he said, his voice dropping to a low, hollow rasp. "They fought through a literal hell to buy five more minutes for people they didn't know."
He looked out at the class, his gaze lingering on their pristine uniforms and young, unscarred faces.
"Only eight made it back across the border before the continent was finalized as a tomb."
A suffocating silence descended on the hall. The air felt thin, as if the mention of the Singularity had sucked the oxygen out of the room. Henry let out a short, weary breath and straightened his duster coat.
"I'd like to say I hope none of you ever have to face something like that," he said, his voice regaining a bit of its detached edge. "But I'd be lying. You're the 'strongest of tomorrow.' You're the ones being groomed to stand in the gap. Hardships like Mnemos aren't just possibilities for you—they're your reality."
In the front row, Serena hadn't taken her eyes off him. She felt a strange, cold resonance from her Hero Mark, a pulse that seemed to sync with the heavy atmosphere Henry was radiating.
"Were you one of them?" Serena asked. Her voice wasn't loud, but in the dead silence of the hall, it rang out like a bell. "Were you one of the eight who came back?"
The question seemed to physically strike him. Henry froze, his hand hovering just inches from the chalkboard duster. He didn't turn around. He didn't even seem to breathe for several long, agonizing seconds. The class watched, hearts pounding, waiting for a confirmation or a denial.
Finally, Henry moved. He grabbed the duster and began to wipe the board with slow, methodical strokes, his back to the room. The chalk dust spiraled into the air, clouding his silhouette.
"That's all for today," he said, his voice flat and devoid of any emotion. He didn't look back. "Class dismissed."