The healing took forty minutes.
Revan left Elara's lab with his shirt tucked in, his posture straight, and his wounds closed enough that breathing no longer felt like a negotiation. She'd wanted him to stay longer. Rest. Drink water. Maybe talk about what happened.
He declined all three.
The corridor outside was empty. Morning lectures had started, pulling students and staff into classrooms like a drain pulling water. Revan stood in the hallway for a moment, letting the silence settle.
His hand drifted to his trouser pocket.
The obsidian coin was warm.
Not the fading residual warmth from last night. This was fresh. Recent. As if someone had pressed a heated thumb against the surface minutes ago.
Revan's fingers closed around it. His eyes swept the corridor. Left. Right. The alcove near the stairwell. The shadow beneath the supply closet door.
Nothing.
But the coin didn't lie. Whoever gave it to him had a way to activate it remotely, and they'd chosen to do so while he was sitting in Elara's lab with his shirt off and his guard down.
'Message received. You know where I am. Very reassuring.'
He slipped the coin back into his pocket and walked.
***
The black envelope was waiting on his pillow when he returned to the dorm.
Jet-black paper. Dark purple wax seal. The crest of House Vespera pressed into it with the kind of precision that suggested the person sealing it considered even wax a reflection of their authority.
Revan stared at it from the doorway for three full seconds.
A wave of frustration washed over him. "Just as predicted. My compliments to my brilliant brain," he thought bitterly.
'fuck'
'Didn't I literally just survive the night? Can't a man enjoy being alive for more than four hours?'
He crossed the room, picked up the envelope, broke the seal. Inside: a single slip of black paper. Silver ink. Sylvia's handwriting, sharp and compact, each letter formed with the efficiency of someone who considered wasted pen strokes a personal insult.
"East Tower. Room 4. Now."
No greeting. No signature. No explanation. Classic Sylvia.
Revan folded the note, tucked it into his breast pocket, and checked the mirror one last time. Wounds hidden. Posture clean. Face arranged into its default setting of respectful emptiness.
'Showtime.'
Every step he took toward the East Tower required conscious, calculated effort. He had explicitly disobeyed her direct orders last night. Elara's magic had closed the physical punctures, but a thin, persistent ache still lingered beneath his skin—a faint phantom pain reminding him of how close he'd come to dying.
He forced his stride to remain perfectly even. If he limped, if he faltered even a fraction of an inch, Sylvia would know.
The silence from her end made it worse. She hadn't given him any context for this sudden summons. No prior news, no warnings. Just a location and a demand.
As he walked, his mind rapidly cycled through the worst-case scenarios. What was she going to say to him? Had she caught him red-handed breaking her rules last night? Was he about to walk into an interrogation about his unauthorized midnight activities?
Or was it something much bigger? His thoughts drifted to the train incident. The Crimson Tears. Had she found out something new?
'Damn it.'
Whatever it was, Revan knew he was walking onto a battlefield blind.
***
The East Tower was the oldest structure in Valtheris Academy. While the rest of the campus had been renovated, expanded, and polished into something presentable for noble families writing tuition checks, the East Tower remained untouched. Stone walls blackened by centuries of weather. Narrow windows that let in light the way a miser let in guests. Staircases that groaned under every footstep as if personally offended by the intrusion.
Nobody used it. Which was exactly why Sylvia did.
Room 4 was on the third floor. A small chamber with a single desk, two chairs, and a window that overlooked the academy's eastern wall. Beyond that wall, the Valorheim cityscape stretched toward the horizon, rooftops fading into morning haze.
Sylvia was already seated when Revan entered.
She didn't look up.
A stack of documents lay spread across the desk in front of her. Her left hand held a quill, suspended mid-stroke above a half-written response. Her right hand rested flat on the desk surface, fingers perfectly still.
Too still.
Revan noticed it the way he noticed everything about her. Fifteen years of reading this woman's moods through micro-expressions and shifts in air pressure had given him a vocabulary for her silences that most people didn't even know existed.
Right hand flat on the desk meant she was controlling something. Suppressing a reaction. The quill hadn't moved in at least ten seconds, which meant she'd stopped writing before he walked in but hadn't bothered to put the pen down.
She was thinking. About something that required effort to think about calmly.
Revan closed the door behind him. Stood at attention. Waited.
Five seconds passed.
"You took nine minutes," Sylvia said without looking up.
"The East Tower stairs are steep, My Lady."
"The East Tower stairs have not changed in three hundred years. You have walked them over a thousand times."
'And I was stabbed three times last night, but sure, let's blame the stairs.'
"My body was sluggish this morning. I will correct it."
Sylvia's quill finally touched the paper. She wrote three words, set the pen down, and looked up.
Pale violet eyes. Flat. Assessing. The kind of gaze that made you feel like an insect pinned under glass, being examined for defects before being cataloged and filed away.
"Sit."
Revan sat.
He'd expected her to argue back. Something cold and efficient like, "This place is already marked with teleportation magic. Why waste time walking?"
But she hadn't done that.
Sylvia slid a document across the desk. Heavy paper. Official seal at the top. Not the Vespera family crest this time, but something else. A silver crescent moon enclosed in a circle of thorns.
Revan recognized it immediately.
The Imperial Transit Authority.
'A transport mandate.'
"Read it," Sylvia said.
He did.
The document was two pages. Formal language. Legal clauses wrapped in polite phrasing that barely concealed the weight of what they were actually saying.
The summary: House Vespera had been commissioned to escort a sealed cargo shipment via armored rail transport from Valorheim Central Station to Outpost Halgrim in the Borderlands. Departure in forty-eight hours. Duration, four days by express rail. The cargo was classified. The escort team was to consist of Lady Sylvia von Vespera and her personal retinue.
Personal retinue.
That meant him.
'The Borderlands.'
The word sat heavy in his chest. In the original game, the Borderlands were endgame territory. The place where the map ended and the monsters began. A strip of land between the kingdom's outermost settlements and the Dead Zones beyond, where civilization thinned to nothing and the rules that governed the rest of the world simply stopped applying.
He'd never been there. Not in this life, not in the game. And now Sylvia was being asked to escort classified cargo into that wasteland via rail.
The last time Sylvia had escorted "cargo" by train, it turned out to be Crimson Tears worth 100,000 gold coins, guarded by a traitor who tried to steal it, protected by a Master-rank warrior who nearly killed Revan, and supervised by an Archmage who vanished into the night.
'I'm sure this time will be completely different and nothing will go wrong at all.'
"Questions?" Sylvia asked.
Several. About thirty, actually. Starting with "What's in the cargo?" and ending with "Are you planning to order me to solo another ridiculous monster in under five minutes?"
"The escort team," Revan said instead.
"How many?"
"Six. You, myself, and four others assigned by the family."
Revan felt a genuine wave of relief wash over his body.
'Four meat shields.'
If Sylvia decided to throw him at another Master-rank monstrosity and demanded the impossible, he wouldn't have to survive it alone.
He would simply arrange a tragic, heroic sacrifice for the four newcomers. If the enemy didn't kill them fast enough to buy him an opening, Revan was perfectly willing to help them achieve their noble martyrdom himself. A dagger in the back during the chaos of battle, all for the sake of the mission.
It was a comforting thought.
"Departure window?"
"Day after tomorrow. Dawn."
"Route?"
"Valorheim Central to Halgrim. Express line through the Ashenmoor Corridor."
Revan's jaw tightened. Just slightly. Enough that he hoped she didn't notice.
The Ashenmoor Corridor. Three hundred miles of track cutting through the densest concentration of Dead Zones on the continent. Stretches where mana vanished completely, where healing magic stopped working, where every ability that made a Mage dangerous simply ceased to exist.
For warriors like Revan, Dead Zones were uncomfortable. For someone like Sylvia, whose entire combat system was built on mana manipulation, they were something else entirely.
Dangerous.
"You seem tense," Sylvia observed.
"The Ashenmoor Corridor has seventeen recorded Dead Zones along the express route. Some stretches last up to forty minutes without mana."
"I'm aware."
"In those stretches, you would be—"
"I said I'm aware."
Her voice didn't rise. Didn't sharpen. But the temperature in the room dropped by about two degrees, and Revan understood that this particular line of conversation had reached its end.
He closed his mouth. Nodded.
That was how Sylvia operated. She didn't dismiss concern
She dismantled them with solutions, then moved on before you could feel grateful.
But she hadn't done that. She'd just shut it down. No counter. No solution. No cold rationality.
Which meant either she already had a plan she wasn't sharing, or she didn't have one at all.
Revan wasn't sure which possibility unsettled him more.
Sylvia stood. Gathered the documents. Her movements were precise, controlled, every gesture exactly as efficient as it needed to be and nothing more. She walked past him toward the door.
Revan turned his head just enough to watch her back as she crossed the threshold. Her posture was rigidly perfect, a solitary figure carrying weights she refused to delegate. Then she stepped through the frame, and the heavy oak door clicked shut, severing his line of sight.
Silence reclaimed the small room.
Revan remained seated for a long moment, his mind already spinning, dissecting the brief conversation piece by piece.
She was hiding something. The realization wasn't a sudden spark; it was a slow, creeping chill. It wasn't just about her unnatural silence regarding the Dead Zones. It was the glaring void of information about the first train incident.
Ever since that night Sylvia hadn't given him a single clear answer. No debriefing on who the traitor really worked for. No explanation of what she had spent the last week investigating. Just absolute radio silence, followed immediately by another classified rail transport to the middle of nowhere.
His jaw clenched as the scattered pieces in his head began aligning into a very ugly picture.
'Is House Vespera actually involved?'
He stared at the empty doorway where his master had just disappeared, letting out a long, exhausted sigh.