I, The Villainess, Will Seduce All The Heroines Instead
Chapter 132: Training As A Team (3)

Chapter 132: Training As A Team (3)

Day one of training with Professor Sirius began with incense, star charts, and a detailed philosophical rant about lunar tides and emotional displacement.

By hour two, Raphael’s sword was halfway buried in a tree out of sheer frustration.

"Alright," Sirius clapped, barefoot again in the middle of the training circle, "today we embrace the Art of Astral Positioning. Which means—"

"—we’re drawing chalk circles," Penelope grumbled, glaring at the elaborate spiral she’d been sketching for twenty minutes.

"Correct!" Sirius chirped. "But with purpose. You see, energy flows best through geometry aligned to starborne harmonics. If you fight within the pattern, the universe fights with you."

"Professor," Isolde said flatly, "I am not sure the universe knows how to swing a blade."

Sirius didn’t seem to hear her. He was busy adjusting Raphael’s stance. "Left foot slightly more southward—there, yes! That aligns your spine with the Orion declination. Feel the difference?"

Raphael did not.

"I don’t mean to be rude," he said finally, as Sirius began humming to his compass, "but this is... strange."

"Strange? Strange is subjective. What’s strange to a fish is normal to the stars."

"That makes no sense," Penelope deadpanned.

Verena, standing by the edge of the circle, was unusually quiet. She hadn’t expected easy, but she had expected Sirius to be more... helpful?

Instead, they’d spent the last three sessions drawing constellations in dirt, throwing pebbles at pendulums, and chasing their "cosmic center of gravity."

She scratched her head. "Professor, I appreciate the philosophical side of this, really. But our Novae Covenant is supposed to be getting combat-ready. I’m just not sure how... spirals and stargazing help us fight actual threats."

Sirius tilted his head, his usual smile faltering for just a moment.

"I see," he said quietly.

He looked up at the sky, as if searching for some celestial permission to proceed.

"I forget sometimes," he added. "That mortals want swords before stars."

There was a long pause.

Then, Sirius raised his hand and the constellations above them shifted. Not just overhead, but mirrored on the ground in flickers of silver light.

In a blink, the chalk circles became radiant lines of force, threading around each of them. Raphael’s sword twitched in its sheath. Isolde’s dagger vibrated. Penelope gasped as her boots lifted slightly off the ground.

Sirius looked back at them, his voice suddenly sharp and clear.

"You want combat? Then learn how the stars move. Learn to predict, to align, to strike at the moment the universe breathes with you, not against."

He pointed at Verena.

"She’s already halfway there. The rest of you? You can scoff. Or you can adapt."

Sirius was trying to do something far more intricate than teach them how to swing swords. He was recalibrating their instincts to move with the flow of the cosmos rather than brute-forcing against it.

Each drill, strange as it seemed, was designed to subtly attune their bodies to the ebb and pull of celestial forces, the spin of constellations, the surge of planetary tides, the invisible rhythm of the Zodiac Weave.

He wanted them to feel battle the way the stars did: not as chaos, but as choreography.

Their footwork echoed the arcs of planetary orbits; their strikes, timed to the pulse of lunar shifts.

It was unconventional, certainly, but Sirius wasn’t shaping warriors.

"Whatever..." Raphael huffed, letting his sword clatter to the ground with a dramatic clang.

Unfortunately for Professor Sirius, Raphael was not the meditative, flow-with-the-stars type.

He was an impatient war machine in pretty armor, a man who preferred blood-soaked brawls over cosmic metaphors.

Thinking? Optional. Hitting things? Absolutely essential.

His Natal Affinity suited him perfectly: a raw, unrelenting force of martial dominance with all the subtlety of a meteor strike.

"You call this training?" Raphael scoffed, stepping forward with a dangerous glint in his eye. "I’ve seen more action in a garden club. Do you even know what battle looks like, Professor?"

Sirius looked up from where he was drawing a constellation diagram in the dirt with a stick, completely unbothered. "Hmm. I suppose you’d rather spar than star-map. Very well." He straightened slowly, brushing imaginary dust from his robes. "Let’s dance."

Raphael’s grin widened. "Gladly."

The duel was instant chaos.

Raphael lunged like a beast let loose, each strike heavy and wild.

But Sirius moved like starlight, slipping just out of reach, redirecting blows with nothing but a flick of his fingers and a tilt of his wrist.

He didn’t block; he flowed. Each evasion felt like a prediction, each counter a whisper from the heavens themselves.

Within minutes, Raphael was panting, his strikes slowing.

"You’re hesitating," Sirius said lightly, dodging another swing. "That’s not very warlord of you."

"I am not—!" Raphael roared, swinging wide.

Too wide.

Sirius sidestepped, flicked his hand, and with a burst of Zodiacal magic, sent Raphael sprawling into the dirt, disarmed and gasping.

The professor offered a hand, smiling.

"Lesson one: even war needs rhythm."

***

Verena barely made it out of the training field alive or at least with her pride intact.

After an hour of being flung, spun, and "gently re-aligned with the planetary flow," she was convinced Sirius had finally lost the last of his sanity to the stars.

Cosmic synchronization through movement, he’d said. What he meant was interpretative dancing with the occasional roundhouse kick and a suspicious number of hip sways.

She was drenched.

Hair plastered to her face, sweat soaking through her uniform, and limbs vibrating with the kind of exhaustion only inflicted by overzealous celestial warriors.

Verena grimaced as she yanked her boot free from a particularly stubborn patch of mud and limped toward the edge of the practice grounds, trailing grass stains and resentment.

Waiting beneath the sprawling branches of a silverleaf tree, arms folded, was Professor Perasius. His coat flared slightly in the breeze, long and gray like some judicial ghost.

"Professor," Verena greeted, dragging her sleeve across her forehead. "Came to arrest me mid-sword lunge? That’d be a first."

His lips twitched, but it wasn’t quite a smile. "Hardly. Though I admit it would’ve been poetic. Maybe I’d finally see if you bleed stardust like Sirius claims."

"I bleed sarcasm and old coffee at this point," she muttered, trudging alongside him.

They walked in silence for a while, the wind carrying the distant holler of Sirius from the field behind them—something about "aligning your solar plexus with Saturn’s gravitational spiral."

Verena rolled her eyes. "You’d think he was training dancers for an astral ballet."

Perasius didn’t respond, just handed her the manila file he’d been holding.

"Any leads?" she asked, flipping it open without much hope.

"We scrubbed Saphira’s memories until she got a migraine. Cross-referenced timelines, checked leyline interference, tracked anomalies, even dragged that poor divination student out of class to triple-scry the area." His voice was steady but weary.

"And me?" Her voice was quieter now, tense despite herself.

He stopped walking and looked at her, the file now closed again in his hand. "You’re temporarily excused. No new evidence. No new witnesses. For now, you’re in the clear."

"Thanks," she muttered, already turning away.

"Verena," Perasius called after her, his voice firm but not unkind. "If anything changes—even a flicker—you know we’ll come knocking."

She didn’t look back, only raised a hand in acknowledgment as she walked away.

Of course they would. Nothing ever stayed buried for long at Irasios Academy.

The halls of the student dormitory echoed with her boots, each step strangely loud in the otherwise familiar quiet.

Despite everything, the place hadn’t changed. The chipped corner on the third stair still snagged robes.

She paused before her door.

Her hand hovered just shy of the handle. Her heart thudded, not with fear, but something quieter, softer. Nervousness.

Sera’s behind that door. And probably Evelyn. Maybe even Beatrice.

They hadn’t seen her since the investigation began. She hadn’t been allowed visitors often during the internal inquiry. Not even letters.

She took a shaky breath and whispered to herself, "Okay. Don’t cry if they hug you. You’re still scary. You’re still cool. You have emotional boundaries. You’re a menace, not a marshmallow."

And then she opened the door.

"VERENA!"

Three bodies slammed into her at once like heat-seeking missiles.

Sera launched herself at Verena’s waist.

Sera followed by delivering a sharp, affectionate smack to the back of her head. "Don’t die on us again, you ungrateful noodle!"

Evelyn was fussing over her like an anxious medic, gently grabbing her face and checking her eyes. "You look pale! Did they feed you? Did they give you water? Oh my god, blink twice if they tortured you!"

They were loud. They were ridiculous. They were her friends.

Something inside her uncoiled, something that had been locked tight ever since she’d been called in for questioning. Warmth bloomed in her chest.

A slow, incredulous smile crept across her face.

"Okay, okay, I’m alive," she said, trying to wriggle free. "Can you not snap my spine to prove it?"

Beatrice sniffled but grinned, arms still vice-locked around her. "You’re home."

Verena looked past them into the room.

The cluttered desks, the half-eaten snacks, the trail of someone’s socks leading from the bed to the window, the scent of lavender soap clashing with citrus potions. It was chaotic. Messy. Loud.

It was home.

"Yeah," she said, finally lifting her arms to pull them all into a proper hug. "I’m home."