Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 177: Door beneath the dust

Chapter 177: Door beneath the dust

They summoned me at dawn.

No rest. No tea. No time to wash the dried blood from my coat.

The messenger was a second-year from the Honor Guard division—stiff-backed and silent as he handed over the summons scroll. Formal script. Gold crest. A wax seal bearing the sigil of Augustus Evercrest, Headmaster of Noctis Ardentis Academy.

And below it, a name scrawled in precise handwriting that made my skin crawl.

Lysaria Valehart, High Arcanist and Head of the Department of Arcane Theory.

The walk through the eastern tower was quiet. Too quiet.

No students here. Only watchers—faculty members in their flowing robes and polished insignias, whispering behind closed doors. I recognized a few. Others I’d avoided since my appointment.

They looked at me differently now.

Rumors traveled faster than spellfire.

They’d all heard about the Blood Mist. The beast. The trap that should’ve killed a dozen students. And the unstable, illegal runework that stopped it.

The doors to the Headmaster’s chamber were ten feet tall and carved from blackened ironwood. Ancient. Fused with runes older than the academy itself. The moment I stepped through them, the air changed.

Thicker. Like being submerged.

Augustus Evercrest stood at the far end, hands clasped behind his back, facing the massive stained-glass window that overlooked the northern cliffs. His hair was white-gold, short and sharp. His long coat shimmered faintly with active wards. The man was a fortress—unmoving, unreadable.

Lysaria sat to the side. Ink-dark robes. Hair coiled in a severe bun. Her eyes, as always, were scalpel-precise.

Neither spoke.

So I did.

"You summoned me."

Evercrest turned. The weight of his gaze hit like a hammer. "Lucian Drelmont. Or should I say... what remains of him?"

My jaw clenched. "I don’t understand."

"You will," Lysaria said, rising. Her tone was clinical. "Explain what happened in the forest. From the moment the mist appeared to the moment it died."

So I did.

I gave them the truth, shaped at the edges. Not a lie, but a weaponized version of the facts. I spoke of student safety, improvised theory, risk, and control. I admitted to creating the rune net.

I left out the masked figure. The words about my soul.

When I finished, Lysaria tapped her quill once against the table.

"Your theory," she said. "Where did you learn it?"

I met her gaze. "I invented it. Using fractured models from Thalorien’s Spiral Codex, cross-referenced with the Rosenthal Disjunction."

A pause. Lysaria’s nostrils flared. She knew those works were restricted.

Evercrest spoke. "You claim innovation."

"I claim necessity."

Lysaria frowned. "Or desperation. Your method stitched together unstable formulas from sealed records. The runes you used react to soul-pattern resonance. That’s... not something a battlefield strategist should be experimenting with."

"No," I said. "But it worked."

Silence.

Then Evercrest stepped forward, slowly, each movement like a bell toll.

"You’ve protected your students," he said. "You’ve wielded forbidden theory. You’ve drawn the eyes of something ancient."

That last part froze me. I didn’t react. I couldn’t.

Lysaria looked at the Headmaster sharply. "Augustus—"

He raised a hand. "The creature in the woods was marked. Bound to an old pattern. You severed it."

"I did what I had to," I said evenly.

Evercrest studied me. "You are not dismissed."

Then he turned back toward the window.

"You are... watched. And the game, as you know, has begun."

Back in my quarters, I slumped into the chair like a man returning from war. Outside, the sun rose through a crimson haze.

Someone had drawn attention to me.

Maybe the masked figure. Maybe the Mist itself.

But the most dangerous thing wasn’t that they noticed me.

It was that Augustus Evercrest had noticed them too.

And he wasn’t just a Headmaster.

He was a player.

Just like me.

They say the Academy’s bones shift at night.

Not metaphorically. I mean it quite literally.

Somewhere deep below the eastern wing, between the sealed catacombs and forgotten relic vaults, there’s a place the architects never claimed, the schematics never mapped, and the students never speak of. It has no formal name.

But I know what it’s called.

The Atramentum Vault.

It took me four hours to find the path. Three bribes. One duel. And the last shred of dignity I had left when I traded my professor’s crest for a key fragment smuggled out by an expelled alchemy student who now ran an underground card table near the training pits.

The key was cold to the touch—bone-white, threaded with obsidian veins, humming with resonance.

The entrance was sealed beneath the Hall of Runic Reconstruction. I waited until curfew, cloaked myself with a misdirection glyph, and slipped past the Warden Shades. At the back of a collapsed hallway, hidden beneath a collapsed statue of Saint Ilarien, I found it:

A door made of melted steel and dragonbone, covered in dust thicker than a library’s worth of secrets.

I pressed the key into the hollow.

It screamed.

A low, psychic wail that bled into my thoughts, scraping against my spine.

The door opened anyway.

Beyond it was a spiraling descent—narrow steps slick with moss, air thick with a metallic tang. Old torches flared to life, reacting to presence alone.

Each step downward felt like an invitation I couldn’t refuse.

At the bottom lay a chamber filled with sarcophagi, sealed scroll cases, broken soul mirrors, and a thousand items that should never have survived history. But at the center, beneath a warded glass case, was what I came for:

The Severance Manuscript.

Not the cheap fragments in the upper libraries.

This was the original.

Bound in living parchment, sealed by six runes, humming with something more than magic—memory.

I approached.

And then I heard her voice.

"I should have known you’d come here eventually."

Lysaria Valehart stood in the archway, arms folded, eyes glowing faintly with suppressed irritation—or maybe amusement. I couldn’t tell with her.

"You’ve been watching me," I said.

"I always watch dangerous things," she replied, stepping into the room. "And lately, you’ve been bleeding red flags like a gutted deer."

"I need what’s in here," I said.

She stared at me. "So did the last one who opened it. He’s still here, in case you’d like to ask his bones what he learned."

I ignored her and reached toward the seal.

The sixth rune lit up.

Lysaria didn’t stop me. But she whispered something that stuck:

"You’re not just changing fate, Lucian. You’re challenging it. And fate does not like to be challenged."

I broke the seal anyway.

The book opened.

And the first page bled.

The page didn’t bleed ink.

It bled memory.

The moment the Severance Manuscript opened, something inside me shuddered. Not in fear, but in recognition—as though a part of me I had long buried whispered, Welcome home.

The first glyph on the parchment twisted as I looked at it. Not drawn. Not written. Alive. It pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat.

I couldn’t help it—I touched it.

And the world fractured.

Not shattered, no. That would’ve been merciful.

This was slower. Like glass under strain. Reality pulled taut. My surroundings warped into a landscape of grayscale ash and firelight. The sarcophagi vanished. The room vanished. Lysaria, too.

I stood in a field of swords.

Each blade planted into scorched soil, each humming with power, echoing with the screams of those who had once wielded them.

A voice thundered through the sky—not loud, but so deep it felt older than sound.

___

"Severance is not a swordform. It is an inheritance. A wound passed down."

___

In front of me appeared a man with platinum blonde hair, clad in armor made from chain-bound runes. His eyes were mirrors—empty, hollow, reflecting me.

___

"Lucian Drelmont," he said. "Do you even know what it means to bear our name?"

___

I wanted to answer. I tried. But my mouth was sewn shut with silence.

___

"You sever bonds, yes. But have you ever wondered why? Not all chains are prisons. Some are lifelines."

___

The field began to crumble, the swords turning to ash. One remained—an obsidian blade with a hilt made of bone and silver thread.

I reached for it.

The man stepped forward.

___

"Severance is a vow: to cut away all that binds, until only truth remains. Are you willing to lose everything to reach that truth?"

___

I gritted my teeth. Managed to nod.

He gave no approval. Only stepped back as the blade rose into the air and pierced my chest.

No pain. Just clarity.

I collapsed back into the vault.

Lysaria knelt beside me, one hand glowing with healing magic, the other gripping her staff like a lifeline.

"You’ve been unconscious for three hours," she muttered. "The manuscript nearly killed you."

I looked at my hands. They glowed faintly—runic symbols etched into the skin, burning then fading.

"I saw him," I said. "One of the First Drelmonts."

Lysaria’s eyes widened, just briefly. "That book doesn’t give visions. It devours minds."

"Not mine."

She hesitated. Then: "What did you learn?"

"That Severance isn’t just a technique. It’s a truth. One that hurts."

I stood, unsteady. But the weight of the manuscript no longer crushed me.

Because it had accepted me.

The sixth seal was broken.

And now... I could see the next Chapter waiting, still locked behind a name written in black flame:

Roderick Vaughn.

And the fate I’d promised to change.