Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 191: Training for a war

Chapter 191: Training for a war

I gathered them at dawn again. The same spot. No uniforms. No formalities.

Felix wore three scarves, muttering about fog and ghosts. Wallace brought his toolkit. Garrick was already sweating through his shirt, stretching like we were about to run a marathon. Mira twirled a new cursed ring on her finger, and Julien looked like he’d slept in a tree. Leo groaned the moment he saw the obstacle course I’d built.

Only Cassandra didn’t speak. Just watched me, as if trying to decide which Lucian had shown up today.

I looked them over, each a disaster in their own unique way.

"Alright, children," I said, chalk in one hand, rune-etched stones in the other. "Today, we begin training for a threat that might not exist, from a timeline that isn’t ours, inside a reality that’s already falling apart."

Julien blinked. "So a normal Monday."

"Precisely."

I tossed the stones in the air. They suspended midflight, forming a ring that hummed with dull blue light. "These simulate rune disruption fields. Get too close, and your mana short-circuits. Wallace, you’re up first."

He sputtered. "Why me?!"

"Because I saw an Echo where you exploded. We’re going to make sure you don’t."

Felix turned pale. "What kind of explosion?"

"The kind where your head lands in a tree."

Wallace whimpered but stepped forward. He didn’t explode this time—just got zapped hard enough to leave his hair standing straight. I called it progress.

The others cycled through. Every exercise was absurd, excessive, and borderline illegal.

Mira practiced dark warding under sleep deprivation. Garrick carried Felix while dodging rune pulses. Julien had to duel me using only a wooden spoon.

I wasn’t training them to win.

I was training them to adapt.

To survive the impossible.

Because what the Mirror Echo had shown me wasn’t a beast, or a spell, or even a person.

It was collapse.

Reality. Memory. Identity.

I still didn’t know how to explain it without sounding mad. I only knew one thing:

It started here.

Later that night...

I sat alone at my desk, staring at the cracked mirror again. It hadn’t shattered any further—but it hadn’t healed either.

The Grimoire sat closed beside me, but I could still feel it breathing. Waiting.

A knock interrupted my thoughts.

I opened the door.

It was Roderick Vaughn.

His usual smug confidence was gone.

"Lucian," he said quietly, "we need to talk."

I stepped aside.

He didn’t sit.

"The headmistress called a closed faculty meeting. Something’s wrong with the boundary wards near the Northern Forest."

I went still.

He continued. "She thinks it’s a magical storm, but I’ve patrolled that area for twenty years. It’s not a storm."

"What is it then?"

Roderick looked at me.

"I don’t know. But last night, I saw something moving in the mist. Not a creature. Not a person."

He hesitated.

"It looked like... me."

The room fell into silence.

Echoes.

It’s starting.

Roderick didn’t flinch when he said it. That unnerved me more than anything else. This was a man who had spat in the face of monsters in the old swamps of Drelmont territory and wrestled corrupted beasts with nothing but his bare hands and bad decisions. Seeing fear in his voice?

Yeah, I took that personally.

"What did it do?" I asked.

"It didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Just... stood there, watching me from behind the trees. Like it knew me. Like it was waiting for something."

He paused. "I left the patrol early. Didn’t even report it. Maybe I should have."

"No," I said quietly, "you were right to be cautious."

I walked over to the mirror—the cracked one I’d seen in the Mirror Echo—and stared at the fracture that bisected my reflection like a scar across time. Roderick stepped up beside me, eyes narrowing.

"You know something."

I hesitated.

For a moment, I considered telling him everything: the reincarnation, the visions, the looming fracture in reality. But the words caught in my throat like thorns.

So instead, I said, "I’ve seen what’s coming. Bits and pieces. Like memory bleeding through dreams."

Roderick gave me a sidelong glance. "Do I die?"

The question hit me like a punch to the gut. I forced my voice to remain steady.

"You die a hero," I said. "Protecting students in the Northern Forest. A beast tide. Something beyond normal classifications."

Silence.

Then he laughed. "Figures. Couldn’t go out quietly, huh?"

"Still time to change it."

"You sure about that?"

"No."

But I’d burn the sky trying.

The Next Morning

The academy was quieter than usual.

Fog rolled through the upper courtyards like it had weight. I felt something under it—pressure, almost magnetic. My rune tattoos itched faintly under my sleeves.

I gathered the class again. No practice dummies this time. No rune drills.

Just seven students standing in front of a collapsing instructor with a fractured soul and a time bomb ticking in his chest.

"I’m altering the curriculum," I announced. "Effective immediately."

Leo groaned. "Again?"

"We’re skipping all formal classes until further notice. From now on, you’ll learn combat application, magical improvisation, battlefield logic, and survival conditioning."

Julien grinned. "You mean we get to punch each other with spells?"

"I mean if any of you die because you were waiting for me to give permission, I’ll come back from the grave and slap your ghost."

Felix raised a hand. "This isn’t about me, right?"

"It’s always about you."

Wallace frowned. "Professor... what exactly are we training for?"

I looked him straight in the eye.

"A war that hasn’t started yet. A war that might not ever start. But if it does, no one else will be ready."

Their expressions shifted. Mira’s brow furrowed. Garrick’s posture straightened. Even Cassandra’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"I saw something," I said, voice low. "In a mirror that isn’t a mirror. It showed me all of you—dead. Torn apart. Corrupted. Burned out from the inside."

Leo took a step back. "Wait, wait, what?!"

"I don’t know when. I don’t even know if it’s real. But if I do nothing, it will be."

They all looked at me then. The professor who gave them nicknames like "Spineless" and "Future Corpse." The man who forced them through combat drills in the rain and threw them into debates just to watch them argue.

Not a hero.

Not even someone they were supposed to like.

But right now? I was the only one willing to bleed to keep them alive.

So they listened.

That Night

I couldn’t sleep.

The Grimoire of Patterns pulsed faintly on my desk, open to a page I didn’t remember unlocking. The diagrams on the parchment twisted and reformed, showing mirrors, runes, and silhouettes without faces.

A note had been scrawled in the corner. Not mine.

"This is not the first loop. You’re not the first Lucian."

I stared at it.

My blood ran cold.

Because in the very center of the page—drawn in ink darker than shadow—was the face of Roderick Vaughn.

Split down the middle.

And behind him... seven broken mirrors. Each reflecting a student.

Each fractured.

Each screaming.

You ever stare into a reflection and feel like it’s staring back?

Not metaphorically. I mean really—like some part of you is being watched through the glass, and if you blink wrong, something will crawl through.

That’s what it felt like now.

The Grimoire of Patterns wouldn’t shut. Its pages turned without wind, whispers escaping between symbols I couldn’t read. And that diagram—the one with Roderick and the mirrors—kept reappearing no matter how many times I turned the page.

I tried burning it.

Didn’t work.

Tried stabbing it.

The blade bent.

I even tossed the damn thing out the window. Found it sitting on my bed five minutes later, flipped open to that same cursed page. My hand brushed the rune-carved edge, and suddenly—

Flash.

Roderick. Standing in the forest. Sword drawn.

Behind him: seven flickering mirrors.

One for each student.

And one more. Cracked, bleeding dark mist. Its surface shimmered like oil.

The Seventh Mirror.

"Lucian?" A voice cut through the vision.

I gasped, sucking air like I’d drowned.

Cassandra stood in the doorway of my quarters. Her eyes, too pale for comfort, narrowed as they flicked from the floating grimoire to my sweat-drenched face.

"You’ve seen it now, haven’t you?"

I stared at her.

"What the hell do you mean?"

"I was born under the Seventh Mirror."

Midnight – The Drelmont Archives

Cassandra moved like someone who’d walked these paths before. She led me through corridors sealed off since the Akaran Collapse—vaults no instructor should have access to.

And yet, doors opened.

Runes deactivated.

Dust parted.

"This place..." I muttered.

"It remembers bloodlines," she said. "And I’ve bled enough for it to know mine."

I should have asked questions. Should have demanded answers. But I was too tired, too unnerved. So I followed her into a chamber carved entirely from obsidian, its walls embedded with mirror shards.

"Welcome," she said, "to the Reflection Tomb."

That’s when I saw it—seven full mirrors aligned in a semicircle.

Six intact.

One shattered.

She pointed at the cracked one.

"Each student under your care reflects a potential. These are not predictions. They’re possibilities. Realities that will exist if not changed."

"And that one?" I asked.

"The Seventh Mirror reflects the hidden one. The anomaly. The outsider."

I blinked.

"...Me?"

"No," she whispered. "Me."

My breath caught.

"But why show me this?"

"Because something is feeding on the futures of others. Twisting the mirrors. Corrupting the paths. And I think—" she paused, her voice suddenly fragile, "—I think it’s using you to do it."

Meanwhile – Faculty Tower

Roderick gripped the edge of his desk as another tremor rolled through the walls. The lantern above his head flickered.

One of the runes on his wall—protective, ancient, designed by the founding instructors—shattered without a sound.

Blood began to drip from its cracks.

The Northern Forest was stirring early.

Too early.

And it wasn’t just beasts this time.

Something old had awakened.

Something beneath the roots.