Episode-219

Words : 1576 Updated : Sep 29th, 2025

Chapter : 437 But the eighty-year-old Major General stood firm. He had faced down Senate oversight committees armed with far sharper questions and far greater power than this haughty princess and her puffed-up peacock of a rival. He had learned, in a lifetime of high-stakes encounters, that the best defense was not a retreat, but a calm, unshakeable, and deeply infuriating, composure. He met the Princess’s icy gaze, then let his own sweep over the smirking, triumphant face of Victor. He offered them both a small, almost imperceptible smile. It was not a smile of amusement. It was the smile of a man who knows he is holding a hand full of cards his opponents don't even know are in the deck. “An excellent question, Your Highness,” Lloyd began, his voice calm, level, betraying none of the internal pressure. He addressed Isabella, but his words were clearly intended for the entire room. “What qualifications could a disgraced former student possibly possess? It is a logical inquiry.” He paused, letting the silence stretch, building the tension. He then turned his back on them, walking slowly towards the massive slate board that covered one wall. He picked up a fresh piece of charcoal. “Perhaps,” he said, his back still to them, his voice a quiet, almost musing, murmur, “the best qualification for teaching how to win... is a profound, intimate, and deeply personal understanding of how to lose.” He turned back to face them, the charcoal held loosely in his hand. “I know what it is to fail, Lord Victor. I know the taste of humiliation. I know the sting of inadequacy. I suspect,” his gaze was sharp, pointed, “it is an experience with which you are not yet intimately familiar. But you will be. Failure is the greatest, and most brutal, of all teachers.” Victor’s sneer faltered, a flicker of confusion in his eyes. This wasn't the defensive apology he had been expecting. This was... a philosophy lesson? “My ‘history’ at this Academy, as you so elegantly put it,” Lloyd continued, his gaze sweeping over the students now, drawing them into the conversation, “was indeed a litany of failures. I failed because I tried to play a game for which I was not suited. I tried to be a powerful mage, when my talent for it is minimal. I tried to be a mighty warrior, when my physical prowess is merely adequate. I tried to fit into a system that was designed to reward a specific, and very narrow, definition of strength.” He looked directly at Victor again, his expression one of almost clinical detachment. “You, Victor, are a product of that system. You are its perfect champion. You are strong, you are talented in the conventional arts, you are the apex predator in this particular, well-manicured pond. And for that, I congratulate you. You have mastered the game as it is currently played.” He paused, then his voice dropped, becoming harder, sharper. “But you have never once stopped to ask if you are playing the right game.” The air in the room shifted. The students were leaning forward now, their earlier skepticism forgotten, replaced by a dawning, intense fascination. This was a line of reasoning they had never heard from any of their other tutors. “This class,” Lloyd declared, gesturing to the workshop around them, “is not about mastering the old game. It is about inventing a new one. It is about understanding that power is not just a sword or a spell. Power,” his voice resonated with the conviction of a man who had built an empire from soap, “is logistics. It is economics. It is innovation. It is the ability to look at a problem—a ballista, a supply chain, a commercial market—and see not just what it is, but what it could be. It is the power of the mind, Victor. A power for which, I suspect, you have very little aptitude.” The insult, delivered with such calm, analytical precision, struck Victor with the force of a physical blow. He stared, his face turning a shade of furious crimson, his hand clenching and unclenching on the hilt of his practice sword. He had come here for a simple, satisfying bullying session. He was now embroiled in a philosophical debate he was comprehensively losing, in front of an audience of his peers, and a deeply unimpressed Princess. He was being outmaneuvered, out-thought, made to look like a simple-minded brute. And he hated it. Desperate to regain control, to drag the conflict back onto familiar, physical ground, he abandoned all pretense of wit. He lunged for the most obvious, most childish, and most politically suicidal, insult he could think of. Chapter : 438 “The power of the mind?” Victor snarled, his voice a low, ugly growl. He pointed a trembling, accusatory finger at Lloyd. “Is that what you call it? Hiding behind your family’s name, your father’s influence? You are no innovator! You are a failure! A disgrace who would still be a nobody if not for the fact that you were lucky enough to be born an Arch Duke’s son! Your father, the great Roy Ferrum, must be so profoundly, deeply, ashamed of the weakling he has for an heir!” The room went absolutely, deathly, silent. The insult was so egregious, so far beyond the bounds of acceptable noble rivalry, that the air itself seemed to freeze. To insult an heir was a grave offense. But to publicly insult an Arch Duke, to question his judgment, to mock his relationship with his own son... that was not just an insult. That was treason. A political crime of the highest order. Borin Ironhand’s jaw dropped. Pip the gnome actually ducked behind his workbench. The other students stared, their faces pale with shock. They were no longer spectators at a debate; they were witnesses to a political suicide. Princess Isabella, who had been observing the exchange with a kind of cool, detached contempt for both participants, suddenly went rigid. Her icy-blue eyes, which had been narrowed in disdain, now widened with a flicker of genuine, shocked alarm. She was a ruler. She understood the lines that could not be crossed. And Victor, in his foolish, arrogant rage, had just vaulted over one with both feet. But before she could even think to intervene, before she could utter a single, sharp word to shut Victor down, Victor, lost in the red mist of his own fury, made his final, fatal, mistake. He wasn’t done. He turned his sneer towards the memory of the woman he had only ever heard of in whispers, the Duchess whose quiet grace was legendary. “And your mother!” Victor spat, the words a venomous spray. “The sainted Duchess Milody! So refined! So delicate! She must spend her nights weeping into her silken pillows, wondering what cosmic crime she committed to be cursed with such a coddled, useless, failure for a son!” The line was not just crossed. It was obliterated. The very air in the classroom seemed to crack. The ambient hum of magic ceased. The sunlight slanting through the windows seemed to dim. The world held its breath. And in the center of it all, Lloyd Ferrum, who had been a mask of calm, almost bored, indifference, changed. It was not a sudden, explosive transformation. It was a quiet, terrifying, absolute shift. The faint, almost lazy smile vanished from his lips. The analytical light in his eyes was extinguished, replaced by a cold, flat, emptiness that was more terrifying than any blaze of fury. The air around him dropped ten degrees, a chilling, absolute stillness descending upon him. The Major General, the cynical eighty-year-old, the awkward nineteen-year-old—they were all gone. All that remained was something ancient, something cold, something that had been woken from a long, deep sleep. And it was very, very, angry. He took a single, slow, deliberate step towards Victor. And in that moment, everyone in the room, from the arrogant Viscount’s heir to the powerful Princess, felt a new kind of fear. A primal, instinctual fear. The fear of a small, foolish animal that has just realized it has spent the last five minutes gleefully, stupidly, poking a sleeping dragon with a very sharp stick. And the dragon was now, finally, awake. — The silence in the Special Category classroom was no longer just the absence of sound; it was a physical presence, a suffocating pressure that seemed to suck the very air from the room. The cheerful, sunlit workshop had become a tomb, the vibrant energy of the students frozen into a tableau of pale, wide-eyed terror. They were staring not at a professor, but at a predator, at the chilling, absolute stillness that had descended upon Lloyd Ferrum. The transformation was terrifying in its subtlety. There was no grand explosion of power, no dramatic flaring of an aura. The lazy, almost amused, young nobleman had simply... vanished. In his place stood something else, something ancient and cold. His posture hadn't changed, but his presence had condensed, becoming something hard and sharp as a shard of obsidian. The faint, mocking smile was gone, replaced by a terrifying, emotionless neutrality. His eyes, dark pools of quiet focus moments before, were now flat, empty voids, reflecting nothing, promising nothing, and in that nothingness, holding the chilling certainty of absolute consequence.

Episode-219

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