The following week after Cassian's crowning ceremony.
It was a Monday morning and the quiet dignity of the Academy did not merely shatter; it was ground to dust under the thunderous, earth-shaking arrival of five massive, griffin-drawn war carriages.
The heavy iron wheels screeched against the cobblestones of the main avenue, sending sparks flying into the morning air.
These were the personal transports of the Most Elite—the highest-ranking third-year senior students who had been absent on a classified, multi-month private expedition instructed directly by Headmaster Alistair. Hardened by real, bloody battlefields at the empire's furthest trenches and brimming with absolute, unyielding aristocratic pride, they were the true apex predators of the student body.
Or so they thought.
The carriage doors flew open, and Julian stepped out, his hand resting aggressively on his dual lightning daggers. He took one deep breath of the academy air, expecting the usual sight of lazy noble cliques, underground gambling rings, and disorganized underclassmen scrambling to bow to his status.
Instead, he froze. His jaw subtly tightened.
The entire campus layout had been completely, systematically overhauled. The casual academic atmosphere was gone, replaced by a chilling, uniform discipline. Thousands of students were moving in tight, highly synchronized poised movements like true aristocrats, their voices locked in rhythmic low murmurs and less chaotic. They weren't wearing their flashy family crests or loose, decorative robes; they wore structured, streamlined uniforms, their movements dripping with the grim aura of a true noble academy. And everywhere Julian looked, students were whispering in hushed, terrified reverence about the "Tyrant Prince's" absolute decrees.
"What the hell happened to this place while we were deploying?" Julian muttered, his lightning mana flaring faintly across his knuckles in sheer irritation.
"It looks less like a school and more like a private noble staging ground. And who is this Second Prince everyone keeps shivering about? Did the royal family drop a toddler into our sector eh?"
"You haven't heard the morning broadcasts, Julian?" a senior girl behind him murmured, her face pale as she clutched a freshly printed imperial broadsheet.
"It's not just the Second Prince anymore. Yesterday afternoon, an official imperial decree was stamped by the Emperor himself. Cassian Valemont has been elevated. He is now the *co-Crown Prince* alongside Adrian. He controls the continental trade lines, he rewrote the border tax codes, and he has a dual right to the obsidian throne."
Julian let out a harsh, mocking laugh, his pride blinding him to the absolute terror in his classmate's eyes.
"A co-Crown Prince? A third-year brat? I don't care what kind of bureaucratic games the royal family is playing while the true elites are away on the front lines. This Academy belongs to the strong, not to pieces of parchment signed by old men in the capital. If this little prince thinks his new crown makes him untouchable up here, he's about to receive a violent reality check."
Seeking to instantly reclaim his lost spotlight and prove the absolute supremacy of the returning third-year veterans, Julian strode straight toward the central training plaza.
There, sitting calmly on an elevated stone chair, was Cassian.
The newly crowned heir was completely unbothered by the grand commotion of the seniors' arrival. He was currently reviewing a massive stack of tactical financial ledgers and trade invoices, his white-gloved fingers flipping through the pages with a practiced, elegant efficiency. Leo and Honda stood like stone sentinels at his flanks, their silver-alloy gauntlets catching the sharp morning sun.
"Prince Cassian!"
Just then Julian's voice boomed across the plaza, his lightning mana exploding outward, casting sharp, violent blue sparks across the fractured cobblestones as he stepped directly onto the lower dais. He threw his arms out, a proud, arrogant sneer contorting his heavily scarred face.
"I don't care what kind of political theater you staged in the capital while we were bleeding for the borders! This is the Senior Sector, and up here, titles mean absolutely nothing without the strength to back them up! I challenge you to a direct, unrestricted duel right here, right now, to show these frightened little birds who actually rules the spires!"
The entire plaza went dead silent. Hundreds of underclassmen stopped their drills, staring at Julian as if he were a dead man walking.
Cassian slowly closed the financial ledger. He didn't rise from his chair. He didn't draw his dark dagger. And he was currently dealing with an absolute, crushing mountain of administrative stress. He had spent the entire night restructuring the empire's dual-heir treasury, navigating his father's complex harem politics, dealing with a severe lack of caffeine, and constantly dodging the suffocating, hyper-fixated glares of two chaotic alpha suitors who kept threatening to duel each other in his hallway.
And right now he didn't need a political debate. He didn't need a formal academic lecture.
He just needed a physical outlet for his massive, throbbing corporate rage.
"A duel?"
Cassian whispered. His voice didn't carry any mana, yet it dropped into a chillingly quiet, hollow note that caused the surrounding air pressure to violently plummet past zero.
Before Julian's eyes could even track the shift, before his high-tier lightning movement could even spark across his heels, Cassian vanished from his stone chair. He didn't use a magic circle. He didn't chant a spell. It was a flawless, silent modern spatial-compression step—a technique that defied the very laws of the empire's primitive magic.
*BOOM!*
Cassian materialized directly inside Julian's blind spot, his posture perfectly upright, his gray silk cloak swirling like smoke. Before the senior could even turn his head, Cassian's white-gloved hand shot forward like an iron vice, catching Julian squarely by his throat.
With a single, brutal surge of raw physical force, Cassian slammed Julian's entire body down into the pristine marble floorboards of the dais. The reinforced stone fractured into a thousand jagged pieces, a cloud of dust exploding outward.
Julian choked, a spray of crimson escaping his lips as his lightning mana instantly fizzled out into pathetic static. He tried to raise his daggers, but Cassian was already moving with absolute, cold-headed mercenary efficiency. Cassian systematically, ruthlessly, and with a terrifying lack of emotion, began beating the top senior to a literal, groaning pulp.
*Crack.*
Cassian's fist shattered Julian's ribs.
*Thud.*
A swift, brutal elbow dislocated the senior's shoulder.
Cassian grabbed Julian by his bloody hair, casually slamming his face into the shattered dirt three consecutive times, his expression completely blank, as if he were simply stamping a series of annoying administrative forms at a desk. It wasn't a fight; it was a complete annihilation.
After a long while of what felt like a complete loss of breath for Julian. Cassian groaned out in relief as he straightened his back feeling much more calm.
"Haa I needed that" he let out a faint chuckle that caused those closest to him flinch as they trail their eyes to the unconscious Julian, wondering if he was still alive.
"Let this be understood by the returning elite," Cassian drawled, his voice completely steady, not a single breath out of place as he stepped over the unconscious, bleeding body of the third-year veteran. He pulled a pristine silk handkerchief from his pocket, casually wiping a single speck of dust from his white but now bloody gloves before tossing the cloth onto Julian's face.
"Your front-line credentials do not impress me. Your aristocratic pride is an unoptimized liability. I am a Crown Prince of this empire, and my authority is absolute."
He glanced up at the remaining four returning seniors, who were standing completely paralyzed at the edge of the courtyard, their weapons half-drawn, their faces turning an absolute, ghostly shade of white.
"If anyone else wishes to audit my executive authority before lunch," Cassian purred, his crimson eyes locking onto them with a predatory glint, "please form an orderly line outside my office and you'll be more than welcome to help me relieve some stress."
"Otherwise, clear this garbage off my plaza. And Elias, hand me the next ledger."
"Right away, Your Highness," Elias replied with a crisp, completely unphased bow, while the rest of the plaza watched the Tyrant Prince return to his paperwork as if he hadn't just dismantled the school's strongest vanguard warrior in under 30 seconds.
*****
The following days felt less like an academic term and more like a high-stakes, low-comedy corporate internship.
Cassian's life had become an endless, repetitive cycle of trying to perform his duties as the newly crowned Co-Crown Prince—managing continental trade logistics and imperial defense budgets—while four of the most powerful third-year seniors treated him like a cross between a god-tier combat instructor and a celebrity.
"Lord Cassian! Lord Cassian!" Celia's voice was the bane of his existence. She was currently hovering three inches to his left, her wind-element aura keeping her floating slightly off the ground so she could match his pace without breaking a sweat.
"I ran the numbers on your strike against Julian yesterday! You exerted four thousand units of force with zero mana expenditure! Was that kinetic optimization? Is it because you eat breakfast on time?...then how many meals do you eat a day?"
Cassian kept walking, his gaze fixed on the horizon, his posture a masterclass in suppressed annoyance.
"Celia. If you don't reduce your volume by fifty decibels, I am going to have the academy's acoustics department redesign your dorm room to be permanently soundproofed with void-glass."
"Aww, he's projecting the threatening aura again!...teach me! teach me! How do you do it?" she squealed to the other four elites, who were currently scurrying behind them like a team of over-caffeinated field researchers.
"See how he uses intimidation to hide his secret training regimen? He's so complex!"
"It's not intimidation, Celia," Silas, the group's stoic earth-elementalist, murmured as he scribbled frantically into a leather-bound notebook.
"It's a deliberate apathetic wall. He's teaching us that silence is a resource, not a lack of content."
Cassian felt an eye twitch.
Throughout his years in this world, throughout his lives, when he had managed black-market arms deals in the middle of civil wars, when he had negotiated peace treaties with dragons.
He had never, in any of his lives, been stalked by five teenagers who were treating his daily walking route to the library as an academic pilgrimage. They hovered all around him every day and night like damned parasites.
They weren't just Julian's lackeys—they were just... *bored*. They had returned from the bloody border trenches to find their rigid, boring hierarchy shattered by a genius third-year prince who was literally rewriting the empire's economic future in his spare time. They didn't want political power; they wanted the "secret sauce" of Cassian's terrifying competence.
Cassian turned a corner, hoping to find refuge in the archives, only to find the five of them immediately pivoting in perfect synchronization as they followed behind him.
"Stop it,"
Cassian said, stopping dead.
The five seniors skidded to a halt, standing at attention like a pack of golden retrievers awaiting a command.
"We are just observing, Your Highness please don't mind us,"
Celia said, her eyes wide, shining with genuine, unadulterated awe.
"We've realized Julian was just an ego-driven fossil. You're the real innovation. We want to be part of the future! We want to learn how to move like you! How to fight like you! How to make the Edrath ministers look like idiots like you!"
Cassian looked at them—the strongest elites of the senior year, their arrogance stripped away, replaced by this strange, obsessive, fanatical loyalty. He looked at their bright, hopeful faces, then at the piles of administrative paperwork he still had to finish before the Emperor's 2:00 PM briefing that were hauled in Elias's arms.
He let out a long, weary, soul-deep sigh that seemed to carry the weight of three lifetimes.
'If I don't die in this stupid novel like the author intended,' Cassian thought.
'Then is my true plot purpose just to become a magnet for obsessive, high-functioning fanatics? I'm essentially a corporate cult leader that lures energetic lunatics wherever I go!' Cassian sighed rubbing his temple before coming into realization.
'But It's–... it's actually kind of efficient, isn't it?'
He reached into his space bag, he pulled out a stack of five sealed, midnight-black Crimson Vanguard tunics, and tossed them into the air towards the five elites.
"Put them on,"
Cassian said flatly, turning his back on them and continuing toward the library.
"The training manual is on the desk in my office. If I catch any of you whining about the workload, or if I hear one more question about my gloves, I will demote you all to the janitorial sector."
There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by the sound of fabric ripping as the five seniors lunged for the tunics as if they were holy relics.
"We won't let you down, Crown Prince!"
Celia shrieked, already struggling to pull the midnight-black drake-hide tunic over her head while hovering mid-air.
Cassian shook his head slowly, his gloved fingers rubbing his temples.
"I am an Adept mage," he whispered to himself, his voice thick with comedic despair.
"I am a sovereign prince. I am not a nursery teacher. So why is everyone so weird?"
He walked into the library, his new, terrifyingly efficient elite guard marching in perfect, eager step behind him, their eyes practically sparkling with admiration.
"Now," Cassian said, sitting down at the central table and sliding a stack of trade invoices toward them.
"You want to follow the ways of the Prince? Then start by auditing these border tax loopholes. And if you make a mistake, don't expect a grade—expect a death sentence."
The seniors didn't hesitate. They sat down, pencils sharpened, their expressions turning from playful curiosity to hardened, professional concentration.
Cassian took a sip of his tea, a faint, tiny corner of his mouth curling upward.
'Well,' he mused,
'—at least the paperwork is getting done.'
*****