Charisma 100: My Academy Life As A Heartbreaking Commoner Chapter 264: The Starlight Ball 3

Sylceris grabbed her arm.

"Aegis, get up. Get up right now."

Aegis didn’t move. She stayed on her knees, her palms flat against the marble floor, her eyes closed. She could feel the construct beneath her, massive and dense, a coiled serpent of shadow energy waiting to strike. The hum of it vibrated through her hands, through her knees, through every bone in her body.

[Oh, I can feel it in the air. The blast is going to happen right here.]

"Are you insane?" Sylceris pulled at her arm, hard, trying to drag her to her feet. "The detonation is in minutes. If you’re in the radius when it—"

"Sylceris." Aegis opened her eyes and looked up at her. "Go."

"I’m not leaving you here to die!"

"Go."

Sylceris stared down at her, her dark eyes wide with terror. She was afraid for Aegis. Despite everything, despite the betrayal, despite all of it, she was afraid for her.

"Please," Sylceris whispered.

"I’ll be fine," Aegis replied.

[I hope.]

Selene appeared at the edge of the ballroom, two inquisitors at her flanks. She saw Aegis kneeling on the floor, saw the green-black energy beginning to pool in the air above her, and her face went white.

"Aegis, what are you—"

For a moment, a flash of memory cut through her focus.

Nazraya’s office, shadow magic pouring into her back, cycling it through her pathways while her body screamed. Then Rosanna’s hands, pure aether flooding her system, stretching her wider and wider while she tasted copper and fought to stay conscious.

[That felt like I was gonna have a heart attack every single time. I wonder what this will feel like.]

Then, the construct detonated.

It didn’t explode outward, not yet.

The first stage was emergence, the stored energy materializing from its hidden pocket beneath the floor and condensing into physical form. A sphere appeared in the air above Aegis, small, no bigger than a fist, glowing emerald green with veins of black crackling across its surface. Beautiful and terrible and containing enough Umbral power to kill every living thing in a hundred meters.

For one second, it just hung there.

Aegis reached up and grabbed it.

The pain was immediate and absolute. Green-black magic erupted from the sphere and poured into her hands, up her arms, through her chest, flooding her aether pathways with more energy than any human body was ever meant to hold. Lightning crackled across her skin, arcing from her shoulders to the marble floor, and Aegis screamed through clenched teeth as her vision went white.

[CYCLE IT. JUST LIKE BEFORE. SPINE TO CHEST TO ARMS TO LEGS TO CORE AND BACK AGAIN.]

She pushed.

The shadow energy fought her, wild and violent, nothing like the controlled doses Nazraya had fed her. This was a weapon of mass destruction’s worth of Umbral magic trying to rip her apart from the inside, and Aegis shoved it through her pathways by force, one circuit at a time.

MP: 830 → 900

Green-black lightning crackled across her body, lashing the marble, scorching lines into the floor around her knees. Across the ballroom, Selene was shouting something Aegis couldn’t hear over the roar of energy in her ears.

MP: 900 → 970

[MORE. KEEP GOING. DON’T STOP.]

The sphere was shrinking in her hands, its energy draining into her with each cycle. Aegis’s pathways burned, stretched beyond anything she’d trained for, her body shaking so violently her teeth rattled. Blood ran from her nose and dripped onto the marble.

Sylceris was walking toward her. Aegis saw her through the haze of green-black energy, bronze skin lit by the crackling lightning, her face twisted with horror and determination, like she was going to try to pull the sphere away or absorb some of it herself or do something equally stupid and heroic.

Aegis threw a hand out. Aether Pulse. The burst of energy caught Sylceris in the chest and shoved her back across the marble, sliding her ten feet away.

[STAY BACK.]

MP: 960 → 1040

The sphere was the size of a marble now. The energy flooding Aegis’s body was tapering, the wild torrent becoming a stream, then a trickle. Her pathways were screaming, every nerve in her body on fire, but the technique was working. The same technique she’d practiced a hundred times over three weeks, taking mana from an origin that wasn’t her own body and making it hers.

The pinnacle of aether weaving. The absorbing of mana.

MP: 1040 → 1100

The sphere vanished. The last of its energy cycled through Aegis’s body, from spine to chest to arms to legs to core, and settled. The green-black lightning died. The roaring stopped. The ballroom went silent.

Aegis knelt on the scorched marble, her hands empty, her body trembling, blood dripping from her nose and her ears and the corners of her eyes. Every inch of her hurt. She couldn’t feel her fingers. She couldn’t feel her legs.

MP: 1100/1100

[I did it.]

[I actually—]

The world tilted sideways. The marble floor rushed up to meet her and she caught herself on one hand, then the other hand gave out too, and she was lying on the cold floor staring at the scorched lines her own body had burned into the stone.

[... funny. I can’t feel anything anymore.]

Her vision blurred. The enchanted lights on the ceiling smeared into streaks of blue and silver. Somewhere far away, someone was screaming her name. Talia, maybe. Or Sylceris. Or both.

[I’m tired.]

The world went black.

---

Fluorescent lights.

That was the first thing she noticed. Harsh, flat, buzzing fluorescent lights in a white ceiling with water stains in the corner. The kind of lights you only found in one type of building.

Aegis was standing in a hallway. A hospital hallway. Linoleum floors, off-white walls, the smell of antiseptic and recycled air and bad coffee. A nurses’ station to her left, unoccupied. A row of rooms to her right, each with a small window in the door.

She looked down at herself. She was wearing the black dress from the Ball. Her hands were clean. No blood, no burns, no scorch marks. She felt fine, physically, like the pain and the explosion and the screaming had happened to someone else.

[Where am I?]

She knew where she was. She knew before she looked through the window. She knew from the smell, from the lights, from the specific shade of ugly beige on the walls. She’d spent enough time in places like this to recognize them in her sleep.

She walked to the third door on the right and looked through the window.

A girl lay in the hospital bed, thin and pale, her brown hair limp against the pillow. Tubes ran from her arms to machines that beeped in steady rhythm. A television mounted on the wall was playing something with the sound off. On the bedside table, a handheld gaming console sat with its screen dark.

Emily.