Perfection was my prison. Lyra's assessment was a mirror I couldn't unsee. My persona wasn't just a disguise; it was a fortress without a single crack in its battlements, and that very invulnerability was what made it suspect. To survive her audit, I had to become more human. And humanity is defined by its flaws.
I needed to stage an accident. Not a grand, temporal one, but a simple, mundane, and utterly human mistake. It had to be public. It had to be believable. And it had to be just flawed enough to satisfy Lyra's ears.
The opportunity arose in the Grand Library. Lyra was conducting interviews at a table in the center, her oversized ears subtly twitching as she listened to a nervous professor explain the academy's mana-conservation protocols. I was on a rolling ladder, tasked with dusting the highest shelves of the Restricted Section, a section whose "restrictions" were, to me, more of a suggestion.
The plan was simple. I would "lose my balance." I would fall. Not a catastrophic fall, just a clumsy, graceless tumble from a moderate height. Enough to look painful and embarrassing, but not enough to cause serious injury. A perfect, calculated imperfection.
I took a breath, ready to execute my pratfall with Oscar-worthy precision. But as my foot deliberately slipped from the rung, I felt it—a genuine, unexpected shift. A structural flaw in the ladder's enchantment, a hairline fracture in the mana-conduit that provided its stability, chose that exact moment to fail.
My controlled stumble turned into a genuine, uncontrolled fall. The ladder wobbled violently. My meticulously planned trajectory was gone, replaced by the chaotic physics of a real accident. I was heading not for the relatively soft pile of old carpets I had positioned, but directly for a sharp-edged reading desk—and worse, for Elara, who was quietly studying there, her back turned.
Time, as it always did in genuine moments of need, became my clay.
I couldn't stop it entirely. Lyra would feel the temporal fracture. But I could sculpt the fall.
In the span of the single second it took me to plummet, I performed a symphony of micro-edits.
· I increased the air resistance against my right side, creating a slight spin.
· I softened the molecular bonds of the wooden desk leg I was about to hit, making it momentarily pliable.
· I guided a gust of air from a nearby open window to nudge a stack of parchments off a shelf, creating a distracting noise.
To any observer, it was a chaotic, messy accident. I crashed into the desk with a painful thud, my shoulder taking the brunt of the impact on the now-softened wood, which still felt solid enough to bruise. The ladder clattered to the floor. The parchments fluttered down around us like confused birds.
Elara jumped up with a gasp, her chair scraping loudly. "Leo!"
I lay in a heap, groaning. The pain in my shoulder was real. The embarrassment was real. This was no performance.
"Clumsy... I'm so sorry, Elara," I mumbled, pushing myself up and wincing. I made sure my voice was laced with genuine pain and flustered apology.
The library was silent for a moment, all eyes on me. Then, the expected voice cut through the quiet.
"Are you quite alright?" Lyra was standing over me, her ledger in hand. Her large ears were aimed at me like sensors. She wasn't looking at the fallen ladder or the scattered parchments. She was listening to me.
"I'm fine, ma'am," I said, my voice tight. "Just... clumsy. My foot slipped." I let a tremor of genuine, post-adrenaline shock into my words. It wasn't hard.
Her quill hovered. She was listening to the truth of my statement. The pain was real. The clumsiness, from a certain point of view, was real. The fear of having nearly hurt someone was real. I had woven a tapestry of truth around a single, necessary lie of omission.
I saw her ears relax slightly. The dissonance she had noted before—the perfect, echo-less silence—was gone, replaced by the messy, harmonic chaos of a genuine human moment. There was the sharp note of pain, the flat tone of embarrassment, the wobbly pitch of relief. It was music to her.
"It would seem," she said, her voice losing its sharp edge of suspicion, "that even the most mundane tasks carry risk. You should have that shoulder looked at."
She made a note in her ledger. I didn't need to see it to know what it said: "Subject Leo. Displayed observable physical fallibility and emotional distress consistent with a non-threat. Previous assessment of 'perfected silence' may be an anomaly of personality, not power."
As she walked away, Elara helped me to my feet, her green eyes filled with concern. "That was a nasty fall. Are you sure you're okay?"
"I'll live," I said, rubbing my shoulder. And I meant it.
Kael, who had witnessed the whole thing, snorted from a nearby table. "Typical Null. Can't even handle a ladder." There was no suspicion in his voice, only contempt. It was the most comforting thing he'd ever said to me.
I had done it. I had introduced a flaw into my masterpiece. I had traded a layer of my invincible armor for the fragile credibility of being ordinary.
But as I gathered the scattered parchments, my mind returned to that single, critical moment—the genuine failure of the ladder's enchantment. It wasn't wear and tear. It was a targeted, subtle sabotage. Someone had weakened that specific ladder, knowing I, or someone, would use it.
Lyra wasn't the only hunter in the library. The Scorpion had sent its auditor to listen, but it had also sent a saboteur to act. They were testing me, pushing me, trying to force a reaction.
I looked at the bruise already forming on my shoulder—a real, physical mark of a very real attack.
The game was far from over. It had just become more dangerous. Because now, my enemies knew that to find the god, they had to first break the man. And they were willing to break anyone standing near him to do it.
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