Omar retracted his hand to his side. "What do you want?" he asked, still facing the mountain that began to heal back to its normal form.
Marie shook her head to refocus on what she came for. "I just wanted to make sure you are alright."
He fixed his hair and sighed. "I am good. Just needed to blow off some steam."
Omar turned around and got his shirt from the ground. "I fixed the mountain. There shouldn't be any problems."
He then walked out. When he was close to Marie, she said, "How did you get stronger in such a short time? It hasn't been a week since the test."
"I didn't. I don't fight to win. I do it for fun." With that, he jumped toward the training ground. The land under his feet breaking, a single leap that would carry him kilometers
Bors sighed, setting the knife down. "But I understand why."
Roy walked closer, his steps heavy on the dream-grass. "Do you?"
"I do," Bors said, without looking up. "But you don't. And you'll have to figure that out on your own." He picked up the knife again, the rhythmic scrape returning.
Roy sat beside him. Even at six feet tall, Roy felt like a child next to the eight-foot giant. Bors's shoulders were like canyon walls, and his hands, though scarred and massive, moved with the delicacy of a surgeon.
"You're just going to sit here?" Bors asked.
"Can't I?" Roy muttered. "This is my mind, isn't it? You're the invader here."
Bors's hand stopped for a heartbeat, the blade hovering over the wood. Then he continued. "I'm no invader, kid. I've told you before: I lived my life, and this one is yours. I'm not here to steer your ship."
They sat in a silence that lasted for a long minute, broken only by the rhythmic scrape of the knife. Bors finished the wooden bird, set it aside, and reached for a fresh block of pine.
"Tell me," Bors said casually. "Why didn't you leave the room?"
Roy looked at him with a raised eyebrow at the weird question.
"You're always talking about how you want to die," Bors continued, his eyes fixed on the wood. "You want someone to stop you. Now you have the perfect opportunity. Just walk out that door. The Academy, the Government, the strongest Ranks in the world—they'd all come for you. There's a damn good chance one of them would find a way to put you down for good. So, why are you still in that box?"
Roy looked at the ground, his voice small. "I still want it. But... I don't want it like this."
"And what's wrong with 'this' way?"
"It's..." Roy struggled to find the words.
"It's the label," Bors finished for him. "You've spent your life terrified of being a monster. If you leave, you're a 'Villain.' You want to be a forgotten hero who saved the world from himself, not a name parents use to scare their kids at night. Am I right?"
Roy took a long breath. "Correct."
"You're still letting everyone else pull your strings, Roy. You act based on the expectations of the people you care about, or you act in spite of what the other ghosts want. But let me ask you: What do you want?"
"I just don't want to hurt anyone," Roy snapped.
"Is that a want? Or is that a fear?" Bors set the knife down and looked Roy in the eye for the first time. "If you don't care about being a hero, then why do you care if they call you a villain?"
"I don't care."
"You do. You don't care about being a hero, but you're terrified of the word 'Villain.' You think they're different things. I was a mercenary, Roy. If you asked two men in the same city about me, one would say I was a demon who crawled out of hell. The other would say I was a saint sent from heaven. Does the second man's praise make the first man's blood disappear from my hands?"
"No."
"And does the first man's hate make the good I did for the second one a lie?"
"No."
"People love labels, Roy. They use them to make sense of a world that's too big for them. Half the 'Heroes' you see on the news are liars who just want the title. You know that. The truth is always somewhere in the middle, in the grey."
Bors continued. "Take us. We have the same soul. If you asked most people, they would say that means we are the same person, but do you believe that?"
"No."
"So you know what people believe doesn't mean it is the truth."
Roy sighed, feeling the weight of his own exhaustion. "You're right. It shouldn't matter how they see me." He started to stand up.
"Sit. Down."
The authority in Bors's voice was like a physical hand on Roy's shoulder. Roy froze and slowly sat back down.
"I'm not telling you to go be a villain, and I'm sure as hell not telling you to go kill yourself," Bors said, his voice dropping to a low rumble.
"It sounded like it."
"That's because you think those are the only two options."
"What else is there? What other ways are there to stop a ticking time bomb?" Roy gestured vaguely to the ground as if to gesture toward the gate below. "If I slip once, if that gate opens, everyone is screwed. I'm a weapon with a broken safety."
"Who decided that?" Bors asked.
Roy looked left and right, confused. "Everyone. The school. The ghosts."
"So it is everyone else," Bors said, leaning in. "A bomb has no will of its own. It just waits for someone else to light the fuse. But you? You aren't the explosion, Roy. You're the one holding the fire. You've spent so much energy trying to keep the fire from burning others that you've forgotten it can also be used to light the way."
Bors picked up the wooden bird he had just carved and handed it to Roy. It was a predator—a hawk with its wings spread wide.
"You don't have to live your life trying to 'not be' something," Bors said. "Stop trying to be the opposite of anyone. Stop trying to be the 'good student' for Darius. Start asking yourself what you would do if no one were watching. If you had all that power and no labels to fear... what would you build?"
Roy looked at the wooden hawk in his hand. "I don't know what I want to build yet," he admitted.
"Then go and figure it out." Bors picked up the knife again and started shaving the wood.
"But I am stuck in the room."
"Remember the kid that always did things on technicalities? Where did he go?"
Meanwhile, at the southernmost tip of the island, hidden beneath a canopy of ancient, magically-shrouded trees, the four instructors entered a building that didn't exist on any map of the island.
"So, Big D," Anton said, scanning his retina and thumbprint at the security hub. The lights flickered to life, revealing a laboratory filled with experimental magitech that would be considered illegal in any other place. "After you've calmed down, you still don't think you went a bit overboard with the kid?"
Darius walked toward the center of the room, his eyes fixed on the massive structure dominating the floor. It was the Mana-Conductive Displacement Gate.
The machine was an intimidating assembly of two heavy, brass-colored rings suspended in mid-air by four jagged pillars of obsidian. Embedded within each ring were four Space Stones. In the center sat a circular platform of reinforced glass. Beneath its transparent surface, another four stones were arranged in a perfect, glowing square, their internal mana-cores vibrating in sync with the rings above.
"No," Darius said, his voice echoing in the chamber as the Space Stones began to glow brighter, feeding energy into the rings. "If he doesn't catch what the punishment actually is, then he deserves whatever happens next. He is dangerous. He must show he can control what he has."
"I still say it would be cleaner to expel him," Mila said, her fingers flying across a holographic keyboard as she calibrated the mana-flow. The Space Stones surged, and the air inside the rings began to distort, looking like a whirlpool of liquid glass. "A student who doesn't follow orders is just a mess waiting to happen."
Elvira stepped onto the humming platform, her expression unreadable. "Just let him do what he wants. Darius won't change his strategies for us."
"I know," Anton said as he stepped into the center. As the final instructor entered, the rings began to spin, their velocity increasing until they were a blur of brass and light. A blinding torrent of white mana erupted from the stones, encasing the group in a shimmering, vertical pillar of energy. "But trying to convince Big D is half the fun, even if he's a stubborn old—"
"I told you not to use it, you little shit—"
Darius's growl was swallowed by the roar of the machine. The twelve Space Stones flashed with a final burst of energy, and with a sharp pop of displaced air, the platform was empty.
Roy frowned, playing back the memory of the roof. Darius's voice booming... then dropping to that quiet, terrifying growl.
"If I knew that you took so much as a single step outside that room, the punishment... would be applied."
Roy's eyes widened, looking at the wooden hawk. "He said if he knew and said step."
Bors smiled for the first time, a grim, jagged expression. He patted Roy's head. "There will be more hard times, maybe even harder than this. Just remember what you walked through and know it won't be different, and maybe one day you won't hide them."
"I don't know about the last part, but thanks anyway," Roy said.
"Aye," Bors replied, the scrape of his knife starting up again. "Don't get caught."