In his past life, he was born to detective parents who gave him everything he needed. He carried the same dreams any young kid does, only his had a clear shape, he wanted to be what they were. A detective.

He had the mind for it, the will for it. He would have gotten there. Until cancer claimed him. After that, none of it mattered anymore, not the dreams, not the determination, not any of it.

With stage four lung cancer, six years was already more than medicine could promise, but his parents made those six years happen anyway. They emptied everything. Every saving, every account, every reserve they’d ever kept. Not to save him. Just to buy him time. Just so he could live long enough...

...they gave up.

He bore them no ill will. They had fought their hardest, and the ending was always going to be the same. But when the visits grew sparse and then stopped altogether, when the bills went unpaid, and the room grew quieter, he found he had only one wish left. Not more time. Less.

Until Arcane Mercenary found him. The novel gave him something to open his eyes for each morning. Small, but enough.

And now, transmigrated into the very world that had once kept him breathing, with a body that no longer failed him, magic he was only beginning to understand, and a family whose fortune no illness could hollow out, he had found himself wanting something again.

A new dream. A new aspiration. One that belonged entirely to this life, and nothing of the last.

He wanted to live...

Leomaris closed the distance carefully, stopping just short of the dummy’s range.

He took a breath and reminded himself what this was for. Survival. The test was as much a part of that as anything else.

He crossed into the dummy’s attack range with a heaviness he hadn’t quite managed to shake, and the dummy answered immediately, a purplish ball of magic already screaming toward him at incredible speed.

Leomaris didn’t let the speed or strangeness of it in. He stripped himself bare of emotion and became, for a moment, nothing but calculation... reading the spell’s disruption rhythm, delaying his motion, holding perfectly still as it closed the distance to inches.

And then, at the very last, he felt the air part.

Eyes fixed on it, he paid attention to his muscle tension, and, with no readable intent, he feinted, dodging the spell completely, but not without a faint burn across his face.

He had no time to think before two more followed.

He let his muscles go loose, tuning himself to his own heartbeat and to the rhythm of what was coming, and in the last fraction of a second before contact, his movements stopped making sense to anyone watching. The dodge was total.

There was a celebration somewhere inside him but he didn’t let it out, he pressed on.

Then, he murmured, just one word. "Solve."

More attacks came. This time, his body handled them. The Sixth Sense technique had taken hold, and his movements no longer required him, dodging each attack cleanly, without consent.

And in that new stillness, he finally had room to consider the spell itself. Its bizarreness. What it actually was.

"Wait... isn’t that spatial magic?"

"Yes, it is... but I thought the dummy could only use six elemental spells?"

"I believe so... but he’s actually dodging the attacks."

The words moved through the cadets while Instructor Mike stood where he was, biting his fingers, unable to do much else.

He hadn’t known the artifact could use spatial magic, that particular detail had escaped him entirely, and everything about what he was watching defied easy explanation.

Stopping the dummy was an option, technically. Destroying it was what that actually meant, and he had no intention of going that far.

So he stood there, impatient and anxious in equal measure, and hoped Leomaris was as capable as he seemed.

Lucius closed in on Mike, keeping his voice low. "Instructor. Can you do something? If that spatial magic lands, the wound won’t be ordinary."

Whatever patience Mike had left gave out. He turned on Lucius with the full weight of it.

"Meh...? Do you have any idea how expensive that artifact is?"

Lucius’s calm didn’t disappear so much as curdle. His expression settled into something that sat uncomfortably between threatening and confrontational.

"Are you telling me you don’t care if he dies?!"

Mike hesitated for just a moment, caught by the sheer weight of the aura rolling off someone that young. It was genuinely unsettling.

But it wasn’t, in the end, enough to move him.

"He’s dodging them, isn’t he? Look at that murderous aura coming off him... my precious artifact is the one at risk. We just need to hold out fifteen more seconds."

Lucius’s head turned toward Leomaris, and whatever argument he’d been forming dissolved. Mike was right, insufferably so.

The question wouldn’t leave Lucius alone. Leomaris’s body moved inhumanely, every muscle under precise control, at speed that defied easy explanation.

From one angle, it wasn’t unprecedented. Archmages could do the same. But that was exactly what made it worth asking about. Leomaris was two ranks below that threshold.

Leomaris moved through it all with the kind of ease that didn’t look learned so much as inherited. Mike’s words, as much as he hated it, held.

What the others read as ease, Leomaris felt as pressure.

The Sixth Sense was his own creation, designed to make him reactive only when an attack was less than a second away.

That margin was tight enough under normal conditions.

Now the dummy was combining multiple spells, and they were coming faster than they had when he’d first built the technique around them.

His body had stopped asking for permission entirely. It moved, and he simply followed, muscles screaming, spine bent wrong, and his eyes burning. He couldn’t afford to blink. He wasn’t sure he could have anyway.

He’d meant to last the full thirty seconds. Push through and train the ability properly.

But his body was telling him something different now, and he had learned to listen. He needed the dummy’s blind spot. He needed to end this.

He was three steps in, the blind spot almost within reach, when something shifted in the air around him. It was the kind of shift that had no good explanation, only a feeling that the dummy’s indifference had become something else entirely. Something that looked, impossibly, like hatred.

Countless attacks followed, all at once, with the conviction of something that meant to kill him.

Leomaris halted.

Not one of the attacks was aimed at him. They didn’t need to be. They were placed too perfectly, hemming him in, holding him exactly where he stood, and the realisation of it tightened his chest.

Then he saw the iceberg. Massive, already forming in the dummy’s grasp, readying to launch with the patience of something that knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

He felt the weight of it. He really felt it. Wherever he moved, one of those attacks was waiting. And the iceberg wasn’t giving him room to think, let alone dodge. There was no good option. There was barely any option at all.

"Shit... this is bad. It’s trying to kill me."

The words were still echoing when the wind shifted around him. It was massive and sudden, but wrong.

Not the fire, not the wind magic hanging in the air. This was dry and gritty. It tasted like sand.

When the world started moving again, the iceberg had stopped where it was, and there was Lucius, standing before the dummy with its metallic head crushed in his hand, wearing the expression of someone who had done nothing remarkable at all.

The sigh left Leomaris before he’d decided to release it. Goosebumps moved across his pale skin in a slow wave.

He was alive. He let that sit for a moment.

’I nearly died.’

Lucius reached him quickly, an encouraging smile cutting through whatever tension remained.

"I think there’s something wrong with the artifact. But you did pretty well, Leomaris. I’m glad to have you as a rival."

"Really... you just saved my life, mate."

Leomaris wore a practiced smile. Lucius being kind to him was something to unpack another time. Right now, his mind was elsewhere. The bizarreness of the situation had its hooks in him.

He turned, expression unreadable, and found Emerald. The one cadet certain to loathe him. She looked dumbfounded like the rest. He didn’t buy it. He’d made that mistake before.

’I take it that whoever can amplify people’s negative emotions toward me can also affect artifacts. But who exactly are they?’

He looked at Lucius again and kept his face easy. His mind was somewhere else entirely.

To amplify the artifact’s dark emotions so easily took a Sorcerer, he was certain of that. And yet every cadet standing in this room was a Magician.

Had it been done before class began? A miscalculation on his part? Or worse, were they beyond Sorcerer, capable of reaching him from a distance he hadn’t thought to account for?

The question went unanswered. He knew how to find the answer through Raine, the heroine, the only viable path he had.

And yet, for reasons he couldn’t quite name, he already knew none of it would go the way he wanted.

Then suddenly, Mike collapsed to the floor, crouched and crying, an unbefitting sight for an instructor.

"My priceless artifact... it’s gone. My 10,000 crownsmark..."

When he finally raised his head from the ground, his gaze snapped toward Leomaris.

"It’s your fault. You caused this. That killing intent you radiated... why wouldn’t it target you instead?"

Leomaris’s expression went slack. It said everything. He’d run out of patience for the day’s nonsense and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.