Chapter 189
Each scream seemed to become the soundtrack of her journey, reflecting the internal chaos that was now seeping into the external world, transforming the surrounding environment into a distorted mirror of her soul as it shattered and reconstructed itself.
Aldraya's own form within the fog was indistinct, resembling little more than a swiftly moving silhouette wrapped in a dark aura.
Only the upright contour of her body and the certainty of her steps could be discerned.
Her face, her hands, her details were lost, obscured by layers of mist and the black smoke she emitted.
She was no longer a fallen Angel with clear tears, but a walking manifestation of infected wounds, a living reality vomiting its own darkness into the world.
Each step she took left behind a darker trail of fog and a slightly colder temperature, as though she were drawing a personal veil of night that continued to expand behind her.
And in this horrific, cinematic state, her pace did not slow.
Instead, the purpose she had set—finding and killing Ilux—provided a straight line amid the chaos she created.
The fog and the screams were merely side effects, bubbles from an ocean of rage that had finally found an outlet.
Her focus remained razor-sharp behind that dark shroud.
She might have been transforming into something no longer resembling her former self, perhaps poisoning the world with her own suffering, but for now, none of that mattered.
What mattered was one name.
Ilux.
And one goal.
To force him to retract his insult against the three pillars that had become Aldraya's very flesh and blood—even if doing so required her to become a walking darkness, surrounded by ghostly screams born of unhealed wounds.
Fhiiiiih!
'Aldraya is truly gone.'
The late-morning hour, buttery and heavy, melted the lingering chill of ice cream in Ilux Rediona's throat.
The school cafeteria had fallen quiet, leaving only the heavy aroma of nasi uduk hanging in the humid air, mingling with the faint sweetness still clinging to his tongue.
He walked slowly, as if every breath had to be measured, recalibrated after the departure of a central axis.
The book in his hands lay open, its pages whispering whenever the morning breeze brushed their edges, yet his eyes were not truly reading.
The text blurred into the background, mere scenery for a much larger stage unfolding in his mind.
The image of Aldraya Kansh Que—the woman who was no longer his teacher—lingered, her presence still warm in every corner of the corridors like a perfume that refused to fade.
His steps carried him out of the cafeteria, taking with them an invisible weight, an example that had suddenly become a memory.
The long corridor of Star Academy stretched before him, a tunnel illuminated by morning sunlight pouring through tall windows, carving bands of light and shadow across the cold marble floor.
Each of Ilux's footsteps echoed, the only sound daring to disturb the silence of this grand institution after the quiet storm of departure.
He followed a familiar path, passing empty lecture halls and heavy wooden doors bearing the names of great scholars, yet everything felt foreign today.
Aldraya's presence had once been like light reflected in every corner, filling the space with possibility and restrained laughter.
Now that light was gone, leaving only elongated silhouettes and shadows, transforming familiar places into a museum of memories that were still fresh and painful.
The book in his grip felt heavier, an artifact from yesterday's world that he had to carry alone into tomorrow.
He stopped at a corridor intersection, where stained-glass light spilled pale colors onto the floor.
Deep blue, dark red, golden yellow.
Here, perhaps, was the last place he had seen Aldraya walking briskly with stacks of files in her hands, wearing the same consistently flat expression.
The air felt different here, quieter, as if holding its breath for something that would never come again.
Ilux stared at the open page of his book, but what he saw was ink spreading into abstract shapes, a roadmap that no longer led anywhere.
His decision to remain at the academy felt like a choice made in fog, a loyalty to a place that had now lost its soul.
He was a private student, a title that now hung around his neck like a medal from a war already over—beautiful, yet painfully reminiscent of wounds.
'This is better.'
He adjusted his glasses with a ritualistic motion, a thin barrier of glass and metal between himself and a world that had suddenly lost focus.
The world beyond them expanded, corridors once blurred now sharp and detailed, every tiny crack in the marble, every mote of dust floating in the light becoming vivid and stark.
Yet that magnification only deepened his isolation.
Even the book in his hands changed.
Letters that had once been blurry now swelled into black monuments upon the cream-colored page, carrying meanings that felt too large and heavy to absorb.
He kept walking, yet it felt as though he were moving inside a glass bubble of his own, a silent aquarium amid the increasingly crowded current of academy life.
His calm, measured steps and his gaze fixed on the page formed an island of stillness that instead provoked ripples of disturbance around him.
From behind lenses that bent the light, Ilux sensed—more than he saw—the stares.
They came from corridor corners, from half-open doors, or from small clusters of students huddled like restless flocks of birds.
Those gazes were not mere curiosity, but a dense, warm irritation, a resentment toward a presence deemed out of sync with the day's general rhythm.
He was a walking reminder, a remnant of Aldraya's era that had yet to dissolve, and perhaps his calm absorption in his book amid unspoken turmoil was perceived as arrogance.
Every breath he took, every slight furrow of his brow as he concentrated on reading, seemed to fuel whispers spreading like fire through dry grass.
Yet Ilux did not avert his gaze.
He allowed himself to become an object of observation, a living statue, while his fingers smoothly turned the pages, producing the sharp, cutting sound of paper against the strained silence.
The glasses, beyond being a tool, were a shield.
They gave him a reason not to look back, to dive deeper into the sea of text and distance himself from the social storm threatening the surface.
Behind those twin panes of glass, the outside world lost its intensity.
Sharp stares became beams of light without heat, inaudible murmurs turned into distant wind.
He walked the same corridor, yet inhabited a different dimension.
His mind, which should have been processing the magnified words before his eyes, instead wandered into a past equally magnified by departure.
Aldraya's final expression, the weight of unspoken farewell words, and the silence of the study room now reduced to an empty space.
The glasses dried his tears before they could gather, converting emotional moisture into a cold, sterile sharpness of vision.
He was an archaeologist deliberately observing the ruins of his own civilization, with a demeanor that might seem indifferent, but was in truth filled with painful calculation.
And he kept walking, carrying that bubble of solitude and the accumulation of stares, moving deeper into the heart of the academy, where Aldraya's shadow might be strongest and resentment toward him most concentrated.
'At first, this silence felt like punishment.
But the more I think about it, the calmer I feel.'
That isolation, in the end, flooded over him like a slow, cold tide.
To be continued…