Chapter 195
It was not an ordinary gaze, but a charged one, coming from various corners of the room.
Those looks felt cynical, heavy with anticipation for failure, and perhaps tinged with a small sense of satisfaction at seeing the loner finally forced to stand before the public.
He could imagine raised eyebrows, restrained smiles at the corners of lips, and exchanged glances that seemed to say, "Let's see how he, the one who works alone, manages to present."
That social pressure, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, remained as yet another layer of suffering, adding weight to a burden that was already close to crushing him.
The voice that beheaded him from within and the piercing gazes from without worked together to paralyze him.
So, with the remnants of control over his trembling body, Ilux shook his head.
Not a hesitant, uncertain shake, but a firm snap of the head to the left and right, a clear signal of rejection toward every pressure bearing down on him, both real and unseen.
Then, almost simultaneously, his right hand rose.
Not rising confidently to ask for permission to speak, but lifting halfway, half-forced, like a white flag raised from within a defensive trench already destroyed.
His arm felt as heavy as steel, and his hand, which moments ago had nimbly spun the pen, now hung stiffly in the air.
He had no will to stand.
His legs felt as if they had been cast into the floor, refusing to support his weight.
He could only remain seated, his body half-turned toward the teacher, one hand raised, his head still caught in the last motion of shaking.
These opposing movements—shaking his head while raising his hand—painted the total chaos within him.
He was asking for time, yet refusing to step forward.
He was admitting that something was wrong, yet unable to explain what.
His words, if they were to come out, would likely choke and stick.
So all that emerged was a mute bodily gesture, a silent plea for brief mercy from a battle only he could hear and feel.
In a room now quiet with questioning silence, Ilux remained seated with his hand raised, while the horrific voice in his head continued to echo and the cynical gazes around him began to shift into cold bewilderment.
"I've been observing you for a while now, and you seem very unsettled.
Usually, if there's unfinished work, you look busy.
I'm worried. Are you sick, or is there another problem?"
"Maybe, Ma'am, Ilux just hasn't finished his assignment yet. That's why he's asking for more time."
"Ahahaha."
The teacher fell silent for a moment, her clear, alert eyes still fixed on Ilux's rigid figure in the corner of the room.
She had spent the entire duration of that mini classroom session observing with calm but depth.
She had seen how the boy arrived alone, worked alone, and sat alone, carrying an aura of quiet discipline that was, in fact, more impressive than the noise of the other groups.
Reflected behind her glasses was the image of a student whose material preparation was meticulously organized, whose notebook was densely filled, and whose posture had initially been one of readiness.
But now, something was cracked.
There was an oddity in that conflicting body language, between the almost unconscious shake of refusal and the half-raised hand like a withered sprout before it could bloom.
That hesitation was not the doubt of someone unprepared, but the trembling of someone besieged by something invisible to others.
Laughter suddenly bubbled up in the classroom, shattering the tense silence that had briefly hung in the air.
Its source was a light, sharp voice, wrapped in a sweet falseness, slipping from the lips of a female student seated not far from the center of attention.
The remark floated through the air, a hypothesis offered not to seek truth, but as a finely honed social blade meant to wound.
It implied negligence, suggested failure, and in an instant redirected the narrative from Ilux's mysterious silence into a collective joke easy to digest.
The laughter that followed was not warm, but a coarse wave of release, an instant consensus to turn that solitude into mockery.
Each breath of laughter thickened the glass wall separating Ilux from everyone else, carving his status as an outsider, as someone deemed incapable of fulfilling even the simplest social rites.
'Stop calling my name with that kind of hatred.'
The laughter and cynical gazes of the room evaporated, dissolving into a far denser fog of personal agony.
For Ilux, the social world laughing at him had shrunk into a blurred, meaningless background.
What was real, urgent, and driving straight into the marrow of his spine was only that voice.
A voice that did not merely call, but clawed, burned, and cursed with an intonation of hatred so personal and boiling.
Each repetition of his name, "Ilux Rediona," was no longer an identity but a mantra of torment, a fragment of dark incantation gnawing away layer after layer of his mental defenses.
Then came the physical sensation, striking suddenly like lightning inside his skull.
A violent, throbbing pain, as if invisible hands were squeezing his brain with furious force.
His survival instinct reacted before his conscious mind could process anything.
His right hand, which had been stiffly raised, now slammed against his own face.
His fingers clenched tightly at his forehead, pressing with all their strength as if trying to crush the source of the pain from the outside.
Both eyes squeezed shut, severing contact with a visual world he could no longer endure.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, the harsh neon lights transformed into pulsing reddish patterns that beat in rhythm with the torture in his head.
He sank completely.
The teacher's voice, the hissing whispers of classmates, and the rustle of paper all vanished, replaced by a chaotic roar of white noise and, above it all, still shrill, Aldraya's hatred-filled voice.
The cold presentation room, the long table, the scent of old wood—none of it existed anymore.
The only remaining reality was the war within himself, a brutal battle between the urge to collapse and the scream of obligation to endure, to remain seated in that chair even as his body longed to shatter into pieces.
"Hey, if you're not ready, just say so.
Don't act busy all by yourself as if we all have to wait for you."
'So damn noisy, you b*stard!!'
The pain in his head had built an unassailable fortress, completely isolating him from the emotional waves rolling through the room.
He did not hear the irritation, did not catch the threatening tone launched from the woman's direction.
For Ilux, outside sounds arrived only as muffled echoes, like shouts from behind thick glass walls separating him from the world.
Every note, every intonation, had been filtered and melted down by the overwhelming roar inside his skull, where anger and curses voiced like Aldraya continued to hammer at his consciousness.
The woman, feeling her mockery had gone unanswered and was now being utterly ignored, saw Ilux's closed eyes and his grip on his forehead as a deeper form of insult.
Ilux's silence was no longer viewed as suffering, but as deliberate defiance, a feigned act meant to evade responsibility while belittling those who laughed at him.
The look in her eyes, once tinged with sour cynicism, now ignited into real sparks of anger.
To be continued…