The door to the dorm room didn't simply open; it yielded to the violent shove of a man possessed. Adrian crossed the threshold, his boots striking the floorboards with heavy rhythmic finality that sounded like a funeral march. His hand was a frozen sculpture of white-knuckled agony, fused to the crow-headed hilt of his blade so tightly the metal groaned under the pressure. From the crow's hollow eyes, a thick, viscous smoke of abyssal energy bled outward, coiling around his arm like a nest of starving vipers. The humiliation of the corridor- the way Valerieus's voice had curled with aristocratic disdain, the stinging mockery of his "commoner" blood- had been scrubbed from his mind, replaced by a cold, searing mania. Adrian's face was no longer his own; his features were stretched taut, his eyes wide and vibrating with an iridescent, fractured light that suggested the soul inside was pacing around like a caged beast.
He didn't walk toward his study table; he stalked it, his head tilting at a jagged, unnatural angle. There, resting on the mahogny surface, sat a letter bearing the wax-sealed authority of the Summoning Academy. A low, guttural sound escaped his throat- a sound that hovered somewhere between a predatory purr and a psychotic sob. He snatched the parchment, his fingers trembling so violently the paper rattled like dry leaves in a storm. He tore it open, his eyes devouring the ink. "Congratulations on passing the first task...Welcome to the Higher Blackwood Academy...you are one of the hundred students who passed..."
The word went silent, save for the frantic thrumming of the dark mana. Adrian's predatory smile didn't just fade; it curdled. His eyes locked onto the word "hundred," and a frantic, rhythmic twitch took hold of his left eyelid. He stared at Principal Kaelen's shimmering mana signature as if he intended to set it on fire with his gaze alone.
"One of a hundred?" Adrian whispered, his voice cracking into a jagged, manic rasp. He began to pace the small room, his grip tightening until the letter was a mangled ball of pulp in his fist. "One...of...a hundred? So ninety-nine other worms breathed the same air. Ninety-nine other mediocre, sniveling peasants and arrogant lordlings managed to crawl over the same line. I am a statistic. I am a decimal point. I am...I am pathetic!" He stopped, staring into the dark corner of the room with a look of absolute betrayal. "This boy- this Adrian- he is weak. He is fragile, soft-bellied failure. To not be the first? To not be the only? It is a sickness. I should be the sun, and they are merely the shadows I cast, yet here I am, huddled in a list of a hundred names like a common grocery item!"
Within the hilt, Obsidian, the ancient Crow Spirit, let out a sigh so long and weary it felt like it had been held in since the dawn of the first era. The spirit's consciousness shifted, manifesting as a pair of glowing, judgmental eyes in the void of Adrian's mind.
"Oh, for the love of the Void, he's doing the 'monologue of self-loathing'," Obsidian groaned, the mental vibration sounding remarkably like a grandfather who had just seen his favorite vase broken. "Look at him. He's actually insulting himself in the third person. 'This boy is weak.' Kid you literally leveled half a forest and nearly collapsed the local leyline. You're in the top one percent of the most elite academy in the hemisphere, and you're acting like you just failed a basic gardening class. Do you have any idea how exhausting this is for me? I am primordial entity of darkness, not a therapist for a teenager with a god complex and a math problem. One hundred is a good number, Adrian! It's a nice, round, prestigious number! Please, stop twitching your eyes like that; you're going to give us both a migraine, and I'm the one who has to live in your shadow."
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Adrian staggered toward the center of the room, his movements jerky and uncoordinated, before finally collapsing onto the edge of the bed with a weight that made the frame groan. He didn't just set the weapon down; he shoved the crow-headed hilt onto the nightstand with a heavy, metallic thud that echoed in the small stone chamber. A sound ripped from his throat- not a cry of exhaustion, but a low, guttural grown that vibrated with the remnants of his unhinged fury. As he slumped back, his hollow eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling, the dark energy around the blade began to boil. Without a single word of command or a drop of conscious mana from Adrian, the shadows detached themselves from the hilt. They swirled in the air, thickening and knitting together until the physical form of Obsidian, the crow spirit, manifested atop the headboard.
The bird was a creature of living ink, its feathers shimmering with an oily, purple sheen that seemed to swallow the candlelight. It didn't look at its master with the expected loyalty of a summoned familiar; instead, it perched there with its head cocked at a sharp, judgmental angle, staring down at the boy with eyes that flickered like dying embers. Because their bond had not yet matured and their levels remained tethered to the earthly realm, the mental link was still silent- Obsidian's voice remained locked behind a veil they hadn't yet pierced. Instead, the crow let out a series of sharp, rhythmic sounds. "Caw. Caw...Caw!" Each cry was punctuated by a slow, exaggerated shake of its feathered head, a gesture so dripping with dissapointment it was equivalent to a long, weary sigh.
Adrian shifted his gaze, his eyes still clouded with that terrifying, hollow mania as he looked at the spirit. There was no warmth in his expression, only a cold, possesive arrogance. "Obsidian," he muttered, his voice dripping to a dangerous, low-octave rasp that sounded like grinding stones. "I didn't even summon you. I gave no command for you to leave the hilt. How is it that you stand before me without your master's permission? Have you forgotten who holds the blade?"
The crow stopped its shaking mid-motion, its beak hanging slightly open as the caw died in its throat. Obsidian stared at him, its bead-like eyes reflecting the flicker of the candlelight with a look of utter, cosmic disbelief. Internally, the spirit felt a surge of ancient, indignant heat. 'This boy,' Obsidian thought, the words echoing only within its own primordial consciousness, 'this tiny, flickering candle of a human is truly, hopelessly lost in his own delusion. The sheer, mountain-sized arrogance it takes to speak of "commands" to a being who once drifted through the Eldritch tides of the Great Void...it is staggering. He thinks because he holds the metal, he owns the soul. He thinks he is the shepherd and I am the sheep, when in reality, I was devouring the stars of past eras while his ancestors were still shivering in caves.'
The humour of the situation finally pierced through Obsidian's ancient pride. Here was a boy who couldn't even keep his own socks matched, lecturing a harbinger of the abyss on "permission" because he was grumpy about a letter. Obsidian let out a final, particularly loud CAW that sounded suspiciously like a sarcastic laugh, before purposefully hoping onto Adrian's pillow and beginning to aggressively preen its wing feathers, completely ignoring the "master" who was currently trying to look intimidating while lying flat on his back. It was hard to maintain a maniacal aura of doom when a supernatural bird was treating your head like a convenient footstool and looking at you as if you were a particularly dim-witted squirrel.
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