0 days passed.
A week of bliss for Shiro.
A week of games, laughter, sword drills, shared meals, and easy camaraderie. Where he slipped seamlessly into the group, helping Elara with her footwork, sparring with Lin, teasing Mara about her dramatic exam panic. Where everyone saw Shiro Malkor as one of them.
Everyone except Reo.
Reo watched. Observation had become Reo's religion, and the chapel was every shared space where Shiro moved. He no longer saw a person; he saw a collection of tells, a living testament to everything false. In the refectory, Reo noted the way Shiro's eyes would widen slightly at the variety of food, not the discerning gaze of a noble selecting a favourite, but the stunned, hungry stare of someone who had never seen such abundance. He saw the way Shiro's fingers, when he thought no one was looking, would trace the intricate embroidery on his sleeve, feeling its texture like a blind man reading a new language. These were not the habits of a Malkor. They were the habits of an imposter marvelling at his own costume.
In the library, Reo pretended to read while watching Shiro from behind a tall shelf. He saw how the Malkor he claimed he was didn't just pull books; he handled them with a reverence bordering on fear, opening them slowly as if they might bite, smoothing pages with a touch too gentle for someone who'd grown up surrounded by such objects. But the most obvious tell was when Shiro read the Crown approved texts: a faint, unconscious tremor would appear in his jaw, a tiny muscle rebellion against the lies he was forced to ingest.
Reo catalogued it all. The too eager laughter at jokes, the over correction in etiquette lessons, the way he sometimes stood a half step outside the circle of nobles, as if afraid his falsehood was a scent they might catch. Every moment was a note in Reo's growing symphony of proof. He didn't just watch; he dissected, and with each incision, his disdain grew colder, sharper, more focused. The boy wasn't just lying. He was performing a clumsy, insulting parody of their entire world, and the fact that the others embraced it only proved how soft and blind they had become.
Reo's vigil was no longer about curiosity. It was about gathering the rope for a hanging. And now, after the exam, after the missing wallet, after the evasive answers, after the trembling in exam hall, Reo was creating the noose.
Why? The narrative didn't fit. The inconsistencies were glaring. And Reo Veyne was the only one who saw them.
Certainty demanded evidence. So he began. Veyne was a military house, old, respected, and intimately tied to the Crown. Money opened doors. Names opened more. Reo used both. He bribed the academy record keepers for access. He bribed Harken for a copy of his own exam, claiming he wanted to review it before results day, comparing it to past exam papers. Harken complied easily; the man was more parchment than spine. And while Harken's back was turned, Reo slipped Shiro's exam into his sleeve.
He returned to his room, a room that had become a conspiracy. The room smelled of ink, parchment, and a new, metallic scent: obsession. Reo's maps weren't just pinned; they were stabbed to the wall, corners torn. Notes weren't written; they were clawed onto scraps in a handwriting that grew progressively less elegant. At the centre, Shiro's sketched face, once drawn with detached curiosity, now felt like a personal insult staring back at him.
Reo snatched the stolen exam roll from his sleeve, the parchment still warm from his body heat. He unfurled it violently, the corners tearing. He didn't just read it; he autopsied it. Each line of Shiro's rebellious script was a pathogen under his gaze. The corrected Polaris, the sprawling Ursa Minor, the essay on the Tumbling Queen... it wasn't academic disagreement. It was a fucking manifesto. Written in the hand of the boy who'd shared his table, laughed at his jokes.
Reo's own knuckles turned white where he gripped the desk. He could almost smell the lie on the parchment, not just ink, but the reek of woodsmoke and unwashed streets that no amount of fine scarlet cloth could hide. "You arrogant shit," he whispered to the empty room, his voice trembling with a fury so pure it felt clean. "You sit in our halls, eat our food, wear our colours, and you have the gall to scribble your truths on a Crown exam?"
He traced a trembling finger over Shiro's drawing of the true Cassiopeia. It was beautiful. That was what made it unbearable. The snake had seen something pure, and instead of being grateful for the glimpse, he'd weaponized it against them. Reo's stomach churned with a disgust that was almost physical. He wasn't just uncovering a fraud; he was scraping filth from between the pristine tiles of his world.
He flipped to the score. Zero. A perfect, damning zero. The zero wasn't just a grade; it was a slap. A perfect, round nothing that validated every suspicion. Reo let out a sharp, humourless laugh that echoed in the lamplit silence. All that performance, that clumsy, earnest effort, and the boy couldn't even be bothered to lie competently on paper. The contempt that had been simmering now boiled over.
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He shoved the exam aside as if it were contaminated and yanked the heavy personnel ledger toward him. His movements were no longer those of a scholar, but of a hunter gutting his kill. He found the page. Parents: Unknown. The words seemed to pulse on the vellum. A low, animal sound of disgust escaped his throat. "Unknown," he spat. "Of course they were unknown. Vermin don't have lineages. They have litters in the dark." His own pedigree, tracing back twelve generations of Veyne warriors, felt like a sacred text defiled by its proximity to this blank space. The pristine, official stamp next to the void was the final insult: the kingdom's bureaucracy, a system his family helped uphold, had been used to sanitize this creature. He ran a hand over his face, his skin crawling. The bribes he'd pay wouldn't be transactions; they would be purifications, fees to access the tool that would finally, officially, unmask the infection in their midst.
The Search Deepened. He rifled through the pages, searching for any hint of lineage, any trace of legitimacy. Nothing. A ghost. A fabrication. He almost closed the file, almost dismissed it as incomplete, when a thought struck him. Birth certificates. Every student had one. Government issued. Impossible to forge.
He left his room immediately, bribed another official, and secured the document. He took his own certificate as well, laying them side by side under the lamplight, comparing fonts, seals, signatures, checking for forgery. His was perfect. Shiro's was perfect too. But the name wasn't.
Shiro Aratani.
Reo stared at it. Aratani. A name he had never heard. He gave the benefit of doubt: perhaps a distant branch family? A minor house absorbed into Malkor centuries ago? He pulled out the Malkor genealogical records, easy to obtain, given the long alliance between Veyne and Malkor. He searched the book front to back. No Aratani. Not once. His pulse quickened.
He checked the place of birth. Higaru. The word wasn't a location; it was a diagnosis. A final, rotting piece slotting into place. Reo's breath left him in a rush, as if he'd been punched. He'd never been there, but he knew it. Every noble child did. It was the festering wound on the city's flank, the punchline to cruel jokes, the place you sent guards to quell riots, not envoys to pay respects. The air in his room, once cool, suddenly felt thick and greasy. He could almost smell it: the stink of open sewers, cheap coal, and hopelessness.
His eyes darted from the word "Higaru" to Shiro's stolen exam, to the sketch on the wall. The graceful star charts, the confident defiance... it was all a pantomime. The boy's easy laughter, his unpolished manners, the way he fought like a cornered animal... it wasn't charming eccentricity. It was the ingrained filth of the slums, a stain he'd dragged into their sanctum.
A violent shudder of revulsion wracked Reo's body. He had touched him. Clapped his shoulder. Shared a tankard. He looked at his own hand, the clean, uncalloused skin, and felt nauseous. The fraud wasn't just intellectual; it was biological, a contamination. Everything Shiro had the uniform, the friends, the place in the lecture hall was stolen. Looted from a world whose gates should have been forever closed to him.
The polished, patient mask of the perfect student vaporized, burned away by the sheer, acidic force of his loathing. Shiro wouldn't just fall. He would be erased from the memory of this place as if he had never existed. The hunt was no longer academic. It was personal.
Reo stared at Shiro's portrait pinned to the wall, the one he had drawn himself, neat and precise. Then he tore it down. He scribbled over it, ink slashing across the page in furious strokes until the paper tore, until the wall beneath cracked from the force of his hand. His breath came fast, sharp. Not just anger. Something deeper. A sense of violation. A sense of insult. A sense of betrayal.
He dared walk among us. He fucking laughed with us. He let us believe he was one of us.
Reo pressed his thumb to his teeth, biting down until he tasted copper. He didn't notice the sting, only the clarity that followed. Reo didn't whisper. A guttural, venomous laugh tore from his throat, ugly and unfiltered. The polished lordling was gone, incinerated from the inside out.
"Shiro Aratani," he said, tasting the name like rotten meat. "You slum rat. You thieving, lying piece of gutter fucking trash."
He stood up so fast his chair screeched and toppled over. He stalked to the wall, ripped the remaining sketch of Shiro's face from its pin, and held it before the lamp's flame. The paper blackened, curled, dissolved into ash that drifted onto his immaculate desk.
"You sat with us. You broke bread with us. You let me... defend you." The memory of himself standing up to Kuro for this thing was the deepest cut of all. His charity had been a sacrament offered to a pretender. "You made me your fucking shield."
He leaned on the desk, his body humming with adrenaline, his mind crystal clear and murderous. This wasn't about exposing him to the Academy; that was too clean, too administrative. This was personal. A debt of dishonour.
"You want to play at being a seeker of the truth, huh?" he hissed to the phantom of the boy. "I'm going to fucking teach you a new constellation. The one made of broken bones and shattered pride. I'm going to take every single thing you've stolen, every smile from my friends, every scrap of respect from the instructors, every moment of peace you've enjoyed in my fucking world and I am going to burn it to the ground with you in the flames."
He picked up the birth certificate, the damning proof. He wouldn't show it to the authorities. Not yet. That was the blunt instrument. He was a sculptor. He would use the knowledge as a chisel. A whispered threat here, a public reminder of his "forgotten" pedigree there, a carefully staged humiliation in the yard, a ruined assignment, a poisoned word in every ear that mattered. He would isolate him, terrify him, and then, when the slum rat was utterly alone and broken, Reo would tell him exactly why.
"You think the cage is bad, Aratani?" Reo finally smiled, a thin, cruel slash in the dim light. "You have no idea. I'm not going to put you back in it. I'm going to make you love it, and then I'm going to slam the door forever. Your life here is over. I'm going to make it fucking hell, and you're going to thank me for every second of it."
The vow hung in the air, a silent, toxic cloud.
The investigation was over.
The war had begun.
What Will Reo Do?
