Noah hadn't sensed her at all.
That was the part that unsettled him more than the hand on his shoulder.
His senses were not ordinary. He could feel mana signatures through walls and track presences across distances that would have been hard for any normal mage.
And yet Daisy had crossed the room, closed the distance, and taken hold of his shoulder without registering as anything more than empty air until the moment of contact.
He moved instantly, throwing his weight forward and pulling hard.
The ice came up from the floor before he'd pleted the motion, Arlo's hands already raised, the cold spreading outwards from Noah's feet and climbing his legs in an instant, locking him in place.
At the same time, Daisy's grip tightened and anchored him in place.
He couldn't shake free without destroying Arlo's ice, and he couldn't teleport with her hand still attached to his shoulder. She would simply be teleported with him, which was worse than staying.
He gathered himself to try anyway.
Then her aura exploded outwards.
She didn't bother to read his mind, there was no time for that. Instead, she used the blunt force of her aura, the wave carrying the weight of her word in a pressed psychic force that hit him from every direction at once.
"Submit."
He felt the word land in his consciousness.
The soul shard he'd offered up to the pulsion trembled immediately, answering before he could intervene, pulling towards the mand the way iron pulls towards a magnet.
He felt it beginning to buckle and clamped down on it. He held it in place, wrapping everything else he had around it and held.
"Never!" He snarled.
The word came out harder than he intended, ground out through clenched teeth, but it came out.
Daisy's grip faltered for just a fraction of a second. Not from the refusal itself but from what she could sense underneath it.
The pulsion was there, she could feel it clearly, seated in him exactly as it should be. And he'd still been able to throw off the mand.
But Noah took advantage of that fraction of a second when she was distracted.
Using all his strength, he twisted his legs and the ice holding them in place shattered, the shards scattering across the infirmary floor.
He twisted his shoulder hard, breaking Daisy's grip, and reached for Null Stride.
Arlo's hand caught his arm.
The grip was stronger than it should have been at C-rank, the new skill evident in it, and in the same instant Daisy's fist closed around the back of his head and drove it into the floor with a force that cracked the stone beneath his face.
Noah lay in the crater for a moment, vision fragmenting.
"Hypocrite," he spat. His voice came out level despite Daisy grinding his face into the ground.
He turned his head enough to look up at Arlo. "Have you forgotten? After your father died. The people you killed in your quest for vengeance. How many of them did you leave behind you?" He held Arlo's gaze. "How dare you stand there and lecture me on morality."
Arlo's jaw tightened. "Every single one of them deserved what they got."
"Submit!" Daisy's voice cracked through the room like a physical thing, her aura surging again, pouring into the pulsion with everything she had.
Noah felt it this time differently. The shard didn't just tremble, it tore.
The pain flooded his body immediately, a ripping sensation spreading from somewhere deeper than his body, and then the shard was moving, pulling free of him.
He couldn't stop it. He had held it as long as it could be held and now it was going.
It separated.
A corporal and solid piece of darkness jumped out of his body, forming beside him, the shadows on its face mimicking his own.
It turned towards Daisy and knelt.
"I am at your mand," it said, in his exact voice.
Daisy stumbled backwards in shock. Her grip on him went slack. Arlo's hand loosened on his arm, his eyes wide and fixed on the kneeling shadow.
The pain from the separation was pure agony, but Noah still had the presence of mind to notice their distraction.
He twisted out of their loose grips and teleported away.
The infirmary vanished, but the shadow, the tiniest piece of his soul, remained behind, kneeling on the cracked floor.
***
Noah walked.
The pain moved with him, radiating from the place where the shard had been and spreading through his body, a hollow ache that had no single location because it wasn't a physical wound.
He had lost a piece of himself. Not the largest piece, not anything that touched the core of what he was, but the absence of it was noticeable in the way a missing tooth is noticeable. Not debilitating, but constant and impossible to ignore once you were aware of it.
He ignored it anyway.
The monolith rose ahead of him, dark against the sky, its surface absorbing the light around it rather than reflecting it.
He stopped at its base and looked up.
This was one of the monoliths Cecilia had shown him. Back during a time when his problems were simple and his goals even simpler.
He was certain Edric didn't know about it. When Daisy had torn through his memories during the interrogation, she had been searching for specific things, following the threads she was given.
The memory of leaving academy grounds with Cecilia had not been among them.
Which meant this was still his secret.
An S-rank monolith.
A dark expression appeared on his face. This was his only option. He would either e out of it stronger than anything they had prepared for.
Or he wouldn't e out at all.
He looked at the entrance for a long moment, the darkness inside it waiting patiently.
When he came back, they'd pay.
He thought about each name in turn.
Lady in Dark.
Camelot.
Edric.
Daisy.
And Arlo.
He let each one settle into the place where the shard had been, filling the hollow space with new purpose.
Then he walked into the dark.
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