Noah’s brows raised slightly at her intensity.
The physical contact sent a small jolt through him, but his mind remained focused on the logistical impossibility of her statent.
"Like what?" he asked, his voice calm. "The academy board isn’t known for listening to commoners when a noble’s reputation is on the line."
Emily, however, didn’t answer imdiately. As the silence stretched, she suddenly realized how close they were standing.
Her hands were still resting on his shoulders, and the heat from his body seed to radiate through his thin shirt.
A deep, involuntary blush crawled up her neck and flooded her cheeks, turning them a bright crimson.
’Why... does he have to be so handso?’ she thought to herself, her heart hamring against her ribs like a trapped bird.
Up close, the sharp lines of his jaw and the piercing, icy clarity of his blue eyes were overwhelming.
She found herself staring at the way his white hair caught the fading afternoon light, and before she knew it, the world around her began to blur.
She started zoning out, her mind wandering into a daze where the academy, the bullies, and even the suspension didn’t exist—only the boy standing inches away from her.
Noah tilted his head, watching the glazed look enter her eyes. He waited for a second, then two, before finally raising a hand and waving it slowly in front of her face. "Emily? What are you thinking about?"
The sudden movent snapped the spell. Emily gasped, her eyes refocusing as she realized she had been staring.
To cover her embarrassnt, she huffed and lightly smacked his chest with her palm.
"Don’t worry about it!" she pouted, turning her face away to hide the sheer scale of her blush.
Noah chuckled lightly, the sound low and lodic. He found her flustered actions genuinely cute.
Emily, on the other hand, froze the mont her hand made contact with him. Her palm was still tingling from the impact, and her mind was reeling.
’Was his chest... always that wide?’ she wondered, her heart skipping a beat. When she had smacked him, it didn’t feel like hitting the skinny, frail boy she had known for years. It felt like striking a wall of solid, tempered marble.
Unbeknownst to Noah himself, his body and physique had already been transforming little by little with every single point added to his stats.
The System wasn’t just upgrading his magical core; it was reconstructing his vessel to handle the imnse pressure of his rising power.
From the lanky, slightly malnourished boy of before—the one with barely any muscle and a perpetual look of exhaustion—his body was becoming rapidly more defined.
His shoulders had broadened, his chest had filled out with lean, functional muscle, and his posture held a new, predatory grace.
Emily shook her head brushing off the distracting, fluttering thoughts about Noah’s sudden change in physique.
She took a deep breath, her face setting into a mask of righteous indignation.
"We could report it at least... to the Order Force!" she insisted, her voice rising with a desperate hope. "There’s no way they’ll just let sothing like this lie, Noah. Even if he’s the son of a count, there are laws! Attempted murder isn’t sothing they can just brush under the rug!"
Noah exhaled slowly, a tired, cynical sound that seed to deflate her enthusiasm. He looked toward the cracked ceiling of the sitting room, his expression distant. "It’s not going to work, Emily," he said flatly.
He knew the reality of the world better than she did. The Order Force was a powerful sub-division of the Magus Order, specifically tasked with handling cris and trespasses committed by both humans and magi.
They were the supposed shield of the common people, the arbiters of justice in a world governed by mana.
However, Noah had already learned the limits of their "justice."
He had indeed reported the systematic bullying to them once before, back when the bruises were fresh and the taunts were still new.
But nothing was ever done about it. To the Order Force, he was just a boy with no magic talent—a nobody whose complaints against the scion of a noble house were nothing more than a nuisance.
Emily gnashed her teeth, her small fra trembling with a mixture of frustration and tears.
"So you’re just going to what... let it die?" she choked out, her voice cracking. "Noah, t-they buried you alive! I saw the dirt, I saw the place... I don’t know how you can just accept that like it was nothing!"
Noah’s eyes suddenly turned cold. The warmth he had shown Kael and the wry amusent he had felt for Emily vanished in an instant, replaced by a chilling, predatory stillness.
A slow, sharp smirk appeared on his lips—a look that didn’t belong on the face of the boy she knew.
Emily felt an involuntary chill run down her spine, the hair on her arms standing on end.
For so reason, she felt a phantom sensation, as if a cold, sharpened blade was being pressed gently against the pulse of her neck.
The air in the small room suddenly felt heavy, saturated with a pressure that made her lungs ache.
Her legs felt heavier also, as if the blood in her veins had been replaced with molten lead, pinning her to the floor. She stared at Noah, realizing for the first ti that the "victim" she had co to save was no longer there.
"Don’t worry," Noah said, his voice dropping to a low, lodic silkiness that was more terrifying than a shout. "They’re not going to just go scot-free after what they did."
His eyes narrowed slightly, the icy blue pupils reflecting a ruthless light.
"All three of them are going to pay," he whispered, the words hanging in the air like a death sentence. "And they’re going to pay... dearly."
Emily gulped, her body shivering even more, until sweat started to drip down her face.
’Is this... really the Noah I know.’ she thought.
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