Chapter 546 | Aim Correctly [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 546: 546 | Aim Correctly [CASTLE BONUS]

She had watched him for weeks. She had known from the first day, the way she knew when a student was carrying an injury they hadn’t reported, that his file and his body did not match. She had pulled him aside and told him she knew he was holding back, and she had meant it as a challenge, the kind that produced the students whose case records she followed after graduation with the pride she never advertised.

She had not meant for it to become this.

She had not meant for the gap between his registration and his reality to be measured in a creature that no-one could suppress and a boy who stood up at four percent stamina and put himself between the fire and a girl he loved. She had not meant to be pulled out of a killing blow by an eighteen-year-old whose golden aura was still the color of the sky outside her window.

The thing was, she owed him now.

That complicated matters. Imara did not like owing people, and she especially did not like owing a first-year student who was so obviously lying about who and what he was that half the faculty had opened files on him. Cole had the longest one. Radiant, apparently, had something too, though Radiant kept his cards closer than a locked vault and had arrived at the debrief looking like a man who had already reached conclusions he wasn’t sharing.

But she owed him her skull, which was still in one piece, and that was not a debt she could ignore.

So she wouldn’t lean on him. Not hard. He had earned that much.

She would just get to the bottom of it. Slowly. The way she read the difference between a tired student and a student who had given up, cataloging the difference until the pattern resolved. She had three years to teach Class 1-B and one of them was a boy with a legendary weapon on no equipment manifest, a body that healed faster than a Branded, an electrical field his file didn’t cover, and enough raw output to stand in front of a thing that had crushed her charge like it was made of paper.

Why hide it?

That was the part that snagged. She turned it over in the fading light while Sera collected her tablet and her tea and moved with that same unhurried grace that made the whole medical wing feel like the calmest place in the building.

A student with that kind of power should be showing it off. Halloran ran on spectacle. Crane taught an entire course on it. Radiant sat at the top of the national rankings because he understood that a symbol was worth more than raw output, and every ambitious first-year in the building understood the same math. Power meant rank. Rank meant sponsors. Sponsors meant a career that didn’t collapse into a case study in Castillo’s class about agencies that failed to read the paperwork.

And here was Lukas Belmont, sitting on abilities that would have made him the most-watched student in either cohort, deliberately performing at sixty percent, quoting Radiant in interviews about symbols and service, letting people underestimate him.

You didn’t hide power like that unless the power itself was the thing you couldn’t afford to have seen.

Which meant the secret wasn’t the strength. The strength was just the symptom.

"You’ve gone somewhere," Sera observed from the doorway. She had a way of appearing at doorways. Imara had never once caught her walking through one.

"I’m processing."

"You’re plotting."

"Those are the same thing when you can’t feel three of your fingers."

Sera’s chuckle came again, softer, and she paused with her hand on the frame. "Get some sleep, Imara. Tomorrow the IHC will want their statement, and you’ll want to be sharp for that. They’ll ask about the boy in the gold." Her grey eyes settled, unblinking, and there was a warning folded into the calm. "Think carefully about what you tell them."

The door clicked. Sera was gone.

Imara lay in the dimming room with her burned arm in its mesh and her ribs filing quiet complaints and one hundred and forty-seven ceiling tiles overhead that she had stopped counting.

Think carefully about what you tell them.

She would. Of course she would. She was not going to hand the International Hero Commission a boy who had saved her life so they could dissect him with auditors and diagnostic scans and a very long memory. Not before she understood what she’d be handing them. Not before she understood him.

Because there was a version of this where Lukas Belmont was exactly what he looked like on the plaza. A kid with too much power and a good heart and a story he couldn’t tell for reasons that made sense to him. The kind of student she came to Halloran to find. The kind whose case record she’d follow after graduation with that private, unadvertised pride.

And there was a version where the reason he hid was worse than the power.

She didn’t know which one was true. That was the whole problem, and it was also, if she was honest with herself in the way she was rarely honest out loud, the most interesting thing that had happened to her since she retired from active heroics because the field had started to feel solved.

Nothing about that boy was solved.

The sunset finished bleeding out. The window went to that flat blue that came right before dark, and the yellow streak was gone, faded back into whatever atmospheric trick had made it, and Imara Steele closed her eyes and let her body do the healing her arm was struggling with and her ribs were managing and her patience would eventually complete.

Tomorrow the IHC.

The day after, Belmont would walk out of this wing on legs that should have kept him bedridden for six weeks, and he would go back to Class 1-B, and he would sit in his third-row seat with his sightlines to the door and the podium, and he would perform being ordinary, and she would watch him do it.

She had three years.

She was patient when the situation earned it. Bom Ba Ye didn’t work if you released it too early, and neither did the harder kind of investigation, the one that involved reading a person across a hundred small moments until the shape of them resolved into something you could name.

She’d aim correctly the first time. She always did.