The uniform was a humiliation.
Nara had spent the morning fussing over me like I was a toddler. She scrubbed my face until it stung and spent ten minutes fighting with the clip-on tie of the Ashford Collegiate uniform. I stood there, stiff and silent, a thirty-year-old warlord being treated like a schoolboy. I hated it. Every fiber of my being wanted to swat her hand away, but when I saw the wet glint of relief in her eyes—relief that her grandson was alive to wear this suit—I swallowed my pride.
"You look so handsome, Ren," she whispered, patting my chest. "Just... stay away from the roof this time, okay?"
"I will, Grandma," I said, the words feeling like lead.
Mika watched from the kitchen table, her expression unreadable. She knew the truth of this school better than Nara did. She knew that for kids from the Shatter Ward, a uniform wasn't armor; it was a target.
The walk to Ashford took twenty minutes. As the grey, crumbling concrete of the slums gave way to the manicured lawns and stone arches of the elite district, the air itself seemed to change. It grew thinner, colder.
I stood at the iron gates and looked up at the clock tower. Ashford Collegiate wasn't just a school; it was a Social Fortress. At the apex sat the Elites—the heirs to Jade City's corporations and political dynasties. At the absolute bottom were the Scholarship Rats. We were the "diversity" projects, allowed into their hallowed halls just to be reminded, every single hour, of exactly how little we possessed.
Inhale. Exhale. I adjusted my backpack. Be invisible. Be the victim. Lay low until you find the rat.
The moment I stepped into the main hallway, the silence of the "ghost" was tested. The whispers started immediately.
"Is that him? The one who jumped?" "I heard he tried to kill himself because he couldn't handle the midterms." "Look at his shoes. They're still scuffed from the Ward."
I ignored them, my eyes scanning the corridor for exits and cameras. Pure tactical instinct. I found my homeroom—Room 302—and took my assigned seat in the back corner. I kept my head down, staring at the scarred wood of the desk.
"Well, well. If it isn't the diver."
The voice was like a jagged piece of glass. Three boys approached, their shadows stretching across my desk. I didn't need to look up to know who they were. They smelled of expensive cologne and unearned confidence.
The leader, a boy named Holt whose father owned half the shipping docks in the city, leaned over me. "We thought you'd be a vegetable by now, Ashvale. Or at least have the decency to stay dead."
I didn't move. I didn't speak. I was counting the seconds, visualizing how easy it would be to drive my pen through his jugular.
One... two... three...
"What's the matter? Brain-damaged?" Holt laughed, and then it happened. He reached out and delivered a sharp, stinging flick to the back of my head. It wasn't meant to hurt; it was meant to humiliate.
Laughter erupted from his two sycophants.
Four... five...
Another flick. Harder this time. "Answer me when I'm talking to you, rat."
The "Devil" inside me snapped. The years of commanding thousands, of deciding who lived and who died, roared against the constraints of this teenage body. I wasn't a scholarship student. I was Kael Dravon. And I don't take orders from children.
I stood up. The chair shrieked against the linoleum floor, a sound like a war cry. I turned around, my eyes locking onto Holt's. I didn't look like a victim anymore. My pupils had constricted into cold, black points of pure, concentrated rage. My fist was already coiling, aiming for the soft spot beneath his jaw—a strike that would shut his nervous system down in seconds.
"You want an answer?" I hissed, my voice dropping an octave into a predatory growl.
"Ren! Sit down!"
The voice hit me like a bucket of ice water. It was clear, authoritative, and terrifyingly familiar.
I froze. My fist was inches from Holt's face. I turned my head toward the doorway, and the world tilted.
Standing there, holding a stack of attendance files and a coffee cup, was the woman from my past. She wore a grey blazer, her hair pinned back with the same elegant precision I remembered from a decade ago. The girl from the library. The only person I had ever truly let in.
The name escaped my lips before I could stop it. A ghost of a memory from a man who was supposed to be dead.
"Sera?"
The classroom went dead silent. The students gasped. At Ashford, you didn't call a teacher by her first name. You certainly didn't call Ms. Calloway—the most respected and feared literature teacher in the senior block—by her first name.
Nostalgia, sharp and painful, ripped through her. There had only been one man in her entire life who spoke her name with that specific, gravelly softness—a man who had been dead for two years.
This was Ren Ashvale—the quiet, brilliant boy from the Shatter Ward who had just survived a tragedy. He was a "good kid," a scholar, and right now, he was seconds away from ruining his life by punching the son of a billionaire.
But then, the professional mask slammed back into place.
"Mr. Ashvale," she said, though the slight tremor in her hands betrayed her. "Sit down. Now."
She looked at the clock, then back at me, her eyes filled with a motherly sort of worry she tried to hide behind a frown. "And see me in my office after the lecture. We need to talk."