Reality came back wrong.

Wrong like when you leave your house for a month for a vacation and come back unsure if the door you entered was yours to begin with.

The training yard came back. The one with concrete that had no intention of bleeding and chain-link that left nothing in the air. The afternoon light that came from the sun rather than from whatever sourceless pale thing had lit the Shade Realm.

Ash was still against the wall.

His body was exactly where he’d left it. Half-leaning, bag strap caught wrong on his shoulder, smear on the left sleeve. However long it had been inside Leon’s psyche, outside it had been nothing.

He stood up.

The interesting thing was how easy it was. He didn’t need to place his hand against the wall to locate balance or gather force first.

[ D-Rank Physique: Tyrant’s Frame ]

[ Tyrant’s Frame: Bone density and muscle fiber reinforced proportional to the user’s self-confidence. Current amplification: 1.7x baseline human. ]

He looked at his hands. Flexed his fingers. His knuckles, which should have been swelling from whatever his hands had been doing in the realm. His shoulder was present, functional, approximately quiet. It didn’t complain about the bag slung over it. The scrape through his sleeve had dried.

Leon was on his knees.

The entourage had backed up. Not fled, just increased the radius around them. The semicircle had become something shapeless, a loose scatter of people who’d been standing close to something and now needed to not be. One of them, a boy Ash recognized by face and not name, had put a tentative hand on Leon’s shoulder and appeared uncertain about what to do with it now that it was there.

Leon was crying.

Not performing-crying. Not the kind of crying used to communicate something, to create an effect, to manage a room.

The unmanaged kind. The kind that arrives before you know it’s coming.

Leon clearly had no idea it was coming because his face was completely confused. He looked like a man who had discovered a limb he hadn’t known he had. Bewildered by the existence of the sensation. Not sure if it belonged to him.

Ash watched this for a moment.

Leon had been making his life worse for three years, consistently, with investment and variety. The immediate thought said satisfying. Except that was for Leon the bully.

What Ash had fought in the realm wasn’t that. What Ash had fought was an eight-year-old who’d learned to read a door. Whatever it had been, it wasn’t cruelty at the root. It was what cruelty was built on top of.

He didn’t know what to feel.

"What," said a voice from the academy doorway, "did I just walk into."

Seth crossed the courtyard with the unhurried gait of someone who’d learned that looking unbothered was its own form of armor. Broad in a comfortable way, like his body had decided early what shape it wanted and simply maintained it. Ash had always found this slightly suspicious.

He stopped a few feet away, looked at Ash, looked at Leon on the ground, looked at the scattered entourage, and returned to Ash.

"You’re bleeding," Seth said.

"Just a little."

Seth sighed, pinching his temple, considering if he shouldn’t have spent two years with Ash. "Is some of it yours and some isn’t, or is some of it blood and the rest is something else?"

Ash considered. "First one."

Seth’s eyes moved back to Leon. The crying had softened into something small and tired, the exhaustion of someone who’d been holding something for a very long time and had just set it down without meaning to. One of his entourage had crouched beside him now, and neither of them seemed to know what the situation called for.

"What happened to him?"

Ash opened his mouth, just to close it immediately.

The thing about Seth was that he asked questions when he was genuinely curious. It had always made him marginally harder to give non-answers to, because he would always wait until an actual answer was given.

"Something he was carrying," Ash said. "I took it."

The courtyard was very quiet. A cloud moved across the eastern wall’s light, and the shadows shifted. Ash noticed the shadows shifted normally here. It gathered in corners like they were supposed to, stayed inside their lines.

Seth looked at him for a long moment. He didn’t look alarmed, not exactly. Something closer to the look of a person who’s realized midway through a conversation that it’s actually a different, more important conversation, and is deciding how to reorient.

"What rank are you reading," he said immediately.

Ash glanced at the interface visible at the edge of his vision.

[ DOMINION: OBLIVION ]

[ RANK: NULL ]

[ DESCRIPTION: — ]

The extraction had registered only internally. Every external metric, every testing stone, every Awakened in this courtyard with any sensitivity to Dominion output. He would still read as the same Null he’d been this morning.

"Null," Ash said.

Seth looked at him.

"You are bleeding from at least two different places. Likely internal bleeding in areas which should keep you from standing upright." he said, "Leon is on the ground crying for the first time in what I would guess is years and you’re telling me you’re still Null."

"Yeah."

"And I’m supposed to believe that."

"No," Ash said. "I don’t think you are."

Seth’s hands found his pockets. When he looked at Ash again, something in his face had steadied, like a foundation locating its level.

"Okay," he said.

Then he stepped forward, pulled Ash’s arm across his shoulders without asking, and started walking them toward the medical wing. He didn’t look back at Leon. He got all the information he needed, rendered a verdict, and moved.

The hunger was quiet the whole walk. Not absent. Just occupied. Like a dog that was given a new play toy, just to discard it in twenty seconds.

The hunger wasn’t pointed at Seth. Nor did it want the students in the corridor who stepped out of the way. It was simply present. Ambient. Constant.

More, it said, underneath everything else. Without urgency. Just saying the direction, like a compass pointing north.

There is so much more.

His shoulder had stopped hurting by the time they reached the medical wing door.