Aurora picked up the note first.

She unfolded it.

Inside was a small stick figure, drawn with a few careless lines, tongue stuck out in a cheeky grin. Beside it, a curved little smiley face.

Simple. Barely a drawing at all.

But it had a kind of life to it that only someone familiar could read—playful, warm, unmistakably personal.

Looking at it, Aurora felt the weight that had settled over her mood lift by some inexplicable amount.

Then her gaze moved to the potions.

A triple compound. The same format as before, and yet clearly not the same thing.

She remembered what the second set had looked like—one of the three vials had been that milky white suspension, those tiny motes of light drifting through it like slow-moving star-dust.

This one was different.

Aurora held one of the vials up to the light and looked carefully.

It was a purer white. More transparent. Perfectly clear.

No impurities. No suspended particles. No drifting glow.

It looked like clean water mixed with a single drop of milk—crystalline, refined, distilled down to some essential quality. As if every bit of color and radiance that had decorated the last set had been drawn inward, compressed into the liquid itself until nothing was left on the surface.

Obviously.

The quality of this set was higher than the second batch she had watched Pandora present to Unit 039.

This was the one Pandora had kept for her alone.

This was the real thing.

The realization bloomed in Aurora’s chest and spread warm.

The small resentment she’d felt earlier—that faint, stinging sense of being used as a prop in someone else’s performance—dissolved completely, as though it had never been there at all. What replaced it was something she didn’t quite have a word for.

Something sweet.

My Lady does keep me in her heart.

Aurora’s grip on the three small vials tightened until her knuckles went pale at the joints.

But after the joy settled, a practical problem presented itself.

What was she supposed to do with them?

Tuck them away somewhere hidden? Carry them close to her body?

She shook her head.

Hide them? And if someone searched the room?

Carry them? And if they shattered in a fight?

Besides.

These were potions My Lady had brewed with her own hands. Specifically for her.

Aurora’s expression shifted. The uncertainty drained away, replaced by something resolute.

If My Lady gave it to her, then it was the same as an order. There was only one way to receive it.

Without hesitation.

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She stopped deliberating. Opened the first small stopper.

Tilted her head back.

And drank all three—every last drop—one after another.

Not bitter, like she’d half-expected.

They dissolved the moment they touched her tongue, becoming a clean, cool current that slipped down her throat like clear running water.

A few seconds passed.

Then the effects hit.

And in that same moment, Aurora understood.

Why Pandora had split them into two sets.

Why she had gone to the trouble of producing a deliberately restrained version to show Unit 039, and saved this one for Aurora alone.

The residual infection that had been clinging to her body—the lingering remnants of the Alpha strain that had never quite been cleared, the dull ache of damage that had been quietly eroding her from the inside—

It met the clean, surging wave of this compound.

And collapsed.

Like packed snow dropped into boiling water.

In the span of a few breaths, Aurora felt the inside of her body go clear.

The heavy, adhesive exhaustion was simply gone. In its place was a lightness she didn’t have a frame of reference for. A sense of strength, clean and full, occupying every part of her.

This compound...

Aurora stood still, processing the changes moving through her with something close to shock.

It was even more extraordinary than the verified, tested batch she had already called excellent.

If the original twenty-seven-potion regimen was the baseline at one hundred percent—

The first batch had been roughly seventy.

The second batch, the one displayed to Unit 039, had been approximately one hundred and forty.

And this one...

Estimating purely from her body’s feedback.

Around two hundred percent.

Double the baseline.

A sixty percent improvement over the already-staggering second batch.

And even the raw number of two hundred percent didn’t fully capture how it felt. The quality of the effect was something that the percentage couldn’t contain. The strength wasn’t coming in like a crude flood or a forced surge. It was moving through her like water finding its level—smooth, complete, leaving nothing out of place.

Better results. And somehow, fewer side effects.

She had taken potions three separate times in quick succession.

By standard alchemical theory and by her own accumulated experience, stacking compounds at this frequency should have multiplied the adverse reactions to something difficult to bear. Potentially dangerous.

But.

Aurora took a slow breath and closed her fist.

Apart from a faint, almost negligible tingling in her fingertips.

Nothing.

The actual adverse reaction was a fraction of what she had expected. Less than she could have imagined.

“My Lady’s ability really is...”

Aurora stood in front of the bathroom mirror, watching the eyes looking back at her grow steadily brighter, and whispered to herself without sound.

The more accurate word, if she were being honest, was “terrifying.”

But a knight didn’t describe her own liege with that word. Not even privately. Not even alone with only herself to hear it.

So Aurora used the more restrained, more careful word instead.

Even though the shock that Pandora had delivered her was considerably more intense than “astonishing” could express.

With that feeling came an emotion she couldn’t cleanly identify.

She had thought, after reaching the Second Rank, after gaining a mentor’s guidance and earning Senior Brother Julian’s genuine attention, after everything that had happened—she had thought she was starting to close the distance.

That she was no longer the ordinary apprentice who could only look up at My Lady’s retreating back and reach toward something too far away to touch.

But apparently.

Not only was My Lady’s combat ability at a level that left no room for hope. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Her alchemical craft, her brewing technique, every one of those skills—equally unreachable. Equally terrifying.

Aurora pressed her fist gently closed.

Her nails pressed into her palm. A small, clean sting.

In a certain sense, having a liege like this was genuinely unfortunate.

As a knight, she couldn’t feel her own purpose in any meaningful way. No matter how hard she pushed, no matter how relentlessly she trained, it seemed like she would never truly be useful to My Lady. She would always be standing to the side, watching My Lady solve alone the problems that Aurora couldn’t even properly comprehend.

But on the other hand.

Aurora’s gaze found her own face in the mirror. The one that was currently glowing with a vitality that hadn’t been there an hour ago, courtesy of the potion still humming softly through her.

She was also genuinely, undeniably fortunate.

To follow someone like this. To witness those impossible skills with her own eyes. To receive the benefit of something that could only be described as a minor miracle brewed into a small glass vial...

“My Lady is powerful, cunning, and... gentle.”

This was a fortune that countless people yearned for, yet could never attain.

Aurora shook her head, like she was physically dislodging the formless self-pitying thoughts from somewhere behind her eyes.

No more thinking about meaning and purpose.

That was weakness.

A knight didn’t get to indulge in that.

She looked at her reflection—flushed and bright-eyed, carrying the mild, pleasant warmth of a potion’s lingering touch, like someone who’d had exactly one glass of something good—and breathed in slowly.

She turned on the tap.

Cold water rushed out.

She bent forward and washed her face with it, hard, both hands pressing the icy water against her skin.

When she straightened and looked up again, the open, overwhelmed expression that the shock had put on her face was gone.

What replaced it was stillness.

And deep inside that stillness, rising back to the surface where it belonged:

The steadiness of Aurora, the knight.