Chapter 2: Chapter 2

When Hoi Vanagord had heard his mother, an eloquent woman, talk to him about "the best school in town," he had not paid much attention. 

He shrugged it off and left the thought behind, concluding that whatever school she had chosen for him would certainly not be as prestigious as she portrayed it to be.

Not that he was meant to care about it, after all. He was just the son of a low-ranking nobleman and could not expect anything better. 

There was no point in complaining, right? But he felt that it was unacceptable. The desire to show off his skills had always burned in him.

Hoi had always been proficient at magic. It wasn’t that level of ability that your family might brag about at parties, or the level that makes you be remembered by third-rate bandits or young knights. He was surprisingly much better than that.

And he had trained daily since when he was but a small child. Whenever he was exhausted and wanted to stop training in spell casting, he remembered his father’s words. 

That man, who ruled over a small and miserable piece of land, had told him, "in this life nothing is given to you," smiling with a frown, "if you don’t like having to fight for what you want, then you were born into the wrong family. If you don’t like to fight, you will have to accept having to bow down at times." So he would tell him with a less than smiling face, but not concealing the clear affection he had for him. 

And often his father would conclude by saying, "however, if you had swordmanship on your side, or magic, or genius, then these words of mine would be but idle talk. That’s because, strength makes nobility, son. Keep practicing."

And so Hoi practiced. He wasn’t talented at all, and it showed. He could never become a magician, everyone had told him so, and everyone had been forced to recant, one after another. From his father's friends, routed one by one by magic cannons capable of piercing even the strongest materials, to his training partners, who had learned the price of insulting his family.

At that point, following such a huge growth caused by his hard work, the young boy was aware that he had the spotlight on himself.

What he could not expect was to be on the spotlight so much that he’d end up at the Qin City Royal Academy, a school created especially for the continent's most promising talents. 

What he really could not expect, of all the possible events in the world, was that he would sit a few feet away from the Prince of the Empire, son of the Emperor and a world-renowned prodigy.

And what really bothered him was how he was being ignored by the latter, almost as if he was but a mere fly. It had been just a few weeks since school began, but that 15-year-old boy with golden-coloured dazzling hair and regal air seemed completely unwilling to offer even a word to anyone.

His classmates, who mostly belonged to the highest nobility in the Empire, were at first terrified by the mere idea of looking the Prince in the eye. There were many stories about the royal family, for better or worse, that nobody had ever denied.

After a while, however, when everyone realized that the Prince's ocean-blue eyes and elegant mouth focused their attention elsewhere and would not care about others, bets began to be placed.

"My guess is he will utter his first word in a few months!" Joked a pretty boy with thick black hair, vivid eyes and a smirk.

"A few months! Are you kidding? Surely we'll have to wait at least a year!" A little girl on the other side of the class, endowed with red hair and a confident air, answered him, almost as if in a chorus.

"A year? I don't know… if even the professors don't require him to talk to them, maybe we may never know what his voice sounds like!" Added the little boy.

Hoi was already there, in the classroom, at that moment: it was early in the morning, the teacher and many pupils had not yet entered the classroom that day. So, those two kids began talking and joking about the Prince, as they usually did by then, but for the first time in the latter’s presence.

‘Are they crazy? He can hear them!’ Hoi thought to himself, noticing how the Prince stood still in his seat, inevitably able to hear the hubbub around him. He was sitting at the last desk with his face turned toward his knees, almost as if he was asleep, showing no intention of raising it again.

Perhaps it was that disinterest that produced that stimulus of courage in the two young men. Whatever their reasons were, they weren’t afraid of punishment.

Soon, Hoi noticed that, other than the four of them, there was another person in the classroom whose heads was equally in the clouds.

It was a girl that Hoi had never paid attention to. She was not ugly at all and had white hair that everyone could envy, but no other redeeming qualities.

Perhaps out of shyness, this girl had never uttered a word in class either.

‘Yet they never told her anything funny. Instead, if the Prince refuses to dignify them with a look or a word, that's when they start acting like children! I hope they receive punishment for all of this....’

So thought Hoi, who could not understand them. They were sons of important nobles in the Empire, but that did not justify them! This school was not only attended by nobles, there were many simple people like him who were accepted on the basis of their achievements. 'Yet,' he believed, 'if I did that, I am sure I would be expelled!'

And as he surrounded himself with such thoughts, he observed the spacious room that housed them. He had paid little attention to it before, but the white quartz walls were filled with the most beautiful quotes and the most famous paintings.

The roof was very low and loomed menacingly, but even the latter boasted writings and drawings of all kinds on it, as well as a permanent light turned on with magic. 

It was at that moment that Hoi noticed where the Prince was looking.

There was a quote on the wall in front of him.

‘The weak defend themselves. The strong defend the weak and themselves. The great defend the strong and the weak, but never themselves.’

These words were framed near the window, under the roof with a color similar to that of wax, serving as the stars of the room's panorama.

'How could I have missed it? He’s sending me a message!' Immediately thought the boy. His short brown hair, hoisted like a topknot toward his eyes and slicked back hair, hid an exceedingly outraged and determined expression. He would solve the problem, for His Majesty himself demanded it!

"Leave him alone!" Hoi shouted unexpectedly and overwhelmed the light tones that had been voiced until then. Immediately, the hazel-brown-haired boy who had done that realised he had called far less attention than he had expected.

The white-haired girl in the seat behind him, busy fiddling with her pens and pencils from earlier in the day, had not even looked up to notice who had disturbed the quiet of the class.

Likewise, not even such a loud gesture, which had probably alarmed even the students outside the classroom, could dispel the Prince's distraction.

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'What do I do now?' Hoi asked to himself, finding himself in an unexpected situation. What he had predicted was different: the Prince would stand up, greet him with the typical royal salute, praise him and make him a noble. Wasn't all of this a test?

Shaking off dreams of being the protagonist of the story, the hazel-haired boy realised that he had been ignored by everyone except the very people he had strongly berated.

In fact, there were two gazes fixed on him. The first, milder, of the boy; the other, more venomous, of the girl. The two looked at him without taking their eyes off, as if they were intimating him not to run away. Only after a few seconds, having calmed the situation, did the girl resume speaking.

"Do you know who we are?" She asked. A simple sentence, composed of simple words, that revealed much more than it seemed to do.

"Are you threatening me?" Responded with an equally questioning attitude Hoi, who could not boast of high aristocratic origins, but certainly held the courage of a king.

"What if we were doing that? How would you react?" The girl retorted. 

'Who the heck is this?' The boy wondered to himself, gritting his teeth and trying to fish in his memories for a time when they had met. 

'Red hair, aggressive attitude, constipated face...' he had heard of a person with these characteristics before. It was just a matter of fishing from his mind the identity of this young girl and her friend. And, to his misfortune, it was a fairly well-known name.

"The daughter of the Baron of Dougleswarth?!" He almost felt like crying when he realized what he had done. 

The Baron of Dougleswarth, a man with long crimson red hair joined in braids, the strongest swordsman in the Empire and the Emperor's own left hand, was easily the second most powerful man in Imperial territory. 

Following the demon king's defeat at the hands of the hero, there were many deserters from the enemy army left, so many that they could gather together.

The second army of demons, legend says, was completely destroyed by a single blow from the Baron while he was still young and sparkling. In Hoi's time, although he had begun losing his former physical strength after the age of fifty, Baron Kail Dougleswarth was nonetheless famous and beloved.

To go against his daughter, unless supported by the Prince himself, was tantamount to suicide.

'The Prince won't even look at me, I don't think he wants to get me out...' Hoi reflected to himself. There was no way that in a normal situation, with everyone talking about him and fighting over him, the Prince could still be more interested about the color of his pants or in reading quotes on the wall.  

'Except if the Dougleswarths and the royals are joking with each other and I disturbed them...'

"Precisely. This is me, Kaila Dougleswarth, and this is my younger brother, a genius if I may say so, Luan Dougleswarth." Said the maiden, pointing with her index finger at that lovely angel, according to her considerations, who was also her brother. 

'She's so corny with him I could die.' The brown-haired boy thought to himself, noticing how the Baron's daughter had almost completely shifted all her attention to her brother's little face, and headed toward him at the opposite side of the classroom.

In truth, Hoi had heard of the girl, but never of her brother. He was already beginning to doubt her words and consider her a mere brocon. But, whether her brother was important or not was the least of his doubts and problems. 

"Well, in any case," she said, after reaching her brother, positioning her hands so she could play with his cheeks, "I will have you expelled from this school. Unlike you, I remember your name, Hoi Vanagord."

"You can't do that!"

"Of course I can. And I will, because my parents have much more power than yours. And I don't like people yelling at me."

At that point the boy was truly angered. The tomato red colour on his face became easily visible and his knuckles tightened. He gritted his teeth and got up from his desk.

"One more word and I'll-" In the middle of that sentence, Hoi paused for a moment. He had already prepared a fist with his left arm, bringing it back. Before he could continue and be executed for treason, his reason knocked at the doors of his head.

"I'm leaving!" He shouted simply, barely drawing the attention of the maiden who was now busy playing with her little brother's cheeks, feeling like she was done with threats.

Noticing the scene, seized with anger, Hoi huffed for a second and immediately ran out of the classroom with quick feet and a strong stride.

Four people remained inside the classroom. After a few seconds, they already became three.

"What a bungler..." laughed Kaila's brother as soon as Hoi had closed the door, laughing like no one else in the class had heard before. He seemed to be having tons of fun.

"That's right, he made a big mess."

"We should keep him in this school. I want to fight him with a sword."

"You want to kill him, you mean?"

Meanwhile, Hoi had entered the bathroom. Aware of the grave mistake he had made, tears would not stop flowing from his almond-brown hair. He sobbed incessantly, thinking about the words he had been told.

'He will have me expelled.' He thought of his father, his mother and all the sacrifices they had to make to get there.

Was this how he was going to end? Should he have left so easily? Should he have fought?

"The threats of a sweet flower in the middle of a meadow never moved the flora of the human world from its imperturbable position.”

An ominous voice silenced the young man's thoughts.

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