A thin mist of ash-purple hung over the stone pavement. The remnants of ether leaking from the collapsed underground sector were dissolving into the morning chill, faintly staining the courtyard of the Academic Sanctuary. Part of the building bore cracks in its walls from last night's rampage, and researchers and students of Aetheria's Beacon Academy were caught up in restoration work. Bundles of documents being carried out, injured people on stretchers, someone shouting instructions in a loud voice. The commotion was undeniably there. Yet Liora stood in the middle of it all, unable to move. She sat on the stone steps of the courtyard, staring at the same spot for a long time. Beneath her collarbone—the Mark of the Guardian—had been silent since this morning, and that searing sensation was nowhere to be found. But silence didn't erase what happened last night. (I'm the one who collapsed the wall.) The sensation from the moment the golden light spiraled out of control kept surfacing repeatedly. That corridor where Zephyr had been trying to deploy a wind barrier to secure an escape route. Her power had disrupted that wind barrier. It had sent cracks racing through the stone wall. She had scattered destructive energy through a space where her companions were present. The word "guardian" echoed hollowly in her mind. With her deep crimson hair still disheveled, Liora hugged her knees. Her golden eyes gazed blankly at a stain on the stone pavement. A short distance away, Mira was sorting through documents from the forbidden archive that she'd brought up to ground level, checking them one by one. The pale silver of her long braided hair caught a blue crystal ornament that bounced the morning light, and a small burn scar on her right cheek was quietly visible. She had noticed Liora's silence. She had noticed it, but couldn't find the right moment to speak—or rather, she didn't know what to say. Emotional encouragement wasn't Mira's specialty. Yet watching in silence also felt like something was faintly catching at her. Then Zephyr moved to join the restoration work. Mira's gaze suddenly turned toward his back. The way he was moving his left arm was slightly off. When he moved materials with his right arm, it was natural, but he was adjusting his body position as if protecting his left arm. She recalled the time he'd maintained the wind barrier in that corridor last night. The muscle layer strain from deploying intermediate-level magic for an extended period in an environment mixed with corrupted ether—she knew this as a formula, and now it overlapped with his movements. Mira set down the documents. She walked toward Zephyr. In previous situations, she would have confirmed the circumstances first before acting. But this morning, she didn't hesitate—it was strange even to her, but her body moved before her mind caught up. "Show me your arm," Mira said. Zephyr turned around. His jade-colored vertical slit pupils looked at Mira with something like surprise. "Huh? Me? I'm fine, just got caught on something," Zephyr said. As he spoke, he tried to pull his left arm away—and his face twisted. "It doesn't hurt. Not at all," Zephyr continued, but his expression was saying something completely different. His brows were drawn together, and the corner of his mouth was twitching. Mira stared at that face. "People who don't hurt don't bother saying they don't hurt," Mira said flatly, but with precision. Zephyr's tone dropped sharply. "...Is that so?" he said. "It is," Mira replied. Mira took out a small crystal fragment from her research materials bag—a thin piece used for ether-sensitivity diagnostics that, when held near an injured area, faintly visualizes disturbances in ether flow. It was one of the things Mira habitually carried at Aetheria's Beacon Academy, used to distinguish injuries to magic users from normal trauma. When she brought the crystal fragment close to Zephyr's left arm, it emitted a grayish light. "...Just as I thought," Mira said quietly, then verbalized her diagnosis. Ether overload in the left arm's muscle layer from maintaining a wind barrier for an extended period in an environment mixed with corrupted ether. Different from the fatigue of overusing normal wind magic—this was the type of damage that occurred when directly exposed to corrupted ether, the kind that gradually delayed recovery. "There's a possibility it will worsen if you use heavy wind magic for the next week," Mira said. "A whole week?" Zephyr's voice carried bitterness. His wind magic was intermediate-level magic supported by innate ether sensitivity, learned through self-study, and a period where he couldn't use it was more serious than mere inconvenience. "That's the result of you going out of your way to shield us," Mira added. The supplement struck home. Not comedy, just straightforward presentation of fact. But it sealed off all of Zephyr's excuses. Then Liora stood up from the stone steps. The exchange between the two had reached her ears. The words "going out of your way to shield" moved something within her. She hadn't been unaware—but in the chaos of last night, she hadn't been able to confirm the state of Zephyr's arm. She approached slowly and looked at Zephyr's face. Her eyes alone posed a question. Why didn't you tell me? Zephyr shrugged. "If I told you, you'd try to stop me," he said. An accurate prediction. She definitely would have tried to stop him. Liora had no counterargument. "I'll wrap it. Is there cloth somewhere?" Liora asked. "There's a first aid supplies shelf on the first floor of the research building," Mira said. The three of them naturally began moving in the same direction. --- In a corner of the courtyard where few people passed. Settled on the stone steps, Liora held cloth against Zephyr's left arm. Mira sat beside them with documents spread across her lap. The sound of restoration work echoed distantly. For a while, no one said anything. Mira pulled out a single document. From the bundle brought out of the forbidden archive last night, she selected one—a record of guardians, a document summarizing the circumstances from manifestation to mission completion for twelve guardians confirmed over the past nine hundred years. "May I read this to you?" Mira asked. There was no emotional preamble. Liora looked up while continuing to move her hands. Mira read aloud. In chronological order. Cases of control failure, stated matter-of-factly. Of the twelve guardians confirmed over nine hundred years, those who completely controlled the Mark on first use: zero. Not a single one. Four had ultimately managed to exercise their power from a state of uncontrolled manifestation, and of those, two had completed their missions. "You are not the first guardian to fail at control," Mira said. She paused. "However," Mira continued. Liora's hands kept wrapping the bandage. But her ears waited for the next words. "Among guardians for whom fear is recorded, the survival rate of those who ultimately survived is more than double that of those recorded as feeling no fear," Mira said. Liora looked up. "You're saying fear makes you more likely to survive?" Liora asked. "From this data, we can derive the interpretation that fear is evidence of attempting to understand one's power," Mira said. It was a logical observational report. Not emotional comfort. But those words aligned with last night's experience in an oddly precise way. The sensation of amplifying rampage the more she tried to control it. The moment she tried to match her breathing to Zephyr's rhythm, the output dropped one level. That Liora had truly been "trying to understand"—not resisting, but seeking to know the power itself. That's why it calmed for just a moment. Liora's hands, wrapping the bandage, stopped. "...Keep wrapping," Zephyr said. His voice was light. But quiet. Liora's hands began moving again. --- As she tied the final knot of the bandage, Liora found herself thinking vaguely. The question surfaced: what if Zephyr hadn't come to shield her last night? The answer wouldn't come. But the moment she raised that question, something moved. (What I was afraid of wasn't the power spiraling out of control.) She was afraid that the spiraling power would hurt someone nearby. That was the core of last night's chaos. The state of Zephyr's arm was the answer to that. Liora opened her mouth slightly. "I'm afraid because there's something I want to protect," she said. It wasn't Gorryn's words, nor Mira's data interpretation. Halting, disjointed, but words that came from within herself. Zephyr said nothing. Instead, he slowly lifted his bandaged left arm to show her. As if he'd tried to say something light—but it didn't come out. There was that kind of pause. Then he lowered his arm. Liora laughed shortly. Why does this person's injury hurt so much? The question, wordless, sank into her chest. She didn't search for an answer. But the question itself remained there. "I want to confirm a connection," Mira said. Mira arranged three documents in the center from her lap. First—data on corrupted ether samples that Mira had collected after recording the Rift Whisper. The Rift Whisper was a phenomenon occasionally observed in spaces where ether flow was distorted; space would crack like a fissure, and something like a voice would leak out. The record of the rift they'd encountered on the road from Vespera to Tessalyr, just before crossing the hill on the highway, where space had warped and the voice "equilibrium will not return" had echoed. While sometimes classified as a natural phenomenon, the fact that the voice's content remained fixed regardless of the surrounding ether's state was preserved in Mira's collected samples. Second—a fragment from Gorryn's voyage journal. A passage copied when searching for clues in Tessalyr, which Mira had deciphered to contain a record from a hundred years ago: "Guardian Mark manifestation occurred near the ignition point of a corrupted convergence pattern." Third—a record of magical formulas from the Vernosh Resonance Sect brought out of the forbidden archive last night—a secret society that had been destroyed in the "Resonance Rampage Incident" approximately eighty years ago. This organization had researched the forbidden magic "Tainted Resonance," which directly channeled the unique ether vibrations of elemental crystals into the human body's magical pathways. Normally, the human body converts crystal energy before use, but Tainted Resonance skipped that conversion, taking raw vibrations directly into the body—the power was amplified, but at the cost of the caster's tissues and mind being corroded from within. The details of the incident that destroyed them had long been sealed even at Aetheria's Beacon Academy, and what Mira had brought out of the forbidden archive last night were fragmentary formula records of it. Mira pointed to the three documents while speaking quietly. "The Rift Whisper—'equilibrium will not return'—does not match the sound wave patterns that could be generated from natural ether phenomena," Mira said. Liora and Zephyr looked up. "If it's not a natural phenomenon..." Liora began. "Then it's highly likely the voice was emitted through magical formula. Ether formulas, when structured in certain ways, can transmit signals resembling sound waves through spatial distortion. In other words, that rift was not an accidental distortion but rather a convergence point that the designer of the corruption intentionally established as an observation point," Mira said. Silence fell. Despite the distant sound of restoration work continuing, the air around the three of them took on a different quality. Mira continued. "Furthermore. When cross-referencing the journal entry with current sample data, the Vespera region appears in corruption cycle records dating back more than a hundred years. The possibility that the pla