Shattered Sanity

(Meanwhile, The Imperial Academy, Jack Sullivan’s POV)

Jack Sullivan sat hunched over a desk buried beneath a mountain of documents, his bloodshot eyes moving between the various testimonies and investigative reports that he had spent the past seven days collecting.

Several red strings stretched across the desk, connecting one document to another as Jack desperately attempted to establish a relationship between the seemingly contradictory pieces of evidence, although every time he thought he was approaching a reasonable conclusion, another inconsistency emerged.

”Fuck... None of this makes any bloody sense.”

Jack muttered, as he ran his fingers through his disheveled hair before leaning forward to examine Principal Boseman’s testimony once again.

Ever since his humiliating confrontation with Duke Drew Dawnriver, the investigation had become the only thing keeping him functioning, as whenever he stopped working, his thoughts inevitably returned to the deaths of his assistants and the indignation he had suffered.

However, the deeper he delved into the Black Week massacre, the more questions he uncovered, and with several crucial pieces of information still missing, he found himself unable to construct a theory that accounted for everything.

’Let’s start with what we know.’

Jack thought, as he pulled Boseman’s testimony towards himself and carefully reread the section concerning the residual Aether discovered at the massacre site.

According to the Principal, the lingering Aether traces belonged to an Ascendant whose strength exceeded the Inferno Rank, suggesting that someone extraordinarily powerful had been present during the incident.

And considering that Riven Dawnriver was merely an Ember Rank Ascendant, the possibility that he had personally generated such overwhelming Aether seemed practically nonexistent.

’Which means someone else was there. Someone powerful enough to enter the Academy without being detected.’

Jack concluded, as he followed the red string connecting Boseman’s testimony to the statement provided by Gary Ironveil.

Gary had confirmed that he had beaten Riven so severely during their confrontation that the boy had barely been capable of moving afterward, making it difficult to imagine how he could have subsequently slaughtered twenty-one students.

Furthermore, Riven’s own testimony suggested that he had lost consciousness during the confrontation, which aligned with Gary’s description of his physical condition.

And then there was Jeff.

According to the available accounts, Jeff had also been knocked unconscious during the incident, yet unlike the twenty-one murdered students, he had somehow survived.

’Interesting... If the killer intended to slaughter everyone present, why spare the unconscious students?’

Jack wondered, as he tapped his finger against Jeff’s testimony before drawing another red string between the documents.

One possible explanation was that the intruder had only targeted those who remained conscious, perhaps eliminating anyone capable of resisting him or witnessing his arrival.

Under that interpretation, Riven and Jeff might have survived simply because they had already been incapacitated when the murderer appeared.

However, there remained one particularly troublesome piece of evidence that Jack could not explain away.

The murder weapon.

Sir Roderick, the weaponsmith responsible for examining Sky-Cleaver, had been unequivocal in his findings, confirming that the wounds inflicted upon the murdered students were consistent with Riven Dawnriver’s halberd.

And unlike the conflicting witness testimonies, the physical evidence surrounding the weapon was considerably harder to dismiss.

’So someone powerful enough to slaughter twenty-one students somehow ended up using the boy’s halberd instead of his own weapon? Why?’ ℯ𝐥.

Jack wondered, as he leaned back against his chair and stared towards the ceiling, attempting to reconcile the weapon evidence with the possibility of an unidentified intruder.

Perhaps the killer had deliberately used Sky-Cleaver to implicate Riven, although that explanation raised another question concerning why the killer would try to frame the Dawnriver heir in the first place?

Then again, there was also the possibility that Riven himself had committed the murders during one of his unexplained blackouts, something Jack had been reluctant to dismiss entirely.

Especially after his private conversation with Vice Principal Chadwick.

’Stormborn...’

Jack thought, as his gaze shifted towards a separate document lying near the edge of his desk, upon which he had written a single word in large letters.

Stormborn.

A race believed to have gone extinct long ago, whose mysterious connection to Storm Aether, and distinct record of having green eyes, had apparently been significant enough for Chadwick to suspect that Riven Dawnriver might secretly belong to their bloodline.

If that suspicion proved correct, then perhaps Riven’s unusual blackouts and the extraordinary Storm Aether detected at the massacre site were connected in ways that Jack did not yet understand.

However, what troubled him was how eagerly Chadwick had introduced that possibility, almost as though the Vice Principal had been searching for an opportunity to discredit Riven long before the massacre occurred.

’And then there’s that bloody Truth Orb...’

Jack thought, as he pulled Chadwick’s interrogation transcript towards himself, remembering how evasive the Vice Principal had become whenever he questioned the origins of the artifact.

Chadwick had possessed a Truth Orb that the Academy had no authorization to use, and rather than treating its existence as unusual, he had apparently been prepared to use it against Riven without hesitation.

More importantly, his suggestions concerning Riven’s true ancestry suggested that his suspicions had existed well before the events of Black Week.

’Why the hell was Chadwick investigating the boy’s bloodline before any of this happened? And who gave him that Truth Orb?’

Jack wondered, as he began tapping his fingers against the word Stormborn, his expression growing increasingly troubled.

If someone within the Academy had already been working against Riven, then the massacre might have been more than an unfortunate incident that happened to implicate him.

Perhaps someone had deliberately engineered the entire situation.

But if that were true, why not chop off Gary’s head? Why murder the other twenty-one students? And why leave behind evidence of spell usage whose strength exceeded the Inferno Rank?

”FUCK!”

Jack suddenly slammed his fist against the desk, causing several documents to scatter across its surface as a sharp headache began throbbing behind his eyes.

Every explanation seemed to account for some of the evidence while contradicting something else, and the more he attempted to connect the pieces, the more convinced he became that he was overlooking something fundamental.

For now, the evidence appeared to favor the possibility of an unidentified intruder killing the students, over Riven Dawnriver acting alone, although Jack remained unwilling to declare the boy innocent while the mystery surrounding his blackouts and the murder weapon remained unresolved.

And with only three weeks remaining before he was expected to submit his preliminary findings to the Emperor, Jack knew that he could not afford to spend much longer chasing disconnected possibilities.

Somewhere among the testimonies, the strange Aether traces, the unexplained blackouts, and Chadwick’s suspicious behavior, there had to be a connection that explained how everything had unfolded.

And Jack did not plan to sleep till he got to the bottom of it, since he understood that this job, if done wrong, could start a political storm that could envelope the whole Empire in a civil war.