The aftermath of the battle in the high tower was not a celebration, but a cold, clinical interrogation of reality. The Guild Knights moved with practiced efficiency, their heavy boots thudding against the stone as they secured the dome. Dame Elara approached Kaela, her hand hovering near her own sword hilt. The sight of the shattered extraction field and the stabilized Grand Reservoir told a story that the Guild's hierarchy was not prepared to hear. To them, a Siphon of that magnitude should have been impossible for anyone below a Champion rank to even touch, yet here stood a Novice with muddy boots and a sword that looked like a piece of salvaged scrap.
Kaela allowed the Knights to disarm her. She felt the heavy, suspicious gaze of the squad as they took Rust-Eater, treating it like a live explosive. They didn't understand the blade, but they felt the vacuum it left in the air—the way the gold light of the Reservoir seemed to avoid the scabbard. Kaela was not taken to a celebratory hall; she was escorted down to the deepest sub-levels of the Bastion, far below the archives, to a room made of lead-lined stone designed to dampen all spiritual energy.
For hours, the high-ranking members of the Sword Council sat behind a long, curved table of obsidian. They were men and women of immense power, their Auras so dense they felt like physical weights in the room. They questioned her relentlessly. They wanted to know how she had bypassed the Sentinel Automata. They wanted to know why she was in the tower at midnight. Most of all, they wanted to know how an Ember-rank Novice had erased a Siphon who was actively feeding on the Kingdom's heart.
"I used the Formless Style," Kaela repeated, her voice hoarse but steady. "I exploited his commitment to the extraction. I targeted the flow of his energy, not his physical body."
She did not mention the Sin-Eater's true nature. She did not mention Hagar. To reveal the sword was a parasitic relic of the Penitent Legion would turn her from a hero into a prisoner in an instant. She framed her victory as a lucky strike of leverage and timing—the very essence of the "scavenger's luck" the nobles already associated with her.
Silas Corvus was brought in as a witness to her "unusual abilities," and for once, the noble youth was silent. He looked at Kaela with a mixture of terror and loathing. He knew, better than anyone, the cold void she carried. When asked if he believed Kaela was capable of such a feat, he only muttered that "the rat has a way of making power disappear." His testimony, though meant to be an insult, only served to confirm the Council's deepest fears: there was something in the Bastion they could not measure or control.
By dawn, the Council reached a verdict born of political necessity. They could not execute the girl who had saved the Grand Reservoir, but they could not allow her to remain a Novice among the general population. Her presence was a disruption to the order they spent centuries building. They declared the event a "classified containment exercise" and stripped Kaela of her official Novice status. She was not expelled, but she was removed from the Academy's roster.
Dame Elara was the one who delivered the final news in the quiet of the interrogation cell. "You saved the Kingdom, Vane, and for that, they are punishing you with obscurity," Elara said, handing back the sheathed Rust-Eater. The Knight's face was unreadable, but she handed the weapon over with a localized shield of her own Aura, protecting herself from the blade's pull. "You are being reassigned. You are no longer a student of the Bastion. You are now a Direct Asset under my personal command. You will live in the shadows of this Guild, and you will do the work the Knights are too loud to handle."
Kaela took the sword. She felt the heavy, sated weight of the Void-Iron. She had been erased from the history books before she had even been written into them, just like the Penitent Legion before her. But as she stood up, she realized that being a "Direct Asset" gave her something the Academy never could: the freedom to hunt. The Shadow Hand was gone, but the Siphons were a network, and now, for the first time, the predator had a scent.