One of the school nurses handed Kira a herbal smoothie to speed up her body’s natural healing and ushered her out of the completely packed hospital ward, announcing that she’s cleared for lessons in a harried voice.
Kira gathered her stuff in her arms and carefully navigated through the labyrinth of temporary mattresses riddling the floor, filled with students from yesterday's summons disaster. All of them bore varying degrees of injuries, ranging from bruises to broken bones, few even in intensive care for internal injuries.
Thinking back to yesterday, Kira shivered as she remembered the frightening presence she had summoned. The instant the summons appeared, a crushing pressure slammed down on her shoulders, unable to resist it, she was immediately crushed into the ground. She couldn't even shout in shock as her lungs were crushed and her head smacked onto the stone tiles below hard enough to crack them.
Darkness had come soon afterward when she lost consciousness. It had all happened so quickly, she barely had time to register anything before her smashed face got intimate with the bloodied rubble.
Fortunately she was spared most of the pain while unconscious, but from what she had heard from the overworked nurses and seen in the overcrowded hospital ward, a lot of students, even a few teachers, were also affected by the extreme pressure, yet was far away enough in the vicinity to get away with minor bruising and broken kneecaps from coming in contact with the floor.
But most students near and around Kira’s summoning circle simply did not have the soul strength to resist her summon’s presence, and as a result were completely steamrolled by it. The state of which they were in was bluntly described by a passing nurse muttering darkly, as “looked like road-kill”.
Which was made worse as a lot of students were not as privileged as noble houses to be able to purchase high purity holy water.
Meaning that while Kira from the noble House of Rockwell was able to recover in one night despite having been in the worst condition out of all, and would’ve died if the stronger teachers had arrived any later to peel her off the floor; the poorer students suffered more in the long term, since the school nurses were completely overwhelmed with the massive influx of patients, and healing using their own mana reserves between running from one critical patient to another, they could not heal any of them to full health without holy water.
So most injured normal students were still in pain, either they had not fully recovered yet, or their injury was non-life threatening enough to be put on a waiting list.
Kira guiltily hung her head as she rushed back to her dorm-room, her elder brother’s warning, who had briefly stopped by at the crack of dawn to check and report to her wellbeing to father, still fresh in mind: with this stunt she pulled, whether intentional or not, she would have made a lot of enemies last night.
The commoner students and their families would obviously bear hard feelings as a vial of high purity holy water would need one to cost their house and life-savings, but the real threat were the noble houses.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Despite having paid for holy water beforehand in case of emergencies, the school could not stockpile enough for so many nobles all at once as holy water was already rare enough in low purities. So noble houses were furious about how the school did not prioritise their children more. Just a bunch of mind-bendingly complicated inter-house politics.
And since the school and its headmaster had more political protection, with nowhere better to release the pressure, these tensions could easily be pushed onto Kira, and by extension the House of Rockwell, as a scapegoat. Kira would likely be blamed for trying to put their heirs and offspring out of commission to eliminate competition from other houses.
When Kira tried to protest to her brother, he cut her off in his patent cold words. “What’s the use in complaining to me? I only told you my predictions of the current situation, believe me if you will, but don’t come crying when things get tough,”
“That’s mean brother,” She had pouted.
“Knowing your position, the House of Rockwell cannot face the main houses’ wrath, so father may have to renounce you from the family,”
“No! Father wouldn’t! He can’t-”
“I said stop crying. I already filled him in the event and yet he still awaits further report of your situation. If I were the head of house I would’ve cut you off already,” Elias Rockwell pushed on mercilessly.
“Besides, is living as a commoner so bad? You can even go to other countries if they decide you’re a criminal,”
Kira scoffed at one of her brother’s infamously bad attempts at cheering her up, for she knew that even though his words were cruel, he had never done anything to hurt her, and all he wanted to say was that things could have been worse than they were.
But Kira was still stung badly from that conversation. Elias didn’t mean it when he said he’d disown her, right?
In a haze of worry and hurt, Kira threw her dorm-room door open and slammed it behind her. Throwing her stuff on the floor beside her bed, she almost tripped over laundry from just the night before yesterday, which had been so peaceful and vibrant with excitement, a stark contrast to the present.
Eager for a shower, she turned the water spell on by pushing some mana into the magic circle on the ceiling, and began pulling her blood-caked uniform off. But before she managed to completely pull them off, Kira’s self control faltered and hot tears fell down her cheek in streams.
Sobbing with her usual noble composure in tatters, she gave up undressing and just sat down under the stream of warm water, arms wrapped around her knees and she shook as she cried.
Kira stayed like that for a long time, crying between rocking to soothe herself and sullenly watching the brown blood lift off her body and uniform, washing down the drain in streams that got fainter the longer she spent sat under the magic circle.
After the appearance of brownish water had long since vanished and Kira had no more tears left to cry, she got up and clumsily pulled off her sopping wet clothes, which was difficult and heavy for her pruney fingers.
Patting herself dry slowly, Kira felt a lot better, except for her puffy blood-shot eyes which hurt to blink, and lethargically pulled on a fresh set of standard school uniform. Kira didn’t know how long she spent crying to herself, but she couldn’t care less about the classes she missed yesterday and today.
She was in the process of buttoning her outer robes when a sharp knock rang through the small room, her safe pocket of silence abruptly obliterated. Kira’s chest constricted in terror, had they already come for her head?
“Kira Rockwell, the headmaster wishes for your presence,” A clipped authoritative voice snapped with indifference. “You’d best not leave him waiting,”