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It was that time of the month again, and Greyham was dreading what was most likely to be more than two hours of briefing, updates, and addendums to school policy, 90% or more of which would most likely have nothing to do with him or his department.

And all of that was not even mentioning the politics that go on during that meeting, but being in the institute he was in, it was unavoidable when nobles got involved, especially when some of the teachers themselves were nobles, and extra especially because of the recent shakedown the king performed. So as much as King Argus the First, founder of the Royal Academy, wished it to be a place where talent could grow without the taint of politics, that dream was pretty much dead from the start.

In fact, if his investigations into where Luke Ironcrest’s name got leaked were not pointing to somewhere in the city guards, he would have suspected one of the teachers somehow hearing about it and leaking it to the student body.

Greyham checked the time to see how long he could push being late to skip all the preamble of the meeting and sighed, it was not long since the meeting started and they would most likely be going through the agenda and last meeting’s minutes.

He had already made his thoughts clear on what he thought of this monthly meeting to the headmaster, but the headmaster was having none of it, saying rubbish about it being his duty as a Head of Department to attend the meeting or some such nonsense.

To which Greyham thought was utter rubbish, his presence there could easily be replaced by one of his assistant instructors for all the good it would do.

As Greyham grumbled to himself, he reached down to his secret drawer to access his stash of hard liquor for a cheeky sip, and as he did so, he heard students running down his hallway shouting something, but his thick hardwood door muffled the words to the point he could not understand. So he just ignored it

But as he got a hold of the metal flask, unscrewed the cap, and was about to take a sip to take the edge off of what was going to be a very boring meeting, he noticed the escalation of students running and shouting outside his private office. Which in his experience, was never a good thing.

After squirreling away his booze once again, somewhat pissed that he did not get to whet his palate in peace with the fine 20-year-old whisky he was about to partake of before whatever ruckus was going on outside, Greyham marched over to his door and swung it open to see the students running towards somewhere further down the hall.

Not wanting to be discovered, in order to see what was really going on, Greyham activated his Aura Suppression technique to make himself blend into the surrounding energies, making it very easy for those around to look past him like he was an uninteresting pillar that they just needed to go around.

As he got closer, Greyham could now hear that there was a scuffle going on, and what he saw almost made him blurt out a laugh at the absurdity of what was going on.

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At the center of a mob of boys, that looked to be made of first to third year of higher education boys, was a boy he had come to recognize over the past few months, Luke Ironcrest.

And what was the absurd thing he was witnessing? He was witnessing Luke swinging around an aura-clad boy by the legs to beat on others.

The only times he had ever seen this move being performed was when he was fighting ogres, giants, monitors, and other big races on the field of battle, and the closest he had ever come to doing such a thing was when he was young, lost his sword on the battlefield, and was forced to grab the nearest thing to defend himself in the moment, which happened to be an armored dismembered arm.

Greyham looked at the belligerents who were engaged in this conflict and noticed that most of them were from noble houses, and from the house crests sewn on their uniforms, he knew that their noble houses were either directly or indirectly implicated in the shakedown, or were close friends of affected houses, which made it pretty clear of why they were attacking Luke Ironcrest.

But before Greyham jumped into action to stop the fight, he recognized many faces of those attacking Luke Ironcrest. These were the usual faces when it came to disciplinary cases, and seeing as Luke was doing well knocking the troublemakers down one after another, he was content to just stand and watch, so long as the injuries were nothing a healer could not patch up.

As for Luke, Greyham could not help but feel a sense of pride for teaching him how to fight like a skirmisher and using said knowledge to maintain the upper hand against a numerically superior opponent.

Especially when Luke started using a dark haze spell in a relatively narrow area like a hallway, but things took a worrying turn when the dome of darkness magic suddenly washed over one side of the boys surrounding Luke, and soon there were the sounds of smacks, followed by the screams of pain and a pop of a joint being dislocated.

A popped joint to finish off an opponent was nothing Greyham had not experienced or seen before during training, but even he thought it was a wee bit extreme in this situation.

After the scream and pop of a joint, the hallway became silent in anticipation of what had just happened. Soon there were sounds of whispering from the dark haze spell, followed by shouts of fear and desperation.

“No! No, please! NO NO” shouted a familiar voice from inside the dark haze spell, followed by more screams.

The opponent was clearly defeated, so in Greyham’s eyes, this was a step too far from what he could tolerate as he started pushing his way to the dome of dark haze, and when he thought he would not be fast enough, he simply jumped over the encircling boys, landed in the dome, blasted out his aura to forcefully dispel Luke’s spell, looked down at a screaming Oswald Berkeley and shouted, “STOP!”, just as another joint popped out of its socket and Luke let go.

Just as Greyham was about to start chewing people out, especially Luke Ironcrest for his excessive use of such brutal methods in what he would count as a glorified schoolyard scuffle.

he saw some boys in the corner of his vision slowly trying to back away and sink into the crowd.

“Nobody move…” Graham growled as his voice carried down the hallway more akin to a beast than a man, and along with the growled words, came the same tyrannical aura that shredded Luke’s spell. But this time, that same aura was pushing all the students gathered in the hallway to their knees, aura or magical protection be damned.

As all the students were being suppressed, Greyham touched the brooch in the shape of the Royal Academy’s emblem and pushed mana into it.

Once the brooch started glowing, he spoke, “Guard Captain, I require assistance at my position to apprehend around sixty students that I currently have detained.”, and shortly after, a stern “Understood.” chirped out from the brooch.