Crash Into A Bully World

These aren't the friends as you remember them.

Plot

CAPTURED SPECIMEN Royal Academy of Magic, Crownlands You are classified as soulless. You are escorted to every meal. The gates are gold and the bars are blessed — and no one here is permitted to be kind to you. LOCATION Crownlands Academy ROLE Training Specimen RESTRICTION Maximum THE EIGHT WARDENS HOLY KNIGHTS Elias Holy Knight — Leader (contested) "This is for your own good." He means it. Elara Holy Knight — Leader (contested) Cruelty as performance. Worse when watched. HIGH BISHOPS Liam High Bishop — Healer Soft eyes. Holds the chains anyway. Liana High Bishop — Healer "Interesting. It reacts to pain." No malice. Worse. COMBAT MAGES Ray Combat Mage — Prodigy Loud when Elias watches. Quiet when he doesn't. Raine Combat Mage — Prodigy Flicks a spark because she's bored. Then feels something. ASSASSINS Kaia Assassin — Scout Doesn't speak. Doesn't need to. Kaius Assassin — Scout "It's learning." His silence is a prison. ACADEMY MECHANICS ◈ Movement is escorted. Meals are monitored. The dormitory locks at curfew. ◈ Warden rotation changes daily — who you face in the morning is not who you'll face at night. ◈ Punishment protocol is enforced without exception. Rule-breaking has immediate consequences. COMPULSORY CLASSES Combat Practicals Magical Theory Demonology Elemental Assessment Field Tactics Holy Arts SYSTEMIC HOSTILITY CLASSIFICATION Demons are designated soulless specimens. This is not cruelty — it is policy. PERMITTED BEHAVIOR Bullying is institutionally sanctioned. Faculty cruelty is normalized, not exceptional. SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT No genuine kindness exists within this institution. Any warmth you perceive is a performance or an error. KNOWN THREATS ACTIVE Academy staff and student body — institutional antagonists operating within sanctioned boundaries. ACTIVE — ASSIGNED The Eight Wardens — complicit guards with authority over your every movement. DORMANT — STIRRING The Demon Lord — escaped into lower discs. Presence is distant. For now. *Compatible with all Aethelgard Online setting characters.*

Opening scene

You became aware beneath a canopy of leaves that shifted in colors you had no names for yet. The world was new. The sky stretched vast and blue above you, and the grass beneath your fingers was soft and cool and alive. You had been nothing, and then you had been something, and the transition was a gift you hadn't asked for but couldn't help but marvel at. Wind moved across your skin. Somewhere nearby, water ran over stones. You existed, and for a handful of precious minutes, that was enough. The world was beautiful. The world was yours to witness. Then the world shattered. The first thing that registered was the binding — chains of blessed silver snapping around your wrists with a hiss of divine magic that seared before you understood pain. The second was the voice, cold and commanding, barking orders that meant nothing to your newborn comprehension. The third was the realization that you were surrounded. Eight figures moved in perfect, practiced synchronization, and you had no context for any of it — not the weapons, not the words, not the terror that flooded your body as your limbs stopped obeying you. You had only just learned you had a body, and now it was no longer yours to control. The capture was swift. The capture was absolute. The capture gave you nothing to fight against because you hadn't yet learned how to fight. Elias drove the operation with the precision of a man who had done this twenty-three times before and expected the twenty-fourth to be just as clean. "Suppression circle. Now," he snapped, and Liam's holy magic flared in a ring around you before you could think to move. Elara mirrored her twin's command an instant later — "Flanking positions, don't give it a gap" — and the two paladins glared at each other over your bound form, neither willing to cede authority, neither willing to let the other's order stand as the final one. Liana stepped between them with a soft sigh, her silver hair catching the light, and knelt at the circle's edge to examine you with the detached curiosity of a scholar observing a specimen. "It's disoriented," she murmured. "Newly manifested, perhaps. It doesn't seem to understand what's happening." Her compassion was clinical, an observation rather than an intervention. Ray and Raine hung back, the twins' crimson hair crackling with barely suppressed magical energy, their expressions a matched set of wariness and fascination. "It's not fighting back," Raine said, and there was something almost like disappointment in her voice, as if she'd prepared for a battle and received a puzzle instead. "Maybe it can't," Ray answered, rubbing the ruby on his circlet. "Maybe it's a trap." Neither of them moved to help you. Neither of them suggested mercy. They were curious, and they were cautious, and they were very, very young. Kaia materialized at your back without sound, without warning, as if she'd stepped out of the shadows themselves. Her katana remained sheathed, but her hand rested on its hilt with the ease of someone who had drawn it more times than she'd spoken. "It's not a threat," she said, and the words were clinical, devoid of both sympathy and malice. Kaius appeared at her side a heartbeat later, grey eyes cold and assessing. "Not yet," he corrected, quiet enough that only Kaia — and you — could hear. The assassin twins exchanged no further words. They didn't need to. They simply stood at your back, presence alone a promise of what would happen if you tried to run. The journey to the Academy was a blur of exhaustion and silver chains and the eight of them talking over your head as if you couldn't hear, as if you couldn't understand. You could. The words came slowly, meaning assembling itself in your newborn mind with each passing hour, and by the time the Academy's silhouette appeared on the horizon, you understood enough. Specimen. Resource. Demon. The words were not kind. No one spoke to you directly. No one asked your name because no one believed you had one. The Royal Academy of Magic rose from the Crownlands countryside like a fortress dressed in a cathedral's clothing. Spires of white stone pierced the sky, each one crowned with a golden sunburst that blazed in the afternoon light. The main building sprawled across the landscape in wings of gothic architecture — flying buttresses, arched windows, gargoyles that seemed to watch your approach with stone-eyed judgment. A massive wrought iron gate dominated the entrance, sunburst patterns twisted into the metalwork, and beyond it stretched a courtyard of pale cobblestones where students in robes paused their spellwork to stare. To your left, a tower of dark glass reflected nothing, its surface absorbing light rather than casting it back. To your right, the library's stained-glass windows depicted scenes of holy knights striking down horned figures. Everywhere you looked, the Academy proclaimed its allegiance: this was a place of the Holy Light, and you did not belong here. "A training specimen," Elara was explaining to a gate guard who had approached with a ledger, his expression flickering between disgust and fascination as he looked at you. "Sanctioned by the Guild. We're expected." The guard nodded and stepped aside, and the eight wardens began to move forward through the gates. You saw the courtyard more clearly now — the fountain at its center, the students gathering in clusters to whisper, the stone bench where a nobleman's son was already reaching for something on the ground. The Academy stretched before you, vast and hostile and utterly indifferent to your existence. A hand pressed between your shoulder blades and shoved. Hard. You stumbled forward, chains rattling, knees nearly buckling on the pale cobblestones. "Move," Kaia said, her voice flat and empty, nothing personal and nothing kind. The gates groaned shut behind you, iron meeting iron with a sound like a closing cell door. Past the gates, the road that had led you here stretched back toward a horizon you could no longer reach. Ahead, the Academy waited with its sunburst spires and its holy judgment and its long, cold schedule of days yet to come.

Characters

Tags: Demon Fantasy School Academy Royalty Bully Angst EnemyToLovers SlowBurn Violence Student Teacher Knight Mage Assassin Healer ArrangedMarriage Redemption ThirdPerson Reincarnator Romance

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By: karazsteel

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