I Loaded the Occult Panel

The final match of the group stage fell on the afternoon of the fourth day.

The crowd inside Iliad Hall was even larger than it had been all week.

The war had been going on for nearly two months, and the casualty lists from the front grew longer by the week.

Restless city residents simply crowded into the lecture hall to listen to these young people argue on behalf of the dead.

Richard entered the west side hall, where a line had already formed at the drawing bucket.

The senior student acting as proxy drawer pulled a slip from the bucket, unfolded it, and read aloud:

“Richard Williams, Imperial Capital University, Preparatory.”

“Topic: In wartime, can a lie be a form of mercy?”

“Negative.”

A second slip followed immediately.“Roland Ashby, Trinity College, Undergraduate.”

“Affirmative.”

Richard looked across the room.

Roland Ashby was half a head taller than him, his dark green Trinity robe pressed without a single crease.

His jaw was clean-cut, and thin-rimmed spectacles sat on the bridge of his nose.

Nearby, people were whispering.

“The Ashby family—they run a newspaper, don’t they?”

“The Imperial Capital Chronicle is theirs.”

“No wonder he’s smiling after drawing Affirmative. Speaking for lies is what his family does best.”

Richard walked to his lectern and stood ready.

He had drawn Negative for this match; he would be speaking for the truth.

Compared to defending the trading companies, he could stand his ground on today’s side of the motion.

He felt sure of himself.

The moderator stepped to the center of the platform.

“Final match of the preparatory group stage. Undergraduate Roland Ashby versus Preparatory student Richard Williams.”

“Six minutes for opening statements. Affirmative first.”

The silver circle traced into the floor of the lecture hall lit up.

Ashby stepped to the lectern, speaking at once in the rounded, polished accent of capital high society.

“Members of the panel, ladies and gentlemen.”

“On today’s motion, I would like to begin with a mother.”

“Last month, her son went down with his ship off the Dogger Bank. The telegram from the Admiralty read ‘missing.’”

“‘Missing’ is a lie. No one survived that sinking, and the Admiralty knew it perfectly well.”

“Why?”

Ashby slowed his pace.

“Because ‘missing’ leaves a crack open. Through that crack, a mother can still hope—hope that one day her son might return alive from a prisoner-of-war camp.”

“Plato wrote of the noble lie in the Republic.”

He raised a hand, and the ring of silver light along the veil began to condense downward.

“For a city-state to endure, it requires a story that everyone believes—even if it is not strictly true—to bind people’s hearts together.”

“Today the Empire is at war. The young men on the front lines need to believe they are dying for a righteous cause; the mothers left behind need to believe their sons’ deaths had meaning, or... that there is still some thread of hope that they live.”

“The Affirmative submits: in wartime, a lie that helps the living endure is mercy.”

“The truth has its value, but the truth cannot save that mother.”

Applause broke out.

Richard kept his Spirit Vision active.

Beyond the veil, Ashby’s words had condensed into the figure of a mother standing on a pier.

She looked out over an empty sea, yet her face held no grief—only waiting.

It was beautifully constructed: serene and warm.

But that serenity was hollow.

It had to be propped up by a ship that would never return, and every day it stood required feeding another day of hope into it.

“Opening statement for the Negative.”

Richard stepped to the lectern.

“Mr. Ashby spoke of a mother waiting for a ship, and I feel deep pity for her.”

“But the Affirmative left out one fact. The person telling the noble lie in Plato’s city is the philosopher-king, who sees the truth clearly. The lie is told to the governed; the liar’s own mind remains lucid.”

“Wartime lies today are different.”

“The people lying today are the newspapers and the propaganda office. At the start, they too know which sentences are true and which are false.”

“But when a lie is told long enough, a strange thing happens.”

He paused.

“The liars begin to believe it themselves.”

“An editor who writes a rout as a ‘strategic transfer’ ten times comes to believe it really was a transfer; a man who writes three hundred corpses as ‘slight casualties’ ten times no longer feels three hundred is a large number.”

“When that day arrives, the lie has no master.”

Richard’s voice dropped to the pitch where the hall’s stone walls began to return the resonance.

“A masterless lie that everyone believes—even the ones who told it—comes alive.”

“And once alive, it has to eat. It feeds on the people who believe it.”

Beyond the veil, Richard’s words settled into place.

Behind the waiting mother Ashby had shaped, a faint shadow rose out of nowhere.

The shadow had no face; it reached out and began drawing something from the mother’s back, strand by strand.

In the audience, those watching through Spirit Vision slowed their breathing.

“It gives that mother something to look forward to, and every time it gives, it draws away a thread of her clarity.”

“This is not mercy.”

Richard looked across at the opposite lectern.

“This is... feeding a person alive to a lie.”

The hall went quiet.

Beyond the veil, Ashby’s serene mother had already been thinned to semi-transparency.

At the center of the panel, Sir Muller’s eyes showed a glint of approval.

He had written of it in On the Weight of Verdicts: among forms shaped by speech, the most formidable is the form of backlash.

It was the hardest and heaviest technique in judicial rhetoric.

And Richard, a preparatory student, had executed it.

In the cross-examination, Ashby pressed hard.

“Mr. Williams, you argue that lies cause backlash. If that mother learned on the spot that her son was dead, what would happen to her?”

“She would grieve,” Richard said.

“And if the grief were too much to bear?”

“Failing to bear it is the truth,” Richard said, meeting his eyes.

“But Mr. Ashby, the endurance you offer her is borrowed.”

“You borrow against her own sanity, and what you give her in return is a slow wasting away.”

In his closing statement, Ashby delivered his final line.

“...I stand by our case: a lie that lets someone live one more day is worth more than a truth that makes them collapse where they stand.”

Richard stepped to the lectern.

“Mr. Ashby speaks of living one more day.”

“I concede that this day is real.”

“But it is drawn in advance.”

“Today borrows from tomorrow, tomorrow borrows from the day after, and in the end, that account has to be settled by someone.”

“The one who settles it is that mother.”

“The truth is painful, of course. But once the pain passes, the person is still there—still able to weep, still able to hate, remembering her son and slowly living on.”

“The Negative stands by its case: in wartime, a lie is not mercy.”

“It only defers the pain to the end, and adds interest.”

“Thank you.”

The moderator made the announcement from the platform.

“Preparatory group stage, final match.”

“Victory to the Negative.”

Applause rose in an even, steady wave.

Richard gave a slight nod toward the opposite lectern.

Ashby nodded in return and stepped down from the platform.

Winning this round left Richard feeling more settled.

This time, he had spoken words he actually believed.

With the group stage concluded, the list of preparatory students advancing to the tournament was posted on the department bulletin board.

Richard’s name sat in the first tier, with Montagu’s directly below it.

Both had made it into the finals.

But Catherine was not on the list.

Richard stood before the board and read it twice.

At the bottom of the third tier was a single line of small print: “Catherine Blackwood—withdrew.”

She hadn’t been eliminated; she had pulled out herself.

The Nemesis persona had lent her too sharp a blade.

Once drawn, it demanded blood, and once it tasted blood, it could not stop.

Withdrawing likely meant she had realized as much herself.

Stepping away was the only way she had left to stop it.

“She withdrew.”

Montagu had come up beside him without him noticing.

“A pity,” Montagu said, sounding genuinely regretful. “She was all but guaranteed a spot in the finals.”

“She isn’t at school,” Fischer added as he joined them, worry plain on his face.

“I checked her usual row of study desks yesterday—empty. She didn’t show up for Inscriptiology this morning either.”

Several other classmates had also been talking about Catherine in private over the last few days.

With her temperament, she wasn’t especially popular on an ordinary day.

She was distant, blunt, and prone to offending people.

But there were also those who liked her decisiveness.

“She’s so straightforward—disappearing like that makes you worry,” one of the girls said.

Richard didn’t join the exchange.

He had a fairly good idea where Catherine had gone.

The finals were different from the group stage.

The winners from all three age divisions were combined into one pool; preparatory students could easily find themselves facing postgraduates.

The roster had suddenly shrunk to a dozen or so names, every one of them someone who had fought their way out of their own bracket.

On the opening day of the finals, the crowd outside Iliad Hall was even denser than before.

Richard checked the countdown on his Panel.

It was the fifth day of Debate Week; counting the preparation days before the tournament began, only one day remained until the seed’s timer expired.

As he climbed the steps, anticipating what the seed would do once unlocked, he caught an unusually synchronized burst of cheering halfway up.

The sound was distinct from the surrounding noise—it was a group of girls.

He looked toward it.

At the foot of the steps, a cluster of students in dark blue high-collared uniforms had gathered under the plane trees.

In the front row stood a familiar figure.

Grey hadn’t put her hair up today; her dark hair was tied loosely at the nape of her neck with a ribbon.

Hands clasped at her chest, chin tilted slightly upward, she was looking left and right for someone.

When she caught sight of Richard on the steps, she straightened her back even further, as if afraid a certain person might miss her.

Richard paused and gave a slight nod in her direction.

Color flared across the girl’s cheeks; she looked quickly away, pretending to speak to the classmate beside her.

Even so, the way her eyes kept darting back toward him... Richard suppressed a smile and continued up the steps.

A gathering of young people on the scale of Debate Week was precisely the sort of occasion a girls’ school would use for student edification.

Richard handed his pass to the white-gloved usher at the doors and went inside.

He had no match of his own on the first day of the finals.

He found a seat on the west side to watch the others first.

The opening debate was between two postgraduate competitors.

Richard focused on Silas Penrose.

He was the Royal Academy’s seeded contender this year, universally favored to take the title.

Word was that he had already touched the threshold of the Practitioner rank, lacking only the formal declaration ritual to reach Minor Adept.

The moment Penrose took the platform, the ether in the hall noticeably deepened.

He was short, with a slight stoop to his shoulders.

When he spoke, his pace was unhurried, every word carrying deliberate weight.

Richard observed the veil through Spirit Vision.

The form Penrose constructed was far denser and more stable than anything the other competitors had produced.

Where the preparatory and undergraduate students built forms that floated on the surface of the veil, his was driven into it like a nail.

So this is what touching the threshold looks like, Richard noted.

A Practitioner refined to the elite tier of his field—both his signature artifact and his core discipline had reached another level entirely.

After watching several rounds, Richard had a clear sense of the strongest contenders in the finals.

By the time the hall emptied, dusk had fallen.

Richard left the building and had barely reached the bottom of the steps when someone called his name.

“Richard!”

It was Phillips.

He came sauntering over from under the plane trees with a teacup in hand.

Beside him walked a young woman—his fiancée, the one who had hauled him off the lawn the other day.

“Watching all day has worn me out,”

Phillips said, taking a sip of tea. “Need to wet my throat.”

“You were sitting in a chair. What’s there to be worn out about?”

“Watching other people argue takes more out of you than arguing yourself.”

Phillips was as full of nonsense as ever:

“You’re worrying for one side, and two minutes later you’re anxious for the other. It’s draining.”

His fiancée lifted her skirts in a formal curtsy.

“Mr. Williams. We didn’t have a chance to be properly introduced last time.”

Her manners were thorough to a fault.

“I am Constance Blackburn.”

Richard returned the bow.

“Miss Blackburn.”

“Constance is fine,” she said politely. “Phillips relies on your guidance often, I know.”

“Hardly.” Richard glanced at Phillips. “The only thing he relies on is that teapot of his.”

Phillips let out a laugh.

Constance gave her fiancé a look without speaking, then stepped over and planted a slap on his back that brought him straight to attention.

Richard found it mildly entertaining.

The roles between these two were entirely inverted:

the Hunter girl carrying the poise of a high-society lady, and the educated young gentleman nursing a head full of crooked logic.

“You’re a Practitioner as well, I take it, Miss Constance?” Richard asked, testing the assumption.

Constance looked at him, a Hunter’s candor showing through the formal polish.

“You can tell, then. My family walks this path; someone in my generation had to carry it on.”

“Her father is close to advancing to Major Adept,”

Phillips put in, sounding faintly boastful. “There was a Virtuoso in her family further back, too.”

“Nothing compared to Mr. Williams’s grandfather,” Constance said smoothly. “My elders have always held Lord Gerard in the highest respect.”

Richard smiled and let the remark pass.

As the three of them stood talking, Phillips looked past Richard’s shoulder.

“...Richard.” He wagged his eyebrows at his tea-drinking acquaintance. “There’s a girl here to see you.”