Episode 1: The Protagonist, Cayen
Cayen. That is my name.
A member of the Kiros Marquisate, vassals of the glorious Empire.
Yet within the family, another word entirely defined my place.
Bastard. Or, more precisely, a discardable piece.
My mother had been a prostitute from the brothels. The previous head of House Kiros, stumbling drunk through the pleasure districts, had impulsively sown his seed. From the day they dragged me into the family, hell began.
The household never allowed me more than a single meal a day. Every remaining hour was filled with savage training that brushed against death itself. Night after night I woke coughing blood, my entire body ripped open by agony, and I understood: I was not being raised as a human being. I was being forged into a hunting dog to clean up the family's shadows.
The year I turned eight, they threw me for the first time onto the frontmost killing fields to handle one of the family's dark secrets. I stopped the surging magic beasts. Stopped them again. And again. I swung my sword to live. I abandoned my humanity to survive. Only when I was sixteen, my body a map of scars, was I allowed to return home.
It was because the family head ordered me to enroll in the Imperial Academy.
The Imperial Academy. A name that rang with grandeur, yet to me it was simply another battlefield. The family assigned me a shadow mission: root out the rebels and spies who had infiltrated the Academy. By day I disguised myself as a lazy failing student; by night I waged bloody, secret wars. Studies inevitably fell by the wayside. To the family I was a consumable part that could be swapped out whenever convenient, so no one cared how thoroughly my body was falling apart.
The gazes around me were colder than cold—they were wretched. My half-sister treated me like filthy vermin unworthy of the marquisate's dignity. The Empire's Saintess, watching me return every night covered in blood, became convinced I was a fallen heretic who had dabbled in filthy dark magic. My fiancée, Lise, eldest daughter of the Airen Ducal House, poured contempt on me every time we met, her eyes as if she had just seen filth.
Public opinion was no different. Failing student. Womanizer. The family's disgrace. By the end even I no longer knew who I was.
But the event that placed the perfect period on my tragic life was something else entirely.
That night a secret order arrived from the family.
Protect the Magic Book Core stored in the Academy basement.
To safeguard that core, a fatal restriction applied: the guardian's mana core had to be forcibly injected to create resonance. The family knew my mana core was already half-destroyed from years of endless combat, and still they forced the mission on me. No—they ordered it precisely because they knew.
In the dark basement I shattered my own mana core piece by piece, holding back the Magic Book's collapse. The very instant bloody tears streamed down my cheeks from the unbearable pain, a thunderous crash tore the basement door apart. Dozens of guards and holy knights stormed in.
The crimes they shouted at me were absurd beyond measure: use of dark magic, collusion with black mages, and the theft and destruction of an Academy relic. Everything unfolded as smoothly as a well-rehearsed play. The Magic Book in my hands and the traces of my shattered mana core became perfect evidence of treason.
I became a traitor to the Empire and was permanently expelled from the Academy.
As I stepped through the Academy's main gate, Lise—my former fiancée—approached and spat coldly,
"The very fact that I was engaged to trash like you is the greatest shame of my life. How could you commit something so vile…"
The Saintess's voice that followed dripped with deep loathing.
"You filthy vermin. Your tail has finally been stepped on. Every night I prayed and waited for the day you would show your true colors."
Driven out without even a chance to explain myself, I returned to the family and only then learned the full truth. The eldest son—my half-brother—had framed me as a traitor and sought to eliminate me for the sake of his flawless succession. The family head quietly tossed me the writ of disownment. It was thorough abandonment, the way one disposes of an old, sick hunting dog once the hunt is over.
Really… what had I lived for all this time?
And so my existence was denied by the family, by the Academy, by every corner of the continent. Carrying a shattered mana core, I began to wander the streets with nowhere to go.