"We are very lucky that there are ancient apocryphal texts that have survived. Maybe some of you know or have heard something about them? The authors of some of these apocrypha met the stars themselves in person and described these meetings, right down to what their physical bodies looked like during their stay on Earth. For example, if these descriptions are to be believed, the warlike Antares had the same red eyes as our new guy."

Most of the audience glanced briefly at Lear. From the sudden attention, he dropped his pen from his fingers and looked in bewilderment at the teacher, who had been looking at him for who knows how long.

He was a middle-aged man who loved his job. He did not have an athletic build and had never served as a guardian, being a historian and working at the Academy almost all his life.

They were in a large auditorium intended for streaming lectures. It was morning, and the room was illuminated by sunlight through the wide windows on the right side, so that there was no need to turn on artificial lighting.

Lear felt a small pang of guilt for not having been listening to the lecture all this time. But he already knew all this.

Besides, he was too wrapped up in his own thoughts.

Perhaps Lear had rushed his decisions.

'I couldn't do anything last time, what difference would it make now?' this thought had been spinning around in his head since he woke up, haunting him and giving rise to more and more doubts.

Not that everyone deserved to be saved.

Meanwhile, the lecture continued. The history professor walked around with an open book in his hands, far enough away from the students that they could whisper among themselves without being caught off guard.

"You must already know what evocation is...no? Not everyone? What a shame..."

'How can I explain to everyone that someone is a bad person and deserves to die? They might... do what they did last time.'

If they had done the same, wouldn't they deserve to die as well?

"This is, roughly speaking, a summoning ritual. But not that you command the stars or subjugate them to your will, that would be sacrilege. All that people can do is ask the stars for help and serve them faithfully..."

Thinking about it made Lear feel disgusted with himself. Who did he think he was to decide the fates of others?

'Well, as a last resort, I'll do the same as I did then, or just kill myself.'

The historian moved from one topic to another, trying to fill in all the gaps in his students' knowledge.

"...After all, all the stars were once people. We just don't remember them... In fact, everyone should know such simple things, especially if they want to become a guardian."

Meyde, sitting on the other side of the hall, suddenly asked:

"But why?" Meeting the professor's gaze, he added "Why don't people remember anyone who became a star?"

The question brought Lear back to reality.

"That's the price for ascension," he answered briefly.

"But these people die anyway, isn't that enough?"

The historian sighed, paused for a second, most likely figuring out where to start, or trying to come to terms with his disappointment, and then explained:

"People become stars for doing great deeds. It just so happens that most often such deeds are either done before death, or directly lead to it. From what we know from descriptions of meetings with stars, most of them ascended by sacrificing themselves for the sake of humanity, or in general after a martyr's death. Anticipating your questions - yes, according to our knowledge, a person can become a star during his lifetime, but there is no exact information or recorded cases of this anywhere. As well as descriptions of all the details of ascension. We know that after people became stars, all memories and references to them disappeared, but we know all this mainly from ancient treatises, since in our time no new stars have appeared or have not yet been discovered."

For some time, Meide and everyone else digested this information, sitting with complex faces, until the lecturer returned to what he had been talking about before.

Even Lear listened to the explanation. The whole topic of ascension seemed too vague and confusing to him.

Once upon a time, stars descended to earth and communicated with people, even shared knowledge with them. Perhaps they missed their relatives and loved ones, but they no longer remembered them. Meeting them must have been very painful, Lear thought, but his attention quickly returned to more pressing problems.

In front of him on the table lay the same list. His gaze unconsciously returned to the last lines, written in a clumsy handwriting.

R.R.'s betrayal

But there were events before that, some of them no less important not only for Lear and the Academy, but for the entire Empire.

The Emperor's death.

Perhaps it was worth thinking about this first, but Lear had no idea how he could influence this event.

From what he knew, the Emperor's death in his previous first year of study was part of a conspiracy against the current government of the Empire. That is to say, that was the work of the people themselves, not the demonic race.

But it could have been done by the demons' supporters inside the Empire. After all, Lear already knew one such person. And he was sure that it was so, even if in his past life everyone around him kept him in the dark - he was no longer so naive and stupid.

Taking advantage of the fact that over time, border clashes with demons escalated into war and took the lives of many guards and future guards, the conspirators struck from within, leaving the Empire without almost its main defense.

After all, the Emperor was responsible for the consecration of the entire territory of the Empire, while the guards protected it only at the borders.

Perhaps all future guards knew this. The greatest star, Sirius, gave its blessing only to the Emperor and his direct heir, that is, the future Emperor, and only they could use its powers, allowing them to protect the Empire from the invasion of demons. Thanks to this protection, no enemy could set foot inside the Empire, but its borders still needed protection. That's why there were guards and institutions that trained them.

And the Academy provided them.

And when they began to run out, they began sending students who had not yet completed their training to the borders.

After the death of the Emperor, the situation in the country worsened a hundred times, which put the integrity and security of the entire Empire into question.

So, it was necessary to find out one way or another who benefited from his death. Who could make a deal with the demons themselves?

Lear had only one lead, and this lead most likely simply could not appear at the time he found himself in.

And it was also too dangerous and unpredictable. And sometimes Lear discovered with horror that he still had a weakness for it.

Ruan Richrass.

He hated Ruan, the man who had found him and literally pulled him out of the rubble of the destroyed school at the orphanage and helped him start a new life. The man who had sold people in exchange for his crazy ideas and allowed demons to kill his former friends and comrades.

Maybe he had never been capable of anything like friendship and loyalty.

But the past, stupid and naive Lear saw him as his ideal, savior and hero. After all, if Ruan had not found him that day, Lear could have died as a child. Just like his friends from the orphanage.

Maybe it was worth forgetting about the betrayal for now, since it had not yet been committed in this life, and trying to join forces with Ruan? After all, he was perhaps the smartest and most talented in the entire Academy, as well as, unfortunately, the most ambitious.

In the end, Lear suffered with these thoughts until lunch. Even sparring did not help him. While the other first-year Antares slouched around the dining table, tired and battered from strength training, with almost no muscles in their bodies that didn't ache, they couldn't even distract Lear from his thoughts. Fighting and training with teenagers as part of the educational process was nothing compared to fighting demons for life and death. In particular, they taught Lear to rely on his reflexes, quick reactions and physical skills, and not on the magic given by serving Fomalhaut.

Nevertheless, he was upset by his current physical form, so he did not even try to shirk training.

"Nothing hurts yet today. Tomorrow you will barely walk." Kariado, one of Meyde's closest friends, originally from the same kingdom, remarked knowledgeably. He was taller than the others, with blond hair and either blue or green eyes, a strong build and stronger than his peers. For the small and even fragile Meide, he willingly acted as a human shield in any dangerous situations.

Lear knew him as a dumb jock, although he had hardly seen him before. Most of his knowledge upon arriving at the Academy was based on what Yuni and Feste had told him.

"My limbs are already falling off," complained Bleary, who was sitting next to him. "And anyway, why only us? I hope your ass hurts the most."

He was short, with jet-black hair and gray eyes. Bleary was known for his comical antics and making fun of everything living. True, in most cases, only he found his jokes funny, the others eventually learned to tolerate them.

"Be patient, because Kieran is not done with–" Meide began cheerfully, when Kariado nudged him with his elbow, "... believes in all of us. And he expects impressive results."

"You take this too seriously, brother. He is never really angry. Have you ever seen him angry? I have not. Even when I helped him change his image and it didn't turn out quite right."

"I have never seen a single chairman angry," Kariado said thoughtfully.

"That image was a hundred times better than what you had in mind, idiot. Better a gray-haired chairman than a bald one." Meide said irritably, eating his sandwich.

"How do you know, maybe it would suit him. And anyway, are you so serious because your parents torture you with their inflated expectations or what?"

"Eat silently."

"Rude."

"Look who's talking."

Kariado, who was too lazy to get involved in this frivolous conflict, looked at Lear with hope. Meide and Bleary noticed this and turned in his direction.

"Um," Lear felt that he should say something, but he had no ideas, "in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with striving to become better. If he wants to train so much, let him train."

Kariado nodded briefly with approval, and the embarrassed Boenetri didn't have time to answer.

"You too stand for submission to the system?" said Bleary with a note of disappointment.

"I stand for the fulfillment of my own desires and goals."

"Suck it!" Meide blurted out joyfully and triumphantly poked his black-haired friend.

Bleary gave him a displeased look, demonstratively turned away and ate the rest of the time in silence, occasionally glancing sideways at Lear.

On the whole, the dinner was harmless and cheerful. Lear's impressions of the Antaresians were much more positive than he expected, and over time they only changed for the better. I wonder what else he was lied to about and what he willingly believed, like an idiot, in his previous life?

When he first arrived at the Academy, Yuni and Feste became his best and, perhaps, only friends. They explained to Lear everything that concerned the internal life at the Academy, including the relations between the faculties. And Lear was convinced that the reason for the enmity between the faculties of Fomalhaut and Antares was, of course, the unbridledness of the latter, that it was not at all caused by an ordinary difference in worldviews and especially in approaches to teaching.

Now Lear was convinced that there had never been any hostility in principle. Yuni and Feste simply did not like the students from Antares, and they did not like him and Lear.

His first meeting with them happened during one of the joint classes, where the students of Fomalhaut were offered to learn hand-to-hand combat from the students of Antares. Lear, Yunilay and Feste were paired with Meide and two of his friends, whom Lear did not even remember then, but most likely they were Bleri and Kariado. By that time, he had already heard about Meide.

It all started with Boenetri speaking disdainfully about the three of them. What did he say then? Probably something about their origin. Lear was literally a nobody in the eyes of others, and Yuni and Feste were from ordinary families, who somehow managed to end up here, and on Fomalhaut at that. Like Lear, they had once been fortunate enough to meet Ruan during their lives, and apparently he had seen something in them – most likely a willingness to obey him unquestioningly in everything, as Lear now understood – after which he was able to drag them into his faculty.

The memory surfaced before his eyes.

Meide looked at them as if they were dirt from under his fingernail.

"How could someone so untalented be accepted into the Academy of Heavenly Guardians? Do they take everyone in the Fomalhaut faculty? I thought it was for smart people. It's no wonder you found each other, such mediocrities always unite in a herd."

At that moment, Lear was very angry. He never had a patient and calm character, and such comments completely infuriated him. Now, looking back, Lear admitted that he had behaved stupidly. Yuni and Feste had always disliked Meide for his character, even before they met him in person, and the Antaresian knew it. If they hadn't said it out loud to everyone, maybe he wouldn't have hated them in advance.

The current Lear had seen what had caused Boenetri's behavior, but he still felt irritated when he thought about it. Things could have been different, and Lear hated himself for almost bringing things to a fight that time. He managed to punch Meide, after which several Fomalhaut students immediately grabbed him and pulled him away.

It was so stupid, and the memory of it brought him so much shame and disappointment in himself.

Meide looked so hurt when Lir hit him with all his might in the face. The memory of his wide eyes, filled with shock, incomprehension and anger at the same time, tormented him. They were both normal teenagers, but Lear couldn't control himself. Where did all this anger and hatred come from?

With an unpleasant feeling, Lear began to understand that in all his interactions with Meide and his company, he was never alone - his "friends" from Fomalhaut were always there in such situations to once again demonstrate their hostility, often before Meide himself.

He did not blame them for his own actions. But he hated himself for following others instead of using his own head.

"I had no choice. They were my only friends, my guides in a completely new life..."

"Almost like Ruan... we have no one else."

"I mean, we didn't have anyone then too. Now I am on my own."

Wait, what? Who are "we"?

"...But they are also ordinary children. What do you want from them?"

"I didn't want or expect anything from them. And that's what led to what happened."