Bloodlust

Your mouth tastes of blood and metal, every breath a reminder of the bruises blooming across your body. This sparring match feels like a cruel joke—a trial you can’t hope to win against one of the fiercest warriors in the realm.

“What’s wrong, little princes?” Malec sneers, his voice dripping with contempt. “All that royal blood in your veins, and yet you fight like a wisp in the wind. Prove to us you’re more than just a girl with a title!”

You barely parry the next strike, his blade slashing close enough to kiss your cheek with its cold edge. The shock of it snaps you back to the weight of your situation, the echoes of your life and its crushing expectations.

You are the king's only child, his sole heir. A princes in a world that values strength above all, a daughter in a lineage that demanded a son. A lifelong disappointment. And though your father never spoke it aloud, his relentless training left no doubt about what he expected from you. Long hours spent on brutal conditioning and sleepless nights poured over ancient texts. Every scrape and bruise was a reminder of the bloodline you were born to uphold. You didn’t know whether it was your duty to him or something buried deeper within you that kept you from breaking.

“Pathetic,” Malec taunts, his eyes narrowing. “The King's legacy, wasted on a fragile girl.”

His words sting, but they also spark something deep within. A power you’ve kept hidden, feared to unleash. The mana that surges within you—your one advantage in this world built on strength of flesh, not spirit. Every fiber of your training screamed to rely on your skill, on your sword, to reject the magic that marks your kind. But that restraint has kept you shackled.

“You don’t deserve the King's mantle,” Malec growls, lifting his sword for the final strike, ready to carve your failure into stone.

But something has shifted in you. You feel the pulse of mana in your veins, hot and electric, coiled and waiting. You have a choice now: to be what they expect, or to be something else entirely. All the academy expects the end of this. Will it be the fall of the princes of the raise of the future queen?