Orion almost thought his senses were lying to him.
They weren't.
The moment the final arrangements settled and the countdown ticked closer to execution, his perception—already stretched wide across mana sense, Protocol, and Temporal Locus—caught on something that did not belong in the mental map he had constructed.
A presence.
Familiar.
Unwanted.
Impossible.
His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly as he shifted his focus, filtering through signatures the way one might flip through pages of a book already read. Most of the competitors radiated the dense, seasoned mana of adults. Twenty-somethings. Hardened. Trained. People who had already tasted failure and survived it.
And then—
There.
Alice.
The recognition was instantaneous and deeply unsettling.
