"Enter."
Kaen stepped forward.
The vertical line that hovered above the slab had not changed — still that tear in the air, soundless, without flash. Ahead of him, the first candidates had already vanished. Solvane, to his right, hesitated a second. He did not look at her. He took one step, then another.
And he crossed through.
No fall. No passage. Just a blank.
A blank that did not last a second. And lasted, maybe, a lifetime. Time itself had not known how to count it.
Then he opened his eyes on something else.
Above him, leaves. Dark, broad, still in an air that did not move. The ground under his palms was damp earth, covered in brown needles. A forest.
He sat up slowly.
Something was wrong.
No bird. Not a single cry, not the beat of a wing, not even the scratching of an insect among the leaves. An entire forest with no living sound. And the silence was not peaceful — it was the silence of a room someone has just left. A silence that knows it is being listened to.
Kaen looked up at the sky.
There wasn't one. Or rather, there was — but not the right one. No sun. No clouds. Just a diffuse glow, everywhere, with no source. As if the light came from the ground, or from the leaves, or from nowhere in particular. As if someone, somewhere, had decided it would be day here, and had not bothered to explain how.
'Her dimension.'
He thought of the headmistress. Of that woman whose face no one knew, and who must have shaped this place the way one folds a sheet. How many times had she opened it? How many cohorts of candidates had walked under these still leaves, had looked up for a sky and found none?
How many had not come back?
He pushed the thought away. This wasn't the time.
He looked around one last time. No other candidate in sight. The dispersion had worked — Elisabeth had thrown them to the four corners of this place, like seeds scattered in a field. No group, no immediate ally, no rallying point.
That was for the best. For what he had to do.
He closed his eyes.
The first exercise Elisabeth had taught him. Before manipulating space, one must see it. See what the eyes do not see. Sense volumes, distances, presences. Trace the map in your head.
He had had five days to learn.
Five days was little.
He took a breath. Another. He pushed away the noise of his own thoughts, the way one wipes a fogged window. And he extended his awareness outward — slowly, in circles, only as far as he could carry.
First the earth beneath him. The roots running through the soil like veins, the buried stones, the deeper layers he could only sense in vague outline. Then the air. The dense matter between trunks, the empty space between leaves. The trees around him, their precise bulk, their spacing.
Everything was there, within reach. Clear.
He stretched the circle.
Farther now — twenty meters, thirty, fifty. The trunks softened but did not disappear. His awareness followed the terrain like a hand sliding over a tablecloth. And further still, the image became less precise. Blurred, as if through a dirty pane.
But he sensed them.
Not distinctly, not as faces — as points, as weights in space. One, a few hundred meters to the south. Another, further west, not moving. Two, together, moving fast — already searching, or already fleeing. A fifth, further north, whose position seemed to fade and return, as if there were an obstacle there that his perception did not know how to cross.
He stretched further.
No Solvane. No Azriel. Not even Lucien.
Too far, perhaps. In another biome of this dimension. Out of his reach. For now.
His awareness began to tremble. Stretched to the point where it lost its own coherence. A dull pain settled behind his temples. That was the limit. The reach he had, for now.
He pulled the circle back in. Carefully, the way one rolls up a fragile canvas. He kept nothing.
'Wait.'
He opened his eyes halfway, breath still slow from the meditation. Blood beat behind his temples. He had stretched too far, too fast. And for what.
For candidates.
He had sensed them moving, searching, fleeing. But none of them was a real threat. None. Not to Azriel. No one in this cohort came close to her level. Even ten of them together would not scratch her.
So what was he looking for.
'Not them.'
An attack would come. He knew it — it was the only thing he knew. And if it could kill Azriel, then it would not come from here. Not from a candidate. Not from a monster of this dimension. Something else. Someone else.
And someone else, in a sealed dimension shaped by the headmistress — could only come through one thing.
A breach.
'That's what I'm looking for.'
He sat cross-legged against the widest trunk he could find. Back set against it, hands on his knees. He closed his eyes again. But this time, he did not deploy his awareness in a wide circle around him. He focused it. Entirely. On the fabric itself — the invisible seam of this artificial space, the cloth beneath the cloth. Where, if someone forced their way in from outside, they would leave a tear behind.
See what the eyes do not see.
Elisabeth had taught him exactly that.
And now, he understood why.
The forest had not changed. No one knew he was there. No one would come looking — not yet. The others had points to win, monsters to kill, rivals to eliminate. They were running. He was waiting.
That was his only advantage.
He had been last in combat. He would be last in this trial too — he already knew it. He wasn't going to kill a single monster, a single candidate. Not one target, not one point. He would finish at the bottom of the rankings. Everyone would see his name in last place and feel confirmed in what they already said about him. The good-for-nothing. The coreless one. The failure of the Celestain.
Except for those who had seen the video. For them, it was something else. The Butcher. The savage. The unpredictable one.
Two reputations that did not fit together. Two different Kaens in the heads of others. And him, in the middle, who was neither.
So much the better. Let them think.
He had something else to do.
An attack would come. He waited for it. His awareness sat on the fabric, motionless and tight. If something tore through the space, he would feel it before anyone else.
If.
He drew another breath.
He needed to be ready first.
Far to the east, his awareness caught a disturbance. Brief. Blurred. Something that did not resemble anything else — not a candidate, not a monster, not the terrain.
Then nothing.
The silence closed back over it like a door.
And Kaen, without moving, waited.