The air was thick, tasting heavily of raw iron, damp earth, and the sharp, burning tang of ozone. It coated my tongue and the back of my throat with every panicked breath I took. I didn't know how I had gotten here. My last memory was the quiet warmth of our bedroom, the soft moonlight, and the sound of Elphyete's steady breathing. But now, the moonlight was gone, replaced by a sickly, pulsating violet luminescence that seemed to bleed directly out of the jagged stone walls around me.
I was standing in a dungeon. It wasn't the pristine, controlled training grounds of the university, and it certainly wasn't the surface of Dhenshin. This was a floor deep within the abyss, a subterranean realm of impossible scale. The ceiling was lost in a swirling vortex of black clouds, and the ground was a fractured wasteland of obsidian and grey ash. I didn't know what floor this was. It could have been the hundredth, or the thousandth, or somewhere entirely off the known charts. The ambient mana in the air was so dense and hostile that it felt like standing at the bottom of a freezing ocean; the pressure was crushing my chest, making it agonizing just to keep my eyes open.
Chaos raged around me, a deafening cacophony of shattering stone, desperate shouts, and the high-pitched, tearing sound of magic being pushed far past its absolute limits. I turned my head, my movements feeling sluggish, as if I were submerged in thick syrup. Every turn of my neck took agonizing seconds.
Off to my left, the landscape was tearing itself apart. The other students were there, scattered across the jagged rocks, engaged in a desperate, losing battle against shadows that had no distinct shape. I saw Celdrich, his face pale and smeared with soot, unleashing barrage after barrage of his scorching fireballs, but the flames were simply swallowed by the encroaching darkness. Zane was on his knees, his broadsword snapped perfectly in half, desperately trying to hold up a flickering mana shield. Lucian was shouting commands that I couldn't hear over the roar of the abyss, his grimoire glowing a frantic, warning red. Euphyne was swinging his massive fists, shattering the ground beneath him, but for every shadow he crushed, three more rose from the ash. They were entirely occupied, fighting for their very survival, completely unaware of where I was standing.
I tried to call out to them, to ask what was happening, to form a plan, but my throat was paralyzed.
Then, my eyes drifted forward, and the breath completely left my lungs.
A few yards in front of me, standing on a slightly elevated ridge of broken obsidian, was Elphyete. Her beautiful hair, which just yesterday had smelled of sweet jasmine and kitchen spices, was matted with dirt and ash, blowing wildly in the unnatural, howling wind of the dungeon. She had her back to me, her delicate hands raised as if she were trying to cast a spell or perhaps just trying to surrender to whatever was standing in front of her.
I tried to step forward, to run to her, but my boots felt like they were bolted directly to the stone. "Elphyete..." I managed to whisper, the sound barely escaping my lips, swallowed instantly by the roaring chaos.
Before I could force my legs to move, it happened. There was no flash of light, no grand incantation, no warning whatsoever. It was just a brutal, silent impact.
Elphyete's entire body violently jerked backward. She let out a soft, wet gasp that somehow cut completely through the deafening noise of the battlefield. She slowly looked down.
There was a hole in her stomach. It wasn't a clean wound. It was massive, a jagged, terrifying cavity that looked as though reality itself had just been scooped out of her torso. Crimson blood, shockingly bright against the dull, dark colors of the dungeon, poured from the wound in a devastating cascade, soaking her academy robes and pooling rapidly on the black stone beneath her boots.
Time seemed to grind to an absolute halt. I watched, trapped in a state of sheer, paralyzing horror, as her knees buckled. She didn't scream. She didn't cry out for help. She just slowly collapsed backward, her eyes wide and entirely vacant, staring up at the swirling black clouds above. She hit the ground with a dull, heavy thud that reverberated directly through the soles of my boots and into my heart.
"No," I choked out, my voice cracking. I fought against the invisible weight holding me down, my muscles screaming in protest. I needed to get to her. I needed to use my locked stats, to break the system, to do anything to heal her. But I was entirely powerless. My body wouldn't obey.
As I struggled against the paralysis, my peripheral vision caught a blinding flash of golden light high above the battlefield. I wrenched my neck upward, my eyes burning.
Hovering in the dark sky was Sir Vael. The man who had casually admitted to erasing a universe, the Otherworlder operating at a mere ten percent of his god-like capacity, was up there. But he wasn't fighting. He wasn't casually snapping his fingers to rewrite the timeline or fix the damage.
He was screaming.
His face was contorted in absolute agony, his golden mana flaring wildly, desperately trying to fold and expand, but it was being violently compressed. Surrounding his body was a translucent, glowing orb covered in ancient, unrecognizable runes. The orb was shrinking. Sir Vael slammed his fists against the inside of the sphere, his strikes packing enough kinetic force to shatter planets, but the barrier didn't even ripple. The unseen force was perfectly tailored to contain him. I watched in absolute, mind-shattering shock as the orb condensed further and further, crushing his golden light until, with a sharp, sickening crack that echoed across the entire realm, the orb snapped shut entirely. Sir Vael was gone. Sealed away.
I was suffocating on the panic. My teacher was defeated. My friends were losing. Elphyete was bleeding out on the cold stone, her silver hair soaking in a growing puddle of crimson. My mind completely fractured under the sheer impossibility of the situation. Nothing made sense. The Seer's danger couldn't be this. It couldn't be this absolute.
I finally managed to rip my foot free from the stone, taking one desperate, frantic step toward Elphyete's fallen body.
But my boot never touched the ash.
The moment my foot descended, the world violently shifted. The deafening roar of the dungeon, the smell of blood, the crushing gravity, and the freezing wind all vanished in a fraction of a millisecond.
I fell forward, bracing myself to hit the jagged obsidian, but instead, my hands slapped loudly against a smooth, polished wooden surface. I blinked, my vision swimming, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
I was sitting at my desk.
The transition was so abrupt, so entirely seamless, that my brain physically ached. I looked around, gasping for air, my hands gripping the edges of the wooden desk so hard my knuckles were pure white. The classroom was perfectly normal. The late afternoon sunlight was filtering softly through the tall, arched windows, illuminating tiny dust motes that danced lazily in the air. The chalkboard at the front of the room was covered in Sir Vael's neat, cursive handwriting, detailing the complex internal geometry of mana folding. The smell of old parchment, chalk dust, and polished wood completely replaced the metallic stench of the dungeon abyss.
I spun my head around. The classroom was full. Zane was leaning back in his chair, whispering something to Lucian. Euphyne was sitting in the back, his massive frame taking up two desks, looking completely bored. And there, sitting just two rows away from me, was Elphyete. She was perfectly fine. Her robes were clean, her silver hair was neatly brushed, and there was no gaping, terrifying wound in her stomach. She was just looking down at her notebook, tapping her pen against the parchment.
I let out a shaky, hysterical breath, running my trembling hands through my hair. It was a vision. An illusion. A trick of the mind. I was safe. We were in the academy.
"Guys..." I croaked, trying to get someone's attention. I just needed someone to look at me, to confirm that reality was actually real.
I blinked.
And they were gone.
In the exact span of a single blink, the classroom was entirely empty. There was no sound of shifting chairs, no fading chatter, no magical teleportation pop. One second the room was full of my friends, and the next, there was absolute, ringing silence. The afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows suddenly felt cold and artificial.
I stood up slowly, my chair scraping loudly against the floorboards. The sound was deafening in the unnatural quiet. "Hello?" I called out, my voice trembling.
I looked toward the front of the classroom, where Sir Vael's desk sat.
Standing right in front of the chalkboard was a figure.
It was a girl, roughly my height, but I couldn't make out a single feature of her face or her clothing. She was completely, entirely blacked out, like a three-dimensional shadow that had somehow detached itself from the floor and stood upright. She wasn't just wearing dark clothes; she was a void. She seemed to actively absorb the afternoon sunlight around her, leaving a hazy, distorted aura at her edges.
I froze, the hair on the back of my neck standing straight up. She didn't move. She didn't breathe. She didn't have eyes, but the sensation of being watched—being entirely perceived and analyzed down to my very soul—was so intense it made my skin crawl.
"Who are you?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. I tried to summon my mana, to prepare any kind of basic spell, but my internal core was entirely unresponsive. The system was completely dead.
The shadowy girl didn't answer. She just stood there, her featureless head tilted ever so slightly to the side. The silence stretched on, heavy and suffocating. It felt like she was waiting for something. Waiting for me to make a choice.
I swallowed hard, pushing past the primal terror screaming in my brain. I tightened my fists and forced myself to take a single step forward, intending to confront the anomaly in the room.
The moment the sole of my shoe touched the floorboards, reality shattered again.
There was no smooth transition this time. The classroom literally broke apart like panes of glass, the wooden desks and sunlit windows falling away into a massive, swirling void of dark red and bruised purple clouds. The ground beneath me shifted from polished wood to an invisible, solid plane of force suspended high in the air.
The air was freezing, biting at my skin. But more than the cold, I noticed the weight in my right hand.
My arm was completely dragged down by an immense, crushing gravity. I looked down. I was holding a sword. But it wasn't a normal weapon. It was massive, easily as tall as I was, and the blade was impossibly thick. Yet, when I tried to look directly at it, my eyes simply couldn't focus. It was completely blacked out, suffering from the exact same void-like distortion as the girl in the classroom. The edges of the blade blurred and glitched, defying the natural physics of light and matter. It felt ancient, heavy with a terrifying, malicious intent that made my arm tremble just holding the hilt.
I dragged my gaze away from the glitching weapon and looked forward into the churning red sky.
Floating high above me, looking down with an aura of absolute, unmatched authority, were two figures. Like the girl and the sword, they were entirely blacked out, rendered as featureless silhouettes against the violent, blood-red storm behind them. One was clearly male, broad-shouldered and imposing, with an aura of dark energy crackling around his form. The other was female, slender and elegant, her shadowy silhouette shifting slightly as if caught in a breeze I couldn't feel.
They didn't have faces, but their presence was utterly crushing. It was a pressure far worse than the dungeon, far worse than Sir Vael's mana folding. It was a pressure that felt fundamentally divine and deeply, violently wrong. They were looking right at me, right at the blacked-out sword in my hand.
The male figure slowly raised his arm, pointing a featureless finger directly at my chest.
A sound began to build in the air—a low, vibrating hum that grew louder and louder until it felt like the inside of my skull was going to violently rupture. The two floating figures began to descend, gliding through the red sky toward me, bringing the crushing pressure with them. I tried to lift the massive, heavy sword to defend myself, but my arm simply wouldn't obey. The hum turned into a deafening, metallic screech, the black figures loomed directly over my face, the world faded into absolute, blinding white—
My eyes snapped open.
I gasped, a massive, desperate intake of air that burned my throat. I shot upward, my torso rigid, my hands frantically clutching at the fabric covering my chest.
I was staring at the familiar ceiling of the mini-mansion bedroom. The soft, gentle light of early morning was peeking through the edges of the thick curtains, painting the room in peaceful shades of pale gold and grey. I was sitting in my own bed. The sheets were completely drenched in cold sweat, clinging uncomfortably to my skin. My heart was hammering against my ribs at a terrifying pace, echoing loudly in my ears.
I looked down at my hands. They were empty. No blacked-out sword. No crushing weight. I looked to my side, my neck cracking from the sudden movement. Elphyete was sleeping peacefully in her own bed across the room, completely whole, completely safe.
I took another deep, shuddering breath, rubbing my face aggressively with the palms of my hands. I tried to think. I tried to grasp the source of the absolute, freezing terror that was currently coursing through my veins. I knew I had just woken up from something. I knew it was something important, something massive and terrible.
But as I reached for the memory, it was already gone.
It dissolved instantly, slipping through the fingers of my mind like fine, dry sand. The images of the dark abyss, the hole in the stomach, the sealed orb, the silent girl, the red sky, and the floating silhouettes—all of it vanished in the span of three seconds, completely wiped clean from the slate of my consciousness.
I sat there in the quiet room, wiping the cold sweat from my forehead, feeling a lingering, heavy phantom ache in my chest that I simply could not explain. I looked out the window, entirely empty of the horrors of the night, knowing absolutely nothing of what my own mind had just shown me.