Mage Summit?
The query flashed across Arthur's Autonomic Merged Processor with the sharp, hollow chime of an unrecognized coordinate.
Before the analytical engine could pull historical ledgers or map the institutional taxonomy of the phrase, Leon's slender fingers flicked inward toward his sleeves.
"We're behind schedule as it is," Leon remarked breezily, entirely indifferent to the sheer drop yawning inches behind his boot heels. "Catch. We're taking the scenic route."
With an effortless, double-wristed pop, two solid metallic discs slipped from the silk lining of his cuffs and tumbled cleanly into his open palms. Without breaking his loose posture, Leon extended his hands, offering one disc to Arthur and the other to Celeste.
The polished faces caught the pale silver wash of the crescent moon, gleaming with the unmistakable luster of refined gold.
Arthur reached out, accepting the token with practiced deference.
The moment the disc settled into his palm, his sensory aperture evaluated its physical parameters. The piece was circular, roughly three inches across, with smooth, chamfered rims and an unblemished golden face. Yet the gravitational feedback felt wrong. It lacked the dense, stubborn heft characteristic of pure elemental gold; the displacement in his palm registered far too light for a solid block of that density.
Beneath the flawless gilded veneer, subtle acoustic vibrations and minute variances in center-of-mass told an empirical tale: an internal core forged of silver, iron, and nickel—a deliberate composite alloy layered with exacting metallurgical precision.
Intentional engineering.
"Pin it over your chest," Leon instructed casually, nodding toward their garments.
Within the silent chambers of his chest, Arthur weighed the risk against the Upper King-rank presence lounging before him. The metallic fitting was inert, devoid of primed detonation signatures or abnormal mana density.
It should be safe.
Arthur smoothed the token against the dark fabric covering his sternum, letting the textile weave hold it fast. Beside him, Celeste complied without a second thought, slapping the gold disc against the black wool cloak swaddling her frame with bright, uncritical obedience.
Leon's lips curved into a sharp, satisfied grin.
"Right then," Leon purred, flashing teeth. "Hold on to your stomachs!"
Moving with instantaneous velocity that bypassed all synaptic warning, Leon's long arms shot forward. His hands locked like vice grips onto the backs of their collars—cinching Arthur's linen wrap and Celeste's heavy cloak in an iron hold.
Before Arthur could pivot his center of gravity or drop his heels into the bedrock, Leon surged forward.
With explosive athletic momentum, Leon hauled both of them across the coping and sprinted straight off the precipice of the Academy.
The frozen turf vanished.
The world tipped vertically on its axis, and the three bodies plummeted into ten thousand meters of screaming abyss.
Gravity seized them in a violent claw. Alpine gales shrieked deafeningly past their ears, lashing their garments into frenzied whips as terminal acceleration mounted with terrifying speed.
Leon was completely relaxed. He hung suspended in the howling drop with loose limbs, his tailored coat billowing behind him like raven wings, his handsome profile utterly serene as though taking an evening stroll through a garden terrace.
Beside him, Celeste was having the time of her life. Her wild cyan locks whipped across the void, her mouth thrown wide in an ecstatic laugh that was torn away by the roaring wind, her amber eyes dancing with lawless glee.
Arthur fell in dead, hyper-focused silence.
Within the frozen architecture of his mind palace, the Autonomic Merged Processor engaged at maximum clock speed. Deprived of footing and surrounded by empty air, Arthur's aperture scoured the yawning chasm, stripping the sensory terror down to cold vector telemetry. He mapped the plummeting basalt face of the floating continent, tracking descent velocity, atmospheric drag, and shear margins, running hundreds of concurrent simulations to calculate any feasible martial mechanics, directional air bursts, or mortar seam grabs that could grant him a fraction of a percent chance to survive the lethal impact.
Down they plunged—ten meters, twenty, thirty, forty—hurtling into the pitch-black shadow cast by the underside of the floating island.
At precisely fifty meters below the upper rim, the vertical face of the basalt fractured.
Arthur's aperture snapped onto an anomaly carved deep into the colossal underbelly of the floating continent. Looming within the subterranean bedrock beneath the Academy's surface was a massive cavernous opening—a yawning tunnel aperture broad enough to swallow an armada of transit carriages, its deep throat swallowed in pitch-black gloom.
Before Arthur could process the structural breach, Leon shifted.
Concealed beneath the fine tailoring of Leon's cuffs and boots, the discrete metallic fittings flared to life once more. Minute charges of lightning crackled across the seams, siphoning a measured pulse of mana to seize the ambient electromagnetism.
Instantly, the gold pucks pressed against Arthur's and Celeste's chests reacted in suit.
A resonant hum vibrated through the composite silver and iron cores. Invisible lines of high-intensity magnetic flux snapped between the pucks, Leon's fittings, and the mineral-dense strata of the subterranean aperture.
The violent vertical drop struck an instantaneous, physics-defying arrest.
Their downward velocity decayed to absolute zero in the span of a single breath, stripping the kinetic terror from the plunge without crushing their internal organs. Then, catching the transverse flux of the tunnel's magnetic field, the vector pivoted.
Defying every law of falling mass, the three bodies surged forward, rapidly accelerating horizontally across the void straight toward the gaping mouth of the subterranean tunnel.
Within the echoing silence of his chest, Arthur's processor locked up in profound shock.
This is… Terrain Manipulation?
The horizontal surge terminated cleanly as their boots crossed the threshold.
Touching down upon the solid bedrock floor of the colossal tunnel, the kinetic momentum unraveled into an effortless glide, settling all three bodies into absolute stillness.
Arthur's Autonomic Merged Processor immediately executed an instantaneous architectural sweep of the surrounding space. The acoustics of the cavern, the dressed basalt ashlar walls, the elevated rib-vaulting, and the recessed fluted brass conduits running along the masonry baseboards registered across his sensory aperture with razor-sharp fidelity.
It's identical.