All Chapters of MAGE ACADEMY : LEO'S FRACTURED SYSTEM : Chapter 31
- Chapter 40
52 chapters
Chapter 31: The Pawn's Price
Victory was a hollow, corrosive lie. It was as bitter ash and as the metallic tang of Kael’s blood, a taste that appeared to have stuck permanently at the back of Leo’s throat. No glorious celebration, no slapping of backs in the antechamber of the competitors, all of sterile and white light. The silence which had taken the place of the deafening noise of the stadium was literally a weight, pressing them down to gasping shallow pain. Even the air was heavy and full of smoke, a mixture of exhausted ozone of unleaved magic, the metallic odor of fresh blood, and the acrid stench of pure, undiluted horror. Her Kael had passed, his ecstatic, tumultuous vitality disappeared, and the dead, cold competence of the medics whose skill had lifted his hideously motionless body to the Infirmary. His life was now suspended by the thinnest of thread, a thread of desperate loadless weaving on the part of Mira and the icy unemotional and frighteningly progressive medicine of the Academy. The psychologic
Chapter 32: The Mentor's Ghost
The Infirmary was a silent, humming dread place. Kael was in a cluster of glowing links and glittering runes, and his freckles were shone, as it were, like sprinkles on over-pale skin. The injury in his side was covered over with a lattice of solid light, but the hurt was more than skin-deep. The medics were murmuring over the essence shock and about systemic trauma - the immediate consequence of having Leo as a mana battery in his Codex. He was stable, but he was not awake. He was a stark, silent accusation.This silence, rather than pain, it was this silence that kept a cold fire in the heart of Kael. Lying there, unable to move, unable to crack a joke, he had nothing to do but think. And he imagined the expression on the face of Riven at the end of the match--not only anger, but a trace of something, something that was calculating. He wondered what the Professor had snatched Leo off so fast. The official story was a reprimand. The instincts of a street breeder, which Kael had, shou
Chapter 33: The Hollow Vessel
The triumph at the arena had been a hollow, pyrrhic echo with such deep and burning wounds upon them all, deeper burns than bodily. Their secret exploration had revealed an ugly, fundamental tear, in their vision of their solitary master, a secret which Kael now is bearing, like a loaded explosive roughshod, codded against his heart, which its timer they do not know, and its devastating power they cannot estimate. The atmosphere in their little, besieged party was cloying and thick, filled with the silent fears, the metallic flavor of betrayal, the crude, uncut nerve-endings of trust which had been rudely cut away. It was in this oppressive mood of false, shattering tension that the second, closer, psychologically more shattering strike was dealt, a salvo that was not directed at their physical being, but at what we might call the very essence of the self that they both were.They had taken refuge in the library that is a so-called refuge of silent minds and organized knowledge, and h
CHAPTER 34: The Soul-Vault
The move between the corridors, hummed and inhabited by the Academy, to the System Core Vault, was not something that made a step but a journey to a new realm of silence. The air in this place was so quiet that it appeared to be solid, a crystal nothingness, that pushed against their ear drums, and even appeared to seep the beat of their hearts. It was the silence of a tomb which had never been sounding, of a place so great and empty that it had forfeited and perished noise. Light was only provided by the dim, airy radiance of the floating Codices, thousands of them, placed in a complex stasis field which vibrated at the rims of hearing, a note so low that one could feel it in the bones rather than hear it. They were drifting like jellyfish, lazy, bio-luminescent and in an infinite dark sea, each of them a throbbing sapphire heart with a stolen lifetime. Kael ended the stifling silence with the first violation of the sanctum by his voice. By the Founders, he said, the words were imme
CHAPTER 35: The Ascension Loop
There was no transition. One moment, Leo's body was a rigid prison of light and pain in the vault, his muscles screaming in silent protest, the cold of the obsidian floor a distant memory against the searing invasion of the System. The other, the anchors of his physical self just... vaporized. His mind was ripped off, a fibre of the carpet of the real world, and thrown into an empty, starless vacuum.The screams of his comrades, the hum of the vault, the metallic flavour of fright in his mouth,--all of it had disappeared, and in its place had come a complete, choking silence not only the want of sound, but the active, sucking thing. He was nowhere. He was nothing. Only a naked sense of presence, a single wavering candle in an edifice of unimaginable blackness. This was the in-between, the space between the streams of data, the silent core of the machine.This was the actual Codex network. It was not some library of cold, dead information, but living, breathing pattern woven of the tho
CHAPTER 36: The Ascension Loop
The word was unwound in the mind of Leo, not as a definition, but as a terribly simple, beautiful and sickening formula. The very pursuit that kept the Academy everlastingly alive was the pursuit of flawless, unchangeable order, its necessity to get rid of every danger to its immortal existence. It broke the Fractured soul, in an attempt to destroy it, so that it would be born again, to undergo the same test, to be defeated or fall in a slightly different manner, its struggle and its solution would bring a tremendous rush of energy, powering the System on another turn. The immortality of the Academy was not simply propelled by the dead, but fed, encouraged, a purpose, the endless, interminable war with him. And all the incarnations of him which preceded it. He was not struggling against the System, he was a life cycle of the System.He knew what to expect and a cold dread came to him. Your next evolution,’ Corvus warned, his own form shimmering with pain as of the memory of his own ac
CHAPTER 37: Memory Echo
It was not a mild wakeup when he came back to his body. A violent, breaking reassembling was it.One moment Leo was a headless, floating spot of mind, drifting through the quietness, starlessness of the Codex network, the brand name of Prima Fractured scalding his very soul. The second, reality interfered with the first like a tidal wave upon a cliff. The feeling came back not as a trickle-trickle, but as a torrent of screams.The chill of the obsidian floor was a bodily trauma, oozing his robes. The odour of ozone and the coppery taste of blood filled the air. The alarms of the vault whining through his ears, like a lancet into the brain, was a physical stress on his ear-drums. The hostile Codices with their crimson, hellish light had pierced his eyes, and made them feel raw and newly-created.It was the surface impressions only. Below them, there was a sound of deeper, more frightful cacophony. He felt the screams of the thousands of Codices which were haunting him, which are silent
CHAPTER 38: Memory Echo - B
Out they bumped into the corridor and the comparative silence of the outside of the vault was a shocking relief. The door was starting to grind like it was about to close the nightmare in but Leo understood that the nightmare had come after him. It had taken root inside him.The trip back by the backwoods of the Academy was a dark and hard-drawn silence. Leo acted like a robot as the body obeyed Kael and the mind was a battlefield. Each touch upon a wall which had known centuries of histories gave a shiver of long-lost conversation to him. An innocent passer-by, his face drawn with weariness, left some dim reflection of domestic anxieties--a child in a sick state, a debt unpaid. His skin had been flayed off, and his nerve endings were flayed, and exposed to the emotional residue of the whole world.This was his new dormant power. Memory Echo. He was taking in what everyone was going through, the living and the dead with as much ease like breathing. And as the echo faded away those har
CHAPTER 39: The Academy's Vessel
The roar of the crowd was a physical force, a tidal wave of sound that crashed against the shimmering barriers of the Duality Arena. The air was crackling with magic that was exhausted, with wailing, bleeding anticipation. This was the culmination of the Duality Games, an event which was covered on both sides of the divide, a gladiatorial battle to congratulate the most compatible student of the Academy. It was a golden slaughterhouse in the eyes of Leo, who was in the combatant circle.The theater was a masterpiece of magic construction, an ideal division on the middle. One was in the blazing, pure light of the Astral Realm, and the air was vibrating with strong, systematized energy. The other half was deep down in the liquid shadows of the Umbral Realm, where magic was writhing and twisting in unpredictable, volatile manners. Their line of demarcation was a transparent shimmering tear, a streak of maize energy which promised to separate anything passing over it with panic.Leo could
Chapter 40: The Underdepth
The silence in the Grand Hall of Ascension was a stark, suffocating contrast to the roaring chaos of the arena. Leo stood alone on the central dais, the polished marble floor reflecting his solitary, disgraced form back at him like a mockery. The air, usually scented with incense and ambition, now smelled only of cold stone and quiet condemnation.All the seats in the enormous, tiered hall were occupied. All the student body, ranging in opinion between wide-eyed first-years and smug upperclassmen, gazed down at him. The walls were hung with the faculty in their formal robes, their faces a gallery of stern disapproval, and, here and there, with a veil of thinly-covered approval. He perceived Professor Riven, standing stiffly among them, with his scarred face like a mask of stone, yet in his eyes, like his eyes, a dark, smouldering rage that was not turned towards Leo.Raised high above, in the Throne of the Founders, was the Headmaster. He did not look angry. He looked… grieved. It was