Hours had passed since the first screams. Since the first bodies fell. The battlefield stretched endlessly, littered with charred corpses and fractured earth, but I didn’t see it. I didn’t smell it. I only felt the weight of survival pressing into every fiber of my body. Frost coiled around my fingers, shadows danced across the jagged terrain, and my Ae surged with every slash, every strike.It was a deadly dance as beasts like smoke rained down on us from the sky.I fought as if the world depended on me. Because it did. My core throbbed with exhaustion. My vision blurred from the strain. Every move was precise, measured, detached. The system whispered, faint static cutting through my mind, giving me fragments of clarity amidst chaos.[System: Core stability critical. Life expectancy minimal. Tactical recommendation: continue combat with extreme caution.]Bodies fell. Shadows merged with frost, forming blades and spikes that ripped through enemy lines. I pushed beyond limits I didn’t

The Disciplinary Bureau was the kind of room meant to make men quiver. Polished floors that reflected the sharp glints of their authority, walls that seemed to lean in, and the air itself thick with expectation. I stepped in, feeling the pulse of their combined presence before I even reached the table.Professors, elite and seasoned, lined the long expanse like sentinels of judgement. The Principal sat at the head, aura humming with authority so potent a lesser man would have fallen to his knees already. I inhaled slowly. Their force alone could crush a student, a teacher, a city if they willed it.It was a terrifying experience. Just a few months back I was almost non-existent with no hope of ever meeting these people in private, and yet they were assembled before me, bodies taut with the refusal to drop their guards around me.[Endurance level dropping. Drop all resistance.]I ignored it. My pulse steadied, frost veins pulsing faintly beneath my skin. Hands slipped into my pockets,

Aegis smelled like metal and old paper and the faint, constant burn of someone testing their limits. It was a smell that settled into your clothes and your mouth until it tasted like curriculum and survival. We lived inside that smell — Lian and I — two ghosts at the bottom of a system that liked neat hierarchies.We were used to being invisible. That’s what made the beatings sting the most: not the pain itself but the audience that decided it was entertaining.“Move,” Ryo said like a verdict, and his cronies laughed as if they’d read the joke in a book and couldn’t wait to repeat it. He liked theatrical cruelty — theatrics softened the vulgarity of violence. The first time it happened, I thought maybe I’d misread the room. The fifth time, I stopped pretending surprise and started cataloguing the angles.They shoved us into the center of the courtyard, where the sun made everything too bright and the students gathered like a jury. The upper-class kids circled, their auras a kind of so