The morning after my meeting with Drayke, the academy’s bells sounded different.Slower. Heavier. Like the building itself was thinking.I woke to the faint hum of the wrist band and a new message blinking across the display.“Unranked?” I said aloud. “That’s not even on the course list.”Leo, half asleep on the other bed, groaned. “You get reassigned again? What did you do this time?”“Apparently I impressed the wrong people,” I muttered, already pulling on my jacket.Block E 13 sat on the edge of the campus half buried in the cliffside where maintenance tunnels and old laboratories connected. The air grew colder the farther I walked. When I finally reached the door, it didn’t even have the academy crest just a rusted plate that read Authorized Personnel Only.I swiped my ID. The lock clicked, the door slid open, and a blast of recycled air hit me.Inside were about a dozen students. No uniforms matched; ranks either didn’t display or flickered with broken signals. They all l

Morning light filtered through the dorm window, too calm for what was sitting under my skin. The hum from the fragment still pulsed faintly through my mark, a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.Kira hadn’t said much since we escaped the tunnels. She sat at my desk now, replaying the corrupted video over and over again. Every frame showed the same thing Halden, the flash, the empty pod.“We can’t go to Drayke,” she said finally. “He’ll twist it, erase it, or worse.”“I know.” I rubbed my temples. “But the system wants a report. If we ignore it, we’ll trigger a compliance flag.”“Eight hours.” I sighed. “Enough time to find proof before we hand him a version he can’t rewrite.”Kira raised an eyebrow. “You plan to out hack the Headmaster?”“Not hack,” I said. “Borrow.”We started in the data wing, where the academy stored all mission logs. The room was a maze of crystal servers and silent drones gliding along the ceiling. Access required triple clearance; luckily, my new Unranked Division sta

Mira’s words echoed in my head long after she said them.> “He said I could heal the system…”The way she said it wasn’t the confident assurance of a healer it was devotion. Faith.And faith, in the hands of someone like Drayke, was the most dangerous weapon imaginable.She turned back to me, eyes bright and soft. “You don’t understand, Kyle. This isn’t a curse. The fragment is helping me see how everything connects. The world’s mana isn’t broken it’s sick. I can fix it.”Her tone was gentle, but the pulse of silver light in her veins told another story. It wasn’t healing her. It was feeding.I kept my voice calm. “And what does Drayke get from all your fixing?”She hesitated. “He… he says I’m stabilizing the other hosts. That I’m keeping them from burning out.”“Then he’s using you as a regulator,” I said quietly. “He’s chaining the fragments through you.”Her smile faltered, uncertainty flickering behind her eyes. “That’s not true.”The mark on my hand burned.“Mira,” I said careful

Morning broke like a malfunctioning alarm.The first thing I noticed was noise shouts echoing through the dorm halls, doors slamming, the buzz of hundreds of wrist bands updating at once.The entire academy was re sorting itself.Leo burst into the room before I could stand. “Kyle, what did you do? Half the Combat Division jumped twenty places overnight!”I blinked at my display.Rank 821.Yesterday it had been 1 521.“Nothing,” I said. “That’s the problem.”Kira’s voice crackled through my comm bead. “Meet me at the east courtyard. Now.”The courtyard looked like a battlefield.Groups of students argued over rankings projected above their heads; some demanded retests, others accused the system of fraud.At the centre, instructors barked orders, trying to contain the chaos. Even the usually composed Aria still weak but on her feet stood among them, eyes distant, as if listening to something I couldn’t hear.Kira found me near the fountain. “It’s spreading faster than we thought. T

The mark on my hand pulsed like a second heartbeat.Each flash synced perfectly with the timer hovering in my vision.The last time the system opened a hidden path, it nearly killed me.This time, it felt… expectant. Like it wanted me to follow.Kira leaned over the cracked display table in the dorm’s back room, tracing the faint coordinates glowing on her wrist. “These readings are you sure they’re real? The Core Gate’s supposed to be under the northern ridge.”“Not supposed to be,” I said. “Is. The coordinates match the Proto Core’s frequency, just at a lower resonance.”She sighed. “Every time you say lower, something explodes.”“Then maybe we’re due for a miracle.”Kira gave me a flat look. “You don’t believe in those.”“No. But I believe in leverage.”By nightfall we were outside the main academy dome, moving under the cover of fog. The northern ridge was restricted territory rumoured to contain the first experimental sectors before the modern ranking system was installed. No o