Three weeks had passed since the duel that shook the nation, and Holy Mountain Academy had started breathing again. Not thriving, not yet, but breathing. Harry trained with Rose at dawn every morning until his muscles screamed and his lungs burned raw. Professor Stone ran combat theory sessions in the evenings, drilling tactical patterns into all three of them until the old man's voice went hoarse. The rhythm was fragile, but it was real.Then Yona walked through the dormitory door without knocking, still wearing travel dust on her boots.Harry looked up from the rice he was stirring on a portable burner. He had never quite stopped cooking for himself, a leftover instinct from the years the Klein family kept him on his knees scrubbing their floors. Old habits lived in the hands longer than they lived in the mind."Sit down," Harry told her. "Food's almost ready."Yona dropped into the chair across from him, and something in the way she folded her hands told him this was not a social v

The Trial Space control center hummed with the dull rhythm of machinery nobody cared about. Banks of screens covered every wall, each one tracking a different cluster of participants through the fog filled corridors below. Data scrolled in real time. Kill counts. Beast performance metrics. Potential classifications updating every thirty seconds.Supervisor Elias Cho leaned back in his chair with his boots crossed on the console and a lukewarm cup of coffee balanced on his knee. He had supervised nine Trial Space openings over the past four years, and every single one played out the same way. A handful of rich kids with premium beasts cleared the lower floors without breaking a sweat. Everyone else scrambled, panicked, and limped out with barely enough points to qualify for remedial training programs.Today was no different."Give me the top ten," Elias called over his shoulder without looking away from the main display.His assistant, a young woman named Claire Park, pulled the leader

Three hours inside the Trial Space, and Harry had lost count of the kills.Rose moved through the fog choked forest like something born from it, her hammer swinging in wide devastating arcs that turned every beast in her path into points on a scoreboard she never bothered to check. Level 2 goblins dissolved on contact. Level 3 shadow hounds lasted half a second longer. Level 4 stone crawlers cracked apart like dry clay under a single overhead strike, their armored shells meaningless against a weapon forged in realms none of them had ever touched.Harry kept pace behind her, feeling the familiar warmth of shared advancement ripple through his body every time Rose broke through another threshold. His own strength climbed in lockstep with hers, muscles tightening, reflexes sharpening, his senses expanding outward like a net being cast wider and wider across the forest floor. Three hours ago he had been Awakening Level, barely above ordinary. Now he could feel the gap between himself and

The Southern Command Mansion smelled like old wood and political tension on the best of days. Today it smelled like sweat, because City Lord Marcus White had been sitting across from General Adrian Cole for the better part of an hour, and every minute of it felt like holding a live grenade with wet fingers.Adrian Cole did not sit in chairs the way normal men did. He occupied them. His frame filled the ornate seat like a boulder wedged into a too small hole, and the Monarch Level aura bleeding off his body pressed against the walls of Marcus's study with the subtle, constant weight of deep water. The teacups on the table between them had not stopped trembling since he walked in.Marcus poured more tea with hands he willed to remain steady. "General Cole, I want to assure you that our region takes the annual scouting process very seriously. This year's awakening class has shown promising...""Promising." Adrian repeated the word like he was tasting something rotten. He leaned back and

Three minutes on the clock.Harry felt the countdown in his chest like a second heartbeat, steady and indifferent to everything happening around them. The system's extraction timer floated at the edge of his vision, ticking down with mechanical patience while the world below him prepared to do something very stupid.Rose landed beside him on the ravine's upper ledge, her boots crunching against loose gravel. She had felt it before he saw it, the same way she always sensed danger, not through logic but through something deeper that lived inside the space between her two bloodlines."Master." She tilted her head toward the eastern tree line. "They are gathering."Harry looked.Through the thinning fog, shapes moved between the trees. Not one or two. Dozens. Beasts of varying sizes and tiers, creatures that had spent the last three hours fleeing from Rose's rampage across the Trial Space, were now converging on the ravine from every direction. Shadow wolves padded alongside armored boars