2026-05-20 05:26:55Knox stepped out of Arena C and looked at the ranking board.
Rank 487. He had won, but he had not climbed. For a moment, the one-month deadline pressed against his chest like a weight. So this was the academy's trap. It gave weak students a taste of height, then waited for stronger hands to drag them down. Knox had survived the first pull yes but that was all. He had not risen but stayed where he was. Knox turned down a side path between two academy buildings. He needed to get away from the watching eyes before his legs gave out. The moment he rounded the corner, his legs almost buckled. The double Echo Step against Venn had taken more from him than he admitted. His calves burned, his knees felt weak, and his breathing was heavier than it should be. Ignis stretched on his shoulder slightly, but Knox could feel through the bond that Ignis was also tired. Ignis's Burst Step had been unstable, and every use burned stamina. His small body felt heavier than usual, like deadweight pressing down on Knox's shoulder. Knox realized they won, but only barely. He stopped beside a stone wall and leaned against it. His hands shook slightly as he pulled up the system notification from the fight. [Official Challenge Victory Recorded] [Opponent Defeated: Venn Rusk — Common Rank Level 3] [Defensive Challenge Won] Rewards Granted: Dragon Points +5 Agility +1 Echo Step Proficiency +5% Burst Step Proficiency +3% Combat Adaptation Recorded Knox dismissed the notification and checked his current status. Dragon Points: 13 Academy Rank: 487 Mana: 11/55 Knox stared at the mana count. Eleven out of fifty-five. His mana pool was not just some abstract number on a screen. It was the reserve his body drew from every time he reinforced himself, activated Echo Step, or sent commands through the bond Ignis’s Burst Step had its own cost too. The movement burned Ignis’s stamina first, but every unstable burst still tugged through the bond and scraped against Knox’s mana. Now that reserve was almost empty. That explained the shaking in his legs, the heaviness in his chest and the slight delay he felt whenever he reached for Ignis through the bond. Mana would recover with rest, food, and proper breathing, but recovery was slow without pills, cores, or access to a cultivation room. Knox looked at Ignis beside him. Ignis tried to act proud after the victory, but his legs trembled slightly on his shoulder. "Your legs feel heavy?" Knox asked. A little, Ignis admitted through the bond. Burst Step makes my body feel strange. Knox pushed off the wall and started walking again. His legs still ached, but he could move. The gap was obvious now. Venn had not even been rich by noble standards, yet he had pulled out a storage band and a training spear like they were ordinary tools. Knox had no proper weapon. No storage band. No recovery medicine. No mana pills. No beast feed. No cultivation room access. No sponsor. And above all, no offensive technique. The academy was not fair. Students with family backing recovered faster, trained longer, and bought better equipment. Knox could win once through tactics, but if he kept fighting with no resources, he would eventually hit a wall. The fifty silver from the Swift-Horn Rabbit mission helped, but it was not enough as real growth cost money. Knox thought about his current situation. Challenges raised rank, but challenges were dangerous when his mana was low. Missions did not raise rank, but missions gave the things he needed to survive challenges. Silver. Mana cores. Herbs. Beast materials. Recovery items. Growth opportunities. This was where Knox decided he could not only chase rank. He needed to build foundation first. He needed missions. Knox arrived at the mission board near the training complex. The board glowed faintly with mana-etched text. Several students stood nearby, checking available missions. Knox scanned the listings. Iron Ant Nest Inspection Reward: 80 silver Risk: Medium Note: Team recommended Training Yard Cleanup Reward: 20 silver Risk: Low Swift-Horn Rabbit Follow-up Reward: 35 silver Risk: Low Warmstone Greenhouse Pest Removal Objective: Remove Tremor Moles from damaged Moonroot section Reward: 50 silver coins, 3 low-grade mana core fragments, bonus pay for limited damage Risk: Low to Medium Knox first looked at the Iron Ant mission because it paid more. But he rejected it. Team recommended meant he'd need to split the reward. The Tremor Mole mission caught his eye next. Warmstone Greenhouse Pest Removal Objective: Remove Tremor Moles from damaged Moonroot section Reward: 50 silver coins, 3 low-grade mana core fragments, bonus pay for limited damage Risk: Low to Medium The system flickered. [Compatibility Detected] No reward preview. No explanation but it got Knox's attention. The system had reacted once before during the Swift-Horn Rabbit mission, and that led to Burst Step and Echo Step. So he could not ignore it. Knox reached out and accepted the mission. The board display updated. [Mission Accepted] Warmstone Greenhouse Pest Removal Objective: Remove Tremor Moles from damaged Moonroot section. Minimum Success: 3 captured or driven out. Full Completion: 5 removed with limited Moonroot damage. Reward: 50 silver coins 3 low-grade mana core fragments Bonus pay if Moonroot damage is minimized Knox did not know what the compatibility meant. He only knew the system had reacted. The mission looked like dirty pest work. But the system had reacted. Knox adjusted Ignis on his shoulder and turned away from the board. If there was something buried inside this mission, he would dig it out.
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Chapter 129 — The Blackridge Report
They did it in the long tent with the map still staked to the table and the eastern half of it crossed out.Laura at the head. Mercer propped in a chair with his leg out straight and a face the colour of paper. Four officers Knox didn't know, two clerks, and Bael standing at the back because he'd refused a seat.Knox stood too. Nobody offered him one and he wouldn't have taken it.They went through it from the first horn. It took two hours and most of it wasn't about him. Company positions, the collapse of the eastern flank, the timing of the third company's front, who had ordered what and when and whether the horns had been read right. Twice a clerk read a line back and an officer disagreed with it and they argued the point down to the minute.Knox's name came into it about forty minutes in and then it didn't leave."Who called the eastern column back off the road.""Morales, sir. Captain was down.""On whose authority?""Nobody's," Bael said from the back. "Thirty-one of us came hom
Chapter 128 — What the Battle Cost
The releases were at seven.Knox hadn’t known that was a thing they did formally until Neris came and got him. Four summons were too broken to keep bound and their summoners had signed for it overnight, and there was a piece of open ground behind the medicine tents where it was done, and the custom at Blackridge was that anyone who could walk came and stood there.Knox could nearly walk. He stood.It took about ten minutes. Each summoner went out alone to their beast and put a hand on it and said whatever they said, and then the light took it apart, and the summoner walked back and somebody else went out. Nobody talked. A boy from the third company got halfway through and couldn’t finish and a sergeant went out and stood next to him until he could.Ignis watched all of it from where he lay.They can’t call them again.No.Ever.No.The drake put his head down.Then it’s the same as dying.It’s not the same, Knox said, because it wasn’t, and then he stopped, because he wasn’t sure the
Chapter 127 — The Tide Breaks
Knox never got to answer her.The field answered first.It started somewhere out past the third company and came across the whole line inside a minute — a change in the noise that Knox felt before he could name. Then a Hollowvein Stalker came out of the dust forty yards away, alone, stopped, and stood there turning its head like something that had just woken up in a place it did not recognise.Behind it, along a mile of front, the Tide stopped pushing.“Signals,” Laura said, and she was already moving. “Every horn. Now.”Knox got up because sitting down and watching it was worse.He had one arm and no mana and his ribs made a noise when he breathed, and Neris found him somewhere in the middle of it and put a hand on his chest and told him to stop, and he stopped for about ninety seconds.From where he stood he could see maybe a third of it.The controlled beasts had come apart. Not all at once and not the same way — some of them simply stopped, some of them turned round and went north
Chapter 126 — The Two-Spike Falls
Knox walked the last forty feet because he couldn't run them.【 Mana: Critical 】He'd been ignoring that panel for a while. It sat in the corner of his vision and stayed there and there was nothing he could do about it, so he stopped reading it.The Vorul was on one knee in the dirt with black around both legs and one arm, fighting it, and winning slowly.Knox could see the restraints thinning where the shoulder worked against them. Nyxarion was holding, and Nyxarion had never held anything for longer than two seconds before today, and the cold coming off the bond had gone tight in a way Knox didn't have a word for.How long.Not long enough for you to walk."Ignis."The drake came up beside him on three legs, dragging the fourth, breathing wrong.Its stance, Knox said.It's kneeling. It hasn't got a stance.It's got one knee and one arm holding it up. Take the arm.Ignis put four fixed points down the length of that arm from the shoulder to the wrist.【 Pressure Control: 74% 】【 Fixe
Chapter 125 — Nowhere to Run
It went north-east and it went fast.Knox couldn't catch it. He knew that before he'd taken four steps — his left arm was dead weight, his ribs were grinding, and there was not enough left in him for Echo Step twice in a row. Half a mile of open ground and it was moving on a ruined knee faster than he could move on two good legs.Ignis couldn't catch it either. The drake got up and went three strides and the bad foreleg went out from under him and put him down on his chest.Don't chase him, Knox said. Look at the ground in front of it.I can't reach—You don't have to reach it. Put it where it's going.Ignis got his head up.【 Distribution: Four Fixed Points 】The ground buckled forty yards ahead of the Vorul, four separate lines sinking under pressure in ground the thing was already committed to. It came down into that and its knee folded and it went over hard and slid.It was up again in under two seconds.But it was two seconds.Knox turned to the shadow.Nyx.I heard him.I'm not
Chapter 124 — Cut the Connection
Knox couldn’t go.That was the whole problem and it took him about a second to work it through. The moment he pulled Ignis and Nyxarion off it, the Vorul would either finish the drake or walk into the wider battle and be gone, and Knox had no way to find it again in four hundred acres of dust and no way to make anybody believe him if he did.So it had to be somebody else.He got behind Ignis long enough to turn his head and find the western edge of the reserve ground.“Bael!”The man was fifty feet back with a broken company reforming around him — twenty-odd on their feet, six or seven summons up, most of them somebody else’s.“Morales—”“There’s a relay north-east. Past the third company front, up on the rise.” Knox pointed with the arm that still worked. “It’s feeding the thing. Every time it pulses, the wounds close.”Bael looked at him for about as long as it took to breathe in.“How far past the front?”That was all he asked.He didn’t ask how Knox knew, or what a relay was doing
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