Alex shouldn't have followed her. He knew it the second the stone door clicked shut behind him. The sound was too final, like a vault sealing.
The passage was narrow and wrong, walls too smooth, like they'd been melted instead of carved. Magic hung heavy here, not bright, not alive. Cold. Stale. Like it had been dead a long time, but never buried.
Sofia stood a few paces ahead, her back to him. Not moving.
"I know you're there," she said.
Alex didn't answer. His hand hovered near the air beside him, and with a flicker of raw will, a sword blinked into existence. Not forged, conjured. A basic summoning spell no real mage would bother using. Too wasteful. Too crude. But Alex had honed it in silence, refining the inefficiency into something sharp. No formal training, sure. But you didn't need choreography when you'd hunted things that didn't bleed right.
Sofia turned slowly. Her smile was small. Tired. And wrong.
"You shouldn't be here."
"Neither should you," Alex said. His voice sounded stronger than he felt. "What is this place?"
She tilted her head. "A beginning. Or maybe an end. Depends on how you look at things."
The walls pulsed once. Just once. And Alex felt something pass through his bones like a groan, like the earth itself wanted to scream but had forgotten how.
"You're hurting people."
"I'm evolving," Sofia whispered. And her eyes flickered again, green to red, red to black, and then something else. Something unlit, unshaped.
And the voice that answered didn't come from her throat. It came from everywhere.
"WE. ARE. STILL. HUNGRY."
Alex reeled, nearly staggering. The voice wasn't one sound but a thousand, stitched together from agony. Children crying. Women screaming. Men breaking. It sounded like the cries from the deepest part of hell.
Sofia took a step forward. Her feet didn't quite touch the ground anymore.
Alex moved. Fast. Sloppy but effective. His blade swung up, not to kill, just to test range.
She caught it.
But not like a mage would, not with a barrier. She caught the blade with her hand.
And bled.
Alex blinked. Sofia screamed, but not alone. A chorus of voices screamed with her, layered and jagged like shattered glass. For a brief moment, Alex noticed something strange: the voices lagged just behind her own, as if whatever was happening to her was still unfinished.
Sofia's eyes narrowed sharply, a flicker of surprise and something darker crossing her face, jealousy and bitter resentment.
"Third Circle," she hissed, voice low and venomous. "An orphan. A late transfer. Only eight months here, and yet you've already reached a power I had to sell my soul to surpass."
Her gaze sharpened, dripping with contempt and envy.
"You and your kind… gifted prodigies born from luck, not blood. I hate you for that."
Alex tightened his grip on the conjured blade, feeling the sting of her words but refusing to let it break his focus.
He made the blade vibrate, slicing clean through her hand. The voices surged louder, howling in pain and fury, as a sharp crack echoed through the cold corridor.
"You're not done," he muttered. "You're still in there."
Sofia's eyes fluttered, just for a moment. He saw something behind them. Fright. Regret.
And then it was gone.
"HE SHOULD NOT KNOW THAT."
The entity sounded more agitated this time. Uncertain.
Alex struck again, a flicker of blue-white mana running down the blade, advanced casting, Circle Three compression technique. It's originally based on a cultivation technique meant to channel qi called qi blade, but Yue and Alex experimented and created a version using mana instead, for Alex. No chanting. No glyph. Pure will-shaping. Yue had taught him the trick while hunting a wind-warped chimera in the cultivation realm
The slash connected this time. Her shoulder tore. Flesh hissed.
The entity screamed.
Not Sofia.
The thing.
And the scream cracked the stones.
Above ground, Yue froze.
The pressure shifted.
She turned west. Toward the old wings. The place no one mapped.
"She started," Yue whispered.
Haku was already moving. He didn't run. He walked fast, coat billowing behind him, and reached into the locked drawer of his study.
The gloves gleamed faintly. Leather so dark it looked purple under moonlight, sewn through with string-thin wire enchanted with pulses, delicate, precise.
"You really think it'll work?" Niko asked. He stood by the door, face pale.
"It has to," Haku said. "We don't have another net strong enough."
He pulled on the gloves. They hummed faintly against his skin.
Alex hit the ground hard, ribs rattling. One of the sigils he'd tried to burn midair had failed; the ambient mana was bending wrong. Whatever was inside Sofia was disrupting the field.
She floated toward him. Face calm. Unblinking.
But her mouth moved wrong. Stretched too wide.
"YOU SMELL LIKE HER. THE HUNTER. YOU HAVE HER MARK."
'What is that thing talking about?'
"SHE FED US ONCE. SHE DOES NOT REMEMBER. SHE BURNED THE ROOT."
Alex tried to stand, hands shaking.
"You talk too much."
He stabbed the blade down into the floor. Mana flared. A shockwave rolled out, wild and unrefined but thick with brute will. It flung her back.
She hit the wall.
Didn't get up right away.
Alex staggered to his feet. Blood from his nose and ear. Maybe a concussion. Didn't matter.
He raised his hand. A second spell, this one borrowed from Haku's lectures.
"Phase Collapse, Circle Three."
The sigil lit. Bright. Precise.
And then it flickered.
The air bent. Gravity twisted.
Sofia screamed, not a scream of pain. Of rejection. The entity didn't like this magic.
"You're not the only one learning from an inhuman being," Alex said.
Then her hand flared.
And the spell failed.
Haku reached the lower stairwell first. He saw the cracked walls. The warping in space.
He slid the right glove over his hand.
"Mana waves resonate like sound," he muttered. "So what happens when you cancel the frequency?"
Niko held out the tuning crystal. "You sure it won't kill her?"
"I hope it will kill the right part."
Sofia rose again.
No burns. No cracks. But her face looked hollow now. Thin. Like her features were losing detail.
The entity was eating her from the inside out.
Alex was breathing hard. He didn't have much mana left. His hand tightened on the sword.
Then the ceiling above split. Clearly Yues doing.
And Haku dropped in like a guillotine, Yue and Niko behind Him.
The gloves shimmered with runes now, strings pulsing with a strange rhythm. A null-beat.
"You took my student," Haku said, voice cold.
Niko and Yue looked at him, never had they seen him like this. The dragon embroidery on his back looked almost alive in this moment, and his back was bigger.
"WE TOOK NOTHING. SHE WAS OPEN. EMPTY. WE MADE HER WHOLE."
"No," Haku whispered. "You made her a vessel."
As he walked closer to her, his eyes were cold as the coldest winter.
The gloves lashed out. and with a simple snap.
Invisible force tore through the chamber.
The entity shrieked.
Its form twisted, splitting from Sofia like smoke uncoiling from fire. Red veins spread across her skin. Eyes turned solid black.
But something else happened.
Above ground, the sky darkened as the floor beneath the west wing twisted and collapsed upward, warping the very space itself. As parts of the school were built by magic, like the room they were in.
Sofia convulsed violently, the entity inside clawing desperately to complete its merger. Then, suddenly, the ambient magic flickered and died, wards dimmed, glyphs sputtered, even the most entrenched spells of the teachers faltered. The principal and Professor Lyra exchanged grim, unsettled looks. The entire school felt it, mana had just been switched off.
Alex staggered back, breath ragged. "Wait… how did you… Shut off all magic? That's impossible."
Haku calmly pulled off his gloves and held them up, their dark leather embroidered with fine, glowing threads. "Magic energy behaves like waves, kind of like the ripples on a pond or sound in the air. If you send out a pulse that's the exact opposite frequency, it cancels the waves out. It's called destructive interference. I had the idea since we did the second demonstration in front of everyone, your roommate Niko helped me by enchanting the strings on it, and I did the rest."
Alex frowned, struggling to grasp the concept. "Huh, you talk again in that weird style of yours, explain it in simpler terms."
Haku gave a small smile. "Later, it's not done yet, but just think of them as something to short-circuit magic. I call them my EMP gloves ."
Alex blinked, confused, then chuckled softly, "Imp Gloves? Like a small demon, sure fits." Alex, bloody on the floor, looked at Haku again with puzzled eyes.
The entity screamed, its form shifting into a physical, brutal shape, completely cut off from magic. It lunged wildly, striking with raw force.
Yue met it head-on, her punch sending it flying across the schoolyard.
the students and faculty watched in stunned silence. The idea that someone could turn off mana was chilling. Rumors spread instantly. Was Haku a monster for wielding such terrifying power? The school's trust in magic and safety cracked for the first time ever.
Alex wiped blood from his mouth and glanced at Yue and Haku. The battle was far from over, but the rules had already changed.