They ran.
Boots thundered against stone, spells erupting left and right—flickers of flame, barriers of ice, waves of kinetic energy. The very walls of the Academy trembled with each distant crash, each reverberating shockwave from above. Debris rained from the rafters. Glowing sigils along the corridor flared to life, ancient evacuation wards forged in a more superstitious age lighting their path in flickering blue fire.
Cael took the rear, eyes sweeping for signs of pursuit, breath measured but tense. Behind them, the corridor split with a deafening boom.
Instructor Gahrel stood alone.
His greatcoat flared with every motion, twin sabers drawn and crackling with pure mana. One dripped silver fire, the other whispered with stored spells. The war construct roared again, lunging. Gahrel met it with a roar of his own, blades singing as they struck.
Stone and beast-screeches were swallowed by the cave-in as the corridor collapsed behind them. He didn't look back once.
The group spilled through an arched breach into a narrow, dust-choked tunnel—one of the Academy's old escape routes. Rune torches guttered back to life along the walls, casting long, flickering shadows.
Students gasped for air, coughed, stumbled. Some wept. Others were stone-faced, running on training and panic.
"Is everyone here?" Irene asked, breath tight, already checking those near her. Her healing glyphs flickered faintly beneath her skin, dimming from overuse.
"No," Derric said grimly. "Tana stayed behind. Damn idiot."
"She always wanted to prove she was better than the rankings," Kaelith muttered, her cleaver still faintly humming. She wiped blood—someone else's—from her cheek. "Maybe now she'll get her medal. Or a tombstone."
"Don't say that," muttered Siva Rae. "We don't know."
"No," Arven said flatly. "We do."
A hush fell for a moment.
Leon exhaled hard through his nose. "Everyone keep moving. Watch your corners. We'll mourn later."
Cael stayed quiet. Still scanning, still listening. The further they got, the more pressure clawed at the back of his mind. "The timeline has shifted"
Kaelith glanced at him. "Darling. You okay?"
He nodded once. "Fine."
But Leon wasn't buying it.
"This isn't supposed to happen," Leon growled, dropping his voice as he fell in beside him. "The war—why is it already here? What the hell is going on, Cael?"
Cael didn't answer immediately. Couldn't. His mind spun—visions of other timelines, failed loops, ruptured threads of probability where Gahrel had died, or Kaelith, or everyone.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low. Measured.
"I don't know."
Leon opened his mouth to push further—
But the world screamed first.
A flash—searing white.
A lance of pure mana, like a divine spear hurled from the heavens, struck the building above the tunnel entrance ahead. Stone detonated. Wood splintered. Smoke and fire bloomed like a second sun.
They had only a heartbeat.
Leon reacted first.
"Down!"
He shoved Cael with both hands, sending them both crashing sideways just as the explosion tore through the corridor ahead. The shockwave hurled several students off their feet. Screams echoed—sharp, too human. Blinding heat washed over them, followed by choking dust and the sound of the world trying to collapse.
Then—silence.A horrible, unnatural silence.
The floor beneath them cracked. Groaned.
Cael's breath caught.
And then it gave way.
Stone crumbled like sand beneath them. The ground buckled in a groaning scream as Cael and Leon plummeted, debris and smoke trailing behind like a cloak of chaos. They fell, tumbled—then slammed hard onto a lower level, the impact knocking the wind out of Cael.
"Cael!" Kaelith's voice, far above, raw and desperate.
"Leon! Cael! Say something!" Arven's voice cracked with panic.
They weren't alone.
Other students had fallen—four, maybe five more. Cael coughed, rolling over to see Leon beside him, bruised but alive, already dragging himself upright.
"We're okay," Leon shouted, coughing through dust. "Mostly."
"Is everyone down there—?" Irene called, but her voice cut off in a choked gasp.
The smoke shifted.
As the debris began to settle, the dim glow of fallen rune-torches revealed the devastation.
The lower hall had once been an administrative level. Now it was a battlefield tomb.
Bodies lay strewn across broken marble and sundered tile—Academians, students, guards, and soldiers. Some were reduced to unrecognizable forms of burnt cloth and shattered bone. Others were twisted in frozen agony, their death immediate and undeserved.
But there were survivors too.
From the haze emerged shapes—at first silhouettes, then clearer forms. A cluster of mages, their robes scorched, armor cracked. Soldiers with dented breastplates and smeared sigils. Bloodied healers dragging wounded behind makeshift barriers of collapsed stone and shattered desks. All of them formed a half-circle, braced behind a wall of shimmering arcane force.
At the center of that line stood a tall figure clad in a reinforced commander's mantle. Their shoulders were squared, hair bound in a tight silver braid, their face smeared with soot and blood—but their eyes burned clear, sharp, unshaken.
Their left hand was raised, still pulsing with the afterglow of a monumental shielding spell. Cracks spiderwebbed across their armor, and their breath was strained—but they were standing.
Still standing.
Commander Elric slowly lowered their hand.
"Hold positions," they barked hoarsely to the mages behind them. "Check wounded. Prep counter-barrier seals in case of another strike. And someone tell me what the hell just hit us."
A weary-looking mage beside them mumbled something about anti-air wards being incomplete.
Commander Elric turned, then noticed Cael's group—the fallen students, Leon already helping another one up, Cael brushing soot from his eyes.
Their eyes locked with Cael's. Cool. Measured. Evaluating.
"New arrivals?" the commander said grimly. "Didn't think we'd be seeing students this far down."
"They fell through the upper level," one of the surviving soldiers said. "Evac route must've run above us."
"Lucky, then." The commander didn't sound convinced. "Could've been vaporized."
From above, Kaelith's voice echoed again. "Darling! Are you there?!"
"We're here!" Cael called, turning toward the half-collapsed opening above them.
Derric's head poked out cautiously through a hole in the rubble. "That's a bad fall, man. You still pretty?"
"Prettier than you," Leon muttered.
"Shut it," Kaelith snapped. "What's down there?"
Cael looked around—at the corpses, the soot, the soldiers, and the eerie stillness just beyond the ruined corridor.
He swallowed. "A graveyard. And what's left of the front line."
Leon dusted himself off, staring ahead with grim recognition.
"They didn't fall back," he muttered. "They held. Even when the strike hit."
"And whoever hit them," Cael added, "wanted them—and us—gone."
Commander Elric turned slightly, listening in. His face remained unreadable, but his hand tightened around the pommel of his sideblade.
"Get them patched up," he told a nearby medic, voice rough but steady. Then he nodded toward Cael. "We'll talk soon. If you're able to walk, we need all hands. Something's coming. And it's not done."
From behind the shield wall, deep within the broken dark, something groaned. The sound was jagged metal dragged across stone, grinding and inhuman. The air thickened, mana twisting unnaturally.
The silence didn't last long.
Smoke parted—no, recoiled—as it stepped into view.
A construct towered above the ruin, frame wrought of blackened steel and glowing etchwork veins of mana. But it wasn't just size or weaponry that made it monstrous.
It stood with posture. With presence.
And it spoke.
"So this is Aldrael's finest?" the thing said, voice like molten iron flowing through gears. It surveyed the bodies below like a sovereign gazing upon a battlefield of broken pawns. "You built towers of knowledge, and now you cower beneath them. Pathetic."
Gasps rippled through the surviving mages and students. Even the bolder ones—Derric, Arven, Kaelith—visibly flinched. This wasn't like the other beasts.
It was aware.
Commander Elric limped forward into the fractured corridor, framed by the dull shimmer of what remained of the last shield spell. His armor was half-melted, the sigil of the Aldrael Vanguard barely visible through the char. Blood stained his side, and he breathed shallowly—but he did not stop.
Behind him came the survivors of the Imperial Arcane Division—scorched robes, broken staves, clinging to the last of their mana. Among them stood a man taller than most, draped in torn ceremonial robes, leaning heavily on a staff of ivory and shadowglass.
Grand Arcanist Enhar Valem, principal of the Academy. His face was drawn, ashen, but his eyes still held defiance.
Elric stared up at the towering construct, pain forgotten for a moment.
"…You speak?"
The construct's molten eyes flared brighter, casting eerie light over the corpses below.
"We were men, once," it said. "Scholars. Mages. Warriors. Citizens. Taken. Twisted. Left to die beneath the banners of your glorious Aldrael."
A horrified murmur passed through the crowd.
"We remember everything," the creature continued. "And now we remember together. Your kingdom forged monsters to fight monsters. We simply completed the process."
"You twist the truth!" barked one of the shield-mages. "Veyruun started this war. With assassinations. With terror. You are the ones who brought pain!"
The construct turned its glowing gaze toward the man.
"Pain? You speak to me of pain?" Its voice deepened—rattling bones, making air vibrate. "Your 'kingdom' gave birth to a god of fire and set it loose upon our children. Your 'justice' burned cities off maps. And you call us terrorists?"
It stepped forward, smoke swirling behind it like a tattered cloak.
"Now we are vengeance. Now we are legion. Every one of us who fell in silence will rise in screams. Aldrael ends today. We'll start with your shining school of cowards."
It raised one massive, glowing claw. Mana crackled along its fingers.
"Tell your king the reckoning has come."
Cael staggered back a step, pulse wild. "No.This wasn't right. This creature—I should remember it. I remembered every major threat. Every battle."
"But I don't remember this."
His mind spun. "Why? Why now? Why not before?"
Panic scraped through Cael's chest like a claw of glass.
The air was thick—too thick. Smoke, mana, fear. It pressed on every lung, choked every word. Around him, soldiers and mages faltered.
A shieldbearer fell to his knees, staring blankly at the glowing giant. Another muttered a prayer under his breath, voice cracking with each word.
"I didn't sign up for this," someone whispered. "It wasn't supposed to be like this…"
A woman dropped her sword with a clatter. "We're just teachers," she said, shaking her head, eyes wide. "We were just supposed to train them…"
A young mage trembled uncontrollably, her tattoos flickering uselessly as her magic refused to obey. "I don't want to die," she sobbed.
"Where are the reinforcements? We sent the call—where are they?"
Another yelled, "It talks! It's thinking—gods, it's thinking!"
Even the shield-bearing instructors stood like statues, hands white-knuckled on staves and swords, breathing hard as if holding back the moment they'd break.
The line was cracking.
The will of Aldrael was breaking.
"Abominations," spat Enhar again, but his voice was strained now. Less venom. More fear.
The construct laughed—a terrible, resonant echo. Its molten eyes narrowed with joy at their unraveling.