Friday afternoon was clear and cool, the kind of spring day that made the academy's mana-reinforced stone glow warm in the sunlight and the training grounds smell like ozone and fresh-cut grass. The Proving Grounds were running standard rotation - underclassmen in the eastern arenas, upperclassmen in the western halls, faculty conducting evaluations on the central field.

  Jace was on the central field, running footwork drills with Torrin in a paired exercise that Thresh had assigned as an alternative to full sparring while his rib finished knitting. The drill was simple in concept and exhausting in practice: Torrin advanced in straight lines at full walking speed while Jace maintained distance using only lateral movement and [Footwork: Evasion]. No contact. No strikes. Just geometry - the art of being somewhere else when the big man arrived.

  "You're anticipating my line three steps out," Torrin said, resetting to center. "You couldn't do that two months ago."

  "Your tells are getting subtler. I'm having to read earlier."

  "Good." The [Brawler]'s face carried the closest thing to satisfaction that Torrin's features ever produced - a slight relaxation around the eyes, a fractional lift at the corner of his mouth. "Means I'm improving too."

  Across the field, Mara was practicing [Triage Sense] range extension with a group of junior [Medic] students under Sister Vael's supervision. The school nurse had begun including Mara in teaching sessions three weeks ago - initially as a participant, then increasingly as a demonstrator. Mara's hands-free diagnostic capability at range was, according to Vael, "unusual for a student at your level and worth developing properly rather than letting you figure it out through trial and potentially dangerous error." Mara had taken this as the highest compliment she'd ever received, which it probably was.

  Elara was in the Forge Quarter. She'd been there since morning, working on a new batch of rune-strips with materials sourced from the Boilerworks salvage. She'd submitted a preliminary research paper on the industrial-aspected mana properties to Professor Dalla, who had forwarded it to the Arcane Conclave's material science division without telling Elara, which Elara would either be thrilled or furious about when she found out.

  It was a good day. The kind of day that felt earned.

  Jace felt the tremor before he heard it.

  It started in his feet - a vibration in the ground that didn't match Torrin's footsteps, too deep, too rhythmic, coming from somewhere below the field's surface rather than across it. He stopped mid-drill. His [Mana Sense] flared automatically, reaching downward through the stone and soil and mana-conduit infrastructure beneath the Proving Grounds, and what it found made his blood go cold.

  The hairline fracture he'd sensed two nights ago. It wasn't hairline anymore.

  Pressure. Massive, building, *wrong* - a mana signature unlike anything in the academy's ambient field, dense and dark and vibrating at a frequency that resonated not in his teeth but in his *spine*. It was coming from the east, from below, from a point approximately two hundred meters beneath the Proving Grounds where the Sunken Subway's deepest tunnels intersected with the raw bedrock of New Chicago's foundation.

  "Torrin." His voice came out flat. Controlled. The voice of someone whose body had already decided this was an emergency and was waiting for his mind to catch up. "Do you feel that?"

  Torrin's eyes narrowed. The [Brawler] didn't have [Mana Sense], but he had a body so attuned to physical force that he could feel a loaded cart approaching from fifty meters away through ground vibration alone. "Something's moving. Deep. Big."

  "It's not moving. It's *opening*."

  The tremor became a shudder. Across the Proving Grounds, students stumbled. Practice weapons clattered to the ground. The mana-conduit pipes running along the arena walls began to hum - a rising tone that climbed from subsonic rumble to audible whine in the space of three heartbeats.

  The alarm hit before Jace could shout.

  It was the academy's perimeter ward system - a layered detection grid powered by the institution's central mana-core, designed to identify planar instabilities within a half-kilometer radius. When it activated, it didn't ring bells or flash lights. It *spoke* - a System-integrated emergency broadcast that manifested directly in every person's awareness as text burning at the edge of vision and a pressure behind the eyes that carried words:

  ―――――――――――――――――――

  [ACADEMY ALERT - PRIORITY ALPHA]

  Planar Breach Detected - Classification: WILD DUNGEON

  Location: Sub-Level 4, East Quadrant

  Threat Assessment: TIER 2 - HOSTILE INCURSION IN PROGRESS

  All Students: Evacuate to designated safe zones immediately.

  All Faculty: Report to breach perimeter. Containment Protocol Seven.

  This is not a drill.

  ―――――――――――――――――――

  The Proving Grounds erupted. Students bolted from their drills, some organized, some panicking, the sharp dividing line between trained responses and raw fear cutting through the crowd like a blade. Instructors shouted commands - evacuation routes, rally points, the mechanical language of crisis management that Ironhold drilled every semester but that no one ever expected to use for real.

  Jace grabbed his gear from the rack - the Subway Fang, his bracers, the jerkin he'd left draped over a bench. His rib protested the sudden movement with a flare of hot pain that he shoved into the back of his mind and locked there.

  "Mara!" He sprinted toward the medical training area. She was already moving - Vael was herding the junior students toward the western exit with calm, implacable authority. Mara broke from the group and ran toward Jace, her face white, her hands steady.

  "I felt it," she said. "Through [Triage Sense]. The mana signature - it's *wrong*, Jace. It feels like a wound. Like reality is bleeding."

  "Where's Elara?"

  "Forge Quarter. East building."

  East building. The breach was in the east quadrant.

  Jace's stomach dropped.

  "Torrin - with me. Mara - stay with Vael's group, get to the safe zone."

  "No." The word came out hard and immediate, surprising them both. Mara's chin came up. "If Elara's in the east building and the breach is in the east quadrant, she's between us and whatever's coming through. I'm not going to a safe room while she's -"

  The ground *cracked*.

  Fifty meters east of the Proving Grounds, the manicured grass of the academy lawn split open in a jagged line that ran twenty meters from north to south, the earth falling away into a darkness that glowed with sick purple-black luminescence. The mana-conduit pipes beneath the surface shattered, sending arcs of raw amber energy sparking into the air. The temperature dropped ten degrees in an instant. The sunlight dimmed - not from clouds, but from something *eating* the light at the edges, the air around the fissure taking on a twilight quality that had nothing to do with the time of day.

  And from the fissure, they came.

  The first Void-Stalker emerged like smoke given weight - a shadow that poured upward from the crack in the earth and condensed into a quadrupedal form the size of a large wolf. Its body was darkness - not black fur or black skin, but actual *darkness*, the absence of light given shape and hunger. Where its eyes should have been, two points of violet light burned with the cold intensity of distant stars. It moved without sound. Its paws didn't touch the grass - they passed *through* it, phasing just below the surface, leaving trails of dead grey earth where living green had been a moment before.

  A second followed. A third. A fourth. They poured from the fissure in a steady stream, each one materializing from the breach with the fluid inevitability of water finding a crack, and they spread across the academy grounds with the coordinated efficiency of a hunting pack that had done this a thousand times before.

  Jace's [Mana Sense] screamed.

  The Void-Stalkers' mana signatures were unlike anything he'd encountered in the Sunken Subway or the Boilerworks. Those creatures had been *dense* - compressed mana packed into physical forms. The Void-Stalkers were the opposite. Their signatures were *hollow* - voids in the ambient mana field, negative spaces that consumed the energy around them. Looking at them through [Mana Sense] was like staring into holes in the world. And the intensity of those hollow signatures registered at a level that made his instincts lock up with the biological certainty of prey recognizing a predator.

  Level 10. Minimum. Some of them higher.

  Four levels above his group. Four levels above most of the student body.

  "RUN," Jace said. "East building. Now."

  They ran.

  * * *

  The eastern quadrant of the campus was chaos.

  Students who'd been in the outdoor training fields were streaming west toward the safe zones, a tide of panicked bodies moving against Jace's group as they pushed east. Instructors were appearing at key intersections - mana-constructs flaring to life around them, weapons drawn, the calm professionalism of combat veterans snapping into place over whatever surprise they felt. Jace saw Thresh moving toward the breach at a dead sprint, his mana-construct arm blazing solid blue, the ambient temperature around him dropping as he drew power into his defensive arrays. Two other Epic-tier instructors flanked him - Professor Caldera, wreathed in a cyclone of controlled flame, and a woman Jace didn't recognize whose hands trailed black smoke and whose eyes had gone entirely white.

  The high-tiers hit the Void-Stalker line like hammers hitting glass. Thresh's [Warden] taunt erupted across the field - not sound but *force*, a wall of aggro-generating pressure that seized every Void-Stalker within forty meters and *dragged* their attention toward him with the irresistible gravity of a black hole. The creatures turned. The violet eyes locked. For a moment, the hunting pack became a focused assault - a dozen shadow-wolves converging on a single target with synchronized lethality.

  Thresh held. His defensive construct expanded around him - a dome of blue-white energy that the Void-Stalkers struck and *phased through*, their shadow-bodies passing through the mana barrier as if it weren't there. But Thresh was ready. His prosthetic arm reconfigured - the fingers extending into bladed segments that glowed with a light that was *wrong* somehow, too bright, too present, as if the mana in them existed more intensely than the reality around it. The blade caught the first Void-Stalker mid-phase and the creature *screamed* - a sound that existed more in the mind than the ears, a psychic shriek of something that had never expected to encounter the specific frequency of energy that could hurt it.

  But there were too many. Even as Thresh and the Epic-tiers engaged the main pack, individual Stalkers broke from the fissure's perimeter - younger ones, smaller, Level 8 or 9, fast enough to slip through the containment line before it fully formed. They ghosted across the campus grounds with impossible speed, phasing through walls, through doors, through the mana-reinforced stone of the academy buildings as if solid matter were a suggestion rather than a barrier.

  Three of them headed east.

  Jace saw them go. Three violet-eyed shadows, flowing across the lawn like dark water, converging on the eastern building cluster where the Forge Quarter and the junior dormitories sat side by side.

  Where Elara was working.

  Where forty freshmen lived.

  "Torrin. Faster."

  They couldn't go faster. Torrin's AGI was his weakness - always had been, always would be - and Jace was limited by the cracked rib that turned every sprint-stride into a negotiation between speed and pain. Mara kept pace between them, her breath coming in sharp gasps, her healing mana already extending forward in tendrils of diagnostic gold that swept the path ahead for injuries she hadn't caused yet.

  They rounded the corner of the east building complex and found the aftermath.

  The first Void-Stalker had reached the junior dormitory. It had come through the wall - *through* it, not breaking it, passing through the stone and mortar and mana-reinforcement as if the building were a hologram - and emerged inside the common room where a group of freshmen had been studying.

  Three students were on the floor.

  The closest was a girl - young, fourteen maybe, small-framed, wearing the first-year uniform of a [Herbalist] class with the green trim of a non-combat designation. She was conscious but not moving. Her left arm was wrong - bent at an angle that human arms didn't bend at, the sleeve of her uniform torn open to reveal a wound that was neither cut nor burn but something worse. Where the Void-Stalker's claws had touched her, the flesh had *greyed* - the color leaching from her skin in a spreading stain that looked like frostbite but felt, to Jace's [Mana Sense], like the opposite of cold. It was absence. The wound was removing something fundamental from the tissue - the mana that infused all living flesh in a Tier 2 world, the ambient energy that kept cells alive and functional in a reality saturated with power. The Void-Stalker hadn't cut her. It had *drained* her.

  The second student - a boy, stockier, [Apprentice Smith] by his calluses - was unconscious, slumped against an overturned desk. Similar wounds on his torso. Breathing, but shallow. The grey was spreading.

  The third wasn't moving at all.

  "MARA!"

  She was already there. The shift was instantaneous - from frightened girl running through a warzone to [Medic] in full crisis mode, dropping to her knees beside the [Herbalist] with her hands extended and her eyes closing as [Triage Sense] swept the damage. The diagnostic hit her and she flinched - a full-body recoil that she suppressed through willpower alone.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Shadow-taint. Deep. The mana depletion is accelerating - their bodies are losing ambient Mana faster than they can absorb it from the environment. If it reaches their cores -" She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. "I can stabilize the first two. The third -"

  "Do what you can. We'll clear the building."

  "Jace." Her voice caught him at the doorway. She was already channeling, golden mana pouring into the [Herbalist]'s arm, fighting the grey. Her face was wet. She hadn't noticed. "Be careful."

  "Always."

  "That's a lie and we both know it."

  They moved into the dormitory corridor.

  * * *

  The junior dormitory was a long building - two floors, central hallway, rooms branching left and right. The evacuation alarm was still blaring, the System's emergency broadcast repeating on a thirty-second cycle that the freshmen were too panicked to process. Doors were open. Students were in the halls - some running for the exits, some frozen in doorways, some helping classmates who'd been caught in the initial attack.

  Jace heard it before he saw it - not a sound but an *absence* of sound. A pocket of silence that moved through the building like a bubble of void, swallowing ambient noise as it passed. The mana-conduit pipes along the ceiling went dark in sequence, their amber glow dying as the Void-Stalker consumed the energy flowing through them.

  It came through the wall at the end of the corridor.

  The shadow condensed into wolf-form ten meters ahead - bigger than the one that had attacked the common room, its body denser, its violet eyes brighter, its hollow mana signature pulsing with the stolen energy of everything it had drained in the last sixty seconds. Level 10. At least. The ambient temperature dropped so sharply that Jace's breath misted.

  It saw them. It evaluated them. And then it dismissed them - turning toward the cluster of freshmen behind them, drawn by the richer mana signatures of a dozen terrified adolescents huddled in a hallway with nowhere to go.

  Jace stepped into its path.

  His [Mana Sense] was howling - every instinct telling him that the thing in front of him operated on a level of reality he wasn't equipped to contest. Four levels above him. The gap was a chasm.

  "Torrin - get them out. North exit. NOW."

  Torrin didn't argue. He turned to the freshmen and became what he'd always been best at - an immovable presence that radiated certainty in a situation that had none. "Move. Follow me. Don't stop."

  They moved. Sheep following a boulder.

  The Void-Stalker lunged.

  Jace activated [Footwork: Evasion] and threw himself sideways. The creature's jaws - shadows that solidified at the moment of attack, gaining substance and mass for the fraction of a second required to tear - snapped shut where his torso had been. The displaced air hit him like a punch. His rib shrieked.

  He slashed with the Subway Fang. The blade passed *through* the Stalker's flank - the creature's body phasing to shadow at the point of contact, the Common-tier weapon lacking any enchantment capable of interacting with non-physical matter. The edge met nothing. The momentum carried him off-balance.

  The Stalker's tail - a whip of concentrated shadow - caught him across the shoulder. The impact didn't feel like being hit. It felt like being *drained* - a sucking cold that pierced his armor and pulled at his mana with hungry efficiency. His MP dropped. Not a gradual drain. A *chunk*. Fifteen percent of his pool, ripped away in an instant.

  *Phase-touch drain. They don't just kill you - they eat what makes you alive.*

  He scrambled backward. The Stalker followed, patient, confident, draining the ambient mana from the corridor as it moved. Every joule it consumed made it marginally stronger, marginally more present, marginally more real.

  Jace needed something that could hurt it. The Subway Fang couldn't. His physical skills couldn't.

  Thresh's arm. The reconfigured prosthetic, the bladed segments that glowed with that wrong, too-bright light. Holy aspecting. Anti-shadow. He'd watched Thresh activate it for three seconds during the initial engagement - seen the mana-flow through [Mana Sense], caught the shape of the technique before the chaos had swept him east.

  Three seconds of observation. Imperfect angle. Glimpsed through chaos. An Epic-tier technique channeled through a body that had never touched holy-aspected mana.

  The Void-Stalker crouched to spring.

  Jace reached for [Skill Mimicry] and prayed.

  ―――――――――――――――――――

  [SYSTEM]

  [Skill Mimicry] Active

  Replicating: [Mana Aspecting: Holy] - Partial Fragment

  Source Proficiency: Expert (est.) - EXTREME TIER GAP

  Mimicry Proficiency: <15% - Untrained equivalent

  Duration: 22 seconds

  WARNING: Incomplete technique replication. Mana feedback risk: HIGH.

  ―――――――――――――――――――

  The light entered him like swallowing a live coal.

  It wasn't gentle. It wasn't warm. It was *present* - a brightness that filled his mana channels with a frequency they'd never carried, pushing against the walls of his pathways like water through pipes too narrow for its pressure. His hands shook. His vision whited out at the edges. The Subway Fang's blade flickered - not glowing, not wreathed in divine fire, but *shimmering*, the metal catching a light source that didn't exist in the visible spectrum, as if the blade were reflecting something only the Void-Stalker could see.

  The creature recoiled. Its violet eyes flared. It *hissed* - the first sound it had made, a sibilant static-burst of psychic displeasure - and the shadows composing its body rippled, destabilized by the proximity of the one thing its nature couldn't absorb.

  Jace lunged.

  The Subway Fang caught the Void-Stalker's shoulder. This time, the blade didn't phase through. The holy fragment - weak, unstable, a candle flame against a bonfire - was enough to give the weapon *purchase* on the creature's semi-physical form. The edge bit. Not deep. Not lethal. But the Stalker *screamed* - that mind-rattling psychic shriek - and flinched backward, shadow-flesh smoking where the aspected blade had cut.

  Two seconds of window. Behind him, the corridor was emptying - Torrin herding the last freshmen through the north exit.

  The [Skill Mimicry] failed at second fourteen. Eight seconds early. The holy light guttered and died, leaving Jace's mana channels burning with feedback damage that felt like acid in his veins. His MP cratered - the incomplete technique's mana cost, multiplied by [Wayfaring II]'s penalty, compounded by the tier gap, had consumed over half his remaining pool in fourteen seconds.

  The Subway Fang went dark. The shimmer vanished. Just a blade again.

  The Void-Stalker recovered. Its violet eyes found Jace with renewed focus - and this time, there was something personal in the gaze. He had *hurt* it. Not meaningfully. But enough to make him a threat worth eliminating.

  It lunged.

  Jace went through the nearest window.

  Glass shattered. His body hit grass. His rib screamed. He rolled, staggered upright, and ran - east, toward the Forge Quarter, toward Elara, away from the dormitory, pulling the angry Stalker with him like a fish on a line.

  *Follow me. Follow the idiot who poked you with a stick. Away from the kids.*

  Behind him, from the direction of the main breach, the sounds of Epic-tier combat shook the earth - detonations, the crackle of high-powered spellwork, Thresh's taunt echoing across the campus like a war horn.

  The Forge Quarter's eastern workshop sat ahead with its door open, its lights flickering, and the sharp crack of a detonation echoing from inside - blue-white light flashing through the windows, the unmistakable signature of Elara's concussive runes.

  Jace dove through the door. The workshop was a mess - tables overturned, inscription materials scattered, one wall bearing the smoking silhouette of a Void-Stalker impact where Elara had blown the second creature backward through the interior partition.

  Elara stood in the center of the chaos. Her satchel was open. Her hands were full of rune-strips. Her face was pale and focused and entirely, terrifyingly calm.

  "The second one came through the north wall six minutes ago," she said, her voice carrying the clipped precision of someone routing terror through analysis. "I hit it with two concussive strips and a disruption rune. It phased through the exterior wall heading south. I believe it's circling."

  "There's another one behind me."

  "I know. I have three strips left. Two concussive, one binding." She looked past him, through the door, to where the Void-Stalker was condensing from its pursuit-form into hunting configuration fifty meters across the lawn. "The binding won't hold a Level 10 for more than thirty seconds."

  "Then we don't stay for thirty seconds."

  Elara adhered a concussive strip to the doorframe lintel - quick, practiced, the adhesive-rune activating on contact. Jace pressed himself against the wall beside the door. The Void-Stalker hit the threshold and phased through it, and the concussive rune caught it mid-materialization - the detonation slamming into the creature at the exact transition point between shadow and substance where it was most vulnerable.

  The Stalker tumbled across the workshop floor, violet eyes flickering. Stunned. Not dead. Not close.

  "Go," Jace said. "Out the back."

  They went. Through the workshop's rear exit, into the narrow alley between the Forge Quarter and the junior dormitory, where Torrin was waiting with eleven freshmen pressed against the wall behind him and Mara kneeling over the [Herbalist] girl she'd carried from the common room, golden healing mana still fighting the grey.

  "North route?" Jace asked.

  "Blocked." Torrin's voice was flat. Controlled. The voice of bad news delivered by someone who'd already processed it and moved on to solutions. "Two more came through the dormitory's east wall while I was evacuating. They're between us and the western campus."

  Jace activated [Mana Sense]. The drain pulled at his depleted pool - he had maybe fifteen seconds of perception left before his MP hit zero - but the information was worth the cost.

  The picture was worse than Torrin's words.

  Three Void-Stalker signatures between their position and the western safe zones. Two more circling the dormitory building from opposite sides. The one Jace had stunned in the workshop was recovering - its signature strengthening as it fed on the ambient mana in Elara's spilled inscription supplies. And to the west, at the main breach site, the Epic-tier signatures of Thresh and the faculty were locked in sustained combat - contained, focused, and completely unable to reach the eastern quadrant.

  They were cut off.

  [Mana Sense] guttered and died. The world collapsed back to a single layer - just buildings, just shadows, just the sound of eleven terrified freshmen trying to breathe quietly.

  "What about south?" Mara asked from the ground, her voice thin with exhaustion.

  "The dormitory's south corridor connects to the academic wing," Elara said. She had the campus layout memorized - of course she did. "There's a reinforced lecture hall in the basement level. Sub-Level 1, Room 4. Heavy ward-work on the walls - it's designed as a faculty shelter during containment events."

  "Can we reach it?"

  "If we move now. Before the circling pair closes the gap."

  A new voice cut through the alley - tight, controlled, carrying the heat of someone whose element was literally fire and whose composure was the only thing keeping it contained.

  "We're coming with you."

  Kael Ashworth stepped out of the dormitory's side exit. He looked wrong - not injured, not exactly, but *diminished*. His fire-silk vest was dark, its enchantment dormant, the ambient mana that normally fed his class's passive heat-bleed completely consumed by the Void-Stalkers' proximity drain. His face was pale beneath the auburn hair, and his eyes were wide with something Jace had never seen in them before.

  Fear. Not for himself. For the boy he was supporting with one arm - Edric, his [Shield Bearer], who was conscious but barely upright. The right side of Edric's torso was grey. Shadow-taint, spreading. His shield arm hung limp, the muscles beneath the skin drained of the mana that kept them functional.

  Behind Kael, two more members of his party - Devi Shan, the [Wind Caller], supporting a freshman who'd twisted her ankle, and a third-year [Evoker] Jace didn't know by name, his staff broken, blood from a scalp wound painting half his face red.

  "How many?" Jace asked.

  "Seven." Kael's jaw worked. "Three of mine, four freshmen we picked up in the stairwell. Edric took a direct phase-touch protecting a first-year. He's-" The words stopped. Started again. "He needs a healer."

  Jace looked at Mara. She was already assessing Edric from three meters away, her [Triage Sense] extending toward the wounded [Shield Bearer] with the diagnostic tendrils she no longer needed to close her eyes to use.

  "The taint's at his shoulder and spreading toward his core," she said. "Slower than the freshmen in the common room - his VIT is higher. But I'm almost empty, Jace. I can slow it. I can't stop it. Not with what I have left."

  The alley was getting darker. Not from sunset - from the Void-Stalkers consuming the mana-conduit energy in the surrounding buildings. The lights in the dormitory windows were dying one by one, each extinguished lamp another metre of ambient mana devoured by things that were still hunting, still circling, still closing.

  "Sub-Level 1, Room 4," Jace said. "Everyone. Now. Torrin on point. Kael - can your [Wind Caller] still cast?"

  Kael blinked. The question had been directed at him but the answer wasn't his to give, and the realization that a [Nomad] was issuing tactical directives to his party crossed his face like a cloud passing over the sun.

  Devi Shan answered for herself. "I have enough for two, maybe three gusts. Low power. The ambient drain is affecting my regeneration."

  "Save them. If something comes through a wall, push it back. Buy seconds. That's all we need - seconds."

  They moved. Twenty-three people - eleven freshmen, seven from Kael's group, and four from Jace's - filing through the dormitory's ground-floor corridor toward the stairwell that led to Sub-Level 1. Torrin at the front, his Holdfast Plate the only solid thing in a world that was dissolving into shadow. Mara in the center, one hand on Edric's shoulder, feeding the last dregs of her mana into his failing body. Elara counting her remaining rune-strips - two concussive, one binding - and calculating blast radii against corridor widths. Kael at the rear with Devi, watching the darkness behind them with eyes that had learned, in the space of twenty minutes, that fire couldn't burn what wasn't there.

  The mana-conduit pipes along the ceiling went dark as they passed. Each section dying in sequence, the amber glow retreating before the advancing void like a tide pulling away from shore.

  They reached the stairwell. Descended. Found Room 4 - a reinforced lecture hall with ward-lines set into the walls, heavy enough that Jace could feel them humming through [Mana Sense] even with his pool scraping bottom. The wards weren't designed to stop Void-Stalkers specifically - they were general-purpose containment barriers, rated for standard dungeon fauna. But they were *dense*. Multiple layers. The kind of ward-work that would give even a phase-capable creature pause.

  How much pause was the question.

  Torrin held the door while everyone filed through. The freshmen huddled against the far wall - a cluster of wide-eyed children who'd come to Ironhold to learn how to be heroes and were discovering what it felt like to need one. The injured were settled on the floor - Edric, the [Herbalist] girl Mara had carried, the twisted-ankle freshman, the bleeding [Evoker].

  Jace stood in the doorway and looked down the corridor. The stairwell was dark. The mana-lamps above were dead - consumed. The ward-lines on the lecture hall's walls provided the only light, a pale blue-white glow that made everyone look like ghosts.

  From somewhere above them - close, closer than it should have been - came a sound that wasn't a sound. A pressure. A wrongness. The sensation of something large and hungry pressing against the edges of the world, testing the walls, looking for the crack that would let it in.

  "Close the door," Elara said quietly.

  Jace closed the door. The ward-lines flared, the barrier sealing with a hum of contained energy that vibrated through the frame.

  Twenty-three people in a basement room. Three injured. One healer running on fumes. Two concussive runes and a binding strip between them and everything else. Faculty pinned at the main breach. No extraction beacon - the nearest was in the Proving Grounds, three buildings and five Void-Stalkers away.

  Kael sat against the wall with Edric's head in his lap, his hand on the [Shield Bearer]'s shoulder, his fire-silk vest dark and cold. He looked at Jace across the room. The arrogance was gone. The certainty was gone. What remained was the raw, stripped-down core of a sixteen-year-old boy who was watching his friend die by degrees and didn't know how to stop it.

  "What now?" Kael asked.

  The ward-lines hummed. The darkness pressed. The lights flickered once, twice, and held - barely, the last ember of an academy that had been built to stand against exactly this and was learning, in real time, whether the builders had been good enough.

  Jace looked at twenty-two faces looking back at him. Some he knew. Most he didn't. All of them waiting for an answer from a [Vagabond] with empty resource pools and a broken rib and a borrowed sword that couldn't cut what was hunting them.

  "We survive," he said. "And we figure out the rest."

  The lights flickered again. In the dark between the flickers, something scratched at the door.