It often felt good to be right about everything.

  There was a certain satisfaction in it that Sael thought most people could relate to. That moment when events unfolded exactly as you'd expected, when your warnings proved accurate, when the people who'd dismissed your concerns were forced to confront the consequences of their skepticism.

  You could say "I told you so" to anyone who hadn't believed you. And if you were vindictive and a bit petty—which Sael hoped he wasn't, but suspected he might be, at least a little—you could feel a small spark of joy watching their faces as they apologized and regretted not listening.

  It was human.

  But then there were the rare, unfortunate times when you'd pray with everything you had to be wrong about something you'd warned about. Times when being right meant everything being wrong. When the satisfaction of vindication turned to ash because the cost of accuracy was too high, and your correctness meant danger for everyone else.

  Sael would have traded every "I told you so" in his life to be wrong right now.

  Because Professor Edmund Carth's hand was glowing with gathered mana, and the spell forming between his fingers was absolutely, unmistakably a [Volcano Eruption]. Ninth circle. Destructive magic at a scale that had no business being cast indoors. The kind of spell you used on battlefields, against armies, when collateral damage was not just acceptable but expected.

  The air around Carth's hand was already warping from the heat. Sael could see the spell matrix taking shape, layers upon layers of compressed fire and force building toward critical mass. In another second it would be complete. Then in less than one second it would detonate.

  This whole building would be gone. Everyone in it would be dead.

  And yet, that wasn't what made Sael's breath catch in his throat.

  It was the energy itself, the mana Carth was channeling through his core.

  The last time Sael had felt this particular energy had been four hundred years ago, at the Battle of Mount Yrsult, and he'd honestly believed—perhaps naively—that he'd never encounter it again.

  Normal mana felt fresh. Electric, even, for lack of a better word. It jolted you awake when you channeled it, sharp and alive as it flowed through your body from your core. It was fast, too fast for most people to ever get comfortable with. Which explained why most people born with mana cores never became mages; the sensation was often too intense, too difficult to acclimate to.

  Sadly, what Sael was sensing now was quite different.

  This mana felt thick. Warm. It moved slowly through Carth's channels, almost languid, and there was something... inviting about it. It didn't jolt or spark or resist. It simply flowed where Carth directed it, obedient and eager, allowing him to cast a ninth circle spell with the sort of ease that should have required decades of discipline and mastery he clearly didn't possess.

  You'd think the power was yours. That you'd finally achieved something through your own skill.

  But you'd be wrong. You were only working with borrowed power, and the interest on that loan would come due eventually.

  The shock of recognition hit him harder than he would have expected. Four centuries was a long time. Long enough that some part of him had started to believe this particular horror had been thoroughly eradicated.

  But there it was, pulsing through Edmund Carth's mana channels as he prepared to incinerate a hall full of people.

  This was, without the shadow of a doubt, Corrupted mana.

  Sael felt... well, he wasn't quite sure, actually.

  What am I feeling?

  That was the first question. Identify the emotion. Name it. Only then could you begin to process it properly. Sael had spent lifetimes learning this particular skill, and it had become something of a habit, this constant internal monitoring of his own mental state. Some people might have called it overthinking, but he preferred to think of it as self-awareness, though he supposed the line between the two was blurry enough that the distinction hardly mattered.

  Shock, perhaps? That numb sensation of reality refusing to match his expectations.

  No, wait. Not shock. Shock implied surprise, and he wasn't truly surprised, was he? He'd suspected this. He'd warned people about it. So not shock.

  Disbelief, then. The stubborn part of his mind that kept insisting this couldn't be happening. But no, that wasn't right either. He believed it. He could see it, sense it, feel it radiating from Carth's core. There was no question of belief. This was happening.

  Disappointment? Bone-deep disappointment that people hadn't learned, that after four hundred years of peace, after everything they'd learned about Corruption and what it did to people, someone had looked at that history and decided it was worth the risk anyway.

  Hmm, closer, but disappointment was passive. What he felt wasn't passive at all.

  Fear? Dread at what Corruption's return would bring, at having to face this again after so long?

  He considered that. But no, fear made you want to run, to hide, it made you want to protect yourself. What he felt made him want to move forward, not back.

  This was anger.

  Yes, that's what he was feeling.

  Anger.

  Sael's hand moved.

  Fast enough that Carth's eyes barely had time to widen before Sael's fingers closed around his wrist and redirected the attack toward the ceiling. The [Volcano Eruption] was already half-formed. Sael could feel the heat of it scorching the air and see the spell reaching that critical threshold where it would either be released or tear Carth's hand apart from the inside.

  He cast [Dispel].

  This was a special circle spell. Unusual in that it worked on any type of magic, regardless of complexity, as long as you could pour in enough mana and maintain precise enough control to match what you were trying to unmake.

  Any mage could do it, really. It was required knowledge even for canceling one's own spells mid-cast. The principle was straightforward: understand the target spell's structure well enough to reverse it, while matching or surpassing the mana the caster had invested.

  The difficulty came from doing both simultaneously under pressure.

  For a ninth circle [Volcano Eruption] that wasn't your own spell, it required twelfth circle execution: perfect structural analysis and overwhelming mana output, all in the fraction of a second before detonation.

  The spell matrix around Carth's hand simply stopped being.

  One moment there was a [Volcano Eruption] gathering itself for release. The next moment there was just mana, stripped of all molding and intent, returned to its original ambient form.

  The waveshock hit the whole Hall.

  Sael had braced for it, but most of the room hadn't. People recoiled violently, some falling off their benches, others crying out as the sudden unraveling of ninth circle magic sent ripples of force through the hall.

  Sael held Carth's arm steady through it all.

  The professor was staring at him with wide, shocked eyes. His mouth had fallen open slightly. The hand that had been preparing to kill everyone in the room was trembling now, fingers twitching like he couldn't quite believe they were still attached.

  The floor beneath Sael's feet began to tremble.

  It started as a subtle vibration, one you might dismiss as your imagination or perhaps something happening in a distant part of the building. But Sael noticed it immediately, and with that noticing came the understanding of what was happening.

  Mages manipulated mana. That was the fundamental truth of magic, the basic principle upon which all spellcasting rested. Mana existed as an ambient energy throughout the world, invisible and intangible but present in every space, saturating reality the way water saturated a sponge.

  Mages learned to sense this mana, to draw it into their bodies through their mana channels, to store it in their core where it could be shaped and directed. And when a mage actively molded and manipulated that mana—applied intent and structure and purpose to raw energy—the result was called a spell.

  For most mages, this process was entirely voluntary. But at a certain threshold of power, the rules changed. When a mage became sufficiently strong, when their core grew large enough and their connection to ambient mana deep enough, their emotional state began to affect the mana around them involuntarily.

  The mechanism was well understood, if difficult to explain to those who hadn't experienced it directly.

  A powerful mage's presence warped the ambient mana field, and when their emotions became intense enough to dominate their conscious thoughts, that emotional state impressed itself upon the surrounding mana. The mana responded to the pattern being projected at it, shaped itself according to the dominant emotional frequency it was receiving.

  Joy created light. Grief summoned rain. Fear dropped temperatures and made shadows deepen. And whatever a mage of Sael's caliber was feeling right now, would be nothing short of a cataclysm.

  The tremor came again, stronger this time. Around the Great Hall, people began to notice. Conversations that had been starting to resume after the shock of the dispelled [Volcano Eruption] faltered and died. Heads turned, looking for the source of the disturbance. Someone's quill rolled off a table and clattered to the floor, the small sound unnaturally loud in the growing silence.

  More tremor, and then again, rhythmic now like a heartbeat, steady and relentless, making the stone floor crack and the support pillars grind against their foundations.

  Sael tried to breathe and apply the techniques he'd spent lifetimes perfecting. Observe the emotion without judgment. Note its presence. Acknowledge its validity. Then let it pass through you like water through a sieve, recognized but not retained.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  But whatever he was feeling wouldn't pass through. It wouldn't dissipate under analytical scrutiny the way emotions usually did when you examined them closely enough.

  The tremors intensified. Cracks appeared in the floor, thin hairline fractures spreading outward from where Sael stood. One of the support pillars made a grinding sound, stone shifting against stone as the building itself began to express the force of what Sael had identified as anger.

  More gasps echoed through the hall, people starting to panic despite their training, their survival instincts overriding their discipline as reality itself started to lose coherence around them. The mana in the hall was responding now, pulled into turbulent motion. Candles flickered and went out. The temperature dropped several degrees in the space of a heartbeat, then spiked up again, then dropped once more.

  "Everyone remain calm!" Headmaster Koleen's voice cut through the rising panic. "Stay where you are. Do not flee. Do not cast defensive magic in a disturbed mana field. Your stillness serves us far better than your panic."

  He was on his feet now, staff raised, his presence alone enough to draw attention and hold it and his eyes fixed on Sael. This was a man who knew exactly what was happening and exactly how dangerous it was.

  "Master Sael, if you are able, I ask that you steady yourself," Koleen continued, his voice pitched for Sael's ears specifically now, though likely half the hall could hear him in the unnatural quiet. "We remain under your protection, but only so long as you maintain control. I beseech you: recall your discipline. Recall your purpose. We have need of your strength, not your wrath."

  Sael heard and understood him. In fact, he even agreed with him. But understanding what you should do and actually doing it were not the same thing, particularly when the emotion was still building despite his best efforts to contain it. Every attempt to dampen it seemed to make it burn hotter, as if the very act of trying to suppress it was fuel for its growth.

  The building shook violently enough that several people lost their footing entirely. Benches toppled. Tables cracked down their centers. The great doors at the entrance rattled in their frame, the sound like thunder confined to a small space, and somewhere in the back of the hall glass shattered as one of the ornamental windows gave way under the stress.

  Sael looked at the source of his building anger.

  He activated [Third Eye], letting his vision shift to see past the physical and into the fundamental nature of what he was observing.

  Professor Edmund Carth was Level 875.

  "Why?"

  The word came out quiet and disappointed. The tone you'd use with a student who'd turned in work you knew they were capable of doing better.

  Carth's mouth moved but no sound came out.

  "Why?" Sael asked again.

  Because he genuinely couldn't comprehend it. Couldn't understand the thought process that led someone to this point.

  The professor's actual level —the one before the Corrupted enhancement— was probably somewhere in the low four hundreds. Maybe high three hundreds if Sael was being generous. It was respectable for someone his apparent age. A foundation you built a career on, taught from, lived a good life with.

  And Carth had thrown it all away for this.

  Because that's what Corruption did. It offered you power now in exchange for everything you might have been later. It was a loan with infinite interest, a bargain where you mortgaged your future self for a temporary advantage, and the terms were written in a language designed to make you think you understood them when you absolutely did not.

  Had Carth not read the histories? Did he not understand what happened to people who walked this path? The Corrupted One's generals had been powerful, yes. Terrifyingly powerful. Level 1000, level 2000, numbers that made regular advancement look like crawling. But they'd also been consumed. Every single one of them had lost themselves piece by piece until there was nothing left but hunger and the need to spread the taint further.

  Did Carth think he would be different? That he could control it? That the rules that applied to everyone else somehow wouldn't apply to him?

  Why was the search for power so intoxicating that basic rationality seemed to evaporate in its presence? Hmm? Why did self-preservation instincts, years of history telling humans not to do obviously stupid things, fail so completely when someone dangled the promise of strength in front of them?

  Just... why?

  Dust rained from the ceiling as one of the ornamental chandeliers swayed dangerously, its chains grinding against the mounting points.

  "Everyone out!" Koleen's voice cut through again. "Move! Now!"

  Several mages had their hands already glowing with gathered mana, protective instincts overriding common sense. A guard had moved protectively in front of the duke, his hand hovering near her weapon.

  "Put that away," Duke Eryndor snapped at him, then louder to the other guards and family members. "All of you, weapons down. We're leaving. Move!"

  "Your grace—" the guard started.

  "Now, soldier." The Duke was already backing toward the exit, his eyes on the cracking floor, the trembling pillars. "This building is coming down."

  The floor cracked again. A support pillar made a sound like grinding teeth. The temperature in the hall was fluctuating wildly: frost forming on metal surfaces one moment, heat shimmers the next.

  One of the academy mages—a younger professor—raised his hand anyway, mana gathering for what looked like a binding spell.

  Orion moved.

  The boy was fast. His hand shot out and struck the professor's wrist just as the spell was forming, deflecting it harmlessly into the ceiling where it fizzled out against stone.

  "Are you mad?!" Orion's voice cracked with terror. "You'll just make it worse!"

  The professor's face went pale, but he stumbled back toward the exit.

  People were already moving, some running despite the Duke's earlier command for calm. Others helped older colleagues. The exodus was messy, driven by pure survival instinct as the building continued to shake.

  "Headmaster—" someone called out.

  "Go!" Koleen waved them off, staff planted on the trembling ground as he backed toward the doors himself. "Everyone out. Get clear of the building."

  In the center of it all, Sael held Professor Carth's arm and waited for an answer that he suspected wouldn't come.

  Because what answer could there be? What explanation could possibly justify this?

  Carth's free hand jerked up, and suddenly purple mana flared around his entire body like oil catching fire. Another blatant sign of Corruption.

  [Slippery Form].

  Sael's grip didn't so much loosen as find itself holding nothing. Carth's arm phased through his fingers, and the professor stumbled backward, gasping. Then he ran.

  It would have been almost humorous if it weren't so pathetic. A man with borrowed power at level 875, enhanced beyond anything his actual capabilities could sustain, running like a goblin caught raiding the pantry.

  "Stop him!" Richter shouted to the people closest to them, moving forward with his sword drawn.

  But the moment Carth turned, the purple mana around him intensified. Several of the mages who'd been moving to intercept pulled up short, uncertainty crossing their faces.

  Koleen raised his staff. "Edmund, don't make this—"

  Carth threw a [Force Blast] without looking back. It was sloppy and panicked. Just raw power thrown backward to clear space.

  But it worked. The other mages scattered. The professors and the Eryndors were all hesitating, still processing the fact that one of their own was apparently the enemy. Or perhaps they were just this incompetent when it actually mattered. Sael wasn't sure which.

  Carth made it maybe fifteen feet outside the room before Sael used [Blink].

  One moment he was standing where the dispelled [Volcano Eruption] had been. The next moment he was directly in front of Carth, close enough that the professor ran face-first into his chest.

  Carth made a strangled sound and tried to backpedal.

  Sael's hand closed around his throat, then he cast [Blink] again.

  Suddenly they were airborne. The Great Hall vanished, replaced by open sky and the rushing sensation of wind. Carth's eyes went wide, his hands scrabbling at Sael's wrist, feet kicking at nothing because there was nothing beneath them except a forty-foot drop to the academy grounds.

  "Why?" Sael asked.

  Carth opened his mouth. Maybe to answer. Maybe just to scream.

  [Blink].

  They were somewhere else. A rooftop, it seemed. Sael's grip shifted and he slammed Carth down against the tiles hard enough to crack them. The professor wheezed, purple mana sputtering around him like a dying flame.

  "Why?" Sael asked again.

  [Blink].

  They were falling now. Faling from the sky. Carth's scream cut off as his body tried to process the sudden shift from horizontal to vertical, from impact to freefall.

  [Blink].

  Ground. Sael's boots hit stone. Carth's entire body jerked from the deceleration, his head snapping back.

  [Blink]. [Blink]. [Blink].

  Forest. Cliffside. Riverbank. Each transition felt like being torn apart and reassembled. Your body knew it had been somewhere else a fraction of a second ago. Your inner ear screamed that the world had just rotated ninety degrees. Your stomach tried to figure out which way was up while your eyes insisted that up had changed three times in as many heartbeats.

  If you weren't used to it, [Blink] hurt. It scrambled everything. Spatial awareness, balance, the basic understanding of where you ended and the world began. Sael was very used to it.

  Carth was not.

  [Wrath Level: 1%]

  "Why?" The word resonated like it was coming from somewhere beneath the earth and the sky at once. It wasn't something he'd meant to do. Just another side effect of his current state, his control fraying at the edges as anger built beneath the surface.

  Carth tried to cast something. His hands moved through the motions, purple mana gathering weakly between his palms.

  Sael grabbed his wrist and used [Blink].

  Mountain peak. Sael swung Carth in an arc and slammed him into the rock face. The professor's spell fizzled out. His eyes were starting to lose focus, the rapid displacement doing exactly what Sael knew it would do to someone unprepared.

  [Wrath Level: 3%]

  "They died for this." Sael's grip tightened. "Do you understand? People I knew. People I cared about. They died so that what you're doing would never happen again."

  [Blink].

  Beach. Sand. Sael drove Carth's head into the ground.

  [Blink].

  Ocean. They were standing on water. Sael held Carth under the surface for two seconds. Three. Then pulled him up, gasping.

  [Wrath Level: 5%]

  "And you thought what?" Sael hauled him up by the collar. "That you'd be special? That the Corruption would treat you differently?"

  [Blink]. [Blink].

  A canyon this time. Sael threw him against the wall. Caught him before he could fall. Cast [Blink] again.

  Deep forest. Ancient trees that blotted out the sun. Sael slammed Carth into moss-covered bark.

  The imbecile was making sounds now. His hands had stopped trying to fight and started trying to shield his head.

  [Wrath Level: 7%]

  [Blink].

  Ruins. Old stone foundations half-swallowed by wilderness. Sael grabbed Carth by the hair and forced his head against a crumbling wall. "You're playing with forces you don't understand. Forces that consumed men a thousand times your better. And you thought you could control them?"

  [Blink]. [Blink]. [Blink]. [Blink].

  Clifftop. Then cliffside. Then the rocky shore of one of Orlys' hidden lakes. Then back to another canyon, deeper this time, where the stone walls pressed in close and the air was thin.

  [Wrath Level: 9%]

  By the thirteenth [Blink] , Carth was frothing drool. His eyes had rolled back. The purple mana around him flickered weakly, his Corrupted enhancement trying to keep him conscious and failing.

  Sael held him up with one hand. They were in a cliff region now, perhaps miles from the city. Far enough that no one would be hurt by what Sael was increasingly tempted to do.

  "Why did you do it?" he asked one more time.

  Carth's mouth moved. Wet, incoherent sounds came out.

  [Wrath Level: 10%]

  Sael's hand tightened.

  He could end this. Should end this, probably. The Corruption would only spread. Carth was already lost. Everything that had made him a person, a professor, someone worth saving, was being eaten away by borrowed power that would consume him completely within years.

  It would be a mercy. It would be... justice.

  His friends had died fighting people like this. They died screaming, afraid, knowing the world would burn if they failed.

  Sael's hand tightened further.

  Then he saw the number in his peripheral vision. 10%. That wasn't good. He'd made a promise about this.

  So... he stopped.

  His hand loosened.

  Carth collapsed to the ground like a puppet with cut strings. He was begging now, the words barely intelligible through the drool, tears and sheer disorientation. "Please. Please. I'm sorry. Please don't. Please. I'm sorry..."

  Sael let him go.

  He wasn't even breathing hard or tired. Thirteen uses of [Blink] across random places, a beating that would have killed a normal person, and he now felt nothing except the hollow disappointment that had been there from the start.

  He looked up at the sky instead. Late afternoon sun. Clear air. By all standard, a day that should have been peaceful.

  His hand went to his coat pocket and found his pipe. The familiar weight of it was grounding. Eirlys had given it to him. On a morning none of them had known turn out to be one of their last together. The wood was worn smooth from use, now that he was looking at it closely. Hmm. He'd need to change that.

  He packed it carefully, taking his time, letting the ritual of it steady him. Then he lit it with a small application of mana and drew in a long breath.

  [Wrath Level: 9%]

  Exhale.

  [Wrath Level: 7%]

  Another breath. The pipe was an anchor. Something real and solid that connected him to a better time. When he'd been more than just power and the weight of surviving almost everyone he'd ever known.

  [Wrath Level: 5%]

  Carth was still on the ground, curled into himself, sobbing.

  Some small stones around them had begun to lift. Just slightly. Pebbles and loose rock rising a few inches off the ground, trembling in the air like they couldn't decide which way gravity pulled. The mana disruption from his anger had been warping the space around them, bending the natural order of things without him even noticing.

  Sael smoked and watched the sky and let the anger drain away like water through cupped hands.

  [Wrath Level: 3%]

  As the wrath level dropped, they settled back down one by one. First the larger stones, then the smaller ones, until finally even the dust returned to earth.

  [Wrath Level: 1%]

  The last pebble touched ground with a soft tick.

  [Wrath Level: 0%]

  Sael took another draw from his pipe and kept watching the sky. It did not feel good to be right.

  Fun fact:

  not to lose it, and I wanted to capture that same feeling here.

  looks like, and I hope that came through on the page. It really does help to have a visual reference when you're trying to translate movement into words.

  Thanks for reading. Next chapter drops Monday!