From his perch high upon the jagged obsidian bluff, East stood unblinking, his amber gaze narrowed against the flurry of crystalline snow. His robes, lined in silver runes, fluttered violently in the bitter wind. Below, the field had become a battlefield—no, a test chamber—where magic clashed and shattered with each breath.
He saw the way the world around the apprentices warped now, subtly at first. A shimmer in the air. A vibration, low and unnerving, that didn't belong in the natural world. The light bent oddly in patches, sound muffled in bursts. Time itself, for the briefest seconds, felt misaligned.
This was no ordinary spell.
East's pupils dilated as he tracked the rippling dome of manipulation expanding around the young man trembling at the center—Tomoe.
