The sky cracked like glass behind silk.
I didn't flinch. Not outwardly.
But something inside me reeled.
The Mnemo-Eye pulsed at my shoulder—its lens shimmered blue, then static-white, like it had seen too much too quickly. A thin voice, like thread across bone, brushed my mind:
"Threads unravel. Shadow bleeds through. Move."
Not a warning. A truth already in motion.
I moved.
The jungle floor was a lattice of woven roots and low mist. I navigated it like memory—fast, precise, detached. The Phantom Edge remained sheathed, but it itched against my back like it knew what was waiting ahead.
And so did I.
The Jackal had appeared again.
It didn't walk beside me. It never did.
But its presence… it hung behind every breath, like a coiled shape in the space between footsteps. My tethered shadow, they'd called it during assessments. A curse in the shape of something waiting to feast.
But to me, the Jackal wasn't just curse. It was a symptom. An omen. A barometer of how broken the sky was becoming.
And right now, it was close. Too close.
I reached the ridge overlooking the clearing.
Below, five students—Echo-bound, third-years from Class B—had holed up in a mana-choked basin. Their sigils glowed faintly, trying to stabilize a fractured ward dome. But the shimmer was weakening. Flickering.
The mercenaries surrounding them weren't from this trial.
They moved like they knew death intimately. No showboating. No spell flares. They wore cloaks dipped in mnemonic ash—killers bred from outside the academy. And they were too organized to be anything but hired ghosts.
I counted seven.
Three with arc-edge glaives. Two sigil-puppeteers with rusted bone talismans. One Void-class repeater wielder. And one… robed, barefoot, watching the students like they were not prey, but offerings.
"Strike fast. Fracture rhythm. Silence second line first."
The Mnemo-Eye offered its verdict. No emotion. Just calculus.
I outlined a plan.
I would use Phantom Edge to slip into the treeline near the glaive carriers. Cut them silently. Use the memory-tether in my Mnemo-wrap to mimic a student's voice from the other side of the basin. When the two puppeteers redirected, I'd ghost behind them—disarm one, spike the other. Then use the repeater's confusion to collapse his firing stance and intercept his channel. The robed one—he'd be last. Too still. Too watchful. He'd see too much if I wasn't perfect.
I moved.
The first kill was clean. His breath left his mouth in a silver ribbon before he even knew I was behind him.
The second noticed too late.
The third parried.
My blade bit stone.
A glyph burst against my cheek, rupturing the nearby fernline into a cloud of glass-like spores. I slipped—caught by a thread of the Jackal's presence—and turned the fall into a roll, but I was already off-tempo.
The puppeteer pivoted.
Chains of stitched bone snapped toward the fleeing students.
One screamed.
Not in fear.
In pain.
I surged forward—Mnemo-Eye shrieking arcane ciphers in warning—but I was already two seconds too late. A younger student, barely into his first Awakening year, was pinned against the basin wall, his left arm crushed beneath the weight of a mana-imbued construct.
I shattered it with Phantom Edge.
But not before I saw the look in his eyes.
Not fear.
But pure and utter dispair.
He'd trusted that someone would come in time.
I wasn't in time.
The basin trembled.
Or maybe that was me.
I stood over the broken construct, Phantom Edge dripping static, the crushed remnants of sigil-bone curling into smoke at my feet. The wounded boy—Niko, I thought, from the Veins of Valor arc—clutched his mangled arm, teeth clenched so tight blood lined the corners of his mouth.
"Mnemo," I hissed. "Stabilize him."
The Eye blinked once—its lens dilating like a pupil—and a slow wave of soft runelight crawled over the boy's skin. Threads of mnemonic balm knit into his aura, holding the fractures in place.
"Spinal alignment preserved. Arm integrity: critical. He requires extraction—now."
"Not happening," I muttered, already moving.
The basin had collapsed into chaos.
The remaining students fought back now, spurred by desperation, their sigils flaring wild. One girl unleashed a memory-echo of a flame serpent, only to have it snared mid-flight by a net of dampening glyphs. Another tried to shield herself with mirrored recall barriers, but the repeater wielder shattered them like glass.
And the robed one?
He hadn't moved.
Not once.
He stood still at the edge of the basin, watching everything fall apart. His hands were clasped beneath his sleeves, his head slightly tilted—not in curiosity. In analysis.
He was studying us.
And he was smiling.
The Jackal pulsed behind me again—this time not quiet. I saw it in the corner of my vision: a long black silhouette etched into the wrong layer of reality, standing beside a shattered tree. Its head turned, mimicking the robed man's tilt. My shadow… mocking me.
"Phantom Edge," I whispered.
The blade responded instantly, its memory-threaded edge rippling like heat against frost. The weapon wasn't just forged to cut—it was meant to erase. One stroke and it could sever illusions, lies, and sometimes… truths I wasn't ready for.
I vanished into flashstep, but the robed man caught me mid-move.
Without turning, he snapped his fingers.
Space twisted.
Not with noise, but with absence.
I landed wrong. Too close to him. Too loud.
He raised a hand, not to strike—but to offer it.
"I see you now, Echobound," he said, voice like silk folded around glass. "I was wondering when your shadow would reach me."
Behind me, the Jackal stepped forward.
This time, I felt it.
Not just seen—felt. As if it had uncoupled from my soul, just a little.
The Mnemo-Eye spun madly.
"Beware. Spectral tether breach. The Jackal is slipping anchor—"
"I know," I said.
Then I lunged.
He met Phantom Edge with nothing but a ripple of gravity-mist. My strike phased through him—but not harmlessly. I felt something give. A thread unraveling.
He winced, for the first time. "Ah. So it bites even through time."
I didn't stop. I pressed forward, using the Jackal's looming pressure as cover. Every move I made was mirrored by a flicker of it—like the Jackal's hunger distorted the world around me, cloaking my pattern just long enough to feint past his defenses.
We danced. Blade and mist. Memory and shadow.
I landed a strike across his shoulder.
He landed a thought in my mind.
It wasn't words. It was an image.
The island split in half. Not metaphorically. Literally—ripped by something ancient, slumbering beneath its core.
The Mnemo-Eye flared red.
"There is something buried here."
The man faded, not in defeat—but as if his time had expired.
Before he left, he whispered something only I heard:
"Your Jackal is not alone anymore."
And then he was gone.
The jungle snapped back into place.
But the basin was ruined. Of the five students, only three could stand. One would never run again. And Niko… he still wasn't moving.
I sheathed Phantom Edge and looked at my hands.
Clean. Precise.
And still, not enough.
The Jackal returned to my shadow, silent again. Waiting. Watching.
—
The jungle swallowed silence like it never knew violence.
We moved through it slowly, broken shapes in a half-line—three students limping, one unconscious on a stretcher of conjured threads I wove from my cloak's memory-lining. The boy missing his arm—Nino—twitched every few minutes, caught between fever and agony. His breath was shallow but steady. For now.
The Mnemo-Eye drifted beside me, dimmed to conserve power, but its lens kept flicking toward the horizon. Searching. Tracking.
"Ambient mana distortion increasing. Large-scale resonance ahead."
"Source?" I asked under my breath.
"Unknown. But rhythmic. Pulsing. Like breath—or footsteps."
I didn't like that phrasing.
We passed a ridge of sun-bleached bone trees, their roots curling like hands trying to claw their way back into the earth. Blood smeared one of them—fresh. Not ours.
I raised a fist. The group halted. The youngest of the three remaining students—tall girl, hazel sigil across one cheek—was the only one who didn't look half-dead.
"You're the fastest," I said. "Stay with Nino. If you see anything move besides me—signal with flarecloth."
She nodded, pulling out a tiny strip of compressed silk lined with blink-glyphs. Smart girl.
I moved forward alone, Phantom Edge humming low against my spine.
And that's when I heard it.
Not a roar. Not a spell.
A clash.
Steel. Screeching. Air rupturing from impact.
Then—
A laugh.
Not joyous. Not cruel.
Wild.
Unbound.
I crested the hill just as the canopy exploded into fragments of light.
Below me, in a clearing cratered by shattered roots and boiling sap, stood a boy—no, a teen my age—surrounded by twitching limbs and crushed vegetation. His gauntlets floated around him like twin stars in orbit, whirring with silver thread and sheer intent. One of them had… a hamster?
No time to parse that.
He moved like he'd been born fighting gravity. Every step disrupted the earth's rhythm; the jungle was responding to him, whether it wanted to or not. And the thing he was fighting—
Wasn't natural.
It looked like a centipede made of rusted metal and memory-glass. Hundreds of segmented legs skittered across nothing. Its head opened into a maw of recursive geometry—eyes within eyes, staring out of folded dimensions.
One of its legs had a student's cloak still pinned beneath it.
Han didn't flinch. His right gauntlet—with some weird thread, I'd probably learn about it later —lashed out like a whip, slicing three legs off mid-charge. Then his left fist caught the monster dead center, shattering part of its inner coil with a concussive hum that shook the tree trunks.
I stepped down into the edge of the clearing.
The Mnemo-Eye flared instantly.
"Warning. Unstable echo frequencies. High-level threat. Unknown identity approaching hostile classification."
The centipede noticed me.
So did the boy.
He turned his head—dark eyes framed by disheveled hair and sweat—and our gazes locked for the first time.
He didn't speak.
He didn't need to.
Because the Jackal flickered beside me again—and his eyes followed it.
His gauntlets flared in response. Not hostile.
Recognition.
I stepped forward.
"Toji," I said.
"Han," he replied, breathless but grinning like he hadn't bled for hours. "You with the school?"
"Sort of."
He nodded toward the beast. "You mind?"
"I was about to ask the same thing."
The centipede screamed.
We