The path beyond the fallen construct narrowed into a winding incline—more worn than the rest, like it hadn't seen reinforcement or repairs in years. Moss crept along the sides of the rock, and faint crystalline veins glittered just beneath the surface, pulsing with an unnatural blue glow.
Juno said nothing as she led.
But she glanced back more often now.
She'd seen the wreckage. She wasn't asking questions yet—but Lyle could feel her watching him sideways when she thought he wasn't looking.
He kept his eyes low. One hand brushed the cliff as they climbed—not for balance, but to trace the mana residue. And what he felt under his fingertips wasn't just old magic.
It was Arcai weave.
Dead wizards had built something here.
And it wasn't marked on the Cadet Zone map.
That was confirmed when the ridge suddenly opened—not into another combat platform or lava-cleaved canyon, but into an arched stone tunnel, half-collapsed, buried beneath layers of melted rock.
The air shifted.
Cooler. Still dry—but sharper. Like the smell of iron in the back of the throat.
Juno stopped short, brow furrowing. "This… isn't part of the trial."
Lyle knew it instantly.
He could feel the Codex stir inside him, like it was leaning forward. Hungry. Alert.
He stepped past her slowly, eyes adjusting to the strange shifting glow inside the tunnel.
There was no instruction rune. No visible zone boundary.
And no one had been here in a long, long time.
"Maybe a shortcut," he said quietly. "Or maybe where they threw the parts of the trial we weren't meant to survive."
Juno gave him a look. "We shouldn't go in."
But her body said otherwise.
She was already two steps in before she finished the sentence.
Lyle followed.
---
Inside, the walls were inscribed with glyphs older than the academy. Not battle runes—structural magic, the kind used in ancient enchantment cores and forgotten seal chambers.
There were no traps.
No defense constructs.
Just silence, dust, and time.
And in the center of the room ahead, set into the floor like a sunken pedestal, was a single half-buried sigil circle.
Old Arcai script wound around its edge, but something was wrong.
The glyphs shifted—just slightly—when Lyle looked directly at them, as if they were alive.
He froze.
Juno didn't step closer. Her instincts screamed the same thing his did.
"This feels wrong," she muttered.
Lyle felt it in his chest now.
The Codex didn't warn him.
It recognized it.
The closer he stepped, the louder the resonance became—not noise, not sound. Something deeper.
Something personal.
He placed one hand on the edge of the stone ring.
And it lit up.
Not a flare of power. Not a defense mechanism.
A quiet, almost reverent glow.
As if it had been waiting for him.
Juno stepped back immediately. "That's not you casting, right?"
"No," he whispered.
Because it wasn't.
This wasn't his magic.
It was something tied to his blood. His name.
> "You are the last, Lyle Greenbottle."
The Codex whispered softly:
> [Arcai Legacy Node Accessed]
[Attunement In Progress...]
He didn't speak. Couldn't.
The pedestal pulsed. A faint outline appeared beneath the stone—a storage seal hidden inside the floor.
It unlocked.
A soft hiss of pressure. Then silence.
A small stone floated up from the middle of the ring—a crystal, dark red, like a drop of ancient blood caught in a prism. Runes swirled inside it, slowly, rhythmically.
The Codex pulsed louder now.
> [Integration Opportunity Detected]
[Arcai Echo Core – Bind to Host | Yes / No?]
Lyle didn't move to touch it.
He just thought the word.
> Yes.
The crystal sank into his palm.
There was no pain. Just heat. Familiar. Like being drawn back into the dream, into Lysera's presence.
Into that world where magic hadn't been broken yet.
Juno stared at him like he'd grown horns.
"What did you just do?"
He pulled his hand back, fist closed over the fading glow.
"Nothing."
"You expect me to believe that?"
"I expect you to trust I don't want to die either."
She didn't respond.
But her gauntlets clicked once as she flexed her fingers.
The chamber lights dimmed, as if satisfied.
And far above them, somewhere in the academy's surveillance room, a red warning light blinked once—
Then stopped.
As if someone… had turned it off.