High above the blistering heat of the arena floor, the structural rafters of the Colosseum were cast in deep, permanent shade.
Miro sat cross-legged on a steel crossbeam, completely hidden from the thousands of cheering, gasping students below.
She balanced the jagged, black metallic shard on her knee.
Traces of violet-black energy sparked across her fingertips, reacting to her shifting mood.
She pressed a hand to her own chest, remembering the sickening crack of her magic slamming into Mori’s stomach an hour ago.
Mori’s furious, bloodstained face flashed in her mind.
Get out.
Miro’s jaw tightened.
She didn’t feel guilty, she told herself.
Guilt was for people who believed in the rules.
She had just panicked.
Mori was the perfect soldier, the Principal’s golden child, and she had tried to take the artifact away.
Miro had simply defended herself.
Below her, the stadium was in a state of absolute bedlam.
Miro leaned forward, peering over the edge of the steel beam.
Down on the white sand, medical teams were sprinting toward two unconscious bodies.
One was Jaxen Vance.
Miro recognized the C-rank speedster’s aerodynamic armor.
He looked like he had been hit by a freight train.
The other body was a boy in a cheap, blood-soaked gray provisional uniform.
“The F-rank,” Miro whispered to herself, genuinely surprised.
She had ignored the tournament brackets.
The Academy Tournament was just a glorified dog show for the nobles to stroke their egos. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
But the whispers echoing up from the stands were impossible to ignore.
The only F-rank in the entire institution had just beaten a C-rank speedster by intentionally letting himself get stabbed.
Miro watched the medics load the boy onto a levitating stretcher.
He was a mess—pale, bleeding heavily from the shoulder, and completely unresponsive.
But as she watched, the black shard resting on her knee began to hum.
The violet energy wrapped around Miro’s fingers, crawling up her arm and pulsing near her eyes.
Suddenly, the world below her shifted.
The blinding sunlight dimmed, and the magical signatures of everyone in the stadium flared into vibrant color.
Miro had discovered this trick an hour ago.
The pre-Cataclysm artifact didn’t just hold dark magic; it stripped away the Rank Authority’s filters.
It let her see the world as it actually was.
She looked at the medics.
Their E-rank mana signatures were dull, sluggish blue wisps.
She looked at the VIP box, where her father stood.
His A-rank aura was a suffocating, rigid wall of gold.
Then, she looked back down at the unconscious F-rank on the stretcher.
Miro nearly dropped the shard.
The boy didn’t have a signature.
Or rather, he didn’t have a human signature.
Instead of the steady, predictable flow of human mana, his body was a chaotic, boiling furnace of raw energy.
And stitched into his fading life force were thick, jagged threads of crimson.
Monster mana.
“What are you?” Miro breathed, her dark eyes going wide.
His body was actively metabolizing the violent, chaotic energy of the dungeon.
It was rewriting his cells, repairing the damage from the dagger strike at a microscopic level even while he was unconscious.
It defied every single law of the Rank Authority.
It broke the math of their entire world.
He was a walking, breathing glitch in the System.
Just like the dark magic in her hands.
Down by the tunnel entrance, movement caught Miro’s eye.
Mori stepped out of the shadows, clutching her bandaged side.
Even from a hundred feet up, Miro could see how pale her sister was.
But Mori wasn’t calling for her father, and she wasn’t looking for the guards to track Miro down.
Mori intercepted the medics.
She flashed her elite clearance badge, barked a sharp order, and physically rerouted the stretcher away from the public infirmary and toward her own private, restricted medical wing.
Miro narrowed her eyes, a slow, dangerous smile creeping onto her lips.
Her perfect, rule-obsessed, duty-bound sister was actively covering up a monstrous anomaly.
Mori was hiding the F-rank from their father.
The violet energy faded from Miro’s eyes as she slipped the black shard into her pocket.
The guilt that had been gnawing at her completely evaporated, replaced by a thrilling, razor-sharp curiosity.
She stood up on the narrow steel beam, perfectly balanced above the sheer drop.
If the perfect soldier was breaking the rules to protect a glitch, then Miro needed to know why.
She needed to know exactly what the F-rank was capable of.
And more importantly, she needed to see what happened when a glitch like that was pushed to its absolute limit.
Miro stepped backward, letting the shadows of the rafters swallow her whole, and vanished.