The heavy mahogany doors of the Grand Council Chamber clicked shut behind Instructor Gage, leaving a cold, suffocating vacuum in his wake.
For several long minutes, not a single high mage or noble representative dared to breathe.
The oppressive, primordial terror that had gripped their hearts slowly began to recede, replaced instantly by a wave of humiliated fury and frantic, overlapping whispers.
Head Instructor Malakor slammed his pale hands onto the marble podium, his face twisting into an ugly, venomous scowl.
"An absolute outrage!"
"A commoner instructor dares to threaten the ruling body of High Pristina Academy?"
"He speaks of erasing this tower as if he were a god!"
Duke Sebastian of House Vance leaned over the stone railing, his eyes burning with aristocratic malice as he gestured to a small group of loyal, corrupt mages.
"He is an unpredictable anomaly."
"A man that powerful cannot be controlled by the traditional laws of the nobility."
"If we let him reach the midterm festival, he will completely dismantle the hierarchy we have spent centuries building."
"He must be eliminated before the sun rises tomorrow."
Malakor nodded slowly, a dark, treacherous smile forming on his lips.
"The academy underbelly possesses a specialized unit."
"The Midnight Phantoms."
"A squad of elite, S rank shadow assassins who specialize in silent casting and invisible throat slitting."
"Send them to his residential quarters tonight while he is asleep."
"Let us see if his arrogant tongue can stop a blade in the dark."
While the old, corrupt mages huddled in the center of the room to finalize their cowardly assassination plot, four individuals remained detached from the chaotic cluster.
High up on a secluded, shaded balcony overlooking the courtyard, four young female instructors stood in a tight circle, their expressions entirely different from the panicked panic of their older colleagues.
These ladies represented the newest, most brilliant generation of the academy faculty, each a prodigy within her respective field.
"He didn't use a single drop of mana to deflect that crushing pressure," Elena murmured, her fingers tracing the edge of her research leather notebook.
As the academy's youngest Magic Theory Prodigy, she was completely obsessed with the raw mechanics of power.
"I examined the recording of Crimson's arena duel."
"The boy altered his muscle fibers and neural reflex speeds without a functional mana heart."
"Gage isn't teaching magic."
"He is actively rewriting human anatomy."
"It is mathematically impossible, yet it is happening right under our noses."
"It isn't just his teaching that breaks the rules," Vivienne added, leaning against the stone railing with her arms crossed.
She was the Combat Tactics Instructor, a sharp, athletic noblewoman from a legendary martial bloodline.
Her sharp eyes had watched Gage's exit down to the exact millimeter.
"Did you see his posture when Malakor threatened him?"
"His weight distribution didn't shift by a single fraction of an inch."
"His movements are mathematically perfect, devoid of any wasted kinetic energy."
"If I fought him, I wouldn't even be able to see the strike that kills me."
A few inches away, Celeste, the young Academy Head Healer, let out a soft, heavy sigh.
Her compassionate but highly observant eyes were filled with a profound level of professional awe.
"I managed to review Crimson's medical chart early this morning after Gage left the wing."
"The boy's underlying genetic caps were literally shattered and reconstructed overnight."
"His body now possesses an ultimate speed potential that matches ancient mythological tiers."
"A regular commoner teacher cannot alter a human soul's limits."
"Gage is hiding an identity that could turn this entire empire upside down."
The fourth lady, a quiet, mysterious instructor named Lyra who commanded the Stealth and Intelligence department, stepped out from the deep shadows of the balcony pillar.
Her elven heritage granted her a natural affinity for sensory detection, and her voice was a low, cautious whisper.
"I was watching from the rafters during the entire trial."
"When Gage released that final sentence, his aura didn't expand outward like a normal mage."
"It collapsed the space around him."
"The old fools think they can trap him with a few shadow assassins, but they have no idea what kind of calamity they are poking."
"We need to keep our eyes locked onto him."
"If he survives tonight, the midterm festival will belong to Class F."
The four young ladies nodded in silent agreement, their fascination with the enigmatic instructor deepening by the hour as the sun slowly dipped below the horizon, bringing forth a cold, moonless midnight.
The faculty residential wing was completely shrouded in absolute darkness.
A thick, heavy fog rolled across the stone walkways, swallowing the faint light of the distant crystal lanterns.
Outside the heavy oak door of Instructor Gage's private office, five indistinct shadows materialized out of thin air.
The Midnight Phantoms moved with perfect, unnatural silence, their black, mana cloaked leather armor making them entirely invisible to the naked eye.
The lead assassin held up a slender, silver dagger coated in an exotic, paralytic venom that could freeze a dragon's heart within seconds.
He gestured with two fingers, and the squad seamlessly bypassed the physical lock, gliding through the threshold like ghosts.
The office was dark, illuminated only by the faint silver moonlight filtering through the windowpane.
In the center of the room sat Instructor Gage.
He was resting calmly in his leather high back chair, his eyes closed and his hands resting smoothly on the armrests, appearing to be in a deep, defenseless state of slumber.
The lead assassin smirked beneath his dark cloth mask.
He signaled his men to encircle the desk simultaneously, their poisoned blades raised high as they prepared to plunge their weapons into his vital organs in a single, coordinated strike.
They closed the distance, their boots hovering an inch above the floorboards without making a single vibration.
They were exactly three feet away from his body when Gage slowly opened his eyes.
There was no sudden movement.
There was no drawing of a hidden weapon.
Gage simply stared straight ahead into the darkness, his icy eyes locking onto the invisible figures with an absolute, terrifying calm.
"How pathetic," Gage whispered smoothly.
Before the assassins could even register his voice, an invisible, catastrophic mountain of passive room pressure exploded outward from Gage's stationary form.
It wasn't mana, and it wasn't a traditional spell.
It was the raw, unadulterated weight of his UNKNOWN statistics manifesting into a physical, crushing gravitational force.
A series of sickening cracks echoed simultaneously through the dark room.
The five elite, S rank assassins were violently slammed downward into the hardwood floorboards, the sheer, unimaginable pressure fracturing their ribs, shattering their knees, and pinning their bodies flat against the earth.
Their poisoned daggers flew from their grips, shattering into useless metal shards against the stone walls.
They tried to scream, but the absolute force pressing against their chests was so immense that their lungs couldn't even expand to draw oxygen.
They lay there, completely paralyzed, bleeding from their eyes and noses as the floor beneath them began to splinter under the weight.
Gage didn't even stand up from his leather chair.
He casually reached into his inner suit pocket, pulled out his physical leather notebook, and picked up his sleek black ink pen.
"Your masters possess an exceptionally limited imagination," Gage murmured, his voice carrying an eerie, regular cadence as he flipped to a blank parchment page.
"To think that five fragile insects could alter the evaluation of this classroom."
He looked down at the lead assassin, who was convulsing violently under the suffocating pressure, his eyes wide with a primitive, maddening terror as he realized the man before him was a force far beyond any rank quantified by the empire.
Gage let out a low, calm sigh, his pen scratching smoothly against the paper as the midnight hours ticked away.
The next morning, the grand corridors of the ivory tower were suddenly shattered by a piercing, horrified scream.
Head Instructor Malakor and Duke Sebastian rushed toward the central administrative hallway, accompanied by dozens of elite guards.
When they reached the grand entrance of the council chambers, they stopped dead in their tracks, their faces turning an absolute, ghostly shade of white as their bodies began to tremble with uncontrollable horror.
Pinned to the massive mahogany doors by five splintered silver daggers were the pristine, unwrinkled uniforms of the five Midnight Phantom assassins.
The uniforms were neatly folded, but the center of each fabric was stained with a thick, dark crimson pool of blood.
Written directly onto the polished wood of the doors, in elegant, mathematically perfect handwriting using the assassins' own life essence, was a single, bone chilling sentence.
The evaluation of your lives has been calculated. Do not waste my ink a second time.
The old, corrupt mages fell into a state of absolute, petrified silence, their lungs completely freezing as they stared at the bloody warning.
The message was loud, clear, and absolutely terrifying, their political games were completely useless against the unknown monster of Class F.