The ember hawk’s piercing screech tore through the suffocating air of South Arena.
Its incandescent wings beat with renewed frenzy, drawing in the surrounding oxygen to feed its own combustion.
On the ground, Goman Arashi coughed up blood, breathing in ragged gasps as he struggled to maintain his atmospheric pressure dome with barely twenty percent of his Spirit remaining.
“Move, noble!” Raad shouted, another crackling charge gathering at his fingertips.
“Raad, don’t!” a rough voice barked.
Soura Sayal grabbed his friend’s wrist mid-motion and slammed him against the rusted shell of an overturned bus.
“Are you insane?” Soura snapped.
“Your electricity will trigger an elemental reaction in that zone!
You’ll create the perfect conductive bridge for those flames to burn every single one of us alive!” Soura had never studied thermodynamics in a classroom.
His instincts alone swept across the battlefield before locking onto Goman, who was still desperately trying to repel the surrounding air with trembling hands.
Every movement the heir made only fed the creature hovering above him.
“Hey, aristocrat!” Soura yelled over the roar of the flames.
“Stop pushing the air away!
Pull it toward you!” Goman shot him a murderous glare.
“You want me to let that thing burn me alive, commoner?!” “Create a vacuum around that damn bird or we’re all dead!
Do it!” With survival finally outweighing pride, Goman brought both palms together and let out a roar of frustration.
He abandoned his personal barrier and completely reversed the function of his Spirit.
The surrounding atmosphere bent violently around the ember hawk with a deafening suction hiss, forming a localized partial vacuum.
The blazing raptor released a shrill cry as its wings faltered from the sudden lack of oxygen.
That single opening was all Soura had been waiting for.
Drawing upon the burst water pipes buried beneath the cracked asphalt, the street-born boy seized the pitiful amount of moisture still trapped inside them and hurled it directly into the low-pressure zone Goman had created.
The physical reaction was instantaneous.
The instant the water entered the vacuum, it flash-vaporized, absorbing an enormous quantity of thermal energy from the hawk.
Ornella’s blazing familiar exploded into a cloud of freezing steam before dissolving into nothingness.
Goman collapsed onto one knee, desperately fighting for breath.
Raad stared at Soura with a crooked grin of genuine admiration.
The brief moment of relief, however, lasted only seconds.
A muffled cry of exertion erupted from the ruined shop nearby.
Tariq, frozen moments earlier by the sight of the fire hawk, immediately sprinted toward the shattered storefront, his lungs burning beneath the crushing pressure.
The situation inside bordered on a nightmare.
Captain Kei’s shadow was not ordinary darkness.
It behaved like a non-Newtonian fluid, an impossibly dense mass of black ink spreading across the floor while climbing relentlessly up the walls.
Kaïs stood in front of Leila, repeatedly driving kinetic shockwaves into the ground.
Every impact pushed the black substance back for an instant before it immediately flowed into place again, threatening to crush their ankles beneath its enormous weight.
Tariq stopped dead in his tracks.
His hands trembled uncontrollably.
Panic threatened to swallow him whole, dragging him back to the memory of the student crushed alive by the Suppuration.
Yet as he forced himself to observe Kei’s attack rather than fear it, one tiny detail pierced through the haze clouding his traumatized mind.
That shadow has weight.
It has mass.
His eyes slowly lowered toward his own hands.
His shadow wasn’t a liquid.
It was absolute absence.
Nothingness itself.
“Trabelsi!” Tariq shouted, his voice raw beneath the Arena’s crushing pressure.
“Stop hitting it!
You’re punching rubber!” “Then figure something out before we get crushed!” Kaïs roared, sweat streaming down his face.
Tariq crouched at the edge of the spreading black pool.
With only twenty percent of his Spirit available, summoning it felt like forcing molten metal through his veins.
He pressed both palms against the concrete and forced his power outward.
He made no attempt to push Kei’s shadow away.
Instead…
He inserted his own shadow inside it.
A perfectly straight, perfectly absolute line of emptiness.
For the briefest fraction of a second, Captain Kei’s shadow quivered.
A microscopic fracture completely devoid of matter had sliced the black mass into two separate halves.
“There!” Tariq screamed.
“Hit the crack!” Kaïs didn’t hesitate.
Every remaining ounce of kinetic energy left inside his body surged into his fist before he drove it directly into the opening.
No longer meeting the viscous resistance of Kei’s shadow, the shockwave tore through the concrete beneath it.
The shop floor exploded apart with a thunderous crash as the entire structure collapsed into the underground basement, dragging the shadow mass down with the collapsing debris.
Kaïs seized Leila by the arm and launched himself forward.
Both landed heavily on the cobblestones outside beside Tariq.
Silence settled over the battlefield once again.
Only the violent rhythm of six exhausted breaths betrayed the monumental effort they had just survived.
All six of them…
Were still alive.
Goman slowly forced himself upright, wiping the trickle of blood running beneath his nose.
His eyes locked onto Soura with barely restrained hostility.
“Don’t ever give me orders again, rat.” “This ‘rat’ just stopped you from becoming a pile of ashes,” Raad spat, stepping forward as dangerous arcs of electricity crackled around his fingers despite the suppression.
“Did you seriously think you could take on two Captains by yourself?
Are you stupid, or do you work at it?” Kaïs brushed the dust from his shoulders before stepping directly between them, instantly cutting off the confrontation.
“Enough.
Both of you.
If we keep acting like idiots, we won’t survive another ten minutes.” He turned toward Soura.
“How did you know about the water…
and his barrier?” “It was instinct,” Soura answered coldly.
“He kept pushing air away.
The fire kept feeding on it.
Besides…” He folded his arms.
“I’m used to cleaning up other people’s messes.
Water absorbs heat when pressure drops.
You don’t need an Academy education to understand something that obvious.” Tariq ran a shaking hand through his hair as the adrenaline slowly left his body, replacing itself with trembling exhaustion.
“We don’t know each other,” he admitted quietly.
“We almost got killed because we don’t even know what everyone else’s Spirit does.
We’ve only got twenty percent of our power.
If we don’t know who’s capable of what…” He looked around at every member of the squad.
“…we’re dead.” Leila nodded immediately, her face still pale but her voice steady.
“He’s right.
We lay everything on the table.
Right now.” She spoke first.
“My Spirit is cellular regeneration.
I repair damaged tissue.
I can heal your injuries…
but under this pressure, I can’t stop overall exhaustion from building up.” “Explosive Fluids,” Kaïs continued, clenching his fists.
“My body produces an extremely volatile substance that detonates on impact.
The problem is…
every explosion hits me back too.
I can’t keep throwing punches forever without blowing myself apart.” “Electricity,” Raad said with a shrug.
“Fluids,” Soura added simply.
“Mostly water.” Every eye turned toward Goman.
The heir pressed his lips together, visibly disgusted by the idea of explaining himself to them.
The pain burning inside his lungs, however, reminded him that reality cared little for noble pride.
“Atmospheric pressure,” he muttered stiffly.
“And me…” Tariq finished, lowering his eyes.
“Shadow.” He paused.
“…Or rather…
the absence of space.” A deep vibration suddenly rippled through the ground beneath their feet.
Far toward the center of the Arena, a brilliant green light burst into the evening sky.
The objective beacon had just been activated.
On the observation platform above, Mazen Nazari relaxed his folded arms ever so slightly.
A faint smile appeared across his lips.
“Interesting.
Squad Four is beginning to understand the true nature of this examination.” Beside him, Thiago Vane kept his narrowed eyes fixed on the marker representing Soura Sayal.
“The boy with the water Spirit possesses better tactical instincts than an Arashi heir,” the Captain observed quietly.
“That is exactly why we need people like him, Director.
But theory ends here.” His gaze hardened.
“Now…
they’re going to bleed.” Below, Kaïs stared at the distant green beacon before turning toward the five others.
“Alright.
Leila stays in the center.
Raad and Soura take point.
If Sayal puts water somewhere, Raad, you turn it into an electrical trap.” Soura gave a short nod.
Kaïs’s pragmatic leadership suited him far better than Goman’s arrogance.
“Goman,” Kaïs continued, “you slow targets with your pressure.
Tariq…
you cover the blind spots we can’t see.
I’ll blow up anything that gets too close.” His eyes swept across the entire squad.
“Nobody goes solo.” There was no oath of brotherhood.
Only a brief silence, born from the absolute necessity of surviving what came next.
Together, Squad Four disappeared into the shattered ruins of South Arena, advancing toward whatever awaited them in the darkness.