The air in the western sector of the South Arena weighed like solid iron.
Oxygen refused to settle into Kenji’s lungs, and every heavy step across the fractured concrete sent a sharp electric lance racing along his sciatic nerve, climbing from his damaged right leg into the base of his spine.
His kneecap had never truly recovered.
The titanic atmospheric pressure imposed by Goman Arashi days earlier in the Academy courtyard had left deep microfractures hidden throughout the bone, and under Director Nazari’s merciless eighty-percent suppression, the inflammation pulsed relentlessly, hot, constant, and impossible to ignore.
The five students surrounding him continued backing away, their boots scraping nervously across the asphalt.
Squad Twelve was not a team.
It was a heap of terrified variables, incapable of producing even the smallest trace of synergy while the hunt closed around them.
A first-year girl hyperventilated against the rusted carcass of an overturned armored vehicle as frost crept across the concrete around her boots, spreading outward in delicate crystalline veins.
Darkness crawled over the shattered facades of the simulated buildings.
Captain Kei’s shadow was no mere absence of light.
It was a perfect endothermic anomaly.
The black, viscous mass devoured thermal energy from its surroundings with insatiable hunger, driving the ambient temperature down by several degrees every second.
Cold seized their organic fluids, slowing the circulation of blood through their bodies until each breath condensed into trembling clouds of white vapor.
“Formation!” Kenji barked, though the command died halfway through his parched throat, stripped of all authority before it ever reached the others.
Nobody moved.
Violent tremors overtook every body in the alley.
One second-year student, unable to control his fear, lifted trembling hands as a faint crimson spark crackled inside his palm.
The tiny thermal ignition instantly consumed what little oxygen remained in their confined space to sustain its unstable combustion.
“Put it out.” Too late.
The sudden thermal depression created by that pitiful flame acted like a deadly pressure beacon.
Kei’s viscous shadow surged into the alley with the unstoppable violence of a freezing mudslide, drawn irresistibly toward the atmospheric imbalance.
Ignoring the agonizing protests erupting from his own joints, Kenji stepped directly into its path.
He forced every remaining fragment of Spirit into his skin as cellular calcification erupted across his body.
Flesh hardened into thick gray stone, transforming him into living granite.
Yet the mineral structure was catastrophically compromised.
The reinforcement merely followed the preexisting fractures in his knee and ribs, creating porous, asymmetrical armor riddled with structural weaknesses.
It was tactical suicide disguised as defense.
A massive tendril of absolute darkness whipped through the air and smashed into Kenji’s crossed forearms.
The shadow behaved like a non-Newtonian solid, hardening at the exact instant of kinetic impact.
Granite failed.
A dry, brutal crack split the alley like a rifle shot as the defensive stone shattered apart.
The shockwave tunneled directly into his skeleton, reaching the already-damaged kneecap Arashi had ruined days before.
Under the crushing force, the joint dislocated violently, bending into an angle no human limb should ever reach.
The giant collapsed heavily, his face smashing against the asphalt as the metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth.
He tried to force himself back up, but his muscles refused to bear the crushing weight of his own mineralized body.
Whatever cohesion remained inside Squad Twelve disintegrated completely.
The terrified first-year released a violent sonic pulse in a scream of pure panic, and the shockwave ricocheted through the narrow alley, amplifying itself against the surrounding walls until it became deafening.
It struck Kenji squarely in the back.
His shattered stone armor, already reduced to fractured plates, finally exploded apart beneath the resonant frequency generated by his own teammate.
Their complete absence of tactical cohesion had sealed their fate.
Kei’s shadows engulfed the scattered students without resistance, plunging their bodies into simulated, bone-deep hypothermia that locked every muscle in place.
A piercing whistle sliced through the gray sky above the arena as a green distress flare erupted overhead, bathing the slaughter in a merciless emerald glow.
It was the emergency elimination signal.
Kenji’s terminal bracelet went dark.
Squad Twelve ceased to exist, becoming yet another official casualty of the Practical Examination.
Far above the catastrophe unfolding inside the South Arena, the steady mechanical hum of the underground ventilation system swallowed the distant echoes of the battlefield.
The corridors of Sector B possessed the sterile atmosphere of an operating theater.
Brilliant white fluorescent lights illuminated a maze of reinforced concrete housing the Central Academy’s security servers and energy generators, the true nervous system of the institution.
Thiago Vane advanced with metronomic precision.
The heavy amber links wrapped around his wrists chimed softly with every measured step, the only organic sound disturbing the artificial silence.
His gray eyes swept across the immaculate walls with the precision of a scanning device.
No scorch marks.
No structural fractures.
No traces of ozone.
The terrorist wielding the crimson cube had descended into the Academy’s deepest infrastructure and walked back out without triggering a single kinetic or thermal alarm.
“Utterly boring.” Jin Arashi flipped a silver coin into the air before catching it without producing the faintest metallic click.
He moved with uncanny fluidity, almost ghostlike.
By continuously lowering the density of the air beneath his feet, he erased the friction of every step, gliding across the polished flooring without ever truly touching it.
“An impregnable fortress,” Jin mused with open irony, pausing to inspect the immaculate finish of his manicured fingernails.
“State-of-the-art biometric detectors.
Ultra-sensitive Spirit resonance scanners.
Vacuum-sealed security doors.
And yet our friend Morgen wandered through this place as though he owned the deed to the castle.” “Class-A clearance codes cannot be obtained through brute-force algorithms,” Thiago answered flatly, his deep voice reverberating against the steel walls.
“The system rejects every non-organic intrusion.” He stopped before the massive blast door protecting the primary server chamber.
The access panel glowed with an indifferent red light, patiently awaiting authentication.
“Simultaneous dual verification,” Thiago explained, studying the optical reader embedded within the wall.
“Thermographic mapping of the user’s vascular network combined with an immediate analysis of their Spirit density.” Jin leaned lazily against the adjacent wall, casually crossing one ankle over the other.
Yet beneath that relaxed posture, the widening of his pupils betrayed the excitement of a predator finally catching the scent of worthwhile prey.
“So our mole isn’t some first-year prodigy hacking the network from a dormitory,” he observed quietly.
“It’s a member of the Academy staff.
Someone whose biological signature has already been fully authenticated and permanently registered inside the central system.” Thiago wasted no time entertaining speculation.
With a sharp motion, he removed his tactical leather glove and pressed his bare palm against the icy surface of the blast door, directly beside the biometric scanner.
His eyes slowly closed as he deliberately slowed his heartbeat.
His consciousness shifted into pure geometric analysis.
Thiago’s Domain Authority extended far beyond the creation of amber restraints.
It granted him absolute perception of spatial laws, their volumes, and the history of every force ever imposed upon them.
His awareness flowed into the molecular architecture of the locking mechanism itself.
The titanium locking bolts hidden inside the reinforced door displayed no traces of kinetic deformation.
There had been no forced entry.
No mechanical twisting.
No structural compromise whatsoever.
Yet the microscopic space surrounding the optical scanner told a different story.
The arrangement of carbon atoms across the scanner’s glass surface still preserved the memory of abnormal thermal stress, concentrated within an area barely a few square centimeters wide.
Thiago opened his eyes.
The gray of his irises gleamed with cold, irreversible understanding as he took a single step backward.
“The optical reader wasn’t digitally hacked from inside the database,” he stated.
“It was physically deceived on-site.” Jin stopped flipping his silver coin.
The smug amusement faded from his face, replaced by the sharpened attention of a mind suddenly confronted with something worthy of admiration.
“Someone applied a synthetic polymer film directly onto the scanner,” Thiago continued, dissecting the evidence with clinical precision.
“An artificial tissue saturated with an advanced heat-transfer fluid.
It reproduced an authorized subject’s vascular heat map to within one-tenth of a degree.” “A thermal prosthesis.” Jin savored the phrase, his eyes brightening with intellectual excitement.
“Elegant.
And outrageously bold.” Turning away from the door, Thiago felt every piece of the puzzle locking together with terrifying clarity.
“To manufacture a biological decoy that convincing,” he said quietly, “someone would require unrestricted access to the Commission’s complete medical database.
They would need the target’s exact body temperature, resting heart rate, and the precise density profile of their Spirit flow.” “And above all,” Jin added, his voice stripped of every trace of playful irony, “they would need a first-class laboratory.
One equipped with microsurgical technology capable of manipulating living organic fluids without triggering the Academy’s biological quarantine protocols.” The Central Infirmary was immediately ruled out.
It swarmed day and night with military physicians, medical staff, and students, while every entrance and exit was meticulously recorded.
There was, however, another facility.
A prestigious department operating almost entirely independent of the military bureaucracy, conducting its research behind permanently sealed doors.
The Department of Applied Spirit Research and Engineering.
The conclusion fell between them like an executioner’s blade.
Jin let out a slow, appreciative whistle that echoed through the deserted corridor.
“And who, Captain,” he asked softly, “just happens to hold the keys to that particular kingdom?” Thiago clenched his fists until his fingernails bit into his palms.
The amber links around his wrists crackled as his blood pressure surged.
David Vang.
The old, mutilated veteran.
Livia Moreau.
The brilliant theoretician behind Domain Authority.
They possessed unparalleled biomedical expertise.
They enjoyed unrestricted access to every classified record.
They knew every structural weakness hidden inside the Central Academy.
And the most terrifying part of the equation had yet to reveal itself.
“They’re supervising the Practical Examination at this very moment,” Thiago said, the urgency in his voice electrifying the sterile air of the underground corridor.
They controlled the South Arena.
They dictated every parameter of the topological distortion.
And at this exact moment, they were overseeing nearly a hundred students trapped inside the simulated ruins, each of them crippled to twenty percent of their normal Spirit output.
If either of them truly was the mole who had allowed Morgen to infiltrate the Academy and orchestrate the bloody extraction of the artifact, then the Seminar had never been a controlled academic exercise.
It was an open-air slaughterhouse, engineered by the traitor himself, meticulously designed to eliminate unstable or inconvenient variables beneath the perfect disguise of an examination.
“The examination has been compromised,” Thiago declared.
His heavy official coat snapped sharply behind him as he spun on his heel without hesitation.
Jin Arashi immediately fell into step beside the Captain.
The aristocrat’s predatory smile slowly returned, sharper than before, as excitement replaced curiosity.
“Now this is finally worthy of our time,” Jin murmured.
“The Patriarch will be delighted to learn that the gangrene has taken root inside the very heart of this prestigious institution’s faculty.” Amber light burst from the chains wrapped around Thiago’s wrists, their glow hardening into something cold and absolute.
There was no longer any room for security protocols, bureaucratic approvals, or diplomatic procedure.
Every second they remained underground increased the possibility that another squad would be sacrificed before the truth surfaced.
“Get ready, Jin,” Thiago ordered, his jaw locked beneath an icy rage.
“We’re going back to the surface.” He paused only long enough for the command to settle between them.
“And if that’s what it takes…” “We end this simulation by force.”