The glow of the emerald beacon flickered, drowned out by the suspended dust.
Tariq wiped the stinging, salty sweat from his eyes.
His lungs fought against Nazari’s topological crush, turning every inhalation into a grueling test of strength.
Beyond the purifying dome, the ground began to tremble.
An erratic, sticky rumble traveled up through the soles of their boots.
The air reeked of ozone and decomposing flesh.
The Orange-level Suppuration was returning.
But the monster was no longer alone.
The asphalt cracked under the weight of a tide of abominations.
Sector B had just vomited forth its test subjects.
Dozens of Green- and Yellow-level Suppurations swarmed around the main colossus.
Asymmetrical bodies and deformed limbs dragged across the tarmac, inexorably drawn to the energetic concentration of the twelve isolated students at the center of the square.
Kais cocked his arm.
His teeth clicked, ready to split.
The muscle fibers in his left forearm were already torn, the inflammation throbbing with every heartbeat.
Tariq let his shadow flow down his wrists.
The darkness condensed, dense and cold, forming ink-black blades ready to slice.
Beside him, Issa adjusted his broken glasses.
A migraine drilled into his skull, but his brain stubbornly mapped out the trajectories.
He evaluated the density of the creatures and the rubble, preparing spatial permutations.
Then, the sky fell on their heads.
Space literally folded above the square.
The light of the emergency floodlights warped, deflected by an unbearable gravitational distortion.
The front line of the monstrous horde flattened against the asphalt with a repulsive, sucking sound.
The creatures’ skeletal structures burst under the geometric constraint.
Mazen Nazari descended from the heights.
The Director floated at the center of his own topology, his hands calmly crossed behind his back.
To his right, the asphalt melted.
Ornella landed in a deluge of flames.
The Captain didn’t merely project fireballs; she triggered instantaneous thermal combustion.
The moisture contained within the cells of the Green Suppurations vaporized.
The bodies carbonized on the spot, reducing to ashes before even hitting the ground.
To his left, Kei advanced slowly.
His shadow bore no resemblance to Tariq’s sharp weapon.
It was a tide of heavy ink, a puddle of purely endothermic darkness.
The black mass spread across the tarmac and swallowed the Orange colossus’s ankles.
The temperature dropped abruptly below absolute zero.
The beast’s organic fluids froze on the spot, instantly shattering its cellular regeneration cycle.
“Rest,” Mazen’s voice echoed.
A wave of pure authority.
“The Academy is taking back control.” Far above the carnage, in the command bunker, the control screens blinked an aggressive red.
David Vang stepped back.
His boots scraped against the debris-littered floor.
The tactical cameras filmed the Captains’ deployment live.
His horde—the diversion meant to drown the Arena in blood and chaos—was being incinerated, frozen, and crushed.
The communicator clipped to Thiago Vane’s shoulder beeped.
“The field is clear for you, Captain,” Mazen’s voice filtered through the thermal interference generated by Ornella.
“You only have one thing left to do.” Vang’s face tightened, his jaw clenched to the point of breaking.
At his feet, Livia Moreau coughed up trickles of dark blood.
Her lungs had given way under the previous shockwave.
She breathed in ragged gasps, her chest heaving with spasms, unable to right herself.
Thiago stepped forward.
The links of his amber chains struck the floor with a heavy, metallic clatter.
Jin Arashi, leaning against the shattered doorframe, slid his silver coin between his knuckles with hypnotic fluidity.
“It’s over, Vang.” Thiago’s gray irises locked onto the old soldier.
Vang did not lower his head.
His warrior’s instinct hadn’t spoken its last word yet.
The corrupted energy core housed at the heart of his metal prosthesis turned cherry red.
A suffocating heat radiated through the control room, saturating the air with the smell of fried components and ozone.
He did not aim his cannon at Thiago.
He pivoted toward the armored bay window.
The gunshot shattered the tempered glass.
The draft ripped papers from the desks and hurled a rain of sharp fragments into the Arena’s artificial night.
Vang lunged into the breach, the muscle fibers of his legs strained to the absolute limit.
His objective: reach the metal beams below to plunge into the labyrinth of maintenance ducts.
His boots left the linoleum.
The void welcomed him.
He never reached the steel structures.
The air solidified around him.
Jin Arashi hadn’t made a single grand movement.
The young noble had simply lowered the atmospheric pressure in front of his own body while massively compressing it behind his back.
The thermodynamic differential acted like a cannon.
Jin was propelled forward at a terrifying velocity, without the slightest friction to slow his course.
In a fraction of a second, he was floating in the void, directly above the fugitive.
A snap of his fingers.
Jin inverted the barometric laws.
The air above the veteran condensed, forming a column of suffocating density.
Vang crashed face-first onto the wide steel ledge of the bay window.
His shoulder bones cracked under an invisible weight of several hundred kilograms.
His lungs emptied in a pathetic gurgle.
Oxygen refused to enter his respiratory tract, repelled by the high-pressure seal.
Thiago slowly approached the edge of the blown-out window.
Amber bindings burst from his sleeves with surgical precision.
The chains wrapped around Vang’s glowing prosthesis, shearing through the white-hot alloy.
The circuits were pulverized, the energy core definitively crushed.
The mechanical arm spat a shower of sparks before dying out with a final, mortal hiss.
“Release the pressure, Jin.
He needs to talk.” Thiago’s voice remained like a sentence.
Jin shrugged.
He landed softly on the control room floor and eased his constraint.
Vang sucked in huge gulps of air.
His body shook with tremors.
A thick clot of blood splattered against the metal structure beneath his chin.
“Why?” Thiago’s chains tightened, constricting the veteran’s bruised flesh.
“Why sacrifice your own students?
Why hand over the security codes to Morgen?” Vang smiled, then let out a nervous laugh.
He painfully turned his head.
His eyes locked onto Jin with foaming disgust, before returning to Thiago.
“My students?” Vang spat out the blood coating his teeth.
“This isn’t a school.
It’s a breeding ground.
Cattle, fattened and formatted to become the Commission’s future soldiers.” Livia, still slumped against the carcass of a server, weakly raised her head.
Her eyes stared at her colleague.
“You strut around in your custom-tailored uniforms,” venom dripped from every word Vang spoke.
“The Five Families.
You’ve hijacked the top of the food chain.
You stole the credit from past wars.
Your ancestors earned nothing.
They built this world on our bones—on the torn limbs of infantrymen who died in the mud while you theorized conflict in air-conditioned rooms.
And today, you impose your rules, your restrictions, and your rotten hierarchy on kids just to maintain your monopoly over the Spirit.” Jin looked down at him.
The noble’s expression crinkled, boredom bleeding through his sigh.
“The bitter old soldier putting the system on trial…
it’s a terribly cliché routine.” “You don’t understand a damn thing, brat of the Arashi clan,” a fanatical smile stretched Vang’s lips.
“Morgen saw reality.
He saw the corruption eating away at your bloodlines from the inside.
Do you think you’re untouchable behind your family names?
His plan wasn’t just to steal a simple energy battery from your basements.
The artifact is only a container.
His true goal…
is eradication.” Thiago’s chains froze.
The temperature in the command bunker seemed to plummet sharply.
“Abolition.” Vang’s eyes glowed with intense faith.
“The abolition of the Five.
The Arashi.
The Vane.
The Kaneshiro.
The Nazari.
The Korolev.” The precise naming of the five founding clans.
These families represented the very architecture of post-reset society.
They drafted the laws, ran the Commissions, financed the academies.
They were the load-bearing pillars of the known world.
“Morgen is going to raze your domains,” Vang savored his pseudo-victory despite the agony of his broken collarbone.
“He is going to strip away your authority.
The Academy was nothing more than a feasibility test.
A rehearsal.
The entire world is going to watch your thrones burn.
The ashes of your palaces will feed the new world.” Thiago clenched his fist.
The amber chains plunged brutally into Vang’s remaining uninjured shoulder.
A bone cracked ominously.
The professor bit the dust, his body contracting under the Captain’s geometric torture, though he muffled his scream.
“Where did he go?” Thiago’s gaze didn’t waver.
Vang merely smiled.
Breathing slowly, drunk on pain, he turned his head to fixate on the heavy sky of the South Arena beyond the shattered windows.
The gangrene ran far deeper than a simple academic betrayal.
The ruins of the exam were merely a prelude.
A war of extinction had just been declared against the Five Great Families.