The ground cracked beneath Kat Gravelle's boots as she landed, stone warping slightly outward from the localized gravity field she dropped with. Behind her, the guardian beast shrieked—then vanished into a flash of dispersing runes.
Kat didn't flinch.
She turned smoothly and walked on, quiet and composed.
Eighteenth down. Tenth crystal secured.
Well beyond the requirement to pass. Not that that mattered.
This wasn't about passing.
It was about proving something—to herself, and to everyone else.
Kat moved like the world bent around her. A soft haze shimmered at the edges of her body where localized gravity warped the air. Even her footfalls barely echoed, muffled by the subtle redirection of force. Her hair, tied in a braid, floated slightly—never quite falling into place.
She entered a new chamber: a ring of broken columns and slanted runes etched into the walls, each flickering with residual mana. At its center, a guardian awaited—this one quadrupedal, wingless, but plated in ridged armor and crowned with glowing eyes.
She didn't hesitate.
She extended her hand—and collapsed the beast into the floor with a single focused spike of gravitational pressure.
The stone didn't even crack. Just a dull, wet thump—then silence.
Kat lowered her hand.
This wasn't hard. Not for her.
The exam felt less like a challenge and more like a maze she was meant to walk through—timed, precise, inevitable.
She hadn't always felt this composed.
Once, she'd been just a terrified little girl…
Eight years old. That's how early her Awakening came.
Far too early.
She was the first child in a generation to undergo early onset puberty—a rare, dangerous phenomenon where a Hyuman's body begins adapting to mana far earlier than it should.
Her core formed before she had adult bones to support it. Her internal pressure spiked beyond tolerances. She broke her own ribs just breathing.
Worse—she awakened gravity manipulation.
An ability that turned her into a walking black hole with no control.
Beds collapsed beneath her. Floors warped. Her own weight crushed her left arm once in her sleep.
She couldn't be touched. Couldn't be hugged.
Doctors from five different noble houses were brought in.
Half of them said to sedate her until her body stabilized.
The other half said she wouldn't survive that long.
Only her family's status saved her. The Gravelle name demanded a solution.
And Kat… somehow lived.
She didn't remember the pain clearly anymore.
She remembered the silence.
The glass room they locked her in. The voices from the other side. The fear in her mother's eyes. The quiet way her father said:
"Gravelles don't crumble. We ascend."
By ten, she was training twice a day under private masters. By twelve, she was winning duels against older students. At thirteen, she was already ranked in the academy's upper quartile.
By fourteen, they said she was a prodigy.
But she didn't feel like one.
She just felt tired.
Freedom wasn't something she was born into.
She was fighting for it.
Not with politics, or disobedience—but with power.
Power so refined, so undeniable, that no one would ever put a chain on her again.
She walked through another corridor without pause. Her chip pinged with a soft mental pulse—an interface only she could sense.
Vital Status: Stable. Mana: 62%.
Not even strained yet.
She could keep going for hours.
She wasn't just surviving the labyrinth—she was dominating it.
And yet, her thoughts drifted.
To the bug boy.
To Elijah.
"C'mon, again!" she'd barked at him just a week ago, watching him dangle from the training beams like a busted piñata.
"Stick the landing. Roll. Bounce up. We practiced this."
"I did bounce," he'd groaned. "Just not… the right kind of bounce."
His ribs had turned purple for two days.
She didn't apologize.
But she stayed late with him the next evening.
He never stopped trying. And for someone like her, surrounded by expectation, that kind of stubborn grit was weirdly… grounding.
Maybe even inspiring.
Another fork. She paused and extended her senses again, using gravitational displacement to "feel" subtle warps in mana fields.
A faint draw. Low pressure at the edges. The exit wasn't far.
She moved on.
Behind her, somewhere in the dark… Elijah was still scrapping for his second crystal.
Elsewhere in the Labyrinth…
The sound of impact echoed again—flesh meeting stone, then shattering crystal meeting bone.
Claro's foot slammed down atop the twitching, serpentine creature, sending a final burst of violet shards through its core. The beast let out a strangled screech before vanishing in a flicker of light, forcibly teleported out by the exam's safety protocols.
He didn't even look at the readout that appeared in the corner of his vision.
He didn't care.
Mana crackled faintly along his arms as another layer of crystal sloughed off his skin—red-orange quartz this time, brittle but sharp, ideal for piercing attacks. New crystals were already forming beneath, a jagged sheen of pale blue creeping along his collarbone and shoulders.
The transformation was constant now. Almost automatic.
Claro Nova—son of House Nova, third-tier nobility, mid-ranked student—was a walking geode, all raw power and cracking pressure.
And he was barely holding together.
The labyrinth had no rhythm to it—just endless stone and monsters and turns. No map. No direction. Claro had stopped caring two hours ago. He wasn't tracing a path. He wasn't heading for the exit.
He was hunting.
Every beast he found, he fought. Every fight, he won. And every win left his head just a little quieter.
The last monster's light hadn't even faded before he slammed a fist into the wall beside him, scattering blue shards like broken glass. His knuckles bled—not because the blow hurt him, but because he hadn't formed a full coating before striking.
Sloppy.
He wiped the blood off and kept walking.
[MANA STABILITY: 29%]
[CRYSTALS SECURED: 3]
[NEURAL SYNC: STRAINED]
He didn't even blink at the warnings.
His chip interface glowed faintly against the inside of his retina, but he ignored the fatigue markers. The warning about mana burnout. The headache blooming behind his eyes.
None of it mattered.
Three Weeks Ago – House Nova Training Hall
Claro knelt before his uncle, fists pressed together, gaze fixed on the floor.
"You're not keeping up," the man said flatly. "Not with Katherine Gravelle. Not with your peers. And certainly not with the upper echelon."
Claro clenched his jaw.
"You want to represent House Nova when you graduate? Prove it. You want to avoid being cast aside like the rest of your branch siblings? Prove it."
Claro said nothing. Just nodded.
Later that night, he crushed a sparring golem into powder with crystal fists—and barely remembered doing it.
Present – Labyrinth Edge
Claro stalked through the winding corridors, heavy footfalls echoing behind him. His crystals changed shape with each step—sometimes like armor, sometimes like claws, sometimes like jagged, blooming growths from his back and shoulders.
Versatile.
That's what his ability was supposed to be.
But versatility didn't help if your brain was cracking apart under pressure.
He spotted another beast rounding a corner—tall, bipedal, with twitching antennae and glassy red eyes. It screeched and lunged.
Claro didn't even slow.
He met it head-on with a shoulder-check that cracked stone. The impact discharged an explosive burst of amethyst from his side, skewering the creature mid-lunge. It vanished in a flash of light and air.
[CRYSTALS SECURED: 4]
He stood panting, staring at the spot where it had been.
"Where are you…" he muttered, eyes unfocused. "Where's the next one?"
His hands trembled slightly. He clenched them into fists until they bled again.
He heard footsteps.
Turned.
Another student—a younger one—rounded the corner and froze.
They locked eyes.
The boy's hand went for his satchel.
Claro didn't give him the chance.
He was on him in a second, slamming the student into the wall, grabbing the satchel before it hit the ground.
The kid vanished in a teleport flash—eliminated.
Claro didn't flinch.
He just looked at the new crystal in his palm.
5.
He looked at the wall where the boy had been a moment ago.
He didn't feel proud.
He just felt… tired.
He didn't care about the exit. He didn't care about the strategy. He didn't even care about the crystals.
He just needed to keep moving.
Because stopping meant thinking.
And thinking meant losing.
Tim pressed a hand to the stone wall and squinted ahead.
Another split in the path.
The labyrinth was silent now—eerily so. No more echoes of combat, no distant roars or warning glyphs humming with mana. Just him, a handful of glowing crystals tucked into a makeshift sling over his shoulder, and that strange thrum beneath the stone.
He didn't have a map. He didn't have a plan.
What he did have… was rhythm.
"Alright, alright," he murmured to himself, flexing his hands. "No more left turns unless it feels like a left turn, y'know?"
He clicked his tongue and snapped his fingers, letting out tiny bursts of mana into the ground. They pulsed outward, subtle vibrations rebounding through the corridors like sonar pings. When the returns came back too fast or too fuzzy, he knew it was a trick of the maze—mana density echoing wrong, warped by the enchantments buried in the walls. But if the pulse came back slow, clean, real…
He pointed forward. "That way. Definitely."
He jogged ahead, not silently—never silently—but confidently. Each step timed with a low-level vibration burst from his soles, mapping the pressure and distortion through his feet.
Tim didn't know the technical terms. But he felt the difference. The way the mana thickened toward the center. The way some walls seemed to ring hollow even when they didn't. The way the maze tried to make him second-guess himself.
He just didn't.
That was the trick.
"You overthink it, it eats you alive," he said to no one. "But if you just—vibe with it?"
He snapped his fingers. "Boom. Easy game."
A faint snarl echoed from the next corridor. Something low to the ground, fast-moving.
Tim grinned. "Oho, got another one."
He crept closer until he spotted it—a stocky, dog-sized creature hunched near a cracked wall. Its skin was pebbled with small mana plates, glowing faintly with elemental energy. A glyph-crab, probably a lower-tier maze spawn. Quick and vicious, but not too bright.
Tim tapped his chin. "I could go around. But you got a crystal in that shell, don'tcha?"
The creature's glowing core shimmered under its armored back, tucked between rune-carved plates. Not a loose crystal—but a drop core. Tim would have to take it down.
He bounced in place, rolled his shoulders, and cracked his knuckles. "Alright, time for some field testing. Let's go with… Rapid Riffbreaker!"
With a snap of his fingers, he sent a pulse of focused vibration through the stone floor directly beneath the crab. It staggered, legs skidding. Before it could regain balance, Tim launched himself in with a heel stomp.
"Drop the Beat!"
The shockwave under his boot blasted the creature upward just enough to flip it onto its back.
It screeched, scrambling.
He didn't stop.
Sliding in low, he placed a hand against the overturned shell and pushed a focused ripple of mana into its undercarriage.
"Pulse Bass Bomb."
The vibration tore through its body, cracking the core plate. The creature spasmed once—and disappeared in a burst of light, teleported away like all defeated entities.
A small, marble-sized mana crystal dropped to the ground in its place.
Tim scooped it up with a flourish. "And that's what we call a bonus track."
He dusted himself off and kept walking, whistling a tune he'd probably make into a named move later. This brought him to four crystals now—one more than required.
Most of his stash came from similar opportunistic fights or snatch-and-dash ambushes. Never a straight brawl. Never drawn out. Just in, pop, out.
He was the same way with people.
Unpredictable. Energetic. But always watching for the open beat to strike.
A few corridors later, Tim found another opportunity.
A scaled beast stalked a small clearing between corridors—four-legged, its body armored with mana-hardened scales and its mouth ringed with sharp, twitching whiskers. Whiskers that crackled with ambient energy.
Guarding something.
Tim's eyes narrowed.
Sure enough, nestled against a stone outcrop behind the beast was another mana crystal. Not loose—clutched in the dead grip of a knocked-out student. The poor kid was unconscious, one leg bent awkwardly beneath him.
Tim winced. "Damn. Hope that guy gets teleported."
He bit his lip. A frontal assault wouldn't work here. But that crystal? It was unclaimed.
And Tim was very good at claiming things.
He rolled his neck, cracked his knuckles, and whispered to himself, "Operation Silent But Slappy in full effect."
He crept to a spot where the walls were tight—just wide enough for a person, too narrow for a beast—and lined up his shot.
He lifted one foot, pulsed mana into it with a grin, and whispered, "Toe Tap Tremor—Shimmer Shot Style."
He stomped lightly.
A pulse zipped forward, resonating through the floor—not loud, but targeted. It hit a stone halfway across the room. The beast's ears twitched. It growled and padded forward, sniffing.
Another pulse. This one behind the beast. Then another, to its left.
"Come on, come on…" Tim whispered, watching it spiral.
When it turned the far corner—
He sprinted.
No hesitation. Just quick steps, a dive into the open, and a hard yank on the crystal as he rolled past the unconscious kid.
The moment his hand touched the stone, it flared faintly—but the beast was already charging back.
Tim launched himself sideways and shouted, "Boomerang Wall-Bounce!"
A burst of vibration from his shoulder blasted him against a nearby wall, and another shot from his heel bounced him off and out of the creature's range.
Its claws slashed where he'd been.
He flipped midair and skidded into the next corridor, crystal still in hand.
"Thanks for the loot, I'm out!"
The beast roared and gave chase—but Tim was already sprinting.
A tight turn. Then another.
"Alright—momentum, baby—don't fail me now!"
He activated a burst from both feet.
"Vibe Vault: Double-Bass Boost!"
The shockwave rocketed him forward, enough to leap a ten-foot gap between stairwells and slide under a crumbling doorway.
The beast tried to follow, but the ceiling collapsed behind Tim, sealing the exit.
He panted, leaning back against a cold slab of stone and laughing breathlessly.
"Yooooo that was sick," he wheezed.
He held up the new crystal. It shimmered slightly, thrumming in time with his pulse.
That made five.
More than enough to qualify.
But more importantly?
Tim felt himself closing in on the maze's core. The vibrations were shifting. The pressure was rising. And something big was coming.
He didn't slow.
Didn't second-guess.
Didn't need to.
"Alright," he grinned. "Let's ride this beat to the end."