The Academy was falling apart.
Not metaphorically. Not politically.
Literally.
We sprinted down the tower steps as alarms screamed through Velvenhold—high, melodic chimes that might have once been calming, but now sounded like a panicked orchestra being thrown into a garbage disposal. The walls vibrated with unstable glyphs. Runes flickered midair like someone had spilled coffee on reality.
Behind us, the marble floor cracked. In front of us, a flying lectern swerved out of control and impaled itself into a wall.
"This is not how I thought my day would go," I panted.
"I warned them," Velis said, leaping over a broken arch that was warping in and out of existence. "I wrote three separate reports."
"Did one of them include 'Your headmaster is a soul-hoarding lich tethered to a volatile leyline reactor'?"
She didn't respond.
Which meant yes.
We hit the lower chambers just as a corridor ahead blinked—gone for a second, then back again, but upside down.
"Cloak me!" Velis shouted.
I ducked behind Iria's shield as Velis slashed a sigil into the air with her staff. A pulse of stabilizing energy shot forward, freezing the corridor long enough for us to cross.
"Nice trick," I muttered.
"Three years of theoretical rune theory."
"You're terrifying."
As we descended, Velvenhold fell apart around us.
A hallway melted into a glowing river of liquid script, crawling up the walls.
A crystal statue of a famous wizard turned to us and whispered, "The price of knowledge is you," before shattering into powder.
A ceiling glyph flickered violently—then exploded, causing anti-gravity to kick in. We floated for five agonizing seconds before Velis snapped her fingers and reversed the field. We all landed in a heap.
Iria stood, unbothered. "I believe we are close."
I groaned from the floor. "Great. Let me know when we're close to not dying."
We reached it.
The door was massive—five layers of spell-locked security, all already half-broken. They peeled open like fruit.
And beyond them... the reactor.
A pulsing monolith of runed crystal and machinery, embedded deep in the stone of Velvenhold's foundation. It glowed a sickly, unstable violet—glyphs orbiting its surface, sparking, stuttering, colliding.
And standing at its heart, partially embedded in a throne of forged aether and bone—
Drenn.
His skeletal form had changed. No longer elegant. No longer restrained.
Now he was a network. Cables of light and energy flowed from his limbs into the reactor. His ribcage cracked open, and the reactor's light spilled through. His voice came not from his mouth—but from the walls, the air, the glyphs.
"Welcome, anomalies."
"You could still accept it," Drenn said, his voice split into layered echoes. "We can rewrite this together. Purpose. Permanence. The city will live, and you—Hitoshi Kaname—will never fade."
I stepped forward. "I already fade from parties and group projects. I'm not about to become an immortal power source."
Velis raised her staff. "We're severing you from the core, Drenn. You're not Velvenhold. You're a parasite that forgot it died."
He paused.
Then he laughed.
"Very well."
The lights went out.
And the fight began.
The moment Drenn merged with the core, the chamber changed.
The reactor groaned like it was being stretched across dimensions. Magic screamed in every direction. Glyphs shattered midair, leaving behind twitching strands of light that whipped across the walls. The floor bent. Gravity pulsed.
And then he rose.
Or—phased.
Drenn's form hovered, cracked open and half-merged with the core. His skeletal frame was wrapped in cables of mana-thread, spine glowing from within like a cracked lantern. His ribcage pulsed with the same violet heartbeat as the reactor, as if the two had become a single entity.
When he moved, he left afterimages of failed spells behind—fragmented illusions of himself cast one frame off from reality.
And he was fast.
He slammed down toward us in a spiral of light and bone. Iria met him with a roar, her cape flaring behind her like a banner of war.
Their weapons clashed—her greatsword and his claw-like limb—sparks of divinity and necromancy exploding between them. But when she struck a clean blow across his chest, the damage shimmered, then began healing, thread by glowing thread.
"Damn it," she growled. "He's regenerating!"
"He's linked to the core," Velis said, her staff raised. "It's feeding him."
"Well unplug him!"
"I'm trying!"
Another clawed limb lashed out—this time at me. I dodged. Mostly. My sleeve was less fortunate.
Then Velis slammed her staff into the floor.
The resulting pulse cracked the stone beneath our feet and shimmered outward in concentric circles. The air buzzed as the leyline connection stuttered. For a moment, Drenn staggered, the glowing threads anchoring him flickering.
Iria didn't hesitate. She roared and surged forward, blade raised high.
"FOR THE BLADE-BOUND STAR!"
Her strike cleaved through his shoulder, severing it in a clean arc. Bone scattered, glyphs cracked—
—and his shoulder began to regrow.
"Buy me another five seconds!" Velis barked.
"You've got three!" I shouted, ducking as a chunk of flying architecture whipped past my head.
---
Drenn shifted.
His body blurred, then vanished. Not invisibility—relocation. A portal glyph snapped open across the chamber, and he emerged behind Velis, claw already mid-swing.
She pivoted, staff raised—but he didn't attack.
Instead, he moved before she moved. His hand darted forward, slamming into her spell the moment she began to form it, disrupting the weave before it could stabilize.
"I cannot be outmaneuvered," he said, voice calm and booming. "Even your defiance follows predictable patterns."
"Let's test that," Velis muttered.
Then she cast a spell backwards.
No, really. Her fingers moved in reverse. She spoke words in what sounded like drunk Elvish. She stomped a random pattern with her foot.
Drenn faltered.
The spell caught him in the chest and detonated in a spray of magnetic dissonance.
"Unpredictability as a weapon," she said.
"I'm a living example," I muttered, flattening against a pillar as Drenn retaliated with a streak of raw mana that melted the wall behind me.
---
Then the floor fractured beneath us.
Iria caught herself mid-fall, leaping across collapsing stone. Velis barely stabilized herself with a levitation charm.
I was not so lucky.
I hit a rune circle—and the air around me went wrong. Colors flipped. Weight vanished. For a terrifying moment, my limbs moved in the wrong direction.
"Zone trap!" Velis shouted. "Don't touch the runes!"
"Thanks for the timing!" I yelled, stumbling sideways.
The glyph beneath me exploded in a tangle of code and light.
I was flung into the air—again—and landed on a crumbling slab of flooring, completely by accident, just outside the active trap field.
Iria gasped. "A miracle!"
Velis snorted. "No. Just Kaname."
---
Drenn screamed. But it wasn't a sound. It was a command—a pulse of will that bent the room's logic.
He began phasing—appearing in bursts around the room, faster now, flickering through glyph-shaped portals. Spells launched from every direction—fire twisted into spirals, lightning woven into precise targeting lines, all of it pulled toward the center reactor, caught in a gravitational field that made the battlefield into a spell blender.
Velis cursed.
"He's using spell gravity. Everything we cast gets sucked into orbit."
"Solutions?" I called out, dodging a floating chunk of rock that was humming an ancient chant.
She didn't answer.
I looked at my hands. Looked around.
Grabbed the first thing I saw—a weird metallic tuning fork I'd been using as a back scratcher for the last day and a half.
I sprinted toward the reactor.
"Interfere!" Iria shouted, covering me with a wall of divine light as I barreled through spell debris.
I waved the fork.
The air screamed. The field cracked.
The orbit broke.
Velis blinked. "...That actually worked?"
"It was vibrating wrong!" I shouted.
Drenn hissed. "You are not an anomaly. You are an insult to pattern."
"Thank you!" I called back. "I get that a lot!"
---
Then came the tether.
One second I was standing.
The next, a line of soul-thread lashed through the air and stabbed into my chest.
I froze. Couldn't breathe.
My body screamed. The artifact on my belt burned hot. Drenn's presence poured into my mind—a cold, logical pressure trying to overwrite me, like a virus finding the right drive.
I saw visions—reflected glyphs, reactor blueprints, a city without people, only process.
Then came fire.
Not literal.
Velis.
She hurled a glowing charm—a tightly packed soul-severing sigil—straight into the tether.
It detonated with a shriek that made my bones vibrate.
The tether snapped.
My ears rang. My knees buckled.
And then—\
The artifact growled.
Not a metaphor.
It let out a low, mechanical hiss that echoed through the chamber like a predator waking up from a long nap.
[
> "Rejection," it pulsed.
> "Hostile overwrite detected."
]
Drenn staggered. "What is this thing?"
"You made it angry," I said, holding the artifact up. "Good job."
---
Velis clutched her staff, breathing hard.
"We can't kill him like this," she said. "The phylactery is the core. If we destroy it, we bring the whole city down."
"There has to be a way to unbind him," I said.
She hesitated. "There is. But it requires a new soul anchor."
I blinked. "Like... someone else?"
"Someone unstable enough to disrupt the identity field. Someone who doesn't fit into magic."
All three of us turned to look at me.
"Oh, come on."
---
I stepped toward the reactor.
The artifact pulsed, harder now—synced with my heartbeat. Lights along its edge flickered, danced, formed a word.
[
'''
> Override Mode Available
> Entity: KANAME HITOSHI
> Proceed with overwrite? Y/N
'''
]
I reached out.
Smiled.
"Y."
---
The explosion wasn't fire. It was logic breaking.
Drenn howled—his body unraveling into glyphs and dust, circuits of soul and identity peeling from his bones as the reactor screamed.
> "You... do not belong..."
"Neither do you," I whispered. "Also, your elevator's broken."
The core shuddered.
The soul signature unbound.
And the last fragment of Drenn shattered—swallowed by the artifact's pulse, then gone.
He vanished.
The city slammed down, hard but mostly intact—cradled by emergency leyline buffers and a lot of dumb luck.
The reactor is dormant. Silent.
Drenn is gone. The core, "reset."
Velis sits beside me on the ruins of a stone platform, flipping through what remains of Drenn's personal spellbook.
Iria stands watch, sword planted in the ground.
Velis finally speaks. "You actually did it."
"I tripped into it."
"Still counts."
I smiled. "So. What now?"
She closed the book. "Now I study you more directly."
"You mean—?"
"I'm not letting you break the world again unsupervised."
Iria nodded. "The star must not fall alone."
I stared up at the sky, which was mostly back to normal.
"Great. I have a babysitter and a bodyguard."
"You have a destiny," Iria said.
"You have unquantifiable field properties," Velis added.
I sighed.
"Perfect."