[12 minutes ago]
Lightning split the western horizon like a blade and the island inhaled smoke.
A black thunderclap rolled over the trees and the students flinched as if someone had struck every nerve in their bodies at once.
Eleanor's voice cut through the aftershock—sharp, controlled, the kind of voice that could part panic like a tide.
"Listen! Steady. You breathe, you form, you do not scatter. You are soldiers of the academy today, not a crowd of frightened people. Demon contact is not an excuse to run."
She stood like a carved statue in her dark formal coat, blue eyes gone hard as the steel of her boots. Around her, the students tried to match posture to command. Their hands trembled; their mouths dried, but they obeyed. A dozen sets of shoulders squared. A dozen hearts did their best to follow.
Adalia exhaled a long smoke ring and let it drift away, detached and dangerous. She had the look of someone who had fought storms and outlived them.
"The Director is on his way," she said flatly. "He will handle large threats. For now, you do what you are told: hold the line, protect each other, and do not go chasing signs alone."
Rena stood in the cluster, the hush of her presence altering the air subtly. Her silver hair fell like a flood to the ground, the lower tips flushed a soft, ember-red that trembled when the lightning struck. Her eyes — red, luminous — watched Eleanor with a restless intelligence. Her mana suit clung to her form and glimmered faintly in the gloom, a second skin of woven light.
She searched the crowd with quick, sharp flickers of attention. Names were like talismans: Leona, Ethan, Lilia, Nox. Their spaces were empty. A small pocket of cold lodged in her sternum.
"Teacher—" her voice came out tight, a thread. "Eleanor, Ethan and Lilia and Nox and Leona — they're not here. They didn't answer."
Eleanor's face went stony for the breadth of a breath, then softened into the practiced mask of command. She inclined her head once. "We know. Search teams are out. There are teachers combing the south flank now. We cannot abandon the group here. Stay together. Hold."
Adalia's eyes flicked over Rena and held for a suspended second like iron at the edge of a blade. "This is not the time to split off. We will find them. The field crews know their jobs."
Beneath the teacher's words, something else whispered — a premonition of heat and old teeth. A pressure like a hand on the back of Rena's throat tightened, then flared.
Her chest stuttered. The dragon heart in her — Drasiruth's legacy — reacted. It burned, white-hot and furious, a coiled sun under ribs. Pain licked up her spine and settled warm behind her eyes. The world narrowed to the drum of her own heartbeat and the furnace that answered it.
Rena clenched her jaw until pain blossomed. She bit the inside of her lip and tasted iron; a line of blood appeared on the lower edge. For a second she felt very young and helpless, and then older than she had a right to be.
A shape rose in the back of her mind, half-remembered, half-memory: a broad, black silhouette, eyes like thin slivers of lightning. demonic entity , or that thing whose name had been a map of misfortune in the whispers of old books. The dragon in her knew the scent — sulphur-like and brimstone — a voice in another time.
Her fingers found the small ring on her left hand almost without thinking. The band was warm from her skin; the jewel, a deep crimson that pulsed faintly with Jin's mana. She had laughed about the ring when he'd forced it on her — sarcastic, teasing, dangerous — his grin a crooked moon.
For a heartbeat the memory of him broke through the pressure: the ridiculous kitchen where they had nearly come to blows over a Jin's endless sarcasm the way he leaned over the stove that first night and seemed to find amusement in absolutely everything; the first time his breath hit hers in the dim neon hush of karaoke and the world shrank to the grammar of mouths and the quiet shock of a kiss that had been an accident and a choice.
She felt the ghost of that kiss like a cooling hand.
The dragon-heat in her eased by a fraction.
It was small, absurdly human, and it changed the arithmetic of her fear. She brought the ring tighter into her palm. The crimson stone warmed and throbbed, and a spreading pulse of comfort — not weak, but steady and deliberate — leaked out, like a lullaby rewritten in ripples of mana.
Students around her felt the change before they understood it. Whispers broke into silence. Shoulders that had been rigid with panic loosened almost imperceptibly. Eyes that were small and dark in terror lifted and looked at her as if to find a shore. The ring's hum was minor, but the shape of her presence augmented it: she was calm, a still point.
Eleanor noticed. Her jaw loosened a fraction. Adalia ground out the end of her cigarette a touch less violently.
Rena's thoughts were a tight, humming coil. If it's demonic entity — if that shadow has come — we're not ready. But fear won't save them. Heart will, and heat will, and stubbornness will. She forced her shoulders back. Find them. Pull them back. Don't be the kind of person who runs.
She pushed the memory away like a tide. The hush of the ring receded into the background and in the space it made, Drasiruth's pulse resumed — slower now, tempered, the dragon's fire folded into a measured breath. She brought her will to it, a quiet, ferocious thing. Be a beacon of steadiness. Breathe calm into the afraid.
Around them, the island's cold hung low. The cove they were in yawned with wet stone and the smell of brine. Drops fell from the lip of the cliff above and made small music on the rock: plink, plink. The cave mouth filtered the wind into a slow, damp sigh. Every sound seemed doubled — the echoes of a hundred small things that lived in drip and mildew.
Someone near the fire coughed; the sound was small and brittle. The smoke from the burning brush mingled with the scent of the tide, and somewhere in the distance a demon wailed like an animal whose throat had been starved of song.
"Eleanor," Adalia said quietly, but still loud enough for the students to hear, "if that presence is approaching, we need to fortify the ring. Spread out in pairs, form shield arcs. Those with healing basics, stay near the center."
A dozen feet moved like a machine, practiced hands flattening, positions adopted. The academy's discipline worked like sutures on a wound: efficient, not pretty.
Rena's fingers tightened on the ring until the metal bit into skin. Behind the clamor she felt the ring's heartbeat: Jin's mana, patient, sardonic, somehow home. It was less a consciousness than a tether, but she let it be a last small proof that the world included something that loved her in a way that was crooked and raw.
He'd laugh at the panic of us all, she thought, and the picture of his crooked smile — the one that always looked like he'd just told a secret joke — eased the weight a little further still.
A student from the rear stumbled forward, a fresh-furred panic showing on his face. "There's a…light on the hill. Movement. It's big."
Eleanor's eyes narrowed. "Which ridge?"
"South-west, by the old basalt spire. There's a line of shadow moving fast."
A low hum filled the air then — not the childish tremor of fear, but a thrum of old power rolling closer, measured and terrible. The cave lips seemed to darken; the water at their feet shuddered.
Drasiruth's heart pulsed a little in Rena's chest, and she felt an involuntary alignment with something that was not herself: a dragon-scale memory, a sense of prey and predator. She did not let it dominate. She kept a small, tight control around the flame. Not yet. Not now.
Eleanor moved like a conductor who had been waiting for a cue all her life. "Two groups — flank left and flank right. Healers with me at the center. No solo runs. If anyone finds Ethan, Lilia, Leona, or Nox — signal with the blue flare only. Not red. Not until they're clear."
Adalia snapped, "And if you see anything bearing the black crack-light, do not engage head-on. Tell me. Signal. We will break it."
The students shifted into formations, young bodies snugged into practiced routines. Rena let herself breathe with them, let the ring's pulse be the metronome for her calm. The dragon in her simmered but did not blaze. The heat sat like a worn ember, useful, contained — a power she could draw like a blade or a lantern, not a furnace.
Her eyes slid to the ridge the student had pointed out. Dark shapes outlined themselves against the horizon. Movement like a tide. A thin, cold wind rushed down the slope and brought with it the scent she had been training to name: rotten sweetness like a house of old bones.
Something moved across the hillside — not a single shape but stripes of dark, like a blade dragged across the face of a map. The earth itself seemed to respond; small tremors skittered along the cove.
"Brace," Eleanor said.
A score of students adjusted their grips. A flare of blue mana bloomed above one of the medics' palms, trembling like a living match.
Rena's hand hovered over her ring. The crimson stone hummed. She felt Jin's punchline at the edge of thought — the mockery of the world, the dare. It steadied her the way a rope steadies a climber. She coiled, biding motion.
Adalia stepped to the cave mouth and spat into the wind. The smoke of her cigarette washed out like a ghost. "If they bring demonic entity himself," she muttered, "it will be a messy lesson — but we will not cry. We will learn."
The wind took her words and muffled them with the sound of something moving: heavy, multi-legged steps on stone, then a low grinding voice of an engine-like growl that was not mechanical at all. It had teeth in it. The ground on the ridge buckled.
Rena's ears began to ring. The dragon-memory shaped a single image, clean as a scar: slitted yellow eyes become the axis of a storm. The world condensed.
She breathed on purpose, steady, ocean-deep. The ring throbbed against her skin and answered her with a soft counter-rhythm, like two hearts agreeing to hold time.
Eleanor's hand came down in a sharp fist. "Hold positions. Now."
The cave's stone drank the sound and sent it out again, folded and strange. The students tensed, a living seam.
Rena's mind — oceanic in an instant of clarity — cataloged the needs: watchers on the ridge, healing ready, flank covers. And within that list a personal, private mission bubbled up and would not be denied: Find them. Pull them back. Don't let the island swallow them whole.
Her mouth shaped the vow silently. The ring warmed, then flared, a little pulse that reached the nearest students with a balm like a memory of sunlight. Two of them relaxed enough to laugh despite themselves — small, raw, human noises that felt like a rebellion.
Beyond the ridge the movement thickened into forms that congealed: elongated torsos, wings like torn banners, a cascade of smaller shapes in the shadow of the larger. They moved like tide-rips, each one a promise of violence.
Adalia exhaled. "Hold steady. Signal when they come into view."
Rena felt the dragon-heart thrum with purpose: not merely to fuel a blaze but to sharpen her senses into spearpoints. She would be heat and restraint both. She would be small mercies and furious light.
The air on the ridge shuddered again, and the black lightning that had been a rumor across the island converged into a street of sparks, charting a line of approach.
Eleanor lifted her free hand and spoke, not a command but a short, terrible fact: "demonic entity is not merely a name. It is a tide. We will be slammed. Expect corruption, expect to lose ground. But— and this is important — do not let fear become obedience."
The students listened. Rena tightened her fingers on the ring until the metal left an imprint; it hurt, pleasantly, like effort. Her breath found a tempo again. The dragon-heat folded into purpose, into the awareness that she held both a weapon and a responsibility: a flame that could be turned to warmth or to ruin.
On the ridge the leading shadow blinked, a slit of yellow cutting across the dusk. The island exhaled an odor of brimstone and something sweet like old fruit gone wrong.
Adalia's cigarette burned out in a small, red bead. She tucked it into her palm and crushed it with calm precision. "The lesson begins," she said.
Rena straightened. Her face had the look of one who had been given a terrible, inevitable job and had decided, then and there, to do it well.
She did not know if she would find her friends, or if they would be whole. She did not know how many lives the island would take or what price would be levied on the souls who would stand and fight. She only knew the concrete of the present: the cold stone underfoot, the damp breath of the cave, the bite of rain on her cheek, the weight of the ring against her skin.
She stepped forward to the mouth of the cave as the first of the dark things crested the ridge and the thunder rolled like a drumline. The ring thrummed a single curt note — a promise, a dare.
The night opened, and the island answered with a sound like iron tearing.
To be continued.
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Heat: Thank you so much for reading.