The dawn had not yet broken over the Academy spires, but the pain was already there, a slow combustion behind his left eye. Kael woke to the sensation of a serrated blade twisting, the cost of the Cranial Gate. The echo of forcing a mind to process raw data faster than biology intended pulsed with every beat of his heart. He lay still in the darkness. The air was cold, smelling of stale breath and old wood, and the rhythmic, oblivious sawing of James and Dean's snores filled the silence.
Kael pushed himself up. The room swam, a wave of vertigo washing over him that left a metallic taste on his tongue. He waited for it to pass, his hands gripping the thin, scratchy blanket until his knuckles turned white. His body was heavy, leaden. But beneath the exhaustion, there was a constant, low-level hum—a jittery, electric anticipation that made his fingers twitch. The Compendium's knowledge, paid for with 100 CP, sat inside him like coiled lightning: the Preparatory Infusion Technique. He had the blueprint. He had the technique.
He slid out of bed, his bare feet silent on the cold floorboards. He moved with the economy of a ghost toward the washbasin. The freezing water hit his face like a physical blow, shocking his nerves awake. He scrubbed his skin until it was pink, washing away the sweat of a restless night. The face staring back from the mirror was pale, the eyes ringed with shadow. He pulled a darker grey robe from his cupboard, plain but practical.
The courtyard was a cathedral of shadows and silence. Kael walked toward the northern tree line, the vast, uncultivated fringe of the Academy grounds. His stride was determined. Running drew the eye; this pace suggested a planned errand.
Let him watch, Kael thought. Kellan's surveillance was a permanent, invisible shroud. I am an Earth affinity student practicing manipulation. Diligence is not a crime.
The air in the woods was cooler, rich with the scent of damp earth. He found a small, secluded clearing, shielded from casual view by a thick copse of gnarled ironwood trees. The ground here was soft loam mixed with clay, shot through with veins of granite. This was his forge.
Taking a deep, centering breath, Kael closed his eyes. He sought the different flavor of mana—the slow, patient, enduring resonance of Earth. He guided it up, not through the turbulent channels of his Cranial Gate, but through the more stable pathways in his arms and into his eyes.
The world shifted.
With his vision bathed in Earth mana, the clearing was transformed. He saw pockets of inert stone, veins of quartz that shimmered with latent energy, and swirling clouds of impurity—traces of rust and decay that would fracture his work.
Purity is the foundation. A single flaw collapses the tower.
Kael knelt, placing his palms flat on the cool soil. He pushed his mana into the earth, not as a blunt force, but as a delicate, probing touch. He was a sculptor feeling for the grain in a block of marble. His sight highlighted a patch of soil that glowed with a consistent, soft ochre light—relatively pure.
He focused. He willed the earth particles to separate, to coalesce, to push the tiny, dark motes of impurity away. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the morning chill. He located a nodule of dense, grey granite about two feet down. He sent a pulse of mana, feeling for the stone's natural vibration—a low, slow hum. He adjusted his own energy, slowing the core's frenetic pulse until it matched.
Sync.
The stone became an extension of his will.
Rise.
The soil flowed aside like liquid. A shard of granite floated up from the loam and settled into his palm. It was solid. Intact. But scrutinizing it with his enhanced vision, he saw a single hairline fracture glowing angry red within.
Useless. He tossed it aside.
He tried again. And again.
The sun began to bleed over the horizon. His mana channels began to ache with a dull burn radiating from his palms up to his elbows.
Failure. He pulled too fast and the nodule sheared in half. Failure. The stone turned to dust when the vibration was off by a fraction of a hertz.
"Focus," he muttered.
He found a rhythm. Locate. Sync. Coax. Filter.
It took him forty minutes to extract the first usable piece. It was a jagged and ugly lump that hummed with a clean, uniform resonance. Material Grade: Low-Acceptable. Impurity: 4%.
He worked, discarding three for every one he kept. By the time he had twenty usable shards lined up on a flat root, an hour had passed. His hands trembled slightly with the effort.
The next stage was where the true torment began.
He picked up the first raw shard. The beetle was divided into twenty interlocking components. The Siphon Array was not carved on the outside, but on the inner faces of these shards. When fused, the carvings would become a three-dimensional vascular system of mana hidden inside the stone.
He concentrated his Earth mana into a needle point at the tip of his index finger. He pressed the mana point against the surface.
Carve.
He tried to trace the first line of the Array's intake valve. His mana fluctuated. The needle flared and became a hammer.
Snap.
The shard exploded in his hand, peppering his face with sharp grit. A thin trickle of blood welled on his cheek. Analysis: Mana Flow Turbulence. Precision Loss.
Kael wiped the blood away. He grabbed the next shard, slowing down, forcing his heart rate to drop. He became a statue. He pressed the mana needle into the stone. The stone yielded. He shaved off layers of granite, drawing a curve, a line, a node.
[Compendium Alert: Depth Variance Detected. Channel creates drag. Efficiency: 62%.]
"Dammit." He crushed the piece in his fist. A sixty-two percent channel in a twenty-part system guaranteed catastrophic detonation.
He ruined four carapace plates. He spent thirty minutes on the head piece alone, etching the microscopic latching runes. The migraine threatened to return, a steady, pounding threat.
"You must adapt," he whispered.
He poured more mana into his eyes, sharpening the world back into focus. He was no longer drawing a line; he was guiding the stone to become the line. It was a brutal dance of intent and material.
Finally, he had them. Twenty pieces. A dismantled puzzle of grey slate, their connecting sides etched with microscopic precision. To Kael's mana-sight, they were a dormant circuit waiting to be closed.
The final stage was Assembly. He had to fuse the stone back together without collapsing the channels.
He gathered the pieces in his hands, floating them in a loose cloud of Earth mana.
Combine.
He pushed his mana into the twenty shards simultaneously, engaging the Preparatory Infusion frequency. He turned the edges of the stone soft and tacky like clay. He pressed them together: centre chassis to abdomen.
The stones touched. A spark of dissonance flared. The left leg segment's mana clashed with the thorax.
Stabilize.
An involuntary shudder ran through his left arm, the hand gripping the pieces shaking violently. He clamped down with his will, forcing the energies to harmonize. Sweat stung his eyes. He realized the problem: he was forcing them together, but they were singing different songs, their mineral compositions out of phase.
He closed his eyes. He dropped the visual feed and switched entirely to sensation. He felt the twenty dissonant hums—a grinding cacophony. He established the thorax piece as the baseline.
Match this.
He risked the Arcane. He poured the raw, unformed energy into the discordant shards, using it to bridge the frequency gaps. He forced the leg to hum lower. He forced the head to pitch higher. The pressure behind his eyes spiked so severely that his vision briefly blacked out in a flicker of white noise. He held the agony, forcing the alignment. Slowly, the screeching faded. The vibrations resolved into a single, agonizing chord.
Now. Fuse.
He let the pieces snap together. There was no heat, no spark. Just a dull and heavy thud of sound as matter became one.
Kael opened his eyes.
Floating above his palm was a beetle. It was ugly. The seams were visible as faint, jagged scars. The surface was rough and unpolished. But it was whole.
He lowered it gently to the ground. He slumped back against the tree root, his chest heaving, the metallic taste in his mouth intense.
"Compendium," he rasped. "Report."
[Analysis: Stone Construct (Beetle Type). Assembly Successful. Internal Array Integrity: 88%. Mana Conductivity: High. Status: Inert.]
Eighty-eight percent. It wasn't the ninety-nine percent perfection he had craved, but it was functional.
Kael picked it up. He pushed a tiny pulse of mana into the activation rune on the beetle's belly. He set it down on a root near a large, black stag beetle lumbering past.
"Go," he whispered.
The stone beetle skittered forward. It was clumsy, driven by the single command: Latch.
It climbed onto the stag beetle's back. The latching array flared. Then the Siphon activated.
Kael watched with his mana-sight. He saw the stag beetle's tiny, meager life-force—a pale white glow that suddenly stretched. The stone beetle flared dark grey. It began to pull. The stag beetle's thrashing slowed, its movements sluggish. The white glow was sucked into the stone spiral.
The process took ten seconds. The stag beetle stopped moving.
Then the stone beetle reached capacity. The feedback loop triggered.
ZKT.
A tiny, audible spark of blue electricity snapped into the stag beetle. The insect jerked once. Legs curled inward in a rigid spasm. Smoke curled from its shell.
Fried.
[Field Test: Successful. Lethality confirmed on small biological target.]
Kael picked up his creation. It was warm to the touch, humming with the stolen, discharged energy. He looked at the dead insect. He had spent three hours, depleted half his mana, and nearly lost control of his own body to kill a bug.
He traced the jagged scar of the fusion seam with his thumb. The efficiency rating was too low. He needed more power.
"One is a toy," Kael murmured. His voice was raspy.
He looked at the pile of raw earth he still had left. He had maybe two hours before the campus awoke. His head pounded. His hands ached.
Kael reached for the earth.
"One is a diversion," he repeated, his eyes cold and bright. "Fifty is an army."
He began to extract the next stone.
The repetition was a different kind of torture. The first beetle had been a battle of discovery. The tenth was a battle of endurance.
Kael was struggling to maintain the perfection of the process. The human mind was not built for such continuous, microscopic fidelity. His mana channels began to fray, the tiny slips resulting in explosive feedback loops.
He failed with the ninth when a stray memory flickered across his awareness: a name, a child's song, something from the original Kael Voss that the Compendium had not yet fully consumed. The spike of sentiment shattered his focus and the stone.
[Loss of Focus. Time Delay: 12 minutes.]
He did not stop. He did not rest. He was racing against the dungeon excursion deadline. He needed the swarm ready in four days.
He fell into a trance. The world narrowed to the granular structure of the stone and the complex geometry of the arrays. He pushed past hunger, thirst, and the migraine that had become a white-hot static overlaying his vision.
Extract. Purify. Etch. Twenty pieces. Tune the frequency. Fuse.
By the thirteenth successful beetle, a profound change had occurred. He wasn't relying on the Prep Infusion technique; he had internalized it. The flow was smooth, the etching perfect, the fusion seamless. His efficiency had increased by three hundred percent.
[Skill Integration: Mana Infusion Technique: Preparatory Infusion (Rank D) achieved. Efficiency +12%.]
A flicker of cold pride moved through him. He was becoming the machine the Compendium demanded.
He finished the fourteenth. The sun was well past its zenith. He had worked for nearly five hours. His mana channels felt scoured by thorns.
Kael dropped his hands. He sat back, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps. Lined up on the root was a silent column of fourteen beetles. A squad.
He began sweeping them into his bag, the stones clinking heavily. He was exhausted, but a raw tension sliced through the fatigue.
He heard a low, scraping sound from the north, a subtle but distinct grind of stone against root that shouldn't be there. Kael froze. He infused his eyes with Arcane mana.
His breath hitched. He saw the serpentine outline of a dense mana signature moving rapidly underground, a thick, green-yellow trail through the earth. It was an evolved, low-level beast he had studied, a creature too large and too aggressive for the Academy's grounds. It was tracking his concentrated mana signature. If it had found him, running was not an option.
Kael prepared for the fight, his fourteen stone beetles silent and cold in his bag.