The soft hiss of the sealed door echoed in the impossibly silent room. For a long moment, no one moved. Rylan's usual energetic confidence had vanished, replaced by a stunned gape. Elara's hand was over her mouth, her eyes wide with a fear that was far more unnerving than Kai's cold indifference. Leo was frantically swiping through data on his screen, his knuckles white.
Kenji felt like he was underwater, the revelation pressing in on him from all sides. He wasn't just a misplaced student; he was a key, a breadcrumb, a time bomb left behind by a cosmic terrorist.
"So… we fight him!" Rylan finally burst out, slamming a fist into his palm. The sound was jarringly loud. "When he shows up, we'll be ready for him! We'll set a trap!"
"You'll do no such thing in my room," Kai stated without looking up from his gyroscope. The air around him seemed to drop a few degrees. "Your friend is a beacon. An invitation for an entity that destabilizes reality. His presence here is a threat to my temporal anchor. You will solve it, or you will leave."
"He's right," Leo said, his voice grim. "We can't fight Omega. His threat level is 'Apex.' Standard procedure is containment and evacuation of the affected reality sector. But the trace… it's not just a beacon, it's a parasitic signature woven into your dimensional frequency. It's feeding on the ambient energy of the Nexus, slowly growing stronger."
"Is there a way to remove it?" Elara asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Leo's fingers flew across his screen. A 3D map of the academy appeared, a dizzying network of floating towers and shimmering energy conduits. He highlighted a single, isolated structure far from the main campus buildings.
"There is one possibility," Leo announced. "The Quantum Crucible. It's not a classroom; it's a research facility. They use it to sanitize artifacts recovered from collapsed or corrupted timelines. It bombards an object with pure, unpatterned reality—erasing any foreign energy signatures. It's incredibly dangerous, but it's our only shot."
A sliver of hope, sharp and painful, pierced through Kenji's dread. "Let's go."
The journey to the Crucible was a tense, silent trek through a part of the academy Kenji hadn't seen. They rode a transport platform made of solidified light, gliding through corridors where gravity shifted unpredictably. Students they passed practiced abilities that were terrifying in their scope; one girl was calmly folding a pocket of space into a tiny, shimmering origami crane, while a boy nearby sketched a creature in a notebook that was simultaneously trying to claw its way off the page.
The Quantum Crucible stood alone on a floating obsidian disc, a stark, windowless dome that seemed to absorb the light of the chaotic sky around it. The air hummed with contained power.
A stern-looking woman in a lab coat met them at the entrance. Her name tag read Dr. Aris. Leo quickly explained the situation, showing her the data on the Omega Trace. Dr. Aris's expression went from annoyed to gravely serious.
"An Instigator trace… here?" She looked at Kenji as if he were a specimen. "Unprecedented. Get him inside. The Crucible is already primed from a previous experiment."
She led them into a circular, white chamber. In the center was a raised platform surrounded by a ring of humming, crystalline pylons. The air was sterile and crackled with energy.
"The process will feel… disorienting," Dr. Aris warned Kenji, her tone leaving no room for comfort. "The Crucible will deconstruct your personal energy field to its baseline—your Null state—and scrub the parasitic signature. Your watch will be inert during the process. Step onto the platform."
Kenji's heart hammered against his ribs. He gave Rylan and Elara a shaky look. Rylan gave him a firm, encouraging nod. Elara offered a small, worried smile. Taking a deep breath, Kenji stepped onto the platform.
"Initiating quantum flush sequence," Dr. Aris announced from a control panel.
The pylons began to glow with a brilliant, white light. A strange, weightless sensation washed over Kenji. He felt as if his very atoms were being pulled apart and cataloged. It was an invasive, deeply unpleasant feeling, but not painful. He saw the faint, shadowy energy of the Omega Trace being drawn out of him, dissolving like smoke in the searing white light.
It was working.
But then, something went wrong.
The Siphon Watch on his wrist, which was supposed to be inert, suddenly flashed. The black screen lit up, not with the familiar swirling vortex, but with a single, sharp, crimson symbol he'd seen once before: the high-threat warning from Omega's file.
Instead of being scrubbed, the energy from the Crucible was being greedily pulled into the watch. The device vibrated violently, and a wave of raw, chaotic power surged back into Kenji. It wasn't borrowed time or a replicated ability. It was the pure, malevolent energy of the Omega Trace itself, now amplified a hundredfold by the Crucible and channeled directly through him.
Pain, absolute and blinding, erupted behind his eyes. He heard Elara scream his name as his vision dissolved into a field of crimson static. The last thing he saw before he blacked out was the symbol on his watch, pulsing like a malevolent heartbeat.