Clyde kept flexing his fingers as they climbed the stairs out of the underground chamber, opening and closing his hand like he was checking whether it still belonged to him.
Everything felt denser. Not heavier, more like every part of his body had been rewritten by someone who knew what they were doing. His muscles responded half a beat sooner than they used to, and when he took a deep breath the air seemed to settle into his lungs and spread through him instead of just passing through. Even his thoughts felt cleaner, as if someone had wiped a layer of fog off the inside of his skull.
Every lunar cell in my body evolved, he thought. That has to be what this is. And my mind is sharper too. An illusion would have a hard time landing on me now.
Aurelian walked on his left and Eira on his right, the three of them stepping out of the stairwell into the golden light of the Academy's artificial sun. Students were crossing the plaza in loose groups, laughing, arguing about homework, carrying on like the world had never ended once.
Clyde watched them go by and something nagged at him.
Why is everything moving so fast? he thought. The library, the journal, the baptism, the centipede, Noxar, now this. A spring appears the same week I need one. It feels like fate itself got bent to make room for me. Is there a deity behind it? And if there is, why would it help me?
"What are you thinking about?" Aurelian asked.
Clyde blinked. "Nothing."
"That was a very long nothing."
"It was a very big nothing."
Aurelian laughed, but he kept looking at Clyde a second longer than the joke needed. Then he slid his hands into his coat pockets and walked on for a few steps in silence.
"Can I tell you something about ascension?" he said. "Nobody puts it in the brochures."
"Go ahead."
"The higher you climb, the less human you get." Aurelian said it lightly, but his eyes had gone somewhere else. "It happens slowly. The closer your frequency gets to a god's, the more your emotions start to fade. Empathy goes first, then the small things, like why a joke is funny or why a person cried at a funeral. If you climb high enough you stop feeling the weight of anything."
Clyde slowed down. "Why?"
"Because a god's frequency doesn't fit inside a human heart. Something has to give, and what gives is the human part."
Clyde looked at his hand again.
So the price of the power to protect people is losing the part of me that wants to protect them, he thought. That is a terrible deal. That is the kind of deal a swindler offers.
"That sounds backwards," he said.
"It is." Aurelian shrugged. "Welcome to the whole system."
Clyde closed his hand into a fist and threw a punch at the empty air in front of him.
Whoosh!
The air snapped, and a gust rolled outward hard enough to flip a few loose papers off a nearby bench. Students glanced over, then went back to their conversations. His arm had moved faster than he had meant it to, and his balance had barely wobbled afterward, as if his body had already known how to carry the extra speed.
So this is what Phase Two feels like, he thought.
"Stop showing off," Eira said flatly.
"I'm not showing off, I'm testing."
"You're showing off."
"A little," Clyde admitted.
That was when Aurelian's coat pocket began to glow.
The light came from a card tucked in the inner lining, pale gold and flickering, pulsing like a heartbeat in a hurry. Aurelian pulled it out and the card shivered once in his palm, then a folded letter slid out of it as if the card had spat it up.
"Messenger card," Aurelian said. "From Aldric."
He unfolded it. Clyde saw his face change before he read a single word of it aloud.
Then Aurelian read it aloud anyway, and his voice came out quiet.
"They are starting the ritual. The Bleeding Moon Cult and the Thaddeus heir."
Thud.
It felt like the sound of the world dropping a stone into a well, and none of them said anything for a moment. Eira's hand tightened on the strap of her bag. Clyde felt the blood go cold in his arms.
The Thaddeus heir, he thought. Caelan, in the library, with the vortex card and the transplanted heart.
He pushed his enhanced Hollow Eyes open, and the world sharpened until he could see every frequency in the plaza at once. Hundreds of Lunar Ichor signatures pulsed around him, students and teachers and staff, each one a warm thread in the fabric of the space. He tuned past all of them, reaching toward the edges, listening for something wrong.
There.
A disturbance in the frequency, like a bruise under skin. A stretch of the Academy's wave pattern had curdled, and it was located in one specific place.
"The library," Clyde said. "The corner of the library."
"The same corner?!" Aurelian said.
"The exact same one. Caelan summoned a Howling in that spot, and now something is building there again." Clyde's voice came out lower than usual. "Why would he choose that one corner of a whole library?"
Nobody had an answer.
"Run," Clyde said. "Now, to the school."
They ran.
The Academy's main entrance was wide and tall, framed by pale pillars that normally drank in the artificial sun like polished bone. Clyde slowed at the threshold and stared at the wall beside the door.
Why are the walls laced with Lunar Ichor?
It was in the stone, running through it in thin lines like veins in marble. The walls had always carried ichor, since the whole Academy had been built from saturated material, but this was different. This flow had a direction, a purpose, all of it pulling toward the same place deeper inside.
Then something clicked behind his eyes.
Snap.
A new layer of perception unfolded, and it was nothing like the frequency vision he was used to. Darkness spread across the corridor ahead of him, but it was a darkness made of feeling. He could see the shape of fear, thick and gray, clinging to the walls like soot. He could see threads of malice winding through the corridor, sharp and cold. Beneath it all, a pulse of something hungry, patient, and wrong.
I can see negative emotions, he realized. Intentions, even. Whatever they are building here is so dark it forced the ability to wake up.
He staggered, and Aurelian caught his arm.
"What is it?!"
"This place is soaked in it," Clyde said. "Dread, hatred, hunger. Whatever is happening, it is a ritual, and the feeling coming off it is about as bad as it gets."
Outside, the light dimmed.
Clyde looked up through the entrance and saw the dome overhead. The artificial sun had shrunk by half, its warm gold bleeding toward amber, and above the dome the real moon, the one that hung behind the cloud cover, had gone darker than he had ever seen it. Something was eating its glow, bit by bit.
A single drop hit the stone step beside him.
Plip.
It was red.
"Red rain," Eira said quietly. "The Bleeding Moon."
Plip. Plip. Plip.
The drops multiplied, tapping the pavement and the dome in a scattering rhythm that sounded much too much like a countdown.
Aurelian's pocket glowed again, and a second letter dropped from the card. He read it faster this time, and his jaw tightened.
"The Sentinels are mobilizing for Matrix," he said. "Stop the ritual before they arrive, at all cost, or Matrix will be wiped out."
"At all cost," Clyde repeated.
"That is what it says."
The three of them looked at each other. Nobody asked the question out loud, because there was only one answer to it.
They went in.
The door slammed shut behind them with a heavy boom, and the sound of the red rain vanished at once, replaced by a thick, wet silence.
It was dark inside, darker than the Academy had any reason to be. The corridor stretched ahead, long and narrow, lit only by the faint glow of ichor crawling through the walls. Clyde's footsteps echoed too far, like the space was larger than it should have been.
Drip.
A drop of water landed on his shoulder.
Drip.
Another on the floor beside him, loud in the quiet.
"We are indoors," Aurelian said, whispering. "The rain cannot reach us here."
Clyde looked up.
The ceiling was a dark blur, but something thin and glistening was stretching down from it, a long clear thread swaying slowly in the gloom. He lifted a finger and touched the drop on his shoulder and rubbed it between his fingers.
It was thick. Sticky. It stretched when he pulled his fingers apart.
"That is not rain," he said slowly. "That is saliva."
CRASH!
Something dropped from the ceiling and hit the floor in front of them hard enough to crack the stone, a shape twice as tall as a man, lumbering upright on arms and legs that bent the wrong way. Its skin was armored in thick, green-gray scales. Its jaw was long and full of teeth, and its eyes, yellow and flat, tracked the three of them as though measuring a meal.
A crocodile, standing like a man.
It opened its jaws and roared, a wet, bellowing sound that shook dust from the ceiling.
"GRAAAAAHHH!"
Clyde did not wait for it to finish.
He pulled his Lunar Ichor into his right hand, and the density of it surprised him, a thick purple glow packing into his knuckles with almost no effort. He drove his fist into the creature's snout.
BAM!
The Howling flew backward, skidding across the stone floor for several meters before it slammed into the wall. Chunks of plaster rained down around it.
"Whoa," Aurelian said.
Clyde looked at his hand, then at the Howling dragging itself upright, shaking its head.
That actually worked?!
He pulled out the butterfly knife and flipped it open, the blade shimmering purple as he charged. The Howling swung a clawed arm at him, and Clyde slid under it, slicing across its ribs. Shink! Dark blood sprayed.
"He is getting stronger," Aurelian said, grinning, with a note of real surprise in his voice.
"So are we," Eira said.
She flicked her wrist. Black hands rose out of the shadows beneath the Howling, long and thin, wrapping around its legs and arms with soft, grasping sounds. The Howling thrashed, but the hands held it in place, dragging its limbs wide.
Aurelian curled his finger against his thumb.
Flick.
CRACK!
An air bullet punched into the Howling's skull. Its head snapped sideways and one of its yellow eyes burst, and the creature let out a strangled howl.
Clyde opened his Hollow Eyes.
The scales and the muscle and the bone all turned translucent, and the pulse of the creature's corrupted heart glowed dull and slow in its chest, slightly left of center, wrapped in thick calcified armor. The armor had a seam on the underside, thin as a thread.
There.
He took the butterfly knife and poured his Lunar Ichor into it. Perfect resonance, every particle aligned, the blade turning a deep, dense purple, so saturated it seemed to hum. He drew back his arm.
Thwip!
The knife left his hand and crossed the corridor as fast as the air bullet had, a purple streak that cut through the dark. It slid into the seam in the armor and went straight through the heart.
CLANG-CRACK!
The Howling went rigid.
The knife had driven all the way through and pinned something against the wall behind it, a small, dull card, its surface cracked down the middle. Clyde stepped closer and looked at it.
A sigil. Faded, ragged, half dissolved. A Lunar Sigil and nothing else, no divine frequency woven into it, no Divine Ichor card fused at all.
The Howling collapsed in on itself and the body began to dissolve into the floor.
"It was an ordinary person," Clyde said quietly.
"The Madness card?" Aurelian asked.
"Maybe." Clyde pulled the knife free and wiped it on his sleeve. "Or the ritual. Either way, somebody out there used to be somebody's neighbor."
The corridor stayed silent for a moment after that.
Then, deeper in the dark, something else began to growl.