The walk back from Vex's office to Block Delta barely registered. Oliver drifted through the academy halls like he wasn't really there, his thoughts stuck on the future Vex had laid out for him. Not classes. Not spells. Just survival.
Four months deadline. Difficulties of missions. How adventurer points are so important. How mission can be deadly. The strong own the world.
The comfort of first year—the fixed schedule, the steady meals, the feeling that tomorrow would look like today—was gone. In its place was something sharp and ugly. This wasn't training anymore. It was preparation for a war.
Back in his plain dorm room, Oliver moved without thinking. A cold shower didn't help. The weight in his chest stayed. Eventually, he sat on his meditation mat, the only thing in the room that felt familiar.
In his palm lay the Dark Widow token.
It was cool and heavier than it looked. Shadows twisted inside the crystal, pulsing softly, almost like it was breathing with him.
He took a breath and did what Vex told him. He focused inward, on the pool of grey mana at his core, and gently pushed a thin stream of it into the token.
Nothing happened.
Then, slowly, warmth spread through the crystal as it pulled his mana in. After a couple of minutes, the token suddenly lit up—not bright, but dark. A deep, solid black glow that felt wrong to look at.
Before Oliver could react, the crystal melted.
Not into dust—but into liquid shadow. It flowed straight into his skin.
He sucked in a breath, staring at his now-empty hand. Panic spiked. Had he messed it up? Poisoned himself?
Then he felt it. A cool, faint tingle on the back of his left hand.
He turned it over.
There was a mark there now. A small, detailed tattoo of the Dark Widow, dark as ink, its legs curling slightly around his hand. It didn't hurt. It felt like it belonged there.
Carefully, Oliver focused on the mark.
Knowledge slammed into him.
Knowledge, not in words, but in pure sensation and image, flooded his consciousness.
He didn't learn shadow control—he felt it. He understood how darkness could be shaped, stretched, and held. Not created, but convinced. He sensed how shadows could be made solid, how they could carry cold and pressure, how they could listen and relay information. It wasn't about elements. It was about intent. It was a masterclass in applying the traits of Subtlety (to hide the manipulation) and Perception (to sense through the shadow-web) to a non-elemental medium—darkness itself. The sensation was alien, instinctual, and illuminating.
He felt like a hunter in the dark, weaving invisible threads, sensing every movement through them.
He didn't notice time passing until the dorm bell rang for lights-out with a loud metal clang.
Oliver jerked awake, head pounding. The rush of information had taken a toll. But under the headache was something else—clarity.
The next morning, he met Leo at breakfast. Over bland nutrient porridge, Oliver told him everything. Vex's warning. The deadline. The token. He pulled back his glove just enough to show the mark.
Leo didn't joke. He just nodded.
Things were serious now.
That day's training was a brutal reminder of how far they had to go, even physically.
The Delta training field had been turned into a nightmare course.
"Today," Proctor Grath announced, "you carry your power."
He pointed to a rack of dense metal blocks. "Five kilos of mana-dampening iron. You lift it with mana only. No hands. You'll carry it through a five-kilometer course. Drop it, you restart."
He smiled grimly. "The course will fight you."
And it did.
The iron wasn't just heavy—it drained mana constantly. Disruption glyphs shattered control. Illusions messed with balance and focus. Reversal nodes shoved mana back into its user.
Elara dropped her ingot with a shout when a glyph tore her grip apart. Leo walked straight into a fake wall and got blasted when his grip rebounded, leaving his eyebrows smoking.
Oliver used a simple shell of grey mana. To his surprise, it held. The iron didn't seem to drain it as badly.
His problem was focus.
Holding the weight while climbing, balancing, dodging fake attacks—it pushed him to the edge. By the end, he was soaked in sweat and mentally empty, but he never dropped the ingot.
Kaelan finished too, his iron trapped in a violent cage of force, his face tight with effort. Different styles. Same result.
Endurance.
For the next seven nights, Oliver trained in secret.
Each night, he meditated on the widow mark, sinking back into those instincts. He stopped focusing on shadows themselves and started understanding the idea behind them. The patience. The control. The way will could turn something passive into a tool.
He wasn't learning to copy the widow.
He was learning how to give a neutral thing a purpose.
On the eighth morning, he reached for the mark—and felt nothing.
He looked down. The tattoo was gone.
The token was spent.
But Oliver didn't feel empty. He felt awake.
The widow didn't have shadow magic. It forced darkness to behave a certain way.
Grey mana wasn't weak.
It was flexible.
It could become anything—if he decided what to make it be.
He didn't need to discover what his power was "meant" to be.
He needed to choose.
The realization wasn't flashy. No explosion. No new spell.
Just direction.
If his mana was clay, then survival meant choosing the shape it would always return to.
And whatever that choice was, Oliver knew one thing—
He didn't have much time left to make it.
End of chapter