The taste of my own mortality was now a constant, metallic tang at the back of my throat. Twenty-two months. Not a distant, apocalyptic deadline, but a personal, ticking clock. The void-datum wasn't just a scar; it was a parasite, and my cracked core was its meal. Every minute [Flicker Step], every strain of my refined mana, was a spoonful fed to it.
Professor Vane's tower became both a sanctuary and a cage. In the world of dust and decay, my condition was not an anomaly to be feared, but a fascinating case study. He poked and prodded at my understanding, forcing me to articulate the "feel" of the void-echo, to quantify the rate of my core's atrophy with morbid precision.
"You are a living graph of Entropic Theory," he declared one afternoon, peering at me through his lenses as I attempted to stabilize a crumbling memory-crystal using only principles of structural sympathy. "Observing you is more instructive than a century of studying dead things. The living process of failure is… exquisite."
His praise was a clinical assessment, and I accepted it as such. I learned. I learned about resonant frequencies that could accelerate decay in specific materials. I learned about alchemical catalysts that could induce "controlled cascade failures" in enchantments—a theory that aligned terrifyingly well with my sabotage of Alric's overload. I learned to see the world not as a collection of things, but as a collection of fragile systems, each with its own breaking point.
This knowledge was power, of a sort. A dreadful, precise power. But it did not fix the crack.
The Stasis-Beetle carapace in the Vault of Echoes became an obsession. Machina ran endless simulations. We analyzed the data from the Venati incursion a thousand times, mapping their path, their timing, their method. We cross-referenced it with my own deep-listening logs of the Vault's rhythms. The lunar zenith respiration was the key. That was when the geomanctic seal was most pliable, when the Venati had struck.
But the security would be heightened now. The Headmaster's winter-sky gaze would be turned inward, patrolling the metaphysical corridors of his domain. The Venati's method—harmonic blending—was beyond me. I lacked their technology, their finesse.
I needed a new flaw. A weakness the Venati hadn't exploited, because it wasn't a weakness of the Vault, but of the academy itself.
The answer came from the most mundane of places: the academy's mana conduits.
During a lecture on magical infrastructure with Professor Vane (who spent the entire time critiquing the "glaring design inefficiencies" and "single points of catastrophic failure" in the Astral Spring's distribution network), I had a realization. The Vault's reactive earth seal drew power from the Spring, but it also fed into the network. It was a stabilizer, a giant capacitor for the academy's erratic mana tides. During the lunar zenith, when the Spring's output peaked, the Vault's seal both absorbed the excess and became more active, hence its "respiration."
But what if that flow was reversed? What if, instead of the Vault breathing in the Spring's power, it was forced to exhale into a sudden, local vacuum?
A power surge. A directed, overwhelming surge into the Vault's intake, overloading the feedback mechanisms of the seal for a fraction of a second, causing a violent, unstable expansion instead of a gentle loosening. A hiccup in the heartbeat. Not a bypass, but a induced cardiac arrhythmia.
It was a theory of applied catastrophe, perfectly in line with my studies. It was also monumentally dangerous. A miscalculation could cause the geomanctic seal to rupture, potentially collapsing the Vault and a good portion of the mountain it was built into.
[SIMULATION COMPLETE. PROPOSED 'BACKSURGE' MANEUVER HAS A 41% PROBABILITY OF CREATING A TEMPORARY (3-5 SECOND) LOCALIZED SPATIAL/ENERGETIC INSTABILITY WITHIN THE VAULT ANTE-CHAMBER. PROBABILITY OF CATASTROPHIC SEAL FAILURE: 19%. PROBABILITY OF DETECTION BY HEADMASTER CAELUM DURING EVENT: 93%.]
Ninety-three percent chance of detection. Those were suicide odds. The Headmaster would sense a disturbance of that magnitude instantly. I would be caught in the act, a gnat triggering a seismic event.
I needed a diversion. Something so large, so distracting, it would pull Caelum's attention away from the Vault, or at least divide it.
The answer, once again, came from my ledger of past thefts and observations. Alric. The overload-prone prodigy. His core was a bomb waiting for a fuse. A controlled, visible detonation in a populated area—the library, a dormitory, the Grand Coliseum—would demand the Headmaster's immediate, full attention. An internal crisis takes precedence over a fluctuation in a secure vault.
It was a monstrous calculation. Using a person, however unstable, as a deliberate distraction. Risking lives and property to cover my theft. The old Kaelen, the one who hid, would have been horrified. The Kaelen who had seen the end of the world and had a void eating his soul found the math... compelling. Not good, not right, but necessary.
This was the bitter calculus of need. To save myself from dissolution, I was willing to become a terrorist in my own home.
I began to plan with a cold, meticulous detachment. I needed to engineer Alric's overload at the precise moment of the lunar zenith, in a location that would maximize spectacle and minimize actual casualties. The Grand Coliseum during a low-stakes practice session was ideal. It was warded to contain magical fallout, and usually sparsely populated in the evenings.
Next, I needed to create the "backsurge." I couldn't tamper with the main conduits from the Spring—that was high-security magic. But I didn't need to. The Vault's secondary intake and output vents, used for calibration and maintenance, were accessible through the same forgotten service tunnels I'd used before. I would need to place a device—a crude, one-time mana capacitor—on the output vent. At the crucial moment, I would trigger it to dump a massive, stolen charge back into the intake, using the vent's own flow against it.
Building the capacitor required resources. I spent my remaining Contribution Points on "failed" energy crystals from the alchemy labs—discarded for being unstable or holding charge poorly. To Professor Vane, I expressed a scholarly interest in "the failure modes of crystalline capacitors." He provided me with several, along with a dour warning about the "energetic unpleasantness" of their disintegration.
In the dead of night, in the bell tower, I worked. Using my scalpel-sharp mana and my understanding of conductive and resistive principles (stolen from library texts and observation of lightning-affinity students), I linked the failing crystals in a precarious series-parallel array. It was a bomb, not of explosion, but of directed magical discharge. I housed it in a stolen soup tureen lined with copper wire and insulating clay. It was ugly, inefficient, and would probably work exactly once before melting into slag.
The final piece was timing. I needed to be in two places at once: near Alric to provide the final, precise "nudge" into overload, and at the service tunnel vent to trigger the capacitor.
[FLICKER STEP IS INSUFFICIENT FOR THE DISTANCE. PROPOSAL: UTILIZE THE ACADEMY'S LESSER TELEPORTATION ARRAY.]
The Lesser Teleportation Array was a pair of stone circles used for training exercises in spatial magic, connecting the Coliseum to a practice field on the south grounds. It was inactive at night, its wards minimal. With my refined senses and understanding of spatial principles from the Mantis and the Venati's near-perfect cloaking, I believed I could hijack it for a single, unauthorized jump. It was another enormous risk.
The night of the lunar zenith arrived, heavy with unshed rain. The air felt electric, thick with the Spring's rising power. My body ached, the crack in my core a throbbing void-tooth.
I slipped into the Coliseum's service passages. Alric was there, as I knew he would be, practicing alone, trying to master a new, volatile evocation. His aura was a bonfire of frustrated, poorly-contained energy. Perfect.
I placed my homemade capacitor deep in the service tunnel, attaching it to the Vault's output vent with clamps of hardened resin. I ran a thin, insulated copper wire from it, snaking it back to a junction box near the teleportation array's control runes.
Then, I took my position in the Coliseum's upper stands, hidden in deep shadow. Below, Alric gathered power for a particularly difficult [Plasma Whip] technique. The air crackled around him. He was at the edge.
I watched, my [Mana-Sense] fixed on him, on the rising tide of the Spring, on the distant, deep thrum of the Vault beginning its respiration.
Now.
I focused a thread of my null-filtered mana, imbued with a precise, contrary vibration designed not to calm, but to destabilize—a principle of "Induced Harmonic Dissonance" derived from Vane's lectures. I aimed it at the exact nexus of Alric's control, the point where his will met the swirling plasma.
The effect was immediate and dramatic.
Alric's controlled gathering erupted into a chaotic storm. The plasma whip, instead of forming, exploded outward in a deafening CRACK-THOOOM of violet-white light and concussive force. The Coliseum's containment wards flared brilliantly, holding, but the noise and light were tremendous, a beacon of magical disaster.
Alarms began to blare across the academy. I felt it then—a sudden, massive shift in attention. A pressure, like a mountain focusing its gaze. The Headmaster. His consciousness swept over the Coliseum, a wave of pure, authoritative power, zeroing in on the crisis.
I had maybe ten seconds.
I sprinted from the stands, not toward the exit, but to the teleportation circle. I slapped my hand against its control runes, flooding them with my sharp, focused mana, overriding the safety protocols with a burst of precisely incorrect energy—a magical short-circuit. The circle flared with unauthorized, sickly green light.
I stepped into it, visualizing the destination circle in the south grounds service tunnel.
The world tore. Hijacking an unstable teleport was agony. It felt like being pulled through a keyhole made of shattered glass. I stumbled out into the damp, dark tunnel, vomiting bile, my core shrieking in protest.
But I was there. I could feel the Vault's respiration reaching its peak through the stone wall. I could feel the distant, titanic focus of the Headmaster on the Coliseum, a sun turned away.
Now.
I touched the copper wire with my finger, completing a circuit with my own body. I channeled a jolt of my mana into the capacitor array.
For a second, nothing. Then, a deep, sub-audible THUMP vibrated through the stone, a sound felt in the bones, not the ears. The light in the tunnel flickered wildly. From the direction of the Vault's vent, a gout of raw, uncontrolled mana—amber and violent purple—erupted, hitting the intake vent opposite.
The geomanctic seal, caught in its moment of delicate adjustment, jolted.
In my [Mana-Sense], the deep, ordered chord of the Vault became a shriek of dissonance. The door of solidified sound in the antechamber didn't just become permeable; it warped, bulging inward like a film of soap bubble stressed to its limit. For three, maybe four seconds, the flawless defense was a chaotic, unstable mess.
It was my window. A window bought with sabotage, with risk to a fellow student, with the terror of possibly destroying the academy's heart.
I didn't hesitate. I ran toward the distorted energy, my body a bundle of pain and desperate need. The thief was going in, not with elegance, but with a brick through a stained-glass window. The calculus was done. The price was paid. Now, I collected.