The presence of Kieran Vance acted like a chemical catalyst in the academy's ecosystem. Whispers followed him. He was placed in special quarters, did not attend regular classes, and was seen occasionally in the company of the highest-ranking proctors, including his aunt. He was a prince surveying a provincial town, and everyone knew it.
For Arlan, the "protection" detail became suffocating. Two 4th Order proctors were now a constant, discreet presence. His movements were logged. His mission access, despite being a 3rd Order Captain, was restricted to low-risk, on-campus tasks. Head Proctor Vance's reasoning was sound—the Accord's "Terminate" order was not an idle threat—but it choked his growth.
He needed to move, to fight, to pressure-test his new power against real danger. The cage was stunting him.
It was Selene, leveraging her own unique position as a watched anomaly, who found the crack in the walls.
"The Aegis Network has blind spots," she told him in their hidden nook, her voice a low murmur. The black-hole spin in her eye was barely visible, a sign of her intense focus. "It's designed to track mana signatures, life signs, and portal usage. But it interpolates data. It makes assumptions to fill gaps. If you move from Point A to Point C, and there's no sensor in Point B, it assumes you took the logical path."
"So?" Arlan asked.
"So, if you can move from A to C without being in the space between… the system gets confused. It might register a lag, a glitch, but not an alert." She pointed a pale finger at his bracer. "Your spatial anchors. Your short-range 'folds'. You can create a path it can't map. A door that bypasses the hallway."
An idea formed—a dangerous, brilliant idea. He couldn't teleport far. But he could create a chain. Anchor in his dorm. Fold space to step five meters away, to a sensor dead zone he'd mapped. Create a new Anchor there. Fold again. A spatial hopscotch across the academy's sensory grid, using minor folds that consumed little mana but broke his continuous travel into untraceable segments.
It would be slow. It would be exhausting. But it was a way out.
He practiced in the dead of night, within his own room first. The bracer's stabilizing effect was crucial; it kept the small, rapid spatial manipulations from spiking his instability. After three nights of failed attempts and one minor backlash that his bracer swiftly contained, he succeeded in creating a stable two-hop chain from one side of his room to the other without triggering the room's motion sensors.
The real test came a week later. His "protection" proctors were a predictable pair. Their shift change at 2 AM had a ninety-second window where coverage was slightly looser, focused on the handover.
At 2:00:30 AM, Arlan activated his plan.
Anchor A: His dorm room wall.
Fold One:A micro-teleport into the blind spot of the ceiling vent's sensor cone.
He hung there,suspended by a whisper of spatial energy holding him to the ceiling, heart hammering. No alarms.
Anchor B:The vent grille itself.
Fold Two:Into the vertical utility shaft behind the wall. Darkness and the hum of pipes.
He repeated the process eight times,moving down the shaft, across a cable conduit, through an empty storage closet, and finally to a little-used service exit on the ground floor that was only warded against entry, not exit.
He slipped out into the cool night air, the academy walls behind him. He was free.
He met Selene and Blythe at a pre-arranged coordinates a mile into the wilds beyond the campus. They had a skiff, procured through one of Selene's shady contacts.
"You look like hell," Blythe observed, her resonator already humming a low, alert frequency.
"The chain is inefficient," Arlan admitted, his mana reserves down by a third. "But it worked."
"Good. Because we found something," Selene said, her face grim. "An active, unmapped D-Class rift. Not in the registry. The Accord hasn't found it yet. It's unstable, wild. The mana pouring out is… chaotic. Perfect for someone who needs to train without witnesses, and for someone like you," she glanced at Arlan.
They flew for an hour, deep into a jagged, lifeless canyon system. The rift was a ragged tear in the side of a cliff, pulsing with erratic, multi-colored light. It was ugly and raw, unlike the stabilized training rifts. Spawn slithered in and out—misshapen things, failures of dimensional biology.
It was perfect.
For the next several weeks, this became their secret training ground. Arlan pushed his limits. He fought the chaotic spawn, learning to use his Amethyst Voidfire in combat. He found that a touch of the purple flame could make a creature's natural armor "forget" its hardness, or make a charging beast "forget" its momentum, stumbling to a halt.
He worked on his spatial chain, increasing its range and efficiency, aiming to someday turn it into a true, rapid Spatial Blink.
Selene, with Blythe acting as anchor and stabilizer, dared to tap into her Eye of Destruction. She started small, annihilating pebbles, then rift-spawn limbs. The cost was visible—each use drained her, leaving her pale and trembling, her vampire vitality struggling to replenish the loss. But she was learning control. She could now fire a thin, black beam of Annihilating Gaze that could pierce through a meter of stone, or create a localized Space Quake the size of a dinner plate that could shatter a monster's core.
Blythe, in turn, honed her resonance to new heights, developing Sonic Lances that could pierce through the chaotic mana fields and Harmonic Shields that could deflect aberrant energies.
They were forging themselves into a weapon in the dark, away from the eyes of both the Academy and the Accord.
One night, after a particularly brutal fight with a pack of phase-shifting Glimmer Jackals, Arlan was meditating near the rift mouth, trying to absorb the wild mana to replenish his cores. The chaotic energy was hard to process, like drinking sand, but the Amethyst Voidfire in his core seemed to cleanse it, burning away the chaotic aspects and leaving behind pure, if thin, mana.
As he cycled the energy, he felt a profound shift in the rift's output. The multi-colored pulsing focused, intensifying on one spot about fifty meters inside the canyon. A low, subsonic hum vibrated through the rock.
"Something's coming through," Blythe said, her hand on her resonator. "Not a spawn. Something bigger."
They took cover. The air in front of the cliff face ripped. Not a graceful tear, but a violent, messy rupture. From it stumbled a figure.
It was a young man, perhaps a year older than them. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds, his clothing—a style none of them recognized, all flowing grey and blue—was torn and burned. In his hand, he clutched a broken staff. His aura was a mess, flickering between 3rd and 4th Order potency, laced with a strange, foreign mana signature that felt like howling wind and crushing depth.
But what drew Arlan's eye was the man's gaze. Even in his pain, his exhaustion, his eyes held a terrifying, unbroken focus. A Sword Intent so sharp it seemed to cut the very light around him. It wasn't a cultivated aura; it was part of his soul. He looked like a blade that had been shattered but hadn't yet realized it was broken.
The man collapsed to his knees, coughing blood that sizzled on the stone. He looked up, his sword-sharp eyes sweeping over their hiding place instantly. He saw them.
"...Not them," he rasped, his voice carrying the weight of vast distances. "Where… is this place?"
"Who are you?" Selene called out, not revealing herself fully.
The stranger tried to stand, failed. "Kaelen," he grunted. "Of the… Lost Battalion. The Accord… they ambushed our world. Shattered the gates…" He looked at the chaotic rift behind him with utter hatred. "This… is not my exit. This is a... back door."
The Silent Accord. Attacking another world. The scale of it was staggering.
Kaelen's gaze locked onto Arlan, seeing past the shadows, past the cloak. "You… you have the smell of void on you. Are you one of them too?"
Arlan stepped out of cover. "No."
A grim, bloodstained smile touched Kaelen's lips. "Good. Then you are… temporarily… my ally. Help me seal this wound. Before what follows me… comes through."
He pointed a trembling finger back at the unstable rift. The subsonic hum was growing. Something was pushing against the other side. Something big.
They had a choice: flee, or fight alongside a wounded warrior from another world against an unknown threat from a rift they didn't create.
Arlan looked at Selene, then Blythe. He saw the same calculation in their eyes. This man was a enemy of the Accord. He possessed an Intent. He was a source of information from a wider war. And he was here, now, in their secret place.
"What's coming?" Arlan asked, drawing Purple-Crack. The amethyst flame in the crack flared to life.
Kaelen struggled to his feet using his broken staff. "A Reality Driller. An Accord bio-construct. Made to… widen unstable rifts. It's why they attacked us. To get the core for their machine." He spat blood. "If it comes through… this canyon becomes a permanent gate to a dead world."
Arlan made the decision. "Selene, Blythe—support and containment. We kill the Driller. Then we talk."
The rift pulsed. A sharp, metallic proboscis, glowing with corrosive green energy, began to push through the tear, widening it with a sound like screaming metal.
Their secret training ground had just become a battlefield in a war they were only beginning to understand. And a wounded, sword-expert stranger had just fallen into their lap.
The cage was far behind. The real world was right here, bloody, dangerous, and full of unexpected allies.