The Commander's words hung in the air, cold and final.
Open the door.
Eighteen pairs of eyes watched him, their collective weight a physical pressure. Leo's gaze flickered to Sera, who stood frozen, her face pale with terror. Then to Vex, whose grim expression offered no comfort, only a silent warning.
Don't die.
He turned back to the massive runic door. It pulsed with a faint, malevolent light, the symbols on its surface shifting like embers in a dying fire. This wasn't an order. It was a sentence.
He forced his body to move. One step. Then another.
His wounded leg screamed, a sharp, grinding protest with every shift of weight. The Dantian in his gut—the impossible core that had saved and damned him—felt like a stone scraping against raw nerves. He could feel their stares on his back. Not fear. Not concern. Measurement.
He didn't look back. He focused on the door.
As he drew closer, details emerged that had been invisible from a distance. The runes didn't just glow. They pulsed unevenly, a slow, shallow rhythm, like something sleeping badly. The stone floor before the door was coated in a fine grey powder.
Hollow dust.
The same residue left behind when the constructs dissolved.
His steps slowed.
This wasn't built like an entrance. No wear patterns. No threshold grooves. Just accumulation.
His mouth went dry.
It felt less like a doorway… and more like a place things were brought.
The realization settled quietly. No panic. No drama. Just understanding.
Behind him, no one spoke.
They weren't waiting for success.
They were watching to see what happened when the mechanism was engaged—and how long the piece closest to it would last.
Leo stopped in front of the door.
The surface was smooth, seamless black stone. No handle. No hinge. Only a central rune, larger than the rest, its light dull and hungry, as if it swallowed what little illumination the chamber offered.
He lifted his bandaged hand.
Hesitated.
Then pressed his palm forward.
The moment his skin made contact, the rune detonated with light.
White flared across his vision, sharp and sudden. The air in the chamber thickened, pressure rolling outward like a held breath finally released.
But the door didn't open.
Instead, a low, grinding sound echoed from behind him.
From the chamber's perimeter, the six sealed doorways began to move.
Stone screamed against stone as each aperture cracked open. Darkness spilled out, followed by motion—figures pulling themselves free, joints grinding, limbs forming with jerky inevitability.
Not fifteen this time.
Thirty.
The pattern clicked into place too cleanly to ignore.
Interaction triggered response. Not progress. Not clearance.
Something cold slid down Leo's spine.
Behind him.
He didn't turn. He didn't have time.
Stone scraped.
A presence loomed close enough that he felt the shift in air. A Hollow had formed just meters away, its crude club already lifted, momentum gathering for a killing blow.
His body moved before thought could catch up.
He forced power downward—hard, desperate, uncontrolled.
Chi ripped through him like a mistake.
It wasn't flow. It wasn't technique. It was pressure released the wrong way, tearing instead of guiding.
The world smeared.
For a fraction of a second, everything became colorless motion—black, red, and wrong. His stomach lurched as space folded badly around him.
He reappeared three meters to the left.
Too fast. Too uneven.
His feet tangled as he came out of it, balance snapping sideways. He stumbled, barely catching himself as pain detonated through his leg.
CRACK.
The Hollow's club obliterated the spot where he'd been standing, stone exploding outward in a spray of shards.
Dust and fragments peppered his back.
Leo sucked in a breath and risked a glance toward the others.
No one moved to help.
No one reacted.
Theron Flameheart let out a short, humorless laugh, shaking his head as if something mildly annoying had just happened. "That's it?" he said, already looking away. "That's what we're risking time on?"
But Commander Arcturus Vale hadn't shifted at all.
His gaze was fixed on Leo—steady, intent, unreadable. Not impressed. Not disappointed.
Assessing.
The thirty Hollows finished forming, their blank faces turning in unison toward the group. The air grew dense with their silent intent, the chamber closing in around the living.
Arcturus's voice cut through the tension, calm and procedural, like a man reciting inventory.
"Formation."
The cultivators moved instantly, snapping into position with practiced precision, a defensive line forming in front of Leo and Sera.
"Defensive perimeter."
Shields rose. Power gathered. The room brightened with contained force.
"The trial continues."
And Leo understood, without needing to put it into words.
This wasn't about advancement. Or victory.
It was about endurance.
About watching what failed first.
And he was standing closest to the gears.
The battle was not a duel; it was a meat grinder. The elite cultivators moved with a terrifying efficiency Leo had never witnessed. Theron's Flame Chi techniques turned Hollows to molten slag. Thane's Light Chi lances purified them into dust. Arcturus stood like a mountain, his simple sword strokes cleaving through stone and shadow with impossible ease. They were winning. But it felt wrong.
The thirty Hollows died in under five minutes, a whirlwind of coordinated destruction. But the victory wasn't clean. A C-rank adventurer named Kane, trying to prove his worth, overextended. A club swung in a wide, clumsy arc, and he tried to parry instead of evade.
The sound was wet and sharp.
Crack.
Kane screamed, his arm folding at an angle no joint should allow. Bone punched through skin, slick with blood.
Sera was moving before the scream finished. She dropped to one knee beside him, hands already glowing with a steady, pale light. The torn flesh knit together under her touch, the bleeding slowing, then stopping—but the bone remained twisted and wrong. Her jaw clenched as she worked, breath shallow, her hands trembling when she pulled away.
Healing had limits. And a cost.
The last Hollow dissolved into grey dust.
For a single, fragile second, the chamber went still.
Then the grinding sound returned.
From the six sealed doors around the chamber, the crimson runes flared again, pulsing together. The dust coating the floor stirred, lifting, drifting back toward the walls as if caught in a slow tide.
This time, forty-five shapes began to form.
A ripple of disbelief moved through the group.
"They're not stopping."
Arcturus didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "This isn't a test of strength," he said. "It's a trial of attrition."
Leo saw it as soon as the words landed. The subtle signs. The heavier breathing. The way a few fighters reset their footing half a beat slower than before. Vex's movements, once sharp and elastic, had tightened—shorter bursts, fewer risks. The air around him no longer shimmered the same way.
They were being drained.
Mira Ashford wasn't watching the fight.
She was watching everything else.
Her gaze tracked the sequence with clinical focus. Hollows fell. Silence followed—brief, always the same length. Then the doors flared. The braziers answered. Another wave took shape. Each time, more than before.
Her eyes slid to Leo.
His earlier displacement—the clumsy, tearing step—still nagged at her. Dark manifestations usually left weight behind, a residue that pressed on the senses. His hadn't. It had been thin. Clean. Almost… absent.
She watched his breathing now. Not panicked. Not erratic. Measured. Controlled in a way fear alone didn't explain. Not mastery—nothing that clean—but discipline carved by repetition.
Or necessity.
She made a brief note in her journal, the quill barely scratching the page.
Subject: Leo Yeager. Illegal entrant. Dark-leaning manifestation inconsistent with standard profiles. Reaction timing exceeds expected baseline. Monitor.
Thane's gaze brushed past her. Paused. He saw the movement of her hand.
She met his eyes and gave the smallest possible nod.
If he dies, she thought, the conclusion immediate and bloodless, I lose a rare data point. If he lives, I inherit a problem with teeth.
The next wave surged forward.
Leo didn't join the charge.
That was his role. Watch. Wait. Draw attention if needed. Bait.
It kept him at the edge of the fight, and it gave him something the others didn't have—space to see.
His eyes kept drifting back to the Rune-Braziers. One stood before each door, their flames colorless and cold, more suggestion than fire. And every time—every time—the moment before the grinding began, the flames leapt.
Just for a heartbeat.
Inside the fire, a faint crimson symbol flashed. The same mark etched into the doors. Gone almost before he could focus on it.
Again.
And again.
Something clicked—not cleanly, not comfortably. More like glass settling into a crack.
They weren't advancing. They weren't clearing the floor. Every kill fed the rhythm. Violence answered with escalation, precise and indifferent.
The room wasn't measuring strength.
It was responding to input.
His grip tightened on his axe. If that was true—if the cycle was tied to the braziers—then fighting harder only made things worse. The solution wasn't cutting down the Hollows.
It was interrupting what called them.
He looked toward the commanders.
Arcturus stood unmoving, a pillar of controlled destruction. Thane's attention never wavered from the front line. Theron carved through stone with bored efficiency, flame rolling off him in waves.
They were gods of combat.
And gods didn't stop mid-battle to listen to a crippled probationer.
The idea of speaking up tasted like ash. Best case, he'd be ignored. Worst case, punished for breaking formation, for distracting them when people were bleeding.
For a moment, he almost stayed silent.
Let them figure it out. Let them burn through their strength. Let the system break them instead of him.
Then the third wave fell.
It took longer.
Another adventurer went down, a deep gash in their thigh that Sera struggled to close, her shoulders shaking with effort. The fighters moved heavier now, their techniques less precise, their breathing rougher.
The doors began to glow again.
The grinding returned, louder than before.
Sixty Hollows pulled themselves from the walls.
Leo's gaze snapped to Vex. The hunter leaned hard on his blade, chest heaving. The air around him lay still, his speed gone, spent.
If Vex fell, there would be no buffer left.
No distance between Leo and the front.
He swallowed.
He couldn't afford to be right later.
He had to be wrong now—or right fast.
And Vex was the only one who might listen.