Chapter 58. The First Omen
Outside the forest, the professors hadn’t moved.
They sat, or stood, for those who had risen without realizing it, still staring at the screen in front of them, struggling to put language to what they had just witnessed. Lightning had never looked like that before. None of them had ever seen it wielded with that kind of force.
Eric’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. Specifically, on Lyra, still sitting on the ground, tears running quietly down her face. He couldn’t get his head around it. That attack had come from a first-year student.
From his left, Ronald’s voice broke through the silence.
"Lord Eric, what was that? How does a first-year pull off something like that? And with the lightning element, no less." He shook his head slowly. "Lord Necrotize has told us that lightning surpasses every other element in raw power, but we never had any real proof of that. And now a first-year student just demonstrated it. Whatever that was, it had to be at minimum a Rank Three spell. How does a first-year reach Rank Three that quickly?"
Eric glanced at Ronald. He exhaled slowly. Then his gaze drifted back to the screen.
"You’re right that none of us have ever seen lightning used like that," he said. "Lord Necrotize has used Lightning Chain, yes, but he exists outside our standard frame of reference. What that girl just did, however, is the most powerful lightning-based attack we’ve ever had documented knowledge of." He paused. "But there’s something else."
He turned to look directly at Ronald.
"That attack she just used isn’t Rank Three."
He let it sit for a moment.
"It’s Rank One."
The silence that followed lasted exactly one second.
"What."
Ronald’s eyes went wide. Around him, every professor who had been listening did the same, jaws slack, expressions caught somewhere between disbelief and total confusion.
"Lord Eric, what are you saying?" Ronald pressed, his voice climbing slightly. "Rank One? That was clearly Rank Three at the absolute minimum. You saw what it did. It reduced a Centarian Monkey to ash. Yes, it’s on the weaker end of Rank Three monsters, but a Rank Three monster is still a Rank Three monster. How does a Rank One attack do that?"
Eric’s expression didn’t waver.
"Ronald, you’re making a flawed assumption. A spell’s rank isn’t determined by its destructive output. It’s determined by how much mana the caster puts into it." He folded his hands. "Generally speaking, spells that consume more mana tend to produce more destruction, which is why we’ve fallen into the habit of conflating the two. But that attack used remarkably little mana. Far less than what a Rank Three spell actually requires."
Ronald looked like he’d been struck. He opened his mouth, closed it, and couldn’t find anything to say.
From the back, a junior professor raised his hand carefully.
"Lord Eric, if you don’t mind, may I ask something?"
"Go ahead."
"How were you able to determine that from here? Because from where I’m sitting, I can’t read anything. That attack looked like Rank Three to me in every way."
Eric glanced at him, and allowed himself a small smile.
"That’s not something you’ll be able to see for a while yet. Perceiving mana density within an active attack requires you to reach Rank Eight yourself. Once you’re there, you’ll be able to see exactly how much mana is being used in any given technique." He turned his head to the right, where a figure in a black long coat sat quietly, dark hair, and an expression that could only be described as permanently unimpressed.
Nicholas.
"What do you think, Nicholas?" Eric asked. "Now that you’ve seen it."
Nicholas looked at Eric first. Then he glanced around at the other professors, who had all turned toward him with undivided attention.
He spoke calmly, without drama.
"Lord Eric is correct. That was not a Rank Three spell." A brief pause. "It was Rank One."
He said nothing more than that.
But somehow, coming from Nicholas, the words settled over the room with an air of finality, and one by one, the professors around him stopped arguing with what they’d seen, and simply accepted it.
No one questioned Nicholas a second time.
The respect the professors held for him ran almost as deep as what they felt for Eric himself, and for good reason. Nicholas was the youngest person in the Empire’s history to achieve his rank. His name sat at the very top of the list of candidates to succeed Lord Eric as Chancellor of this Academy. Every professor in that room understood, on some level, that they were sitting next to someone who would one day be the most powerful figure within these walls.
So when he spoke, people listened.
What none of them knew, what not a single one of them could have imagined, was that the man they held in such high regard was at the center of a plan that would become the most catastrophic event in the Academy’s history. Something that would shake each and every one of them to their core.
Nicholas stared at the screen with his usual unreadable calm. His gaze drifted, and landed on Necrotize.
Then, slowly, that calm hardened into something else entirely.
***
Deep within the forest, in a pocket of shadow that the Academy’s surveillance had never reached, nearly a hundred figures stood in silence.
Every one of them wore a black robe.
Together, they had drawn a large circle into the earth. Inside it, they had inscribed a five-pointed star, and within that, they had written incantations and forbidden texts in languages that had no place in any sanctioned tome.
One of them stepped forward and spoke.
"We must succeed today. We have worked toward this for years, more years than most of us care to count. Today is when we collect what we are owed." A pause. "Lord Eighteen has given much to see this through, and we are grateful. Every one of us came here carrying a wish. A dream. Something we were told we could never have." The voice rose, low and steady, like the pull of a tide. "Today, we take it. Let carnage dance as a sea of blood flows beneath it."
A single hand rose into the air.
"All praise be to Death."
The words rippled outward, and one by one, then all at once, a hundred hands lifted toward the darkness above the trees.
"All praise be to Death."
"All praise be to Death."
The chant rolled through the forest in waves, three times over, before fading into a charged and trembling silence.
Then they began.
The robed figures spread around the outer edge of the circle and started their incantations, low, rhythmic, layered on top of one another like something breathing. The moment the words began to flow, the star at the center of the circle ignited in a deep, luminous black, a color that had no right to produce light, and yet did.
From within that dark glow, shapes began to move.
Things that looked like they had once been human skeletons, now suspended in something viscous and black, drifting and circling through the ritual space like debris caught in a slow current. They moved without sound at first, just drifting, orbiting, until gradually they all began to converge on the center.
They collapsed inward.
The mass of black, skeleton-riddled liquid compressed itself into a single pulsing blob at the heart of the star, its surface writhing, skeletal faces half-emerging from its surface before sinking back in.
SKREEEEEEE—
A sound tore out of it. Shrieking. Wrong in a way that was difficult to describe, not just loud, but structurally incorrect, like something that shouldn’t exist producing noise just to prove that it did.
The figure who had spoken first moved to the front.
If anyone had been standing close enough to see beneath the shadow of his black hood, they would have found a smile there.
Not a pleasant one.
The kind of smile that belongs to someone who has been waiting a very long time, and has finally, finally run out of patience.