Chapter 226: The Hunt Had Begun. (2)
Etched into the pale skin above Nicholas’s chest was an intricate, jagged burn. It was gray and black, composed of impossible, non-Euclidean geometric angles that seemed to fold inward upon themselves when looked at directly. It looked like a miniature fractal of an obsidian web.
"It appeared twenty minutes after I stepped out of the VR pod," Nicholas said, his tone clinical, though the muscle in his jaw clenched tight.
"The medical droids told me it was a localized allergic reaction to the nutrient suspension fluid. Idiots. My family owns three medical conglomerates; I know what cellular necrosis looks like, and I know what ancient spatial branding looks like."
Nicholas buttoned his tunic back up, his eyes never leaving Creed’s.
"So let’s drop the charade, Class Captain. We didn’t just fail an assessment. We were dragged somewhere else."
Creed stared at him for three full seconds. His mind raced at terrifying speed, processing the data.
Nicholas has a mark. Nicholas remembers.
A tidal wave of profound, desperate relief slammed into Creed’s chest, so heavy he almost stumbled forward.
He wasn’t insane. The screaming darkness wasn’t a hallucination spawned by a broken psyche. It was real.
Yet, the moment the relief flared, Creed locked it in a mental vice and crushed it. Vulnerability in front of Nicholas Grey was an invitation to be dissected.
Nicholas was brilliant, cunning, and fundamentally self-serving. If Creed showed how deeply shattered he truly felt, Nicholas would leverage it.
Creed crossed his arms, his posture settling into an easy, cold nonchalance.
"The web," Creed said, voice flat, testing the waters. "You were hanging from it like a prize fly."
Nicholas didn’t flinch, but his pupils contracted violently.
"And you were standing at the edge of the chasm," Nicholas fired back, his voice tightening. "Looking down at me while three different dimensional faults tore the sky in half."
Nicholas took a step closer, his aristocratic composure cracking just enough to reveal the cold terror underneath.
"What did you do, Walden? What did you say to that entity?"
Creed raised an eyebrow, maintaining a stone-cold expression. "Why don’t you tell me? You seemed to have front-row seats."
"Don’t play dumb with me!" Nicholas hissed, his hands curling into tight fists. "I saw the memory constructs! I saw the shattered stars, the armada of dimensional ships, and the seventeen rifts opening across the ancient void! I saw you, or whatever cosmic artifact was shoved into your skull twelve thousand years ago! The entity told you to choose! And then..."
Nicholas stopped. He pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead, a look of genuine, terrifying frustration warping his features.
"And then... it’s blank," Nicholas whispered, his breath shallow. "I remember the entity’s voice rattling inside my teeth. I remember the word Convergence. And then I woke up in the pod, choking on gel, with this damn burn on my collarbone."
Nicholas looked up, his silver eyes burning into Creed’s.
"You remember what you chose. Tell me what you did to us."
Creed looked at him, and for the first time that morning, the corner of Creed’s mouth pulled up into a genuine, albeit deeply bitter, smile.
"I don’t know," Creed said softly.
Nicholas’s face twisted in disgust. "Do you really think I’m that gullible?"
"I don’t care what you think, Nicholas," Creed said, stepping forward until they were barely a foot apart.
The sheer, unyielding weight of Creed’s Will—the same terrifying, unshakeable intent that had held off the Apex Arena guardians—flared quietly behind his eyes.
"I woke up in my bed smelling laundry detergent. My connection to my summons is dead silence. And my own memory ends right at the word ’Choose’. If I made a deal with that thing, I got swindled out of the receipt."
Nicholas stared at him, his analytical gaze scanning Creed’s micro-expressions with mechanical precision.
He looked for the telltale signs of a lie—the pulse in the carotid artery, the dilation of the pupils, the tension in the collar.
He found none. Creed was telling the absolute, horrifying truth.
Nicholas slowly let out a long, ragged exhale, running a hand through his silver hair, abandoning his usual vanity entirely.
"Fucking hell," Nicholas breathed, the profanity sounding alien coming from such a refined mouth. "We’re flying blind."
"Worse than blind," Creed replied calmly, leaning back against the tree. "We’re marked cattle. And the wolves are already circling the pen."
Nicholas’s sharp intellect kicked back into gear, his panic immediately folding away beneath layers of rapid calculation. He paced the width of the dampener field, muttering beneath his breath.
"The assessment wasn’t random," Nicholas said, his eyes darting as he assembled the puzzle pieces.
"Think about it, Walden. G-Hall’s virtual environment is supposed to be mathematically balanced for first-year Awakened.
Even with an elevated difficulty for Hope Candidates, the system shouldn’t have had the algorithmic parameters to generate a Greater Beast King capable of unraveling VR physics. It wasn’t an academy test. The academy was being used as a conduit."
"A backdoor," Creed noted, his mind syncing with Nicholas’s deduction. "Someone—or something—overrode the VR pods to locate specific signatures. You and me."
"Not just someone," Nicholas corrected sharply, turning around. "After I woke up, I pulled five years of confidential academy administrative archives using my family’s remote clearance.
The Ambassadors Academy isn’t just an elite training ground for the Hope Alliance. Three hundred years ago, this entire floating campus was built directly on top of the ruins of an ancient facility known as the Accord Bastion."
Creed’s eyes narrowed slightly. "The Accord?"
"A multi-species treaty signed at the end of the First Interstellar Convergence," Nicholas said, words spilling rapidly.
"An agreement between human pioneers and entities from the deeper dimensional layers to lock away the ’Keys’ that could trigger dimensional collapse. Walden... the academy’s core reactor isn’t an energy plant. It’s an anchor. A cage."
Nicholas walked up to Creed, his expression intensely serious.
"Whatever is inside you somehow resonated with the anchor beneath the academy. That’s why the portal ripped open in your room. That’s why the entity could reach through the simulation and pull us into that chasm. You aren’t just an anomaly, Creed. You are a walking lightning rod for the ancient Accord."
Creed listened, the pieces clicking into a terrifying, cohesive tapestry. The Old Monk’s cryptic ramblings about his parents, about "debts" that could never be repaid, about him being a "pawn meant to flip the board"... it all tied back to this cosmic rot.
His parents hadn’t just abandoned him in Section 7; they had hidden him in the dirt of a decaying world to keep him from acting as the key to a cosmic vault.
"And Marcus Delacroix?" Creed asked, his eyes gleaming with dangerous clarity. "Where does that arrogant idiot fit into this?"
Nicholas let out a humorless laugh. "Our petty little Student Union plot? It just got a hell of a lot more critical.
Marcus’s family isn’t just wealthy donors; the Delacroix syndicate holds the primary logistics contract for the academy’s lower sub-levels. The Path Resonator building isn’t just an advanced training gym, Creed. Its deep-basement conduits tap directly into the Accord Anchor."
Creed’s breath stilled. "The after-hours access badge."
"Exactly," Nicholas said, his eyes flashing with the cold brilliance that made him terrifying. "If we get Marcus’s clearance, we don’t just get double training speed. We get physical access to the diagnostic monitoring stations of the anchor itself.
We might be able to see what breached the simulation. We can find out what this mark is doing to our bodies. And most importantly... we can find out if there’s a way to shut the door before whatever is on the other side decides to finish the harvest."
Creed leaned his head back against the tree, letting out a short, dry chuckle.
Despite the sheer, suffocating weight pressing down on his chest—despite the absolute misery of losing his summons, his interface, and his certainty—a familiar, sharp ember ignited within his gut.
The board was set. The stakes were ridiculous. The enemy was an ancient, faceless cosmic nightmare.
Classic, Creed thought, a wild, sharp grin finally spreading across his face beneath the shadow of his headband. Just another Tuesday in hell.
"Thursday night," Creed said, his voice crisp, clear, and ringing with absolute command.
"Eight o’clock. We stick to the original plan with Marcus. We provoke him, we record the assault, and we strip him of his clearance."
Nicholas looked at Creed’s grin, and for a split second, a flicker of genuine wariness crossed the silver-haired prodigy’s eyes.
Even stripped of his summons, even with his interface broken, Creed Walden had the terrifying aura of a man who would bite a god’s jugular just to prove a point.
"And your condition?" Nicholas asked quietly, his eyes narrowing slightly. "Can you even fight without your summons?"
Creed pushed himself off the tree, rolling his shoulders until his spine gave off three crisp, rhythmic pops. He reached down, tapped the dimensional spear strapped across his back, and met Nicholas’s gaze with icy, unyielding blue eyes.
Creed’s voice was smooth as velvet and sharp as obsidian. "Worry about your own reflections. When Marcus steps out of line, I won’t need a cheat code to put his head through the pavement."
Nicholas stared at him for a beat, then reached down and retrieved the privacy disc from the grass.
The gray barrier vanished with a faint pop, returning the ambient sounds of the morning breeze and distant academy chimes.
"Thursday, then," Nicholas said smoothly, adjusting his collar and turning his back, his aristocratic swagger returning in full force as he walked away.
"Try not to pass out from your headache before then, Class Captain. It would be dreadfully boring to save the world by myself."
Creed watched him disappear down the stone pathway until the silver hair was lost in the crowd.
Alone once more, Creed reached up and touched the fabric of the headband. Beneath the cloth, the mark pulsed once, cold and distant, like a heartbeat waiting for an answer.
Creed exhaled slowly, squared his shoulders, and stepped out of the shadows of the weeping willows, striding back toward the main boulevard with his chin held high.
Let the academy whisper. Let the seniors plan their ambushes.
They thought he was a fallen prodigy clinging to broken dreams.
They had no idea the hunt had already begun.