The transition felt like drowning in reverse—instead of water forcing its way into lungs, reality itself was being extracted from Niko's body, leaving a hollowness that screamed wrongn. His vision fractured into kaleidoscopic fragments before reassembling into something that approximated normalcy but fundamentally wasn't. Beside him, Ayesha gasped, her hand tightening around his with enough force to hurt.
They stood in a corridor that mimicked Grimore Academy's architecture the way a corpse mimics a living person—similar enough to recognize, wrong enough to nauseate. The stone walls curved at angles that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space, creating perspectives that made Niko's eyes water when he tried to focus. The air itself felt thicker, viscous, as if they were breathing liquid shadow rather than atmosphere. Behind them, the rift pulsed with sickly luminescence, a doorway back to reality that suddenly seemed impossibly fragile.
"Don't look at the walls too long," Ayesha warned, her voice strained but maintaining that core of determination that Niko had learned to rely on. "I think the geometry here is non-Euclidean. Prolonged observation might compromise our spatial cognition."
"Speaking from experience?" Niko managed, forcing his mind to engage despite the instinctive terror clawing at his thoughts.
"Speaking from every theoretical text on dimensional incursions I've ever read." She released his hand slowly, as if testing whether they could maintain separate positions without losing each other. "Which also means our spirit energy might behave unpredictably here. The laws of physics are negotiable at best."
Niko extended his senses cautiously, letting his spirit energy flow outward in a controlled pulse. The feedback nearly staggered him. His vast pool of energy, normally so precisely defined within his soul's architecture, felt simultaneously compressed and infinite, as if the boundaries between his spirit and the environment had become permeable. He could sense signatures scattered throughout the shadow realm—human presences, some bright with life, others dim and fading, and some completely extinguished, leaving only residual echoes like spiritual afterimages.
"I count seventeen distinct signatures," he said quietly. "But three of them are just echoes. They're gone."
Ayesha's expression hardened, grief flashing across her features before she locked it down behind professional focus. "Then we save the fourteen who aren't. Can you track them?"
"I can try." Niko pulled out his spirit compass, though he wasn't certain it would function in this environment. The device's needle spun erratically before finally settling on a direction that felt more like a suggestion than a certainty. "Closest signature is maybe three hundred meters that way. But distance might be meaningless here."
They moved deeper into the shadow realm's twisted corridors, and with each step, reality became more negotiable. Doorways opened into rooms that couldn't physically fit within the walls containing them. Staircases led upward and downward simultaneously, depending on which angle you approached from. Shadows moved independently of light sources, pooling in corners and occasionally reaching toward them with something uncomfortably close to intentionality.
The first body nearly broke Ayesha's composure.
They found her in what had once been a classroom—a first-year student whose name Niko couldn't recall, slumped against a wall that seemed to be slowly absorbing her physical form. Her eyes were open but empty, all consciousness devoured, leaving only a shell that the shadow realm was gradually incorporating into its architecture. Her spirit energy was completely gone, not dispersed but consumed, leaving a void that made Niko's soul ache in recognition of the wrongness.
"Catherine," Ayesha whispered, reading the nameplate on the girl's uniform. "Catherine Hawks. She disappeared four months ago. Rumor said she was expelled."
"We can't help her," Niko said, hating the words even as he forced them out. "But we can still reach the others."
Ayesha nodded stiffly, her grey eyes bright with unshed tears, but her voice remained steady when she spoke. "Then we keep moving. We don't let her death be meaningless."
The second signature led them to a vast chamber that Niko's spatial sense insisted shouldn't exist—a cathedral-sized space carved from shadow and stone, its ceiling lost in darkness that moved with predatory patience. And there, suspended in what appeared to be crystallized shadow formations, were three students. Niko recognized two immediately: Jennifer Zhao from Advanced Metaphysics, and Daniel Okonkwo, a third-year specializing in healing techniques.
The third figure made Ayesha gasp in recognition.
"Marcus!"
Marcus Chevalier hung motionless in his crystalline prison, his white skin ashen, his usually animated features slack with unconsciousness or something worse. But his spirit signature still pulsed with life, dim but persistent, like a candle refusing to gutter despite the wind.
Niko approached the formations cautiously, extending his energy sense to analyze their structure. "They're suspended in some kind of stasis configuration. The shadow matter is slowly draining their spirit energy, but the process is gradual. They're being preserved, kept fresh for extended feeding."
"Can we break them out?" Ayesha was already moving toward Marcus's prison, her hands glowing with precisely controlled spirit energy.
"Wait." Niko caught her arm, his mind screaming warnings. "Think about it. These three are positioned in the center of this chamber, perfectly visible, completely exposed. The other signatures I'm sensing are scattered and hidden. This is—"
"A trap," finished a voice from the shadows, and Niko spun toward it, his spirit energy flaring into combat configuration.
A figure emerged from the darkness—a student, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with dark and darker hair that seemed to blend with the shadows around him. He moved with the careful deliberation of someone conserving energy, and his spirit signature flickered erratically, fighting against corruption from prolonged exposure to the realm's wrongness.
"Who are you?" Niko demanded, positioning himself between the stranger and Ayesha.
"Adrian Markov. Fifth-year. Or I was, before I ended up here six months ago." The student's smile was bitter, exhausted. "You're the new arrivals, I assume? Fresh meat for the Devourer?"
"We're here to rescue survivors and shut this operation down," Ayesha said firmly, though her energy remained ready for combat. "How have you survived this long?"
Adrian laughed, a sound stripped of genuine humor. "Survived? That's generous. I've learned the rules, figured out how to hide my signature, scavenged what little spirit energy I could from this place's ambient reserves. But I'm not surviving—I'm just dying slower than the others."
He gestured toward the crystalline formations. "Those three are bait. The Devourer uses them to lure rescuers into the chamber, then seals the exits and feeds on everyone at once. I've watched it happen twice. Students from previous cycles, trying to save their friends."
"Previous cycles?" Niko felt pieces of Professor Morse's research align with horrible clarity. "How long has this been active?"
"This rift? Maybe a couple months. But the realm itself is ancient, and there are older sections deeper in." Adrian's expression grew haunted. "Sometimes I can hear echoes from past victims, spiritual residue that's soaked into the architecture. Decades of students, maybe centuries, all processed through this nightmare."
Ayesha studied Adrian carefully, and Niko could practically see her mind working through trust calculations. "If breaking them out triggers the trap, then we need a different approach. Can you show us where the other survivors are hiding?"
"I can show you where I've established safe zones—places where the realm's attention doesn't focus, dead angles in its perception." Adrian moved toward a section of wall that looked identical to every other surface. "But there's a cost for moving through here. Every time you use spirit energy, you announce your position. And the longer you stay, the more this place gets inside your head."
He pressed his hand against the wall, and a doorway irised open into a narrow passage that Niko's senses insisted led in five directions simultaneously. "There are three other survivors I know about. Two first-years who've been here maybe a week, and a second-year who's been smart enough to stay quiet. But—"
A sound echoed through the chamber, something between a hunting cry and a collapsing star, and the temperature dropped so precipitously that Niko could see his breath crystallize. The shadows pooling at the ceiling began to coalesce, forming shapes that hurt to perceive, impossible angles made manifest.
"It knows you're here," Adrian said, already moving toward his hidden passage. "That energy you used entering must have announced you like a dinner bell. We need to move now."
But Niko was looking at Marcus, at Jennifer and Daniel suspended in their crystalline prisons, their life forces slowly draining away. Behind him, the rift back to reality pulsed, still accessible but for how long? The entity was manifesting, bringing its full attention to bear on their location. They had seconds to make a choice.
"Niko." Ayesha's voice cut through his spiraling calculations, her hand finding his shoulder. "What's the play?"
He looked at her, seeing trust and determination in her grey eyes despite the terror that must be threatening to overwhelm her. His mind raced through scenarios, weighing risks against potential outcomes. Adrian offered knowledge of the realm and access to other survivors, but abandoning Marcus and the others to their slow death felt like a betrayal. Yet attempting rescue now, with the entity manifesting directly above them, could get them all killed.
The shadows overhead twisted into something approaching coherence, and Niko felt that same ancient intelligence from his scrying session focusing on him with predatory interest. *BRIGHT THING. YOU RETURNED TO ME. HOW DELIGHTFUL.*
The voice resonated not through his ears but directly into his spirit shard, promising consumption and eternal darkness.
"Choose now," Adrian urged, halfway through his hidden passage. "Save yourselves and maybe rescue the others later, or die here trying to be heroes."
Niko knew the logical answer. But looking at Marcus, remembering how they'd trained together, how the other student had always pushed him to trust his abilities, logic suddenly felt insufficient. Ayesha waited for his decision, ready to follow whichever path he chose, and that trust felt heavier than any burden he'd ever carried.