The world above was bedlam. The collapse of the southern barrier had been a curiosity. The deep, shuddering tremor that followed, accompanied by a wave of soul-deadening silence that snuffed out active spells and made mana feel sluggish, was outright terror.
In the VIP stands, dignitaries and family heads rose to their feet, questions and demands tearing from their throats. On the contest floor, students froze, their competitive fervor doused by primal fear.
In the ruins on the bluffs, Selene felt it. A wrongness that made the witch-blood in her veins curdle and the vampiric thirst recoil. "What was that?" she whispered.
Fen's silver eyes were wide, staring blankly at the coliseum. "A void… opened. It's… hungry. And she's coming."
"Who?" Kaelen asked, his hand on his weapon.
"Vance," Mira answered for him, her own ice affinity sensing the plummeting temperatures in specific, localized areas far below. "Her rage is a blizzard. And she's moving."
Beneath the coliseum, Iliana Vance strode through the aftermath of negation. The psionic dome around her flickered, but held, pushing back the dead air and the lingering unmasking effect. She was a statue of cold fury, her gown torn, her hair disheveled, blood drying beneath her nose. Kieran stumbled behind her, pale and shaking.
Her mind, a weapon honed over a century, was already assessing, calculating, discarding the failed plan and formulating a new one. The Heart-Shard was awake and volatile. Containing it now was impossible with her available resources. But it could still be a weapon. A deterrent.
And the boy. The Throne bastard.
Her psychic senses, vast as a weather system, swept outwards, ignoring the null-dead zone. She brushed against the panicked minds of students, the confused anger of guards, the calculating fear of her co-conspirators among the faculty.
Then she found it. A mind that was not a mind. A core that was a lattice of cold fire and sharp edges, wrapped in shadows that drank her psychic touch. It was moving, fast, through the lower storage levels.
There.
Status Check - Iliana Vance (Injured, Enraged)
Order: 6th (Monarch)
Rank: 7 (Late)
Mana Capacity: 42,000/68,000 (Severely depleted from negation defense)
Domain Seed: Garden of Subjugation (Damaged, Partially Active)
Psionic Pressure: Overwhelming (Focused)
She didn't shout. She didn't teleport. She simply willed the space between her and her target to compress.
Arlan, sprinting down a corridor, felt the world twist. The hallway in front of him didn't get longer; the exit at the end simply felt further away, an infinite recession born of psychic distortion. He skidded to a halt.
"Running is pointless, Arlan Thorne." Vance's voice echoed not in the air, but directly in his skull, cold and omnipresent. "You are a splinter. And I will pluck you out."
The walls around him groaned. Crates levitated and hurtled towards him, not thrown by telekinesis, but by the sheer command of her will that this space should reject him.
Arlan reacted. Spatial Rend. A silver slash of force cut through the air, not at the crates, but at the psychic field itself. It was like cutting water with a knife—a momentary part, then it flowed back. But it was enough. He Blinked forward twenty meters, the distorted space snapping back behind him with a sound like a whip-crack.
He burst out into a larger sub-coliseum service bay, filled with dormant cleaning golems and obstacle course parts. He had no chance in a direct confrontation. He needed terrain, chaos, something to disrupt her monolithic power.
"You break what you do not understand," Vance's voice pursued him. The very light in the bay dimmed, pressed down by her aura. The air grew thick and heavy, a physical weight seeking to crush him to his knees. Aura Pressure: Soul-Crushing Weight.
Arlan's legs trembled. His Chaos-Anchored Core flared, the negating veins burning bright, pushing back against the foreign law imposed on his personal space. He could stand, but moving was like wading through solid stone.
He turned.
Iliana Vance stood at the entrance he'd just used. She looked like an avenging spirit, her eyes glowing with soft psionic light. Kieran emerged behind her, his Force Aura reigniting, a murderous glare fixed on Arlan.
"You have cost me a divine artifact, months of planning, and the loyalty of useful idiots," Vance stated, her voice devoid of all academic pretense. "Your won't just be studied. I will personally dismantle you, and every secret you hold torn from its lattice before what remains of you is fed to the shard."
She raised a hand. The dormant cleaning golems around the bay shuddered, their eyes lighting up with stolen psionic fire. They turned, not towards dirt, but towards Arlan, their limbs moving with jerky, unnatural speed.
Status Check - Psionic Puppet (Cleaning Golem) x12
Order: 2nd (Adept)
Rank: 9 (Peak)
Class: N/A (Directly Controlled)
Note: Durability enhanced by Monarch's will.
Kieran grinned, cracking his knuckles. "I'm going to enjoy this, patchwork."
Arlan said nothing. His mind was a cold engine of survival. Vance was the threat. Kieran was a distraction. The golems were fodder. His mana was at 2800/4500 and dropping fast just resisting her aura.
He had one advantage: she was injured, her mana depleted. She was relying on her overwhelming quality of power to crush him quickly. He had to make it costly.
As the first golems lunged, Arlan didn't dodge. He stepped into their charge.
Umbral Shroud enveloped him, making him a blur. A golem swung a heavy limb. Arlan's hand, sheathed in a blade of spatial energy sharp enough to part atoms, passed through it. The limb clattered to the ground. He Voidstepped through the gap, appearing behind another golem, his free hand unleashing a point-blank Voidfire Bolt.
Purple fire, tinged with the faintest grey of negation, struck the golem's chest. It didn't explode. The fire clung and ate, dissolving psionic links and metal alike in seconds.
But Vance was not idle. A psionic lance, invisible to the eye, speared towards his mind. He felt it coming—a pressure behind his eyes. He couldn't block it. So he didn't try.
He let it in.
And directed it towards the Sundered Shield Fragment in his core.
The foreign psionic energy touched the fragment's containment lattice.
The fragment reacted with automatic, defensive negation.
The psionic lance unraveled before it could touch Arlan's consciousness. The feedback was minimal for him, a sharp headache.
For Vance, it was a screeching feedback loop into her damaged mental pathways. She staggered, a fresh trickle of blood coming from her ear.
"His core… it negates direct intrusion!" she hissed, her composure cracking further.
Seeing his aunt falter, Kieran roared and charged. His Force Aura condensed around his fist, aiming to pulverize Arlan with a single, concentrated Mountain Crusher Punch.
Arlan turned but didn't retreat. He met the charge, dropping low. At the last second, he didn't strike at Kieran. He slashed his spatial blade downward, at the floor between them.
Spatial Rend.
A micro-tear in reality, a foot long, opened in the stone. Kieran's foot, mid-stride, passed over it.
The spatial tear didn't cut his boot. Kieran's foot, from the ankle down, separated from his leg with a sound like a sigh. Not a clean cut, but a perfect, painless severance that for a millisecond didn't even bleed. Then reality reasserted itself, and agony and gore followed.
Kieran screamed, a high, wet sound, and collapsed, clutching the stump.
"KIERAN!" Vance's scream was raw, maternal fury overriding strategic thought. Her psionic aura detonated outward in a ring of visible, violet distortion.
The wave picked Arlan up and threw him across the bay like a doll. He hit a stack of metal barriers, the impact driving the air from his lungs, cracking ribs anew. His mana took a catastrophic hit from resisting the wave's sheer force.
Mana Capacity: 1150/4500
He struggled to his feet, vision swimming. Vance was kneeling by Kieran, staunching the bleeding with a psionic tourniquet, her back to him. The golems stood frozen, their controlling will distracted.
It was his only chance. He couldn't kill her. He couldn't even fight her.
He had to run. To the surface. To the chaos.
He gathered the dregs of his mana, ignoring the screaming pain in his core. He focused on the ceiling of the service bay, on the coliseum floor far above. He couldn't Voidstep that far. Not normally.
But he had the fragment. And he was out of options.
He pulled, not a lot, just a thread, from the lattice containing the Heart-Shard fragment. A whisper of Absolute Negation.
He channeled it into his next, and final, spatial ability.
Negating Step.
He didn't teleport through space. He took a step that negated the distance between his current point and a point fifty meters above, in the stands of the coliseum.
His application of his Null Intent and the Sundered Shield fragment was quite unique.
The effect was grotesque. The air where he'd been warped and screamed. A line of grey, like a pencil stroke on reality, connected his starting and ending points for a second before fading.
He appeared, stumbling, in a deserted service corridor behind the upper stands, vomiting blood from the backlash. The fragment in his core shivered violently, threatening to destabilize. He had maybe minutes before he lost consciousness from mana depletion and internal injuries.
But he was out. He was in the light, amidst the panicking crowd.
Below, in the bay, Iliana Vance felt the unique, gut-wrenching signature of negation-based spatial travel. She looked up, through layers of stone, with her mind's eye, and saw him—broken, but free.
Her face settled into a mask of glacial, unforgiving hatred. She tapped a comms unit on her wrist, her voice cutting through all Academy emergency channels.
"Security Directive Alpha. Arlan Thorne, 3rd Order, is a rogue anomaly responsible for the catastrophic event beneath the coliseum. He has grievously assaulted a proctor and is armed and extremely dangerous. Apprehend on sight. Deadly force authorized."
She looked down at her unconscious, maimed nephew, then back towards the surface where her prey had fled.
The Grand Melee was over.
The hunt had begun.