The scent of sulfur still clung to the paving stones where the phantom dagger had dissolved. Across the muster yard, recruits jostled and panicked, but the whisper from the shade stayed lodged in Vaylek's ears: Vanguard. The timeline was not an inert spool; it had teeth, snapping at every stitched-together lie he used to hide his identity. “Attention, slop-bloods!” Vondric’s voice, sharp and cutting, sliced through the lingering panic. He stood on a raised platform, arms crossed, a smirk twisting his lips. “Consider your orientation officially cut short. The Collegium requires… practical application. All Kinetic buffers, report to Drill Ring Gamma. Now.” Vaylek kept his chin dipped, swallowing the bile that surged whenever an untested novice barked orders at him. Narlo, pale and shaking, tugged at Vaylek’s sleeve. “Ring Gamma? Isn’t that… isn’t that where they keep the Gloom-Worms?” His voice was a pathetic squeak. “It’s where we go,” Vaylek grunted, forcing his tone flat. He followed the shuffling line of other freshmen support classes, their faces etched with dread. The path led them out into the institute's vast gravel yard, a sprawling expanse of churned mud crisscrossed by containment screens and pylon-mounted light-lenses. Overhead, the perpetual twilight of Ghavis pressed down, thick and gray. Vondric strode to the center, his strike-line peers forming a loose semicircle behind him. He gestured at a circular containment field, a shimmering dome of azure light. “Inside that delightful pen, we have a juvenile Slither-Maw. A mere hatchling, I assure you. But it’s skittish, and it responds to… movement.” His gaze pinned Vaylek. “Support ranks, your task is simple: keep it distracted while our duelists practice Loom-attunement. Think of yourselves as live bait. The squires need moving marks, and a riled beast provides excellent variability.” A murmur of protest rippled through the acolytes. Vaylek felt the familiar pressure behind his ribs, the sheer physical agony of letting a strutting insect demean him without tearing its throat out. “Unless you’d rather face disciplinary action for insubordination?” Vondric’s voice dipped, menacing. “Get in there.” Narlo whimpered, but Vaylek pushed him forward. They were shoved past the perimeter threshold, the azure screen humming as it sealed behind them. Inside, the air reeked of damp reptile hide and sour bile. A creature, no larger than a hound but all fangs and segmented carapace, thrashed in the center. Its many eyes, like polished jet beads, fixated on the influx of new bodies. “Alright, weaklings! Show us that kinetic talent!” Vondric barked from beyond the lattice. “Let’s see some inspiring distraction!” Vaylek forced a flailing stumble, mimicking the frantic retreat of the other students. He evaded the predator's lunges with calculated clumsiness, releasing tiny, dull pulses to twitch the creature's antennae toward dirt patches. The beast was clumsy, blind on its left flank. Itching heat spread across Vaylek's palms—the raw, suffocating urge to crush its skull against the stone beneath his boots. Above, the Loom’s silver text, usually a silent observer, flickered violently. [Warning: Reality-Tear Detected – Sector 00-G: Shroudspire Main Quad] [Anomaly Size: Catastrophic. Threat Level: Judgement-Class] The runes pulsed, bleeding carmine. A tectonic grinding tore through the yard, deeper than thunder, more resonant than any breach Vaylek had witnessed since the fall. It wasn't a slow seepage; the stone foundations wrenched apart in an instant. The ward screens along the yard perimeter snapped with sparks of white ozone. The flags buckled underfoot. A fissure, black as pitch, split open in the sky above the spire's crown, vomiting cold void-rot into the daylight. Through it, something vast and jointed dragged its weight downward. [Abomination – Void-Drifter Alpha: Breach Confirmed] [Hostile Entity Emerging. Eliminating Collegium Defenses.] One of the massive conduit pylons, a pillar of hardened Aetherium, exploded into molten shrapnel. The outer fortress ward shrieked a dying chord as the Void-Horror, a mass of writhing shadow and basalt-black plates, crashed through. The ward crust blew apart in glittering shards. The beast was three stories of segmented armor, its jointed limbs gouging furrows through the yard's stone foundation. Its snout split vertically along a seam of translucent serrated spikes, whistling with a pitch that set the cadets' ears bleeding. Panic tore through the yard. The upperclass duelists stumbled back, weapon hilts slipping through numb fingers. The juvenile creature in the pen burrowed frantically into the muck to escape the apex scent. The monstrosity ignored the fleeing seniors, its compound lenses locking onto a cluster of trapped support initiates near the collapsed gate. A girl in a gray cadet tunic lost her footing on the rubble, sprawling onto her stomach directly beneath the creature's barbed foreleg. The restraint Vaylek had forced on his limbs tore loose. Every drop of calculated cowardice, every second spent pretending to cringe before novices—gone. Salythe's hollow stare in the fallen timeline flared across his vision. *Never again.* He abandoned the low, clumsy crouch. Gravitic density spiked through the mud, a shockwave that flattened the surrounding gravel and knocked the shrieking cadets flat. He lunged right, his hand snatching the nearest steel: an iron practice spatha discarded by a fleeing senior, stuck point-first in a dirt berm. He ripped the iron clear. The blunt edge caught no gleam from the shattered lanterns, but the air around the blade screamed as his kinetic density wrapped the metal in a pale vacuum envelope. He crossed thirty paces of broken flagstone without kicking up dust, a streak of gray wool through the falling soot. Before the beast's claw could crush the girl's ribs, Vaylek vaulted from the stones. The thrust of his boots pulverized the flagstones below, hurtling him past the beast's ribbed torso straight toward the central nerve nexus above its neck. He torqued his hips in midair, bringing the blunt iron around in a flat horizontal crescent. No Loom sigil flared; the cut drew entirely on the condensed kinetic density of the old front lines, compressing the atmosphere into an invisible monomolecular wire. The beast made no sound. Along the path of the swing, a pale horizontal seam opened across its shell, bisecting the crown, the mandibles, and the chitin plates behind them. Both halves separated with a sickening wet heave before slumping into puddles of black ichor that hissed into white steam against the gravel. The cadet on the ground choked on the stench, staring up through dirt-streaked lashes. Vaylek dropped back to his boots without rattling his knees, the practice sword resting loose at his side. With a single sharp snap of his forearm, he flicked the black sludge off the dull metal. Across the perimeter, dozens of upperclassmen and fledglings stood frozen, mouths slack. Vondric remained paralyzed against a shattered barrier post, his lungs refusing to take in air. He looked at them all, his eyes burning with an ancient, terrifying coldness. His voice, when it came, was a low rasp, cutting through the silence like a shard of ice. “Class dismissed.”

Class Dismissed