The morning sky was too quiet.
Not peaceful—unnaturally still. As if the air itself held its breath.
Mist clung low to the ridgelines, curling around the roots of ancient trees like wary fingers. The birds that had heralded the last two dawns were silent. Even the insects, which usually filled the jungle with their rhythmic drone, had quieted to a hush, as though they too sensed something about to rupture.
The second day of the Island Trials had begun, outwardly no different from the last. But there was a tension threaded through the air, barely perceptible yet undeniable.
Scattered groups of students emerged from their night shelters—lean-tos made of folded sigil-woven leaves, carved-out alcoves in coral walls, suspended hammocks strung between memory-forged anchors. Sleep still clung to their limbs, but the adrenaline of the day to come was already rising in their blood.
Today was the Individual Rankings Challenge.
No teams. No alliances. No one to watch your back.
Only one rule: gather as many sigil-marked tokens as possible before sundown. Each token represented a point. Each point, a path toward advancement—or elimination.
Toji stood atop a weathered bluff near the island's center, its black volcanic stone etched with the slow grind of ocean wind and time. From here, the island opened up before him like the inside of a cracked geode—jagged beauty layered in harsh geometry.
His uniform was torn at the shoulder from yesterday's gauntlet, and blood had dried in brown arcs across the hem of his cloak. Some of it was his. Most of it wasn't.
His hands were steady. His eyes were sharper.
Ahead lay a labyrinth of tiered hills, thick with heat-glossed ferns and bone-pale trees whose leaves moved ever so slightly against the breeze. Beyond that, deep jungles cloaked the island's heart like a coiled sentinel. And farther still—where clouds touched water—coastal ridges shimmered with mana residue, pulsing like veins beneath skin.
The hunt had already begun.
From his vantage point, Toji watched students dash across the terrain—blurs of color and motion, echo-tech flaring as some sprinted, others vanished into flashstep cloaks or warped down into Echo channels. One used a gravitational whip to slingshot themselves between two cliff walls. Another plummeted from the canopy, caught midair by a spectral glider stitched from memory-ribbons.
Drones—small and silent—floated above them, their scrying lenses cold and expressionless. Observers from the Arcanum watched from afar. Somewhere, a bell rang to mark the hour.
Toji narrowed his eyes.
He'd already collected two tokens. Hidden them. But today wasn't about survival. It was about proof. And something in him—a low, coiling instinct—was warning that proof would come sooner than expected.
Then came the sound.
Not a cry. Not a roar.
A hum.
Low at first, like a chime stretched too far, buried beneath the wind.
Wrong.
It vibrated against the edges of perception. Not loud, but absolute—as if it belonged in another layer of reality and had just slipped into this one by mistake.
Toji turned slowly toward the source.
The sky—cloudless just moments before—trembled.
And then—
It cracked.
A jagged fissure tore down from the clouds, slicing across the heavens like a black lightning bolt held in suspension. It didn't glow or flash—it consumed. The air around it bent and convulsed, as if gravity had forgotten how to behave.
Sunlight fractured. Shadows twisted into the wrong shapes. The breeze stopped entirely.
Toji's heartbeat stilled in his chest.
Something was coming through.
Something wrong.
And it wasn't alone.
—
Kaela's hand froze mid-gesture.
She had just finished binding her seventh token—threading it through a loop in her cloak—when the air changed.
No sound reached her ears at first, but the wind hesitated, as if the jungle itself were uncertain of the next breath.
She stood in a clearing framed by giant fronds and bioluminescent mushrooms, the remnants of her last encounter scattered around her: a smoking charm-tag lodged in the dirt, illusion dust still curling off a stunned opponent, a foxfire wisp floating above like a curious sentinel.
Then she felt it.
Not through her skin. Not through her senses.
Through the kitsune.
The fox within her snarled—not with fear, but with alert recognition, like a wild thing catching the scent of another predator. Its tails flared in her soulscape, not out of rage but instinct. Old instinct. Ancient instinct.
Kaela straightened slowly, eyes lifting to the canopy above. The light filtering through the trees had taken on an oily shimmer—pale hues gone wrong, like color remembered incorrectly.
And then the tremor struck.
Not in the ground.
In the sky.
A crack sounded—not thunder, but something deeper. A tearing of boundary, not atmosphere.
Kaela sprinted toward higher ground, vaulting off stones and twisted roots, weaving between vines like a shadow in motion. The kitsune's energy flickered at her heels in a lazy swirl of flame.
She broke through the final tier of trees and found herself at the ridge—staring into a wound in the heavens.
The sky had split.
Not with lightning. Not with divine judgment.
With something colder.
A long vertical seam hovered far above the island, splitting the clouds like a needle piercing fabric. Around it, gravity twisted—small stones lifted into the air, leaves reversed their fall mid-descent. Mana currents spiraled around the rift like vortexes gone mad.
And through it—
Shapes.
Not fully formed, not yet.
But moving.
Kaela's hand instinctively went to her sigil tags.
Behind her, something shimmered. She spun.
A beast emerged from the trees.
Not a native creature. Not even a manifested Echo.
Something else.
Six-legged, with too many joints and a smooth, eyeless head. Its flesh was patchwork—stitched with memory threads that didn't belong to it. As if it had been pieced together from stolen thoughts.
It growled—no, not a growl. A whisper. A broken syllable repeated over and over like a corrupted mantra.
Kaela's eyes narrowed. Her tail flared into existence, crackling with pale foxfire.
"Well," she murmured, lips curling into a tight smile.
—
Han slowed his breathing.
Every inhale was a measured calculation. Every exhale had to be near-silent.
He crouched low behind the moss-slick trunk of a half-fallen tree, knees bent over damp loam, the scent of wet bark and faint ash stinging his nostrils. His heart hammered beneath his ribs like a drum caught mid-rhythm—one beat off, like something was wrong in the arrangement of the world. The fractured sky above bled too much color. Streaks of otherworldly light poured through the seams in the atmosphere, licking across the canopy in ghostly arcs of violet and burnt indigo. Mana was leaking. The air pulsed with it, unstable and wrong.
Something had torn through the veil.
Echo beasts roamed now—displaced, frenzied by the breach. Students had scattered across the island like leaves in a storm, some still trying to gather tokens, others simply trying to survive.
And in the middle of it all… this.
Three figures stood in the clearing ahead, speaking in low, deliberate voices.
Han watched them from the shadows. Every instinct told him to stay hidden.
They weren't staff.
They weren't students.
They didn't belong here.
Their presence was like a dropped tuning fork vibrating on the edge of his nerves—too sharp, too smooth, tuned to some internal frequency that had no place in this world. Like a song from a language that never meant to be sung aloud.
The one called Nos—short, lean, with eyes that glittered with predatory playfulness—kicked at a broken school drone near his boot. "Pathetic," he sneered, voice carrying through the glade like broken glass. "They really thought they could contain the tunnels. Cute."
Behind him, another voice—deeper, refined, with razor-edge disdain—chimed in. "Nos, you're wasting time again." He was taller, lean beneath a hooded shroud, and walked with a calculated stride that made every step sound louder than it was. His boots cracked dry leaf litter as he circled the clearing, always watching, always measuring.
"I don't like it here," said the third one—Vero. Her voice was soft, almost bored, but her hands betrayed her mood. They were stained with shimmering liquid that pulsed unnaturally—a kind of memory-ink, flowing in veiny rivulets across her fingers and into her sleeves. "Too much resonance. Too much grief."
Han froze.
Grief.
She said it like it was a scent—something she could taste in the air. Like grief had a texture. A weight. A flavor.
"Come on, Vero," Nos said, flashing her a crooked grin. "You saw the breach. We're not the only ones crawling through the seams. Might as well enjoy the hunt."
"…Tusk?" Vero asked after a beat.
The last of them, Tusk, rumbled from deeper in the trees. He didn't speak so much as growl—a low, thunderous noise like a landslide beginning.
They didn't wear academy colors. No rank badges. No sigil tags. Their clothes were chaotic—scavenged and rearranged, armor strapped over robes and bits of magical circuitry sewn into mismatched cloth. Red threads wound around their limbs like snakes. Their insignias weren't House crests or Echo licenses. They were marks of something else. Something feral.
Han's knuckles flexed.
Mercenaries. Rogue Echo-users.
No one expected them to be here—not in the middle of the Trials. Not on academy grounds.
No one expected the island sky to shatter.
He could feel it now—the way mana bent around them. The island's pulse was off-beat. Skewed. Like something ancient was waking beneath the surface and the ground hadn't yet decided whether to break open or swallow itself whole.
The floating gauntlet just behind his shoulder twitched, responding to his rising tension. Inside, Momo stirred.
"They're not students," Momo said quietly, his voice pulsing through the thread-bridge into Han's mind. "They're hunting."
Han touched the floating weapons behind him—Stormhold.
Twin gauntlets, designed not for brute strength but for precision and expression. Echo-channelled constructs. The left was heavy, marked with reinforced sigil-locks, and housed Momo—their link, their core. The right shimmered faintly, covered in the delicate lattice of his most precious innovation: the Thread of Quiet Grief.
He had made it himself.
A thread born not from cloth, but from memory. Woven from sleepless nights, from loss, from a funeral that never got to end. It was the only thing that didn't break when the others failed. The only thread that Stormhold accepted without splintering.
He kept it bound around his fingers like a promise.
The trio moved again. Vero stalked toward the edge of the glade, nose tilted like she was tracking something through sound alone.
"We split here," Nos said. "Sweep the southern teams. Vero, take the ridge. Tusk with me."
Han's jaw clenched.
The Class B teams were down there. They wouldn't stand a chance.
He couldn't wait any longer.
He moved.
No signal. No warning. Just a silent flash forward. Stormhold snapped to life.
The gauntlets spun out from behind him like wings drawn from breath. The left blinked into defensive position overhead while the right swept low, energy cracking against the dirt. The gauntlet carrying Momo hissed open with a quiet exhale of pressure, and the tiny creature leapt out, his tail blazing with mnemonic current.
Momo hit a root and bounded forward with a chirped, squeaking battle cry. Sparks trailed in his wake.
"What—" Vero started, twisting to face the sound.
But it was too late.
Han sent the right gauntlet surging forward, guided by the Thread of Quiet Grief. It dropped from the sky like a ghost-fist, slamming into the earth between them with a quiet boom. Not just force—emotion. Memory-fire radiated outward in jagged spirals. Fragments of grief burst in the air like glass poppies: childhood abandonment, screams in hospital beds, the hollow of someone who left and never came back.
Vero stumbled, shrieking at the pressure.
Tusk roared and lunged from the tree line, unsheathing a cleaver that looked like it had been ripped from a siege engine.
Han didn't flinch.
He pivoted, weaving his hands in looping sign patterns, delicate and swift. The gauntlets spun in answer. Stormhold danced like a twin-star system.
Tusk's cleaver descended.
Momo intercepted—tiny paws wide, releasing a spark-burst of defensive resonance. The blow struck but slowed—just enough. Just enough for Han to vault sideways and send the right gauntlet directly into Tusk's ribs.
The impact didn't bleed.
It bloomed.
A wave of raw emotional feedback exploded from the contact—feelings Tusk had buried or stolen or never truly processed. The pain of being forgotten. Of betrayal. Of being reduced to weapon instead of person.
He didn't scream from pain.
He screamed because the feeling made him remember.
Nos cursed and hurled three blades, each dripping with blood-forged glyphs. Han spun, the left gauntlet flaring out in a perfect arc, catching each with sigil-laced shielding around Momo's housing.
"You fight like a memory eater," Nos spat, circling to flank.
Han didn't reply.
He didn't need to.
He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, raising both hands.
Stormhold responded.
The gauntlets began to rotate outward, spiraling around him. First slow, then fast. The resonance in the air changed—no longer grief, no longer restraint.
This was resolve.
Momo rose, suspended by strands of sigil-thread from the gauntlet cores, his body flaring with synchronized mnemonic bursts. Like lanterns being lit one by one.
"Don't let him finish it!" Vero shouted, brandishing a short, serrated blade and rushing in.
Too late.
Han snapped both fingers.
Stormhold converged.
The gauntlets slammed together mid-air.
There was no explosion—only silence.
The kind of silence that bends reality.
Three seconds of suspended compression. The world twisted inward—light folded, sound warped. Nos, Vero, and Tusk froze mid-step, caught in a field of broken chronology and shattered sentiment. Their Echo signatures scrambled into noise.
Han moved.
Each step clean.
Right gauntlet to the chest—Nos collapsed, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Left to Vero's arm—her blade dropped and her knees followed.
Both gauntlets twitched outward and carved a sigil into the ground beneath Tusk. It flared.
And detonated.
The brute was launched backward, crashing into a tree hard enough to splinter bark.
Then: stillness.
Only breath.
Only Han's heartbeat.
Stormhold drifted back to their place behind him, purring softly with depleted resonance. Momo climbed back into the left gauntlet with a groggy blink, licking his paw.
"Not bad," the hamster muttered. "Stormhold's finally synced."
Han didn't speak.
He stared down at his hands.
The Thread of Quiet Grief was still intact.
For once.
He exhaled slowly.
And then, high above—
The sky cracked again.
This time louder. Deeper. Like a god breaking something sacred. A massive fracture tore through the clouds, mana bleeding through in violet-black waves.
And then—
A scream.
Not human.
Not beast.
Something ancient.
Something real.
Han turned toward the sound.
And walked toward it.