Chapter 6 An Apex Predator.

Day two of the gruesome training was a waking nightmare.

The students had already started giving up, some throwing up violently, others fainting mid-sprint and a dozen carried to the emergency ward with severe mana exhaustion.

Yet, through the panic, the realization had dawned on them: their parents wouldn’t come to their aid until the term was over, whether they survived this military encampment or what came after it, even worse the term was far from over.

During the run, Belle caught up with Lexi, breathing heavily, “Hey, Lexi,” Belle panted, matching her stride. “Where have you been for goodness sake? You weren’t even in the dorm last night!”

Lexi froze internally, her breath catching in her throat as her boots faltered on the stone. The secret felt incredibly heavy on her tongue as panic seized her chest.

She thought frantically for a lie, her silence stretching too long until Belle snapped her fingers right in front of her face.

“Earth to Lexi! What is wrong with you?”

The pressure snapped something inside Lexi as she turned a cold, defensive glare toward her friend. “You know what, Belle? I think it’s time you stopped poking around my business.”

Belle’s jaw dropped, confused and shocked by the sudden hostility, she tried to counter. “Lexi, I’m just trying to—”

But Lexi didn’t give her the chance as she picked up her pace and ran further ahead into the crowd. Inside, Lexi’s heart was pounding so loudly it drowned out the sound of the stamping boots around her.

A wave of immediate regret washed over her, but it was already done. She had to keep Belle away as to not spill anything.

Far behind her in the pack, Belle slowed, watching Lexi disappear into the crowd of runners. First the vanishing at night, then the excuses, and now this. Belle set her jaw and kept running, but something quiet and bitter had begun to take root in her chest.

Up ahead in the pack, she caught up with Chadwick. She didn’t seem at all interested in talking to him, but the boy was insistent, shifting his stride to run right alongside her.

“Hey,” Chadwick murmured, wiping sweat from his forehead. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m not in the mood for small talk,” Lexi snapped, keeping her eyes forward.

“You should be grateful you know,” Chadwick shot back in a hurried whisper. “If I hadn’t stepped in yesterday, you’d have had your memory forcefully wiped and your brain would be mush.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Lexi said dryly, accelerating to get away from him, but Chadwick easily caught up with her again, his expression hardening.

“I’m serious…” For a moment he thought, realizing he didn’t know her name, “Whatever your name is, you better keep to your promise,” he warned. “Mr Dupond isn’t a very nice man if he gets crossed. I wouldn’t suggest testing him.”

Lexi abruptly paused her run as she looked at Chadwick, “What would he do, exactly? What if I went up to the magisters right now and told them that the Mage of Ruin is indeed behind our very walls?”

Chadwick’s soul nearly left his body as he immediately slapped a hand over her mouth, his eyes darting around in panic. “Are you insane?”

“You two! What do you think you’re doing?”

A voice shattered their conversation, the academy instructor marched towards them, his face twisted in deep irritation.

Lexi and Chadwick straightened up instantly, stepping away from each other as they greeted the instructor with a slight bow.

“Why have you stopped running? What seems so incredibly important to talk about that it couldn’t wait until the sun went down?”

Chadwick swallowed hard, opening his mouth to wave it off with an excuse. “Sir, we were just—”

“He was the one bugging me, sir,” Lexi cut in smoothly, her voice calm as she pointed a finger at Chadwick. “I was trying to complete my laps, but he kept pulling me aside to talk.”

The instructor’s gaze snapped to Chadwick, raising an eyebrow, “Is this true, Mr. Brook?”

Chadwick stared at Lexi in utter disbelief, his mouth opened slightly, stunned by the betrayal, but knowing what was at stake if the instructor dug deeper, he forced himself to nod. “Yes, sir.”

“Very well,” the instructor said, “We have no room for distractions in this vanguard. You shall be punished for disrupting the drills.”

Chadwick’s eyes widened in panic, “Sir, please, I apologize, it was a lapse in judgment, I can—”

But the instructor was having none of it. He raised a hand, cutting Chadwick off with a look that promised a very long, very painful afternoon in the blood arenas.

Lexi meanwhile continued her lap with a knot of regret tightening in her stomach. She couldn’t resist looking back over her shoulder and through the crowd of exhausted students, she watched the instructor roughly grab Chadwick by the shoulder leading him away toward the subterranean arenas.

She took a deep, shaky breath, forcing her eyes forward, and kept running.

Later that morning, at the combat stations, Lexi’s fists found the training dummy with clean, practiced angles—elbows tucked, hips driving through every strike. The drill instructor stopped counting and watched her through three full sequences. “You’ve had formal training,” he said at last. “Family forms?” Lexi nodded once and struck again. Her father had drilled her in the old close-combat forms since she was old enough to stand, and whatever else this academy had taken from her, her body had not forgotten them.

By the time the breakfast bell finally rang, the dining hall was filled with students. Lexi sat alone at the edge of a long wooden bench, but even over the clatter of silver trays, the whispers were entirely inescapable.

At the table right across from her, a small circle of girls was huddled together over their bowls.

“My mother told me he was the devil on earth,” one girl whispered, her eyes wide as she twisted her spoon. “She said when he marched on the capital, the sky literally bled.’

“My father said the exact same thing,” the girl beside her chimed in.

A third girl, wearing a heavily embroidered family crest, shook her head solemnly. “My father was actually a friend of his once. Years ago, before the fall. He said he used to be a brilliant scholar, a completely normal man… but then he just turned evil.”

Suddenly, the middle girl’s eyes darted across the aisle and landed on Lexi, causing her face to light up as she waved her hand over, “Hey! Lexi! Come sit over here with us!”

Hesitantly, Lexi picked up her tray and walked over, sitting at the edge of their bench.

“It must have been absolutely tragic,” the middle girl said immediately, with a dramatic pout, “To watch the slaughter of those three seniors right in front of you. How are you even functioning?”

Lexi merely gave a shrug as she immediately stuffed a large piece of bread into her mouth, chewing slowly to avoid having to give a real conversation.

But the girls didn’t care; they just kept throwing questions at her,

“What did the woman in the armor look like?” the first one asked.

“Normal?” Lexi answered back, then, the girl with the embroidered crest leaned over the table, her voice dropping to a whisper. “What do you think about the impending doom about to befall us?”

Lexi instantly choked on her bread, coughing into her napkin as her head snapped up. “Impending doom?”

The girls let out a chorus of soft laughs, as if she had just asked a stupid question.

“I mean, look around!” the middle girl scoffed, “Why else do you think the Grand Magister is gruesomely training us like soldiers? They’re preparing for a siege.” She pointed a finger at Lexi. “You were the one they sent inside to deliver the threat, Lexi. Didn’t the message tell you everything? We’re the front lines.”

Lexi looked away and kept her mouth shut, the weight of the real truth pressing down on her chest. They thought they were preparing to fight an invading army, but they had no idea the target was sitting right in their own library.

“Well, thankfully I come from a family of powerful high mages,” the first girl said, shrugging as she moved on to her fruit plate. ‘So all of this gruesome training is just a chore for me. My bloodline is practically built for war anyway.”

The other girls murmured in agreement, nodding their heads, but Lexi’s mind was completely elsewhere as she stared blankly at her tray, her heart aching with a mix of guilt and fear.

×××

Meanwhile, deep within the library, Clovis stood still, his single good eye fixed on the stained-glass windows. Outside, the sky had worsened dramatically.

The violet fractures had splintered into hundreds of jagged, crawling lines, bleeding an unnatural static into the atmosphere causing the very fabric of the pocket dimension to warp.

He walked back to his desk, letting out an exhausted huff as he rubbed his throbbing temple. His permanent migraine was a reminder of the temporal rot right outside his doors.

On the center of his desk sat a small silver dish containing the ash residue he had scraped from the split spine of the empty volume earlier that day.

It was the only physical trace the escaping entity had left behind.

A reckless idea suddenly struck him with no option or time left so he decided to try it out.

With a low grunt, Clovis grabbed one of the heavy, iron-bound ritual ledgers from the top shelf, carrying it over to the center of the room, after clearing a space on the floor.

He pulled three candles from his drawer, placing them in a triangle around himself, and struck a match, then he sat cross-legged in the middle of the circle, pulling the book into his lap.

He took a deep breath, his hands shaking slightly. It had been over a decade since he had performed a true ritual of this magnitude, and his body was nowhere near prepared for the strain.

He tipped the silver dish, pouring the glittering ash residue directly over the open pages of the ledger and closed his eyes, his hands flat onto the stone floor as he violently forced the Archive’s magic to bind with his own fractured mana pool.

He was trying to read the creature’s spiritual signature—to rip its location straight out of the timeline.

And the reaction was instantaneous and violent as the magical lamps hovering in the aisles above began to flicker as a sudden wave of intense pressure slammed into the room, causing the air to grow hot.

One of the glass bulbs overhead shattered as Clovis gritted his teeth, his jaw locking as a blinding spike of agony ripped through his skull.

Slowly, a thin, dark stream of blood began to trickle down from his nose, followed by a warm drop leaking from his left ear.

For several agonizing minutes, he held the connection and when his eye finally came open, the pressure vanished, leaving him gasping for breath.

On his lap, the pages of the ritual ledger began to furiously flip forward on their own and then, they stopped.

The gray ash on the page began to liquefy, melting into a dark, ink-like sludge that moved like a living thing across the pages. It began writing itself, carving out lines, text, and coordinates, before rapidly expanding into a detailed illustration.

The drawing detailed a towering, grotesque mass of rotted flesh and thick, matted fur, standing on two powerful, reverse-jointed legs, its face a nightmare.

Clovis stared at the self-mending page, his lips parting in recognition.

“The Krag,” Clovis whispered into the empty library.

The Krags were brilliant, ancient species that perfectly combined the intellect of a human with the savage, predatory primal instincts of an apex predator.

They didn’t just hunt, they also strategized.

As Clovis leaned closer to the parchment, tracing the complex, fluid geometric runes the creature had woven into the margins of the text, the truth became clear as day.

Through his rigorous digging into the Archive’s logs, he realized the glitch hadn’t been a random stroke of bad luck.

The entity had planned its escape from the very beginning.

It had been feeding on the library’s defensive wards for months, biding its time, knowing the exact moment the world would begin to fracture…knowing when the Aethelgard descendants would arrive.