My pockets had been aggressively washed by a temporal anomaly, frozen by a Phantasm, and soaked in the toxic blood of a ghost. Whatever piece of plastic she had given him, it was currently resting in peace somewhere in the dirt.
My hands rested flat on my lap. "The anomalies out there aggressively dismantled my personal inventory. Whatever clearance you handed out this morning, the forest claimed it."
Malenia closed her eyes for a fraction of a second. Two pale fingers rubbed her temple. A deeply exhausted, almost familial gesture that made absolutely no sense for an institutional authority.
The cadence of her voice gained a crushing density. "Losing a Master-Tier perimeter pass issued directly by the Headmaster is not a misplacement, Arzane. It is a Class-A security violation. One hundred Academic Points."
One hundred points.
The unregulated synthetic caffeine in my bloodstream violently weaponized my panic. My E-Rank circuit spiked, threatening to shatter my ribs from the inside as my heart rate forcefully doubled.
I am currently sitting at exactly zero after the duel. A hundred-point deduction puts me at negative one hundred. The threshold for immediate institutional expulsion is negative one hundred. The system is going to physically throw me out of the front gates before dinner!
My facial muscles forcibly clamped down, locking the massive spike in my heart rate entirely out of my voice. "That is a heavily disproportionate tax for a wardrobe malfunction."
"It is the standard rate for leaving institutional authority in the dirt." Her index finger tapped the empty air, swiping a heavily redacted document onto the blue interface, completely dismissing my financial ruin.
She leaned forward, resting her chin on her steepled fingers.
"The Master-Tier pass allowed you to survive the automated defense arrays in Primordial Fringe Sectors," she stated, the White-Static in her eyes pinning me to the leather sofa. "It did not, however, grant you the clearance to bypass a High-Magic quarantine seal at Outbound Ward 04. So tell me, Arzane. How exactly did an unranked student open a locked black-site without triggering the institutional alarms?"
I am staring at a completely blank script for the seven o'clock meeting. But I possess the exact, unredacted script for four in the morning. I can answer this.
"I didn't break the seal," I said. My voice settled into the flat, unbothered cadence of a mechanic explaining a basic gear malfunction. "I triggered it."
The White-Static paused its rotation.
"The ward was built to lock ODS patients inside. Not to keep healthy people out," I continued, keeping my breathing rigidly even. "I allowed the toxic ARS Stage II residue I accumulated from Sector Three to bleed to the surface of my outer nodes. The ward's security array scanned my palm, detected the lethal concentration of anomaly sickness, classified me as an infected patient who had wandered out, and helpfully opened the door to let me back into quarantine."
The silence in the office hardened into concrete.
The White-Static in her eyes ceased its rotation for exactly one second. It was not shock. It was the heavy, calculating silence of a processor trying to categorize the sheer, unapologetic pragmatism of weaponizing a terminal illness just to bypass a lock.
A pale finger swiped across the blue interface. A new, black-barred document materialized in the air.
She shifted the axis of the conversation without warning. "The girl from Sector Three. I personally descended into the Abyssion Archives. Level Three clearance. I cross-referenced the temporal decay rate, the visual parameters, and the specific mana signature you dragged out of the Whispering Woods against every institutional record of the last century."
A sharp flick of her wrist closed the file.
Her gaze pinned me to the sofa. "There is no record of her. No enrollment logs. No casualty reports. No missing person files. Someone went deep into the institutional archives and systematically pulled her paperwork by the roots."
A cold, heavy knot dropped into the absolute bottom of my stomach.
Pulled by the roots.
To scrub a student from Level Three archives requires absolute administrative clearance. Someone inside this Academy's elite hierarchy deliberately fed that girl to an anomaly field and buried the evidence so deep that not even the Headmaster knew she was missing.
In the novel, Arga Orlando cleared Sector Three by walking in and vaporizing the entire spatial loop with a single kinetic strike. The author never bothered to write the lore behind the field because the protagonist just blew it up. I only survived it by using a non-combat exploit from a mid-game dungeon because I was too weak to swing a sword.
I was just trying to not die.
And in doing so, I had accidentally unearthed a massive, undocumented institutional conspiracy.
My brain stared at the sheer, terrifying scope of the unseen political war looming in front of me. Then, running on pure caloric deficit, it calmly picked up the entire conspiracy and shoved it into a mental folder labeled 'Things That Will Kill Me Later'.
I am entirely too tired for world-building right now.
A thick wall of dry, defensive pragmatism buried my absolute lack of context. "I only read the provided syllabus. If the institution didn't print it, I don't know it. If someone purged the archives, they didn't consult a first-year about it."
Malenia did not argue. She let the impossible darkness from the window cast long shadows across her desk.
"You are going to write it down."
A slow blink cleared my vision. "Write what down?"
The tone left absolutely zero room for negotiation. "A comprehensive field report. The structural collapse of the loop in Sector Three. The emotional geometry of the Chief of Surgery in Ward 04. The mechanical data of the entities you encountered. You will compile all of it into a formal thesis framework."
Wait.
First-year students do not write anomaly field theses. That is exclusive curriculum for third-year Field Research Collectives.
The caffeine-fueled gears in my head slammed together, decoding the logistical trap of her order in two seconds.
The structural reality dropped onto the desk between us. "I don't have the academic backing. The ODICIOS network will automatically reject the submission. The people who erased her will see it before it even reaches a faculty review board."
The White-Static in her eyes spun with cold, political calculation. "The report will be submitted under my name. I will act as your official Faculty Advisor."
She doesn't have official proof of which elite faction is conducting these illegal experiments. If she launches a formal Headmaster investigation, they will burn the evidence. But if a random student submits a 'homework assignment' detailing the exact mechanics of the anomaly fields under her direct sponsorship... the data enters the network legally, bypassing all political red tape.
She is turning me into her personal ghostwriter to legally smuggle a bomb into the lap of a massive, shadowy faction.
I weighed the absolute danger of being a blind pawn against immediate expulsion.
My terms landed firmly on the polished wood. "My one-hundred-point perimeter pass penalty."
She didn't hesitate for a microsecond. "Will be entirely expunged from your record the exact second the first draft hits my desk."
"Deal."
I stood up.
The vertebrae in my lower back popped in loud, agonizing protest as I abandoned the safety of the leather sofa. The physical gravity of the room felt twice as heavy on my feet, but the hostage negotiation wasn't over yet.
"I need formal clearance to return to Sector Three."
The ambient mana in the office violently froze. The White-Static in her eyes snapped to a dead halt.
The sheer atmospheric pressure of her aura pressed heavily against my lungs. "The anomaly has collapsed. There is nothing left in that sector but rotting wood and dead earth. The perimeter is strictly closed."
My boots held their ground, fighting the physical gravity to step backward. "I left a physical journal on a flat stone, thirty meters from the secondary clearing. I only retrieved a single torn page during the loop. The back of that page carries an impression. Ghost writing from the pages pressed against it for decades."
The White-Static in her eyes stalled for a microscopic fraction of a second.
My voice remained a flat, unwavering line. "I cannot decode the impression without the original spine to align the friction. I require the rest of the text to properly format your thesis."
Malenia weighed the demand. She didn't ask how I knew the journal was there.
A sharp flick of her wrist dismissed the black-barred document. "Clearance granted. But your circuit is currently adapting to a new rank, and the Fringe wildlife is no longer suppressed by the temporal loop. You will not walk into those woods alone. I will arrange an escort."
My uninjured left hand adjusted my torn collar. "I require a bodyguard, then. Preferably an instructor who lacks political affiliation and knows how to swing heavy metal without delivering a monologue first."
The faintest ghost of a smirk touched the corner of Malenia's scarred mouth.
It was a profoundly terrifying expression. The specific, quiet amusement of an entity who had just mentally matched my incredibly specific criteria with a thing that was likely going to make my life a living hell.
She didn't answer immediately. The heavy leather of her chair creaked.
Malenia stood up.
My exhausted respiratory system immediately forgot how to process oxygen.
She walked around the massive mahogany desk. The impossible, bottomless void of churning ink outside the window seemed to stretch deeper as she moved. She closed the distance between us with the silent, unhurried grace of someone who owned the very architecture of the building. The ambient pressure in the room violently doubled with every step she took.
She stopped exactly one step in front of me.
Up close, the White-Static in her eyes wasn't just a texture. It was a live, scrolling feed of impossible data, quietly processing the exact structural geometry of my fragile E-Rank skeleton. The smell of ancient ozone and cold, redacted history flooded my airways.
I locked every single muscle in my body. I did not step back. Stepping back was an admission of prey status.
Slowly, deliberately, a pale hand raised.
The air between us completely froze.
This is it.
The hostage negotiation has officially failed.
The Headmaster of Endstoria is not going to expel me. She is going to manually rip the corrupted circuits out of my chest and wipe the anomaly from her floor.
Zee explicitly told me to die in this office less than an hour ago. It is profoundly irritating that a Haldia brawler in a neck brace is about to get exactly what she asked for.
I stared at the ascending hand, my exhausted brain completely out of contingency plans, and braced my body for absolute, atomic annihilation.