The clearing was marked on Aether's wristband as a point of interest. Not a reward location, but a convergence—where a larger conflict was unfolding. Vincent had called it immediately when he spotted it happening.
"Team fight," he'd said. "Ten versus five. We watch, we pick up survivors, we move on."
That was the plan. That was practical.
Then the guy named Vane opened his mouth.
Aether heard it from fifty yards away. The words carried through the forest with the kind of cruelty that required real effort to achieve.
"Give it up. You five look pathetic. Honestly, I'm doing the Academy a favor by weeding out the trash."
The defender leader—a kid with dark hair and a bruised face—was breathing hard. His team was losing. But he straightened up when the insult landed.
"We earned these tags, Vane. Back off."
Vane was taller, wearing House colors that probably meant something to people who cared about that. His smile was the smile of someone who'd never been told no in his life.
"Earned? You're begging for mercy like street rats. It's embarrassing. I bet your parents are watching the broadcast right now, crying because they raised such soft, useless failures."
Aether stopped walking.
"Actually, looking at you..." Vane continued, and he was enjoying this, you could hear it in his voice. He was savoring the cruelty. "Maybe they're glad they don't have to claim you. If I were your father, I'd have walked out too. Or maybe they just didn't love you enough to teach you how to fight. Imagine dying and leaving behind something as pathetic as this. HaHaHa even if your father and mother came here, they can't do anything against me I will Kill them too."
The defender leader—Kael, his name was Kael—flinched. His hand tightened on his grip.
Aether's vision went red.
Not metaphorically. His perception shifted. Everything became sharper, colder. His parents were dead. They'd died in a ritual he couldn't stop. They'd died while he was still growing, still becoming. And now some kid was using that dead weight as a weapon against people weaker than him.
The aura came first.
It wasn't visible—not exactly—but it was felt. Thunder rolled across the island without clouds. Lightning flickered in the air itself. The pressure was immense, the kind of thing that made weaker beings want to collapse.
Everyone felt it.
Fifty miles away, Aisha Verdit paused mid-strike against a cluster of beasts. Her white hair shifted in a wind that didn't exist. She knew immediately what was happening. A special admit had released suppressed power. She couldn't identify which one, but the signature was clear—raw, devastating, and absolutely furious.
Corin stopped in his tracks. His hand rested on his dark iron sword. That aura didn't match any of the three other special admits he'd been tracking. This was new. This was someone just waking up.
Kaelen felt it from the opposite side of the island and immediately stopped moving. He was competent, careful, strategic. But this aura screamed something he didn't understand. Rage. Grief. A primal kind of anger that suggested whoever carried it had nothing left to lose.
Back at the clearing, everyone froze.
Vane froze.
The ten students attacking stopped mid-movement.
The five defenders stood there, feeling something fundamental shift in the world.
And Aether walked forward.
He didn't run. He walked. Each step deliberate. The clearing seemed smaller around him suddenly. The space compressed.
Vane realized something was wrong maybe a second before Aether reached him. He tried to move. Tried to call his magic. Tried to do something.
The first of the ten attackers went down before anyone else reacted. Aether's hand went through their defenses like they didn't exist. His punch broke ribs. His follow-up strike shattered the student's wristband didn't trigger the teleport because Aether was still conscious, still fighting, still eliminating—so it sent them instead to the medic zone marked by the wristband's safety protocols.
The second attacker lasted three seconds.
The third one tried to run.
Aether was already there, already moving, and the world was just noise to him. Thunder followed his footsteps. Lightning crackled where he'd been standing. Nine attackers, eliminated in rapid succession. Their teleportations were firing off one after another as the wristbands assessed life-threatening damage. The clearing was becoming a graveyard.
Vane was the last one standing besides the defenders.
Aether grabbed him by the throat and lifted him like he weighed nothing. For a second they were face to face—Aether's eyes completely electric blue, his expression blank in the way only rage could be blank—and then Aether threw him.
Not hard enough to eliminate. Hard enough to hurt.
Vane crashed into the ground near the defender leader. The impact knocked the wind out of him. Blood ran from his nose. His wristband was flashing warnings about internal damage, but not enough to trigger teleport yet.
"Apologize," Aether said.
His voice was different. Deeper somehow. Like there was something else talking through him.
Vane spat blood. "Fuck you."
Aether didn't hesitate. He walked over, grabbed Vane again, and beat him. Not with magic. With his fists. With the raw, human brutality of someone who understood exactly how to break another person.
Vane's face caved in on the second punch. His cheekbone shattered—actual fracture, actual bone breaking. Blood poured. He screamed.
"Heal him," Aether said to Thea without looking at her.
Thea was terrified. She didn't ask questions. Water magic flowed from her hands, knitting bones back together, closing wounds. It was perfect healing, emergency-response level proficiency. Vane's face reformed. The pain remained—healing didn't remove trauma, just closed wounds.
Aether beat him again.
This time the wristband triggered. Vane's injuries were becoming life-threatening in ways Aether's rage wasn't concerned with. The damage assessment tried three times. Each time Aether's strikes landed, new injuries overrode the previous assessment.
"Apologize," Aether said.
Vane couldn't form words anymore. His jaw was damaged beyond speech. He tried to fight back anyway—pointless, useless. His magic couldn't touch Aether. His physical strength was nothing compared to the Anthesis constitution that had activated somewhere during those first nine seconds of the massacre.
The defender leader—Kael—was watching this. The other four who'd been defending him were watching this. They were watching someone systematically destroy Vane while demanding an apology that could never come now.
Finally, Kael said, "Stop it. Stop. I don't want an apology."
Aether looked at him. Actually looked. His eyes were still blue, but there was something calculating underneath the rage now.
"He insulted your parent," Aether said.
"I know."
"He said they didn't love you. That you're pathetic. That they're ashamed and He Will Kill Your Parents!"
"I know," Kael said. His voice was quiet but steady. "I heard him. But I don't want an apology through violence. Just... stop."
Aether stared at him for what felt like a long time. Then something shifted in his expression. A kind of contempt crossed his face.
He grabbed all five of them—the defenders, not the attackers. He moved with perfect efficiency. Each one was taken apart in maybe three seconds. Not allowed to defend themselves because they'd already given up. Not allowed to run because Aether was there. Not allowed to beg because Aether had moved past the point where begging mattered.
They were eliminated. Teleported to the medic zone. Gone.
Only Vane remained.
Aether looked at him—broken, bleeding, unable to speak, unable to fight. And then Aether eliminated him. Not with passion anymore. With cold, clinical precision. His aura flared once, and Vane's wristband registered lethal damage.
Vane was gone.
The clearing was silent.
Vincent, Marcus, Thea, and Darius stood fifty yards away. They'd watched the entire thing. They'd watched Aether eliminate fifteen people in what couldn't have been more than thirty seconds.
No magic display. No dramatic posturing. Just efficiency and power working in conjunction.
Marcus was the first to speak. "Vincent... are you sure about this? Are you sure he's special admission?"
Vincent didn't answer immediately. He was watching Aether stand in the center of the clearing, breathing normally, his eyes still blue. Lightning was still flickering across the forest canopy above.
"Yeah," Vincent said quietly. "He's special admission. I'm pretty sure now."
"Beating up fifteen people straight," Marcus continued. "What kind of monster is that, Vincent?"
Aether turned and looked at them. For a moment, Vincent wondered if they were next. If whatever had been triggered in Aether during those thirty seconds was still active and would consume them too.
But Aether's eyes faded back to normal. The lightning stopped. The pressure on the air released.
"Let's move to center," Aether said. "We don't have enough time."
He started walking. Just like that. Like he hadn't just eliminated someone. Like that wasn't going to matter.
Vincent exchanged a look with Marcus. Thea was pale. Darius was trying very hard not to show fear and failing.
They followed.
In Aether's mind, Lucia was absolutely silent. No commentary. No observation. She was watching, assessing, but she wasn't interfering. This was his rage. His choice. His violence. She would wait to understand his reasoning before she spoke.
Aether knew she was there. He could feel her presence. And the fact that she wasn't trying to stop him, wasn't trying to console him, wasn't trying to explain or justify. It meant she trusted his judgment.
He felt empty. That was the thing he noticed most. The rage had burned through something in his chest, and what was left was cold. Clean. Hollow.
He'd been holding that anger for months. Since his parents died. Since the ritual. Since he'd woken up in that destroyed facility and realized they were gone forever. He'd been keeping it locked down, compartmentalized, controlled.
Now it was out. And it had taken all of it with it.
Across the island, Aisha made a decision.
She was strong. She knew this. She'd been trained since childhood. Her affinities were powerful. Her technique was flawless.
But that aura.
Whoever carried it was going to be a problem. She needed to find them. Needed to assess them. Needed to understand what she was facing before the convergence point hit.
She changed direction. The beasts could wait. The other special admits could wait. This one mattered now.
Corin felt a moment of something that might have been anticipation.
He'd been hunting weak students, accumulating points, building a foundation. But that aura suggested something else. It suggested a real opponent. Someone who wouldn't go down to a clever strike or superior technique.
He started moving toward the epicenter of that aura. He wasn't hurrying. He was patient. But he was interested now.
Kaelen was already preparing defenses.
Whatever had unleashed that aura was combat-capable at a level beyond him. He could feel it. The way the island itself seemed to react to that presence.
Kaelen pulled back. Not running, but consolidating. He wanted to see what happened when all four special admits converged. He wanted to understand the landscape before committing to anything.
Two hours remained.
Vincent's team moved toward the center. Aether was ahead, walking with purpose. His aura had faded, but everyone could still feel the echo of what had happened in that clearing.
Marcus asked Vincent quietly, "What do we do if he turns on us?"
"We die," Vincent said. "So we make sure he doesn't turn on us."
They kept moving.
Ahead, Aether was thinking about something Lucia had shown him once. A memory from one of his past lives. A different war. A different time. The Anthesis Kings had been feared not because they were strongest—though they were—but because they were incompatible with normal existence.
They didn't fight. They eliminated.
They didn't compromise. They judged.
For a moment, walking through that forest with his team behind him and the island converging ahead, Aether felt like maybe he understood what that meant.
It felt like the cold inside him was exactly where it should be.