Midnight entombed the Academy grounds. High within the shadowed canopy of an ancient oak, Arthur stared down at the jagged scar carved into the earth.
Thirty-five days since the raid, he noted, his amber eyes tracking the perimeter. The Delegate's guards had swarmed the crater for weeks, scouring the rubble for evidence of Vigo's subterranean laboratory. Finding nothing but pulverized rock, they had deemed the site vaporized by the God-rank explosion and abandoned it. A cold, perfectly calibrated smile ghosted across his lips. They missed the foundation.
Below him stretched a massive depression, its basin flooded with a sea of smooth, pulverized gray stone. Navigating the ruins required absolute precision. Drawing a slow, measured breath, Arthur engaged the discipline William Sinclair had hammered into his psyche: Autonomic Merged Processor Training.
For five pristine seconds, the bio-electrical friction of his consciousness flatlined. His internal monologue ceased entirely. The nocturnal chill, the rustling leaves, the dense ambient mana—it all rushed through his senses without the cognitive lag of forming words. When his thoughts roared back online, his mind operated as a frictionless engine. He dropped from the branch, landing silently on the frost-hardened grass.
Crater diameter: exactly eighty feet, his mind overlaid instantly, mapping the absent architecture against the empty air. Applying elevation variables from prior navigations.
He approached the invisible perimeter ward left by the guards. Rather than wasting time on a counter-spell, Arthur summoned the Nameless Arts. An ink-black aura bled over his fingertips, hungrily nullifying the magical particles in the air. He slid his hand through the barrier, shredding the ward with zero resistance, and descended the steep incline into the basin.
He began to excavate. His hands moved with rhythmic, mechanical efficiency, tossing aside heavy slabs of stone, while his mind projected a glowing, three-dimensional blueprint over the devastation.
Epicenter depth: 10.7 feet. Above-ground chambers stretched from 14.2 feet southwest to 25.8 feet northeast, max elevation deviation 32.7 feet. Eviscerated. Underground Level One: The Magic Engineering night classroom and Vigo's office. 27.6 northeast to 8.1 southwest. Max elevation deviance of 11.7 feet. Eviscerated. Underground Level Two: The approved alchemy lab. The detonation site. 32.0 northeast to 32.0 southwest. Max elevation deviance of 11.7 feet. Eviscerated. Underground Level Three: The illegal lab that held the subjects. 30.0 northeast to 34.0 southwest. Max elevation deviance of 19.3 feet. Eviscerated.
Arthur's fingertips scraped against solid, unyielding stone. He cleared the remaining rubble, pressing his palm flat against the cold basalt block buried at the very bottom of the ruins.
Level Four. The hidden containment chamber. His fingers traced faint, scorch-darkened grooves etched into the rock. Before the blast, Vigo had manipulated this fifteen-foot slab like a permutation lock. The God-rank shockwave had undoubtedly warped the inner circuits. It had to be broken—silently, with lethal precision.
Arthur drew his sword. The Nameless Arts surged, wrapping the Arcanite-tipped steel in a void-like aura that devoured the ambient moonlight. He aligned the point and drove it flawlessly into the stone mechanism. The dark energy ate the physical density of the rock. With a frictionless, inaudible crack, the seal shattered.
He slipped down the narrow shaft, landing with feline silence in pitch-black gloom.
His amber eyes swept the subterranean dark. He locked onto the far wall, where heavy iron chains remained welded into the stone. They hung empty; the captive priest was gone.
Instantly, phantom agony exploded in his left shoulder. A violent, microscopic flashback seized him—the cold terror of the blade, the visceral loss of his limb. Arthur's curated mask fractured. He flinched, cold sweat prickling his neck as he stared down at his fully regrown left arm, his fingers curling into a rigid claw. With a sharp exhale, he slammed the psychological boundary shut, burying the trauma beneath ice-cold logic. Focus.
He stepped toward the heavy iron table anchored in the center of the room. Thick leather-bound ledgers and loose, frantic alchemical diagrams lay scattered across the surface. Arthur didn't need light to read them. Through his photographic memory—now fully unblocked by Sinclair's cognitive diagnosis—his mind instantly cataloged every variable, every scribbled margin note, processing the data faster than his eyes could scan.
His thoughts isolated Vigo's dying epiphany. Sacinis .99:1.
Two absolute variables remained: Is Vigo's final equation stable? And is this acquisition a logical necessity?
Arthur closed his eyes, plunging his consciousness into a labyrinth of nested counterfactual logic gates. He ran the simulations at breakneck speed, cross-referencing the arcane feedback loops against the physiological anchor of the new variable. The math aligned perfectly. The physical laws supported the integration. It was not a matter of trusting the dead Head Instructor; it was absolute reliance on his own hyper-analytical genius.
And as for necessity...
My knowledge of this world remains catastrophically incomplete, Arthur reasoned, his gaze fixed on his left hand. During the subterranean clash, my magical output shifted. It was no longer just raw exertion; I felt the absolute control of the spell, hindered only by my lack of practice over the last year.
His fingers tightened into a vice. If I have truly unlocked Magic Control, this formula is the ultimate catalyst. It will optimize both my mage and swordsman capabilities. It will provide the exact yield required to exterminate the Black Hand.
Arthur reached out, his grip closing around the heavy, cold cylinder of the alchemical injector resting on the table.
The calculus is settled.
Without a single tremor of hesitation, he pressed the new mechanism against his skin and engaged the cylinder, driving the catalyzed power directly into his bloodstream.
Exactly thirty-five days after the blast that leveled the First Headmaster's House, the floating island shivered once more—and a second explosion tore through the night.