The south filtration tunnel smelled of mineral water and hot metal, the same as always.
Isaac arrived at the third pressure valve at eleven minutes past midnight, set his notebook on the dry ledge above the main pipe, and began. He went straight to the issue of Silas Fulgur.
Back in the Sleep Room, right after the Rite, [The Prism] had catalogued the discharge sequence of [Lightning Spear] before Silas was stopped by the Inquisitors. In that occasion, his right shoulder dropped 1.2 degrees approximately 0.3 seconds before the electricity sprang forth.
What is the most frightening about [Lightning Spear] wasn't its anticipated extent of impact. It was its speed of discharge—its generation by Silas was instant, and the speed by which the lightning travelled was too quick, way quicker than his supercritical bullet.
That meant that Silas, when it came to a one-versus-one duel against Isaac, would have the first move. He needed to take on the defend-and-counter approach.
The discovery of the supercritical fluid, therefore, was very significant—not just because of the offensive potential it held but because it was a strong electrical insulator.
He would defend [Lightning Spear] with supercritical fluid. This meant that he needed to generate it in the 0.3-second timeframe.
Question is, how?
Isaac, with the practiced focus, morphed his mana into the shape of a thread. The mana thread then began to accelerate within the Circuitry, hovering in a way that travelled parallel to the vessel walls. There was no contact. No contact meant zero-friction, and zero-friction meant an acceleration—and therefore mana output—that no one but him was capable of.
I need to manifest supercritical fluid within the 0.3-second time frame… or find an alternative.
He operated [Condensation]. Under his fingertip, a generic waterdrop instantly condensed.
What if I deionize the waterdrop instead?
Deionized water, as in the pure water, was an insulator as well, although its insulating potency wasn't as high.
Evaporate the moisture. Re-condense the resulting vapor, which is inherently pure as ions have different boiling point.
Isaac put this logic into an execution. Performing evaporation was simple; he simply needed to reverse the pressure and temperature parameters that he has been manipulating for the generic [Condensation].
Evaporation.
The waterdrop evaporated from his fingertip, becoming a small cloud of steam surrounding the finger.
[Condensation].
The steam was sucked back onto his fingertip, re-emerging as the waterdrop once more. With zero ionic content, however.
And that wasn't the end. Applying more pressure on this waterdrop, he began to compress it—as much as he could.
A waterdrop that was extremely dance with zero ionic content. From what Isaac felt just now, he was confident that he could use this application within 0.3-second time frame.
Now… let's test if it truly is deionized or not.
He released it downward.
The floor cracked as the waterdrop splashed.
There was a single, clean compression fracture centring the impact point; the stone was depressed by approximately four millimeters at its center. Isaac crouched and ran his thumb along the fracture's edge. The surface was smooth and more importantly, slippery.
Deionized water, lacking magnesium and calcium ions, is a soft water as well. In other words, it was supposed to be slippery. It proved that the waterdrop that he realized just now was deionized indeed.
Then, footsteps arrived from the south junction. Isaac paused.
Marcus Bale came with his work lamp, looking curious. He stopped at the edge of the lamplight. He looked at Isaac. He looked at the fractured floor. He looked at Isaac again.
"That wasn't there this morning," he said.
"No."
Marcus crouched and pressed the depression with his thumb, then ran a finger along the wet surface that covered the fracture. He was quiet for longer than a casual examination required.
"I came because of Silas's formal request," he said finally, still looking at the floor. "Heard it spread through the faculty wing this afternoon. Everyone is talking about it." He stood. "Thought I'd see how you were doing."
Isaac nodded. "I'm preparing as much as I can."
"I can see that." He looked at Isaac steadily. "What I can't see is how an F-ranked water skill put a compression fracture in filtration-grade stone, and feel unnaturally… smooth."
Isaac considered him. Marcus had offered the tunnels without being asked, had maintained the thermal interference that made monitoring impossible, and had come tonight because a formal request spread. He wanted to know if the person he'd quietly decided to help was managing. That was worth something.
He opened his mouth, "The premise is simple—condense the moisture into a limited amount of space, and this leads to the case of compression. Mass-to-volume ratio goes up, and therefore, the density."
Marcus looked at the fracture for a long moment. "That's not in any textbook."
"Well, not in the mandatory ones." Isaac agreed. "But you'd easily find one in a library."
Marcus picked up his work lamp.
"The valve at the south junction has been running hot," he said. "I'll be checking it for the next two hours. The thermal interference in this section will be significant."
Isaac understood what he really meant by that.
"Thank you."
Marcus nodded once and walked toward the south junction without looking back.
Isaac watched him go. Then he looked at the fracture in the floor—four millimeters of compressed stone, the gap between what the rank system said he was and what ten years of precision had actually produced. He opened his notebook.
Marcus Bale.
He paused. Wrote,
Fourth-year. D-rank: [Cinder]. Active during the midnight. Helpful and generous, but I don't know enough about him.
He closed the notebook. Returned to his training.
The valve at the south junction began its thermal discharge, and the tunnel filled with the specific white noise of a pressure system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Isaac worked in the interference for two more hours, refining the 0.3-second window into something he could act on.
...
In the next morning, the students were already seated when Thorne arrived. They were busy talking among themselves about a hot topic that surfaced since yesterday, to an extent where they didn't notice Thorne's arrival.
The formal request. Official, timestamped, irrefusable. Silas Fulgur against Isaac Nameless. The news had moved through the Academy the way news always moved through institutions—faster than the official communication and carrying more emotional weight.
Isaac had watched the social geometry of the room arrange itself around this information from the moment he took his seat. The students who found it entertaining sat slightly more open than usual. The ones who found it uncomfortable sat slightly more contained.
Cassiopeia was writing in her notebook with the focused economy of someone who had already processed the available variables and moved on.
Jax sat in the third row with a grim determination. His state looked unstable. Isaac silently noted this observation.
Thorne set his materials on the dais and looked at the students for three seconds without speaking.
"Two days," he said. "On the first day, we underwent the Mana Quality Assessment. On the second day, we learned Mana Contamination and means to lower the risk." He turned to the board. "Today will be different."
He wrote one word: Discharge.
The students' energy shifted into that of an excitement, knowing what was about to come.
"Overload Risk is a concern that must consistently be tracked. It specifically refers to the chance of the occurrence of Mana Overload should one push one's mana output past one's limit. To reduce the risk, we need to identify that limit first and foremost," Thorne continued, without acknowledging the shift. "Today, you will operate your skills, in the specialized training facility."
Some students held their breaths.
"The room has an artificial Manafold Circuitry of its own. In a way, you can consider this room as 'alive.' Anyone who enters the room, the room will treat as part of its Manafold Circuitry. It will reinforce your flow and reduce the turbulence. Should your mana spike beyond the critical threshold, the room will interfere and regulate. Of course, there are limits, but it will provide you a level of safety."
His gaze moved across the room with the unhurried precision of a man who had already identified every student likely to mistake environmental compensation for personal permission.
"Now, we go."
...
The training facility was a vaulted space with ceilings high enough to accommodate significant discharges and the walls lined with mana-conductive stones that absorbed rather than reflected output.
Isaac felt the room's architecture the moment he entered. There was a subtle adjustment that made the basal flow of his mana more rigid than before. Contrary to what Thorne said, this wasn't a "reinforcement."
Thorne held his hand out. Three circular rings of mana sprang forth at the room's cardinal points, which indicated the manifestation of his skill.
"Look. Isn't that..."
"The infamous A-rank: [Grounded Circuit]..."
The rings spun silently at their operating frequency.
Rings. Spin. Force.
Isaac noticed that the physical movements of tangible mana generated torque fields. He identified that [Grounded Circuit] was a defensive skill, meant to "absorb" a projectile with mass.
He filed it and found a position near the east wall.
The students began.
The first twenty minutes proceeded with the specific texture of people doing something for the first time under observation—high-output students discharging at volume, precision students at frequency, several students discovering that the repeated usage of skills was more difficult than they initially believed.
"[Bedrock]."
Near Isaac, Cassiopeia ran her skill—the subversion of earth—against the training floor, noted something in her pocket notebook.
"[Ferrous Bind]."
Then, she ran her second skill—the protrusion of metallic grasp from her outstretched palm—at the wall brackets. Nodded upon the observation before noting it again.
Taking his gaze off of her, Isaac pondered, how will my mana thread methodology fare in this environment?
Deciding to test out the question, he morphed his mana into the thread. Began its hyper-acceleration.
Then, interference. Isaac narrowed his eyes as he felt a jamming—a friction that the training facility introduced.
Releasing the mana thread, he noted it.
The atmospheric mana is directing the flow of my mana in a particular pattern, providing a guideline. This minimizes mana's contact and collision on the vessel walls; the premise of this training room's mechanism is similar to my meditation, but... less accurate.
This meant that his methodology was more efficient than the room's artificial Manafold Circuitry.
Then, how do I overcome this interference—
As he was thinking, Jax, who has been focusing on his own matter up until now, moved from the back.
"…"
Isaac shifted his eyes, coldly.
Jax's movement had the quality of something planned since the morning—not impulsive, not reactive to anything Isaac had done, but opportunistic, having waited for the right window of time. His eyes held a hue that belonged in someone who wasn't in the right state of mind.
His skill, B-rank: [Bolt Streak], activated.
Blue-white stream of lightning discharged, moving fast and clean across the center of the room, toward Isaac's position at the east wall.
The nearest students registered the discharge immediately—not because it was directed at them, but because B-rank lightning output in an enclosed space produced a pressure shift in the ambient mana that every practitioner in the room felt in their Circuitry simultaneously. Heads turned. Practice sessions paused. Some screamed. Some gasped.
"Isaac!"
A voice shouted, notifying that the electricity was on his way. There was no need for a call, however, as Isaac already recognized the hazard.
Deionized Water. Compression.
He has been practicing to counter Silas Fulgur. Never did he expect that he'd get a chance to practice like this.
[Condensation].
Holding his hand out, he manifested one drop of water from his fingertip. Released it.
Every set of eyes in the room watched as [Bolt Streak] struck right where the drop was falling.
The discharge stopped.
It couldn't advance any further for that split second, much to others' shock. To many, water was always a well-known conductor of electricity. Yet, it was a water, one drop nonetheless, that was putting a stop to the full-output B-rank: [Bolt Streak].
Then, the electricity was deflected, then redirected sixty degrees from its original vector toward the [Grounded Circuit] ring that caught it and absorbed it without ceremony.
The silence that followed was a different quality from normal silence. It was the silence of numerous students whose processing had encountered something it had no category for and had, collectively, paused.
"What—" someone started, from somewhere in the middle of the room. They didn't finish.
Cassiopeia had stopped writing. Her pen was still touching the page of her notebook but nothing was being produced—the motion suspended mid-stroke. Her eyes tracked back and forth between the faint moisture residue where the drop had been and Isaac's position at the east wall.
Her expression was not the usual, composed analytical attention she deployed for interesting observations, but one that was concealing the surprise. She looked at the fractional blue-white dissipation still fading at the [Grounded Circuit] ring. Then back at Isaac.
She closed her notebook. Opened it again. Wrote something quickly.
Behind her, Marlene was staring at the ring with her hands still raised in a practice position she had forgotten to lower.
"That... was [Condensation]," she said, to no one in particular, in the tone of someone reporting something they had personally witnessed and still didn't believe. "F-ranked [Condensation]. That stopped a B-rank discharge."
"It didn't stop it," someone else said, a boy near the south wall whose C-rank reserve had made her one of the session's more confident practitioners until thirty seconds ago. "It—the arc deflected—it went sideways—"
"Same result," another student said. "The [Bolt Streak] didn't land."
"[Condensation] doesn't do that," the boy said. Not an argument—a statement of fact, delivered with the specific bewilderment of someone whose internal model was actively refusing to update. "It's just a freaking waterdrop! It doesn't—"
"We all saw it."
The room had not resumed. Practitioners who had been mid-discharge held their output. Students who had been moving between positions had stopped.
Thorne, from the far end of the facility, let the silence run for exactly two seconds. Then, he spoke.
"Jax Wason." His voice had the register he used when a situation required acknowledgment rather than escalation—flat, precise, devoid of drama. "Your discharge was heading toward another student. If not for that student's quick response, this could have led to an incident." A pause that had the specific weight of someone choosing the word target assessment deliberately, as opposed to any number of other words available to him. "Be mindful of yourself. Should you make the same mistake, you will be forbidden from any further practice today."
Jax slowly nodded, stoic in expression.
Thorne then returned his attention to the student he had been observing before [Bolt Streak] fired.
The room took a moment to resume. Not immediately—there was an interval, perhaps four seconds.
Finally, someone started discharging again. Then someone else. The ambient noise rebuilt itself slowly, like temperature returning to a space that had been briefly opened to outside air.
But the conversations ran underneath it.
"—F-rank shouldn't be able to—"
"—the water was there before the bolt arrived, did you see—"
"—same skill that dripped during the Rite, how is—"
"—I'm telling you, [Condensation] does not do that—"
Cassiopeia was looking at Isaac again. Her eyes were doing the specific thing they did when she had decided a variable was significant enough to require a new framework rather than an update to the existing one.
She turned back to her notebook and wrote for a solid minute without stopping.
Jax Wason. That firing was intentional.
Isaac, at the east wall, wrote.
"Bastard…" He cursed.
Closing the notebook, he returned to the mana thread's stability calculations. The [Grounded Circuit] rings continued their silent rotation.
Across the room, in the mid-session lull, Jax stood in front of a practice dummy and ran [Bolt Streak] against it. The discharge landed correctly. He ran it again. He adjusted his wrist position, frowned at the result.
"Fuck," he said, to no one in particular. Then, examined his wrist angle, "Fuck this! The whole angle is wrong—"
Jax then slipped and fell, earning snickers from nearby students, who quickly hid their expressions as Jax turned to glare at them.
"Slippery. There's water on the floor—"
Jax instinctively turned to face Isaac, who happened to be staring at him. Intently.
For a second, the pairs of eyes clashed.
This was a message that the owner of F-rank: [Condensation] was sending.
Try again and see what happens next.
At last, Jax flinched before averting his eyes. It was the sign of yield against someone whom he previously considered the F-ranked nobody.
Isaac observed this for approximately four seconds. Filed it under a different category than the previous Jax entries,
Case resolved, for now.
The training room continued.