The first complaint arrived at his toll sign two days after the wing changed owners. One of Ava's runners paid her crossing core, then stood there instead of crossing, which meant the payment was actually for talking.
"Powers are failing on our north border," the runner said, "mid-use, like something drinks them. Two of ours collapsed after burning."
"The air near the science wing has gone thick," she added, "and Ava says you'd want to know before it walks."
She was right, because hazards that ate powers did not respect chalk flags. His map showed the science wing as the school's last unclaimed block, and the unclaimed block had begun to exhale.
The party saw the exhale for themselves from the border junction an hour later. Motes drifted out of the science corridors in slow golden veils, pretty as pollen, patient as debt.
[ Spore bloom: mana-reactive. Threat: feeds on active mana. Hosts: unknown. ]
Kendra planted at the border line and refused to blink at the veils. Vasa sampled the air from a distance with one thin thread of frost. Yeda watched the golden motes the way she watched everything, hunting for the seam.
Ava met them at the junction with two of her crew and singed wrapping on one hand. Her own testing had clearly begun some hours before her message had.
"I burned a veil to clear the door," she said, showing the wrap, "and the burn fed them. They doubled inside a minute, then followed the heat home."
"We put out four fires that my own fire started," she said, "which is a sentence I hate saying out loud."
"Mana in, more spores out," Vasa said, cataloguing, "and frost is mana, green is mana, stone skin is mana. Every tool this school has grown since the Merge is food for that corridor."
Jax arrived while they watched the veils drift, six gym fighters behind him and gold faint at his wrists. The bounty of the board's third line had made him faster to answer shared problems, which was its own small economy.
"My patron says the wing is claimable," he said, "and the claim would clear part of my debt. I walked the first corridor this morning."
"How far did you get before it noticed you," Nox asked.
"Eleven steps," Jax said, level, owning it, "then the gold lit, the veils came off every wall at once, and I fed them the whole way out. Whatever is in there, sponsored light is a dinner bell."
The honesty cost him something in front of his fighters, and he paid it anyway. Nox marked the payment, because Jax kept doing that lately, spending pride on accuracy.
"Then nobody with mana walks in," Nox said, and the sentence finished itself in every head at the junction at the same time.
"Nobody with mana," Kendra said, flat as her stone, "and that's a list with one name off it."
The old joke of his life turned over and showed its other face. He had never been given an Awakening, a ring, or one drop of mana to drink. A corridor full of predators now hunted exactly the thing he lacked.
"State the known risks," Vasa said, and her voice carried frost that had nothing to do with her trait.
"Unknown commander, unknown depth, veils that ignore me until proven otherwise," he said, checking the knife, "so I scout, I mark, I come back. Nobody follows me past the junction, whatever the screens show."
The science wing took him the way water takes a dropped stone, without comment. Veils parted around his body and drifted on, tasting him, finding nothing on the menu, losing interest.
Being nothing on a predator's menu had never once been an asset before. He walked through a hazard that had turned back fire, frost, and gold, while it treated him like weather.
The corridors inside had gone soft at the edges, walls furred with colonies that pulsed on a slow rhythm. Lab doors hung open on rooms where glass had grown into the fur, beakers and benches half-swallowed, an ecosystem eating a curriculum.
He marked the route in chalk at knee height, the party's code, turns, counts, and hazards. The map layer took his survey the way it had taken the east wing's, and the product built itself with every step.
One storeroom had kept its door and its contents, filters, sealed reagents, glassware in crates. He marked it double, because Vasa's antidote shelf had opinions about rooms like that.
Deeper into the wing, the colonies stopped being weeds and grew organized. Feeder veins ran along the ceilings toward the wing's heart, all pulsing the same direction, a circulatory system with an address at the end.
Husk-things stood rooted in the fur at the vein junctions, grown around what had been lab stools and cabinets. Two of them unrooted when his chalk touched their junction wall, moving on drained slow limbs, defending plumbing rather than hunting food.
They came apart under the knife without mana to spend on resisting it. The System paid out anyway, which told him the colony counted them as its own. Dead custodians meant the plumbing here could be hurt, and hurtable plumbing meant a siege had options.
[ Husk custodians destroyed: 2. ]
[ EXP +500. (11,000 total.) ]
Twice more on the route he passed things that had once been students. The colonies had grown through them the way the glass had been grown through, and what remained stood in the fur like furniture, drained of whatever they had awakened into.
He counted them anyway, filed the count under grief-shaped data, and kept walking. The dead were information here, and the information said the wing had been hunting since the first week.
The heart of the wing announced itself by pressure before he saw it. The air went syrup-thick two corridors out, and his skin prickled with a charge that had nowhere to land on him.
He took the last corner at a crouch and read the chamber from its threshold. The old main lab had become a cathedral of fur and vein, with the thing the veins fed seated at its center.
[ Spore Tyrant: Rank E+. Weak seam: root bulb. Function: colony heart. ]
The Tyrant hung in its own growth like a swollen seed, veils breathing out of it in slow tides. Around it, suspended in the fur, a dozen drained bodies hung as feed stock, and some of the dozen were fresher than others.
Appraise kept reading, and the second line arrived like a dropped weight.
[ Authority: mana channel rewrite. This entity can seal or open the mana channels of a bound victim by rewriting their core. ]
He read it twice, and the shape of the wing's whole hunger reorganized around the words. The Tyrant did not just drink mana, it edited the plumbing that carried it, closing channels or tearing them wide as suited the feeding.
Sealed channels, opened channels, rewritten cores, all of it sitting inside one System sentence. Somewhere in that authority were tools the school would kill for, and threats it had no answer to, wearing the same root.
A feeder vein pulsed above his head, and the veils shifted toward the door as though the building had mentioned him. Nothing on him could be tasted, but the fur had senses of its own kind, and the visit was no longer unnoticed.
He backed out the way he had come, chalk marks running ahead of him like a paid-out rope. The veils tracked his movement now, curious about food that read as furniture, and he did not run, because running was a scent.
The junction light arrived ahead of him like a friendly border crossing. His party stood exactly where the contract put them, Ava's crew behind them, Jax's six behind hers, three factions waiting on one mana-less scout.
Vasa checked him over with a dry frost thread before anyone spoke, hunting stowaway motes. The thread found nothing to eat on him, which settled the room's shoulders a visible inch.
"The wing has a heart with an editor in it," he said, and gave them the Tyrant, the veins, the drained dead, the authority line, all of it at ledger speed.
"An editor," Vasa said, arriving at the same door he had, "that can seal channels. Or open them."
Silence moved through three factions at different speeds while the arithmetic landed. Every Awakened at the junction had just learned their power was a menu item, and every leader had just learned it might also be a shop.
"Which means every Awakened in this school is either its food or its customer," Nox said, "and it's growing toward all four territories on a schedule. The question is who pays for the surgery."
Three leaders looked at the one person the wing could not eat. He let them look, because the price of the only safe scalpel in the school was still being written, and he intended to write it himself.