The arena was silent now, eerily so after the chaos that had consumed it less than an hour before. Fractured stone and faint traces of warped essence still scarred the center of the battleground, like wounds that refused to heal. The very air seemed to shimmer with residual dimensional energy, creating an unsettling distortion that made looking directly at the manifestation site physically uncomfortable.
Principal Whitmore stood at the heart of it all, his hands clasped tightly behind his back to hide their trembling. His face was pale but controlled, the weight of responsibility pressing heavily upon his shoulders like a physical burden. He had seen incidents before awakenings gone wrong, beasts breaching the outer wards, student duels that escalated beyond safety protocols but this... this was different. This was something that challenged the very foundations of everything he thought he knew about dimensional physics and Academy security.
