The archway didn't lead to a room—it swallowed us whole.
One moment I was standing in the Academy courtyard, surrounded by the murmur of elite students and the scent of manicured gardens. The next, reality twisted around me like fabric being wrung out, and I found myself in a place that shouldn't exist.
This was the Immersion Test, and it was wrong on every fundamental level.
'Electronic distortion sounds.'
The air itself was diseased. Jagged shards of obsidian hung in the sky without any respect for gravity, trembling with a sound that wasn't quite noise—more like a teeth-rattling vibration that made my bones ache and my stomach churn with nausea. The ground beneath my boots wasn't stone or soil, but a shifting, prismatic ooze that reflected fragments of a sky bruised with colors that didn't exist in any normal spectrum.
Even the light was corrupt. It struck my eyes at angles that geometry said were impossible, carrying information my brain couldn't process without pain.
It was chaos incarnate—not violent destruction, but something worse. It was reality that had simply forgotten how to function properly.
"Stabilize the sector!" The instructor's voice crackled over a communication system that sounded like it was being filtered through broken glass and digital static. "Use your Authorities to force localized equilibrium! Contain the spread before it cascades!"
'Students mobilizing.'
The Class A students erupted into coordinated action, and it was simultaneously terrifying and beautiful to witness.
Cassian thrust out his hands, and a dome of shimmering force erupted around a patch of seeping ground, containing its wrongness within a barrier that sparkled with mathematical precision. Tessa moved like liquid lightning, her fingers trailing lines of coherent light that seemed to stitch the fraying edges of reality back together with surgical accuracy. Another student—a girl with silver hair and eyes like polished steel—began to chant in a voice that resonated with harmonic frequencies, causing the trembling obsidian shards to vibrate in sync until they slowly, painfully, settled into stable positions.
They were artists painting over a rotten canvas, surgeons trying to repair damage that went deeper than mere physical wounds. Warriors fighting against entropy itself.
And I was completely, utterly useless.
'Labored breathing.'
I stood there like a statue, a null point in the storm of their miracles. The dissonance around me grated against my senses with the intensity of fingernails on a cosmic chalkboard, making my stomach churn and my vision blur. I could feel it in ways that had nothing to do with my normal senses—the world was profoundly wrong here, and every instinct I possessed recoiled from the fundamental violation of natural law.
[Ambient harmonic dissonance: Eighty-four percent. Tolerance threshold exceeded.]
The System Voice cut through my panic with its characteristic calm precision, analyzing the situation with the detachment of a computer program. It wasn't alarmed by what was happening—it was measuring it, cataloging it, preparing for something.
'Strain in voice.'
"Is the Patron's pet feeling lost?" Cassian's voice was tight with effort as he reinforced his faltering barrier, sweat beading on his forehead despite the artificial nature of our environment. "Or are you just here to observe how real Academy students handle actual threats?"
His words were meant to wound, but they barely registered through the overwhelming wrongness pressing against my consciousness. I squeezed my eyes shut, my hands clenching into fists so tight I could feel my nails digging crescents into my palms. The cacophony of broken reality was too much—I just wanted it to stop, needed it to stop before it drove me completely insane.
'Electronic warning sound.'
The instructor's voice boomed across the simulation with renewed urgency. "Increasing intensity parameters. Introducing catalytic resonance amplification."
A wave of pure, undiluted distortion slammed into the testing environment like a tsunami made of wrongness. It was the sound of reality screaming, the sensation of watching the universe forget its own rules in real time.
Cassian's barrier didn't just crack—it shattered like glass struck by lightning, the fragments of his protective dome dissolving into prismatic dust that hurt to look at. Tessa cried out as her carefully woven light-stitches unraveled, the patterns she'd used to repair reality's fabric coming apart faster than she could reinforce them. The silver-haired girl's harmonic chanting cracked and broke, her voice failing as the obsidian shards above us screamed back into violent, chaotic motion.
'Reality breaking sounds.'
The entire simulation bucked and twisted, reality tearing at the seams like fabric under too much stress. The students weren't just failing—they were making everything worse. Their powers, designed to impose order on chaos, were adding new frequencies to the cacophony, creating interference patterns that amplified the wrongness rather than containing it.
It was the trigger the System Voice had been waiting for.
[Critical system error detected. Cascading reality failure imminent. Temporal displacement reaching dangerous levels. Initiating corrective sequence.]
The voice didn't ask for my permission. It didn't explain what was about to happen. It simply stated its function and executed its programming.
What happened next wasn't something I did—it was something that happened through me.
'Profound silence beginning.'
A wave of absolute Silence bloomed outward from where I stood.
It wasn't an explosion or a blast of energy. It wasn't force or violence or destruction. It was something far more fundamental and terrifying—it was negation given form, the concept of "No" made manifest in reality.
The wave moved with the inexorable patience of entropy itself, spreading outward in all directions at exactly the speed it needed to travel. Wherever it touched, the wrongness didn't vanish or get destroyed—it simply remembered how to be right again.
The screaming light didn't dim—it recalled that light was supposed to be silent and gentle. The prismatic ooze beneath our feet didn't solidify—its molecular structure quietly returned to the timeline where it had always been normal earth and stone. The trembling obsidian shards in the sky didn't fall or shatter—they un-happened, their existence as anomalies seamlessly edited out of local reality.
'Stunned silence from students.'
Within the expanding radius of my influence, the world wasn't healed or repaired or fixed. It was restored to a state of perfect, pristine normalcy that felt more real than real—as if everything else had been a fever dream and this was the universe finally waking up.
The powers of the other students didn't fail or get drained or overwhelmed. They became obsolete. Cassian's hands were still outstretched in a defensive posture, but there was nothing left to defend against. Tessa's superhuman speed was still active, but she was now moving quickly through a space that no longer needed stitching back together. Their Authorities remained perfectly functional—they simply had no purpose in a reality that had remembered how to be stable.
'Wave receding.'
The wave of Silence reached its natural boundary and gently receded, leaving behind a perfect circle of ordinary floor under the stark white lights of what was clearly a training dome. The simulation was gone. The chaos was gone. The wrongness that had violated every natural law was gone.
We stood in absolute, normal quiet, surrounded by technology that hummed with routine efficiency and air that tasted exactly like air was supposed to taste.
The only sound was the ragged breathing of twenty terrified prodigies who had just witnessed something that shouldn't have been possible.
'Disbelieving whisper.'
Cassian was staring at his hands, his face a mask of complete confusion and dawning horror. "What did you do?" he whispered, the question echoing in the sudden stillness. "I can't... I can't feel it anymore."
He wasn't talking about the simulation. He was talking about his power. For those few seconds while my influence had been active, his connection to whatever forces granted him his abilities had been gently, irrevocably severed. Not broken or blocked—simply rendered meaningless, as if the universe had forgotten that such things as supernatural abilities had ever existed.
'Footsteps backing away.'
Tessa looked at me with an expression I couldn't parse—not fear, exactly, but a kind of dawning, terrified awe. Around the circle, other students were backing away from me with the instinctive caution of prey animals who had just realized they were in the presence of an apex predator.
But I barely registered their reactions. I was too busy trying to process what had just happened, too shocked by the reality of what I'd apparently done without conscious thought or intention.
I hadn't used power to fix the simulation—I had somehow convinced reality that the simulation had never been broken in the first place. I hadn't fought chaos with order—I had simply reminded the universe what order looked like, and everything else had adjusted accordingly.
'Slow applause.'
The instructors on the observation platform above weren't moving. They stood like statues carved from stone, their faces locked in expressions of stunned disbelief. These were people who understood combat, who had devoted their lives to cataloging and controlling supernatural abilities, who thought they had seen every possible manifestation of post-Collapse power.
They had no framework for what they had just witnessed. This wasn't strength or skill or even overwhelming force. It was something more fundamental—it was the end of power itself, the negation of the very concepts their world was built upon.
The System Voice was the only thing that remained unchanged, its artificial calm unchanged by the chaos or its resolution:
[Local harmonic stability achieved. Reality anchor fully restored. Dimensional integrity at optimal levels. Synchronization complete. All systems nominal.]
'Heavy footsteps.'
The head instructor—a man whose face looked like it had been carved from granite by someone who'd never heard of the concept of mercy—finally moved. He descended from the observation platform with steps that echoed in the absolute quiet, walking past Cassian, past Tessa, past every other student as if they had ceased to exist.
His eyes were locked solely on me, and there was no anger in his gaze. No fear, no confusion, no surprise. Only a deep, chilling intensity that suggested he was looking at something he had been waiting his entire career to encounter.
"You," he said, his voice low and utterly controlled, carrying the weight of absolute authority. "With me. Now."
He didn't wait for a response. He glanced at a subordinate who stood frozen at the edge of the circle, still staring at the space where impossible chaos had been replaced by mundane reality.
"Notify the Patron immediately," he ordered. "Tell him his asset has achieved full activation."
'Final realization.'
The word hung in the air like a death sentence. Asset. Not student, not person, not even prisoner. I was a phenomenon that had been delivered to their doorstep, a weapon whose capabilities they were only beginning to understand.
As I was led away from the circle of shocked students, I caught sight of my reflection in the polished surface of a wall panel. For just a moment, I saw myself as they must see me—not as Karl Morrison, confused survivor of dimensional exposure, but as something else entirely.
Something that could reach into the fundamental structure of reality and edit it like a document, making corrections to the universe's source code with the casual ease of someone fixing typographical errors.
I had not shown them strength or skill or power.
I had shown them what it looked like when the universe itself bent to accommodate a single individual's unconscious preference for how things should be.
And now they knew exactly what they were dealing with—and exactly why I had been classified as an extinction event.
The System Voice, satisfied with its successful activation, settled into the background of my consciousness like a program running maintenance routines. But I could feel it there, waiting, monitoring, ready to respond to whatever challenge might come next.
[Standby mode engaged. All systems ready for operational deployment.]
'Door closing with finality.'
As the training dome's exit sealed behind us with mechanical finality, cutting me off from the other students and their stares of terrified fascination, I realized that everything had changed in the span of those few minutes.
I was no longer just a problem to be solved or a mystery to be unraveled.
I was a force of nature that had just demonstrated it could rewrite the fundamental laws of physics on a whim.
And I had absolutely no idea how to control it.