The dungeon gate shimmered behind them like a wound closing. Group Seven emerged into the academy courtyard one by one—faces pale, uniforms ragged, some supported by healers. The air tasted metallic, filled with the residue of corrupted mana and the copper tang of fear. For most of the students, the mission had been a brutal lesson; for Raven it had been a revelation, one that had torn the thin veil of normalcy from his life.
But no matter how many bodies streamed from the gate, all eyes found him.
He walked near the back of the line, shoulders hunched, hands shoved into his pockets. He kept his head down because any glance upward felt like asking to be read. His shadow trailed unnaturally close to his heels, darker than the torchlight and oddly alive, like a pet that refused to stay obedient.
Marcus's voice cut through the murmurs like a blade. "He killed the beast. Alone."
The words spread like sparks across dry grass.
"He killed it?"
"No way, it was huge—"
"I saw it. His shadow… it wasn't normal."
Raven felt each sentence as if it were a stone thrown at his chest. The courtyard, once a place of casual clatter and sparring practice, had become an open tribunal. Students craned their necks; parents nearby whispered into sleeves; instructors exchanged looks. The label talentless had been replaced by something far less benign: anomaly.
Hours later—when the last of the wounded had been escorted to the infirmary and the courtyard's panic had shrunk to a prickling, uneasy silence—Raven found himself in a dim chamber beneath the academy. The walls glowed faintly with runes that dampened mana; a web of wards kept the room sealed and sterile. It felt like being inside a clockwork heart: precise, controlled, and cold.
Across from him sat Instructor Valen. She had appeared in the dungeon without fanfare, teleporting into the core the moment the beast collapsed, and now her silver hair caught the low light in a way that made her look older than she had in class. Her expression was a carefully crafted mask—calm, methodical—but it never reached her eyes.
"Raven Silva." Her voice was soft, but each word hit like a chisel. "Sixteen. Orphan. Classified as unmeasurable. Yesterday, you destroyed a Shadow Walker. Today, you devoured a Tier-E beast single-handedly."
She leaned forward. The crystal at her desk pulsed faintly, reading the room. "Explain."
The system's warning flickered behind his vision like a dying moth.
[Warning: Revealing Shadow Eater ability will result in Execution Order.]
The memory of the words felt heavier than any chain. Raven swallowed and met her gaze as best he could. There was a tremor in his throat he couldn't smooth away.
"I don't know how it works," he said. "I panicked. Something… came out of me. I don't understand it."
Valen's eyes narrowed, not in disbelief but in calculation. She had seen anomalies before, yes—students with rare affinities, odd mutations, uncontrollable talents. But this had flavor and edge to it that her training flagged immediately.
"That was no ordinary profession skill," she said. "I have taught hundreds of Awakeners. I have seen mutations and unclassified affinities. But you…" Her voice dropped. She glanced, almost involuntarily, to the shadow at his feet. "…you are something else."
The shadow under his chair twitched as if it had heard. The motion made Raven's stomach clench.
Valen rose and moved to a panel in the wall, pressing her palm against a glowing crystal. A low hum spread through the chamber and the wards brightened.
"You are now under watch," she said. "Every movement will be monitored. Logs will be kept. We will record your activity. If your power spirals out of control, the Mage Council will intervene."
The invocation of the Council was like ice poured down his spine. He had read the legends—robed men who decided quietly and irrevocably. Their "intervention" hardly ever ended in mercy.
"If you wish to survive, Silva," she added, a sliver of pity slipping through her professional tone, "learn control. Quickly. Because the Council does not forgive anomalies."
Released but not free, he stepped out of the chamber with that sentence hanging above him like a decree.
From that day, the world became smaller and simultaneously heavier. The whispering followed him—hushed conversations at a distance, people pausing mid-step to look and then glance away, the sideways stare that tried not to be seen. Students avoided him in corridors; others crossed the room to be on the opposite side of the dining hall. The change was subtle and absolute.
At night, his dreams were louder. Sister Mary's face, the orphanage, the children he'd grown up with—those ordinary comforts had become fragile things he had to guard with everything he'd been given. The academy's wards kept the immediate danger at bay, but the Council's observers were invisible fingers tracing his movements. He noticed the way plain-clothes staff lingered a touch too long by the infirmary; he noticed the scry orbs in corners blink when he walked past. It was watchful attention, not yet hostile, but uncomfortably close.
His system chimed inside his head like a cold clock.
[Concealment priority increased.]
[Adaptive camouflage engaged.]
Small tendrils of magic braided around his presence, muffling the more obvious signatures of shadow manipulation. It was useful—an errand of automated defense from something that wanted to keep him hidden—but it made him feel like a puppet whose strings had been tied by its own maker.
One evening, as he folded himself into his usual quiet path home, Marcus materialized from an alley like a bad omen. He was less swagger than resolve now; his smirk had curdled into a thinner, colder thing.
"I don't know what you are," Marcus hissed, leaning close so the words scraped. "But the Council will find out. And when they do, you'll wish you were still talentless."
The shadow at Raven's feet pulsed, eager and bright with a hunger that tasted like retribution.
Raven could have made the thought vanish with a snap of shadow and a spray of black; he could have shown Marcus what it meant to cross him. But the system's memory of Valen's words and the specter of execution kept his hands folded. Not yet. Not in the alleys where witnesses could be pulled into the calculus of "danger."
Instead, he turned away and said, as if discarding a nuisance, "Keep talking, Marcus. Someday your words will catch up to you."
Marcus's face pinched with fury. He did not step forward. Instead he retreated, muttering threats that puffed into the night and died.
When Raven reached the ruins outside the city—places where the first Spill had left scars and where the mana still hummed weakly in the air—he let himself breathe. This was where he was least likely to be recorded. Here his shadow could move without alarms.
He summoned the system's readout quietly.
[Shadow Energy: 28]
[Skills: Shadow Claw (27%), Shadow Bite (9%), Shadow Roar (5%), Minor Heal (2%)]
Each skill pulsed faintly in his vision, tiny progress bars that crawled upward with each use. The numbers were small but real. They were a ledger of his growth.
"They're watching me," he told the dark underfoot, the words barely a whisper. "I can't afford to be sloppy. If I'm going to survive… I have to grow stronger. Quietly."
The shadow pulsed, and in the great quiet he thought he heard the whisper again, low and ancient as if coming from under a tomb.
They fear you because they remember. You are what they tried to erase.
Raven shivered. He didn't know who "they" were, or what history had been lost in official records, but he understood the caution in the whisper. The more his shadow grew, the louder the eyes would become. The longer he remained under the Council's gaze, the more careful he would have to be. Yet he could not do nothing. There were faces at the orphanage—Sister Mary's lined, faithful face; the children who laughed at games and panicked in storms—those were not statistics to him. They were reasons.
He tightened his fingers around the concrete railing and let the shadow slide along his palm like a cat. The road ahead had narrowed to a razor's edge: grow strong enough to protect what he loved, and stay hidden long enough to avoid the arm that would come to cut him down.
It was a delicate balance. Each day he kept it, the world felt a little less like it might swallow him whole.
And each night, as he lay awake and listened to the hum of the city beyond the orphanage walls, he promised himself something small and terrible: he would learn to control the thing inside him—or he would become the thing the world feared.