The lecture hall could have held a small army.
Tiered rows climbed upward in a concrete semicircle, every seat occupied—one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred students, all facing forward like attention itself was being graded. Holo-screens hovered in a neat arc above the professor's podium, each one layered with rotating schematics of Nano-Enhancer Construction and Structural Integration. Molecular lattices folded in on themselves, glowing lines snapping into place with mathematical arrogance.
I sat three rows from the back. Same seat. Always the same seat.
My pen moved.
My mind didn't.
"—second-generation nano-enhancers require active latency correction," the professor droned, voice amplified just enough to be unavoidable. "Without proper neural synchronization, you're not enhancing performance—you're introducing instability."
A few students chuckled. Someone nodded like this was personal validation.
I stared at the diagram until the lines softened at the edges.
Power like that ending up with a coward.
The words cut through the lecture like a corrupted file.
My jaw tightened. I forced my eyes back to the screen. Nano-assemblers. Carbon-weave scaffolds. Artificial mana channels. Entire systems designed for bodies that accepted modification.
Mine didn't.
The irony wasn't subtle. It was surgical.
My watch vibrated once against my wrist.
Not a message.
Just a ghost sensation. Muscle memory. The body remembering panic.
After Daksh left, the alley hadn't gone quiet.
That part stayed with me.
Hector had arrived eleven minutes after the alert triggered.
He told me later he'd broken three traffic laws and ignored two guardian advisories to get there. I believed him. I remembered boots slamming pavement. Remembered trying—and failing—to sit up when he knelt beside me.
"Vai."
My name sounded wrong in his mouth. Too sharp. Too scared.
He saw the thugs first. All three of them. One slumped against a wall like his spine had forgotten its job. Another folded beside a dumpster, limbs angled wrong. The third was breathing, face pressed into concrete, not moving.
Hector didn't ask what happened.
He shrugged off his jacket, pressed it against my chest, and activated the emergency channel on my watch himself. His hands shook, even with augmentations dampening the tremor.
"Stay with me," he said. Then, more firmly, "Don't close your eyes."
Mana depletion wasn't sleep.
It was absence. Like something essential had stepped out and locked the door behind it.
The police came too fast. Floodlights. Drones. Voices overlapping, asking questions no one waited to hear answers to. Someone lifted me onto a stretcher. Someone else was already mapping the alley.
Daksh was gone.
And before I knew it, four days had disappeared with the wind.
I woke up to white ceilings and antiseptic air. Phantom was curled tight against my ribs like she'd claimed the hospital bed by right of conquest. My body felt hollow—light in the wrong way.
"Severe mana exhaustion," the medic said, scrolling through a floating chart. "Your core held—barely. Four days unconscious. Three days minimum rest. No exertion. No mana use."
Hector didn't make a joke.
That alone said more than the words.
He stood a little straighter, arms folding not in impatience but restraint, jaw setting the way it did before combat briefings. His gaze stayed on the chart longer than necessary, as if memorizing the numbers could stop them from changing.
"Barely," he repeated once, quietly.
The medic nodded. "If he'd pushed even a few seconds longer—"
"I know," Hector cut in, calm but final.
He looked at me then, really looked, like he was measuring something he hadn't expected to have to measure so soon.
"Three days," he said, voice low. "You hear that? You don't move. You don't play hero. You breathe and you eat. That's it."
No teasing. No grin.
That's how I knew how close it had been.
"Mr. Vairagya."
The professor's voice snapped the present back into place.
"Yes, sir." I stood without thinking.
The lecture hall went quiet—not polite quiet, but interested quiet. The kind that waits.
"If you're determined to attend class physically while being elsewhere mentally," he said, adjusting his glasses, "stay back after the lecture."
A few students smiled. Not cruelly. Curiously.
I nodded. Sat back down.
The rest of the class passed like static.
His cabin smelled like synthetic wood and old irritation.
"Sit," he said, eyes on his console.
I did.
He turned slowly, scanning me like I was a malfunctioning component. "You missed four days."
"Yes, sir."
"That's unacceptable."
"I was hospitalized."
He raised an eyebrow. "So you claim."
My fingers tightened once. I kept my voice even. "I can submit my hospital admission records."
"You will," he said sharply. "Today. Administrative Office. If you don't, the absences stand." He leaned back. "This is a technical academy. Not a rehabilitation center."
"I'm keeping up with the material."
"Barely," he replied. "This institution doesn't adjust standards for students who can't handle the strain." A pause, deliberate. "If your body is a liability, you may want to reconsider your enrollment."
The words landed exactly where he aimed them.
"Anything else, sir?"
His lips thinned. "Next time you decide to collapse, try not to do it mid-semester."
Dismissed.
I left without responding. Anything I said would've become evidence.
The hallway lights felt too bright.
Halfway down the corridor, my holopad chimed.
Mom.
I answered immediately.
"Vai." Her voice was tight, controlled—the sound of worry that hadn't slept. "Are you walking right now?"
"Yes."
"You're breathing too fast."
"I just left class."
"Did you eat?"
"Yes."
"…Did you?"
A pause.
"Not really."
She sighed, long and quiet. "Doctors always say 'recovering.' Mothers know better." Then softer, "You scared me. Four days, beta."
"I know."
"You don't have to prove anything," she said. "Not to them. Not to anyone."
I looked down at my hands. Still trembling, faintly.
"I'll come this weekend," she added quickly. "I'll cook. Don't argue."
I almost smiled. "Okay."
"Call me tonight."
"I will."
Outside, the academy grounds stepped downward in wide terraces. Reinforced grass hummed faintly underfoot. Mana-treated stone bore old impact marks no one bothered to polish away.
On the lower field, a training session was underway.
Resonance Blade Training.
Helmets locked. Limiters humming. Mana constructs forming and collapsing in controlled arcs. It wasn't flashy. It was disciplined.
I climbed to the top of the study hall where the open air cut through the noise and sat there, letting my pulse slow.
One trainee finished a sequence and let the construct dissolve.
Her movements were precise. Economical. No wasted motion. She removed her helmet, hair damp against her forehead, breath steady.
Shreya.
She didn't look around. Didn't perform. She reset and went again.
I watched from above. Quiet. Still.
Then I left.
Meanwhile Hector hadn't slept for nights and all one could see him doing was studying the crime scene.
He shut off the alley footage after the third replay. Not because he'd seen enough violence—but because the violence wasn't the problem anymore.
He zoomed in on the gear.
Slow. Methodical.
One thug's arm plate flashed briefly when the light caught it at the wrong angle. Hector froze the frame and magnified.
Mana capacitor. Aftermarket. Military-adjacent.
"Yeah… no," he muttered.
Local-level criminals didn't carry capacitors rated for sustained mana discharge. They burned out fast. Dangerous. Illegal in twelve districts. The kind of thing that came with serial numbers filed down and middlemen who didn't ask questions.
He switched feeds.
The bike wreckage. The side panel hadn't fully melted—meaning it was layered with mana-resistant alloy. Expensive. Overkill for purse-snatching.
Then the disruptor.
Hector paused again.
Short-range mana interference weapon. Compact. Premium. The kind guardians trained against, not civilians. The police report called it "modified tech." That was generous. It was straight-up contraband.
"These idiots weren't just robbing people," he said quietly.
He pulled up the inventory list from evidence intake. Two items already flagged for transfer. One mysteriously "malfunctioned" during collection. Another reassigned to a higher authority with no explanation.
Hector exhaled through his nose.
Someone was cleaning this up.
Then he looked at the damage again—not the weapons, but the alley itself.
Crack lines in the concrete radiated outward from three distinct points. Not random. Not explosive. Controlled vectors. Each impact placed with deliberate spacing.
No wasted motion.
No panic.
No escalation.
Just neutralization.
He'd fought enhanced opponents before. He knew what desperation looked like. What rage looked like. What losing control looked like.
This wasn't any of that.
Daksh hadn't overpowered them.
He'd handled them.
Hector replayed the moment Daksh entered the frame—barely half a second of motion blur before everything ended. The thugs hadn't even fully activated their weapons.
Against that level of gear, that should've been a bloodbath.
It wasn't.
"That shouldn't be possible," Hector said softly.
He leaned back, eyes still locked on the paused image.
If those thugs had landed even one clean hit, Vai wouldn't have survived long enough for an alert to trigger. Mana disruptors didn't care about grit or intent.
And yet,
Daksh had walked through it like it was background noise.
Hector closed the file slowly.
Not because he was done.
Because he knew better than to dig too deep, too fast.
Illegal mana weapons on the street meant someone was testing supply lines. Testing response times. Testing what kind of force it took to stop enhanced targets.
And somewhere in the middle of that mess—
A kid with no neural compatibility had burned through his entire core trying to do the right thing.
Hector stood, rolling his shoulders, jaw tight.
"This city's getting sloppy," he said to the empty room.