The walls hummed softly, alive with the pulse of light that carried both power and data through the academy's arteries. Professor Sera Vance leaned against her desk, half-drained cup of caffeine sludge in hand, half her mind still stuck in the war zones she pretended to have left behind.
The classroom was circular—thirty meters wide, domed ceiling flickering with planetary projections. She'd once commanded orbital strikes across five continents. Now she managed five students who couldn't even agree on lunch.
Or so she thought.
"Alright," she said, voice coarse from another sleepless night. "Recap the principles of metabolic resonance in Ruinborn tissue."
Five very different eyes looked up at her.
Kael, the human boy who never blinked, whose pupils shimmered with faint symbols only seen under certain lighting.
Ryn, a crystalline being from Xyros, whose body refracted light into thin rainbow lines and whose voice came in chords.
Tava, a small scaled girl with a tail that twitched when she was annoyed—a hybrid from the Drakari systems.
Morthen, a fungus-bonded telepath who wore a containment mask to keep his spores from seeding others.
And Iri, the silent aquatic from an oceanic moon, always in her portable hydration field, eyes black as oil.
Together, they were supposed to be her bottom set. Students with inconsistent aptitude readings. The sort that made administrators sigh.
Kael spoke first. "Ruinborn tissue metabolizes thought-energy instead of biomass. It eats cognition."
Sera frowned. "That's—partly right. But that level of precision isn't in the text."
He shrugged. "Didn't need the text."
She turned to the others.
"Did he share notes?"
Tava chuckled. "Notes are irrelevant when you already know the outcome."
"What outcome?"
"The one where you stop pretending you don't want to ask us what you really want to ask."
Her heart froze for a beat. She'd been quiet about it for months—that gnawing question. The one she'd muttered into her pillow after the third glass of synth-whiskey.
Her ability—a growth-type adaptive evolution—thrived on learning, on challenge. But the galaxy had stopped surprising her. She'd fought Ruinborn in trenches made of bone. She'd seen cities of light turn to ash. And she'd never once seen them die out completely.
So the question had formed, bitter and impossible: What would it take to erase the Ruinborn entirely?
She said it now, aloud, partly mocking herself, partly hoping to shock them back into focus.
"What would it take to wipe them out?"
Silence.
Then Kael said, calmly: "Seven hundred and twelve simultaneous stellar ignitions, each collapsing into synchronized singularities, forming a quantum chain that unthreads their hive genome across every dimension they occupy."
Sera blinked. "That's… not even—how do you—?"
Ryn added, "We can show you the schematic if you'd like."
Their crystalline fingers tapped the desk. The lights dimmed, and a hologram materialized in the air: a vast lattice of stars, pulsing like neurons. Equations scrolled across the walls, recursive and alien.
Sera's coffee hit the floor.
"This data isn't in any database," she said, voice rising. "You're accessing restricted archives?"
Tava snorted. "Archives are cute."
Morthen's mask hissed. "Professor Vance, you asked a question. We answered. Isn't that what teachers want?"
Her pulse hammered. "No one should know this. No one should be able to—"
Her ability stirred. She felt it—growth, heat, evolution. Her neurons firing in patterns she didn't recognize. The answers from her students were feeding it.
Her knees buckled, laughter cracking through panic.
"You're cheating," she gasped. "You're all cheating reality!"
They watched, curious, like children observing an animal learning to speak.
Kael tilted his head. "Would you like another answer?"
She stared at them, trembling between terror and awe.
"What are you?"
Ryn smiled, prisms dancing in their face.
"We're your class, Professor."
Outside, above the academy dome, the faint shimmer of the Helios Network's defense grid flickered. Somewhere in the upper atmosphere, a Ruinborn screamed — as if something, somewhere, had just noticed them back.