Clyde was halfway down the corridor when it hit him.
Not a sound, not a sight. Something older than both of those things, the particular pressure behind his sternum that his Astral Card produced when the Hollow Star was trying to get his attention about something it had already noticed before his conscious mind had caught up. A slow, insistent thump, different from the regular rhythm, the rhythm that meant look.
He stopped walking.
Something is wrong.
He opened his Hollow Eyes.
The corridor resolved into its layered state, the frequency gradients of the building's stone visible, the residual ichor traces of everyone who had passed through today drifting at mid-height. He scanned slowly, methodically, the way Soren had told him to scan rather than searching frantically.
There.
At the far end of the corridor, near the junction with the east wing, a figure stood with its back to him. Student height, student clothes, student posture. Everything about it visually correct.
Everything about its ichor signature completely wrong.
The frequency coming off it was distorted at the fundamental level, the specific corruption signature of a fractured Astral Card, the discordant signal that Clyde's Hollow Star had learned to recognize the way a nose learns to recognize smoke. It was maintaining the human appearance with reasonable competence. But the wave underneath the appearance was not a human wave. It was the wave of something that had consumed enough Astral Cards to keep functioning but had lost most of what made those cards originally coherent.
A Howling. Right here inside the Academy.
He deactivated his Hollow Eyes and assessed the situation quickly.
I have the butterfly knife and the Clockwork card.
He reached into his coat and took out the butterfly knife, keeping the motion small and unhurried, the way Aldric moved when he didn't want something to register as a threat before he was ready.
Then he took out the Clockwork card.
He pressed his thumb against the butterfly knife's blade just enough to open a small cut. Sting. Blood welled up quickly. He pressed his thumb to the card.
Hisssss.
The card began its drain, steady and immediate, the familiar pull of Lunar Ichor moving from him into the card's reservoir. He kept his ichor tone low, the way Soren had corrected him, seeking resonance rather than forcing it.
The cogs spun faster.
He whispered the chant under his breath, the Latin pronunciation still new enough in his mouth that he had to think about each syllable.
"Tempus, umbra ultimae horae, dissolve filum tuum sine fine et sine ut potestas tua antiqua hunc secundum cruentem consumat."
Ring.
The clean single tone, quiet enough that it didn't carry.
"Tempus auge," he breathed.
The corridor thickened around him and the gap between intention and action compressed and he moved.
The distance to the Howling closed faster than it should have. He crossed the corridor in what felt like two steps and covered the ground of six, arriving behind the figure before it had registered that anything in its environment had changed.
He grabbed its shoulder and spun it.
The face it was wearing cracked.
Not dramatically, not all at once, but the way a mask cracks when the thing wearing it stops paying careful attention to maintaining the edges. The eyes went wrong first, the pupils expanding past any natural limit, the face beneath the borrowed appearance shifting and resettling as the Howling redirected its attention from maintaining the disguise to dealing with the immediate threat.
It was fast.
Faster than Clyde expected, its arm coming up and catching him across the chest with a force that pushed him back two steps even with the Clockwork acceleration still running. The impact registered as a full-body jolt, his ribs protesting the contact.
Strong. This one is not Class I.
It lunged.
Clyde dropped under the reach of it, letting the momentum of the Clockwork carry him sideways faster than the Howling had calculated for, and drove his fist hard into its midsection.
Crack.
The impact was solid and the Howling folded slightly around it, its corrupted biology absorbing the strike differently than a human body would, the flesh giving and then pushing back with a resilience that didn't belong to organic tissue.
It grabbed him.
Both hands, one on his coat collar and one on his arm, the grip enormously strong, the kind of grip that communicated very clearly that it intended to end the engagement immediately and permanently.
Clyde activated his Hollow Eyes while the Clockwork was still running.
The world layered. The Howling's interior became visible through its surface, the corrupted ichor churning in the specific patterns of a Howling that had consumed multiple hearts, the secondary cardiac structures visible as additional pulses in its chest cavity.
Two hearts. Class II.
He found the primary one. Larger, slightly left of center, pulsing with the arrhythmic corrupted rhythm he had learned to recognize. Surrounded by the beginning of bone calcification but not yet hardened enough to be impenetrable.
There.
He stopped trying to pull away from the grip and drove forward instead, closing the distance the Howling had been using to control him, getting inside the reach of its arms where the leverage went wrong for it. His free hand found its chest.
He pushed his Lunar Ichor into his fingers.
Purple, bright and immediate, the color of his personal frequency expressing itself through his hand the way it expressed itself through Hollow Edge, the resonance building in the tips of his fingers at the point of contact.
CRACK.
He drove his hand through.
The Howling's chest gave way under the concentrated resonance, the corrupted flesh and the beginning of the bone casing parting under the pressure of his ichor-saturated hand, the physical contact amplified by the frequency into something that behaved more like a blade than a fist.
His fingers found the heart.
It was wrong to the touch, dense and irregular, pulsing against his palm with the erratic rhythm of something that had been maintaining function through corruption rather than biology. He felt the Astral Card inside it, the residual warmth of something that had once been a person's identity preserved inside the organ.
He closed his hand around the heart.
CRACK. SNAP.
The Astral Card inside shattered as he compressed it, the sigil lines breaking apart under the concentrated resonance, the metallic snap of a fracturing card ringing out inside the Howling's chest cavity and traveling up through Clyde's hand and into his arm.
The grip on his collar released.
The Howling folded.
Thud.
It hit the corridor floor and began its dissolution, the flesh breaking down rapidly, the corrupted ichor losing its cohesion as the organizing principle that had been maintaining it ceased to function. In thirty seconds there was very little left that resembled what had been standing there.
Clyde let the Clockwork drop.
The corridor reasserted its normal temporal quality around him and the familiar drag of post-acceleration settled into his muscles, not painful, just present, the body registering the return to its standard operating speed.
He looked at his hand.
Purple ichor still faintly visible at his fingertips, receding back into him as the resonance settled.
That worked, he thought, with the specific calm that arrives after something dangerous has concluded successfully and the processing hasn't fully caught up yet.
He pulled out the Clockwork card and pocketed it.
Then he looked at the remains on the corridor floor and thought about how he was going to explain this to Aldric.
He is not going to be happy there was a Howling inside the Academy again.
He turned and walked back toward the principal's office.