Stiles's voice buzzed through the small speaker of my cell phone, muffled by my hand trying to hide the device under the edge of the desk. His conspiratorial tone contrasted absurdly with the monotony of the classroom around me. The History teacher continued his droning monologue about the Industrial Revolution at the front of the class, the chalk hitting the blackboard in a continuous, anesthetic rhythm.
"He's in our year, Nate," Stiles's phrase echoed in my head, repeating in an unwanted and dangerous loop. "He isn't a teacher, or a janitor. He's a student."
I rested my elbow on the desk and let my forehead rest on my fingertips, processing the information while pretending to look at the notes in my notebook. The air seemed to vanish from my lungs for a fraction of a second.
Elias Halloway. The Black Maestro. The corrupted prodigy who used sound frequencies to induce rage and tear people's sanity apart from the inside out. He wasn't hidden in a dirty basement, wasn't conducting rituals in an abandoned cabin in the Beacon Hills preserve. He was here. Sitting in plastic desks identical to mine, eating in the same cafeteria, walking the same hallways as Allison, Scott, and Lydia.
"Joseph Blake," I murmured to myself, testing the fake name, tasting the bitter genius of that plan.
It was a perfectly mediocre name. The ultimate disguise. A white, skinny kid with the dark circles of someone living on caffeine and sleep deprivation. Messy dark hair. Empty gaze. Stiles hadn't just described an individual; he had just described ninety percent of the invisible population of any public high school in the country. The guy who sits in the back row, who never raises his hand to answer, who isn't invited to parties on weekends, but isn't weird enough to get bullied and become the center of attention either.
Elias didn't want to be the villain in the black cape. He had built a ghost perfectly designed to slip under the social radar. And, thanks to the subtle mental manipulation he applied to the administration and teachers, a ghost with a free pass and official documentation.
"Nate? Are you listening to me, man?" Stiles whispered from the other end of the line, his breath hitting the microphone, accompanied by the distant sound of a metal door closing in a bathroom. "What do we do now? I already texted Scott to keep his eyes open, but if this guy is in the same biology class as him..."
"Stay in the bathroom, Stiles. And for the love of God, don't do anything stupid if you bump into him," I replied, my voice nothing more than a sharp breath muffled by my jacket.
Without hanging up the call, I slowly lifted my head, pretending to stretch my neck. I needed to sweep the school. I needed to use Level 4 Vision, even knowing how much of a toll it took on my stamina first thing in the morning. I took a deep breath, smelling old paper, pen ink, and waxed floors, and pushed a microscopic fraction of mana into my optic nerves.
The world didn't explode in neon this time. With Level 4, the transition was much deeper and quieter. The physical density of the classroom—the blackboard, the backpacks thrown on the floor, the coats on chairs—seemed to thin out, gaining an essential texture. The class around me turned into an ocean of tiny light pulses, mundane emotions glowing in harmless shades of boredom, short-term anxiety, and the typical exhaustion of those who woke up too early. No signature of hostile intent. No oily purple smoke dripping from the ceiling.
My eyes, however, didn't stop on my classmates. Driven by a primitive instinct that had nothing to do with geometry or spells, they slid smoothly to the right side of the room. They focused on the small rectangular window of tempered glass embedded in the closed wooden door.
The window looked out onto the main hallway. The hallway that connected the east wing to the main office and the side exit of the building. The glass was a bit foggy at the edges due to the temperature difference, but the view outside was sharp.
First, the figure of an adult crossed my limited field of vision.
It was an older man, with broad shoulders tensed under a brown leather jacket slightly worn at the elbows. His posture was excessively rigid, professional, with long, firm strides that made the linoleum crackle softly even through the acoustic barrier of the door. The man's face was turned forward, focused, but his body language screamed "escort" or "institutional authority." Someone from outside. A district inspector? A plainclothes detective talking to the administration?
It didn't matter. My attention didn't stay on him for more than a millisecond. It was entirely stolen by the figure walking right behind, at a strangely dragging pace, about half a step away from the man in the jacket.
My breath caught in my throat and wouldn't go down.
The hairs on my arm stood up under the fabric of my black jacket. It wasn't the air conditioning. It was the magical core inside my chest giving a jolt, recognizing an anomaly before my rational brain could even process the image.
The silhouette accompanying the older man was exactly the sketch Stiles had just given me. Detail for detail, as if he had jumped straight from the sheriff's son's phone screen into the hallway of my school.
The boy was thin. Very thin. He walked with that hunched, defensive posture of someone instinctively trying to take up the least possible space in the universe, shrinking his shoulders. He wore a dark hoodie, plain and printless, with the hood thrown back and both hands buried in the front pockets. His hair was a dense tangle of very dark strands, cut unevenly on the sides and falling disheveled over a pale forehead.
As he walked in slow motion past the small glass window, his head turned millimeters toward the classroom.
For an instant, I saw the face.
I saw the pale, sickly, translucent skin. I saw the dark circles so deep and dark they looked like bruises under the cruel fluorescent ceiling light. But it was the eyes that confirmed the nightmare.
They didn't look empty; they were absolute wells of nothingness. There was not the slightest trace of teenage boredom, rebellion, or youthful distraction there. What I saw through that glass was a cold, calculated, anesthetized void. The apathetic expression of someone who didn't see people around him, but tools, obstacles, sacks of meat and bone whose brain frequencies could be tuned and torn apart.
I forced my Level 4 Vision to the extreme, demanding that the empty reserve ring on my finger manifest, focusing exclusively on his soul through the transparent rectangle before his walk took him out of my angle of view.
If it were an ordinary disturbed student, I would see a grey aura of depression or red of anger. If it were a werewolf, I would see the beast pulsing under the skin.
But the silhouette of that thin boy, in my spiritual vision, was absurdly and terrifyingly wrong.
There was no explosion of purple mana denouncing him as I expected. On the contrary. He was a black hole. A negative space in reality. A continuous vacuum where sound, emotions, and the energy of the hallway itself simply died and didn't reflect back. He was actively sucking the vital vibration of the environment into himself, masking his own demonic presence with a veil of magical silence so perfect, so absolute, that it hurt the eyes of anyone who knew what to look for. It was a concealment technique so sick and refined that, if I weren't running Vision at the limit of my capacity, I would look directly at his face and my brain would erase his existence from my memory three seconds later.
"Joseph Blake," Stiles's thin, desperate voice buzzed once more on the forgotten cell phone clutched in my hand.
I held my breath, motionless in the chair, watching as the silhouette of the thin boy with the dead gaze, accompanied by the man in the brown leather jacket, crossed the last inch of the door's glass window, disappearing silently down the hallway.
"Stiles," I whispered, cutting through the panic leaking from the speaker. "I'm hanging up."
"Wait, what? Why? Nate, you can't just drop this and—"
"Because the ghost just walked past my door."
I ended the call before he could let out a scream that would alert the entire school, shoving the phone into my jacket pocket.
I needed to leave that room. Now.
I raised my hand, interrupting the History teacher's monologue about steam engines. He stopped writing on the board, the chalk screeching irritably before pulling away. He looked at me over his glasses with the expression of someone who hated being interrupted.
"Yes, Mr. Salt?"
"I need to go to the nurse," I said, already starting to gather my books and shove them into my backpack.
The teacher frowned, crossing his arms. "The class barely started. Can't you wait forty minutes? We are at a crucial part of the curriculum and—"
"Honestly, sir, I would love to wait," I cut in, standing up and leaning my weight on the desk. The paleness in my face was still real, a remnant of the previous night, but my magical core told another story.
I did a quick mental check.
[MP: 1,800 / 2,100 (-500)]
I had well over half of my natural mana available. The Reserve Ring was empty, yes, but I was far from defenseless. If the situation got tight, I had the stamina to fight. Even so, if I stood there arguing for another thirty seconds, I would lose sight of the target.
"But I think the cafeteria sandwich didn't sit well with me," I forced an expression of nausea. "If I stay, I can't guarantee the floor will remain clean."
The girl sitting in front of me flinched, looking back with disgust. The teacher wavered, bureaucratic rigidity losing the war to the fear of having to deal with bodily fluids in his classroom.
"Go," he sighed, gesturing to the door. "But bring a pass from the nurse when you come back."
"Absolutely."
I threw my backpack over my shoulder and walked to the exit. As soon as the heavy wooden door closed behind me, the monotonous buzz of the class was replaced by the hollow silence of the empty hallway.
I looked down the left hallway. The older man's brown leather jacket was turning the corner toward the administrative wing, with Elias—or Joseph's—hunched, dark silhouette right behind.
I started walking.
I adjusted my steps not to make noise on the linoleum floor, keeping a safe distance. If Elias was a sonic mage, his hearing was probably as sharp as a werewolf's. I retracted my own mana, pushing it so deep into my core that I felt almost human, hiding any spark that might alert him to my presence.
As I walked silently, keeping the two in my peripheral vision, I pulled my phone from my pocket. I unlocked the screen with my thumb and opened the chat with my father.
Me: Target confirmed. He's in the school. Name on records: Joseph Blake. The disguise is perfect, looks just like another tired student. No one notices him.
Me: He is being escorted by an adult in a brown leather jacket right now to somewhere. I'm on their tail.
I sent the messages and pocketed the phone, letting out a silent, frustrated sigh.
"I don't know if this will do any good."
I shook my head slightly as I slipped behind a row of lockers.
"My old man doesn't seem to give much importance to this guy."
And it was true. There was something very wrong with Marcus's reaction. My father, the legendary War Mage who almost brought the house down upon hearing of a red mana construct or Jackson's bite, was treating the Black Maestro's presence in town with bizarre passivity. Almost as if it were a logistical inconvenience, not a lethal threat.
There was something in the Salts' past with the Halloways that he wasn't telling me.
Or he trusted too blindly in his own invulnerability.
I stopped at the corner of the hallway and peeked.
They hadn't gone to the principal's office. They walked right past the opaque glass door of administration and continued walking at a slow, rhythmic pace toward the sports wing. The muffled sound of screams and disorderly chants—"STATE! STATE!"—echoed from the main courtyard and the cafeteria, where the entire school was in ecstasy celebrating the lacrosse team's victory and qualification for the championship.
The contrast was almost nauseating. On one side, ordinary teenagers celebrating a game with painted faces. On the other, a predator walking calmly through the hallways, escorting a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a student.
I narrowed my eyes, focusing on the figure of the older man. The brown leather jacket, the overly relaxed posture, that walk of someone who owned the place... and then, the memory of the original script hit me with the force of a punch to the gut.
"Peter Hale," I whispered, throat suddenly dry.
The Alpha. Derek's psychopath uncle. The one responsible for all the carnage happening in Beacon Hills.
My mind started spinning, trying to fit the pieces into what I knew from the show. This was the day after the qualifying game. In canon, Scott spent the morning desperately looking for Stiles, dealing with Jackson blackmailing him about Allison, and then, went to the locker room.
And in the locker room, Peter cornered him.
Peter's original goal was simple: he wanted to recruit Scott. He wanted his new and promising Beta to join his one-man pack to help him exterminate the Argent family. It was a classic manipulation scene, where Peter tried to convince Scott that his instincts were a gift, not a curse.
But why the hell was Peter Hale bringing the Black Mage to a recruitment conversation? Werewolves, especially traditional Alphas like Peter, were proud and territorial. They didn't partner with human mages. Unless...
I swallowed hard and resumed following them, my steps absolutely silent on the linoleum floor. With every meter I advanced, the pressure in the air seemed to increase. The magical vacuum around Elias was so dense that the fluorescent light of the hallway itself seemed to fail subtly when they passed under the lamps.
They turned right, pushing the double metal doors of the boys' locker room.
I picked up the pace. When I reached the door, I didn't enter immediately. I silenced my own breathing and reduced the mana circulation in my body to the bare minimum needed to keep me conscious, turning my magical signature into something as harmless as dust in the air.
I opened the metal door just a crack, enough to slip into the small white-tiled corridor that led to the main locker area. The strong smell of cheap disinfectant, dry sweat, and shower chlorine permeated the air, but beneath that, there was the smell of burnt ozone accompanying Elias and the heavy smell of earth and old blood coming from Peter.
I stood behind the last row of lockers, invisible in the shadows, and strained my ears.
I heard the sound of a locker door slamming shut.
"What the hell...?"
Scott's voice. He sounded scared, surprised to turn the corner of the benches and run into unwanted visitors.
"I really don't understand lacrosse..." Peter's voice sounded right after. It was velvety, calm, carrying that tone of ironic superiority I remembered very well from TV. The sound of short steps indicated he was walking slowly through the locker room, examining the place like a museum. "When I was in high school, we played basketball. That's a real sport. But I read somewhere that lacrosse comes from Native American tribes and that they played it to resolve conflicts. Am I right?"
There was a tense silence. I could imagine Scott's chest rising and falling, survival instinct fighting panic.
"It was you," Scott accused, voice trembling but laden with anger. "You are the Alpha."
"And you are a very stressed boy," Peter replied, and I heard the sound of a wooden bench creaking slightly, as if he had leaned on it. "Scott, Scott... you have no idea how disappointing it has been to watch your stumbles over the last few weeks. I gave you a gift. I gave you the top of the food chain. And what do you do with it? Cry in corners, run from your own nature, and try to cling to a teenage huntress who would slit your throat if she knew what you really are."
I narrowed my eyes in the darkness, waiting for the proposal. That was the moment Peter would say he wanted to help him reach his true potential. That he needed his help.
But Peter's tone changed. The sarcasm vanished, giving way to a cutting, pragmatic coldness.
"I had plans for you, Scott. I really did. A pack needs numbers. I needed loyal soldiers to clean up the mess the Argents left in this town."
"I won't help you kill people," Scott growled, courage returning slowly.
"I know you won't," Peter sighed, a sound of pure boredom. "And that is exactly the problem. You have the blood of a predator, but the mentality of prey. You are flawed, Scott. And I am out of time to fix flaws."
I frowned behind the lockers. That was completely wrong.
"Fortunately," Peter continued, and the sound of his footsteps echoed again, moving away from Scott toward another part of the room. "The universe has a funny way of providing us with alternatives when our first choice proves useless."
The silence that followed was filled by an almost inaudible noise. The sound of fabric dragging softly through the air. Elias.
"What is that?" Scott's voice faltered. The wolf inside him must have felt the same terrifying vacuum I saw in Magic Sight, the total absence of life the boy radiated. "Who is he?"
A short, dry laugh cut the air. It wasn't Peter's velvety sound. It was rough, emotionless, like glass being stepped on.
The hunched figure in the dark hoodie took half a step forward. His dead eyes swept Scott up and down, with calculating slowness, before the boy tilted his head slightly toward the Alpha.
"Was this your first plan?" the boy's voice was monotone, but heavy with sharp disdain. "He can barely stand still without shaking. Pathetic."
Scott's face contorted with indignation, fangs threatening to emerge, but the instinctive pressure in the air kept him pinned to the floor.
Peter let out a theatrical sigh, shaking his head as he adjusted his jacket collar.
"I admit, my recruitment lacked criteria," the Alpha replied, with the casualness of someone discussing the purchase of a defective product. "I came here today to clean up my mistake, Scott. The problem is the Argents have been very observant lately. If the hunters find the body of my own Beta with his throat torn out, their investigation and the politics of my... species... would get too complicated for my taste right now."
Peter gave a light pat on the hoodie-wearing boy's shoulder, the contrast between the killer Alpha and the pale teenager bordering on absurd.
"That's why outsourcing is wonderful," Peter smiled, eyes flashing lethal red for a split second. "The stage is yours. Make it look like an aneurysm... or whatever it is you do."
With a last look of contempt at Scott, Peter turned his back and walked calmly toward the emergency exit at the back of the locker room. The metal door creaked and slammed shut with a dry snap, leaving only Scott and the magical anomaly alone in the aisle between the lockers.
The boy took his hands out of his hoodie pockets. Long, pale fingers stretched slowly.
"Elias Halloway," he finally introduced himself, his voice echoing off the tile in a physically uncomfortable way, as if the room's acoustics were bending around him. "Not that you'll need to remember my name. Your brain will turn to liquid long before that."
Before Scott could growl, the main locker room door flew open, and the sound of sneakers skidding on linoleum echoed loudly.
"Scott? Dude, I looked for you everywh—!"
Stiles.
The idiot had run straight into the slaughterhouse.
Elias's head snapped toward the door with unnatural speed. His empty eyes focused on Stiles, who froze in the middle of the aisle seeing the scene, his phone still clutched in his hand.
"An intruder," Elias murmured, lip curling into a sadistic micro-smile. "Even better."
He made no sudden movement. There was no glowing purple light, no magical boom, no warning. He just focused his intent.
The attack was an invisible wall of frequency. A sound so perversely high-pitched and dense that human hearing didn't register the noise, only the pain.
Stiles screamed.
It was a guttural scream, tearing his throat. He collapsed to his knees instantly, dropping the phone and clutching his head with both hands. His face turned red, blood vessels in his neck bulging as the sonic pressure tried to literally cook his mind from the inside.
It lasted exactly one second.
Long enough for my adrenaline to explode and my 1,800 mana points to respond to my command.
Behind the row of lockers, I clenched my right hand tight, calculating the geometry of the invisible wave Elias was projecting.
Phase Cancellation.
I fired the anti-wave, perfectly inverted, straight into the center of the aisle.
The impact caused no explosion. The effect was much more disturbing.
Stiles's agonizing scream vanished. The hiss of the wind in the locker room windows vanished. Scott's panting vanished.
From one millisecond to the next, the sound of the entire universe simply ceased to exist.
The absolute silence lasted only two seconds.
But for a corrupted prodigy like Elias Halloway, two seconds of total nullification were enough for him to understand the level of the threat. His head snapped around, dead eyes sweeping the row of lockers until they locked onto my position. He realized the trick. He pulled back the hostile intent that was frying Stiles's brain.
The sound of the universe came back all at once, bursting in my eardrums. Stiles's ragged moan, Scott's heavy breathing, and the hum of the fluorescent lights above us snapped back into existence.
"Phase interference," Elias murmured. His voice lost its apathetic monotony. There was a morbid curiosity there. A predator that had finally found something that didn't die with a snap of his fingers. "War magic. You're the Salt boy."
There was no point in hiding anymore. If I let him focus again, Stiles's or Scott's brain would melt out of their ears.
I stepped out of the shadows, walking to the center of the hallway. My mind was already projecting geometric equations into the air around me.
"Basic physics, asshole," I said, raising both hands. "Sound needs a medium to propagate."
I pulled mana from my core, ignoring the sharp pain in my temples.
Isolated Vacuum. Focus: Spherical.
The sphere of air exactly around Elias's head simply ceased to exist. The high-pitched sound he was preparing to fire choked and died in the void. His eyes went wide. The absurd pressure sucked the air from his lungs instantly. His hands flew to his own neck, the human survival instinct finally cracking the sociopath mask.
I thought I had him. That was my first mistake.
Elias wasn't an amateur mage who relied on external screams. He was a conductor.
Even suffocating in the vacuum, he didn't try to run. He lowered his hands from his neck, clenched his fists, and channeled his own mana inward.
He used his own bones, his own ribcage, as a resonance chamber.
The vibration didn't travel through the air; it traveled through his flesh and hit the ground beneath his feet.
The linoleum floor exploded upward. A seismic shockwave raced through the tiles straight at me, breaking my focus and dissipating the vacuum sphere.
"Shit!" I snarled, jumping back.
Structural Shield.
I erected a thick, bluish barrier of mana in front of me just before the floor shards hit. The impact sounded like a shotgun blast. The vibration traveled up my arms, making my teeth chatter violently.
[MP: 1,500 / 2,100]
Elias coughed violently, pulling air back into his lungs, but his eyes now shone with a dark, manic fury. The black hole in his aura collapsed, revealing the Dark Mage's true nature: a spiraling storm of purple, dense, oily mana that made the light from the lamps distort around him.
"You think a vacuum scares me?" his voice now reverberated, not just in my ears, but in my chest. He was speaking on multiple frequencies at once. "I am the tremor."
He extended both open hands toward me.
There was no projectile. There was only a distortion in the air, like heat rising from asphalt, traveling at the speed of sound.
I recognized the signature. Resonance Frequency. He wasn't trying to push me; he was trying to find the natural frequency of my magic barrier to shatter it from the inside out.
My wall of blue mana began to vibrate violently. Fissures appeared in the structure. If that sound passed through the barrier, it would do the same thing to my internal organs.
"Spin the vector!" I ordered myself.
Instead of reinforcing the wall, I changed the angle of the magic structure, turning the flat barrier into a curved ramp. Elias's sonic wave hit the mana curve and was deflected upward with a deafening boom.
The locker room ceiling above us was obliterated. Light bulbs burst in a shower of glass and sparks, and the fire sprinkler pipes and showerheads ruptured, spraying cold water over us.
Elias smiled under the artificial rain.
"Water," he whispered. "A propagation medium dozens of times faster than air."
He stomped on the puddle forming in the hallway. The water around his boot boiled instantly, not from heat, but from extreme vibration. The sonic wave traveled through the water on the floor at an impossible speed.
I couldn't block it. If the water touched my shoes, the sound would enter through my feet and crush my knees.
Impulse!
I pushed mana to the soles of my shoes and jumped, the boost throwing me three meters into the air, nearly hitting my head on the ruined ceiling. The sonic wave tore through the water beneath me, hitting the row of lockers at the end of the hall and crumpling the metal like aluminum foil.
While I was in the air, at the apex of the jump, I saw Elias pointing his fingers up, ready to shoot me down like a bird.
I needed to go on the heavy offensive. Sonic magic was continuous; structural magic was about mass and acceleration.
Kinetic Shot. Multi-fire.
Still in the air, I aimed my right hand at the row of crushed lockers to Elias's left. I fired three spheres of raw force, not at him, but at the metal. The kinetic force ripped three entire lockers from the wall, and with a twist of my wrist, I altered their gravity vector, launching tons of twisted steel straight at the Dark Mage.
Elias's eyes widened. Sound doesn't stop solid mass flying at a hundred kilometers per hour easily.
He crossed his arms and screamed. A literal scream, high-pitched and strident, reinforced by dark magic.
The sound wave hit the lockers in mid-air. The metal shrieked, denting further under the sonic pressure, losing speed, but the inertia I had put into it was too great.
The block of steel collided with Elias, hurling him against the tiled wall with a dull thud and the sound of cracking bones.
I landed on the ground, water splashing around me. My breathing was ragged. I felt a trickle of blood run from my nose; the ambient pressure was rupturing my capillaries.
[MP: 900 / 2,100]
The consumption was absurd. Every structural defense and kinetic vector drained me, while he seemed to use the environment itself as fuel.
I looked at the destroyed wall. The mass of metal shuddered. A low, deep hum began to emanate from beneath the lockers. The sound rose in pitch, fast, until it turned into a piercing whine. The metal crushing Elias began to vibrate so violently that the hinges melted from friction.
The lockers exploded away from him.
Elias stumbled forward. His hoodie was torn, there was a nasty gash on his forehead leaking blood into his left eye, and his right arm hung at an odd angle—broken or dislocated.
But his aura... his aura was colossal. Purple, electric, furious.
He was no longer apathetic. He was in ecstasy.
"I'm going to break all your glass windows," Elias snarled, his voice distorted, seeming to come from all directions. "I'm going to burst your eardrums, your veins, your core."
He didn't raise his hands. He just opened his mouth and sucked in air.
My brain registered the danger before my eyes did. The Grimoire called it Internal Frequency Rupture. He wasn't going to throw sound into the environment. He was going to tune his own mana to the exact frequency of the water inside my body.
If he fired, my blood would boil from vibration.
The humming started in my head. My eyes lost focus. A stabbing pain pierced my eardrums, and my skull felt like it was being squeezed by a hydraulic press. I was losing motor connection with my legs.
"Structure..." I muttered, the taste of copper flooding my mouth.
There was no external shield that could block an attack that was already inside my head. The only way out was the most dangerous thing Marcus had ever taught me. I couldn't block the sound, but I could change the target's acoustics.
I closed my eyes. I stopped trying to fight the vibration and directed all my remaining mana into my own bones and organs.
Structural Densification.
[MP: 300 / 2,100]
I transformed the flexibility of my physical body into something dense like magical lead. Sound travels differently depending on the material. By altering the density of my own biological structure through mana, Elias's deadly frequency suddenly went out of tune. The "channel" changed.
The high-pitched sound inside my head faltered, turning into just an annoying, low hum. The lethal pressure disappeared.
I opened my eyes. Elias's gaze was wide in pure shock, not understanding why I hadn't dropped dead with blood leaking from my eyes.
His surprise was the window I needed.
I took a heavy step forward, water splashing under my boot. His magic faltered for a second of hesitation. It was enough.
"My turn."
Elias instinctively stepped back, eyes wide, his good hand raised, trying to focus a new lethal frequency in the dense air of the destroyed locker room. Desperation finally showed on the prodigy's face.
But I didn't advance for melee combat. I stopped in place, relaxing my shoulders, feeling the blood run from my nose and the high-pitched ringing in my ears.
I cracked a red-stained smile, staring down the Dark Mage.
"You're good at physics," I murmured, my voice hoarse cutting through the noise of water gushing from burst pipes. "But you suck at math. Did you really think this was a one-on-one?"
Elias's gaze wavered. His arrogance had blinded him to the whole board. He was so focused on crushing the only other mage in the room that he completely forgot the Alpha's original prey.
I pulled every remaining drop of my mana. The bottom of my core burned in protest, a dull, deep ache spreading through my chest.
[MP: 000 / 2,100]
Vacuum Field. Max Expansion.
I didn't create a defensive barrier or a kinetic projectile. I annihilated his battlefield.
The vacuum dome exploded outward from me, swallowing the entire locker room. The sound of water hitting the floor vanished. The noise of wind in the broken windows vanished. The unbearable hum of Elias's sonic magic was cut instantly, as if reality's power cord had been pulled from the socket.
The world went absolutely mute.
Elias opened his mouth, eyes wide in pure panic. He tried to scream, tried to channel purple mana to break my silent structure, but without air, without sound, his magic was just a harmless spark fighting against nothingness. He had nowhere to run. He was isolated in space, suffocating in silence.
And then, from amidst the debris of the shower area, the yellow and brown blur shot out.
Scott McCall wasn't a mage. He didn't need air to conjure spells or frequencies. He was brute force, instinct, and primal fury, driven by the need to protect and destroy whatever threatened him.
In the absolute silence of my vacuum, the werewolf's charge was terrifying.
Elias turned his head too late. He barely had time to raise his good arm in a useless gesture of defense.
Scott hit him like a silent freight train.
The werewolf's claws tore through the air and met the Dark Mage's chest with brutal precision. The impact threw Elias against the dented lockers. I saw Scott's mouth open in an animalistic roar that emitted no sound at all, his face transformed into a mask of pure lycanthropic aggression.
He delivered the fatal blow. The claws sank into the pale flesh of Elias's shoulder and chest, ready to tear the boy in half.
But there was no blood.
The instant Scott's claws penetrated the Dark Mage's body, Elias Halloway's eyes went wide one last time, not in human pain, but in a mechanical, hollow shock.
His physical form wavered. The translucent skin, the dark hoodie, the blood on his forehead—everything began to vibrate at a maddened frequency, losing cohesion. The sickly purple aura exploded outward from him, not as an attack, but as containment failing.
Under the weight of my vacuum and the impact of the werewolf's claws, Elias Halloway's body simply crumbled.
He didn't fall to the ground. He unraveled in the air.
Like ash blown by an invisible wind, the boy's form disintegrated into thousands of gray dust particles and purple sparks. The dust swirled through the wet air of the locker room for a second before falling lifelessly onto the puddles of water on the destroyed linoleum floor.
The structure of my spell, now without energy to sustain itself, finally collapsed. The vacuum vanished, and the sound of the real world invaded my ears again with the force of a punch.
The water gushing. The sound of the wind. And Scott's heavy, confused breathing.
I fell to my knees, the hard floor slamming into my exhausted bones. I held my head with both hands, trying to ignore the violent dizziness and the hellish ringing still echoing in my skull.
Scott stopped in the middle of the hallway, claws still extended, looking at the empty space where the Dark Mage was a second ago, then at the gray dust scattered in the water on the floor. His yellow eyes blinked, the wolf yellow fading, replaced by the scared brown of the teenager.
"He... did he turn into sand?" Scott stammered, his voice trembling with adrenaline and confusion. He turned to me, shoulders heaving frantically. "Nate... what just happened? Who was that guy?"
Behind us, at the start of the locker aisle, I heard a weak moan.
I raised my eyes with effort. Stiles was lying on the floor, propping himself up on his elbows. He was pale as a ghost, hands stained with thin blood leaking from his ears and nose.
He tried to open his mouth to speak, but only a choked moan came out, followed by a cough that splattered more blood onto the cracked tile. He was on the verge of traumatic shock.
I let my arms fall to my sides, exhaustion crushing me. I looked at the gray dust staining the water at Scott's feet.
It wasn't Elias.
That sociopath's intelligence was much greater than I imagined. He never set foot in the school. The mental manipulation on the teachers, the fake enrollment, the apathetic behavior... none of that was the Dark Mage in person.
It was a Mana Clone. A construct of dense magic and dust, designed specifically to act as a remote avatar and a disposable time bomb.
And Peter knew. He brought the clone to execute Scott without taking risks.
I tried to take a step toward Stiles, but the invisible warning in my mind flashed red.
[MP: 000 / 2,100]
The price of emptying the core collected its debt instantly. The lethal weakness I felt before I started training magic—that invisible disease that corroded my bones—returned with the force of a derailed train.
My legs gave out.
The biting cold invaded my chest, and my lungs simply seized, refusing to draw air.
I fell to my knees in the puddle of dirty water, clutching my own throat, vision darkening at the edges.
And then, my skin began to glow.
It wasn't the rhythmic light-blue glow of my mana. It was a dense, heavy silver light, pulsing violently in my veins.
But the energy didn't come from my empty core; it came from the outside in, forcing my heart to beat and my lungs to function.
Before I could understand what was happening to my body, the temperature in the locker room plummeted.
The air a step away from me distorted violently, as if space itself were being torn from the inside out. A deafening crack of atmospheric pressure echoed off the broken walls, blasting the water from the puddles sideways.
In the blink of an eye, a dense explosion of dark blue mana obliterated the gloom of the locker room.
And then, he was there.
Marcus Salt didn't open any doors. He simply appeared, materialized by the brute force of a spatial distortion, positioned exactly between me and the rest of the room.
The aura exuding from my father wasn't just magical intent. It was pure, raw, crushing gravity.
The air around him became so thick it felt like molten lead, suffocating the environment immediately.
Scott, who was still standing a few meters away, panting and claws out, turned sharply toward the anomaly.
The wolf inside him tried to growl. His eyes flashed yellow in an instinct of territorial defense—but it lasted only a fraction of a second.
The werewolf's primal instinct met the absolute apex of the magical food chain.
Unable to withstand the absurd physical and spiritual pressure of Marcus's aura, the growl died in Scott's throat. His eyes rolled back, and he collapsed onto the wet floor with a dull thud, instantly unconscious.
Stiles, already injured and on the verge of shock at the end of the hall, didn't even have a chance to try to understand what had appeared there.
The shockwave of my father's presence swept him away.
He blacked out instantly, his body slumping inertly onto the cracked tiles.
On my knees, fighting the darkness invading my peripheral vision, I looked at my own hands, which were now pulsing a heavy silver.
The realization finally hit through the excruciating pain and the ringing in my skull.
A Spatial Safety Anchor.
Marcus had carved a tracking and life-support rune into my own organic structure without telling me. A passive trigger that only activated an emergency teleport when my core hit absolute zero, injecting his mana directly into my veins remotely to ensure my biological failure didn't stop my heart the second my energy ran out.
Marcus slowly turned his face to me.
His posture was stone.
His gaze shone a glacial blue—a contained storm of fury and lethal power that I had never witnessed in all my years of life.
"Dad..." my voice was nothing more than a scratched whisper, the metallic taste of blood flooding my mouth.
He didn't answer.
He just watched me, motionless, as his external energy forced my lungs to take one last ragged breath.
The suffocating weight of that terrifying aura was the last thing I felt before my brain finally shut down and absolute darkness swallowed me.