While the other Sleepers were being ushered toward the reinforced bunkers by frantic Academy staff, Sunny and Nephis moved against the current.
It was a silent, mutual understanding. Nephis moved with the righteous gravity of a star falling to earth; Sunny moved like a smudge of ink on a clean page, almost invisible.
"They're all watching," Sunny said, his voice barely audible over the rising sirens.
On the balconies and through the reinforced glass of the upper tiers, instructors and students looked down. Their eyes were wide, not with fear for the Gate, but with bewilderment at the two Sleepers standing alone in the kill zone.
"Let them watch."
Nephis replied with no reaction, her hand finally closing around the hilt of her sword.
"Look at her," the Sin of Solace whispered, a cold trail of dread suddenly snaking up his spine.
"She wants a show. She wants to see blood. Your blood, Sunless. Or theirs. It's all the same to the flames, isn't it?"
Sunny squeezed the hilt of [Mighty Resolve], his shadow coiled like a suffocating snake around [Puppeteer's Shroud], hoping to drown out the voice.
They could feel the static charge of a reality about to snap.
"Get back! You two, get to the shelters!" an Awakened guard screamed, his voice cracking as he held a vibrating spear.
"This is a Category Two! Sleepers don't belong here!"
Sunny didn't even look at him. He had ditched his belongings the moment the sirens blared; he was lean, unencumbered, and deadly.
From the rift, a flood of monsters erupted—lumbering, translucent horrors with too many joints and faces that looked like melting wax.
Sunny didn't run; he flowed into [Shadow Dance], using the battle arts obtained throughout both of his lives.
To the stunned Awakened soldiers, he moved with a vile, predatory grace that made the veterans' skin crawl.
The heavy, somber steel had no problems cutting through the flesh of dormant creatures.
A beast lunged, but Sunny wasn't there. He pivoted on a dime, the weight of the sword shearing through the creature's neck with clinical apathy.
[You have slain a Dormant beast, Pale Shambler.]
"What the hell is that kid doing?!" an Awakened spearman yelled, frozen in mid-thrust.
Beside him, Nephis was a pillar of focused white light.
'She's using her flames under her skin! It… It changed. Her flaw must have changed as well!'
Her raw physical talent, combined with her aspect, was nothing short of terrifying. Especially when considering that she didn't have years of experience.
She cleaved through a Shambler, her eyes darting to Sunny. Seeing the way he moved—not like a student, but like a butcher.
The horde was growing.
"Get to the secondary line!" a booming voice roared.
Awakened Rock, the instructor, stood a few meters away, his massive shoulders heaving as he fended off a pair of monsters with a heavy practice mace.
He looked at Sunny and Nephis with a mix of fury and disbelief.
"You two! Stay in the damn back!" Rock bellowed, his face turning a deep shade of red.
"If anything leaks past us, you kill it. That's your job! Don't you dare step into the vanguard!"
Thanks to him, the others quickly created a sturdy formation. Making sure to take care of the strongest creatures, leaving only the weaker ones to the Sleepers.
Sunny summoned Serpent and commanded him to help them, hoping to gain further fragments.
It wasn't enough.
He was too slow.
To kill with his current weaker body, he needed to drop the augmentation on his armor and place it on around himself instead. Already regretting the decision, he did just that.
Immediately him appeared.
"Why don't you hide, Sunless?" the Sin of Solace whispered, a cold, oily presence at the back of his mind. "Isn't that your greatest talent? A little rat, scurrying in the corners?"
Sunny didn't answer the ghost. His reasoning was a jagged, desperate thing. In his past life, he had spent years playing the fool, the scout, the hidden knife.
He had hidden from the Clans, from the Spell, and from his own potential. And what had it bought him? A front-row seat to the end of the world.
He had learned the hard way that Fate didn't care if you were hidden; it only cared if you were too weak to fight back when it finally found you.
He knew the risks. Revealing his True Name and his competence this early was like lighting a flare in a dark forest full of predators.
He knew Weaver's lineage would eventually find him again—the blood of the Great Deamon was a greedy, invasive thing that would try to consume his divinity and awaken the Forgotten God.
But what could he do?
He might have looked composed, his dark eyes calm and his movements precise, but beneath the surface, Sunny was drowning in desperation.
All he had against it was a gamble of a plan: use the Shadow God's lineage to saturate his soul so deeply in the essence of death and shadows that even Weaver's ichor couldn't fully claim him.
It was a terrifying, unproven theory.
Every fragment he missed, every second he spent pretending to be a "normal" Sleeper, was a second closer to the apocalypse he had already lived through.
He looked ahead, seeing the girl who would eventually become a sun, and the friend he was afraid of losing again.
Nephis was looking at him too, trying to make sense of the mysterious, confident "Legacy" from the outskirts.
They kept fighting, endlessly cleaving and cutting. Sunny knew exactly where to support her and how best to use her presence.
[You have slain a Dormant…]
[You have slain a Dormant…]
[You have slain a Dormant…]
[You have slain an Awakened…]
[You have slain an Awakened…]
[You have slain a Dormant…]
The ground buckled. A massive, obsidian-plated horror began to pull itself through the Gate.
A Fallen creature, the guardian.
Suddenly, a cold, familiar presence washed over the field.
Master Jet landed between the Awakened and the Guardian, her hand glowing with a ghostly light. She didn't look back, but Sunny could feel her sharp, lethal amusement.
"Nice work, little brother," Jet's voice carried over the roar of the Gate. "But the grown-ups are here now. Go finish your snacks. I'll handle the main course."
Sunny finally relaxed and fell to one knee, gasping for air. Having Jet near gave him a feeling of safety he had begun to appreciate.
Smiling, he checked his runes.
[Shadow Fragments: 161/1000]
"Snacks," he wheezed, glancing at Nephis, who was still looking at him like he was a riddle written in blood. "She really has no respect for the grind."
***
While the dust was still settling, Awakened Rock didn't stomp over with mindless fury; instead, he approached with the heavy, measured gait of a man who had just seen something mathematically impossible.
He came to a halt a few meters away, his heavy mace resting against his shoulder. His breathing was deep and controlled, but his eyes—wide and searching—betrayed his shock. He looked at the mangled remains of the multiple Awakened creatures, then back at Sunny and Nephis.
"You two," Rock said, his voice surprisingly low, vibrating with a grounded authority.
"I gave an order to hold the secondary line. That wasn't an insult to your strength; it was a tactical necessity. Sleepers in the vanguard of a Category Two disrupt the rhythm of the Awakened defenders. We have to watch your backs instead of the rift."
He paused, his gaze lingering on the surgical precision of the wounds Sunny had inflicted.
"However," Rock continued, his brow furrowing as he tried to reconcile what he had just witnessed with his decades of experience. "I've never seen a Sleeper—Legacy or otherwise—move with that kind of... finality. That wasn't a student's form. That was a veteran's execution. Who authorized you to break formation and engage Awakened-rank threats?"
Sunny slowly got up. The [Puppeteer's Shroud] felt tighter than ever, the illusion of silence in his head ringing like a bell after the Sin of Solace's "departure".
Nephis stood her ground, her silver-gray eyes cold and unyielding as she faced the instructor. She opened her mouth to speak, but a calm, chilling voice beat her to it.
"He had my authorization, Rock. Put the mace away."
Master Jet stepped over the cooling remains of the Fallen Guardian, her boots clicking softly on the stone.
She was flicking a drop of black ichor off her thumb, her expression one of bored, lethal grace.
"Master Jet," Rock said, his tone shifting to one of professional respect, though his confusion remained.
"With all due respect, these are first-year Sleepers. Both of them were using battle arts that shouldn't exist in a Dreamer's repertoire. It was effective, yes, but highly irregular."
"Irregular is my specialty," Jet said.
"I gave the Vicar a standing order to assist in venting the pressure of the lower-rank hostiles if the defenders were overstretched. He's a special case, and since the Star was with him, I decided to let the True Names earn their keep."
Rock looked from Jet to Sunny and Nephis, his expression softening into something more contemplative than angry.
He wasn't a hot-head; he was a teacher, and he was looking at students who had just skipped ten grades in a single afternoon.
"I see," Rock said slowly. He turned back to them, his gaze piercing. "Your skill is undeniable, but skill without discipline is a death sentence in the Dream Realm. Go get checked by the healers."
He gave a sharp, professional nod to Jet and turned away, beginning to organize the cleanup crews with the calm efficiency of a man who had seen many things, but perhaps none as haunting as the boy in the black silk armor or the white-haired girl with no injuries.
Once he was out of earshot, Jet turned fully to Sunny. She didn't ask where he learned to dance through death—she already knew he was a monster in a boy's skin. Instead, she just tilted her head, a sharp smirk playing on her lips.
"Authorization, huh? I don't remember that phone call being so... official."
"Consider it a retroactive gift," Jet replied, her eyes drifting to Nephis, who was watching their exchange with intense, silent scrutiny. "Besides, you saved me about ten minutes of work. That's worth a white lie to an instructor."
She leaned in closer. "But watch yourself, Sunny. You're starting to smell more like a Devil than a Sleeper."
"She's right, you know," the Sin of Solace whispered, a faint, muffled prickle against his mind. "The spotlight is getting very, very bright."