May 18, 2025 — Rennes, France 11:47 PM
Street lamps shattered one by one along the Rue de la Monnaie as a wave of invisible force rolled outwards from the center of the old quarter, flipping parked cars.
A portal had rifted open.
A Red—Catastrophe class.
Eighteen hours. That was all they had been given.
Eighteen hours to clear it, and the party inside had gone silent at sixteen hours straight.
Now, there was nothing left to count down to.
Outside the emergency perimeter on Boulevard de la Liberté, a row of Manatech Group.
Vans sat with their side doors flung open, as their equipment humming, and hologram screens glowing with frantic readouts.
Technicians in white coats moved between terminals with the controlled panic of people who already knew the worst had happened.
Supervisor Élise Moreau pressed her headset hard against her ear with both hands, eyes fixed on the central monitor where a red blinking icon pulsed over the map of the old quarter.
"Phantom Squad, come in. This is Manatech Division, Rennes Command — do you copy?"
Static.
"Phantom Squad, respond. Dubois, Marchand, anyone—please respond."
More Static. Then just for a second an voice, warped and layered, like two people speaking at once from the same throat.
"...they're... beautiful..."
Élise yanked the headset off. Her hands were shaking.
Behind her, a young technician named Remy spun around in his chair.
"Supervisor — the mana signature inside the portal just flatlined. All six of them."
"What do you mean flatlined?" another technician, Pauline, snapped from the adjacent terminal. "Flatlined how? Dead, or—"
"Possessed," Élise said flatly. Her voice was hollow. "They've been turned."
The room went dead silent.
Then every alarm in the van went off at once.
On the monitor, six new signatures blinked into existence — not inside the portal, but outside it. Moving fast, moving towards the city.
"They're out," Remy whispered. "Oh God...They're already out."
"Sound the outbreak alert!" Élise slammed her fist on the console. "Get every available adventurer on comms — now! Full mobilization! This is not a drill!"
The portal rupture sent a visible shockwave over the rooftops buildinys.
To anyone watching from a distance, it looked almost beautiful—a column of pale violet light erupting into the night sky, laced with threads of silver and black that curled like living smoke.
Then came the screaming.
Hundreds of Aetherials poured from the mouth of the portal, flickering like distorted mirages, before each one found a host to possess.
A man walking his dog on the Rue Saint-Georges stopped mid-step. His dog barked—then whimpered and fled.
The man turned slowly, his eyes already gone, replaced by two dim points of violet light. His mouth opened. Something that wasn't his voice came out.
A woman running from a café stumbled when the shadow beneath her feet moved—detached itself from the ground and wrapped around her ankles.
"AHHH!!!" She had just enough time to scream before it pulled itself upward, drowning her in darkness.
In less than four minutes, three city blocks were lost.
"All units, this is Manatech Command broadcasting on emergency frequency seven!" Élise's voice cut through every adventurer's earpiece in the city.
"Dungeon break confirmed at the Vieux-Rennes portal site. Red-class breach, Aetherials have exited containment."
"Civilian possession confirmed across sectors three, four, and six. All available adventurers are ordered to deploy immediately. Threat level is being assessed—current estimate is B-Threat, potentially climbing."
"Watch for Abominations. I repeat — civilians are being turned. Do not engage possessed individuals with lethal force unless there is no alternative. Protect those you can. Move!"
On the rooftop of a four-story building two blocks from the breach, a team of four adventurers crouched low behind the ledge, watching the chaos below.
Their team leader, a tall woman with close-cropped dark hair and a pair of twin short swords magnetized to her back, lowered her binoculars slowly.
Her name was Capitaine Isabelle Voss Upper A Rank, Fighter class, a twelve-year veteran serving Frech's hero association.
The scar that ran from her left eyebrow to her jaw caused from a S-Threat Aetherial three years ago.
She let out a deep breath "Three blocks gone in under four minutes," she said, mostly to herself. "That's fast, that's very fast."
To her left, a wiry young man with round glasses and a tattered scarf wound around his neck was already sketching glowing rune-lines in the air with two fingers, reading the mana density in the streets below.
This was Théo Beaumont— Mid A Rank, Mage class, Grade V Sorcery. His specialty was Air Manipulation, and he had a habit of narrating what he saw like he was writing a report in real time.
Académie du Voile Arcanique — Lyon, France | Two weeks earlier
The classroom on the third floor of the East Wing smelled like old wood and spent mana. The desks were tiered, the windows tall and narrow, and the blackboard at the front.
Professor Seraphine Aurel walked in two minutes late, which was intentional.
She always walked in two minutes late on the first day. She said it gave the room time to settle into its own noise so she could see who kept talking and who went quiet.
She was somewhere in her mid-forties — lean, brown-skinned, hair pulled back with the efficiency of someone who had decided years ago that it wasn't worth thinking about.
She wore the academy's dark blue coat, she rolled both sleeves to the elbow, and the mark on her left forearm—a faded branching scar, the kind left by sustained magical overload—was visible to anyone who knew what it meant.
Most of her students didn't. Yet.
She set her notes on the desk, did not open them, and looked at the room.
Twenty-three students. Most of them sixteen or seventeen. Some eager, some nervous, two already looking like they regretted the career path.
"Now, let's begin the lesson."
She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote two words on the board without preamble.
MANA. MAGIC.
She set the chalk down and turned around.
"Different things," she said. "Who thinks they're the same?"
No one raised their hand, because this was clearly a trap.
"Smart," she said. "Who can tell me how they're different?"
A girl in the second row raised her hand—short hair, ink-stained fingers.
Seraphine had already identified her as the type who would either be excellent or would exhaust herself trying to be excellent. Either way, useful.
"Yes."
"Mana is the source energy," the girl said carefully. "Magic is the application."
"Closer than most first answers." Seraphine folded her arms. "But 'application' is vague. Say it precisely."
The girl—her name tag read Mireille she thought for a second. "Mana is the energy that exists in the environment and in us. Magic is... the shaped effect. What happens when you give mana a form and intent."
"Good. Sit with that."
Seraphine began to walk slowly along the front of the room. She had a habit of moving when she lectured — not pacing nervously, but circling, the way someone does when they're thinking and talking at the same time.
"Mana is not yours," she said. "I want you to understand that before anything else. It is not a personal resource you were born with."
"It is ambient—it saturates the world, it lives in the air, in the earth, in the walls of this building. What you have, those of you with awakened cores, is the ability to draw it. To pull it in and hold it and decide what to do with it." She stopped.
"That is the first step. The drawing. And most first-years are terrible at it."
A boy near the back—long legs stretched out, arms crossed, the look of someone who was here because his parents expected it—spoke without raising his hand. "My uncle is a Mid A Rank. He said mana control is the easy part."
Seraphine looked at him for a moment.
"Your uncle," she said, "has been drawing mana for however many years he's been active. When you've done something for a decade, it stops feeling hard."
She continued her slow walk. "Ask him if it felt easy the first time he pushed too hard and the backlash cracked two of his ribs."
The boy said nothing. A few others exchanged glances.
"It's not a scare tactic," Seraphine said, matter-of-factly. "It's information. Mana drawn beyond your core's current capacity does not disappear politely. It tears on the way out. We will talk about that in week four."
She stopped in the center of the room and turned to face them directly.
"Now. Direction."
She wrote the word on the board under the first two. Underlined it once.
"This is where fighters and mages split. Not in power, but in direction." She held up one hand and pressed it flat against her sternum.
"A fighter pulls inward. The mana goes into the body, Into muscle and bone and weapon. They do not project, they do not cast."
"They become for the duration of their infusion something denser, more present, more threateningly real than an unawakened person has any right to be."
She lowered her hand and extended it outward, palm open.
"A caster pushes outward. The mana leaves the body, takes on shape, takes on the rules the caster gives it, and becomes a discrete effect somewhere else in the world."
"A spell, a formation, a beam of light or a wall of compressed air or a rune that sits dormant in the floor until someone steps on it." She brought her hand back in.
"Same mana, opposite direction. And the direction determines everything — how you fight, how you tire, how you die, if you get it wrong."
Mireille's hand again. "Which is more powerful?"
Seraphine looked at her. "Neither."
"But at high rank—"
"Master mage can reshape terrain. At high rank, a Master fighter can hit hard enough to crack the foundation of a building."
Seraphine tilted her head. "You are asking which tool is better. I am telling you it depends entirely on what you need to do. A hammer is not better than a scalpel. They are not in competition."
She walked back to the board.
"What kills adventurers in the field is not picking the wrong class." She tapped direction once.
"It is not understanding which direction their power flows—and then trying to make it flow the other way because the situation seems to demand it.
"You cannot perform surgery with a hammer, you will not demolish a wall with a scalpel. Know what you are."
She looked at the room.
"Mana is the tide," she said, and the rhythm of it was clearly something she'd said many times before.
"Magic is what you build on the shore. If you forget which one you're doing—the dungeon will remind you. And dungeons," she picked up her chalk again, "are not gentle about it."
Back on the rooftop, Théo's rune-lines blazed in the dark — threads of his own mana pushed outward, reading the current, measuring the pressure the way Professor Aurel had spent three sessions drilling into them.
He still heard her voice when he ran diagnostics. "Know what you are."
What he was, right now, was worried.
What he was feeling right now made him genuinely uneasy. "Mana saturation in the breach zone is—okay, that's not good." He pushed his glasses up his nose.
"That is genuinely not good, Isabelle. The ambient mana reading down there is almost double what a standard Red-class produces."
"Whatever was inside that dungeon was not your average intelligent Aetherial pack."
"Are you telling me this is actually worse than a Red?" said the third member of the team — a heavyset man in reinforced plate armor who went by Gros Laurent, Low A Rank, Tank class. He had arms the size of most people's torsos and a voice like gravel in a tin can.
He was also, at this moment, eating a protein bar with remarkable composure.
"I'm saying the Aetherials that came out of there are punching above their weight class," Théo replied.
"At least two of those signatures down there read like B-Threats. And one of them—" He paused, squinting at the rune-lines floating in front of him. "One of them is something I don't have a category for."
"You don't have a category for it," repeated the fourth member of the team — a young woman sitting cross-legged on the rooftop with her eyes half-closed, her fingers idly weaving threads of pale blue light between them like a cat's cradle.
This was Soline Achebe—Upper A Rank, Support class, specializing in Healing and Barrier magic.
She had the calm, unhurried energy of someone who had made peace with danger a long time ago. "That's comforting. Truly... I feel very safe hearing that."
"Soline."
"I'm serious, Théo. I feel incredibly reassured."
"Can you two focus?" Isabelle said, cutting them both off.
She stood up from the ledge, drawing both short swords in a single smooth motion.
The blades caught the violet light from below and shimmered faintly with the mana threaded through the metal.
"Lauren, you push forward first. Théo, I want a wind barrier at street level—anything airborne gets pushed back before it reaches us. Soline, stay at range if anyone goes down, Understood?"
"Understood," Soline said, unfolding from her seated position with fluid ease.
"Understood," Théo echoed, dismissing the rune-lines with a wave.
Laurent finished his protein bar, crumpled the wrapper, and tucked it into his belt pouch with the solemnity of a man securing a sacred relic. "Let's go break some ghosts."
The street below was a warzone.
From the far end of the Rue du Chapitre, a four-person squad of B-Rank adventurers was already engaged—a fighter, two rangers, and a mage holding a loose line against a cluster of Aetherials that had taken on vaguely humanoid forms, their bodies like cracked glass filled with writhing shadow.
The fighter, a young man with lightning crackling across his gauntlets, drove his fist into the nearest Aetherial with a roar.
As the impact landed the creature shrieked—a sound like metal tearing and skidded backwards across the cobblestones.
The session continued with Professor Aurel dropping a plain iron rod on the front desk with a flat clank and then standing back with her arms folded, looking at her students.
"Who thinks this can hurt an Aetherial?"
Silence. Last class had taught them that her questions had teeth.
"Nobody," she said. "Correct instinct. Now — why?"
Mireille, carefully: "Aetherials aren't fully physical. An untreated object just... passes through the less-manifested ones."
"Good memory. Precise enough." Seraphine picked the rod up. "An Aetherial exists partially in the physical plane and partially in the aetherial layer — a kind of in-between space that overlays our own."
"Depending on how anchored the individual is, physical matter interacts with them to varying degrees."
"Some fully manifested Aetherials—the ones that have planted themselves in the physical world—can be hit with your bare hands and it will register. But a phasing type, one that hasn't committed to being here?" She let the rod fall through her loosely open fingers and caught it at the last second.
"Your fist goes through it like some fog. Boulders, walls, chains it's useless. You are applying force to something that hasn't agreed to have mass."
"So how do fighters hit them at all?" someone from the middle rows asked.
"Because fighters don't hit with their fists." Seraphine set the rod down and pressed her open palm flat against it.
She just held it there for a moment. "They hit with their mana."
She removed her hand.
"Pick it up," she said to the boy nearest the front. "Édouard, yes?"
He reached for it and stopped.
The rod felt different.In a way that made the back of his hand prickle slightly.
He looked up at her.
"You felt that," she said. It wasn't a question.
"What did you do?"
"Infused it." She walked back to the front. "I pushed mana into the object. Not through it — into it. Saturated the material until it crossed what we call the aetherial threshold."
"It is not a spell, there is no formula, incantation, or projection. It is simply presence—raw, directed, sustained. And to an Aetherial, that rod is now something they cannot ignore."
She looked at the room.
"A Fighter who has mastered infusion does not cast magic through their weapons. They become the weapon."
"Their mana turns their body and their blade into something that exists on both sides of the threshold simultaneously physical and aetherial."
"That is why a punch from a mana-infused Fighter can send a creature of pure ether skidding across the floor."
A hand from the back. "If infusion works, why bother with elemental magic at all?"
Seraphine looked at.
"Because infusion works on anchored types. Against a phasing Aetherial—one that hasn't committed to the physical plane infusion has diminishing returns. The creature simply phases more. It steps further into the aetherial layer and your beautifully infused fist misses it entirely."
She went to the board and drew a quick grid. Along the top she wrote: Anchored. Phasing. Formless. Down the side: Physical. Energy. Spiritual.
"Energy elements like lightning, fire, light, explosion, and sound these transmit through the aetherial layer directly."
"They do not depend on the target having decided to be physical. You are sending something that was never purely physical to begin with."
"A phasing Aetherial cannot step away from fire the way it steps away from a sword. The fire follows the aetherial thread. It finds the core."
Mireille's hand. "And formless types?"
"Rare... Against a genuinely formless Aetherial one that has no anchoring at all you need spiritual elements."
"Soul, shadow, high-intensity light, certain sound frequencies at Grade IV and above." Seraphine capped her chalk.
"But if you are sitting in this classroom, you are not yet equipped to fight a formless-type Aetherial. And if you ever find yourself face to face with one—"
She looked around the room.
"You better run and call for someone who is better equipped." Her voice was even.
"I have seen adventurers die because they refused to admit their element was the wrong tool for the moment. Pride is not a magic element, It does not appear on the grid, and most important of all it does not save your life."
She let the room sit with that for a moment.
Then, quieter: "Learn what you are, learn what they are, match them correctly. That is not giving up—that is being useful."
That was exactly what Luca should have done. His lightning was the right tool — it registered, it hurt the Aetherials, the energy threading through his gauntlets bridging the gap between physical and aetherial perfectly.
But he read the fight and forgotten to read the room. He was so focused on the one in front of him.
"Stay mobile," Professor Aurel would have said. "An Aetherial that can't touch you can't take you."