The names were added.
The lists updated.
The scouts moved on—efficient, clinical, already scanning the next team entry.
But not everyone in the chamber moved with them.
Far above the seated tiers, where the light dimmed and the projection glows didn’t quite reach, a lone figure stood near the upper catwalk—behind the reinforced viewing shield, where only those with high clearance had access.
He hadn’t spoken a word all day.
But now—
Now he stared.
Through the shifting feed. Through the echo of thunder spells and spear strikes. Through the rising hum of scout chatter and system resets.
Straight at Ethan Hartley.
His pupils were slit.
A thin vertical line of gold gleamed inside each eye, refracted through the crystalline lens like twin blades drawn halfway from their sheaths.
His breath caught—once.
A crack escaped his throat.
Soft.
But fractured.
“…It’s him.”
The words weren’t spoken with wonder.
They dropped like broken glass.
His hands curled at his sides—one wrapped in a silk glove, the other bare and scarred with faint arcane scoring. His coat—dark, noble-cut, unmarked by faction—shifted slightly with the ambient mana pressurizing around him.
And his eyes—
His eyes did not blink.
They froze.
Like something long-buried had stirred.
Like something long-feared had been recognized.
Or remembered.
And slowly—slowly—his gaze turned cold.
Dead cold.
As if memory had locked its jaws onto him and whispered a name he could neither refute nor forget.
“Ethan Hartley…”
Something that didn’t belong.
Something that should’ve never caught up.
And now that it had—
He would not let it pass again.
*****
The morning sun filtered through the cathedral-like windows of the Arcadia North Annex, casting thin, deliberate beams across the clean-cut stone of the observation corridor.
Fourth day.
Leonard stood still, hands resting behind his back, gaze fixed on the display crystal hovering in front of him—unlit.
He hadn’t activated it.
Not yet.
The silence around him was almost meditative, but his thoughts moved like clockwork gears—grinding, calculating, realigning.
He had spent the last three days combing through the academy’s cadet roster with surgical precision. From the top fifty down to the 900s. Filter after filter. Pattern after pattern.
He’d observed formations. Studied recovery responses. Measured mana drift, tempo irregularities, and glyph contour delays.
Every anomaly had been logged, marked, tested.
And discarded.
One by one.
Even Darien Vale—one of the most promising outliers on his list—had returned no resonance. No echo. No pulse.
Three days. Over four hundred cadets personally reviewed.
And the artifact?
Still quiet.
Still waiting.
Still blind.
He let out a long, quiet breath through his nose.
This method is too slow.
He had known it from the start, but now—with time compressing and scouts circling like wolves around the rising stars—he could no longer afford the wide net.
Precision. Now. Not theory.
That meant changing tactics.
Leonard activated the projection crystal at last—but not to search.
Instead, he pulled up his private list.
Nine names.
Each one marked with a golden glyph in the shape of a crescent halo.
They weren’t the highest-ranked cadets. Some weren’t even in the top 1000.
But they shared traits.
Not power—but silence.
Mana signatures that looped oddly.
Records with missing birth notations.
Spell rhythms that bent instead of surged.
And most importantly…
A way of hiding, without realizing it.
These weren’t cadets trying to be seen.
They were cadets whose presence distorted just slightly the longer you looked at them.
Of course while he was looking for his target, he didn’t forget his sister.
But sadly…..It was not the time.
Not yet.
Leonard hadn’t had time to properly observe her team’s dungeon runs. Not with how deeply entangled he’d become in building, refining, and combing through the initial candidate net. Filtering theory from noise. Casting light through a maze of shadows.
And while whispers of her performance had reached his ears—
People murmuring about her flawless mana threads.
Scouts trading clipped phrases about an “unmarked healer with conductor instincts.”
Even one of the Blackstone Verge observers had referred to her as “a tempo catalyst with layered field awareness”—
Leonard hadn’t been surprised.
He’d expected nothing less.
Because he knew his sister’s potential.
Even before her mana had awakened.
Even before she had entered the academy.
He had seen the signs of it—quietly blooming, half-curled beneath her calm demeanor, unassuming but never truly dormant.
And yet, he hadn’t looked.
Not yet.
That wasn’t neglect.
It was discipline.
She had asked him to wait—until her team was stronger. Until the moment was right.
And Leonard honored that.
But still…
A flicker of thought crossed his mind, light but persistent.
“I should probably visit her soon.”
He filed the thought away with practiced ease.
First, the list.
These nine cadets.
These final threads.
On the list—there was no Sylvie Gracewind.
Not yet.
Leonard hadn’t had time to properly observe her team’s dungeon runs. Not with how deeply entangled he’d become in building, refining, and combing through the initial candidate net. Filtering theory from noise. Casting light through a maze of shadows.
And while whispers of her performance had reached his ears—
Cadets murmuring about her flawless mana threads.
Scouts trading clipped phrases about an “unmarked healer with conductor instincts.”
Even one of the Blackstone Verge observers had referred to her as “a tempo catalyst with layered field awareness”—
Leonard hadn’t been surprised.
He’d expected nothing less.
Because he knew his sister’s potential.
Even before her mana had awakened.
Even before she had entered the academy.
He had seen the signs of it—quietly blooming, half-curled beneath her calm demeanor, unassuming but never truly dormant.
And yet, he hadn’t looked.
Not yet.
That wasn’t neglect.
It was discipline.
She had asked him to wait—until her team was stronger. Until the moment was right.
And Leonard honored that.
But still…
A flicker of thought crossed his mind, light but persistent.
“I should probably visit her soon.”
He filed the thought away with practiced ease.
First, the list.
These nine cadets.
These final threads.
He stepped away from the projection crystal, its golden crescent-marked glyphs still floating silently in his wake. His coat flared faintly behind him as he exited the observation corridor and stepped into the sunlit hallway beyond.
The scouts’ sector remained quiet at this hour—most of them still reviewing footage, or preparing bid offers. The academy’s schedule had entered its later combat phases. Dungeons were rotating fast now. Cadets moving on tighter schedules.
That suited him fine.
Leonard passed through the warded barrier at the end of the hallway with a single pulse of mana—subtle, clean, uniquely his—and entered the cadet-side quadrant.
Now came the second movement.
He murmured under his breath, voice low enough to avoid echo, syllables shaped by ancient pronunciation:
“Caeli tangere, lumen signare, ambulo inter eos.”
Mark from the heavens. Touch the breath between them.
A flicker of warmth passed over his palm. Not hot. Not even visible.
But as his fingers moved in slow, deliberate passes through the air, they traced tiny arcs of radiant ink—golden lines that evaporated almost immediately. Unseen to all but the caster.
Helio-threads.
Sunlight-based sigil points, each designed to latch onto a specific mana imprint as long as proximity was maintained.
Leonard passed through the southern arch of the training wing’s mezzanine, where two of the nine marked cadets were scheduled to pass through for a physical examination block.
He timed his breathing.
His steps.
And as one cadet—a wiry boy with hawk eyes and wind-thread tattoos—moved past the stairwell, Leonard whispered again:
“Signa primum.”
The thread latched.
No reaction.
No resistance.
No detection.
Success.
He continued walking. Twenty seconds later, another cadet—older, a transfer from the western front line academies—passed through near the apothecary column. Leonard adjusted his pace. Tilted his shoulder. Whispered the spell once more—barely a breath.
Marked.
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