The final day of the combat examinations arrived not with a roar, but with a chilling, artificial stillness. The Grand Coliseum had been modified overnight; four towering Anti-Magic Obelisks of dull, soul-sucking lead stood at the cardinal points of the arena. They hummed with a frequency designed to strip away glamours and suppress active mana-channels.
Lucas stood in the tunnel, feeling the weight of the Midnight Violet book beneath his robes. Beside him, Moxie—still in her dual-tailed feline form—flicked her ears irritably.
"The obelisks are radiating a low-frequency drain, Papa," Moxie's voice was crisp in his mind. "They aren't just looking for power; they are looking for 'depth.' A shallow mana pool will dry up instantly. An infinite one, like yours, will ripple."
"Keep the filter tight," Lucas whispered, stepping out into the blinding light of the arena.
The proctors had paired the students into "Survival Quadrants." By a stroke of what the school called "random selection"—but Val had warned was a targeted setup—Lucas, Cora, Benson, and Venice were placed in the same bracket.
The moment the freshmen crossed the threshold into the arena, the atmosphere didn't just change—it died. The four Anti-Magic Obelisks flared with a sickly, leaden light, casting long, jagged shadows across the sand.
A rhythmic, low-frequency thrumming began to vibrate through the floor, a sound that felt like teeth grinding against bone. It was the "Suppression Field," a localized vacuum designed to devour any mana not tethered to a Master-tier soul.
Benson was the first to falter. His Storm-Winged Peregrine, which had been circling with the arrogance of a thundercloud, let out a pathetic, choked screech. The vibrant azure lightning that usually danced along its feathers flickered like a dying candle before snapping into cold, grey smoke. The bird plummeted, slamming into the sand with a heavy thud, its majestic wings suddenly too weighted to lift.
"What is this?" Benson roared, his face contorting as he clutched his chest, feeling his own internal mana-wells being siphoned into the leaden towers. "My beast... it's starving! It's eating my own life force just to breathe!"
Venice Everbloom fared no better. Her Ancient Willow manifested not as a towering guardian, but as a withered, weeping skeleton. Its silver leaves turned to brittle husks in seconds, crumbling into ash before they even hit the ground. She stayed upright only by leaning against the trunk, her knuckles white.
"The field... it's a vacuum," Venice whispered, her voice trembling with a rare flash of fear. "It's not just suppressing us; it's hunting for a leak. If you have more than you're showing, the obelisks will tear it out of you."
Across the quadrant, Cora's knees buckled. The Mercury Child infusion was a masterpiece of alchemical masking, but it required a constant, delicate flow of "Life" mana to maintain the illusion of a Silver Jasmine. Under the crushing weight of the suppression, that flow stuttered.
The vibrant green of her aura bled away, replaced by a cold, stagnant grey. The air around her began to grow heavy with the unmistakable, cloying scent of a long-disturbed grave. A shadow, many-legged and terrifying, flickered for a split second behind her—the true silhouette of the Grave-Weaver.
"Cora, the physical!" Lucas shouted, his voice a strained rasp.
He was fighting his own battle. Every fiber of his being wanted to unleash Nyxia just to shatter the oppressive leaden weight, but he forced his soul to remain small, compact, and "indigo." He focused on the 85th percentile like a lifeline, allowing the obelisks to drain his surface mana while he locked his core behind seven layers of cognitive shielding.
"Don't reach for the book!" Lucas barked, his breath coming in ragged gasps as he lunged toward her. "The metal! Use the structural reinforcement!"
Cora's head snapped up. Her eyes, usually a bright, forced green, had gone completely black, save for a ring of mercury silver around the iris. She didn't reach for her grimoire. Instead, she slammed her palms flat against the arena sand.
"I hear you, Archivist," she hissed, her voice overlapping with a chittering, multi-tonal echo.
She stopped fighting the drain. Instead, she surrendered the "magic" and turned inward to the biology. The Mercury Child within her marrow responded to the desperate command. With a sound like grinding gears, the liquid metal surged beneath her skin.
Her fingernails didn't grow; they were replaced. Ten inches of jagged, liquid-silver claws tore through her fingertips, hardening instantly into a metal that shouldn't exist in this world.
"Let them watch," Cora muttered, a feral grin splitting her face.
She vanished. It wasn't a teleport—it was raw, unadulterated speed. Without the drag of mana-manipulation, her muscles acted with the terrifying efficiency of a Calamity-tier beast. She moved like a silver blur across the sand, her claws leave glowing white streaks in the air.
Benson barely had time to raise his arm before she was on him, the silver claws stopping a hair's breadth from his throat. There was no lightning to save him. There was only the cold, hard reality of a girl who had turned her own blood into a weapon.
"You're right, Benson," Cora whispered into his ear as the proctors watched from above with wide, terrified eyes. "A Blue Book is a weapon. But I don't need a book to unmake you."
Lucas watched from the side, his heart hammering against his ribs. The mask had slipped, but it hadn't shattered. By trading magic for physical monstrosity, Cora had given the Elders exactly what they wanted to see: a "Gifted Combatant" rather than a "Necromantic Anomaly." But as he felt the silver-white scale of the White Dragon burning beneath his own skin, he knew this was the last time a simple mask would suffice.
The conclusion of the mid-terms was a masterclass in tactical mediocrity. While Benson Sky-Rupture claimed the top rank through sheer, vein-popping stubbornness—forcing his starved Peregrine to let out one final, pathetic spark to clinch the win—Lucas and Cora executed a perfect descent into the middle of the "Elite" pack.
They emerged safe and respected by their peers, yet entirely uninteresting to the High Priest's analytical gaze. The Elders saw only a hardworking scholar and a physically gifted transferee, never suspecting that the true architects of the Orizon-Sub collapse were sitting right in their lecture halls.