The physical reality of the Imperial Academy was something that completely, utterly defied the standard geographical logic of the lower mortal realms.
It was an institution of an impossibly vast, near-limitless scale, entirely situated within a completely separate, independent pocket dimension that had been painstakingly carved out of the cosmic void by the foundational ancestors of the empire tens of thousands of years ago.
The grand massive gate that the youths had frantically fighting to breach outside the capital walls was not actually a structural entrance to a collection of campus buildings at all.
It was merely a highly sophisticated, spatial transit gateway leading straight through the dimensional rifts and into this entirely separate realm of existence.
At this exact, breathtaking moment, all thirty-six of the surviving elite students stood closely together upon the surface of a semi-solid, highly dense white cloud.
