There was no victory pause. No breath after Wave 6. No moment where the world seemed to acknowledge that they had survived something horrific. The courtyard was still soaked in blood, bone armor lay shattered across the stone, and the survivors were in the middle of tending wounds when the System spoke again. Not gently or ceremoniously. The air itself vibrated as the announcement cut through the space, sharp and immediate, interrupting a healer mid-incantation.
SYSTEM NOTICE:
SPEED ROUND ACTIVATED
[WOW YOU ALL HAVE BEEN DOING GREAT!]
SURVIVE THE NEXT 3 WAVES CONSECUTIVELY.
NO REST PERIODS WILL BE PROVIDED.
BONUS EXPERIENCE AND ACCELERATED LOOT SCALING ENABLED.
There was no flourish to it. No buildup. The words appeared and vanished almost as quickly as they had come, as if the System were impatient, tightening a screw and waiting to see what snapped first. For a moment, no one moved. Then panic rippled outward. "That's not possible," someone said, voice thin and cracking. "We haven't even regrouped."
Another survivor dropped to their knees, clutching a bandaged leg that was still bleeding through the wrap. Jenn was already moving, staff glowing faintly as she forced mana into wounded bodies that had not finished regenerating from the last wave. Helena stood beside her, shadows flickering unevenly around her boots, her brow furrowed in concentration. Something was wrong. Dorian felt it immediately, a subtle pressure change in the air, like the world had shifted its weight. Predator's Focus prickled at the edges of his perception without him consciously activating it, feeding him fragmented data that didn't quite align. Distances felt off. Sound carried strangely. His lightning stirred beneath his skin, restless. Helena hissed under her breath. "My mana isn't settling." Jenn nodded grimly.
"Same. It's like just as I begin to channel mana to cast a spell it wants to slip out of place." Before anyone could respond, the air at the edges of the courtyard warped. The distortion looked like heat shimmer layered over broken glass, reality bending inward on itself in short, uneven pulses. From those bends, shapes began to resolve. They were humanoid, lean silhouettes with elongated limbs and bladed forearms, their bodies phasing in and out of existence in short, stuttering bursts. They did not teleport, they flickered, snapping forward in jagged increments, never fully present until the moment they struck.
"Contacts!" Evan shouted, raising his guard. The first Rift Skirmisher appeared behind a caster who was already mid-channel. Its blade flashed once. The spell collapsed with a sharp, hollow sound, mana backfiring violently. The caster screamed as their cooldown locked, the interface flickering uselessly in front of them. The Skirmisher vanished. Panic spread instantly. "They're interrupting casts!" Lena shouted, fire sputtering around her hands as she tried to reorient. "My cooldown just doubled!" The Skirmishers didn't charge the front line. They ignored it. They bypassed fighters entirely, phasing past shields and weapons as if those defenses didn't exist, appearing instead near the still, the focused, the vulnerable. Jenn, Helena, anyone who paused long enough to aim. One flickered directly toward Jenn, blade already raised. Dorian moved on instinct, shoulder slamming into her as lightning cracked outward from his dagger. The Skirmisher solidified just long enough for the strike to land, its form destabilizing before collapsing back into nothing. No corpse fell or System message chimed.
Another appeared near Helena, its timing perfect, slipping in during the half-second gap between curse pulses. She twisted away, shadows lashing out reflexively, but the effort cost her more than it should have. She staggered, breath hitching. "They're targeting support!" Evan roared. "They don't care about us!" The survivors reacted the way they always had. They bunched up. Fear drove them closer together, fighters tightening formation around healers and casters, shields overlapping, backs pressed together in a desperate attempt to create safety through proximity. It made everything worse.
New distortions bloomed beneath their feet, circular zones where the air shimmered and sound lagged just slightly behind movement. A survivor stepped into one by accident and cursed as their vision doubled, their swing lagging just long enough for a Skirmisher to carve into their side. "Get out of the zones!" Dorian shouted, scanning the field as Predator's Focus sharpened the chaos into patterns. "They're baiting you into them!" The Skirmishers moved with intention now, flickering near the edges of distortion zones, striking once, then vanishing, herding survivors into unstable ground where skills lagged and targeting slipped. A healer tried to finish a longer restoration spell. The cast stalled. Their hands shook as the cooldown locked in place, numbers refusing to count down. A Skirmisher reappeared. The blade struck cleanly across the throat. The body hit the stone before the spell could finish. Silence followed, heavy and immediate.
Jenn froze for half a second too long, staring at the body, horror flashing across her face. "That spell should've gone through," she whispered. Dorian felt the realization settle in his gut like a weight. "This wave isn't about strength," he said tightly. "It's about breaking habits." The courtyard had become a mess of motion and fear, survivors scrambling to adjust to rules that had changed without warning. Standing still was death.
Long casts were punished. Formations meant nothing when enemies could ignore them entirely. Another Skirmisher flickered into existence near a support player trying desperately to finish a shield spell. The cast stalled. The blade fell and the body crumpled. Dorian clenched his jaw. The System wasn't testing how hard they could hit. It was testing whether they could unlearn everything that had kept them alive so far. And it was doing it without mercy. The courtyard no longer felt like a place meant for people. What had once been a gathering point, a space for orientation and nervous introductions, had been stripped down to stone, blood, and warped air that refused to behave correctly.
The Rift Skirmishers did not advance as a wave so much as seep into existence, appearing at the edges of vision and striking before the mind could fully register their presence. They were not fast in the traditional sense. They were early. They arrived in the gaps between intention and action, slipping through the spaces where certainty usually lived. Dorian forced himself to breathe through the pounding behind his eyes. Predator's Focus remained active, and the strain was beginning to show.
The world around him felt overlaid with a second image, trajectories ghosting ahead of movement, flashes of intent rippling through the distorted air like heat off stone. It helped, but it hurt. Every flicker of insight came with pressure, as if his skull were being slowly tightened in a vise. "Left flank, two phasing in," he called, voice rough but steady.
"They're going for Jenn." Evan moved before the words fully landed, barreling sideways with his shoulder lowered as Lena's fire followed a half second later. The flames did not explode outward this time. She kept them tight, compressed, forcing the nearest Skirmisher to anchor itself fully into the world for a heartbeat too long. Evan's strike landed squarely, shattering whatever passed for a ribcage before the creature could pull itself back out of phase. It did not fall. It came apart, unraveling into dark strands that dissolved into nothing before they hit the ground. Helena had stopped trying to grab individual targets. The first few attempts had nearly killed her. Instead, she spread her curses outward in layered fields, thin but overlapping, saturating the ground and air with pressure that made phasing costly.
Each time a Skirmisher blinked through the space she controlled, it slowed just enough to matter. Blood trickled from her nose now, and her breathing had gone shallow, but she did not break concentration. Jenn never stopped moving. She healed on the run, hands glowing as she slid between bodies, ducking strikes that came too fast to fully see. She never planted her feet long enough to finish a full channel. Instead, she worked in fragments, partial casts that stitched wounds just enough to keep people alive, even as her own hands began to tremble.
She used her weapon to cut down enemies when she saw openings. She was no mere healer anymore that was for sure. Dorian caught a glimpse of her face between flickers and saw something there that had not been present before, not fear, but resolve sharpened by necessity. She had learned the cost of standing still. The Skirmishers adapted. They always did. Their flickers grew tighter, more aggressive, abandoning caution in favor of speed. They struck deeper into the formation now, cutting across angles that should not have existed, baiting survivors toward the shimmering distortion zones that pulsed unpredictably across the courtyard. The zones warped sound and sight, causing spells to misfire and blades to pass inches from where they should have landed.
Twice, Dorian watched a Skirmisher feint retreat, only to strike when a fighter stepped into the distortion and hesitated for half a second too long. "Use the zones," Dorian shouted, forcing the words through the ache behind his eyes. "Don't avoid them. Push them in." It felt wrong to say it. Everything about the zones screamed danger, but Apex Predator fed him a different truth. The Skirmishers relied on predictability. They counted on fear. If the survivors moved deliberately through the distortion, if they accepted the lag instead of fighting it, the creatures' timing fell apart. They tested it. Lena lured one forward, retreating just enough to draw it into a shimmering pocket of warped air. The Skirmisher blinked, misjudged the distance, and reappeared half a step too soon.
Evan hit it with everything he had, the impact reverberating through the stone beneath their feet. The creature tried to phase out and failed, its form tearing unevenly before collapsing inward.
A sound rippled through the survivors, not a cheer, but something close to hope. The environment shifted again, almost resentful, as if the space itself disliked being used against its purpose. The distortion zones flared brighter, their edges sharpening, but the survivors were already moving with them instead of against them. They learned where spells stalled and where strikes landed true. They learned to fight in uncertainty. The final push came without warning. The remaining Skirmishers surged forward at once, abandoning their careful probing in favor of sheer aggression. Flickers overlapped, silhouettes stuttering in and out of reality so quickly they left afterimages burned into the air.
Dorian felt his focus spike, then strain, the red tint at the edge of his vision deepening as his perception pushed past comfort into pain. He called targets until his throat burned, lightning lancing from his dagger whenever a form solidified long enough to be real. Helena's curses thickened the air, dragging at the Skirmishers like invisible hands. Evan fought through blood and exhaustion, every movement slower but no less brutal. Lena's fire came in precise bursts, each one timed to force solidity at exactly the wrong moment for their enemies. Then one of the Skirmishers made a mistake. It flickered into a distortion zone mid-phase, its form destabilizing violently as the warped space interfered with its ability to anchor.
The creature screamed, the sound doubling and folding in on itself, and then it collapsed, not falling but unraveling, its body tearing apart into fragments that dissolved before they could touch the ground. Silence followed. Just the sudden absence of pressure. A System announcement rolled across the courtyard, its tone flat and impersonal.
WAVE 7 CLEARED.
[Surprised you did it!]
XP AWARDED.
LOOT DISTRIBUTED AT END OF BLITZ ROUNDS
No one moved to check their interface. Dorian staggered, dropping to one knee as the world finally stopped flickering. His head throbbed, a deep, pulsing ache that made light feel too sharp. Jenn leaned against a broken column, hands shaking so badly she had to clench them together to stop. Helena sank down beside Dorian, pale and breathing hard, her shadows retreating back toward her feet as if exhausted themselves. Suddenly the remaining students began offering health and mana potions to the four of them. Dorian thanked them and looked around for Wilhelm but he was nowhere to be seen. The System did not give them time to process the victory. The timer reset.
WAVE 8 INCOMING.
[Yes,I wasn't kidding about multiple rounds.]
There was no countdown. The courtyard held its breath again, and this time, everyone knew it would not be for long. Everyone began to drink their potions as they readied themselves for the next wave.