The eastern wall came apart and Leon was already moving.
Not toward the exit. Toward the breach.
The first Chimera Beast came through the gap at full speed—six limbs scrambling, a jaw that unhinged past its own skull, its hide glistening with a corrosive, iridescent ichor. "Solar Edge."
Sunlight channeled through the greatsword in a burning arc that left an afterimage hanging in the dust. The solar arc cored through the beast, leaving a cauterized hole that smoked in the dust. It collapsed mid-stride, and he vaulted over the body to meet the next.
Behind him—screaming. Students who had been dancing thirty seconds ago now scrambled over fallen tables, their formal shoes slipping in dust and blood. A girl in a blue dress stared at the breach, frozen, until someone pulled her away.
His body moved, instinct already forming the command for his next strike.
"Radiant Sweep."
Horizontal arc, solar energy expanding outward on impact. Three beasts pushed back from a cluster of students cornered against the western wall. The students scrambled behind him without being told. He didn't look at them. He was already moving to the next group.
Two more through the southern breach. Another from the east. The mana chandeliers were swinging, casting the hall in shadows that kept shifting. Half the light was gone. The other half slashed unpredictably across the carnage.
Leon's greatsword cleaved through hide and bone, the impact jarring his arms, and he pivoted from the kill to face the next threat.
More coming.
Across the hall, Cassian was a blur of silent, precise motion. He met the first beast from the southern breach with two clean cuts, and it hit the floor in sections. "War Pressure." Leon heard the words, saw the air around Cassian seem to shimmer and thicken. Students nearby recoiled from it, their shoulders hunching as if under a physical weight. Even from a distance, Leon could see the smaller beasts hesitate at the edge of that oppressive aura, while the larger ones charged straight through.
He let them.
"Rending Strike."
Both blades came across in a single motion. The beast that had pushed through War Pressure split along the center line and fell in two directions.
Ignoring the carnage he'd wrought, he moved to the next breach point.
Students didn't rally behind Cassian. They fled from his path. He moved through the hall as a cold front of focused violence, his presence alone seeming to drop the temperature. His dual blades caught the last of the chandelier light and swallowed it, giving nothing back as he carved clean paths through the chaos.
A beast came through the southern breach — bigger than the first wave, the modification more visible, the limbs thicker. It saw Cassian and came at him low.
"Dominance Step."
One step forward. The ground cracked under it. The beast's charge met his forward momentum and its four hundred kilos of muscle seized. A sound like stone grinding on stone echoed as its claws dug grooves into the marble floor, its mass arrested by his single, unmovable step.
Both blades came up.
"Dreadmoor Cross."
The cross pattern carved through the beast's chest. Its legs went out from under it and its legs buckled and it crashed down, a dead weight of flesh and unsupported bone.
Cassian turned. Two more through the breach behind the first.
"Cassian."
Leon's voice. Across the hall, mid-fight, barely audible over the noise.
Cassian looked.
"East and south are the worst. I'll take east. You hold south."
Cassian looked at the southern breach. At the beasts coming through it. At the students between.
"The exits," he said.
"What about them?"
"Students need a way out. Clear the northern corridor — I'll funnel them toward it."
Leon paused for half a second. A beast lunged. His greatsword met it in a reflexive, brutal sweep, and he was already turning back to Cassian as it fell.
"Done," he said.
It had to be enough. Leon turned back to the fight.
Cassian advanced on the southern breach, his pace deliberate and unbroken—a calm center in the swirling chaos of fleeing students.
The beasts kept coming.
Leon cleared the eastern breach twice. Both times the gap filled again before the dust settled. A beast he'd cut in half still dragged its torso forward on two limbs, pulling its own entrails across the broken stone, relentless even in death.
He cut down another beast, and another lunged to take its place—an endless, screeching tide.
"Solar Burst."
Light erupted outward from his position — a sphere of concentrated solar energy expanding in every direction, pushing the beasts back three meters, buying him a precious second to take in the entire, desperate tableau.
Students were moving toward the northern corridor. Cassian's plan was working — the ones who could move were moving. The ones who couldn't were being carried by the ones who could. Some of the second-years had stepped up — organizing the younger students, forming barriers, doing what they could with the combat training they had. Professors were fighting at the far end of the hall near the main entrance, holding the largest breach, techniques Leon could feel from across the room. They had their side. He had his.
He turned back to the breach as its stone frame groaned and splintered wider. What squeezed through weren't like the others—they were larger, their armored hides scraping the edges of the new gap.
Three more through. Bigger this time.
"Blazing Advance."
He covered the distance in one burning stride, greatsword coming up mid-motion. The first beast met the blade and the solar element seemed to seek out the corruption, burning through the modification to annihilate the altered flesh beneath. The second caught the follow-through. The third got past him.
He turned, and a spike of ice shot through his gut. Near the overturned tables, a beast bore down on three students—one slumped between the other two as they scrambled, their movements clumsy with terror.
"Solar Edge!"
Too far. The arc of light struck the beast's flank, searing hide and muscle. It staggered, but it didn't fall.
A wall of metal came down between the beast and the students.
"Blade Storm."
Cassian. The name was a jolt in his mind—the man had crossed the entire hall, a phantom moving through the chaos that Leon, in his narrow focus, had completely missed. The dual blades struck from both sides in a pattern that never repeated. Each strike found a new angle, the metal-reinforced edges turning the beast's assault into a desperate fight for survival.
It didn't.
Cassian looked at Leon across the bodies.
"The gaps are getting wider," he said.
Leon looked at the eastern breach. At the southern. At the spaces between them where beasts were finding new ways in — through the windows now, through the service corridors, through sections of wall that had been weakened by the initial blasts.
"I know," he said.
The beasts emerging from the breaches weren't just bigger. They moved with a chilling coordination the earlier cannon fodder had lacked. They had been holding these back, he realized with a fresh spike of dread—a second wave, meant to finish what the first could not.
Leon met the first one at the eastern breach.
"Sunfall."
Solar energy gathered above the beast and dropped — a pillar of concentrated light that hit it across the spine. It buckled. Didn't drop. The modification absorbed what should have put it down and the beast came up swinging.
Its forelimb smashed into Leon's ribs.
He felt the impact in his teeth. Pain flared, but instinct was faster. He brought the greatsword down, shearing through bone and sinew to sever the limb. A second strike through the skull finished it, and he turned.
Blood on his formal shirt. His ribs were wrong. He kept moving.
His eyes snagged on a corner near the collapsed chandelier—three students pinned, two beasts closing. The distance felt immense, a chasm no technique could cross in time. The realization coated his tongue in metal, a bitter foretaste of failure.
"Cassian!"
Leon shouted his name, but a blur of motion was already there. Cassian didn't acknowledge the call, his dual blades moving as the War Goddess Pulse expanded from his stance, driving both beasts back long enough for the students to run.
They ended up back to back, the tide of beasts parting for a moment around them before crashing in again. The air was thick with the dust of rubble and the coppery stench of blood, and the few working lamps threw shadows that writhed over the carnage.
"How long can you keep this up?" Cassian said. Not looking at him. Cutting something down.
"As long as it takes."
"That's not an answer."
Leon didn't respond. A beast came through the eastern breach and he split it from shoulder to hip.
"Dawn Shield."
The golden barrier expanded around the students behind them. It held, but the drain was a physical pull deep in his gut, a growing hollowness that his own power could no longer fill as quickly as it was being emptied.
More coming through. Always more.
A high-pitched scream—different from the others—cut through the din and snagged his attention. Across the hall, a second-year student he'd seen tending the injured was thrown from her feet. He had a fractured image of her kneeling, tying a strip of silk around a freshman's arm, her back to the wall.
The beast hit her from the side. She didn't see it coming. Nobody did—it tore through a fresh breach in the wall, moving with an impossible speed for its size.
She crumpled to the floor, a heap of silk and blood that made his breath catch hard in his throat.
Leon was already running. Blazing Advance burning mana he couldn't spare, the hall blurring, the distance between them shrinking but not fast enough.
Another student got to her first — pulled her sideways, got her behind an overturned table. The beast's second strike hit the table instead. The table didn't survive. The students did.
Leon reached it as it reared back, his greatsword driving up under its jaw in a single, terminal motion.
The second-year was conscious, bleeding from a deep wound in her side, her eyes wide and fixed on his face. The terror in them was absolute, but underneath it was a sliver of desperate hope.
He couldn't fix this.
Kill every beast? More would tear through the walls. Stand in every breach? Another would open behind him. Burn through all his mana? The gaps would remain. He couldn't be everywhere.
He knelt beside the student, his hand trembling slightly as he placed it on her shoulder. "You're going to be fine," he lied, the words tasting like ash. The hope in her eyes was a physical blow.
He forced himself to his feet.
The hall was full. Beasts at every breach. Students behind him. Cassian holding the southern wall alone. The mana chandeliers dead now, all of them, the only light coming from techniques and the faint glow of mana barriers students had put up to protect the injured.
Leon was the center of it.
A scream from the east, a crash from the south, a dozen points of crisis burning in his vision. He couldn't reach them all.
His chest got warm.
It was a heat that had nothing to do with exertion. It felt like a star igniting in his sternum, a core of power he'd only ever borrowed from, now claiming him. The energy didn't flow from him into the greatsword; it pulsed from the sword into his hands, up his arms, a circuit finally completing itself. His mana wasn't draining—it was churning, reshaping into something brighter, heavier.
The air grew heavy, pressing in on him with the weight of a coming storm as a low hum vibrated up through the soles of his shoes.
Across the hall, Cassian stopped mid-strike. He turned, his head snapping up to look directly at Leon.
The beasts hesitated. The screams of the students quieted. Across the hall, he saw heads turn, not toward the breaches, but toward him.
The warmth spread.