[ 03:50 AM ]
There was a pressure on my throat.
Not a metaphorical one. Two hands with no physical mass, carrying the absolute temperature of nowhere, were gripping my neck with clinical precision. The freezing cold pierced my skin, shocking my exhausted, comatose brain back into the waking world.
I opened my eyes, my lungs pulling in the dark air of Room 317.
In the corner of my vision, the ODICIOS clock read 03:50 AM. My mechanical alarm had vibrated five minutes ago, and my body—completely broken by the accumulated fatigue of Sector Three—had entirely ignored it. If it hadn't been for the freezing grip on my throat, I would have slept through my only operational window.
The icy hands slowly retreated, slipping back into the space below my sternum.
"Thank you," I whispered to the empty room.
No response. But the Eclipse resting in my Solar Plexus pulsed once, very faintly. The Shadow She Left Behind had done her job.
I sat up and ran a quick biological inventory. The Integration Period was complete. The fragile, shattered sensation of my F-Rank nodes was gone, replaced by an architecture that felt marginally wider and significantly colder.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ NATIVE SYSTEM ]
◈ Odic Circuit: E-Rank (Stable)
◈ Eclipse Capacity: 1 / 2 Slots Occupied─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
One slot empty. Exactly as scheduled.
I pulled on my ruined uniform, the fabric still stiff with yesterday's mud. I had a second, pristine set in the wardrobe, but I wasn't going to ruin clean clothes for a low-level dungeon run. The bloody hospital ward I was heading to would only destroy them anyway.
I slipped out of the East Tower and moved through the quiet courtyards.
The Academy of Endstoria did not sleep. Not entirely. As I passed the southern perimeter, the rhythmic, synchronized thud of boots echoing against the dirt reached my ears. Through the morning mist, I could see the silhouette of the South Tower training grounds. A platoon of Haldia first-years was already running in perfect, two-line formations.
04:00 AM. Every single day, without exception.
I watched them for two seconds. Some people are fueled by discipline, ambition, and the pride of their bloodline. I am fueled by a severe caloric deficit and the desperate desire to not be murdered by the plot.
I kept walking.
I made a brief detour to a 24-hour automated supply terminal near the logistics wing. I tapped my wrist against the ODICIOS scanner and purchased two high-density nutrient bars and three cheap Synthetic Thermal-Packs—the standard, non-magical hand warmers issued for winter field expeditions.
Fifteen Credits total. An acceptable budget for a boss exploit.
My destination tonight wasn't in the novel I had read three times. The original author of this world had been too obsessed with romantic tension and aristocratic politics to care about abandoned medical facilities. But the game was different. In the game, players explored the borders of the map. And ten years of gameplay had taught me exactly where the developers hid their low-level farming spots.
I was heading to Outbound Ward 04—an old quarantine black-site buried in the eastern perimeter, struck from the official ODICIOS maps due to lethal anomaly saturation.
Twenty minutes later, the treeline thickened. The fog grew heavy with the scent of sterile alcohol and old blood.
I pressed my back against the damp bark of a massive oak tree. Thirty meters ahead, the Academy's eastern blockade stood between me and the ward. Two Enforcement Faculty members were patrolling the ridge. They were equipped with Head-frames—Receptive Coils designed to read ambient Odic signals and mana fluctuations in the dark. Below them, an automated Barrier Monitor drone swept the forest floor with a pale blue Odic-detection laser.
With F-Rank Agility, outrunning them was mathematically impossible. I had no stealth magic. I had no weapons.
I was about to calculate a diversion when the junior faculty member suddenly stopped walking. He tapped the side of his Head-frame.
"Hold on," the junior guard muttered, his voice carrying through the quiet fog. "My Receptive Coils are picking up a thermal dip. Right by the old oak line."
My heart hammered against my ribs. He's reading the ambient cold from the ARS Stage II residue in my circuit.
The senior guard turned, his hand dropping to the hilt of his weapon. "A thermal dip? Stage Two residue pattern?"
"Maybe. It's faint, but it's dropping," the junior guard said, drawing a stabilization rod. "I'm going to check it out. We had a breach in Sector Three yesterday. The Headmaster wants no chances taken today."
"Sweep it," the senior ordered. "I'll cover you with the drone."
Oh.Oh, no.
The heavy crunch of the junior guard's boots approached. Crunch. Crunch. The blue laser from the drone swung violently toward my direction, sweeping through the fog. He was walking straight toward the oak tree I was hiding behind. I had nowhere to run. If I stepped out, the laser would flag me. If I stayed, he would walk around the trunk and find a first-year student covered in mud.
Ten meters.Eight meters.
I pressed my back so hard against the bark it bruised my spine. I locked my breathing.
Shadow, I ordered silently, directing absolute, desperate intent toward my sternum. Freeze me. Now.
The temperature around me plummeted instantly. The Shadow She Left Behind manifested half a step behind my left shoulder. Her phantom hands wrapped around my circuit, violently suppressing my body heat and ambient mana emission to absolute zero.
Three meters. The junior guard stepped around the trunk of the oak tree.
He was standing right in front of me. Less than two feet away. I could see the condensation on his collar. I could see the glowing blue runes of his Head-frame lens scanning the exact space where my chest was.
I didn't blink. I didn't breathe. To a machine calibrated to detect living, breathing Shardbearers, and to a Receptive Coil looking for a mana signature, I was effectively a walking corpse. I was indistinguishable from the freezing damp wood behind me.
The guard stared right at the space I occupied. He stood there for three agonizing, suffocating seconds.
Then, he tapped his headset.
"Nothing," the junior guard called back over his shoulder, lowering his stabilization rod. "Just a dead thermal pocket. Probably a ley-line fluctuation pulling the heat out of the ground."
"Understood," the senior guard replied. "Get back to the ridge. The perimeter is clear."
The junior guard turned his back to me and walked away.
I didn't exhale until he was back on the ridge. I slipped past the iron gates of the outer perimeter, entirely undetected, leaving the patrol behind in the fog.
Ten minutes deeper into the dark, my ODICIOS interface spun twice, fractured, and died.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / NETWORK ]Connection Lost. Unmapped coordinate.─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Unpaid overtime officially begins.
The facility finally emerged from the mist. It was a decaying, single-story stone clinic entirely swallowed by dead ivy. The main entrance was blocked by a rusted iron gate, locked shut by a glowing High-Magic quarantine seal. The runes pulsed with a warning red light.
Breaking a High-Magic seal with bare hands was suicide. But I hadn't come to break it.
This seal was designed to keep ODS-infected patients locked inside, not to keep healthy people out, I reasoned. And technically, I am not healthy.
I pressed my bare palm against the glowing runes. I consciously allowed the toxic ARS Stage II residue—the anomaly poison I was still carrying from Sector Three—to bleed to the surface of my outer nodes. The ancient seal scanned my hand, detected the heavy concentration of anomaly sickness, misclassified me as an infected patient from inside the ward, and clicked open with a heavy mechanical groan.
I slipped through the gate.
The exact moment my boots touched the decaying floorboards inside the clinic, local physics shattered.
The cramped, rotting hallway violently stretched and expanded. The walls pushed outward, exploding into a massive, cavernous hospital ward that seemed to stretch for miles into the freezing dark. Hundreds of rusted iron beds lined the infinite room, lost in a suffocating fog that smelled of surgical antiseptic and despair.
Above my head, my Native System projected its pale grey text into the dark.