"A raw, uncalibrated kinetic flush."
Instructor Cicero's voice sliced through the residual steam of the amphitheater. His leather shoes cracked against the stone floor as he pivoted away from Syevira's fading projection. A vein pulsed visibly at his temple. His wire-rimmed glasses caught the harsh, sterile blue glare of the projector lens, magnifying the absolute aristocratic revulsion twisting his features.
He stared at the projection, then slowly turned his head to look at me. His expression was a volatile mixture of deep academic revulsion and profound disbelief.
"You applied a raw, uncalibrated kinetic flush to a Symbiode student's primary node?" Cicero asked, his tone dripping with absolute, aristocratic disgust. "Without a sterilization protocol? Without a resonance check? That is barbaric. You are incredibly fortunate you didn't trigger an Arcane Redline and blow her ribcage."
"I am from the provinces," I said. No tremor. No inflection. The syllables hit the dead silence of the amphitheater with the clinical weight of a finalized autopsy report. "I panicked."
"Step up, boy," Cicero snapped, gesturing sharply to the plate with his brass rod. "Let us see exactly what kind of primitive, uncalibrated circuitry possesses the audacity to perform back-alley surgery on Academy grounds."
Right. My turn.
I stepped onto the cold brass plate.
I am operating on a newly evolved E-Rank circuit. It has spent the last several hours aggressively cannibalizing my own physical reserves to fuel an unmapped passive skill that eats anomaly poison. My Solar Plexus node is currently housing an unclassified pocket dimension containing a Phantasm entity that refuses to leave. And I just permanently integrated the absolute, unfeeling precision of a dead doctor into my palm nodes.
I have absolutely no idea what this highly expensive Magitech X-Ray machine is about to display. I am mathematically certain it is not going to look like a normal teenager.
"Stand still," Cicero commanded, pulling the heavy brass lever.
The pale, sterile blue light washed over me.
The Odic Projector above my head hummed. Then, it clicked. The massive, translucent projection of my internal engine materialized in the cold air.
For two full seconds, the amphitheater was completely silent.
My E-Rank circuit was visible. The pathways were wider and denser than any standard first-year's, glowing with a dull, heavy, immovable light. But as the projection rendered my Solar Plexus node—the exact anatomical coordinate where Eclipse rested—the blue holographic light didn't just render.
It bent.
A massive, perfectly spherical void of absolute darkness sat in the dead center of my projection. It wasn't a Shadow attunement. Shadow attunement absorbed ambient light. This void was actively distorting the holographic projection around it, pulling the blue light of the Magitech interface inward like a localized gravitational collapse.
And wrapped tightly around the jagged edges of that void, the projector managed to render a faint, horrifying outline of my vascular channels. They were completely saturated with the dark, jagged signature of ARS Stage I residue, being aggressively devoured and converted into fuel by the INHERITANCE passive.
The machine above my head began to emit a high-frequency, mechanical whine.
The Receptive Coils are trying to read the conceptual weight of Eclipse and The Terminal Mercy. The machine lacks a semantic category for them. Internal pressure spiking. The Governor Valve is starting to redline.
"What..." Cicero whispered, taking a physical step back from the control console. The elegant, clinical arrogance was completely eradicated from his face. "What in the name of the Architect is that? Your Master Node is... it's a void. It is absorbing the projection feed! And your outer channels are flooded with..."
He couldn't even name it. That old and expensive machine simply didn't have the vocabulary for anomaly poison being burned as high-octane fuel.
Up in the tiered seating, the silence had turned into the specific, heavy quiet of an audience realizing they were looking at something deeply wrong. Arga Orlando was leaning entirely forward, his dark eyes locked onto the black void in my chest projection.
The high-frequency whine of the projector grew louder. A faint, sharp hiss of steam erupted from the device's brass heat-sinks.
The machine is going to break. If it breaks, I am going to be billed for it. I currently possess more than 5000 Credits to my name. I absolutely refuse to spend a single one of them paying off institutional property damage.
I took a casual, measured step backward, moving entirely off the brass projection plate.
The pale blue light instantly cut off. The horrific hologram vanished. The terrifying whine of the overstressed Magitech slowly died down as the Governor Valve successfully vented the excess pressure with a heavy, exhausted hiss of steam.
I looked at Instructor Cicero. His predatory eyes were wide, staring blankly at the empty air where my impossible projection had just been.
"I absorbed the backlash of her nodal cramp," I said, my voice completely flat, maintaining the absolute deadpan rhythm of a very tired provincial student. "It was a very strong cramp. And I haven't slept well. I believe your machine might need recalibrating, Instructor."
Cicero slowly turned his head to look at me. He looked at my perfectly pressed uniform. He looked at my entirely unbothered posture. And then he looked into the absolute, uncompromising exhaustion in my eyes.
He didn't have a single piece of protocol for this. There was no institutional rule regarding a first-year whose internal engine casually crashed a four-hundred-year-old Odic Projector.
"Take your seat," Cicero said, his voice tight. It wasn't a dismissal. It was a retreat.
I turned around and walked up the steep stone steps of the amphitheater. Syevira had already claimed a desk in the middle row, naturally securing the standard three-meter isolation radius around herself.
I didn't hesitate. I walked straight through the invisible boundary, sat down in the wooden chair right next to her, and let out a slow, profound breath as the heavy, toxic outward pressure of her passive emission instantly cooled the overheating friction in my E-Rank nodes.
"Acute nodal cramp," Syevira murmured without turning her head, her voice an impenetrable wall of flat ice. "A brute-force kinetic flush. You are an astonishingly consistent liar."
"The projector accepted the parameters," I whispered back, letting my forehead rest heavily against the cold wood of the desk. "And it saved you from becoming the centerfold of a live autopsy."
"You nearly shattered a highly expensive piece of institutional magitech," she noted.
"I am a severe operational hazard," I muttered, closing my eyes to fight off the impending migraine. "And I am officially going to sleep through the rest of this lecture."