The seam didn't just pulse this time. It tore.
It wasn't a clean break. It was a violent, jagged rip that seemed to suck the clouds inward, warping the sky like wet paper. In the gym, the industrial lights overhead went into a seizure, strobing so fast it made the room feel like a fragmented nightmare.
"Get back! Move!" Garrick shouted, his voice cracking over the sudden roar of wind.
The air pressure didn't just drop; it vanished. Everyone staggered, clutching their ears as the vacuum tugged at their lungs. Mira lunged for a bolted-down weight bench, her knuckles white as she hung on for dear life. "That's not... that's not wind!" she shrieked.
The gym's steel skeleton groaned, a deep, metal-on-metal scream that vibrated through the soles of their shoes. Outside, the sound of campus changed. The confused murmurs of the last few days were gone, replaced by the kind of raw, animal panic that only happens when the world stops making sense.
The seam widened another inch, and for a terrifying heartbeat, gravity simply quit.
Loose five-pound plates lifted off the mats. Dust and chalk swirled upward in lazy spirals. A half-full water bottle hovered three feet in the air, its contents bubbling toward the cap. Then, as quickly as it had lifted, the world slammed back down.
The sound was deafening. Glass shattered inward, raining diamonds across the gym floor. Every emergency alarm on the block began to wail in a discordant, screaming chorus.
Lucien's hand clamped onto Nox's shoulder, his grip like a vice. "Nox, look. It's not just the gym."
He was right. Through the jagged holes where the windows used to be, they could see the humanities building across the quad. A massive fissure had opened in the brickwork, perfectly aligned with the scar in the sky. The seam wasn't glowing anymore; it was just wrong. A void-black sliver cutting through the blue. The color behind it wasn't the darkness of space; it was something deeper, a bruised, oily violet that hurt to look at.
Students were scattered across the courtyard. Some were sprinting for the dorms, but others had just... stopped. A guy near the fountain had collapsed to his knees, his hands clamped over his ears so hard his face was turning purple.
"I can hear it!" he screamed, his voice raw. "Make it stop! It's humming!"
Mira flinched, her eyes wide. "I don't hear anything. Why is he saying that?"
Seris was already moving, her med-student instincts kicking in even through the terror. She crouched by the broken window, watching the boy. "Pulse is visible in his neck. His pupils are blown. That's a massive neurological overload."
Lucien turned back to the sky. A low, sub-bass rumble started to vibrate through the city. It wasn't thunder; it was the sound of something immense and heavy being dragged across stone. Nox felt it in his teeth, a grinding resonance that made his stomach turn.
Across the quad, three more people went down at once. They weren't fainting; they were doubling over, clutching their chests or their heads, their bodies convulsing as if they were being electrocuted from the inside out.
Garrick swore, his voice shaking. "It's hitting them. It's choosing people."
"Not yet," Nox said, his voice a cold blade in the chaos.
Lucien snapped his head around. "How can you be sure? Look at them!"
Nox didn't answer. He couldn't tell them that this was just the "Atmospheric Sickness"—the body's violent rejection of the mana beginning to bleed through the veil. This wasn't the selection. This was just the pressure test.
The seam flickered, and a shockwave rippled out. It wasn't an explosion; it was a silent, destabilizing wave that turned every phone on campus into a dead brick of glass and plastic. Car alarms in the distance began to scream, joined seconds later by the deep, mournful howl of the city's air-raid sirens.
For one terrifying second, the depth behind the tear became clear. It wasn't empty. It felt... occupied. Like a massive, lidless eye looking down through a keyhole.
Lucien's breath hitched, a jagged sound in his throat. "...It's looking back at us."
Nox didn't deny it. He couldn't.
The rumble reached a crescendo, a bone-shaking roar that felt like it would shatter their ribs, and then it just stopped.
The silence that followed was worse than the noise. The seam snapped tighter, shrinking from a wide tear back down to a thin, silver scar. The sky around it bled back to its normal, deceptive blue. But the world didn't go back to normal. The alarms were still screaming. People were still sobbing in the dirt.
The gym floor was a ruin of cracked concrete and broken glass. Lucien slowly turned to Nox, his face pale, a smear of blood on his forehead from a flying shard.
"That wasn't the weather, Nox."
"No."
"That wasn't a freak accident."
"No."
Lucien swallowed hard, his eyes searching Nox's for a lie he could cling to. Finding none, his voice dropped to a whisper. "Then what the hell was it?"
Nox looked up at the thin silver line still etched into the heavens; a permanent reminder that the door was unlocked.
"It was a knock," Nox said.
The ground gave one final, rhythmic tremor, then went still. The seam remained, quiet and stable, like a hunter waiting in the tall grass. And across the city, the sirens just kept rising.