A moment after Leon placed his hand on the orb, a very brilliant light flashed.
"Why was the light so bright?"
"Did you see that? What's happening?"
"Damn, almost got blinded by the unexpected flash."
The students were all talking amongst themselves, necks craning, hands shielding eyes that were already too late to protect. The instructors exchanged glances but said nothing yet. They were watching.
Then, before the chatter could settle into anything coherent—
"HEY! LOOK AT THE SKY!"
The shout cut through everything. Every head tilted upward at once.
Unlike the phenomena the others had produced, each one contained to the space above the awakening grounds like a personal announcement, what they were witnessing now was different in a way that was immediately and deeply unsettling. It didn't stay above the grounds. It stretched and kept stretching, until it seemed to swallow the sky itself in every direction a person could look.
"Hey, I'm dreaming, right? Pinch my cheek for me."
"What is happening?"
"Is there an invasion?"
"SHUT THE FUCK UP, THAT'S NOT POSSIBLE."
The entire sky went pitch black. Not the kind of black that came with storm clouds or a passing shadow. The kind that felt deliberate. Darkness fell upon the entire land and sky without warning, and the air shifted with it, thickening, pressing down. Violent clashes of thunder erupted from every direction, and huge lightning bolts fell from the sky continuously, striking the earth in different places with no pattern and no mercy. The clouds parted and cascaded into steps surrounding the awakening grounds, framing the space like something ancient and ceremonial, as an eerie aura swallowed the atmosphere whole. Even the strong felt it. That was the part that mattered. Even the ones who had no business being afraid found their heart reacting.
Everybody was scared. Students dropped to their knees, some were crying quietly with their heads down, too overwhelmed to be embarrassed about it. Others had already lost the fight with their nerves in more obvious ways. Many officials had rushed out from wherever they had been, faces tight, trying to understand what exactly they were looking at.
Slowly, after about five minutes that felt considerably longer than five minutes, everything died down. The lightning stopped, the darkness lifted, and the atmosphere returned to something resembling normal, like a held breath finally released, though the residue of whatever that was still sat in the air in a way that made people reluctant to speak above a murmur.
Behind the scenes and away from the grounds, the headmaster of the academy walked into an office room that overlooked the awakening area below, his expression giving nothing away beyond the fact that something had his full attention.
"What was that just now? Did it come from the new students?" he asked.
Two people were already inside the room, positioned near the window. They had been there primarily to scout, the kind of quiet presence that existed at every awakening ceremony whether students noticed them or not. The one in the two piece suit and glasses turned from the window. His expression was less composed than usual. Surprised, actually, which was notable in itself.
"You won't believe this, sir. It's actually the son of Carter." A brief pause. "The supposed untalented one."
The headmaster's eyes shifted. "Really." It wasn't a question. He stepped forward to get a proper look himself, standing at the window and studying the figure below. "Is that him?" he said quietly, more to himself than either of the two people in the room. "I wonder what kind of summon he will call forth."
With a phenomenon of that magnitude, it was certain to be something incredible. That was simply how it worked in this world. The awakening was a singular event, unrepeatable, a one-time window through which a summoner reached across whatever existed on the other side and drew something back. Each could only get a single chance, you carried it for the rest of your life and it carried you, and everything you became would be built on what came through in that first moment. The scale of what had just happened in the sky suggested that what was coming through for Leon Carter would be something worth remembering… perhaps, something never seen before.
Everyone present was eager to see it. That much was obvious just from the quality of the silence that had settled over the grounds.
Leon, however, was having a different experience entirely.
He was lost. Not quietly uncertain, not the kind of thoughtful pause a person takes before doing something significant. Genuinely, privately lost, standing in front of all of them with his expression still and his thoughts in considerably less order.
According to what he knew, what was supposed to happen in the vision during awakening was straightforward. The summoner sees their summon. They meet it, they establish a bond in that inner space first, before the creature can ever be called into the physical world. That was the process and how it was meant to work according to memory of how these things worked that the former Leon knew.
Well… That was not what he had experienced.
'What was that? How do I even go about it now?'
In his vision, Leon had found himself standing atop a mountain. His first thought was that the sea below looked strange, the colour wrong, the texture off, but then his vision sharpened in a strange way as if he was suddenly caused to see, opening up beyond its usual limits, and what he realised he was looking at were not waves.
They were skeletons, millions of them, and of different kinds and sizes, all standing together in a silence that somehow communicated scale better than any sound could have. An army of the dead stretching as far as the eyes could carry.
The strange part, the part that nagged at him even now, was that he had felt nothing standing before it. No fear, not even unease, just a kind of stillness that felt almost like recognition.
When he turned back, there were two figures. Tall and deeply imposing, standing on either side of a throne made from a black material that held no shine, no reflection, just depth. Their eyes carried something in them that didn't translate easily into thought, something deep, like unspoken mysteries…
Even then, as he stared at them and the throne, even without the conscious decision, he simply found himself walking toward the throne, unafraid of the creatures beside it. He looked at the throne for a moment, inspecting the material and the shape and the way it sat in that space, and then he sat down.
It felt like the right thing to do. That was the only explanation he had.
A moment after, the vision ended, and he came back to normal.
The problem now was that he hadn't made connection to any monster, he just saw a bunch of undead in their millions, sat on a throne guarded by two powerful looking undead, and that was the end.
"Y-you can go ahead and call forth your summon," the instructor said. The slight stammer was noticeable.
"Yes," Leon replied.
His voice came out steady, calm, even. Nobody watching him would have known the internal scramble happening behind that expression.
"Yes."
Even though he replied boldly and calmly, he was actually lost. After a few more agonizing seconds of anticipation weighing on every soul present, Leon whose eyes had closed finally opened, and before him, a huge imposing door materialized. It stood at a height of 2 meters, textured with carvings and symbols that spoke of something old and ancient.
The silence that followed was of a very particular quality.
A door. Leon had summoned a door.
Nobody knew what to do with that.
How come a person's summon was a door? It made absolutely no sense!
Even Leon himself was confused, thinking to himself the possibilities that he might actually be trash in this world.
'Not yet, not yet… What can a door do? Something will come out of it, right? RIGHT???'
This was the same thought everyone had—well not the same, but similar.
Surely, a few seconds later, the door swung open slowly with a lot of suspense, and eerily what seemed like smoke but was actually dust flowed out.
Beyond the door was pitch darkness and Leon could not see a single thing, but as he watched, slowly, a skeleton of around 2 metres tall stepped out of the door, dragging itself out as though its body was a bag of cement, and Leon soon saw why, after seeing the old and rusty great sword that followed it in it's right hand.
Once the skeleton exited the dungeon, the door disappeared, leaving only the skeleton behind standing before Leon.
While Leon admired the skeleton and wondered how powerful it may be and what its grade was, everyone around him, especially the students, almost fell sick from the dark aura spewing from the undead skeleton.
"Student! Leon Carter! Unsummon, now!" The instructor commanded, bringing Leon to the realisation of what his summon was doing.
Quickly, he called off the summon, and gradually, the aura disappeared and he was asked to return to the crowd.
As he descended, the grade of his summon was announced, and for a moment, everyone's opinion of him shifted.
"Leon Carter." A pause just long enough to be noticeable. "Grade 1 Summon."
Even the instructor heard himself say it and seemed uncertain about it. "Grade 1?" he repeated, quieter this time, almost to himself. The number didn't fit. Nothing about what had just happened fit a grade 1 classification, and everyone present who understood the grading system felt that immediately.
'Grade 1???!'