Rein's toe touched down on a branch as lightly as a breath before he kicked off again, and with Haste still coursing through him — paired with the near-weightlessness of Nighty's cloak — he skimmed over the academy rooftops like a demon's shadow drifting above the ground.

  The night air was cold enough to bite bare skin, yet his chest burned.

  [Rein, can you hear me? It's exactly like you predicted — there is a massive spell formation hidden out here!]

  Sophia's voice rang inside his ears through the Mana Resonance Link, the range broadened and stabilized by LIZ until it carried cleanly past a full kilometer.

  [From up here, I can see three active circles around the Oval Arena, and another point farther out — around the Whitmore estate… which is basically nothing but smoke and dust now. That building's probably smashed into rubble. Nothing left intact.]

  "Thanks, Sophia," Rein answered as he vaulted from the crown of a pine toward the clock tower, touching roof tile for a heartbeat before launching to the next building. "Keep scanning other points too — not just the arena. The chaos is probably starting to spread across Arcadia, and any Shapeshifters still embedded in the city will be moving on their fallback plan by now."

  [And how am I supposed to tell them apart, when they can change faces whenever they want?]

  "At your level — and Isabella's — you can," Rein shot back. "Just imitate the mana pressure pulse I used earlier; the trick is compressing your mana and releasing it one step denser than normal. It'll interfere with the imitation Core Mana Circles inside them — maybe they won't revert on the spot, but they'll show tells. Guaranteed… so do it for me, Sixth Disciple."

  [H — Sixth Disciple? Ha… no way. Not yet. I've got a long road.]

  Sophia laughed it off, embarrassed, and cut the link. Rein switched channels immediately.

  "Isabella — how's the arena?"

  [Captain Cruz and I finished off the remaining ones. Guardian units are evacuating the crowd now, and the FMD just transferred Alexander to custody at the main branch.]

  Her voice was flat. She paused, then added —

  [Rein… I'm examining the Shapeshifter bodies. Most of them have a foreign object embedded inside.]

  "A black stone with carved runes," Rein said, tightening his brow as the diagrams he'd once skimmed in the underground Hub flashed behind his eyes.

  [Huh… how do you know that?] Isabella's suspicion sharpened.

  "I'll explain later. Right now you need to check yourself and everyone near you immediately — any unexplained mana loss?" Rein warned, his tone turning hard. "That stone isn't a charm. It's a fragment of a Relic, built to act as a ManaSink, tied into the Mana Drain rings circling the arena."

  [That… makes sense.] Isabella sounded suddenly alarmed. [No wonder — the judges maintaining the arena barrier look awful, like they've all hit mana depletion, and even I felt my mana getting pulled faster than it should. It was… wrong.]

  The wind hitting Rein's face wasn't just cold; it carried a strange hollowing sensation — the same feeling as mana being siphoned out without permission.

  The disaster-puzzle snapped together into a picture so clear it was nauseating: the barrier weakening at the worst possible time, the "need" to force everyone into heavy spellcasting against the Student Council impostors, the Shapeshifters unleashed to spread panic and keep the arena boiling…

  This wasn't merely plan stacked on plan.

  It was harvest.

  "Isabella — drink a mana potion now, and destroy every Relic fragment you find!" Rein barked into the network, urgency breaking through his usual control. "Those stones are catalysts. Everyone in the arena is trapped inside a massive Mana Drain Ring — the harder they cast, the faster they get drained!"

  He remembered his own mistake — his confidence that he was controlling the board. He'd noticed his mana dropping too quickly, had even chugged a potion after finishing Alexander, and Sophia had been close to blacking out after Tempest Blade. They'd all waved it off as pressure, fatigue, overexertion.

  The truth was uglier.

  According to the underground research notes he'd read, wide-area Mana Drain rings usually suffered from two fatal flaws: they were hard to spread across a large radius, and they were inefficient — too slow to matter, because strong mages would feel it and simply walk out before it became dangerous.

  But in the final paragraph of that paper, the researcher — writing under the pen name Puppet Master — had proposed a single line that would have revolutionized darkcraft if anyone had dared to implement it:

  "What if we place the Mana Sink directly inside the bait?"

  Those rune-carved black stones were the catalysts — opening gaps in the local mana layer — and paired with at least three rings around the arena, they patched the Mana Drain ring's weaknesses cleanly.

  When Rein first read it, he'd nearly laughed at the absurd nickname, like something torn out of a cheap serial.

  Now, as he felt invisible threads tightening around Arcadia until the city itself seemed unable to breathe —

  If one side was a drain that swallowed mana from thousands, then the other side had to be a reservoir — a place to gather that stolen mana into one concentrated pool; in a system this deliberate, an intake always meant a collection point.

  Rein's black silhouette cut through a thinning veil of smoke and reached what had once been the Whitmore estate.

  Brick and stone piled into jagged mounds, magical flames still licking at the wreckage, ancient trees snapped like matchsticks. Bodies of Whitmore retainers lay scattered while healer teams worked against the clock without discrimination.

  "Rein… is that you?"

  Ingrid's trembling voice came from one side. Rein turned — and found the blonde girl with glasses in a state that barely resembled "fine": soot smeared across her clothes, a fracture line slicing through her thick lenses, blood seeping down her left arm, and yet she was still gritting her teeth and healing a teammate collapsed beside her.

  Rein rushed over, dropped to one knee, and laid his hand lightly over her wound.

  A pale green glow spread. The jagged cut from glass began sealing under Rein's Cure Wound.

  "What happened here, Ingrid?" Rein asked, tight-voiced. "Why are you even here?"

  Ingrid adjusted her cracked glasses with a hand that wouldn't stop shaking, then looked up to meet his eyes. "Remember when Master Chloe said she had urgent work for me…?"

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  Rein nodded — he remembered The Vault, that day Ingrid had offered to support him in the duel, and Chloe had refused, sending her instead on a "different" mission.

  "So… Senior Catherine sent Master Chloe a sealed message," Ingrid said, drawing breath like it hurt. "She said she'd found a lead on the black metal rod that was stolen from The Vault back then… and it was hidden at the Whitmore estate."

  "Wait." Rein's brow furrowed. "You mean the one the Shapeshifter stole while disguised as Librarian Bale?"

  "Yes — and part of that loss was on me, too…" Ingrid's voice thinned. "So I brought a healer team and we came here in secret, following Senior Catherine's plan — during the duel, when the estate's defenses would be at their weakest. With help from Guardian units under House Spencer, we meant to retrieve the rod and return it to where it belongs…"

  Rein pressed his lips into a hard line. "So you came here… following Catherine's 'plan.'"

  "Yes, but when we arrived… everything was wrong," Ingrid said, voice tight. "Whitmore's men were already waiting — everywhere. It was a trap. We had no choice but to fight, and right when the chaos hit its peak… a massive explosion went off. Everyone got caught in it and injured, just like you can see."

  Rein's hand clamped around Ingrid's shoulder. "Ingrid, listen to me — Catherine, the one who sent that letter… she was probably dead long before tonight."

  Ingrid's eyes went wide; her whole body trembled. "W-what…?"

  "The Shapeshifters must've known the real Catherine was investigating them," Rein said. "So they removed her, wore her skin, and played the part to steer you into their game — using this place as the perfect point to erase evidence and wipe out your team in the same stroke."

  "And that fake Catherine… Isabella already put her down in the arena."

  Ingrid's fist tightened until her nails dug into her palm.

  Rein rose slowly, his dark silhouette cutting across the firelight behind him. "Okay. I'll handle the rest. Ingrid, get the injured out of here — fast. This area is the heart of the mana collection array, and it's about to become even more dangerous."

  "You're going inside?" Ingrid called after him, worry plain in her voice. "Be careful!"

  Rein halted for a heartbeat, remembered something, then turned back to the girl with cracked glasses. "Ingrid… do you have a spare mana potion on you? I'll buy it off you."

  Ingrid blinked at him, confused, then hurriedly dug through the soot-stained pockets of her cloak. "I've only got one left. I used almost everything treating the wounded…" She thrust the bottle forward.

  "Take it. No charge. Consider it a freebie for a regular customer."

  Rein took the clear blue vial without hesitation, feeling the faint warmth trapped in the glass. "Thanks, Ingrid," he said, and a thin smile briefly softened the edge of his face.

  "Believe me — if you tweak the formula and fix the taste so it's actually drinkable, your potions will sell like wildfire compared to the standard market sludge. Way more than you'd expect."

  Then he turned away and started toward the still-burning carcass of the estate, orange firelight rippling across black armor like a warning.

  Through Mana Vision, the world ahead wasn't just flame and smoke; it was crisscrossed with warped, dark-violet mana lines, violently streaming downward into the earth like a gigantic, silent whirlpool.

  So this is it — the exit of the array… the convergence point for the Academy's harvested mana.

  Rein raised the iron mask and put it on; the moment cold metal touched his face, Nighty flowed and expanded, sealing it into a smooth, pitch-black full helmet, ventilation and sensors snapping online in the same instant. He stepped through the wall of fire without hesitation, moving into the ruin until he reached what had once been the central hall — now a mountain of brick and collapsed beams piled higher than his head.

  "Here, LIZ."

  [LIZ: Confirmed. This position matches the underground architectural map in Whitmore's database.]

  As she spoke, the HUD flared across his vision; a holographic layout of the estate pulsed, highlighting a deep cavity beneath the debris.

  "Then let's go."

  Rein lifted his hand. Two LIZ Hands materialized in midair, and with uncanny precision they began clearing the wreckage — lifting multi-ton slabs as if they weighed nothing, silent and efficient — until a wide opening finally yawned into view. A spiral stairway of stone had partially collapsed, leaving only a dark, vertical throat plunging into blackness.

  Yet behind the mask, Rein's glowing blue eyes could see mana so dense it looked almost liquid, spinning downward like the eye of a storm.

  He triggered Vortex to stabilize his body, then lowered himself carefully into the broken spiral — last time he'd paid for carelessness and missing information, but this time he'd come prepared.

  As the darkness closed in around him, Sophia's voice cut through the link again.

  [Rein — can you hear me? There really were Shapeshifters embedded at the Department of Healing! I just took out two of them. They were disguised as third-year healer seniors — clean, convincing, the whole act. When I got there I released mana pressure like you said, and those two lost it and bolted like their brains caught fire — so I corrected their trajectory!]

  "Good. I hear you," Rein replied, already focusing ahead. "Thanks, Sophia — keep dealing with the rest. We'll talk later. Down here… I'm pretty sure I'm about to be busy for a while."

  He cut the connection and poured every scrap of attention into the mana-sense in front of him; the deeper he went, the more the silence devoured sound, and the stronger that wrongness became — like the air itself didn't agree with what existed beneath it.

  The moment Rein's boots touched cold stone, the dim mana lamps bolted along the walls flickered alive one by one, lighting in sequence as if responding to his movement; their pale blue glow trembled in rhythm with the subterranean mana flow, revealing a corridor stretching forward into darkness.

  He removed the iron mask and slipped it into his cloak pocket, then moved on in silence.

  Before long he reached the central chamber — the place he'd nearly died the last time — but something had changed. There was still the massive door at the far end, yet his gaze slid to the left wall, the one that had once looked like solid rock, sealed so perfectly it might as well have been natural stone; now, whether from the explosion above or a damaged mechanism, the stone had shifted aside, exposing a hidden hall behind it.

  Rein stepped in carefully.

  The first thing that hit him was the stinging bite of chemicals and ozone thick in the air, braided with a faint metallic tang of blood that turned his stomach.

  What lay before him was a vast laboratory that looked ripped straight from the darkest age of alchemy: warped glass apparatus connected by metal tubing sprawled across long stone tables, and the sickly green glow from oversized cylinders around the room threw light across Rein's face. Inside those cylinders floated pale pink masses of flesh.

  Some had begun forming the outline of hands stretched too long, too wrong; others showed faces without eyes, mouths moving soundlessly as if trying to breathe inside a drowning current.

  "This is straight-up Doctor Frankenstein," Rein murmured.

  He moved deeper and found the core of the chamber: a large black spherical stone, runes carved into its smooth surface glowing deep red like pulsing veins. A heart — pumping harvested mana from the arena through those energy lines into every growth tube. Beneath the core, a graveyard of opened scroll boxes lay scattered, their parchment guts spilled across the cold stone.

  On the central worktable, a notebook bound in monster hide lay open. Rein scanned it quickly; the handwriting was neat, clean, obsessively precise — nothing like the rough field notes from the underground Hub.

  Not Puppet Master. Another researcher.

  He swept the room again, and the inconsistency gnawed at him: the facility looked abandoned in a hurry. Papers left out carelessly. Tools scattered. That didn't match the discipline in those pages at all.

  Something changed the plan.

  Then a deep, humming roar rose from outside — like a massive engine spooling up — its vibration traveling through stone until Rein's brow tightened. He abandoned the lab and followed the sound back toward the enormous door at the end of the main corridor.

  The huge ringed sigils that had once been still were spinning faster now, accelerating by the second; the mana circuits on the door blazed bright, and behind it some complex mechanism began to move, slow and heavy, rumbling like an ancient beast being forced awake.

  Something distorted his mana perception — not the door, not the mechanism. Something else.

  "You're Rein… and last time you disguised yourself as 'Decem,' didn't you?"

  A woman's voice spoke from nearby — so close and so perfectly hidden in the shadows beside the door that she might have been part of the darkness itself.

  Rein narrowed his eyes, then answered evenly. "About last time — I'll apologize for sneaking in." A brief pause. "You caught me before I could finish the act."

  He took the iron mask from his pocket and tossed it to the floor at the edge of the shadow. Metal rang against stone.

  "We're not so different. Both of us were wearing lies."

  The figure in black remained still for a moment… then gave a soft laugh.

  "Yes," she said, stepping into the dim light. "We're impostors."

  Her head tilted slightly.

  "But you…" Her voice sharpened into a needle. "Are you absolutely sure you're the real 'Rein'?"

  Rein's expression faltered — just for a heartbeat — his eyes shaking.

  Right. I almost forgot.

  Because I'm not the real Rein of this world either.

  These entries expand the lore and mechanics introduced in this chapter.

  Completely optional—read only if you enjoy diving deeper into the system.

  Magic and Spell Techniques

  Mesosphere-Pressure Pulse (Detection Method)

  A practical detection technique Rein teaches Sophia: compress mana, then release it “one step denser than normal,” creating a pressure pulse that interferes with imitation Core Mana Circles inside Shapeshifters. It may not force instant reversion, but it produces observable “tells” and panic reactions in infiltrators.

  Long-Range Mana Resonance Link (Update)

  The Mana Resonance Link is stabilized and extended by LIZ, allowing clean communication past a full kilometer without distortion or dropouts—turning it into a battlefield command network.

  Mana Drain Ring (Wide-Area Harvest Array)

  A large-scale ring formation circling the arena that drains mana from everyone inside. The more intensely people cast (barrier maintenance, shields, battle spells), the faster the array drains them—turning combat into forced harvesting.

  Collection Point / Reservoir Node (Convergence Logic)

  Rein deduces that a drain must have a reservoir: if mana is being harvested from thousands, it must be concentrating somewhere. He identifies the destroyed Whitmore estate as the likely convergence point for the collected mana flow.

  Improvised Cure Wounds (Update)

  Rein briefly casts Cure Wounds on Ingrid’s glass-cut injury, described with a pale green glow (consistent with his non-standard casting aesthetics and rapid stabilization under field urgency).

  Relics and Artifacts

  Relic Fragment “ManaSink”

  A rune-carved black stone found embedded inside Shapeshifter bodies. It functions as a ManaSink—not a charm—designed to siphon ambient mana and feed it into a larger drain array. Rein identifies it as a Relic fragment tied directly into the arena’s Mana Drain rings.

  Black Metal Rod (Update)

  The stolen black metal rod (taken earlier by a Shapeshifter disguised as Librarian Bale) is used as bait. “Senior Catherine” claims it is hidden at Whitmore estate, pulling Chloe’s people away from the arena at the worst moment.

  Heartstone Reservoir

  A large black spherical stone etched with glowing red runes, described as the “heart” of the facility—pumping harvested mana through the siphon network into the growth tubes. This appears to be the primary reservoir and distribution core of the mana-harvest system.

  Location

  Underground Lab (Frankenstein Facility)

  A concealed laboratory chamber revealed behind a shifted wall. It contains alchemical glassware, chemical stench and ozone, and large cylinders holding pale pink flesh masses forming malformed limbs/faces—suggesting engineered bodies or growth experiments tied to Shapeshifter production.