Advent of the Tenth Script

The courtyard was quiet again.

Not empty—quiet. Different. As if even the wind was

listening now.

Team 17 stood in a loose circle, breaths clouding faintly in

the chilled dawn air. No instructors. No spectators. Just cracked tiles beneath

their boots and a silence that felt… watched.

Cael Valeon exhaled, letting his thoughts settle into

rhythm.

Nia stretched her arms slowly, her illusions flickering

around her like threads unraveling and reforming—each iteration cleaner,

tighter. Tobin cracked his knuckles and stomped once, channeling his mana

downward. The earth rumbled slightly.

Jorvan knelt, fingers tracing a fresh pressure glyph he'd

drawn by hand.

Yesterday, they'd watched titans clash.

Today, they trained like they would be eaten next.

Cael glanced at the old wall behind them—the one laced with

nearly invisible glyphs, fragments of spells written in a language even their

instructors avoided. It pulsed faintly now when he focused. He didn't tell the

others.

Not yet.

"Positions," he said.

The team moved.

Not with grace. Not yet. But with purpose.

Cael began to move, faster this time. He didn't cast a

spell. He didn't need to. He let his steps follow angles, not instincts. Angles

were always right. He adjusted his weight mid-dash—just enough to pass Nia's

overlapping illusions, then veered at a right angle to avoid Tobin's shockwave.

Jorvan's glyph detonated milliseconds late.

Cael had already slipped beyond its blast radius.

"Still too slow," he called.

Tobin groaned. "You say that like it's encouraging."

"It is. We were worse yesterday."

"Is that supposed to be—"

"Again."

They moved.

Again.

This time, Jorvan's scroll struck first. Nia threw a mirror

image into the fray, and Tobin leapt forward, slamming the ground.

And this time… Cael stopped.

The illusion had adapted.

Nia's latest projection didn't shimmer. It didn't flicker or

drift. It moved—just a breath off Cael's pace—and it turned mid-step, hand

raised, waiting.

Waiting to counter him.

He stared into its eyes.

She'd learned.

He smiled.

And let it hit.

Mana cracked around his shoulder, throwing him sideways. He

rolled, stood, and nodded.

Nia stared in stunned silence. "You… let it hit you?"

"That's how I know it worked," he said calmly. "If I didn't

respect it, I'd dodge it."

She flushed. Jorvan whooped.

Tobin crossed his arms. "He's a weird bastard, but… he's our

bastard now, I guess."

---

Later, after drills, they sat in a rough circle near the old

spell wall.

Cael unrolled a torn map of the Academy.

"Look here," he said, tapping between the training fields

and the west tower. "There's a drainage route that shouldn't exist. I mapped it

from memory yesterday after the match."

"Drainage?" Jorvan frowned. "That's hardly—"

"—Unless it doesn't connect to the sewer at all," Cael

interrupted. "It routes toward the base of the arena. Right where Freya's final

blow struck."

Tobin looked up slowly. "You're saying… there's a hidden

chamber beneath the arena?"

"No," Cael said. "I'm saying there's something down there.

And the Academy's built around it."

Silence.

"The glyphs here," Cael added, nodding to the stone behind

them, "they're shielding something. I've run the equations. The mana pressure

on this wall is inverse to the rest of the courtyard. That means something is

pushing outward, not inward."

Jorvan's face paled. "That's not containment. That's

suppression."

Nia's voice was soft. "Like it's trying to rise."

Cael nodded once.

"That's why the Trial matters," he said. "It's not just a

ranking ceremony or a glorified tournament. It's a pressure valve."

"You think they know?" Tobin asked. "The instructors? The

nobles?"

"They know something," Cael said. "But not everything. If

they did, they wouldn't let the barrier glyphs fall apart after one clash."

Jorvan looked like he was going to be sick.

"What do we do then?" he whispered.

Cael folded the map slowly.

"We survive the first round," he said. "Then we find the

cracks."

---

That night, as stars flickered above the academy spires,

Rael'Zhur stood once more in the shadow of the west tower, watching nothing—and

everything.

The sigil beneath the arena hadn't pulsed again.

But he knew the signs.

They were learning too fast.

Even the weakest teams now whispered of things they weren't

meant to notice.

He traced the rim of the obsidian crystal in his palm.

Shadow coiled through its surface.

No. Not yet.

But soon.

---

Beneath the Academy, behind layers of old runes and

forgotten seals, something stirred again.

Not with light. Not with sound.

With pressure.

A breath that didn't come from lungs. A presence without

shape. It slid through cracks no one had seen, tracing glyphs worn thin by

centuries.

The arena above had gone quiet. But far below, the earth

remembered.

It remembered battle. Sacrifice. Blood.

And now…

Curiosity.

That was new.

Someone had begun asking the wrong questions.

Prodding the old walls. Sketching maps not meant to be

drawn. Speaking of things that were supposed to sleep forever.

And the thing beneath?

It listened.

It had always listened.

---

That night, Cael Valeon sat alone on his bed, hands folded

in thought.

He didn't sleep.

There was a sound outside.

A breath.

Not footsteps. Not wind.

A breath, where no one should have been.

He stood. Waited. Looked toward the wall.

And for a heartbeat—just one—a line of glowing script

shimmered across the stone. Not any glyph he knew. Not any language he'd seen.

It vanished before his eyes could track it.

And then?

A soft, pulsing knock echoed behind his mind. Not on the

door.

Inside it.

He gasped.

And somewhere, deep below, the pressure spiked — just enough

to crack a stone in a hidden wall.

The runes flared. Then died.

And in the dark, where no one watched…

Something smiled.

---

One floor below that cracked stone wall, in a space where

light hadn't walked in centuries, the runes hissed.

Not flared. Not pulsed. Hissed.

Faint lines of forgotten script crawled along the surface —

not ink or magic, but something deeper, etched into the stone's memory. One of

the older glyphs blinked once, then held its glow longer than the rest.

Not resisting.

Remembering.

A subtle shift echoed across the buried hall. Like old

machinery coughing back to life. Like a pattern resetting.

Then… silence again.

But not peace.

---

Far above, Cael sat on his bed, staring at his wrist.

Nothing was there now, but for a heartbeat earlier, he had seen it: a line of

perfect gold — no thicker than a vein — had shimmered across his skin. Not

drawn. Not cast.

Written.

He flexed his fingers slowly. The mark was gone. But the

weight of it wasn't.

Behind his eyes, the knock echoed again — soft, deliberate.

Not angry. Not kind. Curious.

It didn't hurt.

But it wasn't meant to hurt.

It was meant to check.

---

Outside his window, the wind shifted. The flags of the

Academy snapped once in unison. And above the highest tower, where the stars

were clearest, something moved — not in the sky, but behind it.

A tether frayed.

A door blinked.

Rael'Zhur stopped mid-step, hand tightening on the obsidian

crystal.

He didn't speak. Didn't breathe.

Because something had looked back.

And it had started learning names.