Shadowbound: The Awakened Fool

By morning, the academy buzzed like a nest of stirred wasps.

The courtyard had been cleaned repaired by emergency runes, debris swept, walls patched, but the memory lingered. Everyone saw it. Everyone felt it.

A mid-tier professor brought to his knees.A single masked figure appearing from nowhere.A forbidden power that moved through spells like smoke through glass.

Some said the man wasn't human.Some said it was a spirit, a cursed specter summoned by ancient blood.Some whispered another word.

Shadowborn.

But no one could say with certainty who the masked man had been.

Only a name, passed from lips trembling with adrenaline:

Liam.

Freya Vale stood in the Flame Division hall, fingers clenched around a half-folded flyer bearing the schedule for the next spellcasting assessment. She wasn't reading it.

Her thoughts were elsewhere.

She had seen the fight from a distance, arriving minutes too late, just in time to see the ruined stone and blackened cracks on the courtyard floor. The descriptions didn't match any flame spell. Or lightning. Or wind.

"Liam…" she muttered under her breath.

A few first-years nearby whispered the name with awe. Her jaw tensed.

She hated the way it made her chest twist.

Ren Vale, in contrast, was on fire with curiosity.

"Masked rogue shows up, defeats a Syndicate-level invader, and disappears like a legend!" he whispered excitedly to his classmate Mira in the cafeteria. "And no one knows who he is! How is that not the coolest thing ever?!"

Mira, ever quiet, only tilted her head.

"Too fast," she said.

"What do you mean?"

She tapped the rim of her cup. "No spellcasting. No buildup. Just movement. That's not how mages fight."

Ren blinked.

"Then… how did he fight?"

Mira didn't answer.

In the staff wing, behind a closed door etched with lightning runes, Elira Dawn paced alone.

A flicker of light hovered above her palm, an illusion reconstruction pulled from the courtyard's residual mana.

She had reassembled the sequence frame by frame.

A shadow blur.A slash that bypassed magical barriers.A delay in the victim's injury.A spell circle unknown, with no recognized school.

She replayed it again.

There were no missteps. No wasted movements. No hesitation.

And no mana signature.

"That's not possible," she whispered.

Even the most elite needed to flare mana. Even she, ranked in the top four in the academy, left a trail when she moved at full speed.

But this Liam?

He had moved like a ghost.

And ghosts didn't leave footprints.

She turned to the stack of student files on her desk.

Her fingers hovered over one.

Kairo Vale.

Nineteen. Supposedly magicless. Older than every student by years. Moved like someone who had survived far more than just disappointment.

She hadn't seen him since the courtyard incident. He hadn't spoken in class. But her instincts honed from a decade of spell duels and battlefield deployments—prickled.

She flicked her finger. The file opened.

Unmeasured mana. Affinity: Undetermined. Status: Late Admission.

The same week, Liam appeared.

Her eyes narrowed.

Across the city, beneath stone and fire, in a temple that hadn't seen daylight in centuries, a conclave gathered.

The Abyss Syndicate.

The skeletal man who had attacked the academy lay bandaged and bound in cursed restraints, body half-reconstructed by dark alchemy. His voice was gravel.

"He used it. The black flame. But it wasn't just that. He tore my spell apart, not broke it, unraveled it. Like it was made of thread."

The cultists murmured.

From behind a veil of smoke, a deeper voice answered.

"Then the legends were true."

A figure stepped forward, tall, cloaked in void-stained armor, the High Priest of the inner circle.

"The Shadowborn didn't die out. They went silent. Hidden."

He turned to the captive.

"Could you identify him?"

"No. He wore a mask."

The priest raised his hand.

"It won't matter."

He turned to the gathered cultists.

"Send in the Night Crows."

That night, Kairo Vale sat alone in his dorm room, the lights dimmed.

The black half-mask rested on his desk.

His coat lay folded neatly nearby. The cloth shimmered, faintly woven from enchanted fabric he'd acquired years ago. Resistant to most detection runes. Immune to basic mana scans.

He hadn't used it in four years.

Not since the last time someone tried to kill him for what he was.

Umbra stirred within him.

"You'll draw them out now."

"I know."

"They'll want your blood. The Syndicate doesn't lose quietly."

"I'm counting on it."

Kairo reached for the mask, eyes calm, the flame inside him quiet but ever-burning.

"If they want to find Liam," he whispered, "then let them."

He lowered the mask over his face.

"I'll be waiting."