The Fading Chant

The academy called him lazy.

Quiet. Unmotivated. Detached.

Seiran Kurosaki didn't mind. He preferred it. Let them whisper. Let them assume he was bored with everything.

It was easier than explaining that he'd once been one of the academy's finest—and one of its mistakes.

Years ago, Astral Academy launched a secret experiment: Class Zero.

The goal? Train a group of magically gifted children in total isolation. No distractions. No hierarchy. No rules but one—grow strong enough to defend the academy from future threats.

It worked... at first.

Seiran remembered it too clearly. Eight students. Eight talents. No families. No visitors. Every day was training, testing, exhausting trial after trial until magic bled from their hands like instinct.

He and Kuro had been the youngest. And the most dangerous.

Kuro—quiet, brilliant, broken even then—was the best summoner they had ever seen. But his power came from something else.

Something unnatural.

The instructors called it a "mana enhancement technique." A breakthrough. Seiran remembered the first time they made Kuro channel it. How he collapsed afterward. How he started talking to shadows. How they ignored it.

"They pushed him too far," Seiran muttered now, standing on the academy's rooftop, eyes on the storm clouds building in the distance. "And I watched it happen."

The final trial of Class Zero had been a disaster.

A binding spell, meant to link their spirits for synchronized combat, backfired. The crystal that held it cracked. Kuro screamed. Something—not a spirit, not human—answered from the other side.

The veil between planes tore open, just a little.

It was enough.

Three students vanished that night. No bodies. No records. Just names scrubbed from the registry.

Kuro was locked away in a "medical" wing for a year. Seiran never saw him again.

Until now.

The next day, Seiran walked through the back corridor of the Archive Wing, the area where most students didn't even know a door existed. Behind a false shelf, tucked between histories and glamorized illusion books, was a stairwell.

Down.

Below the school, beyond the libraries and wine cellars and relic storage, was a place few were meant to remember.

Seiran stepped through the magical seal. It pulsed against his fingers, recognizing his mana. Of course it did.

He had helped build it.

The Sub-Level was cold. Dim. And lined with glass capsules. Empty now, but once filled with students like him.

He reached the control altar, laid his palm flat, and muttered, "Initiate record access. Subject: Kurosaki, Seiran."

The walls lit with shimmering panels of text and memory—a painful summary of his own life.

Primary affinity: shadow displacement

Secondary: adaptive shielding

Emotional range: dulled due to mana exposure

Status: downgraded to general track

Recommendation: surveillance. Potential instability.

He snorted. "Gee, thanks."

Then he opened Kuro's file.

Half of it was redacted. The rest was worse.

Exposure to fragment energy

Suspected possession event: 68% probability

Discontinued from the Zero program

Subject denied purge; vote was split

"Vote was split?" Seiran whispered, disgusted.

"They tried to erase us, Kuro. And when they failed, they just locked the doors and pretended we didn't exist."

He stared at the crystal logs for a long time.

Until one entry caught his attention.

Active magical signature detected – identical to Kuro's. Near the southern gates.

And it wasn't alone.

***

Back in the dorms, Kenshin and Hiro were half-asleep, arguing over whose turn it was to clean their gear. Yoshino floated silently in the corner, eyes narrowed like she felt a shift.

Ayame was flipping through a spellbook when Seiran entered, completely uninvited, holding a sealed envelope.

Kenshin sat up. "Dude, you knock?"

"No," Seiran said. "Because I'm not here for pleasantries."

He handed the envelope to Yoshino. "This is from the Archive Wing. Restricted access. It's about the thing that infected Kuro."

Yoshino opened it, her calm face tightening at the contents.

"It's a parasite of fragmented mana," she said slowly. "Part of a larger entity. Not bound to any known dimension."

"So… like a mana tumor with an ego?" Hiro asked.

Seiran deadpanned, "Sure. Let's call it Chad."

Ayame blinked. "You're helping us now?"

"I'm not helping you," Seiran replied. "I'm cleaning up their mess. The academy buried this to protect its reputation. But it's spreading."

He looked at Kenshin directly.

"And you're the first person who's shown signs of resistance to its pull."

Kenshin stood slowly. "Let me guess. Because of Yoshino?"

Seiran nodded. "Her energy… It's not fully formed like a normal spirit. She's bonded directly to you, not summoned. That's rare. Maybe even unique."

Yoshino frowned. "I was created from his call, not extracted from the ether."

"Exactly," Seiran muttered. "Which means you're not just his spirit. You're a filter. And possibly a target."

Outside, the magic sensors began to hum louder than usual.

Someone—or something—was approaching the perimeter again.

Seiran turned back to the group. "You wanted the truth? Here it is."

"The academy is built over a collapsed realm fracture. The school's mana grid hides the scar. Every few years, it stirs. They throw a cover story at the public, seal it up again. But the crack is spreading."

Hiro raised his hand. "Uh, is there, like, a… you know… plan?"

Seiran shrugged. "There was. It was called Class Zero."

Ayame stood slowly. "So… now what?"

Kenshin tightened his fists. "Now we figure out what they didn't tell us."

The silence after his words was only broken by the low, electric hum coming from outside—the kind of sound that crawled under your skin and whispered "you're not supposed to be here."

A red rune flared to life in the hallway just beyond their dorm room, pulsing once, then fading.

Seiran didn't wait for permission. He turned, coat flapping behind him like some perpetually annoyed crow. "Follow me. We don't have much time."

"Wait—" Hiro said, grabbing a half-eaten sandwich. "Are we allowed to just leave at night without clearance?"

"No," Seiran said. "But I'm also not technically allowed to exist. So."

"Fair."

The team—Kenshin, Ayame, Hiro, Yoshino, and their unwilling tour guide Seiran—moved through back corridors and service tunnels most students didn't even know existed. Wards flickered weakly on the walls. Some of the light crystals were cracked, buzzing faintly.

Kenshin squinted. "These tunnels look like they haven't been touched in years."

"They haven't," Seiran replied. "This used to be the utility path between the Spell Research Wing and the Outer Grid. It was sealed after the last breach."

"Why do schools always hide the good stuff underground?" Hiro muttered. "What ever happened to normal problems, like pop quizzes and mystery meat?"

Yoshino's glow lit the dark stone as they reached a heavy iron gate. Seiran tapped a sigil. It hissed open.

Beyond it: a steep staircase spiraling downward into shadows.

Of course it was stairs.

They emerged in what looked like a shattered observatory. Cracked telescope rigs lined the ceiling. The walls bore claw marks.

Not metaphorical emotional claw marks. Actual, physical "something tried to climb its way out of reality" marks.

Kenshin stepped carefully. "So… this is the perimeter?"

"No," Seiran said. "This is the last perimeter. The new one is twenty meters further out."

"Why is this still here?"

"Because bureaucracy is slower than monsters."

They reached the outer grid—a thin barrier of silver runes and twitchy, unstable spellwork. It buzzed erratically.

Yoshino stopped suddenly.

"There's something moving," she said. "Beyond the ward. It's… watching."

Ayame touched her wrist. "Where?"

Yoshino pointed.

At first, there was nothing. Just the whisper of leaves and a shimmer in the air.

Then it stepped through.

Not fully.

Just a piece of it. A shape—vaguely human but made of shuddering lines and broken reflections, like someone stuffed a nightmare into a human outline and hit print on the wrong dimension.

It didn't move naturally. It glitched forward in pulses. No footsteps. No breathing. Just presence.

Kenshin took a step back. "Okay. You guys see that too, right?"

Hiro nodded, eyes wide. "Yup. We're officially in a horror movie now."

The creature tilted its head at them. Its face was just static. Where eyes should've been—light. The kind that seared into your skull.

"Don't speak to it," Seiran whispered. "Don't even think too loud."

"What do you mean think too loud?!"

"I mean it hears intention. It's not fully here. If you engage it, it will latch."

The being reached a long arm toward the barrier.

The ward flashed.

It paused. Pulled back. And vanished.

Yoshino stepped forward, trembling.

"It wasn't probing for a way in," she said. "It already found one."

The runes across the ward began to dim, one by one.

Ayame grabbed Kenshin's arm. "What do we do?"

Seiran answered grimly. "We buy time."

"Time for what?"

He turned to the others.

"To break into the archive, steal the Headmaster's private seal, and override the academy's lockdown system so we can track how far this thing's already spread."

Kenshin blinked. "You had that plan locked and loaded, huh?"

"I didn't survive this long by being spontaneous."

Hiro clapped once. "Okay! Cool. Casual breaking and entering. Definitely what I pictured when I enrolled here."

Yoshino's expression was unreadable. "This thing… it doesn't just feed on mana. It remembers."

Kenshin looked at her. "Remembers what?"

"Fear. Regret. Pain. It keeps a piece of everyone it touches."

The others went quiet.

Even Hiro.

As they turned to leave the forgotten perimeter, Kenshin glanced one last time at the cracked observatory. The shattered glass. The broken sigils on the wall. The ghost of a defense line meant to hold something back that shouldn't exist.

They were never told about this.

They were never meant to be.

But now they were in it.

And Kenshin, for all his sarcastic deflections and bruised knuckles, felt something different than dread for once.

Resolve.

"I don't know what this thing is," he said aloud, "but I'm not letting it turn this place into a graveyard."

Seiran nodded, for the first time with something like approval.

"No more shadows," Ayame said quietly.

"And no more secrets," Kenshin added.

As they made their way back toward the surface, none of them noticed the flicker of movement behind the cracked ward.

The thing hadn't retreated.

It had listened.

And now, it remembered their names.