The courtyard was a ruin of smoke and splintered stone when the second wave hit—worse than the first, more focused, angrier. The sun was a hard, white coin overhead that did nothing to warm the air; it only threw the shadows into sharper relief.
Orders bled into shouts. The Headmaster's wards flickered like a dying hearth. Tired limbs moved anyway. They could not afford to fall—not here, not now.
Kaito's spear felt heavier than ever in his hands, the blue wraps tight against the shaft, the tiny flame-charms clinking like a nervous pulse. He kept his movements small, economical. The first wave had taught them to fight together; the second taught them what they could not outrun.
At first it looked manageable. The Circle formed a tight line, working like a single, brutal organism—Mira's lightning lancing into the ranks, Jin turning the ground to slick ice and then shards, Elara's roots ripping troughs to swallow ankles, Ryo a golden hurricane at the front. Daxen's shadows stitched a moving wall; Liora's mind-threads slowed and misdirected. They cut, burned, froze, and pulled—their powers a concerted defense.
But the enemy was cunning. They used the rubble to funnel attacks, struck in coordinated flurries, and tore at the seams of the Circle's formation. One flank collapsed under a sudden push. Another gap opened and widened. The Headmaster's wards hiccuped.
A great bulk—thicker, blacker, its skin like scrubbed coal—cleaved through Daxen's shadow wall and slammed into Mira. She took the blow to shield a thrown student; the lightning in her hands sputtered into a single, dead ember. She fell, hard, and didn't get up right away. The air smelled of singed hair and metal.
Everything accelerated. The Circle splintered into small fights. Friends bled and screamed and kept moving because if they didn't move they would die. Kaito saw Aria thrown backward against a torn banner; she hit stone and slid, clutching her side, breath ragged. Ryo was on his knees, one shoulder dented and smoking. Jin's breath came shallow; frost had stopped his heart's rhythm long enough to bruise him by the time he staggered. Elara's vines hung limp and shredded, and she stamped one foot, barely able to push a root through the last of the attackers. Daxen's shadows thinned as claws tore through the wrappings around his forearms. Liora's face went pale as she staggered, eyes far away as her mind-thread snapped and frayed.
Kaito's fists clenched until the wraps cut into his skin. The world narrowed to the sound of their labored breathing, to rags of cloth and bone-deep weariness. They were falling apart. He could feel every wound like a blade inside his chest.
He stepped forward because he always stepped forward. He met a lunging thing with the blunt cap and felt its weight like a thrown log. It hit the shaft, and the impact shivered up his arms. For a heartbeat everything was normal—then heat like a hammer slammed into him from the inside, a white-hot pressure that shoved through his ribs and out into his hands.
The spear answered.
It wasn't the controlled flare he'd once coaxed and contained — it was raw, eager, angry. Fire seared up the shaft in a blue surge, then erupted at the head in a roaring sheet that spat across the courtyard. The blast knocked attackers backward in a falling wave; shadow-ash hissed in the light and peeled like smoke from stone. The air filled with a scent like old forests on lightning nights, like a sky that remembers volcanoes.
Kaito felt the force of it, every inch of flame a memory in his bones. For a flicker he saw the world burn in true color: the curve of the academy roofs as though they were hills under a hot sun, the wind like a living hand. Then he forced himself to pull the heat in, close it down, clamp it shut like a god pressing a lid on a furnace. The surge died back, coiling under his ribs until it was a hot ache.
When the smoke cleared, the courtyard looked different. Fewer Shadowspawn moved. Many lay ashen and unspeaking. But the cost for that blast was written in the Circle.
They were all hurt—badly. Mira lay on her back, limbs crooked, breathing shallow. Jin's lips were white, frost melting into a trickle. Ryo sat propped against a broken column, head down, shoulders slumped, one eye swollen shut. Elara's hands were stained with soil and blood; she had hardly any strength left to pull herself upright. Daxen's shadow cloak peeled like wet cloth from his skin; he sat with his back against the Headmaster's stone bench, eyes closed as he pressed a hand to a bleeding side. Liora's eyes focused and unfocused, her mind retreating and returning in tremors. Aria—Aria crawled toward them, her shirt dark with crimson where the banner had cut her.
Kaito alone stood, mostly whole, breath harsh but steady. The blue wraps along his spearhead smoked faintly; the tips of the blades were tinged a permanent, uncanny blue—as if the metal had been kissed by ice and flame both. When he set the weapon down it left a dark ring in the stone where heat had scorched the floor.
Silence fell like a sheet. The Headmaster moved between them, hands trembling as he checked wounds, issuing orders in a voice that tried to be calm and failed. He barked for herbs, for beds, for wards to be reinforced, for someone to carry those who could not stand. Servants and acolytes spilled into the courtyard like ghosts, hauling stretchers, pouring water, and calling for the healers.
Kaito wanted to move, to reach for each of them, to apologize, to explain—he wanted to fix it all with the next pulse of blue—but the taste of ash in his mouth tasted like a confession. He had given them a weapon that answered to his blood. It helped, yes; it had cut the tide; but it had answered like a living thing, and it had left a mark on the world. And on him.
Aria's hand found his ankle as one of the servants passed. Her fingers were cold, trembling. She did not look angry—there was no time for that—but there was an expression that made his chest empty: fear, and something else he was not ready to see—calculation. She looked up, straight into his face, and for a single moment her eyes were not only Aria's. They were a mirror searching for what it might reflect.
"Kaito," she said, voice small and steady, "what did you do?"
He could tell her the truth and watch those words shatter them, or he could lie and let them heal fully in ignorance. The blue on the blade glowed faintly in the dying light; it looked like a promise and a threat at once. He lowered his gaze, to the blood on his hands and the smear where the spear had left a blue stain on stone.
"I made a choice," he said finally, voice hoarse. "I did what I had to do."
Aria squeezed his ankle and then let go, turning back to help, but the question lodged in the air like a fired dart. They would ask it again. And next time the answer might not be simple.
Night came down on the academy with the wounded moaning softly in the infirmary. The spear, propped against the Headmaster's bench, shimmered in the moonlight—its blade tips a permanent, impossible blue that seemed to drink in the dark and hold it. Kaito sat on the low step and watched the bandages and the young faces drifting under lamplight. He felt hollow with the knowledge that he had saved them and scarred them in the same breath.
Outside, on the highest spire, a raven took flight, bearing news on black wings. In the shadowy hollow where a figure smiled without revealing his face, someone heard the story and said nothing, only that small smile widening. The war had escalated, and now the truth had a color: blue, bright and terrible, and impossible to hide.
For Kaito, the night was full of ash and a new kind of resolve. The spear had shown a fragment of what lay inside him—and the world had answered with blood. He would train harder. He would learn control. He would bind his secret tighter. But he knew, with a cold certainty, that secrets left a scorch that time only darkened—not erased.