Haku moved through the halls of the school with the practiced silence of someone used to slipping between systems. His custom glove hummed faintly, tucked beneath his long coat, inert to anyone who couldn't hear its particular language of soft mechanical pulses.
It was nearly midnight. Perfect.
'Alex and Yue almost lost their lives because of this. I have to be sure.'
The others thought the ritual had worked, and in one sense, it had. The entity had been severed. That much he'd confirmed from the energy collapse. But the resonance profile? That was another story.
Magic in this world wasn't so different from physics back home. It behaved like a wave, distorted by emotion, intent, and mass. Most mages didn't think of it that way, of course, they operated off rote, circles, and lineage. But not Haku. He'd built the glove to not only cancel frequencies but also detect specific frequency echoes for his research, and maybe one day to also apply it to qi and aura. It didn't cross his mind, but it was almost as if he was creating a second stormy ocean.
'If the entity had really been banished, the signature should be gone.'
But he kept picking up static.
Now, he was going back to the chamber alone. Or so he thought.
Yue and Alex crouched behind the third stairwell balcony, cloaked in minor shadow enchantments that Alex performed.
"Why are we following him again?" Alex whispered.
"Because he told us not to," Yue said flatly.
"That's usually a good reason to not follow someone."
Yue didn't answer. Her eyes never left Haku's distant figure.
Haku reached the nexus chamber, or what remained of it. The ritual's blast had left scorched runes embedded like scars in the stone, and the air still shimmered with lingering mana. No one else was allowed down here after what happened.
He knelt by the central binding ring, brushing dust from the ancient inlay.
Then he activated the glove.
Soft blue light flickered over his knuckles as the device spun up, drawing latent mana into its lattice of filters.
"Alright," he muttered to himself. "Wave theory applies. Every spell, every being, has a frequency footprint, a harmonic in this world. The entity was massive, parasitic. It would've destabilized the local pattern with high interference... so even if it's gone, the frequency should still echo here."
He adjusted a small dial.
"Come on, show me your tail."
The glove pulsed. Thin tendrils of light projected outward, scanning in nested spirals. The normal field noise registered as faint and chaotic, nothing alarming.
Until a spike.
Haku froze.
"Damn thats loud. That's… not background."
The glove hissed. Red light blinked along the edge.
"Low amplitude, repeating... That's a residual harmonic. It's still here. Or part of it is."
He moved closer to the floor, scanning the nexus circle again. The readings sharpened.
"Localized. A persistent phase ghost," he murmured. "Which means the severing didn't destroy it, it displaced it. Like cutting off a limb and leaving the nerve behind."
Behind him, a voice hissed.
"You knew it wasn't gone."
Haku didn't flinch. "You should be in bed."
Yue stepped into the room, Alex close behind. "We should've known you wouldn't be."
"I told you both to stay out of this."
"You did," Alex said. "So obviously we didn't."
Yue's eyes were locked on the glove. "What are you picking up?"
Haku hesitated, then sighed. "Residual mana signatures. Look, magic, as they teach it here, doesn't account for wave collapse. But if you think of the entity as a waveform."
"A conscious one," Yue added.
"Right. Then the ritual disrupted it, but didn't nullify it. It's still resonating through the environment. Like a struck tuning fork that won't go quiet."
Alex glanced around. "So… what? The entity's still here?"
"No," Haku said. "Or not exactly. Think of it like.." He reached for an analogy. "Like heat after a fire. You can put out the flame, but the stone stays warm. What I'm reading is the leftover heat. But it's structured. Still organized. That's the problem."
Yue took a step closer to the central sigil. "It wants to re-form."
"Maybe," Haku said, lowering his voice. "Or maybe someone's helping it."
He tapped another setting.
The glove hummed higher, a fine red grid rippling across the room.
And then the central sigil on the floor, the one Yue had stood in during the ritual, flared faintly in return.
It was subtle. Almost undetectable. But the glove caught it.
'A Wave-match detected?'
Haku's breath hitched.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, no.. This isn't just an echo. It's a loop. Someone bound part of it into the structure."
Alex paled. "You mean this place is a container now?"
"No," Haku said grimly. "It's a conduit. Someone rerouted the entity's remaining frequency into the leyline beneath the school."
Yue took a step back. "Bernard."
"I can't prove it," Haku said, standing, "but it's his style. Precise. Subtle. Let someone else take the spotlight, then redirect the fallout."
Alex frowned. "What do we do?"
Haku glanced between them. He hadn't planned for company. Hadn't planned to share any of this. But now they were here. He didn't expect the people he wanted to protect from this came to protect him instead.
He looked away, jaw tight.
"…We map the spread," he said finally. "We trace the loop through the leyline network. Quietly. No one can know."
Yue nodded. "Understood."
Alex grinned, though it didn't quite reach his eyes. "I knew you weren't just a quiet deity. Cancelling magic and now even something that can track a being not from this world."
Haku exhaled through his nose. "I'm not a deity."
"Sure," Alex said. "That's exactly what a deity would say."
Haku turned back to the glove, tuning for a broader sweep.
If Bernard wanted to use the fracture, he'd first have to dig his fingers into the ley veins. The school's deepest roots.
And now Haku knew where to start looking.