Light hit Ryo's eyes like a blade. For a second the world was nothing but brilliant white and a cold, antiseptic smell. Pain followed — a hot, spreading ache under his skin, like someone had set his veins alight. He didn't know how long he lay there before something solid leaned over him.
"You're awake," a calm voice said.
Ryo blinked. Crystal-paneled walls leaned away into shadowed corridors and glyphs pulsed faintly along them. A figure stood framed in the doorway — tall, composed, a woman in the academy's black-and-gold uniform. Her hair was silver and cut short, and her eyes were a hard, unyielding violet.
"Where—?" Ryo croaked.
"You were found in the ruins of Valen City," she said. "Barely alive. We brought you to the Arcane Dominion's infirmary."
Memories rushed back in jagged flashes: the Gate, the roar, Aiden's last charge, the eye beneath the earth, the Guardian's voice. He swallowed; his throat tasted like ash and iron.
"You were listed as part of Team Nine," the woman continued. "Everyone else… didn't make it." Her tone was clinical, but something had softened around the edges. "You're the sole survivor."
Ryo's heart twisted. He pictured Captain Aiden's last smile, the others' faces he'd learned by rote. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the weight of them press on his chest. Then he looked at the woman again. "Thank you. For saving me."
She nodded once. "I'm Master Lys. Head Healer for the Academy. There's someone here who wants to see you — the Council's representative. They have questions. But first, you need to stand."
He tried. The effort sent a flare of pain through his limbs, but something else answered the strain — a warmth under his skin that steadied him. He flexed his fingers. Gold runes danced beneath the surface of his palm and faded; as if whatever had branded him beneath the Gate was still settling into the world.
Word moved faster than he expected. Within hours, rumors pulsed through the academy like a swarm: Team Nine gone. One survivor returned. A miracle or a monster, depending on the telling.
They led him through hallways lined with trainee banners and portraits of famed Gatewalkers — faces set in stern expectation. Students turned their heads as he passed. Whispers trailed him like smoke.
"There he is," someone said. "He's the one who came back."
"He must be—" another voice hissed. "Either marked… or cursed."
The academy's courtyard looked the same, but everything felt different to Ryo. The courtyard's training dummies, the clanging of sparring steel, the banners snapping in the wind — all of it seemed like theater now. He felt like he wore every stare, every rumor, like a cloak.
By midday he found himself before the Council chamber: a vaulted room where the academy's highest sat in black robes, faces cut from decisions. The Council examined him with thin curiosity at first, then suspicion. Questions slid across the table like knives.
"How did you survive? What transpired in Gate Nine?" asked one counselor, eyes narrow.
Ryo answered plainly, telling the truth as best he could: the Gate's anomaly, the monster, the collapse. He left out the eye and the voice and the sigil. He left out Lumina.
They did tests: Crest scans, blood markers, rune-readings. Instruments flashed and sighed and finally reported the strangest result any of the examiners had seen in decades — a dormant Crest pattern overwritten by an unknown signature. Somewhere deep inside his soul, some foreign architecture had nested.
"We detected no prior Crest," the chief examiner said slowly. "And yet your resonance reads as… altered. This signature is unlike the Crests cataloged in the archives. It is—" He chose his words with care, "—novel."
Rumors that followed the reading were worse than silence. Novel, in the context of Crests, could mean thrilling. Or it could mean dangerous.
"You will be placed under observation," another councilor decided. "For the safety of the school."
Ryo's jaw tightened. He wanted to tell them everything — to say he had a pact, that a Guardian had offered him power — but what he'd felt in the ruins had been too raw, too sacred, too likely to become a weapon in the wrong hands. He only bowed. "Understood."
He left the chamber with a new assignment: restricted access, supervised training, and no contact with outside teams. A gilded cage, polite and impenetrable.
Two days later, they called him in for a supervised assessment — a simple combat test in the sparring hall. It was ostensibly routine, but the room pulsed with expectation. Students crowded the balconies, and instructors lined the floor. Among them, perched like a statue, was a young woman Ryo recognized from his class lists and rumor — Seren Valen, the academy's top prodigy. Black hair, poised features, and a Crest that shimmered with a rare Celestial pattern. She observed him with an unreadable face.
"Start," the examiner said, and the practice construct — a training homunculus — surged forward.
Ryo felt the old reflex: fear, then the soft warmth under his skin responding. He moved. The motion surprised him; his limbs felt quicker, more precise. With a thought he channeled the smallest trickle of energy through his palm — a thing he had never managed before the Pact. It tasted like sunlight and old iron.
The homunculus struck, heavy and unrelenting. He sidestepped, feeling an unfamiliar clarity — the Guardian's voice like a whisper at the edge of his mind, translating movement into possibility.
A golden arc answered his palm. It was only enough to stop the construct's fist, nothing more. But the hall — crowded, expectant — gave a sound between a murmur and a gasp. Eyes widened. Even Seren's gaze shifted in a fraction of a degree.
"Impressive control for someone relegated to observation," she said after, voice carrying through the hall. "You moved with intent."
Ryo wanted to show restraint, to be small and unseen. But the hush in the hall tasted like judgement, and memory pushed him forward — the monsters, Aiden. He could not stand small anymore.
He pushed a deeper thread of light through his palm. It flared — not large, not destructive — but it cut the homunculus's power core and sent it sparking. The crowd erupted. Instructors frowned; the Council's representative scribbled notes. The rumor mill that had followed him grew teeth.
After the test, in a narrow corridor where only a handful of students lingered, Seren approached him. Up close she was colder, yet something in her eyes betrayed curiosity rather than contempt.
"You have an unusual seal," she said softly. "They said Team Nine vanished. I thought… I thought you were gone."
Ryo's fingers trembled. "I don't know what I am," he admitted. "But I know I won't let what happened happen again."
She studied him for a long moment. "Power without control devours you," she warned. "The academy will either shape you… or break you."
"I'll learn," he said. The Guardian's warmth hummed beneath his thoughts, patient and distant. Lumina had given him a path, but not the map. The rest he would carve himself.
That night, he stood alone on the dormitory roof and looked at the stars — ordinary, small, and distant. The Academy glowed below him: an island of light in the dark continent of the world. He pressed a hand to his chest where the golden sigil pulsed just beneath the skin.
"Climb the Gates," Lumina had said. "Ascend beyond mortality."
Ryo let that promise settle into him like a second pulse. He thought of Aiden and the rest of Team Nine and whispered into the cold wind, "I'll climb them all."
Below, in the sleeping halls, rumors continued to spin. Some called him a miracle. Others called him a threat. He was both — and neither. To survive meant becoming something both small and dangerous: unseen until needed, forged in light.
He had no idea how many Gates remained. He had no notion of the enemies that watched from beyond the folds of reality. But standing on that roof, under the indifferent stars, Ryo felt an ember of certainty burn — faint, stubborn, alive.
He had returned. The Academy of Shadows had welcomed him home.