———
"This is anomalous. Truly anomalous," Professor Torian muttered, his fingers tracing the air above a complex, glowing runic circle hovering between them in the lab. The intricate lines of power pulsed with a steady, rhythmic light. "Your description of 'seeing flaws' is too simplistic. I need to understand the mechanism."
Kael watched, his engineer's mind appreciating the design's elegance even as he perceived its inherent instability. "It's like... a load-bearing wall built a few degrees off true," he explained, pointing to a junction where three runic paths converged inefficiently. "If I apply pressure here..." He reached out, his will a precise instrument, and touched that single point of failure.
The runic circle didn't shatter or explode. It un-wrote itself from existence, vanishing with a soft sigh of displaced air, leaving behind no trace of magical residue.
Torian immediately checked a bank of crystalline instruments humming nearby. Their readings, which usually spiked with residual energy after any magical interaction, remained flat. "Zero arcane pollution. Again." He ran a hand through his wild hair, frustration and fascination warring on his face. "But how? I can see the same structural weakness you described, but when I attempt to replicate the process... nothing happens. It's as if the flaw is invisible to my will."
He moved with renewed purpose, sketching a far more complex formation in the air—a multi-layered shield matrix used in advanced warding. As the last rune settled into place, he attached several small, silvery sensors to Kael's temples and wrist. "Again. But this time, I'm monitoring your bio-arcanic signature. I need to see what happens inside you."
Kael focused. The shield matrix was a masterpiece of defensive magic, but to his perception, it was a cathedral of interconnected flaws. He chose the primary one—a cascading failure point in the mana-conversion protocol. He pushed.
The matrix dissolved into nothingness. Simultaneously, the sensors screamed. Dials spun wildly, and a holographic display projected a chaotic storm of energy within Kael's frail body. A violent, inverted surge—not an emission, but an absorption.
"THIS!?!" Torian breathed, his eyes wide with dawning, terrifying understanding. He stared at the data, then at Kael, who was swaying on his feet, his vision spotting. "It's not expulsion... it's consumption."
Kael stumbled, catching himself on the workbench. "Professor? What's... happening?"
"Powers above," Torian whispered, helping him to a chair. "We've been wrong from the start. Completely wrong." He began pacing, the pieces clicking together in his brilliant mind. "It's not that you lack mana, Kael. It's that your mana operates on a fundamentally different paradigm. Quick, describe the deconstruction sequence for a simple Fire Bolt!"
Still disoriented, Kael gestured weakly, sketching the flawed flow of a standard Fire Bolt formula in the air and then his precise, surgical counter-flow that would neutralize it.
Torian stared at the imaginary diagrams, his face pale. "By the gods... You're not a nullifier. You're a predator. Your mana signature doesn't create; it consumes and neutralizes other mana. That's why you leave no residue. That's the 'flaw' you see—it's the point where the spell is most vulnerable to your unique form of consumption."
The truth landed on Kael with physical weight. He wasn't broken. He was... different. A hunter in a world of creators.
"But why do I keep collapsing?" he asked, the practical concern cutting through the revelation.
"Because your body is the conduit!" Torian explained, his voice intense. "You're channeling wild, disordered mana every time you do this. Your constitution isn't built for it. You're a siphon for chaotic energy, and it's tearing you apart from the inside." His expression turned gravely serious. "This is what I feared. Listen to me, Kael. You must not use this in a duel. Not yet. If you were to directly target a mage's core... you wouldn't just cancel their spell. You could devour their mana entirely, leaving them a crippled husk. Or the feedback could kill you both."
To emphasize his point, Torian swiftly etched a small, subtle glyph onto the collar of Kael's academy robe. It glowed faintly and then faded from sight. "A Monitoring Glyph. It will alert me if you approach a critical energy threshold and transport you to safety. This is not a suggestion. It is an order."
———
But later, standing at the edge of the packed Aetherium Dueling Hall, Kael found the order impossible to obey. The air thrummed with the excited chatter of hundreds of students. He saw the ones Finnian had tormented—the commoner boy from the library, the first-year girl—their faces a mixture of fear and a desperate, hidden hope. They were looking at him. Torian's warning warred with the crushing weight of their silent plea.
He stepped onto the platform. A hush fell over the crowd.
Finnian smirked, already in position. "So the trash has decided to be taken out. You should have stayed hidden with the other garbage."
"If I'm trash," Kael retorted, his voice cold, "then what does that make a mage so careless with his magic?"
The insult struck true. Finnian's face darkened with rage. "You DARE?!"
He didn't bother with a single spell. Both hands came up, and the air around him shimmered as he began weaving multiple complex formations simultaneously—a dazzling, brutal display of power meant to overwhelm.
"Look! Trinity Assault! Finnian's multi-casting tier-three spells!" a voice yelled from the stands.
Kael didn't try to match him. He moved, his body humming with terrifying awareness. He became a phantom in the storm, his hands tracing counter-formulas.
Whoosh. An "Ice Javelin" shattered into mist before it fully formed.
Fizz. "Chains of Binding" unraveled at his feet.
Thump. A "Concussive Orb" dissolved into a harmless breeze.
"What... what is happening?" a student whispered, voice thick with confusion. "He's not even casting!"
With each precise deconstruction, Kael felt a jolt of wild energy surge into him—the "consumption" Torian described. It was intoxicating and agonizing, fire in his veins. And with each surge, the hidden glyph on his collar pulsed brighter, faster—a frantic, visible warning beat.
Finnian, enraged and humiliated by the effortless negation of his assault, gathered his power for a final, concentrated blast. "ENOUGH OF THIS!" he roared, a sphere of raw, destructive mana forming between his hands. His face, usually a mask of cool composure, was twisted in frustration. This "defect" was making him look incompetent.
Kael saw it. The core of the spell, a brilliant, unstable sun. And he saw the flaw—not a small crack, but a gaping maw. His predatory instincts took over. He didn't just want to cancel it. He wanted to *devour* it. He started forming the counter-flow, a formula to seize and pull.
The glyph on his collar flared into a blinding white star.
The world dissolved into pure, searing light and a sensation of being violently wrenched through reality. The roar of the crowd, Finnian's furious face, the solid platform—everything vanished.
———
Silence.
Kael's vision cleared. He stood in a featureless, grey void. A few feet away, Finnian was thrown onto the non-existent ground, gasping, his face a mask of pure terror. He clutched his chest, his magical aura visibly dimmed, as if he'd felt the edges of his power being torn away.
Standing between them, his face a storm of disappointment and fear, was Professor Torian.
"You were warned," Torian said, his voice low and shaking. The words echoed in the endless grey. He looked from Kael, still vibrating with uncontrolled energy, to Finnian, pale and shaken on the ground.
"And now," Torian hissed, the sound filled with grim finality, "you will both listen."