Gio was operating on fumes, but the need to deliver the goods to Sarya was paramount. If he waited till the last minute he wouldn't be able to focus on his current tasks.
He quickly grabbed the "CCR Notes" he spotted earlier when looking for other materials, copied the essential "Failure Points of last 4y initial ranking exams" onto a clean set of pages, and slipped the folded paper into his tunic pocket.
He moved with a strained, stiff stride leftover from his ordeals and a new body down to the North Wing and quickly located Room 112. He knelt, casually dripping off the notes by sliding the folded paper halfway under Sarya's heavy door, ensuring it looked like a quick, anonymous drop.
As he began to rise, he heard movement and the light, and practiced footfalls of a nimble person ascending the central stairwell.
Rikkia Stone-Pelt reached the landing, carrying a large, worn bag of books. Her intense golden lynx eyes immediately locked onto the unusual sight: Gio kneeling at a door in the wrong wing, looking pale and utterly exhausted.
A slow, wry smile touched her lips. She stopped two steps below the landing.
"Making a delivery, Wyatt?" she called out, her voice low and carrying a hint of amusement. "Looks like a love letter. Didn't think you had it in you."
Gio straightened, his response immediate. "It's class work, Stone-Pelt," he responded dismissively, his voice flat and tired. He didn't break stride, turning immediately toward the stairs to leave.
As he did, his head came up, and his eyes—still haunted by the void flecks—briefly locked onto hers.
Rikkia's smile vanished. Her keen, animal instincts flared, and the fine lynx hair along her scalp and neck began to stand on end out of an instinctual feeling of wrongness. Her eyes registered no visible magic or color in his, but the simple contact with his gaze was like touching a frayed, live wire. The sheer pressure of his being—his eyes acting as an open doorway to the soul of the veteran overlaid with cosmic chaos—was a profound, chilling sensory overload that screamed DANGER.
The moment he broke eye contact and turned his back, the terrifying instinct vanished, disappearing like an illusion. The hair on her neck settled. She blinked, feeling a rush of confusion. What the hell was that?
Gio, unaware of the exact instinctual horror he had triggered, continued down the stairs not knowing the turmoil he just caused Rikka.
Returning to the desolate confines of Room 412, the Gio was consumed by a bone-deep exhaustion—yet terror made a mockery of rest. Sleep was no longer refuge; it was an open door to the screaming, dimensional abyss. He feared the descent, for the self that returned from the Void was never quite the same.
With trembling hands, he manipulated the magical timepiece on his bedside drawer, a cold, brass thing near the head of the bed. He fought the esoteric mechanism into compliance, figuring out how to set a desperate sentry for a two-hour interval. It was a pathetic defense against cosmic horror, but necessary.
After an hour of staring into the shadowed ceiling, fighting the inevitable pull, consciousness finally fractured.
The descent was immediate. He fell, not through space, but through a torrent of screaming colors—hues of impossible geometry and non-Euclidean angles that defied mortal sight. The chorus of contradiction—the ultimate truth of the un-logic—shrieked against the frail shell of his mind. He was plunging toward the monstrous, colossal entity that waited at the bottom, the thing with the eyes.
But before he could reach the final, sanity-rending revelation, he was violently yanked back.
He awoke with a shuddering gasp, the raw taste of metallic aether on his tongue. The terror remained, but the entity never seen, foiled by the alarm. He was disturbingly rested, the body unnaturally energized and suffused with a cold, shocking current of power. The brief contact with the abyss had given him strength.
This unnerving vitality was the final, damnable proof: he was not merely traumatized; he was actively, involuntarily Void Delving with every lapse into slumber. The abyss sought to claim him, yet offered power as a lure.
Driven by a desperate need for assessment, he began to meditate. He focused on the surging Mana within, tracing its flow through muscle and bone, searching for the infection.
After agonizing trial and error, guided by the remnants of Wyatt's instinct, he managed to isolate the corruption. He realized, with profound relief, that the taint was not yet systemic. It did not yet rule his consciousness.
With a tremendous expenditure of will, he focused the concentrated impurity into a channel. The taint was not fluid; it was a thick, sludge-like consistency that bore the reflected, philosophical colors of the Void. With effort It began to expel itself through his eyes he tried everything the skin, bowls, and mouth but the eyes seemed be be the only avenue he could force it out of.
A noxious, cold stream of acid-green and midnight-black corruption wept from the corners of his eyes. It was a visceral, horrifying process—the proof of his exposure—and the expelled mass moved subtly, as if possessed of a rudimentary, malignant sentience.
He found a sturdy, cork-stoppered bottle among Wyatt's meager possessions fighting the urge to destroy the repulsive material, he doubted fire would work, sealed the Exudate of Un-Space within. He instantly felt the bottle radiate mana—not clean, academic energy, but the raw, unpredictable power that pulsed from the Labyrinths themselves. It was a fragment of the primordial, a source of power ripped directly from the veins of the world.
Knowing the sheer, catastrophic risk of this blasphemous material being discovered, he drew a knife and carved a slit into his thin mattress, tucking the cold, dangerous bottle into the foam.
He calculated the cost: the amount of taint expelled versus the amount still poisoning his soul suggested a clean-up time of at least four months. And that was only if his every encounter with sleep did not infuse him with more of the alien poison.
He had traded one form of destruction for another. The fight for survival was now the fight for his sanity.
"At least we're still sane huh, Wyatt."