A storm brewed beneath the surface of the dome.
Yet above it, in the northern watchtower of Silver Mist Academy—a room veined with ancient runes and humming with enchantments—there was only the quiet flicker of projection screens.
The Observatory Hall.
Dozens of translucent panels floated midair, conjured by embedded arcane projectors.
They rotated slowly, showcasing different segments of the arena—chaotic battles, unexpected alliances, and moments of eerie stillness.
Each one displayed a live feed of the battle below—some were zoomed in close on individual fighters, while others gave sweeping panoramas of the shifting terrain.
Chairs hovered just off the ground, adjusting automatically for height and comfort.
Aetherlight lamps glowed in suspended crystal orbs above, casting a warm hue over the assembled figures.
The air was scented with faint silverleaf, a calming herb designed to keep temperamental staff from flipping tables.
A gathering of instructors had taken their places.
The vampire elder Letharion Virelle stood still as a statue in the back, crimson eyes narrowed, lips curled in faint amusement.
His skin was pale marble under the soft glow of floating runes, and his cloak bore the silver insignia of House Virelle, woven with real moon-thread.
Beside him, his hands rested on a staff of obsidian wood inlaid with a single blood gem.
Near the center stood Kaelvar Rhend, broad-shouldered and sharp-jawed, with an ever-present smirk beneath amber eyes.
The werewolf instructor—fur-lined collar, rugged uniform sleeves rolled up—watched with folded arms, every so often flicking his gaze toward the screens with half-checked pride.
"Look at her go," he muttered as a fierce, blonde girl spun through three opponents with reckless agility, her strikes wild yet precise.
"That's my niece, Nyra Rhend. Told you she was born feral."
"No one doubted that," came a melodic voice—Professor Aeval, the fairy instructor, her copper-gold hair twinkling like starlight.
Though human-sized, she sat cross-legged in mid-air, a tea cup balanced between two fingers.
Her wings, while currently folded, shimmered faintly in the ambient light.
"You just said it twenty-three times since we started."
Kaelvar grinned. "She's worth it."
The center screen crackled as the terrain shifted violently, stone erupting from mossy fields, turning the terrain into a jagged maze.
"Oh! Here comes the storm shift," Aeval chirped, sipping her rose-leaf tea.
"Let's see who wipes out who."
Another panel blinked to life.
Marco Gravesbane, soaked and panting, was seen paddling frantically atop a summoned ice disc.
"Alliance!" he shouted, breathless. "Let's work together"
The screen zoomed out just as a rock whizzed past his ear.
"You electrocuted me, you maniac!" yelled Liora Veylin Evermist, a fairy girl with damp hair sparking at the ends.
She launched another stone at him, her cheeks flushed and lightning dancing on her fingertips.
Kaelvar barked a laugh. "That boy's got guts."
"Or a death wish," Letharion muttered.
"And there," murmured Professor Daegon, the elven battle theory specialist, pointing with a gloved finger.
The screen shifted. Selene Avaris Vaelthorn, tall and composed, moved like a silver flame across the field.
She wore a fitted grey coat split at the back, gliding with eerie precision over rubble and fallen students.
Her silver eyes glowed faintly with her bloodline, not a single drop of mud marring her appearance.
Not even the teachers commented immediately.
"Flawless," murmured Letharion finally.
"As expected of her bloodline."
"She has potential," Daegon added. "She's not even exhausted."
"She doesn't need to," came a voice as cool as the void.
Every head turned.
Vice Principal Seraphiel Vaelthorn had appeared without sound, stepping through a ripple in the air as if she'd always been there.
Her long silver hair shimmered like liquid moonlight, and her piercing emerald eyes scanned the room.
Her robes were high-collared and midnight black, embroidered with silver roses that shifted like mist.
"She's only warming up," Seraphiel said. "Selene knows the stakes."
"Confirmed," Daegon murmured.
"He grew up under the Renwild household as a retainer's son. Rare dual-class."
"And dangerous," Kaelvar added, eyes narrowing. "He's clean. Scary clean."
The center-most rune-screen shifted again—and silence swept across the room like a passing storm front.
There he was.
Eden Prairie.
He was crouched against a fractured rise of stone, white hair plastered to his pale skin by rain.
His hoodie was soaked through, one sleeve shredded, and blood darkened the fabric at his ribs.
He had one orb left—cracked, flickering faintly.
Despite the wounds, despite the exhaustion painted on his face, his eyes were locked ahead, distant and unreadable.
He was hiding.
He was waiting.
A movement flickered in the crowd of faculty.
Aurora Prairie stood tall near the leftmost projection, her silhouette bathed in the pale blue light of the screens.
She wore a sleek, high-collared combat coat of silver-stitched black, split at the hips for mobility.
Her long, white hair flowed behind her in soft, silken waves, casting a faint shimmer like starlight across her White flawless skin.
Her figure, sharp and curvaceous, exuded the same quiet confidence that made the name Prairie a whispered threat in dueling rings.
Her expression remained calm.
Composed.
Almost cold.
But as Eden appeared on the screen—battered, breathing hard, alone—a flicker of emotion cracked through her stoic mask.
Just for a second.
Not fear.
Not pity.
Worry.
She didn't speak.
Her arms remained crossed, lips sealed.
But her silver eyes remained fixed on the boy in the ruins, unmoving.
The others noticed.
"Still standing," Kaelvar muttered again. "Barely, but standing."
Aeval raised a brow, swirling her tea. "What did you say earlier? That he moved like a Ghost?"
"Ghost with fists."
"He took on Valois Laurent and Fenrir Maverick at the same time," murmured Daegon.
"They barely walked away. One orb each, cracked to hell.
That boy shattered one of Fenrir's and nearly destroyed two of Valois's."
"And people thought he was weak just because he's classless?"
Professor Letharion Virelle let out a dry chuckle.
"The Prairies never produce weaklings.
They produce monsters in human skin."
Aurora's gaze flicked toward him.
The corner of her lip twitched upward. Barely.
Seraphiel Vaelthorn, still unmoved by the commentary, simply nodded.
"He'll make it to the top 10."
Aeval tilted her head playfully.
"Is that foresight… or favoritism, Vice Principal?"
"Neither," Seraphiel replied without blinking.
"It's fact."
******
(Glory's POV)
I was running.
Or rather, swimming, half-wading, half-gliding, half-flying—whatever desperate combination my body and mana could manage through this ridiculous terrain.
The waterlogged landscape of the dome was chaos incarnate, a jagged expanse of shattered platforms, sunken ruins, and shimmering arcs of misty rainfall.
Silver Mist hadn't gone easy on us.
What was supposed to be a student evaluation felt more like a battlefield ripped straight from a war chronicle.
Water sloshed beneath my boots as I vaulted over a broken statue, its submerged arm reaching toward the surface like it was still drowning.
Thunder cracked above.
Lightning split the sky, and the downpour thickened.
Even from a distance, I could sense pockets of spells detonating, spheres of magic blooming and imploding like firecrackers.
My breath came in steady bursts, and my mana stirred around me in tight, invisible streams.
I still had two orbs glowing faintly across the wrist of my silver watch.
One had already shattered.
A mistake I didn't plan to repeat.
That boy had been fast. Faster than I expected from a Crystallo of all people.
He'd had a crystal Gauntlet that magnified his reach, forming shields and lances of radiant glass that spun like orbiting stars.
I remembered the feel of one shard grazing my side, the heatless burn it left behind.
He had smiled like it was all a game—until I swept the wind through his feet and buried him face-first into the flooded ground.
Even then, he'd tried to laugh, sputtering through a mouthful of swampy water before his orb cracked and he vanished in a flicker of blue light.
Gone. Eliminated.
I'd barely had time to breathe before someone else came at me.
I didn't know who he was.
Maybe a Kaleeki—he'd moved like one.
Cloaked in shimmering dark threads, he danced between shadows like a puppet master.
If I hadn't used the rising stormwinds to blind him, I might have lost more than just an orb.
I spun around now, senses flaring, my boots finding purchase on a moss-covered ridge just above a deep basin of water.
Fights were everywhere.
The dome had been transformed into a semi-aquatic battlefield. Some of the deeper trenches had swallowed up students entirely.
I caught a glimpse of glowing hair and trailing fins weaving through the water—an Aquilan mermaid in full flow.
One of them—the girl with the lavender eyes and coral bangles—shot up like a spear from the pool, dragging an unfortunate boy by the ankle.
He kicked wildly, his arms swinging, but she giggled and spun him twice before tossing him into the shallows.
His second orb blinked out. Her eyes sparkled as she vanished back beneath the waves.
The Aquilan kids were dominating the water.
I kept moving, leaping from one broken pillar to another.
The humidity was rising. The air stank of damp spellwork and mud.
Marco.
There he was.
The idiot was riding a disk of ice like it was a sled, paddling with a branch while shouting something about, "If I die, bury me in snacks!"
He slid straight into a boulder.
The ice cracked. He yelped.
"THIS IS NOT HOW I GO!"
I didn't even have time to warn him.
A fairy girl with angry wings and a vine whip hurled a stone at him, which he deflected by slipping on the ice and accidentally dodging.
He spun in place like a drunken ballerina, arms flailing.
"STYLISTIC EVASION!"
The fairy screamed and chased after him.
I had to bite down a laugh. Idiot.
Around us, it was carnage.
A boy from Lunaria was fighting two girls from Elyria—one wielding mist and mirages, the other using blood-infused daggers.
He danced with elven precision, forming radiant moonlight barriers with his hands.
One of the vampire girls screamed and vanished into vapor, while the other shrieked, leapt across a wall of floating crystal, and slashed his cheek before he parried and shattered her second orb.
A Necrozi student rose from the flooded stone plaza, conjuring skeletal arms from the depths.
Two Wulfgarn boys charged him, roaring, their claws glinting.
One of the skeletons was torn apart mid-rise.
The other exploded in a shockwave of bone dust.
The Necrozi boy only smirked and summoned a swirling coffin of shadows that devoured one wolf boy whole.
Blue light flashed. An orb broke.
Thunder again.
No sign of Eden.
Where are you?
I hadn't seen him since the beginning.
Not since he vanished between the rocks and shadows, fighting that vampire—the Laurent heir—and Fenrir Maverick.
The entire arena had stopped to watch them on the rune-screens.
Three combatants locked in brutal chaos. Eden—barehanded, outnumbered, and cornered.
But he fought like a devil.
Like a Prairie.
No one was surprised that he survived.
Some of the teachers didn't expect less. A few of them murmured to each other, their eyes glinting knowingly.
"The Prairie bloodline doesn't break."
"He fought Valois and Fenrir alone. Of course he's still in."
"Monster blood, that one."
But I hadn't seen him. Not with my own eyes.
And my gut was churning.
Lightning rippled overhead again.
I took another breath and leapt forward.
A surge of wind coiled around me as I channeled my class, vaulting over the next platform.
The wind obeyed. The water parted below like it respected my passage.
More chaos unfolded.
Two fairy girls were locked in an aerial duel, their wings shimmering in rapid bursts.
One hurled a glowing orb of pollen that detonated in a flash of golden dust.
The other shrieked, veered off, and slammed into a vine-covered statue. Her third orb blinked.
"Stupid pollen—CHEATING TRICK!" she shouted as she vanished.
A boy in a fire cloak—a Pyropex—ignited the surface of the water in front of him to blind his opponent, only for an Aquari student to rise behind him, completely unharmed, and kick him square in the back of the head.
His orb cracked. Steam hissed. The Pyropex roared.
The fighting was beautiful and brutal.
It was art in motion.
A symphony of screams, spells, laughter, and rage.
I ducked behind a half-submerged stone pillar as a blast of wind magic collided with a streak of flame not ten feet away.
The resulting explosion turned the surrounding mist into a haze of steam, and I flinched at the sting on my face.
My clothes were soaked, stuck to my skin, and the taste of brine filled my mouth.
The terrain had gone mad.
Water had once dominated the field, shimmering across dunes and carved basins like an inland sea.
Parts of it were waist-deep—others, far deeper.
I'd seen a student from the Pyri continent vanish completely below the surface two minutes in, sucked down by a whirlpool left behind by some girl with hydromancy and poor manners.
But now, the arena had shifted.
At first, it was just a low groan beneath my boots, like the earth was yawning.
Then a full quake followed, sending stone slabs erupting from the water's depths.
Some hovered in place like floating platforms; others became cliffs, waterfalls roaring down their sides where the water had no time to adjust.
Runes flared alive beneath our feet, ancient circuits that hadn't lit up in centuries.
To my left, a pair of Aquari twins from the Aquilan continent moved like sharks through the deep waters.
I didn't even see them breathe.
One dove under, and a heartbeat later, a Wulfgan girl—who'd been firing ice darts—was yanked off her perch with a gurgled scream.
Her third orb cracked on impact before she vanished in a burst of light.
Aquari dominance in the water was absolute.
The water was their domain.
But they weren't the only ones thriving.
"Incoming!" a voice screeched behind me.
I barely turned in time to see Marco Theron Gravesbane again, fly—literally fly—over my head on a ice disk he conjured again.
His arms were flailing like a man who had no business being airborne, and his expression alternated between mortal terror and gleeful chaos.
"Make way! Prince of Glacier Bay incoming!" Marco screamed.
"Marco—what the hell are you doing?!" I yelled, instinctively ducking.
"Testing aerodynamic equilibrium of summoned frost platforms! I think I got the—WHOAAA—"
He spun off the disk mid-sentence and faceplanted into a patch of shallow water.
A second later, his platform shattered into snowflakes, and three other students halted their fight just to stare at him.
One of them, a Kaleeki girl with violet war paint on her face, blinked. "Is he dead?"
Marco coughed, spat out water, and raised a shaky hand.
"No... but if someone could turn the arena heater on, I'd owe you a very cold juice box."
Then, as if the gods had enough of him, a random gust of wind sent a nearby shield flying—clanging him in the back of the head.
He went limp, blinking at the sky.
"I take it back... make it two juice boxes…"
Everyone was too stunned to hit him.
One of his orbs was cracked now, and he didn't seem to notice.
I had to choke back a laugh.
Typical Marco.
But the moment passed fast.
Another terrain shift rumbled beneath my feet.
The ground to the west cracked apart, lifting platforms into the air—floating, rotating chunks of shattered ruin suspended like broken stairways.
"Great. Now we're platforming," I muttered.
Above me, a boy in red armor—a Pyropex—launched into the air using combustion bursts, flames roaring from his boots.
He landed atop one of the floating ruins, only for a Terrakai girl to meet him mid-leap and slam him down with a boulder she'd wrenched from the earth.
The impact shattered two of his orbs instantly, and he barely had time to swear before the system teleported him out in a flash of white.
I paused on the edge of a ruined courtyard, taking in the chaos.
A Crystallo healer got swarmed by a pair of werewolf girls who dropped from a tree like feral cats.
He blinked out mid-scream.
Near the eastern marsh, a group of Feywyn archers were using illusions to fake their locations—three of them surrounded a Necrozi girl, who was calmly raising skeletal constructs to block each shot like she saw it coming.
In the center, a rune pillar burst open, sending a blast of water high into the sky.
From the surge, two more Aquari shot up like missiles, spiraling midair and striking a group of Terrakai fighters with orbs of compressed current.
One exploded with a shriek and vanished.
And amidst it all…
Marco was somehow still surving in all this. Again.
He'd conjured a floating inner tube made of ice this time and was now paddling his way across a flooded hallway using a single summoned spoon.
A spoon.
Not a paddle. Not a shield. A single silver spoon, like he was eating cereal out of a lake.
He dipped it into the water with as much seriousness as a general commanding a fleet.
The kicker?
No one knew where he got the spoon.
Where did he even get the spoon?
My jaw opened, then closed again.
I couldn't form a word.
Nearby, two other students—one mid-battle—just stopped to watch him float by like some ridiculous fairy-tale gondolier.
"Should we stop him?"
the Terrakai boy whispered, half-bloodied and stunned.
The Necrozi girl he was fighting shook her head slowly, mesmerized.
"He's... already lost."
Marco didn't hear them.
His eyes were locked ahead with grim determination.
The back of his icy tube began to melt.
"Oh, that's new," Marco said.
Then the tube collapsed. He flailed. "I regret nothing!"
Sploosh.
One of his orbs blinked red, but somehow it still didn't shatter.
He floated there, stunned, soaking in a few feet of water like a discarded mop.
A Feywyn girl tiptoed past him like he was a floating corpse.
I had to put a hand over my mouth to keep from bursting into laughter.
Marco was a one-man distraction technique. Accidentally.
But again, the arena wouldn't wait for him to finish drowning in two feet of water.
Far ahead, a massive chunk of land cracked apart and lifted skyward—dozens of stone steps rotating slowly in the air like a gravity-defying puzzle.
Two duelists were already climbing it:
a sword-wielding elf and a massive Wulfgan with steel-plated arms.
Each strike between them sent echoing booms across the battlefield.
The elf was faster, but the wolf-boy hit like a crashing carriage.
A third leap later, the Wulfgan crushed the elf into a column with a shoulder tackle that sent the top of the staircase crumbling—and another orb blinking out of existence.
No fatalities. Just cracked pride. And orbs.
This was still a test after all.
No one was dying, but everyone was fighting like they'd never get another chance.
I took a deep breath and pressed forward.
I had two orbs left. One slightly cracked.
My mana was dipping, my stamina wearing thin.
But I hadn't come this far to fail.
Then the ground rumbled once more.