It started with a dare.
Isabella wasn't the kind of person who took dares seriously unless they came from someone she wanted to prove wrong. Ricardo, unfortunately, was exactly that person.
"You won't," he said, grinning just enough to make her mad.
She adjusted the straps on her gloves, summoned a mana thread between her fingers, and narrowed her eyes. "You want to bet?"
They were in Practice Room 9, a chamber supposedly built with extra enchantments to resist fire, sound, pressure, and occasionally the wrath of disappointed professors. Supposedly.
The plan was simple. Rerun the shield experiment from earlier using Haku's tuning-fork concept, isolate a hostile mana pulse, then cancel it mid-air using wave alignment instead of brute force.
Simple.
On paper.
Ricardo activated the emitter core, a spell-forged device they'd both borrowed-slash-stolen from Haku's lab without asking. It hummed ominously, spinning up a pulse that shimmered in violet light.
"Okay, frequency set to baseline resonance. Hit it."
Isabella wove her shield with precision this time. No walls. No hard edges. Just a ripple, thin and curved, shaped like a shallow bowl instead of a dome. Her mana didn't clash; it waited.
The moment the pulse hit, her shield vibrated.
But then something strange happened.
Instead of canceling out cleanly, the wave rebounded once, twice, and then collapsed inward. The whole room sucked in air, like it had been punched in the lungs.
The pulse imploded.
Then exploded.
Hard.
The shockwave wasn't violent, but it was wrong. Like someone had bent the laws of motion and forgotten to unbend them. Lights dimmed. The floor creaked. And the spell emitter fizzled out with a mechanical cough.
Ricardo stared.
"…Did we just break the physics the professor talked about?"
Isabella blinked, hair floating slightly from residual static. "We broke something."
The door slammed open.
Haku walked in, holding a sandwich in one hand and disappointment in the other.
"You two are unsupervised for five minutes, and you decide to flirt with experimental wave harmonics?!"
"Technically, it worked," Isabella said, eyes wide and still kinda proud.
"No, it almost worked. Then it almost reversed entropy, and then you nearly cracked the mana anchors in this room. Look."
He gestured at the back wall. A faint spiral pattern had etched itself into the stone, like frostbite on granite.
Ricardo's voice was a whisper. "Is that… a standing wave mark?"
"Yeah," Haku muttered. "Which shouldn't be possible unless your mana echo aligned with the ambient field harmonics perfectly, which, to be clear, I haven't taught you how to do yet."
"Oops," Isabella offered.
Haku exhaled slowly. Put his sandwich down. "Right. Congratulations. You've officially broken something I didn't think could be broken. You're now banned from unsupervised applications of theory until you've passed three consecutive safety reviews, one ethics test, and a psychological stress simulation."
Ricardo raised a hand. "Do we get praised at least?"
"No, you get anxiety," Haku replied. "And a lecture."
He pulled out a sheet of paper, drew two circles intersecting, and began to diagram what should have happened versus what almost destroyed the room. Midway through the explanation, which included terms like "constructive resonance," "field drift compensation," and "Haku's Law #3: Don't trust feedback loops with feelings," Isabella interrupted.
"Wait. You knew this might happen?"
Haku didn't answer. Just sipped his tea.
Which meant yes.
Which also meant this was a test.
And they'd barely passed.
Ricardo leaned against the wall, still eyeing the spiral etched in stone. "You're really trying to teach us to break the system, aren't you?"
"No," Haku said quietly. "I'm trying to teach you how not to get broken when the system breaks first."
Silence.
He looked at the wall, too, frowning now. Thoughtful.
Then turned back to them.
"Next time you pull something like this without warning me first, I'll make you write mana frequency equations by hand. Backwards. In ink made of failed potions."
They both groaned.
"Now clean up," Haku said, waving a hand. "The Vice Headmaster already suspects too much."
And with that, he walked away, sandwich in hand, humming something suspiciously like the theme to Star Trek.
Meanwhile, somewhere else.
Elena smiled like a knife.
Not the polite kind of academic smile. Not the one professors wear when they're impressed, but pretending not to be. This was the smile of someone about to dissect a specimen that had the audacity to look back at her.
And the specimen today was Alex.
He sat two rows back, as usual. Not hunched or cocky. Just… annoyingly calm. Like he knew the test was already over before it began, even though his grades were just average at best, but he was getting better, and that fast.
He looked like Haku, in that frustrating, quietly smug way. Which made Elena want to grind her teeth into powder.
"Alright, class," she said, voice dipped in syrup and salt. "Let's do something different today. Let's discuss mana behavior under pressure during dynamic spellform evolution."
Blank stares.
Except Alex.
Of course, Alex.
His expression didn't change, but Elena had seen that look before. It was the same one Haku wore right before he made fun of her.
"I'll need a volunteer to demonstrate. Perhaps one of our… newer talents."
She didn't say his name.
She didn't have to.
Alex stood. No hesitation. Just enough polite reluctance to seem reasonable.
"Let's test your control," Elena said, motioning to the mana chalk circle etched into the platform. "Trace the standard Helix Compression Sigil. Double-layer. No anchor glyphs."
A few students turned to look at her. One even raised an eyebrow.
That wasn't beginner level.
That was an advanced third-year specialization without stabilization.
Elena, of course, smiled wider.
If he failed, and he would, he'd overload, and the sigil would fracture. Best-case scenario: he gets scorched eyebrows. Worst case? A small crater.
But Alex didn't even twitch. He walked to the circle and looked at the chalk lines like they were familiar roads. Then, with no chant, no dramatic gestures, no glowing aura to beg for attention…
He drew.
With mana.
Pure threads, sharp as glass, flowing from his fingertips like he was pouring ink across invisible paper. Each motion was measured. Clean. No excess. The Helix took shape, layer by layer, wrapped like double helixes around a hollow axis of neutral mana, compressing and stabilizing itself as it formed.
There was a moment, just one, where even Elena forgot to breathe.
The sigil didn't just complete. It shimmered, hovering slightly above the chalk outline. Perfect balance. Impossibly efficient.
"What variant is this?" one student whispered.
Alex turned. Voice steady. "Modified from standard. Folded in three additional wave nodes to reduce rebound during multi-spell layering. It's more stable."
"That's not in any of the standard texts," Elena snapped, the words sharper than she intended.
"I know," Alex said.
No arrogance. No mockery.
Just the truth.
After all his physics lessons with Haku and monster hunts with Yue, he became a practical genius when it came to thinking outside of the box.
And it infuriated her.
Her hand twitched. She wanted to call it sloppy, to tear it apart, to correct something, anything, just to reestablish control.
But there was nothing.
Just flawless spellform.
And murmurs growing behind her like a spreading wildfire.
Even the back row, the lazy ones who hadn't paid attention all term, were now wide-eyed.
"Where did you learn that?" she asked tightly.
He looked at her, calm and unreadable. "I've been experimenting. Professor Haku encourages independent theory."
And just like that, she felt the twist in her stomach.
Haku.
It always came back to him. Even when he wasn't in the room, his fingerprints were everywhere. His students weren't students, they were quiet revolutions waiting to explode.
She'd spent years building a reputation, respect, and structure. And he strolled in with his stupid cloaks and coffee breath and started upending everything with laughter and duct-taped spell cores.
And now even her students were quoting him.
The class began to whisper again. Notes scribbled. Diagrams copied. One even pulled out a mana lens to analyze the structure before it faded.
She couldn't stop it. Not without making it obvious.
So she forced the lesson to continue. Barely.
Asked rote questions. Droned on about spell compression ratios like it still mattered. Like the world hadn't just shifted under her feet.
Alex sat down quietly. He didn't gloat. He didn't smirk.
Which made it worse.
He'd won without trying to win.
And Elena realized with cold clarity that if she didn't crush this now, she'd lose more than just the class. She'd lose ground. Reputation. Maybe even her future seat at the Mage Assembly.
And that wasn't acceptable.
So after class, she left the lecture hall in a storm of expensive boots and repressed rage, ducked into the West Tower offices, and slammed a glyph-sealed door shut.
Inside, Bernard Van Keunen waited, already reviewing a mana-recording of the demonstration with that horrible neutral look he always wore when someone had disappointed him.
"…He's more dangerous than we expected," Elena said, voice tight.
Bernard didn't look up. "Not the boy."
Pause.
"…Haku?"
Another nod. Still no eye contact. "The boy is proof. Haku's training creates high-functioning anomalies. That cannot continue unchecked."
Elena crossed her arms. "So what now?"
Bernard's voice was a whisper wrapped in precision. "We adjust the plan. Increase surveillance. Prepare containment."
Elena exhaled slowly and bitterly.
And for the first time that day, she smiled a real smile.
Cold. Careful. Calculated.
Because she couldn't wait to see him and his people scream.
If only they knew who his assistant is, they might have waited longer, but sadly, even after they did a background check, they did not find anything; the empire itself kept her information hidden, afraid of what she might do if people looked her up.