There were places in Astralis Academy that even most instructors didn't know existed.
Sub-levels buried beneath reformatted blueprints. Tunnels sealed after magical accidents. Wings collapsed during the construction of the third ring and quietly left off maps. And there were places beyond even those—places built for the original founders, for the first Dominion researchers, and for things older than either.
Kael Vire was headed to one of those places.
And he wasn't thrilled about it.
The map he'd found in the restricted archives—scrawled by a rogue research archivist and buried between banned theoretical texts—looked like it had been drawn by a drunk god. Jagged lines, warped scale, and mana-reactive ink that only appeared under filtered moonlight or forgotten-spectrum lenses. Aether bled from the page when Kael touched it, trailing up his arm like an old ghost whispering a dare.
He stood now at the entrance marked on the map: the base of a cracked statue of Archmage Elarin the Thoughtless, hidden behind the eastern gallery of Magical History. It was a statue most students passed daily without glancing twice—just another relic of old vanity.
But Kael knew better. He always knew better.
"There's always a trap door under the idiot who thought he couldn't die," Kael muttered.
The statue's orb—clutched in marble fingers—was a manual key, one that had long since lost its magic signature to time. Kael twisted it counter-clockwise, slowly, until it clicked.
The floor didn't rumble. No dramatic music swelled.
Instead, a section of the wall beside the statue slid open with a whisper.
No one looked. No one cared. And Kael stepped through like he was just going for a walk.
The corridor beyond was narrow and curved downward, carved from ancient stone lined with mana veins so old they barely pulsed. The air changed with every step—thicker, colder, flavored with metal and dust and forgotten things best left untouched. Light came from soft-glowing crystals embedded in the walls, flickering in uneven pulses as if unsure whether they were allowed to still exist.
Kael reached the first threshold and paused. A detection glyph—dormant, but old. An amateur wouldn't have seen it. An expert might've triggered it without knowing.
But Kael had read this scene.
He knew the defense field spanned six feet forward and locked onto irregular footfalls—fast, slow, then fast again. It read hesitation as aggression.
Kael moved fluidly. Step, step, shift left. Heel, toe, then a full pause at the three-second mark.
A faint blue pulse passed beneath his boots.
The trap didn't activate.
[TRAP AVOIDED: Mana-Based Pattern Sensor]
"This would be so much easier if I were an idiot who didn't know better," he muttered.
[Response: Highly unlikely.]
"Thank you, System. I feel validated."
He reached the base of the staircase ten minutes later. The temperature had dropped another five degrees. The walls were no longer smooth. They pulsed with etched script—Dominion glyphs, each one still semi-active. Magic this old didn't die, it just waited. Kael avoided touching them.
The first room opened like a gullet.
A domed chamber of floating metal rings, cracked pillars, and dormant spell nodes. He recognized it instantly.
This was it. The Test Vault—a forgotten evaluation chamber from the pre-Dominion war effort. In the novel, it had been abandoned after a series of "Core failures," which Kael now knew meant: too many students exploded.
On the far wall, a hovering pedestal flickered.
Kael stepped forward.
Three glyphs materialized midair:
[SELECT CORE ALIGNMENT:]• Synth-Knight• Sigilcaster• Netwalker
He grimaced.
"Great. A lockout gate."
[Core Drift incompatible with auto-classification.]
"Which is why I'm going to cheat."
Kael extended his palm and began to pulse his Core in rhythm—low Synth resonance for two seconds, a faint Sigil bleed through his left bracer, and finally a fake Netwalker interface run through his internal null loop. It was a delicate pattern, one that required perfect timing and mana modulation.
Any misstep and the vault would recognize him as an intruder and trigger the defense cascade.
Kael kept it smooth. Controlled.
The glyphs flickered.
One of them stuttered. Shifted. Blinked.
Then: ACCESS GRANTED.
The platform underfoot rumbled softly, rotating a quarter turn before locking into place.
[You have exploited a 300-year-old magical UI. Congratulations.]
"And I didn't even need an update patch."
The pedestal cracked open like a flower.
Inside was a glove.
Dusty. Dented. The metal along the fingers was blackened, and its mana-core socket looked like someone had tried to cook soup inside it. Barely-functional at best. Broken junk at worst.
Kael picked it up with both hands and exhaled.
"The Corebreaker Gauntlet, Prototype Mark I," he said aloud, mostly to himself. "One of three."
In the novel, this item was a joke—an early mechanic intended for a side character who got cut in revisions. But hidden deep in the files, Kael had found the truth.
The gauntlet didn't just override Core limitations—it bent them. Temporarily, dangerously. When upgraded with its sibling pieces, it could simulate divine path access. A relic capable of channeling multi-path resonance in a single frame.
He turned it over.
The runes were fried. The inner circuits dormant. It wasn't reacting to his Core yet—but it would. Eventually.
[ITEM ACQUIRED: Corebreaker Gauntlet v1][Status: Dormant. Upgrade Required.]
Kael smiled to himself.
"One down."
He stashed it in his inner coat lining, behind three concealment sigils and a dimensional pocket he'd definitely not been authorized to create.
Then he froze.
There—subtle. Not noise. Not presence.
But movement.
He reached out with a pulse of aether—barely a thread—and felt the air ripple.
Someone had been nearby.
Recently.
And they were good.
Kael turned slowly, eyes narrowed.
Nothing.
The chamber behind him sat empty.
No footsteps. No breathing.
But the residual spell traces clung to the air like perfume on a disappearing guest.
[SYSTEM: Mana Decay: 5 minutes. Trace signature unknown. Observer present.]
"How much did they see?"
[Estimate: 68% probability they observed item retrieval.]
Kael didn't curse.
He didn't panic.
He smiled.
Let them watch.
Let them whisper and wonder what Kael Vire was doing in a room no one remembered, walking out with a relic no one respected.
Let them try to guess.
He wanted them to.
Because misdirection was better than secrecy.
He turned and made his way back up the spiraling stair, silent as shadow, the Gauntlet pulsing once against his ribs.
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Far below, in the hidden corner of the vault corridor, a figure stepped into the open.
Wrapped in reactive black silk, their Core burned low—a tight coil of cold energy that hummed like starlight caught in a box.
They knelt, fingers brushing over where Kael had stood.
"Vire..." they whispered. Not quite admiration. Not quite hate.
Then they vanished.