"Kaelen?" I tilted my head, as if the word itself amused . "You mistake for soone far less interesting."
Marcus pressed himself harder against the tunnel wall, his tactical manual forgotten at his feet. Thomlin’s sword wavered in his grip like a flag in a hurricane. But Seraphina held her ground, those analytical eyes searching for cracks in my performance.
Smart girl. Too smart.
"You may call Phantom." Each word dropped into the silence like stones into still water. "Leader of the Twilight Society."
The reaction was everything I could have hoped for. Marcus made a sound that might have been a prayer or a whimper—hard to tell the difference when terror stripped away pretense. Thomlin’s sword clattered against the stone as his hands shook. Even Seraphina took a half-step back, her composure finally cracking.
But I caught the way her eyes lingered on my stance, the tilt of my head. She was morizing details, filing away inconsistencies. Later, when the shock wore off, she’d start putting pieces together. Start asking dangerous questions.
Ti to disappear.
My hand found the smoke pellet in my robes—one of Lyra’s creations, packed with enough alchemical compounds to blind a dragon. The glass sphere felt warm against my fingers, eager to release its payload.
"The Twilight Society sees all that transpires in the shadows of this Academy. Knows all the secrets you’ve buried beneath your carefully constructed facades. And when the ti cos for the reckoning you cannot even begin to imagine..." I crushed the pellet between my fingers, feeling the glass crack against my skin with satisfying inevitability.
Thick grey smoke erupted between us, sound-dampening and vision-killing. The tunnel vanished into a fog that tasted of sulfur and old regrets. Through the haze, I caught glimpses of my audience—Marcus stumbling backward, Thomlin swinging his sword at shadows, Seraphina standing perfectly still as she tried to track my movents.
I gave them a story to rember.
A silhouette moving left, toward the obvious side passage. A billow of a cape that didn’t exist, created by a flick of my robes. Every theatrical motion was a lie designed to burn itself into their mory, a grand exit to overshadow the quiet, desperate reality of my escape to the right.
The mont the smoke swallowed completely, I dropped the act.
[Master of Disguise] deactivated like a candle being snuffed out. The alien tattoos faded from my skin, the unnatural light died in my eyes, and the voice that had commanded ancient shamans cracked back into sothing recognizably human. The grey robes collapsed around a fra that suddenly felt too small, too young, too fragile.
I stumbled right. My legs gave out. Gone. I crashed into the rough stone wall, the impact driving the air from my lungs. I didn’t even feel it. There was only the pain in my head. And the blood.
Christ.
The headache felt like soone driving railroad spikes through my temples. My mana circuits—pathways I’d forced to carry power far beyond their design limits—burned like acid in my veins. Every breath tasted of copper and failure.
Blood ran freely from my nose, pattering onto the tunnel floor in drops that sounded impossibly loud in the sudden silence. I pressed my forehead against the cold stone, trying to anchor myself as the world spun around like a child’s top.
Maintaining the disguise, the voice, the mana suppression, AND fighting... Never again.
The words echoed in my skull, a promise and a curse wrapped in equal asure. I’d pushed [Master of Disguise] past its breaking point tonight, forced it to hold a form that should have been impossible for soone my level. The skill had held—barely—but the cost...
Another wave of nausea rolled through , and I had to bite my tongue to keep from retching. The taste of blood only made it worse.
I need to get stronger. This body is a liability.
The thought wasn’t an abstraction; it was a physical reality. Every ragged breath was a testant to a physique built on instant ran and neglected noble son languor. My muscles, unused to anything more strenuous than turning a page, scread in protest. The mana pathways, so brilliantly forged in the illusion, now felt like frayed, sparking wires inside a chassis that was never ant to handle the voltage. This wasn’t a warrior’s exhaustion; it was the pathetic, systemic failure of a body that had never truly been alive.
Borrowed power.
Desperate improvisation.
That was the truth behind the godlike figure. The real ? I was just the bleeding idiot in a forgotten tunnel, praying my legs would work before they ca looking for answers.
I forced myself upright, one hand braced against the tunnel wall for support. The maintenance passage stretched ahead of , a narrow throat that would lead back to the Crystal Caverns through routes no academy map had ever recorded. All I had to do was keep moving.
One foot in front of the other. Like learning to walk all over again.
The voices behind grew fainter as I stumbled deeper into the mountain’s bowels. Marcus was babbling about theoretical impossibilities, his worldview cracking like glass under the weight of what he’d witnessed. Thomlin kept asking if they should follow, his voice pitched high with barely controlled panic.
But it was Seraphina who worried most. She wasn’t panicking—she was analyzing. Filing away details that might prove inconvenient later.
I’d have to deal with that problem eventually. But not tonight. Tonight, I’d accomplished sothing that should have been impossible—saved Rhys Blackwood from his scripted death, acquired valuable skills from the combat, and created a legend that would echo through the academy’s halls for years to co.
The Phantom was born. The Twilight Society had its first public appearance. And sowhere in the tunnels behind , three students were discovering an unconscious Rhys beside a massacre that would beco the stuff of whispered stories.
Another drop of blood hit the stone floor, and I realized I was smiling.
Worth it.
The maintenance tunnel curved ahead, leading toward Leo and the comfortable lie of Kaelen Leone’s incompetence.
But first, I had to make it that far.
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