The wind shifted.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't violent.
But it was wrong.
Nola felt it first.
A chill that slid down her back like a whisper against bone. The kind of chill that didn't come from weather or magic but from something older. Like something was watching her.
Maika felt it too. She straightened slowly, hand tightening on the hilt of her sword. "Do you feel that?"
Nola nodded, breath catching. "Yeah."
The air was too still. The light was too dim. Even the ruins around them seemed to lean inward, like the world was bracing for something it didn't want to see.
And then it came.
Not thunder. Not howling.
Just a stillness so absolute it erased every sound.
At the Central Tower, where ash still floated from the sky, everyone stood frozen.
Not by choice.
The teachers, Moon Legion, even survivors from the riftspawn assault, every one of them was still, and unable to move, as if the world itself had been paused.
Their eyes darted in panic.
Their hands trembled.
But their bodies would not obey.
Only five figures stood unbound.
Caelis. And the four members of the Special Investigation Team.
And at the center of the crater, just behind the smoldering scorch where Soren had been consumed stood a man
The Mediator.
He did not arrive. He did not descend.
He simply was there as though he had teleported.
As if the space around him had accepted him before anyone realized he was there.
He stood tall, cloaked in layered shadow-stained robes. His mask was a flawless obsidian, smooth and featureless and it reflected nothing. No eyes behind it. No light. Just stillness.
He tilted his head slightly, gaze sweeping across the battlefield.
Not angry.
Not triumphant.
Just… disappointed.
"So little damage," he said, voice dry and low. "So much wasted potential."
His voice wasn't loud. But it curled inside every ear, every spine, every soul.
A whisper that filled the world.
"He was meant to burn this place down. Not beg for mercy like a moron."
No one spoke.
No one could.
Except Caelis.
His mana flared. Not in rage. In control.
He stepped forward, hands glowing with leyfire. "You don't belong here."
The Mediator turned his head slightly. "And yet, here I stand."
The four Special Members moved instantly.
Sun. Void. Eclipse. Comet.
Together, they moved with surgical precision, launching a synchronized strike. A dome of suppression magic flared first, trying to trap the Mediator in a silence field.
It shattered before it formed.
Void Legion blinked in from behind with a shadow blade to the neck.
The blade passed through air.
Sun Legion slammed down with an explosion of divine light that cracked the floor.
The Mediator wasn't there.
He was beside her instead.
A single flick of his wrist sent her crashing across the field, skidding into a mound of rubble, barely breathing.
Eclipse Legion activated a fortress glyph, summoning a pillar of chained earth to trap the Mediator's limbs.
It coiled around his torso sealing him tight.
For a moment, everyone hoped.
Then the chains turned to sand.
The Comet Legion member fired a lightning arc at point blank.
And this time, it landed.
A flash of power.
A shudder of wind.
The arc struck the side of the Mediator's face and the mask cracked a little.
Just barely.
A tiny fracture, slicing from chin to the edge of the right eye.
Silence.
The Mediator reached up and touched the crack.
And then he tilted his head towards them.
"Ah," he said softly.
And then he moved.
Not fast.
He was beyond fast.
The Eclipse Legion member didn't even get to scream.
One moment he stood with his arms raised, shield pulsing.
The next, the Mediator's hand was inside his chest, gripping his heart.
And then it wasn't.
Because the heart and its owner were gone, erased from this world.
Reduced to blood, silence, and absence.
The ground where the Eclipse Legion member stood was clean. Nothing left. Not even ash.
The others screamed and rushed forward in a spell of fury.
Caelis shouted something, maybe a warning or maybe a spell but it was drowned out by the scream of mana as the Mediator turned.
And every rune in the area shattered.
Glyphs collapsed mid-air.
Weapons disarmed themselves.
Leylines buckled beneath their feet.
The Mediator stood still again, one cracked eye of the mask glowing faintly now as just a flicker of red shined beneath the mask.
He turned his head to the sky, as though listening.
Then sighed.
As if disappointed.
"It seems I'm needed elsewhere."
He took a single step back.
And the world folded into a crack in front of him.
He was gone.
In the silence he left behind, the spell broke.
The teachers gasped, staggering as motion returned to their limbs. Moon Legion officers collapsed to their knees. A few students sobbed, gasping for breath as if they'd been drowning for hours.
Caelis didn't move.
She just stared at the place where the Mediator had stood.
The others rushed to the remains of the Special Team, their numbers now three instead of four.
The Sun Legion member wept openly.
Void Legion stood over the missing spot where their dead companion had been, shaking.
"Did… did we even hurt him?" the Void agent asked.
Caelis's voice came slowly.
Flat and rough.
"I think we barely trickled him."
Far from the crater, Nola felt the pressure lift.
Like something ancient had blinked and turned away.
She sank to her knees, breath shallow.
"What was that?" Maika whispered.
"I don't know," Nola said.
Caelis was scared.
Because whatever the man that had come showed them, it wasn't even his true power.