"Okay! Okay, what do I do?!" Maya sobbed, dropping her glowing green staff. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"You have to bleed," Zen gasped in a strained whisper. His vision was fading into a dark blur. With every heartbeat, his shattered ribs ground against his core, threatening to send him into shock.

"Medical magic won’t work on me. You have to bypass my core," Zen instructed, fighting to keep awake despite the agony. "Take your dagger. Cut your palm. Press it directly over my heart."

Maya’s hands shook violently. She looked at the small utility dagger strapped to her thigh, then up at Val.

Val was kneeling in the concrete dust, Zen’s bleeding head resting in her lap. Her academy uniform was soaked in his blood.

Her thick fake glasses were cracked down the middle, and behind them, her crimson eyes were glowing with murderous hysteria. She still had her combat knife gripped tightly in her hand.

"Do it, Healer," Val hissed, her fangs fully extended. "If he takes his last breath, I will spend the next three days making sure you beg for yours."

Maya squeezed her eyes shut tight, drew her dagger, and sliced a deep cut across her own palm. She cried out, dropping the blade, and slammed her bleeding hand directly onto the centre of Zen’s chest.

"Now what?!" Maya panicked.

"Force your mana into my bloodstream," Zen commanded through gritted teeth. "Don’t try to heal me. Just release your mana into my veins."

Maya nodded frantically. She closed her eyes and pushed.

The reaction was instantaneous and violent.

This was nothing like the gentle, warm glow typical of standard Vitality healing. Instead, a jagged, dark green light burst from under Maya’s palm. Zen’s body arched off the ground as the raw mana forcefully ran through his veins.

It felt like thick, hot lead was flowing through him. His inverted core instinctively tried to violently reject her magic, treating it like a hostile virus. The clash of energies made Zen choke on a fresh wave of blood.

"He’s choking! Stop it!" Valeria screamed, raising her knife as if she were about to stab Maya to break the connection.

"Hold her back, Jax!" Zen managed to roar.

Jax, who had desperately scrambled across a fallen concrete pillar bridging the chasm, lunged forward.

He grabbed Valeria’s wrist with both hands, throwing his entire body weight and his heavy kinetic armour against her. "Val, let her work! He told her to do this!"

"Get off me!" Valeria shrieked.

There was no contest. Jax might as well have been trying to hold down a hurricane.

A terrifying burst of golden Aegis mana exploded from her skin. The forceful shockwave hit Jax’s chest plate, lifting the heavily armored boy completely off his feet and throwing him ten yards across the concrete plaza.

He hit the ground hard, gasping for air, and his armour cracked.

Valeria didn’t even look at him. She raised her knife again, stepping toward Maya to end it.

But Zen forced his mind to calm down. He used an ancient Imperial meditation technique to suppress his own body’s natural defences, forcefully opening his mana pathways and allowing Maya’s desperate energy to anchor directly to his blood.

The violent rejection stopped. The jagged green light smoothed out, sinking deep into Zen’s chest.

The excruciating fire in his ribs suddenly dialled down from a roaring inferno to a manageable, dull throb. The shattered bone fragments stopped grinding. His breathing slowed, returning to a steady, even rhythm.

Valeria froze, her knife inches from Maya’s neck, as she watched Zen’s chest steadily rise and fall.

Zen let out a long, exhausted breath he felt like he had been holding for six hours. He let his head fall back heavily into Valeria’s lap.

[Warning: Non-standard mana integration detected.]

[A blood pact bond has been established between Host and: Maya Reed, High F-Rank, Vitality Path.]

[Bond Classification: Involuntary. Passive. Permanent until dissolved by mutual cultivation agreement or death of either party.]

Zen blinked slowly at the blue text floating in his vision. "Permanent?"

[Affirmative. The blood pact does not require a skilled practitioner to initiate. It requires only a desperate one. Maya Reed’s Vitality mana is now passively tethered to your bloodstream. At a base level, this will cause minor ambient healing during sustained proximity.]

[Secondary effect: Your blood carries a trace resonance of ancient Imperial mana. Through the bond, a fractional echo of that resonance is now present in Maya Reed’s mana circuit. Probability that this echo will cause her mana to evolve in unusual ways: 67%.]

[Probability that the Goddess of War will eventually detect this tether: 89%.]

[Recommended action: Do not tell her about the tether.]

"Obviously," Zen thought dryly.

He glanced at Maya, who had collapsed onto the concrete. She was gasping for air and completely worn out.

Her hands were stained with a mixture of their blood. She had no clue what she had really accomplished; in her mind, she had only performed a desperate, illegal procedure to save a classmate’s life.

She didn’t know she had just permanently tethered her soul to a five-hundred-year-old Emperor and painted a massive target on her back for the Goddess of War.

"Thank you, Maya," Zen said quietly.

Maya offered a weak, tear-streaked smile. "You’re okay?"

"Get away from him," Valeria snarled.

Valeria shoved Maya backward, immediately throwing her arms around Zen and pulling him possessively against her chest.

She glared at the healer with pure venom, wiping the blood from Zen’s mouth with her thumb. "If you ever put your blood on him again, I will drain every drop of it from your body."

Before Maya could apologise, a deafening, high-pitched whine echoed across the ruined plaza.

The extraction beacon Zen had manually rewired just moments ago suddenly screeched to life.

Inside the open maintenance panel, blue circuits sparked violently. A massive pillar of teleportation light shot down from the artificial sky, flooding the entire courtyard with brilliance.

"The beacon!" Jax yelled, groaning as he pushed himself up from where Valeria had thrown him. "We’re pulling out!"

The ruined concrete, the ashes of the Void Beast, and the purple smoke vanished in a blinding flash.

A split second later, the four of them materialised onto the cold steel floor of the academy’s main staging area.

Jax pushed himself up from the metal floor with a pained grunt, his left arm hanging at a distinctly wrong angle from the blast, but he refused to stop moving.

"Medics!" he screamed, his voice cracking. "We need medics right now! He has broken ribs!"

But the medical teams didn’t rush forward.

The staging area was dead silent.

Zen forced himself to a kneeling position, pushing past Valeria’s protective grip. He looked up.

The entire room was completely locked down.

Every other student squad had been pushed back against the far walls.

Surrounding the teleportation pad in a tight, impenetrable circle were two dozen elite Vanguard soldiers. Every single one of them had their high-tech mana rifles raised and aimed directly at Zen’s squad.

The crowd parted, and the Vanguard Inquisitor slowly walked forward. His dark trench coat swept over the steel floor. His scarred face was rigid and cold, like it had been carved from stone.

He didn’t look at the blood on Zen’s chest. He wasn’t looking at Maya or Jax.

The Inquisitor stopped at the edge of the teleportation pad. In his hand, he held a digital datapad playing the Vanguard surveillance feed of the D-Rank sector. The video paused exactly on the image of Zen kicking the piece of rebar into the air.

"Somewhere in Sector Four," the Inquisitor began in a voice that sounded like he was delivering a death sentence. "A Void Beast spawned. But what interests me more is the coverage gap."

The Inquisitor slowly raised his eyes, locking them directly onto Zen.

"Ninety seconds before that Void Beast died, my entire surveillance array went completely dark," he stated coldly. "During that ninety-second blackout, our external satellites registered a massive, localised pulse of ancient S-Rank Imperial magic."

Jax went pale. Maya whimpered, grabbing onto Jax’s cracked armour.

"Someone down there deliberately shattered the cameras," the Inquisitor said, raising his hand to signal the soldiers to cock their rifles. "And no one is leaving this room until I find out who just used Ancient Magic in that dungeon."

Valeria slowly stood up, and the air around her began to violently warp and distort as she ran out of patience.

"I did," she said coldly.