Chapter 6: Two Seconds

The Gates lecture was in the main theory hall. It had tiered seating and an acoustic design that made one voice carry to a hundred ears without effort. During these classes, Ash preferred the back of the room, which came with the benefit of leaving before anyone else.

Gates, Professor Eacus explained, were dimensional fractures. They appeared without warning in locations that shared no obvious pattern, held open by a pressure differential between this side and whatever was on the other side, and closed on their own timeline rather than anyone else’s.

What came through them were Hollows.

Ash had seen one, once, three years ago during a containment exercise the academy had run as a demonstration for incoming students. It had been a low-grade one. Class Two, which would make it roughly a C-Rank equivalent. Four B-Rank students had handled it in under four minutes.

What he remembered wasn’t the fight. It was the Hollow itself. Hollows at their core had been a person that had lost the core of that somewhere and were beyond the point of return. It moved wrong. Not in the way Leon’s shade had moved like. Just absent. Like it could move beyond human limits, but tried to mimic the way a human walked as best it could.

Professor Eacus’ slide changed. Gate classification, Class One through Class Seven. Class One through Three were academy-manageable. B-rank and above had clearance to handle them as they deemed fit. Class Four required Guild coordination. Five and above were national-level events with documented civilian casualties. Class Seven had occurred four times since the Threshold. Two of the four locations were still uninhabitable.

"Of course, since Aegis Academy is privately funded, public guilds and dispatchers are not obligated to answer calls if one appears on Academy grounds," Professor Eacus continued.

Ash wrote down the class thresholds without looking at the page.

Across the room and three rows down, Phoebe was taking notes as if each word spoken during the lecture would be on the next quiz. Her posture was the same in a lecture hall as it was everywhere else. Managed, deliberate, a perfect performance running even when no one was watching. Her Shade pressed outward with its familiar accumulated weight.

Ash’s hunger registered her and waited.

A testing stone session was held later in the practical hall adjacent to the theory room, which meant the transition was walking through a single corridor.

The stone sat on a pedestal at the room’s center. It was roughly the size of a human head. It was translucent and looked like it should be cold to the touch but wasn’t. When an Awakened made contact, it read their Dominion output and rendered the result in the blue text only the individual student could see. The instructor, Galba, received a corresponding readout on her tablet.

They moved through the queue alphabetically.

Ash was third.

He put his hand on the stone. It was neither cold nor warm. It felt like touching glass. He watched it remain entirely inert. No glow, no resonance, no flicker of recognition. The blue text appeared at the edge of his vision as it always did. It was his own personal screen, independent of the stone’s output, reading what it always read.

[ DOMINION: OBLIVION ]

[ RANK: NULL ]

[ DESCRIPTION: — ]

Galba looked at her tablet. Made a notation. "Next," she said, without anything in her voice beyond the administrative.

The whispers behind him weren’t subtle. They never had been. He moved out of the queue and returned to the room’s edge and the whispers settled back into the ambient noise of sixty students waiting their turn.

Then the next student touched the stone and the room moved on.

He ran into Phoebe by accident. While rounding the corner of the east-wing access corridor on his way to the dormitory stairwell, her Shade hit him at close range before he registered her physically. Full pressure, all of it, the years of accumulation present and dense and suddenly very near.

She was standing at the corridor window, looking at something outside with focused intent. She was in uniform, but looked like she was finishing the end of another perfect performance. A button slightly undone at the collar, her hair just slightly less arranged. She heard Ash’s footsteps and turned immediately. Her expression settled into its default register before she fully saw who it was.

Then she saw it was Ash, and her expression changed.

"You’re in the wrong wing," she said. She wasn’t hostile or rude, she was only pointing out a thing in the wrong place.

"I’m taking a shortcut, I’m not trying to start anything here," Ash said.

She looked at him the way she’d looked at the courtyard through the window. He watched her Shade from the inside of his perception: the pressure of it, the density, the years of maintenance. Up close it had more texture. What he previously read as uniform accumulation had grain to it. Layers. Sediment added incrementally, each deposit distinct, all of it compressed by the weight above.

"You’re that Null awakener, aren’t you" she said.

"Yes." Ash moved his eyes to look past her, rather directly at her.

"I heard you were at the training yard when that incident happened to Leon."

"Yeah, I was there."

She looked at him for another moment. He watched her decide he wasn’t worth the full expense of dismissal and settle instead for the simpler version.

"I don’t know what you want," she said, already looking back toward the window, "and I don’t really care."

Ash noticed her right hand move as she turned back to the window. She pressed her thumb into her opposite palm for two seconds, then pressed her hand against her thigh.

Her Shade flared inward, compressed, and sealed again. A brief fracture, then the seal closed automatically, like a well-practiced repair.

She didn’t know she had done it.

Ash walked past her and continued down the corridor. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

At 11 PM, sitting in the dark, he sensed the east wing from across the building.

The Shade’s behavior was almost predictable now. Three doors down, awake or asleep, it pressed outward with steady patience. His hunger had been stirring since the hallway. Not loud, just present and aware of the direction, distance, and density behind the door.

He thought of the thumb pressing the palm. The two seconds of pressure. The Shade spiking and resealing.

He got up.

The corridor was empty. He moved quietly, his body handling weight with the ease he’d had since extracting Tyrant’s Frame. The east wing door was unlocked, as always until midnight. He entered, walked down the corridor, and stopped outside her door.

The Shade was louder here. Not fully overwhelming, Leon and Evelyn’s Shade were much more potent in that regard. But it was distinct, present, and somehow aware of being perceived.

He stood there briefly, just long enough.

He needed more than a hallway conversation. He needed to understand the realm’s shape before entering. A controlled extraction was better than a chaotic one. The hunger wanted this clean.

He turned and walked back to his room.

Soon, the hunger finally spoke. Not impatient. Just noting the timeline with the patience of something that had already decided the outcome and was willing to wait.

Soon.