"Time to eat."
After leaving Iron Front's headquarters, Rowan Mercer blended into the flow of Academy City and ducked into a crowded underground food court. His body no longer depended on regular meals to survive, but skipping food still left him feeling hollow and off-balance. When life allowed it, he ate like a normal person. Three meals. No drama.
He chose a small ramen shop, ordered a bowl, and had barely reached the halfway point when a clear young girl's voice rang directly inside his head.
"This is the Disciplinary Committee. Please remain calm. We are communicating via telepathy. A hostile individual has infiltrated the underground district. Defensive barriers will activate shortly. Evacuate immediately and proceed to designated shelters."
"Terrorists? Let's go, hurry!"
The shop emptied in seconds. The owner grabbed the register. Customers abandoned half-finished meals. Rowan sighed, set down his chopsticks, and followed the crowd out.
Incidents like this weren't rare in Academy City. Despite the glossy brochures, it wasn't a peaceful utopia. Sometimes outside forces tried to steal its technology. Sometimes enhanced individuals overestimated themselves and turned to crime. Other times, research experiments went catastrophically wrong, and test subjects snapped.
Rowan didn't care about any of that.
All he wanted was two more quiet months. After that, he'd leave Academy City behind and head for the major churches to study this world's magic properly.
Academy City had a ceiling. Push past it, and you brushed against something inhuman. Rowan doubted the city was capable of going that far yet.
The telepathic warning came from the Disciplinary Committee, one of the two organizations maintaining internal order. Academy City had no police. Regular security forces handled conventional threats, armed with cutting-edge weapons and powered armor. The Disciplinary Committee, on the other hand, was made up entirely of students with abilities, organized by school.
One of them, Rowan recalled, was a certain teleporting girl who took her job a bit too seriously.
As the crowd funneled toward the exits, Rowan's gaze snagged on something wrong.
An eye opened in the concrete wall to his right.
It blinked once, iris swiveling as it scanned the fleeing civilians, then slid along the surface like a living thing, moving away with purpose.
Rowan's steps slowed.
"That's… magic."
The structure, the movement, the residue it left behind. Different system, same fingerprints. He recognized it instantly.
"A mage inside Academy City," he murmured.
Interest sparked. He vanished from sight and followed the roaming eye through the darkened corridors.
It stopped in front of three students. One boy and two girls.
A laugh burst from the eye, sharp and unhinged. Female. Flat, almost neutral in tone.
"So you were here all along."
The smallest girl, dressed in white robes resembling a nun's habit, stared at the floating eye. Her expression went blank, her voice turning oddly mechanical.
"A human-shaped construct formed from soil. A guardian originally tied to a sacred site, forcibly overwritten and converted into a British-style guardian angel."
She finished speaking, then blinked and returned to looking like an ordinary child.
The boy beside her stared. "Wait. Does that mean the terrorist the Committee warned about is a mage?"
Rowan's interest deepened.
These weren't normal kids. The girl had identified a spell at a glance. The boy clearly knew what mages were.
"Looks like I stumbled onto something good," Rowan thought.
The mage's voice echoed again. "The banquet begins. Cry as much as you like inside your dirt-lined grave."
The underground district shuddered. Lights snapped off all at once, plunging everything into darkness.
Immediately, the boy and the robed girl started arguing.
"Index, take Kazakiri and hide!"
"That's backwards, Tōma. You should take Kazakiri and run. If it's a mage, I'm the one who should deal with it."
"You can't fight. You can't even cast spells."
"My body can't, but my mind can. I carry one hundred and three thousand grimoires. I know every spell in this world. Knowledge is enough to dismantle magic."
Rowan froze.
One hundred and three thousand.
His heartbeat spiked.
A boy whose right hand erased all supernatural phenomena. A girl whose memory contained the entirety of the world's magic.
He no longer needed churches. Or archives. Or captured priests.
This girl was a living vault.
If Rowan could access her knowledge, truly access it, he could master every spell in existence.
The underground darkness felt suddenly very bright to him.
Before he could move, hurried footsteps echoed from the corridor.
"They're here."
"There are still civilians inside."
Two girls arrived, both wearing Disciplinary Committee armbands. One had short brown hair and sharp eyes. The other crackled faintly with restrained electricity.
The electric girl stared at the boy. "You. It's you again."
"Uh… right. Yeah. Me."
The boy nodded, a flicker of confusion crossing his face before he smoothed it over. He had lost part of his memory not long ago. If he had met her before, it was probably during that gap.
Rowan stayed invisible, watching everything.
The mage. The erasing hand. The girl with one hundred and three thousand grimoires.
The pieces were assembling themselves.
And Rowan Mercer had never been more awake.