The Grand Library of the Academy was usually a place of silence, dust, and the smell of old parchment. Tonight, it smelled of ozone and terror.
"Keep moving!" Arthur shouted, grabbing Zack by the collar of his robe and hauling him around a corner.
A fraction of a second later, a beam of pale blue light sliced through the air where Zack had been standing. The beam hit a marble bust of a former Headmaster. There was no explosion, no fire. The statue simply turned into gray dust, collapsing into a pile of sand with a soft hiss.
"Disintegration magic," Julian gasped, sprinting alongside them, his long legs eating up the distance. "That's... that's forbidden! That's lost magic! How is a statue casting high-tier destruction spells?"
"It's not a statue!" Arthur yelled back, his lungs burning. "It's a Sentinel Mark III. It's a janitor with a gun!"
They skidded around the corner into the East Wing corridor. Behind them, the heavy, rhythmic THUD-CLANK-THUD of the pursuer echoed off the stone walls. It wasn't running; it was walking with the terrifying inevitability of a glacier.
Arthur's mind raced. He had spent two years preparing for the Mana Meltdown, but he hadn't expected the security system to wake up this early. The pressure in the Ley Lines must be causing the ancient defense protocols to trigger false positives. To the Sentinel, Arthur and his friends weren't students; they were "corrupt data" blocking the pipes.
"Where are we going?" Vivian demanded. She was running backward, her rapier drawn, eyes scanning the darkness behind them. "My sword bounced off its skin! It's made of Enchanted Granite!"
"The Workshop!" Arthur commanded. "We need home-field advantage!"
....
They burst through the doors of the Gymnasium, sprinting across the polished wooden floor toward the secret panel behind the scoreboard.
"Open! Open!" Arthur slammed his palm against the hidden rune-lock.
The stone wall groaned and slid open. They dove into the workshop, tumbling onto the metal grating of the floor.
"Zack, seal the door!" Arthur barked.
Zack scrambled to the control panel, mashing the close button. The heavy stone wall slid shut just as the Sentinel appeared at the gym entrance.
BOOM.
The impact shook the room. The Sentinel was hammering on the door. Dust rained down from the ceiling.
"That door is three feet of reinforced stone," Julian said, leaning against a workbench, trying to catch his breath. "It will hold."
HISSS.
A blue light began to burn through the center of the door. The stone turned molten orange, dripping like wax.
"It's cutting through!" Vivian yelled. "We have maybe two minutes!"
Arthur stood up, wiping grease from his hands onto his trousers. He looked around the workshop. It was filled with tools, half-finished projects, and piles of scrap metal. But they didn't have a weapon strong enough to crack enchanted granite.
"We can't out-damage it," Arthur muttered, his eyes darting across the room. "Julian's fire just makes it glow. Vivian's steel can't scratch it. We need to attack its logic."
"Its logic?" Julian asked, staring at the melting door. "Arthur, it's a rock monster. It doesn't have a brain to confuse!"
"It has a Core," Arthur corrected. "An Atherian Processing Core. It runs on a loop of commands: Identify Target -> Analyze Threat -> Neutralize."
Arthur grabbed a large, polished silver mirror from a pile of junk. He grabbed a second mirror. Then he grabbed a jar of glowing mana-ink.
"Zack," Arthur said, his voice deadly calm. "Do you remember the lesson on Recursive Runes?"
Zack's eyes went wide behind his fogged glasses. "The... the infinite loop? But Arthur, that's theoretical! If you create a rune that feeds into itself, the mana density becomes infinite! It creates a singularity!"
"Exactly." Arthur slammed the mirrors onto a workbench, facing each other. "We are going to build a Mana Trap. A Hall of Mirrors for its brain."
...
The door was glowing brighter. The center was sagging inward.
"We have sixty seconds!" Vivian shouted. She stood in front of the door, shield raised, ready to buy them time with her life.
Arthur worked with terrifying speed. He didn't use a ruler. He didn't use a compass. He used his thumb and the ink.
He drew a complex rune on the surface of the first mirror. [Input: Mana Signature.]
He drew a second rune on the other mirror. [Output: Reflected to Input.]
"Julian!" Arthur shouted. "I need a power source to jump-start the loop! Charge this crystal!"
He threw a small quartz shard to Julian.
Julian didn't argue. He poured his mana into the crystal until it glowed white-hot. "Here!"
Arthur placed the glowing crystal exactly in the center, between the two mirrors.
The effect was instantaneous.
The light from the crystal hit the first mirror, bounced to the second, and bounced back to the first. Because of the runes Arthur had drawn, each reflection didn't lose energy—it gained it.
The space between the mirrors began to hum. The air distorted. A high-pitched whine filled the room, climbing higher and higher in frequency.
"It's a feedback loop," Arthur explained, stepping back and putting on his welding goggles. "It's a scream that gets louder forever."
CRASH.
The workshop door finally gave way.
The Sentinel stepped through the molten hole. It was eight feet tall, humanoid, and made of grey stone blocks held together by blue light. Its single eye—a massive sapphire lens—swiveled around the room.
"TARGETS LOCATED," the Sentinel boomed. Its voice wasn't spoken; it vibrated the bones in their ears. "PREPARE FOR STERILIZATION."
It raised its arm. The blue disintegration beam began to charge.
"Hey! Ugly!" Arthur shouted, standing directly behind his mirror trap.
The Sentinel paused. It looked at Arthur. Then, it looked at the humming, glowing anomaly on the table between them.
The Sentinel's core directive took over: Analyze Threat.
The blue eye focused on the mirrors. It tried to read the mana signature.
"Gotcha," Arthur whispered.
The Sentinel sent a query pulse into the trap. The pulse entered the mirrors. It bounced. It amplified. It returned to the Sentinel a thousand times stronger.
The Sentinel's eye widened.
"ERROR," the Sentinel droned. "DATA OVERFLOW. INPUT EXCEEDS CAPACITY. RECALCULATING... RECALCULATING..."
The Golem froze. Its arm lowered. Its head began to twitch.
Inside the trap, the light was now blinding. The Golem was trying to process an equation that had no end. It was trying to count to infinity.
"RECALCULATING... RE-RE-RE-CALCULATING..."
Smoke began to pour from the Sentinel's stone joints. The blue light holding it together turned an angry, unstable violet.
"Get down!" Arthur tackled Vivian. Julian dove behind a lathe. Zack curled into a ball.
POP.
It wasn't a massive explosion. It was the sound of a lightbulb burning out, magnified by ten thousand.
The Sentinel's blue eye shattered. The light inside its body vanished.
The massive stone construct slumped forward, dead weight, and crashed onto the floor with a sound that shook the foundations of the castle.
.....
For a long time, nobody moved. The only sound was the cooling tick of the Golem's stone body and the gentle shhh-shhh of steam escaping its joints.
Arthur stood up, brushing dust off his uniform. He walked over to the trap. He carefully kicked the mirrors apart, breaking the loop. The humming stopped.
"Target neutralized," Arthur said, his voice steady, though his hands were trembling slightly. "Software crash induced via hardware exploit."
Julian stood up, staring at the pile of rocks that used to be an unbeatable killing machine.
"You..." Julian pointed at the mirrors. "You killed it with a reflection. You didn't even use a spell."
"I used logic," Arthur said. He walked over to the Golem's head.
The sapphire lens that had served as its eye was cracked, but large fragments remained. It was a flawless, mana-focusing crystal of Ancient make.
Arthur picked up a shard of the blue glass. He held it up to the light.
[Item: High-Grade Focusing Lens.] [Properties: Amplifies Mana Beams by 500%.]
Arthur turned to Julian, a dangerous grin spreading across his face.
"Julian," Arthur said. "You asked when you would get your gun."
Julian looked at the lens, then at Arthur. "You want to turn that... into a weapon?"
"We just destroyed a tank," Arthur said, pocketing the lens. "Now, we are going to loot it. Zack, help me strip the armor plating. We need it for the car."
Vivian sheathed her rapier, looking at the melted door. "Arthur... if these things are waking up... the Academy isn't safe anymore."
"No," Arthur agreed, looking at the countdown on his iScroll.
[Time Remaining: 99 Days.]
"The school is becoming a war zone," Arthur said. "We have three months to finish the car, graduate, and get out before the entire defensive grid decides we are the virus."
He looked at his friends. They were covered in dust, terrified, but alive.
"Class is dismissed," Arthur announced. "It's time for shop class."
End of Chapter 32