No alarms sounded at first.
The Council Complex was designed to detect power—surges, elemental distortions, hostile resonance.
This was none of those.
The first explosion came from below ground.
Not magical.Structural.
Stone supports fractured with a sound more like grief than violence. The western archive wing sagged, then collapsed inward, sending dust and silence billowing into the morning air.
People screamed.
Not because of lightning.
Because there wasn't any.
Akihiko was on his feet instantly. "Status report!"
A junior officer staggered in, blood on his temple. "No elemental signature. None. Just—devices. Pre-elemental engineering."
Valen's face drained of color. "Who would attack us like that?"
Masako answered softly. "Someone who doesn't want to be measured."
More impacts followed—not detonations, but failures. Doors jammed. Wards desynced. Communication lines died one by one.
Not a siege.
A message.
"They know how we build," Mizuki said tightly. "This is internal knowledge."
Akihiko clenched his fist. "Lockdown the perimeter. Deploy response units."
"They're not running," a voice said from the doorway.
Everyone turned.
A messenger stood there—shaking, eyes wide.
"It's a village," he said. "Rinvale. Two hundred people at most. Farmers. Laborers."
Valen scoffed. "Then this is madness."
"No," Masako replied. "This is memory."
Images flickered onto the central screen.
Villagers stood outside the shattered wing.
Unarmed.
Most of them.
Some held crude tools. Others just held pictures—children, homes, fields scorched and abandoned.
One woman stepped forward.
Her voice carried without amplification.
"You tested stability on our bodies," she said. "You called the screams acceptable variance."
A murmur spread.
Akihiko stepped closer to the projection. "This is an unlawful assembly," he began.
The woman continued.
"Our children don't sleep anymore. Some don't feel the elements at all. Some feel them too much."
She lifted her sleeve, revealing skin patterned with old burns.
"You never answered."
The screen shifted—another elder, shaking but furious.
"So we came."
Silence hung heavier than any threat.
Valen turned toward Mizuki. "Deploy Kurogane. Now."
Mizuki's eyes hardened. "You want him to be the face of suppression?"
"I want stability," Valen snapped.
Akihiko hesitated.
Then nodded.
"Summon him."
Far across the academy, Kurogane felt it.
Not lightning.
Voices.
Pain without resonance.
Raishin looked at him sharply. "They're asking."
"Yes," Kurogane said.
"And you're not going?"
Kurogane remembered the empty ground.The observer who never intervened.The silence that didn't ask for belief.
"No," Kurogane said quietly. "If I stop them, the Council stays unheard."
Raishin's breath caught. "This starts a war."
"It reveals one," Kurogane replied.
Outside, the villagers stood their ground.
Not heroes.
Not soldiers.
Just people who had waited long enough.
And for the first time in centuries, the Council faced a truth no metric could stabilize:
Lightning was not the first thing to strike back.
Human silence was.