Chapter 97. A Predator Choosing by Criteria We Cannot Perceive
The sun had begun its slow descent, painting the training grounds in long, blood-orange shadows when the messenger arrived. He wasn’t merely running; he was sprinting as if the hounds of hell were snapping at his heels.
The junior instructor nearly collapsed against the training ground gate, his chest heaving so violently it sounded like ragged tearing fabric.
William recognized that particular shade of terror immediately. It wasn’t the adrenaline of combat; it was the cold, hollow panic of someone who had been handed a burden they weren’t equipped to carry.
"Vice Headmaster Blackwood... Instructor Wade..." the young man gasped, doubling over as he fought to reclaim his lungs. "Headmaster Albert... he demands your presence! In his office... Immediately!"
The afternoon’s levity evaporated instantly. The lingering echoes of Kaela’s teasing and the comfortable warmth of the day were incinerated by the messenger’s desperation.
Catherine’s entire demeanor shifted. "Huh...?"
The softness she had shown William moments before vanished, replaced by the steel-hard focus of a commander preparing for siege. Her eyes narrowed, scanning the messenger’s face for any sign of a larger threat.
"What kind of report?" she demanded, her voice dropping an octave into a dangerous register. "Is this about the academy’s security?"
"I... I wasn’t told specifics, Ma’am," the boy stammered, wiping sweat and grime from his forehead. "Just that it was urgent... that the Headmaster sounded... different."
William caught Catherine’s eye. No words were needed.
The unspoken communication between them forged through countless battles and shared dangers was instantaneous. A silent agreement passed between them: whatever this was, it was serious.
Without waiting for the students to ask questions, they turned on their heels. They moved toward the administrative wing with a synchronized, purposeful stride, their pace deliberately fast but controlled, leaving Olivia to take over the supervision of the students.
...
When they pushed open the heavy oak doors to Albert’s office, the atmosphere inside was suffocating. The room, usually a sanctuary of quiet contemplation and the comforting scent of old parchment and tea, felt charged with an oppressive, static tension.
Albert stood behind his desk, his shoulders hunched as if carrying an invisible weight. Several sheets of parchment were spread across the surface like corpses laid out on an altar.
And then there was Olivia. William hadn’t expected to see her there, but seeing her standing beside Albert, her face pale and her jaw set in grim concentration, made his stomach twist.
"What’s happened?" Catherine asked, cutting straight through any pretense of formality.
Albert didn’t answer immediately. He simply gestured toward the desk, his fingers trembling slightly as he smoothed out a map.
"A series of incidents, Catherine... William..." His voice was hollow, stripped of its usual grandfatherly warmth. "Individually, each one might have passed for coincidence."
"A freak accident, a string of bad luck, a temporary lapse in ward security. But together..." He paused, his eyes meeting theirs with a haunting intensity. "Together, they form a pattern that I find considerably harder to dismiss."
He began to lay out the details, each one landing like a hammer blow. "Over the past seventy-two hours, the city’s border patrols have reported inexplicable disturbances along the outer wall."
"Wards that have stood for centuries flickered, not failed, but flickered as though something had passed through them without registering... Something that shouldn’t exist."
William leaned over the desk, his mind already racing through tactical possibilities. "And the disappearances?"
"Three residents from the outer district," Albert said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Gone without a trace."
"No signs of struggle, no blood, no witnesses... One moment they were in their homes; the next, there was simply... nothing left."
"No bodies to bury. Just empty spaces where people used to be."
"And the ground?" William pressed, remembering the reports from the training fields.
"Cracked stone," Albert confirmed. "Near the outer training fields, we found sections of solid granite that had shifted and splintered in patterns that defy any known geological stress."
"The cracks weren’t random; they looked like... impressions. Like something massive and unseen had pressed itself into the earth."
"Any connection between the missing residents?" William asked, his fingers drumming against the hilt of his sword. "Occupation, lineage, location?"
"Anything that ties them together beyond the fact that they’re gone?"
"Not obviously," Albert admitted. "Two laborers, an elderly shopkeeper."
"Different districts, no known social or blood connection... If there is a predator choosing its prey, it is choosing based on criteria we cannot yet perceive."
"That’s almost worse," Olivia interjected quietly, her voice laced with dread. "Targeted disappearances give you a motive to counter."
"Random disappearances mean we’re fighting a ghost... We can’t protect people from something we can’t predict."
"I’ve had the sites examined by our best mages," Albert said, his movements slow and deliberate as he slid a folded parchment across the desk toward Catherine.
His eyes closed for a brief second, as if steeling himself. "The residual mana signature recovered from each location, the empty homes, the cracked stone—it matches something in our deepest archives."
"Something I prayed would remain nothing more than a nightmare."
Catherine reached for the parchment, her fingers brushing the ink as she prepared to face whatever horror lay written beneath.
Catherine’s fingers trembled slightly as she unfurled the parchment. For a moment, the only sound in the office was the crackling of the fireplace and the distant, ominous tolling of the evening bell.
Then, she spoke. The words were quiet, hollowed out by a sudden, icy dread.
"This is the same signature," she whispered, her eyes scanning the complex magical notations as if they were venomous snakes. "The exact same resonance... and the same chaotic frequency... from the dungeon collapse eight years ago."
A heavy silence descended. William felt a cold prickle at the base of his neck. "You’re saying this isn’t just a coincidence? That something is mimicking the collapse?"
"I believe so, yes," Albert answered, his voice grim and aged. "The magical fingerprint is unmistakable."
"That’s not possible," Catherine snapped, though the sharpness was undercut by the tremor in her breathing. "Signatures like that don’t simply reappear coincidentally, not after this long, not without something deliberately, surgically recreating the exact conditions."
"This isn’t a natural phenomenon! This is a performance from someone!"
"I agree entirely," Albert said, leaning forward into the lamplight. "Which is why I summoned you both immediately."
"I refused to wait for a complete report when the implications alone could burn this academy to the ground."
Olivia stepped forward, her movements precise and controlled despite the visible tension in her shoulders. From the small leather satchel, the same one she used for her meticulous research, she produced a second sheet of parchment.
William recognized that look in her eyes; it was the same laser-focused, almost obsessive energy she had displayed when digging into the secrets of the academy’s past.
"There’s more," Olivia said, her voice cutting through the growing unease. "The investigators didn’t just find residual mana."
"At two of the sites, the locations where the stone had shifted, they found evidence of deliberate marking... a symbol carved into the disturbed stone. It was identical at both locations."
She turned the parchment toward them. William leaned in, squinting at the rough sketch.
It was an angular, spiraling design, a series of interlocking lines that seemed to twist inward on themselves, creating a visual paradox that made his head swim. To him, it was meaningless geometry.
But to Catherine, it was a death sentence.
The moment her eyes landed on the sketch, the color drained from her face so completely she looked like a specter. Her hand shot out to the edge of Albert’s desk, her fingers gripping the polished wood with such force that her knuckles turned white as bone.
"Catherine?" William asked, his hand instinctively moving toward her shoulder.
Alarm sharpened his voice. "What is it? What did you see?"
Catherine didn’t answer. Her breathing had become shallow and ragged, the sound of someone drowning on dry land.
Her pupils dilated until her eyes were almost entirely black, reflecting the horror written on the page. When she finally spoke, her voice was thin, brittle, and terrifyingly unsteady.
It was a sound William hadn’t heard from her since the day the dungeon had collapsed around them eight years ago.
"I’ve seen that symbol before," she said, each word seeming to cost her an immense effort of will. "Once... In the depths of that collapsed dungeon, eight years ago..."
"It was carved into a wall of obsidian, right at the precipice where the rift originally tore open!" Catherine gritted her teeth. "I saw it for less than a second before the ceiling came down and the world turned to screaming stone and blood."
She closed her eyes tight, but the image clearly burned behind her eyelids. "I never told anyone... Not Headmaster Albert, not the official inquiry, not even Grock..."
"I convinced myself I’d imagined it, that it was some hallucination born from the smoke, the blood, and the terror of the collapse... I told myself it was just a trick of the light."
Albert’s entire body went still. The grandfatherly scholar vanished, replaced by a man who looked suddenly as old as the mountains.
"You’re certain, Catherine... No misremembering?"
"I’ve seen that symbol in my nightmares more times than I can count, Headmaster Albert," she said, her jaw snapping shut with a visible, desperate resolve. "I would know that spiral anywhere..."
"Even in my sleep, I can feel the wrongness of it." Her voice wavered before hardening into something cold. "It belongs to an organization... An old one..."
"I only know the name because Aldric mentioned it once in a fragment of a military history lesson from his own training..."
"An order that was supposed to have been purged from existence generations ago..." Catherine takes a deep breathe.
She exhaled and said. "...The Hollow Circle."