Hunter Academy: Revenge of the Weakest - Chapter 984

Chapter 984: Chapter 229.2 – Anomaly

“Stop.”

Both halted.

Sweat beaded on Ethan’s forehead. Astron’s breathing had shortened slightly, his grip relaxed but not fatigued.

“You both failed,” Eleanor said, flat and uncompromising. “But the failure was expected. It’s your first day working with live resonance.”

She turned slightly toward Ethan.

“Lightning is volatile. Few cadets grasp how to follow its rhythm before trying to force it into control.” A pause. “You followed.”

Ethan blinked, almost surprised by the note of acknowledgement.

She didn’t linger.

Instead, she turned toward Astron.

“You understood the structure. You anticipated the imbalance. But you treated it like split mana control.” Her voice lowered. “Don’t. This is not dual-casting. This is convergence.”

Astron’s gaze didn’t waver, but he gave the faintest nod.

Eleanor stepped back, arms crossing again as her analytical mind ran through timelines.

If they keep this pace…

Her thoughts mapped across days, iterations, potential breakpoints.

Eleanor’s gaze drifted from their faces back to the regulators, now cycling through cooldown patterns, the glow of the elemental crystals dimming into stillness. Her arms remained folded, but her mind was moving rapidly.

Of course Ethan adjusted faster. It makes sense.

Lightning.

It wasn’t just his elemental affinity. It was something deeper, more instinctive. Every inch of his psion structure responded to lightning as if it were native—coded into his body’s rhythm. That kind of connection wasn’t built through study or repetition.

It was felt.

He didn’t tame it.

He understood it.

She had seen this before. Among those who trained early in elemental resonance. Among bloodline warriors and trait-forged heirs. But Ethan hadn’t had that kind of start. No tutor-guided mana paths. No refinement chambers.

And yet—

He moved like someone born to wield lightning.

It was more than control. It was intuition.

Eleanor’s eyes shifted to Astron.

And him?

That was the question she still hadn’t answered.

Even now—months into her observation, even after personal sessions, even with full access to his training logs—she had no idea what his elemental affinity was.

He had never shown preference. Never leaned into any specific energy type. She had subjected him to fire, wind, ice, even high-resonance shadow induction… and none of them stuck.

Not in the usual way.

No rejection, no resistance—but no acceleration either.

Just… neutrality.

That’s what made it so strange.

Elemental neutrality was rare. Suppressed affinity even more so. But him?

She studied Astron’s posture—the loose readiness in his arms, the way he waited for the next command without leaning forward or backward.

No anticipation.

No hesitation.

Just balance.

It’s like his mana doesn’t belong to any family of elements I’ve shown him. As if… his affinity is hidden. Or worse—undefined.

That possibility was unsettling.

Yet it also made sense.

Because for all the vagueness of his alignment, Astron’s understanding was precise. High.

When things were explained clearly—when a concept was mapped out with direct cause and effect—he absorbed it without error. His execution might lag behind at first, but only because he spent that time solving the problem, not brute-forcing it.

He didn’t learn by feel like Ethan.

He learned by logic.

By structure.

If I give him the right frame, he adapts. Fast.

And that, Eleanor mused, was where the contrast lay.

Ethan’s learning curve was strange. It wasn’t steady. It dipped and rose in sharp bursts. There were times when he struggled with a concept for days—and then, seemingly without warning, something would click.

He would break through.

Not because of external feedback.

But because his internal world had shifted. Realigned.

That was the mark of what most instructors would call a “natural genius.” Not the kind that mimicked perfectly or studied with discipline, but the kind that internalized.

And when Ethan internalized something?

It stopped being knowledge.

It became instinct.

Eleanor’s lips thinned as she completed the thought.

He leaps forward when no one’s watching.

That kind of mind was dangerous. Brilliant, but volatile. Because without the right direction, those leaps could go wrong. Too far. Too soon.

She looked between the two of them now.

Astron—the tactician with undefined power and razor understanding.

Ethan—the wild current shaped by discipline, waiting for internal sparks to unlock his next layer.

They were different.

But both were moving forward at speeds the academy wasn’t ready to accommodate.

Eleanor turned back to the console, her fingers hovering over the next program.

Her calculation was nearly complete.

A month.

That was all it would take.

If she guided them correctly—if they kept responding as they had—then in a month, their weapon coating and psion resonance wouldn’t just stabilize.

It would evolve.

She glanced back once more.

And quietly, with a note of anticipation rising in her chest—

“Let’s begin again.”

******

The final cycle of resonance dimmed with a low, harmonic chime—an audible signal that the regulators were disengaging. The elemental crystals blinked once, then faded to their dormant states, the shimmering strands of active mana slowly unwinding into still air.

The field stilled.

Ethan exhaled hard, his breath ragged, shirt clinging to his skin, damp with sweat. His shoulders rose and fell with the kind of fatigue born not from exhaustion—but sustained focus. His hair was stuck to his forehead, lightning residue still faintly crackling at his fingertips before fading into silence.

Astron, too, was winded. Less visibly—but the signs were there. The subtle tightness in his stance, the measured inhale through his nose, the faint tremor at the edge of his left hand where he had kept psionic output stable longer than before.

Their weapons lay on the racks nearby. The air between them was charged—not with mana, but with quiet, hard-earned progress.

Eleanor stepped forward at last.

She didn’t smile.

She never did.

But there was a faint change in her presence. A soft recalibration of tension. A cue that, for today, their trial was complete.

“Sit.”

The command was flat, but neither of them resisted. Ethan sank onto the mat with a muted grunt, wiping his forearm across his brow. Astron followed, silent, folding one knee beneath him in his usual disciplined posture.

Eleanor summoned a slim black notepad from her dimensional seal and tapped it once. A translucent projection flared to life above the mana regulators—a rotating display of real-time resonance data, pulse feedback, and internal convergence maps.

She began the briefing.

“First: Resonance Disruption Patterns.”

A graph appeared, showing a clean slope for Astron and a jagged, broken one for Ethan.

“Ethan, your lightning psion initialized too aggressively in the first cycle. That caused your output waveform to spike—resulting in ‘detached flow syndrome.’ That’s when the element refuses to adhere to the weapon’s surface tension and instead arcs back toward the user.”

Ethan grimaced. “Right. That’s what burned my glove.”

“Yes. Because you weren’t grounding the energy.”

She tapped again, and the projection focused on a blade schematic.

“Lightning resonance relies on field balance—you can’t anchor it the way you would with flame or frost. You need to oscillate your core resonance to match its pulse. Think of it like surfing—don’t hold the wave. Ride it.”

Ethan nodded slowly, absorbing it with a furrowed brow.

“Your last run was much better. You started modulating your output in tandem with exhalation. That’s the correct instinct. Continue tuning that pattern.”

“Astron.”

The graph shifted. This time, his lines were tighter—compressed, controlled, but asymmetrical.

“Your issue wasn’t surge—it was balance. You approached the dual-weapon coating as two separate resonance threads. That caused polarity conflict between the regulators. You need to unify your core before you split flow.”

She flicked again, and the image now showed a dual-core diagram, with mana threads branching outward.

“Think of dual coating not as dual output, but mirrored expression. Both weapons should reflect the same base signal. Symmetry before divergence.”

Astron nodded once, quietly.

“You made significant progress by the fourth run. Good frame shift. But remember—refinement doesn’t come from constraint. Stop over-managing.”

A pause.

Then:

“I want both of you to write this down and internalize it—”

The projection flattened into clean lines of script:

| Weapon coating principles, notes:

Resonance must match….

Stability requires…

.

.

It went like this with details that she noted.

Eleanor waited until both had memorized it. Ethan was already jotting it into his mana-notes with a tired but focused hand. Astron, she noted, merely scanned it twice—then nodded.

It was enough.

She turned away, walking toward the far regulator control panel, and with one last glance over her shoulder, spoke without inflection:

“You’re dismissed.”

Ethan stood slowly, rolling his shoulder, offering a quiet “Thanks, Professor,” before heading toward the door.

But before Astron could follow—

“Wait.”

He stopped mid-step, turning his head slightly.

“I’d like to speak with you.”