Hunter Academy: Revenge of the Weakest - Chapter 994

Chapter 994: Chapter 233.2 – Changes across the world
“That’s what’s bothering me. Something is strange.”

Elena, the fifth in their squad and the quietest so far, finally spoke, her voice muffled behind the scarf around her mouth. “Are we sure it’s not a misread from the terrain? That slope might be amplifying echoes or mana spread. We’ve had false positives before.”

“No,” Jules said, shaking his head slowly. “That pulse wasn’t natural. It didn’t scatter like windborne mana. It locked on for a second.”

Gellard checked the readings again. The glyphs on the tablet screen pulsed once more—no longer in irregular bursts, but in a rhythm. A slow, deliberate beat. Almost… breathing.

He frowned.

“It’s not fluctuating wildly,” he muttered. “It’s stabilizing. Like something on the other side is syncing its frequency. Like it’s aware of the tag markers.”

That made everyone pause.

Elena’s hand hovered near her waist, close to the sidearm she usually kept holstered for emergencies. Ryn’s fingers twitched against the side of his rig, scanning spikes still active.

“That’s not Class-6 behavior,” Jules said finally. “That’s… something else.”

“Maybe,” Gellard replied, still staring at the screen. “But until we get full calibration and final resonance depth, we don’t label it anything more than what it shows. If it reads Class-6, we treat it like Class-6.”

“And if it’s not?” Ryn asked, his voice dry but quieter now.

Gellard didn’t look up.

“Then we’ll all wish we were overestimating.”

No one spoke after that.

The stakes finished syncing to the ambient mana stream, their outer rings flashing once with final confirmation. Data packets were logged, resonance signatures stored, coordinates uploaded. All that was left was the final spectral imaging.

They waited in silence, the frost clinging to their gear as if trying to pull them downward.

Jules exhaled slowly, watching his breath drift into the dark. “Readings will finish in ten.”

Elena’s eyes scanned the slope again, then the clouds above. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t open in five.”

A low hum whispered again—fainter this time, like something testing its voice behind the veil.

Gellard didn’t look away from the screen.

He just said, “Brace in case it does.”

*****

Far from the frostbitten slope, buried beneath layers of earth and sacrificial secrecy, a circular chamber pulsed faintly with red luminescence. The walls, obsidian-like but veined with writhing streaks of coppery glyphs, seemed to breathe—slow and steady, like the heart of something not quite asleep.

At the chamber’s center, an elaborate construct stood. It resembled a grotesque altar fused with machinery: gearwork etched with runes, crystal conduits humming with subdued energy, and a basin in the middle—shallow, rimmed with teeth, filling slowly with blood that trickled from four equidistant spouts. Each spout extended from a bound body slumped above, barely alive, twitching as the siphon continued.

Around the construct sat five figures in silence. Hooded and unmoving, they wore robes of differing origin and cut—some stitched from stitched leathers, others wrapped in veils of woven shadow. Only their hands showed: blackened at the fingertips, nails overgrown and marked with occult seals.

A voice cracked the stillness—not spoken aloud, but pressed directly into the minds of those present.

“𐑒𐐭𐑛𐐬𐑂…𐑅𐐯𐑊𐑉…”

It was not language. Not in the human sense. The syllables were jagged, wrong—each one resonating deep in the spinal cord, like splinters against thought.

The construct responded.

The blood in the basin began to rise, not with volume, but with pressure—levitating in long, glistening threads that twisted upward like red silk unraveling in reverse. At the apex of the arc, just above the machine, the threads converged into a spinning sphere. It trembled once.

Then—

FWHOOOM.

Mana erupted.

Not in a blast, but a pulse—so refined, so thin, it slid between layers of air like a knife through silk. Unseen, but felt. It rose past stone and soil, coiling upward like smoke with a memory. It pierced the crust, the clouds, the veil of the upper sky—and vanished beyond sight.

The five figures did not move. But in their midst, a sixth seat sat empty, facing the machine.

A shimmer cut through the still air—subtle at first, like a disturbance in temperature, a rising ripple above unseen fire. It emanated from the empty sixth seat.

Then came the sound. A wizzle—no, not quite sound, not quite silence. A frequency that bypassed hearing entirely and whispered straight into the spinal cord. Cold. Familiar. Ancient.

The empty seat distorted.

Faint outlines curled inward, like fabric drawn back against a wind that wasn’t there. Space folded—not sharply, but as if gravity itself held its breath. From the center of that vacant place, something began to form. Not flesh, not shadow. A presence.

And with it, a single object materialized in the air just above the seat. A page.

Torn from no book, but pressed with a seal that shimmered with ouroboric ink. It floated down in an agonizing slowness, then rested gently on the stone, pristine and utterly silent.

Written in crisp, black characters:

It worked.

A long moment passed.

Then, one of the five figures leaned forward slightly, the creak of old leather the only sign of motion.

“…Is that the best course of action?” The voice was androgynous. Careful. Distant.

Another responded, deeper and rasped as if their lungs remembered dust more than breath. “Do we even know its effects?”

“We can’t,” the third said—a whisper like silk being cut. “And that is the trade-off. Remember.”

They were silent after that. Not in agreement, but in acknowledgment.

The blood in the machine’s basin had stopped rising. The crimson threads held their spiral above it, suspended mid-air like marionette strings awaiting command. At their center, the orb spun slowly—now with golden filaments threaded through the red. Filaments that didn’t glow, but seemed to pull light into them. As if refracting time itself.

Faint motes began to drift off its surface—tiny specks shaped like fragmented letters from forgotten alphabets, vanishing as soon as they took form.

One of the robed figures finally spoke again. This one wore bone pendants across their chest, each carved with a sigil older than any nation.

“This was the last one,” they murmured. “The final Core. Once given, there is no reversal. The equation runs.”

“The machine has its own law,” the first voice added. “We only define its boundary condition. The rest…”

“…Belongs to the world now,” finished another.

Above the orb, something cracked.

A single hairline fracture opened in space, no larger than a grain of sand—but filled with color no eye could fully see. The crack pulsed once, then faded, as though it were never there.

Below it, the machine’s base shifted.

Lines glowed faintly across the floor in a massive, incomprehensible array. Not a sigil. Not a summoning circle. A computation. One that mapped not place, but potential. A living equation written across stone and blood, threading the past, the future, and the unknowable now into a singular axis.

The figures didn’t speak again. They knew better.

Because what they had done was no invocation.

It was not summoning, nor sacrifice.

It was the activation of a correction.

And corrections, by nature, do not explain themselves.