His boldness was a flare of a light through the blackness.

Noticing Alex go on, Kaelen took a hesitating step, with his lips drawn in a silent prayer. Seraphina followed suit, stung by the sight of the sight of the so-called C-class charity case gaffing her more courage than her own, her jaw set in a new, steelier resolution.

I went last, guarding our rear. When I got onto the bridge my Quantum Analysis Mind was flashing with a violent warning.

'Trap detected. Runic instability. The construction of the bridge is made such that it collapses with the collective weight of the fourth individual. Critical failure imminent'

I looked ahead. The rest were nearly across. There was no time to warn them. Should I recede, the bridge would perhaps be safe, yet we should be in an ugly place. We would all come tumbling down, in case I rushed forward.

There was only one option. An irresponsible, foolish and very excruciating alternative.

'I can't use a full Shadow Swap. The mana price is unreasonable, and the signature is too blatant. but a micro-burst... an uncontrolled, untamed spatial warp...

As I stepped on the crystal floor which broke at my feet into a million bits I did.

My uncooked, raw Space affinity was snorted into the world. I did not make an attempt to regulate it, did not make an attempt to develop a gate. I just pushed.

"BLINK!"

The world tore apart. I got the impression that my body was being torn to pieces and was being sewed up within a minute.

Oblivion to the pain, the scream of protesting electric paths, the taste of ozone and blood in my mouth.

I came out on the other side of the chasm, and rattled and fell on the ledge of the rock. I fell down on my knee, with a deep coughing at my throat, and a drip of blood running through my nose.

The whole Bridge of Burdens melted away behind me and disappeared into the abyss.

The members of my team were looking at me with a face of shock, awe and disbelief beyond belief. They had witnessed the bridge being blown up. They had seen me vanish. And they had seen me back, with blood and hurt, but alive.

I had just spared them some extermination, and I had done it at my own peril, by tearing myself to pieces.

I forced myself on my feet and wiped the blood off my nose with the back of my glove. I didn't offer an explanation. I didn't say a word.

I simply turned and went down the corridor.

But I could feel it. The transition of the air in my back.

The contempt of the look of Seraphina had been changed to a multifaceted, grudging admiration. It had made the fright in the eyes of Kaelen more or less worship.

And Alex... Alex seemed to have cleared his eyes on seeing a miracle.

As my team developed a tenuous, desperate cohesion in the psychic battlefield of labyrinth, a different screen in the VR Hall showed another form of war.

_____________________________________

(VR CONTROL ROOM)

The teachers and the audience were given a masterclass of contrasting ideologies, acted out in the simulated dungeons of the other highest ranked teams.

[Team 1: The Lionheart Phalanx]

The troops of Leon were as beautiful and terrifying as an engineered war machine. Nothing was hesitant, nothing wasted. Their advancement was the result of centuries of good breeding and an inbuilt feeling of hierarchy and positions.

They had come to a puzzle room: a room with a pressure-plate floor that would cause a shower of poison darts, unless the right order was walked over. It was secreted in an obscure runic text upon the distant wall.

Defensive position at the door, Chris. Keep a watch of our back, my dear, said Leon, in a calm and clear voice. Chris dropped his tower shield, and was a stone wall of iron and stone.

"Selena, analyze the runes. Give me the sequence."

The inscription flashed through the violet eyes of Selena, and her mind was working on the old writing like a nursery rhyme.

The order is founded on the astrological conjunction of the Twin Moons, she said in a low intonation, which was a sweet contrast to the lateral clamor of the dungeon.

Third plate, fifth, and the one with the serpent.

"Understood." Leon walked with his steps, which were accurate and confident, and did as she ordered. The clicks of the pressure plates were depressed, and the dart traps were silent.

Their teamwork was flawless. They were a phalanx, with Leon as the spear, and Selena as the strategist and Chris as the indestructible shield. They walked through the maze and they did not overcome adversity, they merely could not be defeated by adversity because they were so perfect that adversity could not possibly take root. They were the products of what the Academy was meant to make.

[Team 2: The Serpent's Pit]

By sharp contrast, the team that Eric was leading was a fiasco of grand proportions. their dungeon pod was now a viper-pit of arrogance and recrimination.

They were seen on the screen falling into a mere spike trap. Eric, without pausing to see, had just moved forward, and imagined the world to bow down to his wishes. The ground collapsed and his two lesser-noble team-mates fell down into the hole. Their screams of surprise were abridged when they were wiped out.

Eric and Petric stood on the ledge.

"You incompetent fool!" Snarled Petric and his face was twisted with anger.

"You led us right into it! You are too proud, and have lost us two members!

Eric didn't even look at him. He stared at the road ahead of him and his jaw was set. "They were weak. At any rate they would have slowed us down.

"Slowed us down?!" The voice of Petric reached a high shrillness.

"This is a team trial! You can't just—"

"I can," Eric interrupted in his icy voice. He addressed Petric with a cold cold-blooded fire in his eyes.

This test is concerning who is the most powerful. I shall not be bound to the follies of inferior men and in case you are unable to follow, then remain and rot.

Eric turned without saying and ran deeper into the labyrinth with no escort. He did not solve puzzles, he broke them.

A closed door was dealt with a Radiant Slash. A passage of walls was merely torn asunder by rude, explosive light magic. He was one who destroyed, but he was also hemorrhaging mana at an abnormal pace. His lone way was a wild-cat game.

[Arcade Academy - VR Simulation Control Room]

Below the VR Hall, in an otherwise sterile white room and vibrating with mana-crystal servers, a junior technician was biting his lip, staring at a secondary diagnostic monitor.

'That is weird,'he thought to himself, and typed a command into his console.

On his screen a complicated waveform was visible. To the majority of the students it was a smooth, wavering line.

But with the students of the trial in the Labyrinth of Echoes, the wave form was jagged--waves of violence that were spurting with a dark evil red energy.

The psychic stress level is off the scale, he told his boss, a more cynical and older man who was dozing in his chair half-awares.

They are being pushed very far out of the safety parameters by the AI.

One eye of the supervisor opened. "So? They're the top students. A bit of pressure suits them very well."

"No..sir, you don't understand," the technician insisted, his voice tight with anxiety.

"The feedback is… corrupted. It is not merely presenting them with illusions, but it is literally feeding off the ensuing fear by actively intensifying their deepest traumas. Look at the energy signature."

He traced to a slender, virtually unnoticeable strand of code that is being wound into the innermost programming of the AI.

"This is not included in the normal Labyrinth program. It's like… a virus or a ghost in the machine."

The head of the group narrowed his eyes, then shook his shoulders.

Most likely a bug of the previous update....the system will purge it.....,"

"....Stop worrying."

The technician desired to protest, to insure that this was unsafe, remembering what he had heard on the Fresher's Ball, of a rogue teacher and a demon machine. However, he was also a mere junior technician.

He gave a sigh and swung back to his screen, a feeling of fear tying in his stomach.

He did not realize that the ghost in the machine was the psychic leftover of the artifact of Derisu Vengraud that had gushed into the mana system of the Academy and lodged in the NOVA AI.

The Labyrinth of Echoes, the test of mental strength, was the ideal place where this corruption could wake up.

____________________________________________

[Team 4: The Misfits]— Michael Team

I knew none of this, of course. Not the specifics. But as I led my broken but resolute team across the crystalline bridge, my gamer's intuition was screaming that something was fundamentally wrong.

I had played the Labyrinth of Echoes in the game. It was supposed to be unnerving. It wasn't supposed to feel like this.

The psychic pressure was too real, too malicious. It didn't feel like a program running a script; it felt like a predator hunting its prey.

The whispers didn't feel like echoes; they felt like they had teeth.

When I used Shadow Swap to cross the chasm in a blink, the backlash had been more than just mana strain.

For a split second, as I tore through the fabric of the virtual space, I had felt it—a cold, alien consciousness brushing against my own. A presence that did not belong here.

'...this isn't just an AI...'

The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. The dungeon itself was compromised. Tainted.

The stone door at the end of the platform slid open with a low groan, revealing the heart of the labyrinth.

It was a vast, circular chamber, and at its center floated not the Golem guardian I expected, but a swirling vortex of shadow and light—a chaotic mass of raw psychic energy from which the screams of hundreds of students echoed.

"Everyone, on guard," I said, my voice low and urgent. My team, now bound to me by a thread of hard-won trust, immediately formed a tight defensive circle.

"What is it, Michael?" Seraphina asked, her voice stripped of its earlier arrogance, now just sharp and focused.

"The labyrinth," I said, my gaze sweeping the oppressive darkness ahead.

"It's not just a test anymore. There's something else in here with us ....Something hostile."

My words hung in the air, a chilling prophecy. This trial was no longer about a grade.

It was about surviving a ghost that the Academy itself didn't know it had unleashed.

(To be continued)

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