Half a second before the impact.
While everyone else was still processing what they were seeing, while eyes hadn’t even finished blinking, Necrotize drew his hand from his pocket and raised it upward.
Everything around him was moving at a speed that defied comprehension. The lightning had covered half the distance between sky and earth before most people had registered it was falling. And yet Necrotize raised his hand slowly and in an unhurried manner. As though ti itself had agreed to wait for him.
Then he spread his fingers open.
A protective layer materialized over the entire academy in an instant. A shield so fast in its formation that in the sa mont it appeared, the lightning had not advanced a single centitre further.
Three milliseconds later, the strike hit.
Boom.
The impact didn’t pass through the shield. But the force of it did, not as destruction, but as consequence. The entire academy shuddered. Every pane of glass in every window shattered simultaneously. Books flew from their shelves. Objects slid from desks and struck floors. The lake at the academy’s centre erupted in massive, churning waves. Every bird in every tree burst into the air at once. And in the chest of every student within those walls, sothing lurched, Terror.
***
Eric stood on the balcony of his office and watched all of it.
He had been watching from the beginning, Necrotize and the girls moving into the garden, Catherine’s arrival, the gathering of the clouds. He had seen each piece fall into place.
When the lightning descended, his body went cold.
He was a Rank Nine Archmage. If he had chosen to act, he could have been there in under half the ti it took the strike to fall. He hadn’t moved, not because he couldn’t, but because so quiet certainty told him he didn’t need to. Soone else had it handled.
But the thought ca anyway: ifit had fallen to , could I have stopped it?
Yes. Probably. But not cleanly. Not without cost. His magic, all of it, might not have survived the attempt.
He looked around his balcony. Broken glass lay across the floor in every direction. He turned and looked into his office, everything thrown from its place, nothing where it had been.
Eric let out a long breath.
And this is only the second day.
That was all. But those six words carried the full weight of whatever was coming, and he chose not to imagine it in any more detail than that.
***
Nicholas sat in his office chair amid complete disorder. Glass on the floor. Books scattered from their shelves. The large, smooth orb that had sat on his desk, shattered, its pieces spread across the room. He stared out through the window toward the sky where black clouds still churned above a protective shield that enclosed the entire academy, and beneath it, the remnants of sothing that should not have been possible.
He pressed his hand into a fist slowly, until his fingernails were digging into his palm.
***
Ronald stood in the training ground with his sword already drawn, watching the sky with the focused stillness of soone who had been paying attention since the very beginning.
Helen was under her desk.
Her entire body was shaking and the only coherent thought moving through her mind was a persistent, detailed fantasy about abandoning the academy entirely and relocating to a mountain sowhere far away.
Carlos had been outside his dormitory hall when it happened. He had taken in every detail with sharp, unyielding attention.
And for the first ti in longer than he could account for, he felt sothing he didn’t particularly want to feel.
Fear.
It wasn’t a familiar sensation. In his life, there had been very few monts that genuinely reached him this way, only one period in his childhood which was buried and sealed away sowhere deep in his mind, that he didn’t wanted to rember. But here it was again, surfacing without permission.
He didn’t like it at all.
***
The strike lasted exactly five seconds. During that ti, the Academy felt as though it was counting down its final monts in the world. Yet, miraculously, it survived and everyone within it lived to tell the tale.
Then it stopped. The clouds began to disperse the mont it ended, pulling back and thinning until the sky above the academy was completely clear, open and still, as though nothing had occurred.
Necrotize lowered his hand. The protective shield dissolved without a sound.
He looked at Elizabeth and Lyra. Both of them had gone pale, colour drained from their faces as though it had been taken from them directly. Catherine stood beside them, composed by comparison, but not because she was unaffected. Because she had faced a heavenly tribulation herself once, had been forced to withstand one alone, and that experience had not made her less afraid of them. It had made her more so. She knew what was coming for Lyra, not once, but again, and again, in the stages ahead. That knowledge sat quietly in her chest.
Necrotize looked at the academy.
Every broken window. Every toppled shelf. Every object displaced by the shockwave.
He snapped his fingers.
Everything returned, glass back into fras, books back onto shelves, furniture upright, objects back in their places, every crack sealed. All of it restored in an instant.
Everything except the fear inside the people who had experienced it.
That he left as it was. He had no interest in altering anyone’s mories or reaching into their minds without their consent. If they chose to carry this, that was theirs to carry.
He turned to Catherine, who stood watching him with a collection of questions she clearly couldn’t ask here, not in this place, not in front of others.
He acknowledged it without saying anything about it.
Then he looked at Elizabeth and Lyra, who had both co back to themselves enough to be present again.
"Alright." His tone was easy, unbothered. "What needed to happen today has happened. Elizabeth, take Lyra back to your dormitory. I’ll see you both again tomorrow."
Elizabeth straightened. "Yes, my lord."
Lyra said nothing. She simply nodded, quiet and unhurried.
The two of them left the garden together.
Once they were gone, Necrotize opened a portal to his realm, the air splitting cleanly to reveal the Destruction Realm beyond it. He and Catherine stepped through, and it closed behind them without a trace.
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