The morning sun had barely crested the eastern hills when Hasegawa Ouga slipped out of the church's back door and vanished into the treeline.
His feet found the familiar path without conscious thought, muscle memory guiding him through the undergrowth toward the training ground he'd carved out of the jungle's heart over four brutal years.
The village was still waking up behind him—the distant clang of Duran's forge, the sleepy crow of Henrik's rooster, the smell of bread drifting from the baker's chimney. Morning sounds. Peaceful sounds. The kind of sounds that had lulled him into believing this pocket of the world was safe.
He had a boulder waiting for him today. A big one. He'd found it two weeks ago, half-buried in a stream bed, and had spent the intervening days slowly hauling it to his training clearing. It was roughly the size of a small carriage and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred pounds. Perfect for resistance training. The body was the foundation of Reinforcement Magic—you could flood your limbs with all the mana in the world, but if the underlying muscle and bone weren't conditioned to handle the stress, you'd tear yourself apart before you landed a punch. The Talent could adapt his body to damage, but it couldn't build baseline strength from nothing. That part he had to earn the old-fashioned way.
By the time he reached the clearing, the sun had fully risen, painting the jungle in shades of emerald and gold. He stripped off his shirt, draping it over a low-hanging branch, and approached the boulder. His reflection stared back at him from a puddle of rainwater—grey eyes cold and focused, black hair tied back,the physique of someone twice his age carved onto a fourteen-year-old frame. He didn't smile at the reflection. Smiling was for the village. Out here, there was only the work.
He crouched, wedged his shoulders under the boulder's lip, and heaved it onto his back. The weight settled across his spine like a collapsing sky. His knees buckled, but he caught himself, mana flaring through his legs in a reflexive surge of Reinforcement. Organ Fortification kicked in, bracing his lungs and heart against the crushing pressure. He took a shaky breath, then another, and began the first push-up.
One.
Two.
Three.
The world narrowed to the rhythm of exertion. Up, down, up, down, the boulder rising and falling on his back like a monstrous turtle shell. He counted the reps in his head, not because the number mattered, but because counting gave his mind something to do while his body screamed. By fifty, his arms were trembling. By a hundred, his vision was swimming. By two hundred, he'd entered a trance state, the pain distant and irrelevant, his mind drifting to the status review he'd done the day before.
Stage 3 mana. All those resistances. High-mid regeneration. The locked Soul Slash. He was strong, objectively strong, strong enough to crush any normal mage who looked down on his commoner's grimoire. But the world he'd transmigrated into was not normal, and the threats on the horizon were not normal mages. He needed more. The volcano. The exam. Yami. Mana Zone. The list of objectives scrolled through his mind like a mantra, and his body kept moving, up and down, up and down, the boulder grinding against his vertebrae with every rep.
---
In the village, the morning unfolded in its usual gentle rhythm.
Henrik sat on his porch, whittling a new spoon from a block of birchwood, his gnarled hands steady despite the arthritis that had plagued him for years. He'd been meaning to thank Ouga for the salve the boy had brought back from the last town over—something with herbs that numbed the ache better than anything the old remedies could manage. Ouga was a good lad. Strange, sometimes, in ways that Henrik couldn't quite put into words, but good. The kind of person who made a village feel like more than just a collection of buildings.
Duran was at his forge, hammering out horseshoes for the trader who'd pass through next week. The rhythmic clang of iron on iron was a heartbeat that the village had known for thirty years. His daughter, Lily, was finally recovering from the fever that had nearly taken her over the winter, and Duran worked with a lightness in his chest that he hadn't felt in months. He owed that recovery to the money Ouga had quietly left for the healer's visit—money earned from boar hunts and mana beast pelts that the boy had no obligation to share but always did.
The baker's wife was sweeping the front step of the bakery, her infant son strapped to her back in a cloth sling. She'd named him Oren, after her father, and he was a fat, happy baby who gurgled at the birds and grabbed at sunbeams. She hummed while she swept, a lullaby her mother had taught her, and thought about the berry pie she'd bake for the church's evening meal. Ouga liked her berry pie. He never said so directly, but she'd noticed he always took a second slice when he thought no one was looking.
Sister Maria was in the church kitchen, up to her elbows in bread dough, while the younger children sat at the long wooden table practicing their letters on slates. Elise, six years old and irrepressible, had drawn a picture of Ouga fighting a dragon. Tomas, the oldest at thirteen, was helping the little ones with their alphabet, his voice patient and steady in a way that reminded Maria achingly of Father Aldric when he was younger.
Father Aldric himself was in the chapel, kneeling before the altar. He'd been there since dawn, praying for guidance. The conversation with Ouga about leaving hadn't happened yet—the boy had been evasive in that quiet, careful way of his—but Aldric knew it was coming. He'd known for years, really, from the moment Ouga had woken up in that cot with eyes that were too old for a ten-year-old's face. The boy was destined for something beyond this village, beyond the quiet rhythms of church bells and harvest seasons. Aldric had made his peace with that. What troubled him now was the fear that whatever waited for Ouga in the wider world would take the boy and return something unrecognizable. Not bad, necessarily. Just... changed. Hardened. The way war hardened soldiers, or grief hardened widows.
He prayed for protection. For guidance. For the strength to let his son go when the time came.
And then he heard it.
A sound. Faint at first, so faint he almost dismissed it as the wind. But it grew louder, sharper, resolving into something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Cries. Human cries. Not the distant shouts of children playing or farmers arguing over fence lines, but screams. Screams of terror.
Aldric scrambled to his feet, his knees cracking against the stone floor, and ran to the chapel's window. What he saw made his blood run cold.
Smoke. Black, oily smoke, rising from the direction of the wheat fields. And beneath the smoke, shapes moving—too many shapes, moving too fast, in patterns that had nothing to do with farm work or village life. He squinted, and his heart seized in his chest. Figures in grey robes. Dozens of them. Spreading through the village like a stain, and everywhere they went, the screaming got louder.
"No," he breathed. "No, no, no—"
He burst out of the chapel doors just as the first explosion rocked the village square. A fireball, conjured from someone's grimoire, slammed into the roof of the baker's shop and detonated in a shower of flaming thatch. The baker's wife screamed, clutching her baby to her chest, and ran. A grey-robed figure intercepted her, something metallic glinting in his hand, and Aldric didn't see what happened next because he was already running toward the church's back door, toward the orphanage wing, toward Maria and the children.
"Sister!" he bellowed, his voice a thunderclap of terror and fury. "Sister Maria! Take the children and run! Take them to the jungle, now!"
Maria appeared in the doorway, her face ashen, a wooden spoon still clutched in her flour-dusted hand. She didn't ask questions. She didn't hesitate. She simply turned and began herding the children toward the back exit, her voice rising above the chaos in a steady stream of prayer and instruction. "Elise, take Tomas's hand. Tomas, carry the little ones if you have to. Everyone stay together. Stay together!"
The children were crying. Elise was wailing. Tomas had gone pale but his jaw was set, and he grabbed two of the younger ones by the arms and dragged them toward the door. Aldric watched them go for one heartbeat, two, and then he turned to face the flames.
His grimoire floated up from his belt, its pages flipping open with a thought. Water Magic. It wasn't much—he was a village priest, not a Magic Knight, and his spells were designed for irrigation and healing, not combat—but it was all he had. He summoned a sphere of water the size of a wagon wheel and hurled it at the nearest grey-robed figure, catching the man square in the chest and sending him crashing through the wall of Duran's forge. The blacksmith was already down, Aldric saw with a sick lurch, his body crumpled beside his anvil, his hammer still clutched in a hand that would never swing it again.
More figures emerged from the smoke. Five. Ten. Twenty. Aldric counted them with the detached precision of a man who knew he was already dead. They moved like trained soldiers, their magic flaring in a dozen different colors—fire, wind, earth, lightning. One of them, a hulking brute with arms like tree trunks, caught Aldric's next water bullet in his bare hand and crushed it into steam.
"A priest?" the brute rumbled, amused. "They're even weaker than the farmers."
Aldric didn't dignify that with a response. He fired again, and again, and again, water bullets and water whips and a desperate, swirling vortex that he threw at the advancing line with everything he had. It wasn't enough. It had never been enough. A blade of wind scythed through his vortex, dispersing it. A tendril of earth rose from the ground and wrapped around his legs, yanking him off his feet. He hit the dirt hard, his grimoire skittering out of reach, and before he could rise, a boot slammed down on his chest, pinning him in place.
The last thing he saw before the world went dark was the grey-robed figure above him, smiling. And the necklace around the man's neck—a pendant in the shape of an eye, its pupil a slitted red gem that seemed to pulse with malevolent life.
---
When Aldric woke, he was tied to a post in the center of the village square.
The pain came first. A deep, grinding ache in his ribs where the boot had landed, a sharper sting in his shoulder where something—a blade, maybe, or a shard of stone—had cut him. His robes were soaked with blood, and his left eye was swollen half-shut. He blinked through the haze and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
The village was burning.
Not just burning—systematically destroyed. Every house, every structure, every fence and shed and garden wall had been set alight. The church itself was an inferno, its stained-glass window shattered, its bell tower listing at a drunken angle. The grey-robed figures moved through the wreckage with the casual efficiency of men who had done this many times before, their grimoires floating beside them, their faces hidden beneath deep hoods.
And in the center of the square, kneeling in a ragged semicircle, were the villagers.
Everyone. Henrik, his old hands bound behind his back. Duran's wife, weeping silently over the body of her husband that lay nearby. The baker's wife, clutching her infant son, her face a mask of terror. And the children. Tomas, Elise, all the orphans from the church. Sister Maria knelt among them, her habit torn, blood trickling from a cut on her forehead, but her eyes were fierce and unbroken.
Aldric strained against his bonds, a guttural sound tearing from his throat. "Let them go! They're children! They're just children!"
No one answered him. The robed figures continued their work, ignoring his screams.
Then a figure emerged from the smoke.
She was young—younger than Aldric had expected—with short black hair that framed a pale, sharp-featured face. Round glasses sat perched on her nose, the lenses catching the firelight and reflecting it back in eerie orange glints. She wore the same grey robe as the others, but hers was trimmed with silver thread, and the eye pendant around her neck was larger, more ornate. She walked with a bounce in her step, a spring of barely contained excitement, and when she smiled, it was the smile of someone who had forgotten what human empathy felt like.
"Ooh, you're awake!" she chirped, clapping her hands together. "Good! I hate it when the subjects are unconscious. You miss all the interesting data."
"What... what are you?" Aldric rasped.
"Me? I'm a scientist!" She spun in a little circle, her robe flaring out around her. "Well, more of an alchemist, really. Specializing in mana extraction and transference. Fascinating stuff. You wouldn't believe how much magical energy is just sitting around in untrained commoners, doing nothing. It's wasteful. Criminal, even."
She turned toward the children, and Aldric's heart stopped.
"No," he whispered. "No, please. Take me instead. Take my mana. All of it. Just leave them alone."
She ignored him. She knelt beside Elise, who was trembling so hard her teeth were chattering, and produced a device from beneath her robe. It was a cylinder of brass and crystal, one end tapering into a long, hollow needle that glinted wickedly in the firelight. Elise tried to scramble backward, but one of the robed men held her in place.
"This will only hurt a lot," the scientist said, and drove the needle into the little girl's arm.
Elise screamed.
Aldric screamed louder.
The device hummed, a sickly yellow light pulsing through its crystal chamber as it drew something out of Elise's body. Mana. Aldric could sense it, a faint, flickering current being ripped from the child's undeveloped mana pathways. Elise's screams faded into whimpers, her small body going limp. The scientist withdrew the needle and examined the device with a satisfied nod.
"Low yield, but consistent with the previous samples," she murmured, scribbling something in a notebook she'd produced from seemingly nowhere. "Next."
They dragged Tomas forward. He fought—kicked, bit, clawed at the hands holding him—but he was thirteen and they were grown men with magic, and it didn't matter. The needle went in. Tomas screamed. Aldric screamed. The device hummed.
And on it went.
For two hours.
Aldric lost his voice somewhere in the first thirty minutes. He lost his mind somewhere in the second hour. He watched them drain the children, one by one, then the adults—Henrik, the baker's wife, the young couple who had just gotten married in the spring. Each one got the needle. Each one screamed. Each one went limp, their mana reserves hollowed out, their bodies left twitching in the dirt. Some of them died right there. Some of them didn't. The ones who didn't die were left to watch.
Sister Maria was the last of the adults. She didn't scream when the needle went in. She looked at Aldric, her eyes filled with a sorrow that went beyond pain, and she mouthed something that might have been "forgive me." Then her eyes went glassy, and her body slumped forward.
The scientist stood up, stretching her back like someone who'd just finished a long day of paperwork. "That should be sufficient for today's samples. We'll process the extracted mana back at the base. Good work, everyone!"
Aldric found his voice. It came out as a croak, a rasp of pure, undiluted hatred. "Why? What... what could possibly justify this?"
The scientist turned to look at him, and for the first time, something flickered in her eyes. Not guilt. Not pity. Curiosity.
"Why?" She tilted her head, like a bird examining a particularly interesting worm. "Because the world is unjust, Father. Nobles hoard magic and power while commoners like you and your little flock suffer in obscurity. The Midnight of the Evil Eye is going to change that. We're going to eliminate discrimination, erase the barriers between noble and commoner, and build a new world where everyone is equal. And to do that, we need resources. Your mana, their mana, all of it—it's going to fuel a revolution."
"That's not revolution," Aldric spat. "That's murder."
"Semantics." She waved a hand dismissively. "History is written by the survivors, and you won't be among them. Oh, don't look so glum! Your sacrifice is noble, really. You're contributing to something greater than yourself."
She turned to leave, and Aldric saw his chance. It wasn't a chance, not really—just a dying man's final act of defiance, a gesture that would mean nothing in the grand scheme of things but meant everything to him. His grimoire was gone, but he didn't need it. He'd spent thirty years mastering Water Magic, and even with his mana pathways shredded and his body broken, he could summon one last spell. A single water bullet. No bigger than a marble. He shaped it in the palm of his bound hand and, with the last of his strength, hurled it.
It wasn't aimed at the scientist. Even dying, Aldric understood that he couldn't hurt her. The spell was too weak, and she was too strong. But behind her, one of the grey-robed men was adjusting his necklace, the eye pendant swinging loose on its chain. Aldric's water bullet struck the clasp.
The necklace fell.
The scientist didn't notice. She was already walking away, already moving toward the next atrocity. But the necklace lay in the dirt, its red eye staring up at the smoke-choked sky, and Aldric smiled.
It wasn't much. But it was something.
The world went dark.
The last thing he heard, before the darkness swallowed him completely, was Sister Maria crying. Loud, broken, inconsolable. The sound followed him into the void, and then even that faded, and Father Aldric of Hage Village breathed his last.