Outside the gate, more than fifteen hours had passed.

John Cromwell sat in the command tent with his arms folded and his eyes fixed on the gate readout.

He was a Rank Three Champion and the academic Supervisor for Key City. A man who had overseen dozens of First Entries without incident.

Right now, none of that history was doing anything to ease the weight sitting in his chest.

The gate was still blue.

In a standard First Entry, candidates reached the beacon, defeated the guardian, and created an exit within five hours at most.

That window accounted for freshly awakened holders still building their Mastery before they were strong enough to push through.

But experienced Rank one Initiates with high mastery had been sent ahead of the students to shorten that timeline. They should have cleared the beacon hours ago.

But the gate hadn’t changed color and no exit had opened.

Cromwell had been telling himself there was a reasonable explanation but he was running out of reasonable explanations to tell himself.

At that moment an agent suddenly pushed through the tent flap, breathing hard.

"Sir. The gate." The agent stopped, to steady himself. "We found something. Something we’ve never seen before."

"Get to it," Cromwell said flatly. "We don’t have all day."

"Sir — it’s a false gate." The agent held up his tablet, readings already pulled. "And the actual tier..." He paused for half a second too long. "It’s a Tier Three gate."

The chair scraped back hard as Cromwell stood.

"Are you certain about those readings?"

The agent turned the tablet toward him. Cromwell stared at the numbers. And the readings were accurate.

Tier Three disguised as Tier One. Two full tiers below its actual classification, this was not a minor discrepancy, but a gap that shouldn’t have been logically possible.

And they had sent more than two hundred freshly awakened students and a support team of High-Mastery initiates into such a gate that should have been completely off-limits to anyone below Rank Three.

Cromwell’s head swam.

He didn’t even stop to question why the one-hour test had failed. A false gate two tiers above its displayed classification was already so far outside recorded precedent that the test’s failure was the least shocking part.

What dominated his mind was the image of every student who had walked through that portal this morning.

He was still working through the implications when a second agent came in at a near-run, phone extended outward.

"Sir. It’s the Valerians." She kept her voice controlled, but her eyes said everything. "They’re asking what’s happening with the First Entry."

Cromwell closed his eyes for exactly one second.

Of course they already knew. With the Valerian family’s reach and resources, nothing stayed hidden from them long, certainly not a gate incident involving their daughter.

He took the phone slowly, already knowing this conversation was going to be the easiest part of what came next.

❖❖❖❖

Winston hit the tree hard enough to crack it, bounced off, and skidded several meters across the ground before stopping.

A massive figure stood where their campsite had been thirty seconds ago, club lowering back to its side with the casual ease of something that had barely noticed the impact it had just caused.

[Giant Tree Troll — Level 22]

After three days of steady grinding through the forest, Winston and Freya had made the call to rest and recover stamina before pushing on.

They had chosen a quiet section of the forest, checked the perimeter, and set up camp.

What neither of them had caught was that the quiet section belonged to something that had been standing perfectly still among the trees, blending so completely with the bark and moss around it that even Freya’s enhanced senses had missed it.

Freya was already moving.

『RELEASE』

The transformation hit mid-stride. White fox ears pushed through her hair, the tail snapped out behind her, and her speed jumped instantly, more than double, closing the distance to the Troll in a blink.

Her katana was a Level 6 permanent spell, already enhanced by her Realization’s passive.

With her Mastery sitting at seventy after three days of grinding, her base output already rivaled a Level 14 monster.

Her sacred active skill pushed that to Level 20 equivalence.

The Giant Tree Troll swung its club in a wide horizontal arc. Freya ducked under it, came up inside the swing, and drove the katana across the creature’s chest in one clean motion.

A large gash opened across the bark-like hide, deep enough to matter but shallow enough to make it furious.

The Troll pulled back and brought the club straight down. Freya jumped clear, landing ten meters back as the impact cratered the ground and threw a wall of dust into the air between them.

She had done her part in creating an opening.

Winston was already on his feet.

Three days of grinding had moved Winston’s Mastery to ninety points.

That alone changed everything. At ninety, his base output matched a Level 18 monster, already a significant jump from where he’d started.

His energy pool had scaled with it, sitting at eighteen hundred points, more than enough to cast any spell he carried without needing Soul Burn as a crutch.

But raw energy wasn’t the most important thing that ninety Mastery had unlocked.

Every twenty points of Mastery expanded his soul lotus count by one.

Four twenty-point thresholds crossed meant four additional lotus slots added since he’d started.

His usable Soul capacity had grown from five to nine. One lotus was currently on cooldown, since the Giant Tree Troll’s opening hit had connected before Winston fully registered the threat, burning a Life Tithe charge in the process.

But eight active slots remained, and eight was more than enough.

『IGNITE』

He burned all eight souls directly into his Realization without hesitation. The heat in his chest wasn’t just a flare this time, it was a sustained surge!

[Mastery: 270] [200%]

The number broke every threshold a First Realization was supposed to reach. Normal progression capped out at one hundred before a rank-up attempt.

Winston had blown past that entirely. At the five-point-per-level conversion rate for a First Realization, his current output placed him at the equivalent of a Level 54 monster.

Tier Three territory!

The Giant Tree Troll was still pulling its club back from the crater it had made when Winston took one step and then he was simply behind it.

The speed the Mastery boost generated didn’t feel like running. It felt like the distance had ceased to matter.

The gladius swept clean across the Troll’s neck, the head dropped and the body followed a half-second later, collapsing into the disturbed earth with a heavy, final crash.

[0.2 Mastery Gained]

[1 Soul Gained]

[You Received A Spell]

Freya stood ten meters back, still in partial transformation, fox ears catching the settling dust. She looked at the headless Troll. Then at Winston.