[Celestial Academy — Southern Perimeter — 10:59 AM]

The containment wagons opened from the inside.

Not because someone opened them. Because what was inside decided to get out.

The first creature went through the reinforced containment metal as if it were wet paper — not with explosive force but with the calm of something that had spent decades in too small a space and finally found that the space had ended. Four meters tall in a low stance. Eight when it fully straightened. An exoskeleton of a substance that was neither bone nor metal but something in between — dark plates with edges that glowed on the spiritual plane with an energy signature that the Guild’s system theoretically catalogued as level 200 but had never confirmed in the field.

No visible eyes. No visible mouth. With the ability to orient toward magical presences without needing either.

The second emerged ninety seconds later from the parallel wagon. Similar in scale. Different in form — more elongated, with four limbs touching the ground and two touching nothing because they existed partially on the spiritual plane. It moved leaving marks on that plane that lasted several seconds after it passed, like temporary scars in the space between life and death.

The third didn’t emerge.

The third broke its own wagon from below — emerging from the southern courtyard floor as if the wagon had only been the most recent container in a long history of containers. Shorter than the other two. Wider. With an anatomy that made looking directly at it for more than three seconds physically uncomfortable because the brain didn’t know how to process it.

The ground around the three cracked under their weight.

The windows of the Academy’s south building vibrated until they shattered.

---

[Celestial Academy — Monitoring Room — same moment]

Magnus looking at the screens.

He didn’t say anything for four full seconds.

Then he turned to Agustín.

"What have you done?"

Agustín looking at the screens with no particular expression.

"What was necessary."

"There are four thousand students in this Academy." Magnus. His voice lower than normal — the kind of low that wasn’t calm but the sound of someone who had just understood the scale of what he was looking at. "Those creatures don’t distinguish between a Fragment bearer and a first‑year student."

"The bearers will be eliminated. The incident will be documented as a consequence of active Fragments in a civilian zone."

"Those creatures cannot be controlled in an urban zone!" Magnus struck the table. For the first time in twenty years at the Academy, Magnus struck something. "The containment level they require needs open terrain, specialized teams, protocols that don’t exist in an educational building. You just released three level‑200 entities on the continent’s largest campus with four thousand people inside."

Agustín didn’t respond.

Magnus looking at the screens. The first creature moving toward the administrative wing. The second toward the central courtyard. The third — the third had turned toward the west classroom building where the students who hadn’t evacuated yet still were.

"This is going to be on a national scale," said Magnus quietly. "When news of what happened here gets out — and it will get out, Agustín, it always does — the Temple won’t be able to contain the damage."

Agustín kept looking at the screens.

"The damage was already done when the bearer of Fragment 1 entered this Academy."

Magnus looked at him.

For the first time in years, Magnus looked at him without the institutional filter of twenty years of collaboration.

"Get out of my monitoring room."

---

[Imperial City — Abandoned Circle Headquarters — same moment]

Viktor in front of the communications screen.

Max beside him — sixteen years old, level 31, two months in the Circle learning exactly the kind of things the Temple didn’t teach.

The energy signal from the three creatures reached the Circle’s detectors before the first verbal report left the Academy.

Viktor looked at the numbers.

"Level 200." Not as an exclamation. As confirmation of something he had hoped never to have to confirm.

"What are they?" said Max.

"Ancient." Viktor activating all of the Circle’s communication channels simultaneously. "Pre‑dating the Guild’s classification system. The Temple has them catalogued in their restricted archives as pre‑sealing entities — captured decades ago in operations that were never publicly documented."

Max looking at the screen. The energy signature of the three creatures overlaid on the Academy map.

"Alex is there."

"I know."

"What do we do?"

Viktor considered the question for exactly two seconds.

"Prepare emergency extraction. Northern route, three vehicles, full medical team." He stood up. "And pray we don’t need it."

---

[Celestial Academy — Administrative Wing Corridor — 11:00 AM]

Alex felt the first creature before he saw it.

F1 responding with an alarm unprecedented in the sixteen months he had carried the Fragment — not the combat‑threat alarm, but something more primal. The recognition of something that existed on the same plane as the original Harvester and that the original Harvester didn’t classify as an enemy because it didn’t classify anything as an enemy.

Only as presence.

And this presence was massive.

[F1 — detection of level‑200 entity — distance: 80m and closing]

[F4 — alert — interference on plane between life and death]

The first creature rounded the corridor corner.

Eight meters of dark exoskeleton with edges glowing on the spiritual plane. No visible eyes. Orienting directly toward Alex with the precision of something that read magical presences with an accuracy no physical sense could match.

F1 was the most intense presence in the corridor.

F5 was the second.

The creature evaluated both.

And launched — not toward one. Toward both simultaneously, dividing its mass between the two trajectories with a fluidity that shouldn’t be possible for something that size.

Alex activated [Shadow Step].

Davan activated the Dominion field.

Both in opposite directions.

The creature passed between them and struck the far corridor wall.

The wall — forty‑centimeter‑thick stone — gave way as if it were plaster.

[Alex HP: 358,900 → 312,400] — shockwave from impact.

[Davan HP: 238,200 → 198,700] — shockwave from impact.

Both on the ground.

The creature emerged from the wall.

Turning.

---

Davan looking at the creature.

The creature looking at Davan — or doing what served as looking.

The necklace on Davan’s neck pulsed. F5 trying to apply Dominion to the creature — the aura that forced lesser beings to obey.

The creature was not lesser.

The Dominion field found nothing in it that responded to hierarchy because pre‑sealing level‑200 entities didn’t operate within any hierarchy that F5 could read.

The necklace vibrated with something that in a more integrated Fragment would have been a warning.

Davan looked at Alex.

Alex looked at Davan.

For the first time in the previous Chapter — and in this one — neither thought of the other as an immediate enemy.

---