The flow of students scattered the moment they crossed through the main entrance. Some headed straight for the dormitories, others drifted toward the cafeteria with vacant stares and dragging feet. Exhaustion showed on everyone, but no one stopped in the middle of the path. The academy’s routine asserted itself even after a night like that one.

Gerald was the first to break formation. He brought a hand to his lower back and stretched with an unsteady groan, yawning without any attempt to hide it. His glasses slid down the bridge of his nose and he nudged them back into place with two fingers.

"I’m going straight to bed... if anyone tries to wake me up, I’ll just die right there."

Bīng Xuě let out a quiet laugh, turning her head slightly toward him.

"That’s not very heroic."

"After last night, I don’t care how it sounds."

Lyria and the others went their separate ways without much conversation. The group dissolved naturally, each one carrying their own exhaustion toward a different corner of the academy.

Aku didn’t follow.

He stopped in the middle of one of the main corridors for a few seconds, watching the figures move away, the murmur of footsteps dissolving into the clean, polished walls. Light from the artificial star came through the large windows, laying soft lines across the floor. Everything looked calm, orderly, as if the forest were far more distant than it actually was.

He turned around and took a different direction.

His steps were steady and unhurried. He moved through several sections of the academy, passing common areas, busy corridors, more open structures. The flow of students thinned gradually until it disappeared almost entirely. The surroundings grew quiet.

He arrived at an outdoor training area.

Not the main combat yard where they trained with instructors. This space was smaller, enclosed by tall walls of white material with blue-veined streaks running across the surface like lines of contained energy. The floor was smooth, faintly reflective, marked with subtle signs of regular use.

No one was there.

Aku walked to the center.

He stopped.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. His breathing was even. His posture, relaxed. The quiet of the space didn’t interfere with his focus.

He raised his hand.

The air around him responded.

The Azoth didn’t appear all at once. It filtered in first as a slight distortion, a change in the density of the surrounding air. Then it took shape. A dark, liquid mass began gathering around his arm, moving slowly, as if searching for a defined structure.

Aku watched the process carefully.

This wasn’t the first time, but his focus tonight was different. He wasn’t looking to attack or defend. He was trying to understand.

The mass extended, forming an additional arm that moved with a slight delay relative to his own. The surface wasn’t uniform. It rippled, compressed, and expanded in irregular patterns. Aku turned his wrist and the mass responded, though with a small deviation.

He adjusted the density.

The surface became more compact. The movement gained precision. The shape stopped deforming with every pulse.

Then he released it.

The mass dropped to the floor and dispersed, dissolving without resistance.

Aku’s expression didn’t change.

He raised his hand again.

This time, the Azoth gathered more quickly. It didn’t form an arm. It condensed into a single point in front of him, an irregular sphere fluctuating in size with every passing moment. Its surface didn’t reflect the light. It absorbed it.

Aku brought his other hand closer.

The sphere reacted.

Compression increased.

The mass began to rotate, not uniformly, but in multiple directions at once. Small distortions appeared along its surface, as if the space inside it wasn’t following any stable logic.

Aku held his focus.

He wasn’t building a simple shape.

He was organizing chaos.

Inside the sphere, energy didn’t flow. It collided. It fragmented and reformed in patterns that never repeated. A closed system, but unstable. Each point within it held a different state from the one beside it.

High entropy.

Very high.

The sphere vibrated.

Not outward.

Inward.

Aku tilted his head slightly, studying the reaction. His control held steady, but the effort climbed. Sustaining that level of instability without letting the structure collapse demanded constant precision.

The sphere stopped fluctuating.

It stabilized.

Not in shape.

In behavior.

The internal chaos stayed active, but contained within a clear boundary. The surface stopped deforming. It held still, even as everything inside it kept moving.

Aku took a step forward.

He extended his arm.

And threw the sphere.

Not a wide, sweeping motion. Direct.

The sphere crossed the space in a straight line, without deviation, and struck the wall in front of him.

The impact didn’t produce a conventional explosion.

No shockwave.

There was an exchange.

The surface of the wall, solid, ordered, structured, made contact with the sphere. For an instant, both systems occupied the same point.

And then they changed.

The order of the wall broke down.

Not gradually.

All at once.

The molecular structure lost its cohesion. The matter ceased to hold its solid form and shifted into an unstable state, a bright, agitated mass that emitted its own light.

Plasma.

But not uniform.

The wall’s material didn’t scatter into the air. It remained contained within the same volume, but its state was something else. The surface vibrated and fluctuated, as if each particle had lost its reference point entirely.

The sphere was gone.

It hadn’t exploded.

It had been consumed in the process.

The exchange completed in an instant.

Aku observed the result without moving.

The affected section of the wall was still active, releasing small bursts of energy that dissipated quickly. Gradually, the structure began to reconstitute itself. Not immediately, but steadily. The material recovered its order, rebuilding the original surface as if the damage had never happened.

Aku lowered his hand.

His gaze stayed fixed on the point of impact.

The experiment had worked.

He had managed to contain a high-entropy system within a defined structure and transfer that state to another body on contact. The result wasn’t direct destruction, but an alteration of the matter’s state based on the exchange of order and chaos.

It wasn’t a refined technique.

But it had potential.

Aku turned his wrist slightly.

The Azoth responded, gathering in his hand again in a smaller, more stable form.

This time he didn’t throw it.

He let it go.

The mass dissolved into the air and vanished without a trace.

The yard fell silent again.

The surface of the wall finished reconstituting itself, recovering its original appearance with no visible mark of what had just happened.

Aku turned and walked away.

His footsteps were soft against the floor as he made his way toward the exit of the training area. The light from the artificial star continued bathing the space with the same steady intensity, constant and unmoved.

The rest of the academy carried on.

And so did he.