Villainous Instructor at the Academy
Chapter 172: The ritual of refraction

Chapter 172: The ritual of refraction

The next morning arrived not with sunlight but with the sound of bells.

Urgent, discordant, the Academy’s emergency bell rang only for two things: invasion, or disappearance.

I shot upright, breath ragged. My clothes were damp from sweat, the Grimoire still warm in my lap. The runes under my skin pulsed faintly, and when I touched the base of my spine, I could still feel the memory of burning ink etched into flesh.

The bells rang again—three times. That meant containment breach.

I threw on my robe, strapped a side dagger to my thigh, and reached for the Grimoire. As my fingers brushed its cover, a message shimmered faintly across the leather:

"A pattern must evolve or be erased."

Charming.

The hall outside was chaos. Faculty in half-armored robes barked orders at each other. Summoned familiars darted across the air—eyes in the sky. I caught sight of a blur: Head Enchanter Nyssen, still in nightwear, hovering two feet off the ground and surrounded by motes of silver flame. Someone screamed about a lost student. Another muttered something about blood on the walls in the sublevel.

I turned a corner and nearly ran into Roderick.

He looked as tired as I felt. His coat was open, revealing the chainmail beneath, and a scar across his neck pulsed with old magic.

"Lucian," he said, gripping my shoulder tightly. "There’s been a breach in Sublevel Theta."

"Isn’t that sealed?"

"It was. Until a few hours ago."

I didn’t need to ask what had triggered it. The Grimoire had opened something.

"I’m coming with you."

He didn’t argue. Just nodded and tossed me a charmstone for mana suppression. "We’re on cleanup. No heroics."

Cleanup, huh?

Sublevel Theta was not part of the student-accessible wing. It was older than the main Academy, built into the foundation of the mountain itself. The walls here were carved from slate and bone—literal bone, in some cases. Mage bones, hardened by centuries of entropic magic. The air tasted like metal and rot.

We passed two dead things on the stairwell.

I say things because they weren’t human anymore. Their bodies were twisted—skin pale, eyes black and weeping violet ichor. The corruption was similar to the Blood Mist I’d seen once during a hidden side event in the original Sword of Radiance. That wasn’t supposed to appear until Act IV.

What the hell was it doing here?

A containment team of four advanced mages stood at the base of the stairwell, preparing a sealing array. Their leader turned to Roderick and me.

"It’s localized to the vault," she said. "We think it was a dormant rune—reactivated by sympathetic resonance."

She looked at me when she said that.

Great.

"What was stored in the vault?" I asked.

She hesitated. "Fragments."

"Of what?"

"Consciousness."

Oh.

Fantastic.

The vault had been ruptured from the inside.

The door, once sealed with twenty-seven concentric runic layers, was now curled outward like it had birthed something.

Inside, the walls were covered in etchings—scratches so deep they bled mana. At the center lay a shattered crystal coffin, empty.

But not silent.

A whisper echoed around us. No tongue. Just intent. A feeling of hunger wrapped in the shape of words.

Roderick’s grip tightened on his blade. "Something was waiting."

I stepped forward, ignoring the shouting behind me. The Grimoire burned against my chest, a warning—or a calling.

As I reached the shattered coffin, a pulse radiated outward. Not light. Not heat. Pattern.

The marks along my spine ignited.

And suddenly, I saw it.

A second node. Half-formed. Not a throne, this time—but a mirror.

A mirror made of meat and metal, reflecting nothing except possibility.

My vision blurred. My breath hitched. A new phrase burned itself into the Grimoire:

___

[Node II: The Mirror of Consumption – Awakened]

New Pattern Trait: Reflective Surge

Temporary ability to duplicate observed spell effects within a 3-second window.

WARNING: Mirror instability may affect the caster’s identity.

___

I stumbled back, eyes wide.

The walls were melting.

They pulled me out an hour later, barely conscious. I’d blacked out after the node activated. My mana had dropped to dangerously low levels—something that shouldn’t have happened.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst part came after I looked in a mirror and saw not my own face—but someone else’s smile.

Back in the infirmary, I lay still as the healers tried to stabilize my aura. Most of them kept their distance, whispering behind curtained partitions. They were afraid. Not of death. But of me.

Professor Lucian Drelmont, now officially marked as a Pattern-Bound anomaly.

I stared up at the ceiling, cold sweat dampening my neck.

The Grimoire lay beside me, inert.

Then it blinked. Once.

New Trait Calibration Required.

Initiate Ritual Y/N?

I closed my eyes.

"Yes," I whispered.

Elsewhere, in the Northern Forest...

A pack of beasts howled in unison. The trees trembled as something vast and wrong pushed through the veil of night.

A silver-eyed girl sat atop a ruined altar, watching it all unfold.

She licked blood off her fingertip and whispered:

"Looks like he found the second one."

Behind her, a corpse blinked.

The Grimoire of Patterns did not whisper.

It commanded.

In the infirmary’s lowest ward—sealed for high-risk arcane afflictions—I drew the circle with ash made from my own burnt hair and blood scraped from my inner cheek. A lesser ritual might have called for silver or binding chalk.

This one demanded parts of me.

The ward was quiet. Even the air refused to move. No healer entered once the Grimoire displayed its message across my chest like a brand. Roderick had watched from behind the ward’s reinforced mirror, jaw tight, blade never far from reach.

But he didn’t stop me.

He couldn’t.

"Initiating Calibration Sequence..."

The Grimoire’s voice wasn’t a voice. It was thought shaped like thunder—woven directly into my nervous system.

"WARNING: Host integrity compromised. Identity Anchor unstable. Proceeding."

The circle hissed to life, casting the room in flickering blue-white light. It wasn’t runes this time—it was syntax. The Pattern didn’t use traditional magic. It rearranged existence like a program rewriting itself.

Symbols floated in the air.

Then came the mirror.

Not real. Not quite illusion either. It shimmered into view above the circle—a vertical sheet of liquid glass, reflecting me in nauseating detail.

Only... it wasn’t me.

The reflection had my face. My clothes. My scars.

But his eyes were wrong.

Too steady. Too knowing.

He smiled.

"Hello, Allen Cross."

My knees locked.

That was my name. The name of the man I used to be—before I woke up in this cursed world inside the body of Lucian Drelmont.

"You’re not supposed to know that," I said, voice dry.

The mirror didn’t answer with words. It pulsed. A ripple ran through it, and suddenly the room smelled like smoke and cheap instant noodles.

My apartment. My life. My death.

I staggered back, vision swimming.

"Host identity drifting."

"Stabilization required."

"Choose anchor."

Two symbols appeared in the mirror, burning themselves into the air like scars made of light.

The first was a sword piercing through an eye.

The second was a tree with roots tangled around a heart.

[Anchor A: Retain Lucian Drelmont — the mask, the power, the corruption.]

[Anchor B: Restore Allen Cross — the truth, the burden, the origin.]

A choice.

No. A test.

I clenched my fists.

Lucian’s body had power. Authority. Danger. It was a shield. A weapon.

Allen? Allen was a burnout. A man crushed under office deadlines, who used video games to forget he hated everything.

But Allen cared.

He knew right from wrong—even when he ran from it. Lucian didn’t. Lucian enjoyed hurting people.

What the hell was I becoming?

The mirror pulsed again, this time more urgently.

My vision flickered. I saw scenes—moments not my own. Lucian laughing as he burned a student’s project in front of the class. Allen crying silently at his work desk, a resignation letter never sent. Lucian executing a prisoner with a smile. Allen giving his food to a stray cat.

The mirror shattered.

I screamed.

When I woke, I was no longer in the ward.

I lay on the floor of my quarters, breathing hard, shirt soaked with blood and ink. The Grimoire lay open beside me.

On the page, a single line had been added in neat handwriting.

Anchor: [Fractured Self] — Hybrid accepted. Calibrated at 68.3% stability.

Beneath that, a new trait:

[Trait: Mirrorveil] — Project false emotional states and visual aura signatures. Can deceive magical detection. Caution: prolonged use may destabilize self-concept.

I exhaled slowly.

So that was the cost. I hadn’t picked either side fully.

I was no longer just Allen, and never truly Lucian.

Something else looked back from the mirror now.

Later that night, Roderick brought wine.

He didn’t ask what I’d seen.

He didn’t comment on the flicker in my eyes, or the way my smile no longer matched the curve of my mouth.

He just poured two glasses, leaned back in his chair, and said, "We lost two containment teams today. There was a third vault. It’s empty now too."

"Fragments?" I asked.

"Worse. One of them said it whispered your name before dying."

I didn’t answer.

The Grimoire hummed faintly at my side.

The Pattern had fed.

And it was still hungry.

Elsewhere...

Felix Dorne stood at the edge of his family’s swamp estate, staring at a shadow slithering just beneath the water. Cassandra stood beside him, silent as a ghost.

"Did you feel that just now?" he asked.

She didn’t respond.

But her eyes shone faintly.

Like a mirror.

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