The door sealed with a hum that Jace felt in his fillings.

  Ward-lines blazed along the frame - pre-existing enchantments carved into the reinforced concrete by whoever had built this shelter, designed for containment events the academy hoped would never happen and had planned for anyway. The blue-white glow stabilized, connecting with the ward-network that ran through the walls, the floor, the ceiling - a geometric cage of protective energy that wrapped the room in a shell of focused intent.

  For three seconds, nobody moved. The silence inside the ward-shell was absolute - a muffled, pressurized quiet that made the air feel thick, as if the room had been sealed in glass. Outside, somewhere beyond the concrete and the light, the scratching continued. A dry, patient sound, like claws testing the surface of something they hadn't yet decided to tear open.

  Then someone cried. A freshman - a boy, small, pressed into the corner near the overturned podium - made a sound that was halfway between a sob and a gasp. The sound broke the seal on everyone else's silence, and the room filled with the controlled chaos of twenty-three people trying to process the fact that they were alive and that alive was not the same as safe.

  Jace leaned against the wall beside the door and took stock.

  The lecture hall was built for maybe forty. It felt smaller with twenty-three - bodies and fear taking up more space than the mathematics of square footage accounted for. Emergency lighting came from the ward-lines themselves, the blue-white glow casting hard shadows that made everyone look hollow and strange. The ceiling was low - maybe three meters - reinforced concrete supported by steel I-beams that Jace could feel thrumming faintly with residual mana from the academy's damaged conduit network. There were no windows. One door. Two ventilation shafts, both narrow and warded separately.

  *A box. A good box, but still a box.*

  He cataloged the people.

  His group occupied the near wall. Torrin had positioned himself beside the door without being asked - standing, not sitting, his Holdfast Plate catching the ward-light, his massive frame a physical fact between the entrance and everyone behind it. Mara was already on her knees beside Edric, Kael's [Shield Bearer], her hands extending the diagnostic tendrils of [Triage Sense] toward the spreading grey on his torso. Elara crouched near the wall opposite, her remaining rune-strips laid out on the concrete beside her in a precise row - two concussive, one binding - each one representing a finite amount of violence she could still project into a world that demanded infinite.

  Kael's people were in the second row of bolted-down desks. Kael himself sat with Edric's head resting against his thigh, one hand on his teammate's shoulder, his fire-silk vest hanging dark and cold. The ambient mana drain from the Stalkers' proximity had starved his class's passive effects - no heat bleed, no flicker of contained flame, just a boy in expensive armor that had stopped being magical. Devi Shan, the [Wind Caller], sat beside him with her knees drawn up, her hands clasped in her lap, the pre-cast gestures she usually cycled through conspicuously absent. She was conserving. Smart. The third-year [Evoker] - a broad-shouldered young man whose name Jace still didn't know - was propped against a desk, holding a wadded strip of fabric to the scalp wound that had painted the left side of his face in drying red. His broken staff lay across his lap in two pieces, and his expression carried the specific blankness of someone whose primary weapon and casting focus had been destroyed.

  The freshmen filled the back of the room. Fifteen of them - eleven from Torrin's dormitory evacuation plus the four Kael's group had collected in the stairwell - huddled in loose clusters that mapped to whatever social bonds they'd formed in their first weeks at the academy. Some were crying. Some were silent. Some were staring at the walls with the fixed, glassy focus of people who were hearing the scratching and trying very hard to believe it was something else.

  The [Herbalist] girl Mara had carried from the common room lay on a folded jacket near the far wall, her broken arm splinted with strips torn from someone's uniform, the grey shadow-taint on her forearm held at bay by the residual healing mana Mara had invested. The [Apprentice Smith] - the stocky boy from the dormitory - sat beside her, his own tainted wounds wrapped in makeshift bandaging. He was conscious. He was pale. He kept looking at the grey patches on his torso the way you look at a stain that won't come out.

  And against the wall near the podium, the teaching assistant - Halric, a young [Skirmisher] whose primary qualification for being in this shelter was that he'd been running drills with freshmen in the eastern training yard when the breach hit and had shepherded six of them into the sub-level before the Stalkers cut off the corridor above. He carried a short sword and the expression of someone who had not signed up for this. His eyes kept moving to the door. To the walls. Back to the door.

  "Is it going to hold?" Halric asked. His voice aimed for authority and landed somewhere near desperation.

  Elara answered. She'd moved to the nearest wall and was running her fingers along the ward-lines, her [Scribe]'s inscription knowledge translating the enchantment grammar with the same analytical fluency she brought to everything. Her fingertips traced the geometric patterns - reading the flow, the density, the structural architecture of protections that had been built into this room by someone considerably more powerful than anyone currently inside it.

  "The ward matrix is multi-layered," she said. Her voice was clinical. Steady. The voice she used when the situation was bad enough that precision was the only tool she had left. "General-purpose containment, rated for Level 6 to 8 standard threats. The construction is solid - Uncommon-tier inscription work at minimum, possibly Rare-tier foundation glyphs in the floor. It was designed to handle a sustained assault from conventional dungeon fauna."

  "Void-Stalkers aren't conventional," Jace said.

  "No." Her fingers paused on a junction point where two ward-lines met. The glow there was slightly uneven - a flicker, barely perceptible, the enchantment equivalent of a hairline crack. "The ward's defensive paradigm assumes physical threats. Kinetic force. Elemental energy. Creatures that interact with matter in standard ways. Void-Stalkers phase through physical barriers and drain mana directly from their environment. The wards will resist the drain - that's part of their function, maintaining internal mana coherence against external disruption. But they're *static*. They can't adapt. They can't be replenished." She pulled her hand back from the wall. "They're a battery. Not a generator."

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  "How long?" Torrin asked from the door.

  Elara's jaw tightened. The question she didn't want to answer. "I don't know. Hours, certainly. The ward density is high enough that passive drain will take time to degrade the matrix below functional threshold. But I can't calculate the rate without knowing the precise number and tier of the creatures outside, and I can't-"

  "Hours," Jace said. "That's enough for now." He looked at Mara. "The injured?"

  She didn't look up from Edric. Her hands were pressed against his torso, the golden glow of healing mana threadbare between her fingers - the last reserves of a pool she'd been running empty since the breach began. Her eyes were half-closed, [Triage Sense] mapping the shadow-taint's progress through mana-resonance rather than visual assessment.

  "Edric's taint is at his shoulder and progressing toward his core. His Vitality is slowing it - I'd estimate three to four hours before it reaches critical junctions. I can slow it further, but I can't stop it. I don't have the power or the specialization." She shifted her attention without moving her hands, her [Triage Sense] extending toward the other wounded. "The [Herbalist] is stable - the taint on her arm isn't advancing. The earlier healing took root. The [Apprentice Smith] has surface contamination that's responding to his own Vitality. He'll scar, but he'll live."

  "The [Evoker]?" Jace nodded toward the third-year with the scalp wound.

  "Concussion. No shadow-taint - his wound is physical, not phase-touched. He needs rest and probably stitches, but he's not in danger." She paused. The pause carried weight. "Jace. I have maybe fifteen minutes of active healing left in my pool. After that, I'm running on ambient absorption, and the ambient mana in here is already lower than it should be."

  Because the Stalkers were draining it. Even through the wards, the creatures' presence was a slow leak - pulling energy from the environment, thinning the mana-field that Mara's regeneration depended on.

  A feedback loop. The longer they stayed, the weaker their healer became.

  "Conserve," Jace said. "Minimum viable treatment on Edric. Keep the taint from advancing. Nothing else unless someone's life is in immediate danger."

  "Jace-"

  "I know." His voice was quieter than he wanted. Harder than he intended. "I know what that means. But we can't spend what we don't have. Not yet."

  Mara held his gaze for a beat. Two. Then she nodded - the sharp, professional nod of someone accepting a triage protocol they hated - and reduced her channeling to the barest trickle, a thin golden thread of mana holding the line between Edric's shoulder and his core.

  Kael watched this exchange with flat, unblinking eyes. He said nothing. His hand stayed on Edric's shoulder.

  The scratching outside the door intensified. A rhythmic pattern now - not random testing, but deliberate probing, the same section of wall being stressed repeatedly as if something were measuring the ward's response to sustained pressure.

  Jace activated [Mana Sense]. Two seconds - all he could afford. The pulse cost him six MP, leaving his pool somewhere in the low teens, and the information it returned was a snapshot: three void-signatures circling the room at a distance of approximately fifteen meters, moving in a synchronized pattern that covered all four walls and the floor. A fourth signature, fainter, deeper - below them, in the sub-level's utility corridors, moving with slower deliberation.

  Four confirmed. Maybe more beyond his range.

  He let the Sense fade and breathed through the hollow ache it left behind.

  "Four contacts," he said, keeping his voice low enough for his team and Kael's group but not the freshmen. "Three circling, one below. They're probing in a coordinated pattern. Testing the wards from multiple angles simultaneously."

  "Intelligent," Elara said. She didn't sound surprised. She sounded like she'd expected it and wished she hadn't been right.

  "They're pack hunters," Jace said. "Elara briefed me earlier - Conclave research on Tier 2 shadow-plane predators. They coordinate through an alpha. The subordinates probe and the alpha directs."

  "How do you know one of those signatures isn't the alpha?"

  "I don't."

  Silence. The scratching continued.

  Halric stood up from his position near the podium and gripped his short sword with both hands. The blade trembled. "If they get through the door, I'll hold the entrance. Buy time for the students to-"

  "To go where?" Torrin's voice was low and even and carried no malice, which somehow made the question worse. "There's one door and no windows. If they breach, we're all in the same room."

  Halric's face went grey. The sword continued to tremble.

  "Nobody's breaching anything yet," Jace said. He met Halric's eyes - the TA was maybe four years older than Jace, Level 8 or 9, a [Skirmisher] with decent fundamentals and no experience with anything that couldn't be cut. "Keep your weapon ready. Stay near the freshmen. If they panic, you're the authority figure. Give them something to focus on."

  It was a role assignment. Not a combat one - a leadership one. Halric's grip on the sword steadied. Not because the fear left, but because having a job meant having a direction, and direction was a substitute for courage when courage had run out.

  Jace turned back to the room. Twenty-three people. Three injured. One healer on fumes. Three rune-strips. Two [Skirmisher]-class combatants (Halric and Jace) with no ability to interact with phase-state enemies. One [Brawler] whose fists couldn't touch shadows. One [Blaze Dancer] whose fire fed the things hunting them. One [Wind Caller] with enough mana for two or three gusts. One [Scribe] who'd already spent most of her arsenal. One broken [Evoker] with no staff. And fifteen children.

  The ward-light on the eastern wall flickered.

  Not a long interruption - barely a heartbeat of dimness, the enchantment stuttering before reasserting itself. But in that fraction of a second, the blue-white glow dipped to amber, and the shadows in the room stretched and deepened, and every person in the lecture hall stopped breathing.

  The glow stabilized. The breathing resumed.

  But the scratching outside the door was louder now. And from the wall to their left - the interior wall, the one that connected to the sub-level corridor - came a new sound.

  Not scratching.

  *Tapping.* Slow. Rhythmic. Patient.

  Something was knocking.