Hunter Academy: Revenge of the Weakest novel Chapter 994

"That's what's bothering me. Something is strange."

Elena, the fifth in their squad and the quietest so far, finally spoke, her voice muffled behind the scarf around her mouth. "Are we sure it's not a misread from the terrain? That slope might be amplifying echoes or mana spread. We've had false positives before."

"No," Jules said, shaking his head slowly. "That pulse wasn't natural. It didn't scatter like windborne mana. It locked on for a second."

Gellard checked the readings again. The glyphs on the tablet screen pulsed once more—no longer in irregular bursts, but in a rhythm. A slow, deliberate beat. Almost… breathing.

He frowned.

"It's not fluctuating wildly," he muttered. "It's stabilizing. Like something on the other side is syncing its frequency. Like it's aware of the tag markers."

That made everyone pause.

Elena's hand hovered near her waist, close to the sidearm she usually kept holstered for emergencies. Ryn's fingers twitched against the side of his rig, scanning spikes still active.

"That's not Class-6 behavior," Jules said finally. "That's... something else."

"Maybe," Gellard replied, still staring at the screen. "But until we get full calibration and final resonance depth, we don't label it anything more than what it shows. If it reads Class-6, we treat it like Class-6."

"And if it's not?" Ryn asked, his voice dry but quieter now.

Gellard didn't look up.

"Then we'll all wish we were overestimating."

No one spoke after that.

The stakes finished syncing to the ambient mana stream, their outer rings flashing once with final confirmation. Data packets were logged, resonance signatures stored, coordinates uploaded. All that was left was the final spectral imaging.

They waited in silence, the frost clinging to their gear as if trying to pull them downward.

Jules exhaled slowly, watching his breath drift into the dark. "Readings will finish in ten."

Elena's eyes scanned the slope again, then the clouds above. "Let's just hope it doesn't open in five."

A low hum whispered again—fainter this time, like something testing its voice behind the veil.

Gellard didn't look away from the screen.

He just said, "Brace in case it does."

*****

Far from the frostbitten slope, buried beneath layers of earth and sacrificial secrecy, a circular chamber pulsed faintly with red luminescence. The walls, obsidian-like but veined with writhing streaks of coppery glyphs, seemed to breathe—slow and steady, like the heart of something not quite asleep.

At the chamber's center, an elaborate construct stood. It resembled a grotesque altar fused with machinery: gearwork etched with runes, crystal conduits humming with subdued energy, and a basin in the middle—shallow, rimmed with teeth, filling slowly with blood that trickled from four equidistant spouts. Each spout extended from a bound body slumped above, barely alive, twitching as the siphon continued.

Around the construct sat five figures in silence. Hooded and unmoving, they wore robes of differing origin and cut—some stitched from stitched leathers, others wrapped in veils of woven shadow. Only their hands showed: blackened at the fingertips, nails overgrown and marked with occult seals.

A voice cracked the stillness—not spoken aloud, but pressed directly into the minds of those present.

"𐑒𐐭𐑛𐐬𐑂…𐑅𐐯𐑊𐑉…"

It was not language. Not in the human sense. The syllables were jagged, wrong—each one resonating deep in the spinal cord, like splinters against thought.

The construct responded.

The blood in the basin began to rise, not with volume, but with pressure—levitating in long, glistening threads that twisted upward like red silk unraveling in reverse. At the apex of the arc, just above the machine, the threads converged into a spinning sphere. It trembled once.

Then—

FWHOOOM.