The Glitched Mage

The forest pulsed with illusory life—roots shifting just beneath the surface, distant howls carried on a breeze that wasn't real, and the oppressive heat clinging to every breath. The students didn't know it, but none of it was real. Not the beasts. Not the wounds. Not even the blood.

But the fear? That was real.

A scream tore through the trees as a boy scrambled backward, blood pouring from what looked like a gash along his thigh. A beast made of smoke and claws barreled toward him, fangs gleaming—only for the boy to vanish mid-scream.

In a blink, he was gone.

Far above in the boughs, Aria lowered her hand. Her eyes were cold, calculating. "Too panicked. He wouldn't have made it two more minutes."

"Another illusion death?" Nyx asked, appearing beside her in a soft flicker of shadow.

"Yes," Aria replied. "Third one in the last half hour."

Nyx's gaze followed a trio of students navigating through the underbrush below. One clutched a cracked staff, another limped, and the third muttered a constant stream of spells under his breath, trying to stay brave. "This trial is a masterpiece of fear. They really think they're dying out here."

"That's the point," Riven's voice echoed softly as he emerged from the mist of the forest, his invisibility ward rippling around him before fading entirely. "If they can't master their panic in an illusion, they'll never survive the real thing."

Elsewhere, Krux stood still in the middle of a quiet glade. A girl crouched near a mana beast illusion, breathing heavily as she prepared to strike. She hesitated—but not from fear. She was watching its movements. Calculating.

Krux almost smiled. "That one's got a soldier's eye."

Then the beast lunged—and the girl didn't run. She pivoted low, slid under its swipe, and sent a blade of ice into its side. The illusion shattered like glass and faded into mist.

She blinked, confused. Looked down at her hands. The core she expected wasn't there.

"Interesting," Krux muttered, already moving on.

Back at the heart of the forest, Riven stood before an obsidian stone hidden in a veil of illusions—its runes pulsing faintly beneath his fingers. It was the anchor of the entire trial, powered by a mixture of abyssal mana and the altar's siphoned energy. Without it, the forest would collapse into dust.

"You really think they'll be ready after this?" Nyx asked, watching a pair of students get overwhelmed by a massive beast with flame-scorched fur.

"They won't all make it," Riven said calmly. "But the ones who rise—those are the ones we want in our Academy."

Another scream.

Another flick of the hand.

A student blinked out of the illusion just before the beast's claws would have struck. Safe. Alive. But changed.

"One week," Riven said quietly. "Seven days to prove they belong. Or to learn they don't."

He turned, shadows coiling at his heels as he vanished back into the trees.

The forest whispered around them, full of danger that wasn't real—but the consequences, the growth, the fear?

Those were more real than any battlefield.

—x—

By the second day, the forest was beginning to break them.

Not with claws or fire—though the illusion made it feel that way—but with exhaustion, fear, and doubt. The air felt heavier, more humid, as if the forest itself were growing more alive, more watchful. Every rustle in the leaves sent jolts of panic through weary bodies. Some students hadn't slept. Others had already stopped trusting their own senses.

None of them knew it was all a lie.

Riven watched silently from a high perch above a sun-dappled clearing, arms folded across his chest. Below, a girl with soot-smeared armor and twin braids moved like a wraith. She crouched behind a moss-covered log, breath steady, eyes locked onto the beast that sniffed the air nearby—a tusked bear made of thick, bark-like hide and steaming breath. A lesser illusion, but still deadly if approached wrong.

She didn't hesitate.

A sharp slide from cover, a burst of motion, and her blades moved in swift, practiced arcs—one to the leg, the other through the throat. The illusion shattered with a faint echo of shattering glass, its body dissolving into mist and light. She stood over the fading remnants, breathing hard but calm.

"Sera," Riven murmured. "From the Emberwatch borderlands. She's killed nine so far."

He didn't have to turn to know Nyx had arrived beside him, her voice low and amused. "She's got edge. Grit. A little reckless, but she's smart enough to survive."

Riven gave a small nod, already watching another movement far to the east.

A different clearing. A very different student.

This boy stood still—almost unnaturally still—at the center of a ring of beasts. Wolves made of fog and bone circled him, their mirrored eyes reflecting every twitch. But the boy didn't flinch. His hands glowed faintly with golden light, lines of soft, humming script curling along his forearms. As the wolves lunged, he exhaled—and in that moment, light pulsed outward.

The wolves froze mid-air, suspended in perfect silence, before dissolving all at once like dandelion fluff on the wind.

"Elion," Nyx said. "From the Sanctum Isles. No formal training, but a natural affinity for light and control."

"He's got an incredible amount of raw mana," Riven said thoughtfully. "A little refining and he could be one of the strongest students we've seen yet."

Deeper still, they passed through shadow to watch another battle—this one messier.

A hulking boy, sweat-drenched and snarling, charged a shadow-cat illusion with a flaming branch in hand. His mana surged violently, uncontrolled and wild, as he hurled the makeshift torch with a roar. The cat vanished under the impact, illusion disrupted by brute force.

He laughed, chest heaving, then stomped away toward the next sound of movement without waiting for the mist to clear.

"Too much rage," Riven muttered. "But he might survive through sheer brutality."

"He'll either be dead by day four," Nyx said, "or he'll be leading a warband."

Aria's voice cut through the newly placed comm runes. "Twelve removed so far. Most by panic collapse. One passed out from imagined blood loss."

"Good," Riven said. "We're starting to separate the weak from the strong."

But it was the girl in silver who drew his attention next.

She moved like a dream through the mist—unhurried, eyes half-lidded, her mana coiling in gentle waves around her like a second skin. She didn't fight the beasts directly. Instead, she wove illusions of herself—doubles that taunted and drew the predators in—and then struck from behind, silent and unseen.

When she walked away from a downed chimera, it took Riven a moment to realize that she hadn't actually struck it.

She had turned it against itself.

"Lysara," Nyx whispered, her tone more serious now. "From one of the tributary clans. I almost didn't let her through the gate. No record, no sponsor. But she insisted."

Riven watched the girl vanish into a swirl of fog, the illusion folding around her like a cloak. "She doesn't need a record," he said. "Her strength is proof enough."

—x—

By the third night, the false sun had vanished from the illusion, and the world turned colder. The beasts became more feral—faster, hungrier. Riven had adjusted the anchor, drawing more power from the altar to fuel the deeper layers of fear. The forest grew darker in spirit, not just in light.

Some students lit fires and circled up, pretending their companionship could hold back whatever stalked the dark.

Others went silent, alone, eyes wide with paranoia.

But a few still moved with purpose—Sera, now leading a pair of others who followed her without question. Elion, who carved runes of protection into the ground and meditated beside them. Lysara, who hadn't been seen by another student in over a day.

Riven watched them all as he stood once more at the heartstone of the illusion.

His voice carried without warning, soft and cold, whispered into the false wind.

"Three days remain. From this point forward, the trial changes."

In every quadrant, students froze. The beasts disappeared. The silence was worse than the howls.

"You've faced the forest," Riven said. "Now you face each other."

There was a pause—then a ripple of tension through the trees.

"Points will no longer be collected from mana beasts," he continued. "They will be collected… from the fallen."

Gasps echoed through the illusion as realization sank in.

The forest would offer no more prey.

Now, they were the prey.

—x—

By the fourth morning, something fundamental had shifted in the forest.

Gone were the cries of mana beasts, the growls in the dark, the flares of illusionary fur and claw. The air, still heavy with damp heat, now held a different kind of weight—one made not of danger, but suspicion and paranoia.

The silence wasn't peaceful. It was charged. Unnatural.

Riven's words from the night before still echoed like a curse in the minds of the hopefuls.

'Now you face each other.'

At first, there had been disbelief. Then hesitation. Then hunger.

Without beasts to slay, without more points to gather from them, the path forward was clear—and cruel. If they wanted to survive the trial, they would have to take the points from each other. The forest would not provide more prey. Only rivals.

And so, slowly, everything began to spiral.

A group of three students, once walking shoulder to shoulder, now moved with their hands close to their belts, to their blades, their fingers twitching with quiet spells. One drifted too far to the edge of their circle—gone in a blink, vanished into the mist with a muffled cry. The others didn't call after him. They just kept walking.

Alliances thinned. Trust vanished.

By midday, the first true fight broke out.

It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't even loud.

A boy had stumbled into a clearing, his tunic torn and smeared with mud, clutching his dagger as if it were the last thing anchoring him to life. The girl who found him didn't speak. She just attacked—fast, brutal, driven by exhaustion and desperation. Her blade flashed once, her scream louder than it needed to be, and he barely managed a shield before they crashed together.

He shouted. She clawed at his side. They tumbled to the ground, and just as the illusionary weight of his ribs cracked and the breath fled his chest—he vanished in a shimmer of silvery light. Extracted. Alive. But shaken.

She remained alone in the clearing, panting, dirt streaked across her cheeks, staring at the empty space where he'd been. A faint pulse of energy flickered in her chest—a subtle sign that his points had transferred to her. Proof of her victory. And her choice.

From above, veiled behind overlapping wards, Aria tilted her head slightly.

"She didn't want to do it," she observed, her voice low.

Beside her, Nyx crouched like a shadow-born feline, a gleam in her eye. "But she did it anyway. That's the difference."

It wasn't the only fight that day. Across the illusion, the air had begun to fill with sound again—not the primal cries of beasts, but something far more human. Magic clashing in brief, sharp bursts. Branches cracking beneath the weight of fleeing feet. Shouts—some of fury, others of betrayal. Cries for help. Pleas.

And silence.

Some still clung to ideals. They tried to reason, to negotiate. They offered alliances, shared meals, made promises. Most of them were the first to fall. They hadn't yet accepted what the trial had become. They couldn't see that this test was no longer about raw power—it was about will. Hunger. The instinct to survive, no matter the cost.

Sera moved like someone who had already accepted that truth. Her blades never left her hands now, even when she crouched to drink or curled into the roots of a tree for rest. She didn't hesitate anymore. Twice now she'd fought——once against a brute who charged her without strategy, and once against a girl she had shared firewood with on the first night. Both had come for her points. Both had fallen.

She didn't kill them. But she didn't apologize either. She fought hard, fought fast, and when their bodies flickered and vanished into the shimmer of extraction, she kept moving. Each time, the faint pulse of transferred points thudded through her chest like a war drum.

Far to the north, where the mist hung thick and pale as breath on glass, Elion remained rooted within his warded circle of runes. He hadn't moved in hours. At first, others came, curious—some hopeful, some predatory. But none could breach the barrier of his magic. The air around him buzzed with quiet force, a pressure that made intruders' teeth ache.

Two tried to attack. Both failed. One was thrown backward, unconscious before she hit the ground. The other had his magic unraveled mid-spell and woke outside the illusion, shaking with the shock of imagined death. Elion never opened his eyes. He simply sat, breathing slowly, his control absolute.

Others weren't so disciplined.

Brann, the brute of flame and fury, had stopped hunting for points. Now he hunted for the thrill. He roamed the false forest with wild laughter on his tongue, eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep and too much mana use. He had turned violent for violence's sake. Trees burned in his wake—though the illusion absorbed the damage, the psychological effect was lasting. Students fled before him, some extracted only moments before his illusions snapped bone and flesh.

His total was rising. Fast.

And then, there was Lysara.

No one could find her. Her mana signature flared and vanished like smoke on wind. She left no trail. No sounds. No warnings.

But she was there.

One student—nimble, confident, a marshland water-shaper—claimed he could track her. He'd trained in sensory magic, he said. Knew how to read terrain. His voice was cocky. Too loud.

The duel lasted eleven seconds.

He struck first.

He didn't strike again.

When he woke outside the trial, he was curled into himself, whispering her name like a question. Like a confession. Like a curse.

Back at the obsidian heart of the illusion, Riven stood unmoving, hands behind his back as he watched the chaos bloom through the anchoring runes. Dozens of flickering signals blinked across the illusion map—students clashing, collapsing, rising. The false forest had become a battlefield. Not of spells and strength.

But of survival.

"They're unraveling," Krux said through the link, his tone unreadable.

"No," Riven replied quietly. "They're being reforged."

He turned, shadows coiling at his heels as the false sky above darkened. A storm brewed on the horizon—not real, but woven from fear, seeded by the illusion itself.

"The weak devour each other," he murmured. "Because to survive as a mage, you must become ruthless. Power must be your purpose—hungered for above comfort, above pride, above all else. Only when they understand that… will they begin their true ascent."

He paused, eyes tracking the cluster of signals around the storm's epicenter.

"…they're already preparing for what comes next."

Because this trial was never about the forest.

It was about exposing who they truly were—and how far they were willing to go to rise.