Exam - 10 Web

Alex returned to the courtyard with the emotional range of a brick that had been stepped on repeatedly. The magical archways flickered in mild confusion as he passed—perhaps sensing the deep, simmering grump aura emanating from every pore of his being.

The day had been one long performance of frustration. Misinformation, cloaked data trails, erased records, and entire junior squads vanishing like over-budget stagehands. And to top it off, the subtle realization that they'd all been waltzing through carefully disguised illusions left every member of his team somewhere between irritable and volcanic.

Davor had punched a pillar. It hadn't deserved it, but he claimed the structural integrity had been suspicious.

Marell snapped at a report parchment and told it to stop lying.

Jamie nearly threw her comm-crystal out the window after it refused to stop autocorrecting "disappearance" to "reassignment."

Even Orin, usually the calmest, was caught mid-rant about illusion masking protocols while chewing on a mana-stabilized pen. No one asked questions. They just gave him a second pen and a privacy charm.

Now, back at the courtyard, the war room table (which used to be a tea table) was buried under a mess of hasty notes, scrambled dossiers, half-unrolled scrolls, and hastily constructed conspiracy strings tied together by actual enchanted yarn. Someone had moved all their antiques—like the old scrying compass, a cracked echo-stone, and the memory-jar Marell swore still giggled at night—off the side shelf to make room for more document trays.

Files shifted constantly. Pallen had instituted a rotating queue of update parchments, and Jamie had started organizing the pile based on 'Likelihood to Cause Existential Dread.' The high-priority bin had a glowing rune that pulsed more out of spite than urgency.

Alex dropped into his chair without ceremony. His usual side tray—complete with chocolate creamed almond puffs and pistachio flavored raisin cookies—sat untouched beside him. A tragedy not even the cookies could fix.

"We've been dancing in someone else's illusion field all day," he muttered, voice tired, brittle. "And we only realized it after they changed the music."

The rest of the team sat nearby in various degrees of collapse, skimming through the reports.

One page updated itself mid-read, revealing yet another contradiction.

"If I see one more 'internal prioritization notice' I'm going to re-prioritize someone's face," Marell muttered.

Alex rubbed his eyes, sighing. "How are we supposed to counter this when even the documentation has trust issues?"

He reached half-heartedly for a puff. Held it. Put it back.

Then, without shame or self-preservation, Rahul reached out and grabbed one.

There was a pause.

Alex turned, slowly, eyes sharp enough to shave granite.

Rahul took a bite, chewed, and said flatly, "If you didn't want it, I'm helping the economy of emotional recovery. It's a kindness."

Alex narrowed his eyes further but said nothing. Barely.

Rahul continued unfazed, letting the next bite melt on his tongue. "You know, this is different from the ones my grandmother used to make back home. Hers were rougher, less polished—but somehow warmer. She'd add this tiny hint of burnt cinnamon, said it helped hide imperfections. We didn't know the difference, just thought they were magic."

He leaned back, smiling faintly. "She used to create illusions around the garden—small ones, little things to play with our senses. We'd chase butterflies that weren't there, get lost in a maze of three bushes. It was playful, never deceitful. We only found out much later—after we were older, after the training started—that she was once a recognized illusion master. The seniors whispered about her like she'd rewritten some of the base matrices."

His voice turned a little softer. "She never flaunted it. Said power was a story better told through laughter than awe."

Rahul sat forward again, more thoughtful now. "Her illusions weren't just visual. She wove in sound techniques and minor mana disruptions. You couldn't tell where one sense ended and another began. It taught me something early—no illusion is perfect. It needs other support. Because mana isn't static. It shifts, it breathes. And unless you guide it—mask it—it'll always give the game away."

That made everyone pause.

"So this morning… whoever pulled it off didn't just cast a visual illusion," he said slowly. "They performed."

Davor grunted, brow furrowed. "Means we've been staring at the wrong angle. We were watching the stage. Not the crew."

"Exactly," Orin said, eyes lighting up. "We've been looking for a single caster signature, when it was likely a constructed net—ambient mana redirection, embedded sound distortion, maybe even temporal masking. Which would require enormous prep... and support."

"Support web," Orin added, already pulling out a different set of mana-filtered overlays. "If it was real, it would've needed layered distractions, audio illusions, maybe localized time shifts. That means resonance echoes... and if we're lucky, leftover fragments."

It didn't take long for the team to shift focus. Papers reshuffled. Illusion patterns layered with known mana signatures. Background noise recalibrated.

The late-night work began with optimism and momentum… and gradually descended into rage and despair.

Jamie had chased down a paper trail that began promisingly—cross-referencing instructor access logs with private estate visits—only to find it ended in an archived tea ceremony schedule. With calligraphy flourishes. She screamed silently into her scarf for a full minute.

Pallen unearthed what looked like a sponsorship ledger buried in a curriculum update... which turned out to be a noble's meal plan annotated with emotional intent tracking. It included phrases like "Tuesday stew: bitter like my mother's expectations." It was illuminating. Just not helpfully so.

Orin had tracked three aura signatures from the testing area through resonance blotches, convinced they indicated cross-house communication. But the path led to a theater club rehearsal involving explosive stagecraft and an actual magical chicken. Even the chicken had an alibi.

And Davor, bless him, had followed a trail of surveillance reports that turned out to be Jamie's mislabeled hobby records. She'd been tracking flower growth near mana vents. Davor was so annoyed, he refused to speak for ten whole minutes.

Each document had potential. Each document betrayed them.

Alex, silent in the center of it all, kept turning pages and muttering under his breath about inherited incompetence and the great-grand-uncle who apparently once mistook a binding sigil for a soup recipe.

The growing mess on the table reflected the growing frustration in the room. Scrolls began sliding off corners. Ink stains spread across the edges of important maps. Someone knocked over a rune stabilizer and didn't bother setting it back up.

It was only then—after they'd exhausted every promising lead, after Jamie had declared the table cursed and Orin nearly lit a report on fire out of spite—that the servant's pause broke the spiral.

He just stared at a pattern in one of the mana-thread projection logs, mouth slightly open.

Pallen glanced up. "What? You find a secret summoning?"

The servant pointed to the sequence. "No. But this pattern—it's wrong. It's too smooth."

Marell stood. "Too smooth?"

"It loops," the servant said. "Like someone recorded background mana flow and replayed it. This isn't real-time. It's a feed."

Now the entire room was standing.

Alex stepped forward. "Run it through everything. If this loops, it's a cover feed. And that means... someone didn't just cast an illusion. They broadcasted a false reality."

He didn't need to say it aloud, but they all thought it:

Someone had the resources to alter the visible truth of Arcana.

And they'd used it on a bunch of students.

The chocolate almond puff sat, still forgotten.

Arcana had officially out-weirded itself.

And Alex was really not in the mood.