The Anomaly
CHAPTER 1: THE ANOMALY
The atmospheric pressure inside the dingy, industrial side apartment of District 9 didn’t just drop; it shattered.
Evangeline Vance pressed her palms against her temple, a low, rhythmic throbbing vibrating against her skull. On the scratched wooden desk in front of her, the digital clock flickered. 11:58 PM. In less than two minutes, she would turn nineteen.
To the rest of the mundane world outside her window, nineteen was just another year of scraping by, paying transit taxes, and trying to survive the choking smog of Earth’s lower sectors. But to Eva, nineteen felt like an approaching execution.
For months, her vision had been glitching.
She stared down at her hands. Her pulse points were glowing, not with light, but with a strange, dark distortion that seemed to swallow the ambient illumination of her desk lamp. As a student of structural mechanics, she had spent her life analyzing the world through logic, geometry, and cold data. But logic couldn't explain the invisible ripples tearing through the air around her.
11:59 PM.
"Come on," Eva whispered, her jaw tightening. "Hold it together."
Then, midnight struck.
A soundless detonation ripped outward from her chest. It didn't break the glass windows, and it didn't disrupt the cheap furniture in her dingy apartment. Instead, every single electronic device within a three mile radius instantly went black. The streetlights outside died. The hum of the city grid vanished into absolute, suffocating silence.
In the center of the room, Eva gasped, falling to her knees. Her eyes, usually a calm, observant hazel, had turned into terrifying, pitch-black voids that reflected absolutely nothing.
She didn't know it yet, but across the uncharted Atlantic waters, deep within the hidden geographical dead zone where the five ruling bloodlines held humanity by the throat, a massive ancient monolith inside the Aethelgard Institute of Awakening had just cracked down the center.
The forbidden Aurelius line had just woken up.
Three months later, the sky above the Aethelgard Domain was choked with blue and gray clouds.
Eva stood at the iron gates of the Institute, her fingers tightly gripping the strap of her duffel bag. She was wearing a standardized, unadorned gray uniform, the mark of a low-tier commoner. They had found her within six hours of her awakening. Men in tailored black coats with crests that looked like a scroll was embedded within had knocked on her door, offered her a choice between an "evaluation scholarship" or staying in that shitty facility on the other side of the continent until further notice. it wasn't much of a choice really.
"Don't look them in the eye," a sharp, furious voice whispered beside her.
Eva glanced to her left. Standing next to her was Nora, a fierce looking girl with wild amber eyes and a uniform that already bore minor scorch marks around the cuffs.
"who are they?" Eva asked quietly, her voice entirely devoid of the panic most commoners felt. Her mind was already operating like a computer, scanning the massive, Gothic modern stone architecture of the campus, mapping the guard patrol routes, and calculating the strange, heavy energy radiating from the black lake behind the academy.
"Worse. The legacies," Nora muttered, spitting onto the stone path. "Look up at the balcony."
Eva shifted her gaze.
High above the courtyard, leaning against a carved obsidian railing, stood the upperclassmen. But one figure anchored the gravity of the entire space.
He looked barely twenty, with stark, silver white hair that caught the gray light and cold, penetrating silver eyes. He wore a tailored black and gold uniform that screamed absolute authority. Julian Zenith-Sterling. The absolute peak of nobility, and the weaponized heir bred to hold the monopoly on power.
As Julian casually looked down at the incoming flock of freshmen, he let his spirit energy ripple outward. A subtle, invisible pressure that made ninety percent of the new students instantly drop their heads in instinctual submission. Nora ground her teeth, her fists igniting with a faint, volatile puff of blue flame before she suppressed it.
Eva, however, didn't blink.
When Julian’s silver gaze drifted across the crowd, it casually swept over her.
And then, for the first time in his life, Julian froze.
To a master of the spiritual system, the world was a deafening roar of people's rotting, greedy, terrified and most intimate thoughts and secrets. But the moment his energy brushed against Evangeline Vance, the noise stopped. It didn't just fade, it was deleted. She wasn't a mind he could read or a puppet he could pull. She was a profound, absolute void of complete silence.
Julian’s eyes narrowed, his fingers tightening against the stone railing. A dark, dangerous curiosity sparked in his violet pupils.
Eva felt the weight of his gaze, but her analytical mind simply registered it as a variable to be calculated even though she felt astonished as to the kind of aura he had . She calmly tore her eyes away from the so called "rookie king" and walked toward the grand hall.
She didn't notice the shadow standing in the architectural blind spot of the western tower.
Malakai Cross leaned against the cold stone, his second year black uniform unbuttoned at the collar, a mocking, solitary smile playing on his lips. His crimson eyes; the mark of a pariah bloodline were fixed entirely on Eva's retreating figure.
He didn't need a diviner to know who she was. The ancient, suppressed blood inside his own veins was roaring, demanding that he drop to one knee before a girl who didn't even know her own name.
A feeling he didn't quite like.
Malakai glanced up at the balcony, watching Julian's pristine, tyrannical facade begin to fracture from across the courtyard.
"Let the game begin, you beautiful monster because truth be told he had never laid sight on anyone as beautiful," Malakai whispered into the dark, his hand subtly tapping the dagger hidden beneath his sleeve.
