A week had passed on the road. Seven days of monotonous rhythm: step, inhale, the crunch of dry twigs underfoot. The forest beyond Zeno’s cabin began to change. It grew denser, “cluttered” with minor magical distortions. Here and there, trees had unnaturally twisted branches, or patches of ground where grass grew with its roots pointing upward.

  My shoulder had fully healed. The new armor, “version 2.1,” performed flawlessly. The braided cords I had used to replace rigid fastenings provided the exact necessary give. Now, when I moved, the bone plates no longer dug into my body—they slid smoothly with my muscles. It was an honest engineering victory: I hadn’t grown stronger; I had simply reduced the friction between myself and my protection.

  [Will to Live] was dormant. I had learned to keep it in deep hibernation, allowing it to signal me only occasionally with a faint tingling at the back of my skull when nearby mana became too unstable.

  “Approaching,” Zeno said briefly, without looking back.

  We reached a temporary camp set in a depression between two rocky hills. It wasn’t like the fortified hunter villages we had visited before. More like a forward post, hastily assembled from tarps, stakes, and a few protective amulets thrust into the ground. The air smelled of iron and something acidic, like a battery workshop.

  Three figures greeted us. They sat by a fire over which a small cauldron hung, but at our arrival, they rose in sync. No panic, no flurry—just three professionals accustomed to the forest rarely giving up anything friendly.

  “Zeno?” the eldest, a man with graying stubble and heavy eyes, lowered his hand from the hilt of a short sword. “Old fox, I thought you had long vanished into your wilderness.”

  “You’ll wait in vain, Kael,” Zeno smirked, approaching the fire. “I brought you a helper. We need to pass through the ‘Blind Sector,’ and I hear there’s a cleanup scheduled.”

  Kael glanced at me. His eyes narrowed, scanning my homemade armor, my height, the way I carried myself. Beside him stood two others: a tall woman with slender, constantly moving fingers—a clear sensor—and a bulky guy whose arms were covered in protective tattoos all the way to the elbows.

  “A kid?” the woman frowned. “Zeno, we’re going to the ‘Pulsator.’ The background there is enough to make unprepared vessels rupture in five minutes. Why bring this ballast?”

  “This ballast reads anomaly structures faster than your amulets, Rina,” Zeno replied calmly. “And he’s not a ‘kid.’ He’s a component that may come in handy when your plan goes to dust.”

  I stayed silent. Arguing made no sense. I simply stepped slightly aside, listening to the hum of the “Pulsator” echoing from somewhere beyond the hills. It was a low-frequency rhythm, vibrating deep in the bones. [Will to Live] stirred faintly inside me, acknowledging the threat.

  “Fine,” Kael nodded shortly. “We leave in ten minutes. We need to seal the point before it goes into resonance. Kid,” he looked directly at me, “if you fall behind or start ‘glitching’—we drop you. Group rules.”

  “Understood,” I answered, my voice surprisingly steady.

  Moving as a group proved harder than surviving alone. It was an entire science of vector synchronization. Kael led, cutting through major energy spikes with his stabilizer sword. Rina constantly scanned the area, sending out brief mana pulses that returned with information on air density. Bram—the muscle-bound guy—closed the formation, maintaining a dome of passive protection around us.

  I walked between Zeno and Bram. My task was not to draw attention, but I couldn’t just follow. My mind automatically synced into their system. I could see where Bram’s dome thinned over uneven terrain. I felt Rina’s pulses stumble against invisible barriers.

  “System overloaded by 12%. Group rhythm unstable,” my inner voice noted.

  We delved into the Blind Sector. Here, reality began to completely “flow.” Trees became semi-transparent columns, and the ground beneath my feet felt sometimes like soft sand, sometimes like solid metal.

  “Attention,” Rina commanded. “Ahead: the Distorter. Type—wandering.”

  From the fog, as if through a torn wound in space, something emerged. It was not a living creature. A mass of geometric planes, flesh fragments, and sparking arcs, chaotically assembled into a horse-sized heap. It moved in jerks, changing shape every second.

  “Bram, hold it! Rina—fix it!” Kael shouted.

  They worked like clockwork. Bram slammed his fists into the ground, his tattoos flaring blue. The dome around us thickened, taking the first blow from the Distorter. Rina raised her hands, and glowing threads shot from her fingers, attempting to anchor the anomaly in one point of space.

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  I stood frozen, seeing what they could not. Not part of their magical academy, I looked at the anomaly not as a monster, but as a technical malfunction.

  “Left!” I shouted, breaking the silence. “Its assembly point is shifted fifteen degrees left of center! You’re striking a phantom!”

  Kael hesitated for a split second, but Rina, used to trusting instincts, instantly redirected her threads. They latched onto the seemingly empty space, and the Distorter suddenly gained density. A screech sounded, like tearing metal.

  “The kid’s right!” Bram hissed, holding the dome under a barrage of blows. “Hit it, Kael!”

  Kael lunged forward. His sword flashed a blinding white. One precise strike into the core I had highlighted with a brief mana pulse, and the anomaly collapsed into a heap of lifeless debris.

  For a moment, the world fell silent. Kael panted heavily, hands on his knees. His sword slowly cooled in his grasp.

  “How did you know?” Rina approached, wiping sweat from her forehead. Her eyes no longer held disdain. There was professional curiosity.

  “Interference,” I replied, adjusting my pauldron. “Its mana created echoes. You targeted the source of the sound, not the speaker.”

  Zeno, standing a little apart, smirked into his beard but said nothing.

  We reached the Pulsator an hour later. The sight was horrific. In a small hollow hovered a massive, pulsating cluster of inky-black energy. It expanded and contracted like a mechanical heart, and with every “beat,” a wave rippled through the forest, causing leaves to instantly fall and turn to ash.

  “If we don’t ground it now, in half an hour there’ll be a city-sized hole in space,” Kael checked his amulets. “Plan: Bram and Rina form a containment perimeter. I go to the center and drive in a stabilizing rod. Zeno, cover the rear. Kid… stay here and monitor the flows. If the perimeter fails—shout.”

  They began. It was beautiful and terrifying. Magic flowed in streams, forming complex geometric shapes. Bram and Rina stood at the hollow’s edge, maintaining the energy lattice. Kael, staggering under immense pressure, descended with a heavy metal rod etched in runes.

  I watched, feeling [Will to Live] stir. Pressure in the zone was extreme. My vessels began to pulse, a characteristic whistle of overload appearing in my ears.

  “Warning. Environment critically unstable. Activation of protection recommended.”

  “No,” I whispered. “Not yet.”

  Kael was five meters from the center when the Pulsator surged unexpectedly. Rina’s lattice snapped with a dry crack. Bram fell to one knee, his tattoos smoking and burning his skin. Kael was simply thrown onto the rocks.

  “Hold him!” Rina screamed, trying to repair the weave, but her fingers trembled with fatigue.

  I knew if I didn’t intervene now, we’d all be atomized. But I wasn’t a mage. I had no techniques. I had only my body, my skill, and my understanding of the process physics.

  I lunged forward.

  “Iron, wait!” Zeno shouted, but I ignored him.

  I activated [Will to Live] at 30%. The world went gray. Shoulder pain vanished instantly, replaced by icy calm. I saw the energy flows like force lines on a blueprint. Rina’s perimeter sagged in sector 4-B. Bram was losing grounding.

  I grabbed Bram by his scorched forearm without hesitation.

  “Use me as a shunt!” I yelled. “Dump the excess through my channels! My armor is insulated!”

  The hulking man looked at me wildly, but had no choice. He redirected the flow.

  It felt as if molten lead had been poured into my veins. My reinforced vessels, trained for three months, groaned. The armor vibrated, bone plates clicked, absorbing and redistributing colossal energy. The dampers I painstakingly cut at night were at their limit—they softened the recoil, preventing my spine from shattering.

  I became a living lightning rod.

  Through me, Bram’s mana flowed into the ground, stabilizing the overall field. This gave Rina the few seconds she needed to mend the lattice breach.

  “Kael, now! Go!” I rasped. White haze flickered before my eyes—dangerous sign. My body burned.

  Kael, bloodied but alive, leapt to his feet and drove the rod into the pulsating core with a single powerful motion.

  A brilliant flash. Silence.

  I released Bram and sank to my knees. [Will to Live] shut down instantly, leaving me alone with a body that felt as if it had been run over by a fully loaded wagon. Every nerve screamed from overload. Shoulder throbbed sharply, stabbing pain.

  “How… how are you even alive?” Bram panted, looking at his hands, no longer smoking. “A flow that could have turned a kid your size into ash passed through you.”

  I tried to answer, but only a dry rasp escaped my throat. I simply gave a thumbs-up with my trembling right hand.

  Kael approached, wiping blood from his chin. He glanced at the silent Pulsator, then at me. His look held no doubt. Respect—the kind given to a reliable tool that didn’t fail at a critical moment.

  “Zeno,” Kael turned to the approaching old man. “Where did you find him?”

  “I didn’t,” Zeno helped me up, throwing his cloak over my shoulders. “He found himself. And apparently, he’s only beginning to understand what his ‘honest’ system is capable of.”

  That evening, we sat in the same camp. But the atmosphere had changed. I was no longer on the sidelines. Rina treated my hand burns with a cooling ointment, while Bram slipped me the best pieces of meat from the cauldron.

  “You made a mistake, kid,” Kael said quietly, sitting next to me. “You exposed yourself to the direct flow. That could’ve killed you.”

  “I knew my system’s tolerances,” I replied, feeling the ointment’s warmth calm my skin. “If I hadn’t intervened, the lattice would have collapsed. Our chance of survival would have been less than five percent. I chose the option with minimal loss.”

  Kael smirked.

  “Rational son of a gun. You’re not a mage. You’re something else. And that’s what we need in the team.”

  I stared into the fire. Hands still trembling, shoulder aching, and a strange emptiness inside—a price for using [Will to Live] as a conductor. But for the first time, I didn’t feel like a lone hunter. I was part of the mechanism. One cog, small but keeping the whole machine from breaking.

  I closed my eyes. Ahead lay a long road, new anomalies, and most likely, even more pain. But now I knew: I could make mistakes, suffer, be a weak eleven-year-old—and still change the rules of the game.

  Because control isn’t just strength. It’s knowing when to become a living shunt to save the rest.

  “Sleep,” Zeno’s voice was surprisingly soft. “You’ll need your strength.”

  I didn’t argue. Sleep came instantly—deep, heavy, completely calm.