Ronan froze.

Not from fear, but from confusion and shock.

He’d half expected to get a quest during the final battle, one he fully intended to ignore should the penalty allow it, but this wasn’t what he’d been anticipating at all.

He stared at the system screen, rereading the penalty line twice to make sure the implication was real.

[Failure Penalty: A high-grade, malicious parasitic entity will identify you as a viable host.]

That made no sense.

The Refinement Leech was a parasite. High-grade. Many would describe it as malicious.

It was drawn to exactly the conditions Ronan had been trying to create: distorted mana, exhausted cores, fractured nodes, unstable battlefield flow.

Is the system threatening me with something I want?

He didn’t understand. Confused would be an understatement to what he was feeling.

His eyes flicked toward Luca. The protagonist staggered under another coordinated attack, blood dripping from a shallow cut across his ribs. His movements were still sharp, still controlled, but slower. The students surrounding him weren’t strong enough to kill him – not even close – but they’d learned to time their strikes, to pressure him into defending rather than counterattacking, to wear him down without giving him an opening to escape.

Luca sent him a look, noticing him for a slight second before turning back and fighting. He likely didn’t care that Ronan wasn’t helping, as long as he didn’t interfere.

Ronan watched for three seconds longer.

Then he turned away.

The system wanted him to run toward the protagonist. To insert himself into Luca’s orbit. To play the role of convenient ally, useful pawn, or disposable support character. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

But that didn’t interest him. The system seemed to have majorly misunderstood what his intention was in this exam, which was odd since he’d seen it as this all knowing entity before this.

I guess it’s a lot more limited than I thought, Ronan mused to himself. That’s useful information to keep in mind.

[4 minutes, 32 seconds remaining.]

Ronan kept moving through the smoke and broken ground, detection rune pulsing faintly in his palm. His gaze swept across the battlefield’s outer edges, searching for mana distortions, strange temperature shifts, anything that resembled what he’d read about the leech.

The leech wouldn’t manifest at the center.

It would follow the runoff and attach itself to a dying, weak host. Not insert itself into the center of the battle and die a pathetic death.

That was how parasites survived.

[3 minutes, 47 seconds remaining.]

Behind him, Luca grunted as another spell glanced off his shoulder.

The system called the penalty malicious.

He was aware that most people would consider it malicious. But was it really? A parasite was malicious by nature – it fed, attached, altered its host’s mana flow. The Refinement Leech was dangerous, unstable, and often fatal if the host couldn’t adapt quickly enough.

But danger and malice weren’t the same thing.

Was he just overthinking this?

Probably.

Ronan dismissed the thought.

The system had never given him complete information before. It framed quests in ways that pushed him toward specific outcomes, offered vague descriptions, withheld context. This felt like more of the same.

But he couldn’t falter. The leech was more important than the mystery skill he would receive.

[2 minutes, 58 seconds remaining.]

He crouched near a patch of disturbed earth where mana pooled unnaturally. Sapphire’s detection ward flickered, reacted briefly, then settled.

Nothing.

Ronan exhaled slowly and kept searching.

The battlefield roared around him. Explosions cracked through the clearing. Students screamed orders, accusations, desperate warnings.

Somewhere near the statue, Iris’s voice rose sharp and strained as Freya’s disruption rune began twisting the dual-node flow beneath her control.

Ronan ignored all of it.

[1 minute, 43 seconds remaining.]

He reached the forest’s edge and scanned the terrain one more time.

The ideal conditions were here: exhausted students, fractured mana, unstable node synchronization, fear thick enough to taste.

The leech should have appeared by now.

But it hadn’t.

Which meant either he’d misunderstood the requirements, or the creature simply wasn’t present in this part of the battlefield.

Ronan’s jaw tightened.

He glanced back toward Luca one final time.

The protagonist was still standing, still fighting, still holding back power he couldn’t reveal.

He wasn’t dying. He wasn’t even close.

The system doesn’t want me to save his life. There’s little I could do to help a monster like him. I just want to drag me into the story.

The blatant manipulation irritated him a little bit, but he ignored those feelings, staying focused.

[47 seconds remaining.]

Ronan closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and looked at the detection ward in his palm. It pulsed faintly, steady and unremarkable.

He still had time.

He could go back and help Luca. Do the easy thing and help the protagonist and complete the quest.

No.

[Timer reaches zero.]

[Quest Failed.]

[Penalty Applied.]

For a few seconds, nothing happened.

No pain. No presence. No immediate consequence. No sight of any leech.

Then Sapphire’s detection ward cracked in his palm.

The crack ran through the entire ward. The surface splintered slowly, like ice under pressure, and the runes etched across it flickered once before going dark.

Ronan stared at the broken artifact as warmth spread through his hand – not from fire, not from mana, but from something else entirely.

Something that felt wrong.

He looked around, and suddenly, everything was dark.

His vision was gone.

No, every sense in his body was gone except his sight, which was able to perceive the endless abyss of darkness in front of him.

Ronan’s first instinct was not fear.

He tried to define the darkness the way he defined everything else.

It was sensory severance, a mental projection, a mana-space created by the parasite, a defensive failure from Sapphire’s ward, maybe even a system-induced hallucination. He listed possibilities in rapid succession.

Each one less logical than the last, and he realized that.

None of them matched what he knew.

The Refinement Leech was dangerous, yes, but it was still a mana parasite with known behavior. It attached to damaged circulation pathways, fed on impurities, and forced the host’s core to adapt through stress.

It did not erase the world.

It did not strip away sound, touch, balance, smell, mana sense, and leave only vision suspended in an endless black void.

Ronan tried to move, but he could not tell if movement existed here. He tried to breathe, but there was no body to breathe with.

The lack of inputs was a prison.

He forced himself to stop thinking in circles.

But the darkness denied everything.

There was no ground, no ceiling, no distance, no direction.

There was only himself and the sense that something unseen was already present.

Then he saw it.

A glint of red.