EQUINOX || The Catalysts Series, #3

XLI

Lena has never traveled back in time before with this much intention. Similarly, she's never tested her limits as to how far back she can go.

Past instances were executed during combat against other students, and they were merely quick seconds to surprise her opponents in battle, nothing more. This time, as she is spiralling into nothingness and into the thin fabric of time-space, she's looking for a particular thread of time.

She needs to go back to before she'd accidentally spiraled into her own past, when she'd been just idling by the glass windows in the emptying classroom.

It is much quicker than Lena can put the pieces together, the time—can she even call it that in the continuum?—barely enough for her to playback and consider what just happened.

The Shadow Syndicate are here. Fai is a damned mole.

That's about all she concludes as her feet touch solid ground. As usual, Lena lets the world settle down from its spinning. Impatient this time, she blinks the vertigo away forcefully and takes a bold step. The tip of her shoe hits a hard wall, and when she extends her hand forward, she makes contact with a cool, smooth surface.

The glass window pane. But when is this?

Her answer comes as her sight becomes less blurry, adjusting to this new reality. Through the glass window, a crowd of students gathers on the fields below, still approaching the gates where silver-uniformed guards await. It's not nearly as empty as when Lena had been daydreaming, before she went on her time-leap. When Lena turns to take in the classroom she's in, she is indeed the only one, the last to leave.

It worked; she's back in time.

For the better, Lena steps back from the glass panes automatically, not needing another spiral to the past that led to her unfortunate run-in with the Shadow Syndicate in the first place.

And what she needs to do now is to get the hell out of here. Perhaps she might be able to catch the last few students of her year leaving the hallway, and she will not be alone anymore. Her fate is now altered, and she will not face the Shadow Syndicate alone. Still trembling from the memory of the encounter that didn't happen in this timeline, Lena takes one last glance at the glass window panes in a holistic view. She isn't too close to the windows anymore, but she can still faintly make out the students sitting the field, and then she spots Caelus and Roen appearing beneath her building.

She's about to run out of her classroom to avoid a similar outcome when a thought halts her. The memory from her near death experience is vivid, and she remembers the exchange.

Lena will escape it this time, but still... she'd need to inform the headmaster about Fai's connection to the Shadow Syndicate. Should she run and fetch him now, just in time to catch them in the hallway? The mysterious Arcana may as well be away however, because he hasn't exactly been around—not even to interrupt what happened when the authorities punished Lucifer and the other students. He only ever shows up when required; and it seems as though he knows when to step in. He must have known the outcome was not as severe, and that his own students would have handled the authorities without—

The authorities! Lena thinks.

Lena still doesn't trust them, but if the Shadow Syndicate are here, the authorities have no reason not to deal with them. While they don't publicize the Shadow Syndicate's worst crimes in the media, the authorities must be doing something beneath the surface.

She'll get the hell out of here and warn them somehow—without tipping off her own abilities and how she got the information in the first place—and in the case they don't believe her, she'll make sure to cause a scene enough to warrant them a reason to check the hallways. She can just guide them here indicating there's an ongoing duel or something—yes, that will do.