No! I don't want to be a Super Necromancer!

Deep beneath the Central Military Compound, buried within the subterranean Tech Department's monitoring labs.

Fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, illuminating a sea of fatigued engineers and technomancers hunched over consoles, churning through mana signal readings like bureaucratic drones.

Lin Ke, one of the youngest engineers in the room, rubbed his eyes for the fifth time that hour. His coffee was cold, his snack ration untouched, and the blinking graphs across his display had all but blurred together—until something caught his attention.

A line dipped. Not dramatically, not even noticeably to most.

But it dipped consistently.

"…What the hell," he muttered.

He leaned in, running the diagnostic a second time. The mana signature from Sector 4A—the core of the Beijing mana grid—was off. Not broken. Not fluctuating. Just… bleeding. A few dozen mana units at a time. Every seven minutes.

Clockwork precision.

He ran the script again. Same result.

Mana wasn't being consumed by the grid.

It was being siphoned.

With a growing pit in his stomach, he pulled up more sectors. Sectors 4C, 5B, and 6A all showed identical micro-drains. Each line was whisper-thin, but together, they outlined a hidden pattern across the city—like veins beneath the skin of something waiting to awaken.

Before he could process it further, his supervisor shuffled past, sipping cold tea from a mug that said "It's Not A Bug, It's A Feature."

"What now, Ke?" the man grumbled.

Lin hesitated. "Sir, there's a mana drain happening citywide. It's subtle, but recurring. I think someone's drawing power from the grid... not stealing it, but redirecting it. Consistently. Like it's being stored."

His supervisor barely glanced over. "Probably faulty cables. Or sector recalibration. Write a generic report for the upstairs AI parser. Don't flag it. You'll just clog the system."

"But—"

"Ke, this isn't some horror movie. No one's building a secret bomb with the city's power. Just file the report and move on."

The supervisor left, muttering something about overdramatic interns and caffeine-induced paranoia.

Lin Ke sat frozen in front of his console.

And ignored every order he'd just been given.

Instead of filing the generic report, Lin spent the next several hours digging. Cross-referencing mana paths. Checking structural layouts. He pulled a city map from the older archives, overlaid the active mana nodes onto it, and almost choked.

The points where mana was being siphoned weren't random.

They formed a ring around the base of Beijing's primary defense array. The power grid for turrets, barriers, communications, and surveillance. All of it.

If those mana pockets were triggered simultaneously…

The defense systems would crash.

Not forever. Just long enough. Long enough for something to get through.

His heart pounded. He didn't know if this was sabotage. A test. A bug.

But he knew it was wrong.

He packaged the entire report, labeled it "Potential Grid Compromise: Sectoral Mana Pooling" and forwarded it—not to his direct superiors, but to every mid-level manager and department head he could access.

The responses came in fast.

Most marked it "irrelevant." A few added laughing emojis. One simply replied, "LMAO Ke, get some sleep."

But one connection pinged back.

And it was from outside the tech department.

Elsewhere: Pearl Institute - Boys' Dorm

Ji Chen had been casually hacking the city's encrypted comm system in the background while playing an aerial mana-chess sim and brewing three cups of tea.

He blinked at the flagged packet that landed in his console like a drunk pigeon on a rooftop.

"Mana siphon?" he murmured, leaning in.

He read the logs.

His brow furrowed.

"Well," he said aloud to no one, "that's not ominous at all."

The kid's analysis was amateurish but shockingly accurate. Mana wasn't vanishing. It was being redirected. Coalescing in ringed formation beneath key infrastructures. And nobody was talking about it.

Ji Chen scratched his head, swirling the tea.

"I don't do saving the city. I play wind tricks and roast arrogant nobles."

He thought for a moment.

Then sighed.

"There's only one lunatic who'll believe me."

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"Okay," Jiang Xiao Yu said sternly, tapping the digital board like it owed her money. She turned to the trio of chaos incarnate who had somehow become her only way of contributing to the National Tournament.

"The National Tournament begins in less than a week. We need strategy. We need analysis. And most importantly, we need discipline."

The three looked at her with varying degrees of betrayal, as though she had just declared war on their collective freedom.

Damien was leaning against the wall like an aloof statue, arms crossed, face unreadable, radiating the energy of someone who had already assassinated the tournament bracket in his mind and was now just waiting for the paperwork to catch up.

Fatty was halfway under the snack table, legs flailing, claiming to search for the "lost" second tray of duck buns. Which, according to the empty plates, never existed.

Elly had taken full control of the back of the couch, flopped upside-down with her feet on the headrest and her orange hair dangling toward the floor like a fox-themed chandelier. She occasionally kicked her legs lazily like a bored cat contemplating mischief.

Jiang Xiao Yu's eye twitched so hard it looked like she was trying to Morse-code a distress signal.

She clicked the board again. The holo-screen flared to life, displaying faces and stats of upcoming district-level opponents.

Lightning mages with delusions of grandeur, gravity knights who bench-pressed trucks for breakfast, spacewalkers who dual-wielded quantum spears, and a War God College team known only as "The Twins" who once used a visiting professor as a spell dummy.

Elly tilted her head (or maybe her world was upside down, hard to say). "Can't we just… wing it again? Like last time? You know. Improvisational glory?"

"No," Jiang Xiao Yu said flatly, clicking the board again with enough force to make the table vibrate.

Fatty's head popped up from beneath the table like a confused gopher. "But we did fine in the Beijing bracket! I mean, I threw Elly like a magical dodgeball and she scratched three dudes into surrender. I call that… innovation! Foxball tactics!"