Inside the academy control hall, teachers monitoring the midterm realized something had gone wrong when student signals inside City D began flashing unstable on the main display board.
The board showed two hundred green dots representing active students spread across the fallen zone. Within ten seconds, fifteen dots turned yellow. Five more turned red. Then twenty yellows appeared at once.
Several signals vanished completely.
A teacher shouted across the control room. "Emergency retrieval protocol! Activate mass extraction!"
Staff rushed between control panels while trying to activate the emergency system. Fingers moved across magical interfaces that controlled the mass teleportation array built into the academy foundation. Mana channels lit up beneath their hands as they poured energy into the retrieval network.
The array did not respond properly.
