While Feng Ye had just exited the changerooms and passed the sliding doors to the huge aquatic complex, far away in Akeno’s office a mobile phone on the desk buzzes.

Akeno who was tapping away at her computer and taking a look at various budgets which need approval notices the message from Feng Ye. Stopping her work, she takes up her phone, unlocks it with the biometric fingerprint sensor, and opens up the text.

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FROM: Feng Ye

Priority: High

Content: Hey Akeno, I had just bumped into a rather strange occurrence at the Kami Institute’s aquatic centre where the qualifiers for swimming is being held. A rather strange male with very pale skin dressed in a dark blue hoodie with dark colored pants and sunglasses had approached me. Despite the warm weather outside, his body seemed to emit a chill of some sort. He spoke as though he was in a trance, however, mid-conversation he stiffened and seemingly had a complete personality change. Pretty odd, so I figured I’ll bring it up.

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After reading this message, Akeno knits her brows and exhibits a pondering pose deeply lost in thought. Chilly aura and temperature. Also, a trance like state… She closes her eyes to ponder.

Akeno suddenly opened her eyes and mutters, “It may be dangerous... if this is what I think it is.”

Immediately, she contacts Miku to arrange for the student enforcer team to organize some man power to immediately head over as fast as possible. As long as she doesn’t make too big of a move, the board of directors will probably not care as much if the student enforcer team goes to institutes to clean up “some trolls up to mischief”. Perhaps, they actually are looking forward to this occurrence as it would weaken the available manpower the student council organization has and thus, allow them to have more opportunities to grasp some loopholes.

Thus, Akeno cannot send any high level strength to support like herself or any hidden trump cards such as Kotomi (obviously). To do this, she decided to rely on the enforcer team.

In that text message sent to Miku has a single, rather ominous subject line is utilized.

“HIGH RISK: POTENTIAL SPECTRE ACTIVITY.”

Spectres are very troublesome. They are a high ranked type of ghost which is capable of possession of live beings. When a spectre has arrived, it finds a host body to attach to in order to grow stronger. Naturally, it cannot attach to just any random lifeform on the street. There are three stages of spectres which exist in this world.

Primary stage, secondary stage and tertiary stage. A spectre that has just been summoned or brought by the whims of the randomness of nature is primary stage which is it’s weakest condition. It acts on instinct alone and needs to attach onto a lifeform as soon as possible. It usually targets those with frail minds, in despair, or hopeless. Essentially, at a person's darkest moments, a primary spectre can seize the opportunity to attach on to the host.

An individual with no such dark moments isn’t vulnerable to spectres which are at the primary stage.

Only at the secondary and tertiary stages, are spectres annoying AF to handle as they are able to grow their own consciousness, thus, plan strategically.

Specifically, a secondary stage spectre will develop its own consciousness and thus have its own goal rather than acting on instinct alone. Tertiary stage spectres can manipulate and possess the host for limited amounts of time.

In order for a primary stage spectre to develop to secondary and tertiary, it will need to satisfy a variety of conditions.

The first condition is to attach to a host. The second is to gain enough supplement in the form of very intense despair, fear, anger, negative emotions, etc. Another way to gain supplement is through dark magic. Spectres feed off dark magic which is essentially a super compressed form of the intense despair, fear, anger, etc. Due to such, dark magic is actually branded as for heretics and is strictly prohibited to be practiced. Satisfying the two conditions will result in the secondary spectre.

The tertiary stage usually is achieved after some time attached to the host, but requires the spectre to be able to influence the host’s thoughts to a mental direction which will be forever irreversible. By having some influence over the host’s thought, the spectre which has developed its own consciousness in the secondary stage will eventually be even able to take over its host consciousness for periods of time and manipulate the host’s body as their vessel.

The possession of a weak person for strong individuals usually shouldn’t be a problem. However, a spectre poses a huge risk. Once a tertiary spectre has fully consumed the host’s consciousness, their thirst for power and strength will just be enlarged. Their consciousness will cause them to be ambitious, thus, seeking for a stronger vessel to replace their current one. Due to this fact, the appearance of a spectre is a headache and needs to be strangled as soon as it appears.

From the information provided in Feng Ye’s text, Akeno can extrapolate that the host still has the dominating consciousness and hasn’t been fully consumed.

Akeno clenches her fist. Whoever is the behind the scenes manipulator is truly vile. To release such an issue at an swimming event. Unlike other events, a swimming event in which people are in the water is very difficult to evacuate quickly just simply due to the resistance and distance from the pool walls. During a super crowded event and warm ups in which basically 95% of the swimmers are swimming laps to warm up, it is pretty much impossible to evacuate smoothly and quickly unlike non pool events where everyone can disperse and run.

Helpless, Akeno sits on her office chair and silently hopes that the enforcer team can make it in time and that whoever is in charge of the scene can support…

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Meanwhile, Feng Ye takes a look around at the large 50 metre pool. All 10 lanes are filled with numerous swimmers from the institute all swimming laps to warm up. Feng Ye sees a side lane which has relatively less swimmers than the others and slides in.

Immediately, Feng Ye starts to warm up with alternating swimming strokes. Occasionally doing some freestyle, into some backstroke, followed by some breaststroke and butterfly. As the competition is about speed, most likely everyone will go do freestyle unless for some reason their butterfly or backstroke is faster than their freestyle.