Wildpact Apocalypse. Apocalypse Wildpact Academy, #1

Every monster in the world chose someone. Every monster except his. And the one that found Kael wasn't supposed to exist. For three hundred years, the Pact has kept the peace. Every human who reaches bonding age enters the Wildpact Trials - a ceremony where monsters cross the barrier from the Wilds and choose their partners. The bond unlocks magic. The bond grants strength. The bond is everything.
Kael Mourne has waited his whole life for this moment. He has trained his body. He has memorized every bonding manual the Academy allows students to touch. He has done everything right. And when the Trials end - when every other student in his cohort has a monster beside them - Kael is standing alone. Unchosen. Stripped of rank. Reassigned to the Academy's lowest cohort. Marked for dismissal at semester's end unless he proves his worth without a bond - which is like proving you can swim without water.
Then, three nights after the Trials, something scratches at his dormitory window. Not a registered monster. Not a species in any Academy catalog. A creature that should not exist - because the Academy declared its entire species extinct one hundred and fifty years ago, after hunting every last one of them down. It didn't come through the Wilds barrier. It didn't follow the system's bonding protocol.
It tracked Kael across three hundred miles of open frontier and found him by instinct alone. And when their eyes meet, the bond doesn't form the way bonds are supposed to form. It detonates. The creature - Kael names it Echo - can hear the Pact System itself. Not use it. Hear it. And what it has been hearing, for three hundred years, hidden beneath the clean chime of every bond ever forged, is something the Academy has never told anyone:A countdown.
Now Kael is the lowest-ranked student in a system that wants him gone. His bond is unclassified and his stats are hidden from the Academy's scanners. His only mentor is an old archivist who pretends to be harmless and isn't. His only ally is a monster the world thinks is dead. And somewhere above him, in the Academy's highest tier, the people who ordered that extinction are watching a ghost they thought they buried walk through their front door.