The baggage carousel gave a low, reluctant thud. Like something sighing through gritted teeth. Solan Elric looked up—just in time to meet the eye of his own medical history.
It lay there, sliding toward him on the belt, swaddled in layers of burlap and strapped tight like a dead thing too dangerous to bury. Under the flicker of fluorescent lights, the explosion-proof binding glinted faintly. The Hazardous Item tag flapped in the A/C breeze, mocking him.
A few nearby passengers stared. One blonde girl in oversized sneakers whispered to her friend, “Is that, like, a cosplay prop?”
Solan ignored them. Jaw tight, spine straighter than it had been all week, he stepped forward with the hollow dignity of a man retrieving a lost golf club. His fingers touched the hilt—and the cold hit him instantly, curling up his bones.
That’s when the dog stopped.
The security K9—a lean, brindled mutt with a blue vest and calm eyes—tensed mid-step. Its handler gave a light tug, but the animal didn’t move. Its ears went back. Then, with a sharp huff, it backed away.
Solan hesitated. Looked around. No one else seemed to notice. He sniffed at his sleeve. Did I shower last night? The dog let out a low growl. Great. I smell like fear and international war crime.
That thing always weighed more than he remembered. Like it was full of deep-sea water. But it had been with him long enough that the weight had turned into familiarity—dull, unavoidable, almost private. Maybe that was what it felt like when your Kamuy was one of the few things that still belonged to you.
Two percent of the world. That’s what the numbers say. But when it’s you—just you, alone with something you can’t set down—it doesn’t feel like statistics. No training. No ceremony. Just consequence.
He slung the wrapped hilt over his shoulder and hauled his duffle bag off the belt. Somewhere behind him, a border officer droned, “Welcome to City of New Elysion,” in the same voice people used for weather reports. The air that hit his face felt wrong—too warm for where the city sat on a map, like someone had dialed the climate up by accident and never admitted it.
Something massive tore through the clouds and anchored itself in the Gulf of Alaska. They gave it a name long enough to sound official—Draconic Primary Entity—then shortened it to the Dragon, as if that made it smaller.
At first, it was just impact—an eruption of water and light, a tremor that traveled farther than it should have. No one expected anything to remain except a scar on the seabed.
They were wrong.
Whatever settled beneath the surface did not vanish. It lingered. It bled into the surrounding water, into the air, into the soil. The scientists called it the Draconic Factor .
Around what would become New Elysion, winter still bit—but it no longer killed. Within the city limits, the air held steady, warmer than it had any right to be. Summers climbed into the high eighties, sometimes brushing ninety, enough to make asphalt ripple. Winters hovered in the twenties and low thirties—cold enough for frost, never for extinction.
Step beyond the green fringe and the illusion snapped. The subarctic returned without apology. Glaciers on every horizon. The researchers named it a climate torsion zone . The locals called it hell with a postcard view.
He licked his dry lips. The Academy at New Elysion made him a blunt offer: two years tuition-free. No welcome letter. Just a sterile, automated acceptance—and a dose of Stabilin already in the mail.
It was the good kind. Not the generic strain you found in border clinics or ration centers—the one that came with a 48% chance of neural scarring. This was Premium-tier Stabilin, straight from the program they never advertised, but everyone knew existed: a black-box budget devoted solely to keeping Kamuy students alive.
Thirty percent of the Academy’s student body carried Kamuy. And the Academy kept them alive on the most expensive drug in the world, just so they could study comparative literature. The Academy at New Elysion had been the first institution to do it. No strings. No service requirement. No post-grad buyback clause. They didn’t even ask what kind of Kamuy you had.
The vial came in a slim climate-sealed capsule. Light-blue serum, suspended like liquid frost. Microfiltered. Tamper-sealed. Serial-coded. Federal-grade dosage. The kind usually reserved for high-risk containment zones or diplomatic Kamuy-carry permits. Market price: $1,000. Black market? Three times that—if you were desperate enough, or dying slow enough, to pay it.
He’d never needed it. Not once. Maybe the doctor was right—his Kamuy was too weak to destabilize. Or maybe his Draconic Factor was just low enough to slip beneath the world’s threshold for danger.
That should’ve felt like relief. It didn’t.
He hadn’t sold it—yet.Before flying in, he had only reached out through a back-channel forum to someone who claimed they moved Stabilin off-record. No real name. No guarantee. Just a handle, a dead-looking profile photo, and a reply that came too fast to trust.
This was his first time back in the City of New Elysion. If the contact was fake, he’d find out soon. If it wasn’t, it could cover what the scholarship never did: meals, dorm fees, laundry tokens—and the crater where his GPA should’ve been.
By the time he reached the tram platform, the doors were already chiming their final warning. Solan bolted, his duffle bag thudding against his leg. He slid inside at the last second, shoulder-first, breath burning, and the doors sealed shut like the city had decided—fine, you can stay.
His reflection flashed in the glass: wet hair, sweat-darkened shirt, the wrapped bundle slung across him like a coffin.
He didn’t need a transcript to know how this looked. Kamuy Rank: C-. Academics: C+. A perfect fit for The Academy at New Elysion’s tagline: The apex of the strange. The exception to the rule.
The tram doors slid shut, and for a second it felt like the carriage had lost a layer of air—like something essential had been quietly siphoned out.
Solan took a seat by the window. His backpack rested heavy on his thighs, and the long, cloth-wrapped bundle leaned against the edge of the seat, strapped and layered like a body that refused to stay put. There weren’t many people on board—just a scattering of faces: someone bent over a phone, someone dozing beneath headphones, an old man staring out the opposite window as if the view might eventually confess something.
All freshmen were supposed to have reported a day ago. Solan’s flight had left from nowhere important, which meant it left late. The delay rippled outward, swallowing every connection after it.
The tram started moving, gliding along the coastline. Outside, the port district passed in rows of gray containers stacked like coffins. Wind smeared the scent of disinfectant and engine oil across the glass. Farther inland rose the city they called the “world’s most livable polar metropolis”—clean as a commercial, symmetrical as a model kit, even the clouds trimmed as if someone had taken scissors to their edges.
Solan pressed his forehead to the window. The cold steadied him.
He just needed to reach the Academy. Find his dorm. Drop his things. And then—if fate was feeling generous—sleep. Everything else could wait.
When the tram stopped, only Solan stepped off.
Solan hauled his duffle bag onto the platform. At first glance, he almost thought he’d wandered into some curated “post-apocalyptic campus ruin” exhibit. The plaza was too empty. Wind threaded through the buildings, whispering between stone walls like it was rehearsing secrets. The streetlights were still on. The signage was intact. The pavement was immaculate. There was simply no one there.
For a moment he wondered if he’d arrived early. Maybe orientation was next week.
He walked forward, his footsteps echoing against the stone—too crisp, too loud, as if someone behind him were mimicking his stride half a second late. Medieval façades framed the square: green lawns, red cobblestone paths, castle-like silhouettes, a church spire in the distance where pigeons lifted and settled again.
He followed the main axis, scanning for a useful sign. There were signs, technically—but each pointed somewhere vague and ceremonial: Administration Block. Research Wing. Visitor Center. The dorms, apparently, did not merit a clear arrow.
Solan stopped and turned slowly in place, a familiar weight settling in his chest. The world gave some people a compass. For others, it offered a map that said good luck.
He was about to keep walking when something in the shadow beneath a tree at the edge of the lawn snagged his attention.
There was a person.
Face down. Arms stretched out. The posture was oddly deliberate, almost theatrical—like someone had carefully arranged themselves for a “death, but make it artistic” poster shoot. One leg was slightly bent, as if the body insisted on maintaining compositional integrity.
Solan halted.
His brain supplied the first explanation it did not want to take responsibility for: …a corpse?
Then a second, calmer thought: No. This is the Academy. The Academy does not have corpses. Unless their orientation program is aggressively avant-garde.
Great. His first welcome gift in New Elysion: a commemorative campus body.
He crouched and tapped the person lightly on the shoulder.
“…are you alright?”
No movement.
He swallowed and tapped again, harder this time.
“Hey. You okay?”
Leaves brushed against each other in the wind, a thin, papery rustle. Other than that—nothing.
In that suspended second, Solan’s brain helpfully began assembling an entirely unnecessary horror script: remote campus, empty quad, body under a tree, me—the late freshman. Next scene: a professor in black stepping out of the shadows to say, Welcome to the real curriculum.
He reached down and turned the figure’s face slightly to the side.
The person inhaled suddenly, like surfacing from deep water. The sound came out thick and distorted, as though half a pillow were still lodged in his mouth.
“…fuck… how did I fall asleep…”
Solan froze.
The boy lifted his head slowly, revealing a face unmistakably, inconveniently alive. His hair looked electrocuted. His eyelids were half-open, expression dazed—like someone who had almost graduated inside a dream and wasn’t sure which part had been real. He squinted at Solan for a couple of seconds, as if confirming he wasn’t a hallucination.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Solan stared back. The tight coil of fear in his chest dissolved into something larger and drier: irritation. Clean, uncomplicated irritation.
“…I should be asking you that,” Solan said. “What are you doing out here? Practicing how to die aesthetically?”
The boy considered this with alarming sincerity, then nodded as if impressed. “You’ve got taste.”
His gaze dropped suddenly—to the long, tightly wrapped bundle at Solan’s feet, then to the dorm tag tied to the handle of his duffle bag. His eyes sharpened in an instant, like something that had just located prey.
“Oh—” he drew the sound out. “You’re new.”
Solan didn’t answer.
The boy pushed himself up from the grass, brushing off debris with the efficiency of someone for whom this was routine.
Solan arrived at a calm internal conclusion: this school was doomed.
“Do you know where Fenrir Hall is?” he asked at last. “I tried using navigation. Everything here looks the same.”
The boy stretched lazily, like he’d just finished a nap rather than a performance. His tone was bright in a way that bordered on hostile.
“Hold on, which room are you?”
Solan’s stomach tightened. “302?”
The boy’s grin widened as though he’d just won something substantial. “Fuck. Roommate!”
A thin thread of dread unspooled inside Solan. For a split second, he wondered whether silence might still save him. The boy stepped closer, eyes glittering with a very obvious, very deliberate kind of delight. Solan felt himself being assessed.
“Solan Elric. Freshman.” He said it quickly, as if naming himself might neutralize the situation.
The grin deepened. It wasn’t malicious exactly. It was worse—it was entertained.
“This is going to be fun,” the boy said reverently.
Solan’s internal response was equally devout: Can I still run?
And then—
A siren ripped across the sky.
Not a sound that started , but one that tore open, like something above the campus had split its throat. The noise was metallic and warped, vibrating with distortion, flooding the square in a single violent surge. It ricocheted off stone and glass, layered over itself, multiplied—like a pack of unseen things sprinting between buildings and using every wall as a mouth.
Solan’s spine snapped straight. His heart clenched hard enough to hurt.
He looked up instinctively. In the distance, red warning lights began to pulse on a nearby building, staining the glass in sharp bursts. The air shifted. A faint sweetness threaded through it—smoke, but not the kind he recognized.
Beside him, his newly acquired roommate looked almost relieved.
“There it is,” the boy murmured, like he’d been waiting for the opening note of a song. “We’re on.”
He leaned in, close enough that Solan could feel his breath.
“Solan Elric,” he said. “We’re all going to die.”