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 Elric 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. One year ago, at three in the morning, he’d watched it pull itself out of his left arm. No light. No sound. Just pain, slow and meticulous, as if his bones were being redrawn inch by inch. That was how he learned he was a Kamuy-bearer. That was how the Kamuy chose him.
Ten percent of the world. That’s what the numbers say. But when it’s you—just you, alone at 3 a.m., bleeding light from your wrist—it doesn’t feel like statistics. No training. No ceremony. Just blood and consequence. Just this…thing.
He still didn’t know if that counted as lucky. But for now, he was just a guy hauling his own curse through customs.
“Welcome to New Elysion.” The line came from overhead—neutral, prerecorded, impossible to argue with. Screens above the baggage carousel looped the slogan in clean white text:
THE WORLD’S MOST LIVABLE POLAR CITY.
Solan dragged his suitcase off the belt and tugged at his T-shirt out of habit. The air wasn’t hot. It wasn’t cold, either. Just precisely regulated enough to make him feel like he’d dressed wrong on purpose. A woman wrapped in a gauzy sun-shawl glided past, already acclimated, already elsewhere. She glanced at him the way locals glanced at weather—briefly, without sympathy.
“Yeah,” Solan muttered, hauling his bag toward the exit. “Livable my ass.”
Almost sixty years ago, The Dragon fell into the Gulf of Alaska. Nobody expected it to leave behind anything except a scar on the seafloor. They were wrong. Whatever leaked from the seabed changed the region—broke it, reshaped it. Around New Elysion, winter still bit, but it didn’t kill. Within the city limits, the air stayed tempered—warmer than it had any right to be. Summers climbed into the high eighties, sometimes brushing ninety, enough to make the streets shimmer. Winters hung in the twenties and low thirties, cold enough for frost but not for death. Step outside the green fringe and the world snapped back to subarctic reality—glaciers on every horizon. The scientists called it a climate torsion zone . The locals just called it hell with a postcard view.
His suitcase got stuck three times on the architect’s precious wave-patterned flooring. Norman Foster had once pitched it to a former Soviet general as “a grave for escapees.” Now it was an influencer hotspot.
Solan kicked the case loose. 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.
Seventy 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 was barely larger than a cartridge fuse, a slim, climate-sealed capsule designed for single use. Light-blue serum shimmered inside, suspended like liquid frost. Microfiltered. Tamper-locked. Serial-coded down to the molecule. Market price: $1,000. Black market? Three times that—if you were desperate enough, or dying slowly enough, to think it was still a bargain.
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 didn’t need the monthly dose, so he sold it. Quietly. Discreetly. Just enough to cover the parts of his life the scholarship didn’t touch: meals. dorm fees. laundry tokens. That crater where his GPA should’ve been.
The A/C rattled. Heat rolled back in. Solan grabbed his things and broke into a jog for the tram just as the doors began to close. His reflection slid past in the glass—wet, hunched, already out of place. Sweat-darkened fabric. The slump of his shoulders. The oversized bag dragging at him like a coffin.
He didn’t need a transcript to know how this looked. Kamuy Rank: D. Academics: C+. A perfect match for the Academy at New Elysion’s slogan: the apex of the strange. The exception to the rule.
The tram slid along the coast like a cold paper knife. Solan leaned against the window as the polar city unfolded in slow, deliberate frames. He didn’t have some grand reason for coming here. No dreams of changing the world, no burning ambition to join the elite. He just… went to college because that’s what you do. Everyone else did.
The first impression was hard to breathe through—rows of steel-gray port warehouses lined up like tombstones, the sea wind slapping the glass with the scent of engine oil and hospital-grade disinfectant. Then came the residential blocks: low, boxy houses pinned to the frozen ground in neat Nordic rows, like someone had arranged a miniature set and forgotten to add life. Then the towers rose from the mist—clean lines, mirrored sides, corporate perfect. Solan clicked his tongue. One day, maybe, he'd work in one of those. Or maybe not.
Then the city dropped away. Fields stretched suddenly along both sides of the track. The August wind ran through the silver-green grass in waves, like something brushing its fingers across the earth. The campus appeared without announcement—low buildings crouched along the horizon, shy and expensive. Oversized glass windows gleamed in the sunlight like they’d never heard of a heating bill. A bronze plaque flashed on the side of one hall, catching the sun just long enough to remind Solan of those coming-of-age movies. Except his youth had felt more like a low-budget horror film.
The library made it feel even stranger. Students lounged beneath oak trees, voices hushed, shadows dappled by leaves. Through the glass curtain wall, the sun carved precise geometries into the study floors. It was too quiet. Like the port he’d passed through earlier belonged to another world entirely.
“The Academy at New Elysion Station. Now arriving.” The announcement snapped him back.
The dorm looked older than he expected—four stories of weathered stone, open walkways, and wooden doors that felt like they had stories if you leaned in. His door was ajar. Solan stood outside for three full seconds, then knocked. His knuckles made a dull sound, lost in the hallway noise. No answer. He pushed it open. The hinges groaned like they’d been waiting years.
The smell hit him like a wall: a three-part harmony of ramen broth, solder smoke, and the ghost of whatever detergent had given up halfway. Two hundred square feet of life, crammed wall to wall. A textbook titled A Concise History of the Drakespawn lay open on the lower bunk, its pages flapping in the wind kicked up by a spinning drone blade. A coffee mug in the corner held a toothbrush—bent, still damp—with brown residue clinging to the inside. Solan’s suitcase caught on the threshold. He was halfway through planning a silent retreat when the upper bunk shifted.
“Finally!” A mop of greasy hair popped out over the edge. “I thought I was getting a double room with the spirit of loneliness again.” The body attached to the voice dropped fast—too fast. A flash of oversized T-shirt with a possum graphic, then a jarring thud as the floor trembled.
“Matthew D Edinburgh. D for ‘damn it’—as in, I failed three classes last semester. One year in, still kicking.” He grinned, barefoot, oil on his palms, wiping them vaguely on his pants. “But this time I’m turning over a new leaf. Only failing two, max.”
Solan stared. From the bird’s nest hair, to the coffee-stained shirt, to the smoking circuit board on the floor. His eyes landed on the walls—layered with posters of idol singers in outfits that defied gravity.
“Solan Elric,” he managed. “Freshman.” He shook the offered hand, and in that moment, understood why people called college the beginning of the end .
Matthew kicked aside a pile of spare parts and beamed. “Welcome to hell’s co-op dorm, roommate.” With a flourish, he pulled two beers out from under his pillow. “Around here, we don’t do GPAs. Just survival.”
Solan didn’t take the beer. Matthew carried it anyway.
By the time they were back outside, the afternoon had settled into something bright and unhurried. They’d already crossed half the campus—past one building Solan hadn’t caught the name of, a quad he’d forget just as quickly—before he realized Matthew was still holding the can like it belonged there.
“Are you sure this is healthy?” Solan asked. “Do you always do day drinking?”
Matthew glanced at him. “We just met, and you’re already challenging me.”
He waited a beat, then added, “I like you.”
After a few steps, he squinted sideways at Solan. “You’ve got this mysterious vibe going on. Don’t tell me you’re someone important’s kid.” His eyes flicked to the long, tightly wrapped bundle slung at Solan’s side. “That thing isn’t a relic, is it?”
“No,” Solan said. “It’s my Kamuy.”
“Oh.” Matthew brightened immediately. “What does it do? Shoot lasers? Invisible slashes?”
“Fortunately, no.”
“Lame.”
“Thanks.”
Everyone knew the truth: no two Kamuy-bearers ever had the same Kamuy. Even if two abilities looked similar, the way they worked—how they manifested, how they failed—was never the same. And you didn’t get to choose that part.
The Kamuy chose you. End of story.
The academy’s central axis was quieter than Solan had expected. Low buildings followed the slope of the hill, glass and concrete softened on purpose, as if none of them wanted to look important. Students passed through in loose streams, rarely stopping. Everyone moved like they already knew where they were going.
They paused in front of an unremarkable storefront—small, understated, marked only by a minimalist metal plaque that looked almost temporary.
“Oh, this,” Matthew said, jerking his chin toward it. “The audio shop.”
Solan glanced inside. Rows of equipment lined the space, orderly without showing off. Listening stations were built into the walls, the lighting kept deliberately low—like someone had turned the world’s volume down a notch.
“Officially run by the music department,” Matthew went on, slipping into that half-informed, half-confident campus-guide tone. “But don’t let that fool you. Their collection’s insane. Any region, any era—if you want it badly enough and wait long enough, the academy can get it.”
He smacked his lips, as if weighing someone else’s budget. “Honestly? Too much money and nowhere to put it.”
Solan didn’t reply. He was watching the door. It opened. Someone stepped out.
She carried a canvas bag, the strap worn soft and fraying at the edges. Earbud wires slipped loose from her collar, hanging untidily against her jacket. High-top boots hit the pavement a half-beat behind everyone else, like she hadn’t quite reentered public space yet.
Before the door fully closed, her hand lifted. Palm down. Fingers forward. A small, instinctive motion—as if she were aligning herself with a beat that hadn’t entirely faded yet.
Solan saw it.
He couldn’t say how. The movement was too brief, like the world had dropped a frame. It wasn’t aimed at anyone. Nothing waited for his reaction.
The next second, her gaze shifted, then moved past him. Her hand dropped back to her side, the motion erased cleanly. She folded herself back into the rhythm of the campus and kept walking.
Solan looked away without thinking. For a split moment, he had the sense that the gesture hadn’t been meant to have an audience—and that somehow, by being there, he’d broken the atmosphere.
Beside him, let out a short whistle. “Is that how freshmen dress now?”
Glancing around to make sure no one else had heard, Solan said, “Can you not? You’re gonna get us into trouble.”
✦ ✦ ✦