“What—”
He never finished the word.
People burst from every direction at once. The plaza that had felt abandoned a minute ago became the mouth of a tide. Bodies poured in, colliding, accelerating. Someone ran too fast and laughed—sharp, exhilarated. Someone else had already lifted a phone, filming with the steadiness of a surgeon. A few faces were pale enough to be real.
Solan was swallowed.
His backpack twisted sideways as shoulders slammed into him. The long wrapped bundle clipped against knees and shins, earning a spray of irritation.
“Watch it!”
“What the hell are you carrying?”
“Move—move—!”
He tried to cinch it tighter, but tightening only made it more conspicuous. In the crush, the bundle felt like a bone—long, rigid, impossible to fold. It had never been designed for human panic.
A staff member in a yellow vest barreled toward him. The man’s gaze landed on the bundle and hardened instantly.
“Drop that fucking thing!” he shouted.
Solan blinked. “What?”
“I said drop it. Now.” The man pointed at the wrapped length as if it were seconds from detonating. “You want to trip someone and get them killed?”
The crowd slammed into Solan again. A shoulder caught him hard. His grip slipped.
The bundle slid free of its straps and hit the pavement with a dense, unforgiving thud—too heavy for cloth, too solid for anything that pretended to be harmless. The sound traveled up his spine.
His chest tightened, sudden and visceral. It felt like he had dropped something internal, something not meant for air.
Instinct pushed him to reach for it. But feet were already sweeping past. A shoe clipped the edge. Another heel came down squarely on it. The yellow vest was still shouting.
“Move! Don’t look back! Crisis Access Tunnel—this way!”
The current took him.
He twisted once, just once, and saw it lying there on the stone—long and pale under the flashing red light, like an abandoned spine.
The absurd part was this: his first thought wasn’t I lost my weapon. It was I lost proof.
Proof that he was something. Proof that he belonged to whatever this place thought it was training.
You can’t even keep hold of your own luggage. You don’t even look like someone who owns what he carries.
He tried to swear, but the word dissolved in his throat.
They were forced into a narrower passage. The lights flickered. Smoke thickened into a sweet, metallic haze. Footsteps hammered against the concrete in overlapping rhythms. Somewhere ahead, someone tripped. The scream tore sideways through the corridor like fabric giving way.
Solan’s mind kept circling back to the bundle on the ground. It pressed at him like a tongue worrying a cracked tooth—useless, painful, impossible to ignore.
The far end of the tunnel erupted. A real, full-force blast. Fire tore through concrete and flung shards like knives. The scream that followed drowned out every other sound. “They’re here! They’re breaking in—!”
The end of the tunnel had turned into smoke and chaos.
A student bolted forward, Kamuy blazing, static screaming off his palms. The air crackled—then popped like bubble wrap. He didn’t get the second shot off.
Another followed. Then another. Kamuy flared all over the corridor—lightning, flame, pressure waves crashing against the walls. Solan felt his entire body slam to the ground like gravity had been flipped. His skull roared. His nerves screamed.
Just static in his ears. Then white. Then dark.
He grabbed the wall and hauled himself up. His head was spinning. His ears were ringing, and it felt like someone had poured warm honey into them—sweet, sticky, smothering.
And then he saw her. A girl stood at the far end of the tunnel, breathing hard—shoulders trembling. Her hair was a mess, gray dust streaking her forehead. It felt she might collapse, but she didn’t. Her eyes stayed locked ahead—unnaturally calm.
He followed her gaze. A man in a mask was walking toward her, slow and steady. In his hand, a matte black handgun. Held low, like it was no big deal. But his steps were certain.
Guns? Seriously? I thought New Elysion banned firearms.
Not my problem. I don’t have the sword. I don’t owe anyone anything.
He shifted sideways, trying to edit himself out of the frame.
The girl looked at him.
Just once.
The look was not pleading. It wasn’t dramatic. It was precise—like the tip of a blade touching the hollow at his throat.
I see you.
His body locked.
Something older than fear detonated in his chest. The raw, primitive humiliation of being seen and choosing to be small. It burned hot enough to move him.
You’ve already been witnessed.
There was no clean way to step back from that.
He heard himself whisper, the words scraping up his throat like a plea made to no one in particular.
“…Can we just pretend I’m not here?”
The masked man lifted the gun. Slowly. Not dramatic. Just enough.
A numbness crawled up Solan’s heels. His palms prickled. His body tilted forward as if it had found an old track beneath the floor—
—Not like this.
He lunged.
No sword. No plan. Just a desperate instinct to make this less humiliating than standing still. His first step was faster than he expected. The second faster still. He dropped low, one hand coming up in a motion that felt disturbingly precise, as though it belonged to someone who had practiced this ten thousand times in secret.
And then the world slipped sideways.
The masked man shifted half a step, almost politely, like someone pulling a chair out of the way. Solan’s knee buckled. His shoulder went wide. That brief, perfect alignment collapsed into something closer to self-destruction. He pitched forward, knee cracking against concrete, cheek striking stone, momentum dragging him in a graceless slide before he came to a stop in dust and grit.
For a second, everything held its breath.
What the hell was that? For a flicker of time, his body had moved like it remembered something he’d never learned. He didn’t even have time to curse before the muzzle was pointed at him.
Black. Circular. Blank.
His mind emptied. Shame, fear, strategy—evacuated. One thought remained, clean and unadorned.
Oh. So this is where the last shred of my pride gets shot instead.
He stared at the barrel and, absurdly, thought of the bundle he’d dropped—lying somewhere behind him like a trampled evidence bag. Then of himself. Equally trampled.
A shot cracked through the tunnel.
His body jerked instinctively, curling in on itself like something kicked. He waited for pain.
It didn’t arrive.
The lights snapped to a blinding white. A hiss cut through the speakers, followed by a voice so even it might as well have been generated by a machine.
“…End of simulation. Thank you for your participation.”
Yellow vests reappeared. Clipboards. Whistles. Someone wheeled out a mop bucket. The smoke thinned obediently. The crying stopped as if switched off. Actors returning to neutral.
Solan remained on the floor, mind lagging behind the shift.
…A drill?
Solan started replaying the lunge in his head — that weird little half-second when his feet landed exactly where they were supposed to, like he’d done it before. Then nothing. Like the whole thing short-circuited. Probably adrenaline. Or dumb luck. Or both. Whatever it was, it had fizzled faster than it started, and all it left him with was a mouthful of dust and an audience. Good. Let it stay gone.
“Wow,” a voice drifted from nearby, bright with a satisfaction that bordered on cruel. “You really committed to that dive.”
Solan turned his head.
A boy stood a few steps away—clean jacket, polished shoes, a gold insignia pinned with quiet authority. Not staff. Not emergency crew. He looked like he’d stepped out of the Academy’s promotional materials: composed, expensive, naturally aligned with the architecture.
His gaze skimmed Solan, then the dust, then the long bundle still missing from his side. His smile was thin, reflective.
“That leap?” the boy said. “Legendary. In the worst way.”
“Trying to make an impression? Or did no one where you’re from explain the rules?”
The boy tilted his head. “What was that supposed to be, anyway? A rescue? Or just a cry for attention?”
Solan’s first thought was Both. His second was You’re enjoying this way too much. He went with the first. “Bit of both,” he said. “Figured I’d multitask.”
“Someone should probably teach you the rules around here.” Then he walked off. No name. No parting shot. Just silence—and the crowd, already closing behind him.
Solan’s throat tightened. He didn’t know the boy’s name, but he recognized the type instantly—the kind the world adjusted itself around. For people like that, doors remained open. For people like him, survival required not standing in their path.
He considered replying. Nothing coherent formed. He caught himself running his tongue over his teeth. All there. Small mercy. Still, if he’d lost one, it would’ve been the perfect cherry on the day—a freshman idiot, bleeding dignity into concrete over a war that wasn’t real.
He pushed himself upright and stumbled back toward the plaza.
The tree was still there. The strip of grass beside the path. The daylight. Nothing had truly changed. The bundle lay a few steps away against the stone—and someone had walked over it. Two overlapping treads, pressed into the cloth at an angle, like whoever it was hadn't even noticed.
Solan looked at the imprints for a moment.
He crouched down. His fingers found the knot on the outermost layer and worked it loose—the cloth was gritty, still warm from the sun in the way fabric got when it had been lying on stone. The layers came away one by one.
Someone nearby slowed their pace.
The black blade emerged.
It was long—longer than it looked wrapped, somehow—the hilt a dense coil of twisted growth, thorns pressed into one another like something that had calcified mid-motion. The crossguard curved outward in the same language: irregular, dense, organic. The blade itself was matte black from base to tip, drinking the light rather than reflecting it.
A second person stopped.
Solan looked at the imprints for a moment. He hoped whoever it was hadn't twisted an ankle.
His hand was on the hilt.
For a moment, the world held exactly where it was. The voices around him. The stone under his knees. The gritty warmth of the cloth still in his other hand.
Then the heat came—dense, pressurized, moving upward from the grip like something had been waiting at the base of it for a long time and had just been given permission. It climbed into his palm, his wrist, the inside of his forearm. Thin black lines, tracing up from beneath his sleeve, branching slow and deliberate along the inside of his left arm. They followed the line of his veins as if they already knew the route.
No light, no sound, nothing theatrical. But something was opening, something that had been a door finally becoming a door. Solan‘s breath snagged. A subtle click of alignment.
"Hey—" someone called from nearby, uncertain who they were calling to.
The heat reached his shoulder. The black lines kept moving, unhurried, like they had nowhere else to be.
Voltage spiked, heat reversing into cold. The plaza tilting away from him.
Before darkness took Solan whole, his last thought was whether this was the part where he had to start taking Stabilin.
The world cut power. Clean and final.
.