The first thing Solan heard when he surfaced was a line so familiar it was immediately irritating.
“Hey you, you’re finally awake.”
The tone was too light. Too amused. Like narration laid over a disaster that shouldn’t exist. His eyelashes fluttered. The world was still coated in a thin gray haze. For a split second he thought he was back in the tunnel—the muzzle, the dust, the way the lights had snapped to white, scraping everything flat.
He drew a breath.
No smoke. No sweet metallic burn. Just the dormitory’s layered scent: cheap pressed wood, stale detergent, and something faintly scorched—like a circuit board that had died once and been forced back online.
The curtains weren’t fully closed. A blade of light cut across the edge of the bed. Someone was sitting a few feet away, posture loose, as though the room had been designed around him. A can rested in his hand; the metal rim caught the light. He tipped it back, swallowed, then exhaled with exaggerated satisfaction.
“Okay,” the boy said, like he’d been waiting for the exact moment Solan’s eyes opened. “Tell me something. Do you have, like… a heart condition?”
Solan blinked. The sentence hit, but meaning lagged behind it.
“Because yesterday? One drill and you went full Victorian fainting woman. You scared yourself so hard you slept almost twenty hours.”
Solan tried to speak. Nothing came out on the first attempt. His tongue felt too heavy for language.
The boy leaned back, pleased with his own diagnosis. “Also, you look skinny. But you weigh a ton. I nearly threw out my back hauling you in.”
Solan’s mind hadn’t fully rebooted. He pushed out the only questions that felt stable enough to exist.
“…Where am I?”
The answer came too quickly, as if rehearsed.
“302. Your—well, our dorm.” The boy gestured broadly, like unveiling a luxury suite. “10:36 a.m. It’s a beautiful new day.”
Daylight. Birdsong somewhere beyond the window. The world was not exploding.
Solan glanced down at himself. His clothes had been changed. His shoes were gone. The arrangement had a strange, misplaced tenderness to it—as if someone had treated him like a piece of furniture that needed to be returned to its proper position.
His gaze dropped to the can in the boy’s hand. Beer.
Solan lifted a hand and pressed the back of his head. His fingers found a swollen edge. The pain flared hard enough to whiten his vision.
The boy set the can down immediately. His voice shifted, awkward in a way that suggested he’d rather not confess.
“Ah. Right. About that.” He cleared his throat, looked away for a second, then back. “When I carried you up yesterday, I may have… clipped your head on the doorframe.”
Solan stared at him, measuring whether he’d misheard.
“Not on purpose,” the boy added quickly, scrambling to salvage his moral standing. “That corner is vicious. Ambush architecture.”
Solan pushed himself upright, the dull ache in his skull feeling like memory being nailed back into place. As if anticipating every movement, the boy casually tossed another can toward him.
Solan caught it on reflex. The aluminum was icy, cold enough to sting along his knuckles.
“Don’t mention it,” the boy said. “It’s on me.”
He wiped his palm against his pants, leaving a faint smear of oil, as though remembering belatedly that introductions were part of civilization.
“Oh, right, I never actually introduced myself.”** **
He grinned, as if announcing the title of a joke.
“Matthew D. Edineberg. D for ‘damn it’—as in, I failed three classes last semester. One year in, still kicking.” He lifted his chin slightly, waiting for applause that would not arrive. “But this time I’m turning over a new leaf. Only failing two. Max.”
He held the pose for a beat, waiting for applause that didn’t come. “Yeah. I know,” Matt said, nodding like Solan had just delivered a standing ovation. “Before you say anything—I know my first impression was insane. You’re welcome.”
Solan didn’t move. Matt leaned back in his chair, perfectly pleased with himself. “You ever seen how theater-major girls react to a good performance? Same concept. I was workshopping something on the lawn. Corpse realism. Tragic silhouette. The whole thing.”
He pointed at himself. “I got too focused. And I actually fell asleep.”
Solan stared at him. This couldn’t be real. A person like this shouldn’t exist. A person like this definitely shouldn’t be assigned to his room.
“Yeah, yeah—on me,” Matt went on, waving a hand. “I could’ve warned you it was a drill.” He grinned, shameless. “But hey. Once-in-a-lifetime experience, right? Builds character.”
He clapped his hands lightly, like closing a pitch meeting. “Anyway.”
“Okay,” Matthew said, exhaling in relief—then immediately disguising it under a shrug. He jerked a thumb toward the wall. “You should check your stuff, by the way. If anything’s missing, don’t blame me. I can carry a body. I don’t transport life assets.”
Solan didn’t own much worth stealing. An old phone. A few clothes. Documents. And—
He swung his legs off the bed too fast. Pain flashed white behind his eyes, but he ignored it and dragged his suitcase closer, yanking the zipper open with unnecessary force. The sound of it splitting felt intimate, invasive—like unfastening something inside himself.
Everything was there. ID. Charging cable. Acceptance paperwork folded into something close to resentment. And the small blue capsule—Stabilin—no larger than a bullet, priced like ransom.
He let out a breath.
Then swallowed it.
Something was wrong.
The outer cloth and straps remained, collapsed and hollow. But the weight—the dense, silent weight—was gone. Cleanly gone. The emptiness inside the wrapping felt colder than absence should.
His hand hovered in midair.
Matthew threw both hands up instantly, posture exaggerated, theatrical surrender.
“Before you accuse me of anything—disclaimer: I stole nothing. If I were stealing, I’d take the blue one. I know you’re thinking, ‘Wow, Matt, how dare you go through my mysterious murder bundle.’ But I had to make sure you weren’t about to detonate the Academy. Also, I needed to confirm you are actually Solan Elric.”
Solan didn’t respond. He stared at the emptied wrapping. What unsettled him wasn’t loss. He should have felt something falling away, some gravitational shift.
He didn’t.
Instead, he felt it—near. Not imagined. Felt. Like a cold presence leaning against the corner of the room. Like a shadow folded into the air. Like something resting beneath his own skin.
He raised his left arm slowly and rolled back the sleeve.
A thin black line traced beneath the skin along the inside of his forearm.
Not a bruise. Not a scar. More like ink drawn directly into a vein—precise, restrained, cold. The line followed a shape almost identical to the blade’s silhouette, as if the weapon had been reduced and rewritten into his internal blueprint.
He stared at it.
The headache receded, replaced by a quieter fear.
It wasn’t that he had lost the sword.
It was that the sword had entered.
“Okay,” Matthew said, sighing as if signing himself into some moral agreement. “Even though this is technically none of my business, I volunteer to be the first person who makes you think this Academy isn’t entirely full of monsters.”
Solan had never met anyone who complimented himself with such elaborate sincerity.
“Here’s the deal,” Matthew continued. “Breakfast is on me. Campus tour, also on me.” He glanced at the time, lips pressing together as reality intruded. Some of that generosity shrank into practicality. “Actually—no. I’ve got something today.”
He spread his hands.
“Breakfast is on me. Tomorrow, I take you somewhere interesting. Somewhere that’ll help you die less often.”
He stood, already halfway to the door.
“Alright, sunshine. Let’s move before the breakfast discount expires.”
The “breakfast” turned out to be a cup of coffee so large it required two hands and tasted faintly acidic, and two breakfast hot dog rolls that looked less like food and more like a chemistry experiment in beige. The sausage had the density of compressed regret. The bread glistened in a way bread shouldn’t.
“Don’t ask what’s in it,” Matt said, unwrapping his own with confidence. “If you ask, the answer is protein.”
He said it again after Solan took a cautious bite. “Protein.”
Possibly a third time. Solan wasn’t entirely certain. There was a ringing in his head that made repetition feel theoretical. The back of his skull throbbed in slow pulses, like someone tapping a dull spoon against bone. He tried to decide whether the dizziness came from concussion, caffeine, or existential miscalculation.
The coffee didn’t help. It tasted like punishment diluted in boiling water.
Matt talked the entire time—about film theory, about a professor who allegedly graded based on vibes, about how the Academy’s vending machines were rigged against left-handed people. Solan nodded when appropriate. Or when he guessed it was appropriate. The world still felt half a step misaligned, as if he had reentered it slightly off-center.
When he returned to the dorm, the air inside seemed cooler than before. It drifted low across the floor in slow currents, brushing against his ankles as though the ventilation system had decided he was temporarily suspect.
Matt hovered near the door, already halfway out of the room in spirit.
“By the way,” he said, slipping on his jacket, “I’ve got a movie thing with someone. Culture. Growth. Character development.” He gave Solan a look that was part grin, part shrug. “Try not to bleed on anything expensive.”
Then he was gone. The room settled.
Solan sat with his back against the bedframe, legs drawn in, hands resting lightly on his knees. His left arm was still humming—quiet, steady, like a charger someone forgot to unplug. He pushed his sleeve up.
The mark was still there. A black line just beneath the skin, thin as calligraphy, curling like a stylized burn along the inner forearm Great. Step one toward being mysterious: grow your own haunted body art.
He laid a palm over it. Cool. Metallic. Almost… patient.
Most Kamuy users didn’t walk around armed, he reminded himself. Other weapon summoners never carried anything. You didn’t see someone queuing for the commuter tram with a halberd on their shoulder.
Last night’s recall made one thing painfully clear: he hadn’t been special; he’d just been late. Everyone else got a kind of built-in briefing the moment they awakened—a blurry operating manual that said just enough: **You are an ice-type Physical Manipulation user. You can shape cold. Don’t try freezing your own heartbeat. They knew the outline, not the boundaries. The world didn’t hand out instruction books—just instincts. A sense of direction.
Even Somatic Augmentation types—regenerators, muscle-weavers—woke with a hazy awareness of what their bodies could do. A cut closing on its own. A bone knitting faster than it should. The Kamuy told them, quietly: This is part of you now.
But Solan… what had he gotten?
A blade. Full stop. No instinct. No framework. No sense of classification. Nothing that whispered this is the shape of your Kamuy, or even this is safe. Just a weapon that appeared one night, then crawled back under his skin like it had been living there rent-free.
He didn’t even know which discipline he was supposed to fall under.
Somatic? Manifestation? Something in-between?
The real question was: did that mean he had to start taking Stabilin now?
Nobody really understood Stabilin. Kamuy use didn’t map to dosage—some people burned through their powers daily and needed almost nothing, while others barely activated theirs and still required weekly injections. Draconic Factor levels didn’t predict a thing. Side effects ranged from skin lesions to memory gaps to people who smiled through the day and crumpled into pills at night.
Solan had never taken any. That untouched prescription was the only reason he could afford New Elysion at all—housing, meals, everything. It was his lifeline.
But what if that changed? What if the blade really had “activated”? What if next month, a dose became must? He’d lose that income. Need a job. Apply for aid. But would financial aid even cover meal plan?
A slow headache began to press against his temples. He glanced again at the black line. It didn’t glow. Didn’t move. Just lay there like nothing had happened. “…Maybe one more try.”
Not for combat. Just to see if the recall had been a fluke. If the sword would answer at all. He held his breath, focusing on the faint electric seam under his skin, trying to remember the sensation from last night—the feeling of something coiling back into him, slotting into bone as if it belonged there.
A twitch. A pulse. The line lit once—sharp as a nerve firing. And the blade materialized wrong .
CLANG—!
The blade landed tip-down on the floor, rattling the wooden boards. Dust leapt from beneath the bed. Solan stayed frozen, hand still in the summon pose. He stared at the blade. “…At least it’s not blood this time.”
But the exhaustion came immediately—like a trapdoor giving out beneath him. Heavy, full-body, familiar now. His vision stuttered. His limbs turned to wet sand. The bedframe pressed into his spine and the world dulled around the edges.
Please don’t let my Kamuy be some kind of self-targeting narcolepsy.
And then the blade, the mark, the room—all of it folded away into the dark.
✦ ✦ ✦