“Halt the ship!” Sha’Karr bellowed.
The brakes screamed, sparks flying from the wheels. The Land Ship ground to a stop. Nothing made a sound.
Sha’Karr closed his eyes. The wind-feathers around his neck flared outward, expanding into a sphere of invisible pressure that Silas felt as a change in his eardrums with a subtle pop, like ascending a mountain. The feathers fanned out in all directions in a large sphere, and Silas understood: the Captain was using the air itself as a sensory net, feeling for disturbances in the stillness.
“Three targets,” Sha’Karr announced, eyes snapping open. “Left flank. Heavy.”
The brush exploded.
A wolf the size of a carriage horse launched from the treeline. Its hide was a fused crust of gray lichen and bark, its muzzle slick with a glowing green rot that dripped from fangs too long for the jaw. Two points of feral light burned in a skull that was half-bone, half-wood. It was a Nature-Affinity Dire Wolf. A beast the dead forest had claimed and remade in its own image, something that had drunk so deeply of the Silent Woods’ necrotic mana that the rot had become its body.
Silas’s grip closed on the rail so hard the wood bit into his palm. Every instinct screamed at him to move, run, find steel and put it between himself and the thing that had just torn through sixty feet of undergrowth like curtain fabric. He didn’t run. There was nowhere to go, and his body had settled on the oldest option available: the stillness of a creature that cannot fight and cannot flee and can only hope it has not yet been noticed.
The guard moved.
He flowed, a single, liquid motion from the prow to the railing to the air beyond it, his blue cloak snapping behind like a sail. The movement was so fast and so smooth that Silas’s adrenaline-sharpened eyes couldn’t track the individual stages.
One moment the guard was on the deck, the next he was in the air, falling toward the wolf with the slow grace of something that had left gravity’s jurisdiction. As he fell, he drew his longsword, and the temperature on the deck dropped so sharply that Silas’s breath came out white. The moisture in the air condensed in the guard’s wake, pulling from the humidity and the sap in the nearest trees, crystallizing into a blade of jagged ice that extended the steel by three feet. The combined edge hummed with a mana signature Silas could feel in his molars.
The guard swung in a lazy arc. The ice-blade hit the wolf mid-leap.
A wet, cracking sound exploded from the scene. The beast was bisected cleanly, both halves freezing solid before they hit the ground. The ice spread across the carcass in a crawling frost, sealing the wound, locking the death in place. The wolf’s momentum carried the frozen halves forward in separate arcs. They landed in the underbrush with the heavy, brittle sound of ice on stone.
It had taken less than two seconds. The guard had killed a beast the size of a horse in the time it took Silas to exhale.
“Two more, rear flank!” Sha’Karr barked.
Torin spun, now getting involved. He punched the air with both fists, and the metal plates on his gauntlets detached, six curved blades that flew from his hands like startled birds, swirling with orange light, each one finding its own trajectory. They hit the second wolf as it scrabbled up the hull, shredding lichen-crusted hide and bark-fused muscle. The beast tumbled backward, already dead, hitting the road hard enough to shake the deck.
The third wolf tried to run. The guard, standing over the frozen halves of the first kill, raised his left hand. Two spears of translucent ice erupted from the muddy ground beneath the fleeing beast, driving upward through its chest and pinning it to a tree trunk. The wolf twitched and fought, the ice thickened, and all movement ceased.
Ten seconds. Three beasts.
Silas was gripping the railing hard enough to hurt. His heart was still hammering; the threat was gone and his body was still running a fight it no longer had, against an enemy frozen to a tree. His hands shook with the afterimage of fear.
Beside him, Kent had gone the color of old milk. Malachai hadn’t moved. He was standing at the rail with his thin hands braced against the wood, and his expression wasn’t fear. It was hunger. The same hunger Silas had seen in his father’s eyes when Harren told stories about what high-tier sacred artists could do. It was the desperate, aching awareness of how much power existed in the world and how little of it belonged to people like them.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Torin hopped over the rail and knelt beside the first wolf’s carcass. He drew a short knife and made a practiced incision beneath the ribcage, cutting through frozen flesh and vine until his hand found what it was looking for. He pulled out a Spirit Core, a dull, bruise-dark stone the size of a heart, its surface veined with threads of that same sick green, still warm and pulsing with residual mana. He tossed it onto the deck, where it rolled in a slow arc and came to rest against Silas’s boot.
“That,” Torin called up, wiping his knife on his trouser leg, “was a Cobalt performance. The Iceman up there?” He jerked his thumb at the guard, who had already returned to the prow and was cleaning his blade with the disinterest of a man who had done this so many times it no longer qualified as a story. “Full fusion with his beast’s power, High Chrome. Frost Leviathan bond. At his level, the mana isn’t something he uses. It’s something he is.”
He looked at the blank faces staring down at him.
“You kids don’t even know the tiers, do you?” Torin pulled himself back onto the deck. “Right. Short version. Foundation, that’s you. Soft. A vessel. Bond at the Academy and you hit Wood: the core sets, you start cycling. Copper is first compression. Steel burns the impurities out and the body hardens, and that’s where the real fighting starts.” He held up fingers as he counted, and ran out of them somewhere in Chrome. “Cobalt, that’s the Captain and I. Chrome, Low to High, that’s the Iceman. Most people peak there, if they ever get that far.”
“And above Chrome?” Silas asked.
“Titanium. Then Radiant. Then Sovereign.” Torin’s voice lost its usual wry edge. “You don’t meet those people, kid. At the early stages of your development, you’re lucky to survive being near them.”
Nobody spoke for a while after that.
The trees broke two days later.
Silas woke to a change in the air. The damp rot of the forest was fading, and what replaced it was crisp and thin and sharp: mountain air, carrying the clean bite of snow and something he didn’t have a word for. A density. A hum under the silence, felt in his chest more than heard.
Mana. Ambient mana, thicker than anything he’d felt in the Rustbelt or on the road. The air itself was saturated with it.
He scrambled to the railing.
The Land Ship had crested the final ridge. Below them, the world opened up.
The Argentum Academy rose from the base of a snow-capped mountain range, and at that moment Silas knew the word “Academy” was a lie. It was a city. A multicolor fortress, built by people who understood that knowledge and power were the same substance and had designed their architecture accordingly.
White marble and glass climbed the mountain’s southern face in concentric tiers: training grounds and dormitory blocks at the base, laid out in brutalist rows softened by mana-lanterns glowing steady blue-white; lecture halls and laboratories ascending in rings, their walls inlaid with copper conduit that pulsed with channeled energy; and higher still, needle spires in the styles of each city-state, connected by floating bridges of light that carried the distant shapes of people walking hundreds of feet above the ground. A lake sat in a glacial bowl to the east, blue and clear as a mirror, reflecting the spires in perfect inverted symmetry.
And everywhere, in the air, on the bridges, circling the spires, there was movement. Skyships drifted through the clouds, pulled by teams of winged Spirit Beasts in glowing harnesses. A core-powered train clad in polished brass burst from a tunnel in the cliffside blowing its horn, levitating above its tracks on a cushion of crackling blue energy. Figures in uniforms walked the terraces.
A Great Spire rose from the mountain’s shoulder at the summit of it all, a needle of white stone and glass that caught the morning sun and threw it back in prismatic arcs across the valley below. It looked like a declaration: we built this, you didn’t, and the distance between those two facts is the distance between your life and ours.
Kent was crying. He wasn’t hiding it. The tears were rolling freely down his ruddy cheeks, his mouth was open, and he was making no effort to control it. “I thought maybe it was smaller,” he said. “I thought maybe the pictures had been exaggerated.”
“They weren’t,” Silas said.
Malachai said nothing. He stood at the rail with his thin hands on the wood, staring at the Academy with the same expression Silas had seen at the campfire, that raw, unguarded hunger. But there was something else beneath it now. His eyes were moving, scanning the tiers, the spires, the bridges, the auras, not with wonder but with focus. Counting the distance. Measuring the gap. Doing the arithmetic that boys from the Sump did instinctively when confronted with wealth: figuring out what it would cost to belong, and what they’d have to become to afford it.
Sha’Karr walked up behind the three of them. He inhaled the alpine air, and a rare smile broke his craggy face.
“Drink it in, lads. That there is the Argentum Academy.”
The smile dimmed.
“May you be lucky enough to bond. Because if you don’t, I turn this ship around in seven days, and it’s a long, quiet ride back to wherever you came from.”
Silas stared at the approaching towers. He gripped the railing, the same railing he’d gripped during the wolf attack, the same railing he’d stood at on the first morning when the Rustbelt was still visible behind them.
Seven days. That was the window. Seven days to touch a stone, be assessed and hopefully chosen, or seven days to fail and ride back to the forge and the thin broth and the slow grinding down of everything he was until nothing remained but a pair of ruined hands and a name on a guild ledger.
Malachai hadn’t moved. His hands were still on the rail, the arithmetic still running. Whatever he was calculating, the answer was a price. And whatever the price turned out to be, Malachai had already decided he would pay it.
The morning sun caught the Great Spire and sent a column of light across the valley that was so bright it hurt to look at.
Silas didn’t look away.
A splinter of old oak from the railing bit into the meat of his palm. He welcomed it. He tightened his grip until the wood creaked and the pain became the only honest thing on the deck.
I am not going back, he thought. Whatever it costs. Whatever it takes.
I am never going back.