Chapter 5: The Academy's Teeth
Orin woke to voices below his warehouse, the particular cadence of authority questioning the unwilling. City watch, probably, canvassing the slums for witnesses to last night's theater of stupidity. He pressed himself against the floorboards, breathing shallow, listening to the interrogation's rhythm without catching words.
They wouldn't find anything. Slum dwellers practiced selective blindness as survival instinct. See too much, say too much, become a problem for whoever held the nearest weapon. The watch knew this, went through motions anyway, theater answering theater.
The voices faded. Boots on cobblestone, receding like bad weather.
Orin counted to three hundred before moving. His body protested differently now. Not pain exactly, more like his skeleton was settling into unfamiliar architecture. The ironback essence had rebuilt something fundamental, and his flesh was still negotiating terms with the reconstruction.
He examined his hands in the warehouse's dusty light. The same hands, superficially. Still scarred from childhood fights and industrial accidents. Still too thin, knuckles prominent beneath skin that had never known enough meals. But stronger now. He flexed, watched tendons move beneath flesh, felt power coiled in muscle fiber and bone density.
A weapon pretending to be a boy pretending to be harmless.
The city beyond his sanctuary was waking up mean. Factory whistles shrieked their demands. Cart wheels complained against stone. Somewhere distant, a street preacher promised salvation through suffering, his voice raw with conviction nobody was buying.
Orin pulled on his least damaged clothes, wrapped the void stone in cloth to hide the silver specks, and descended into the slums' digestive system.
The Military Academy sat in the city's western quarter, where architecture stood proud echoing a time of ambition. Stone walls thick enough to stop siege weapons, gates that could've held against armies. These days they mostly held against poor kids with delusions.
Fifty years ago, the academy accepted anyone with baseline competency and a green or blue stone. Meritocracy, they'd called it. Equal opportunity for those willing to bleed.
Then the nobles noticed their children were competing with butcher's sons and mason's daughters. Noticed their genetic advantages meant less when training equalized technique. So tuition appeared. Then entrance fees. Then equipment costs and uniform expenses and a thousand small financial razors that bled the lower classes until only the wealthy remained.
Now the academy took perhaps a few students from the slums every five years. Token inclusion, proof the system worked if you tried hard enough. Never mind that trying required resources trying couldn't generate.
Orin approached the gates with a hundred other hopefuls, all of them calculating odds and finding nothing comforting.
A blue-stone boy who'd probably emptied his family's savings for the entrance fee stood practicing forms, his movements crisp but mechanical. Memorized rather than understood. His birthstone glowed dull azure as he channeled essence through basic enhancement patterns.
Green-stones clustered in self-congratulatory groups, comparing family lineages and hunting trophies like collectors trading rare diseases. Their stones burned brighter, essence capacity translating to casual arrogance. These were the ones who'd pass. Everyone knew it. The exam was formality dressed as opportunity.
And then the blackstones. Seven of them, Orin included, standing separate because proximity to failure was contagious. They wore defeat like inherited jewelry, precious and worthless.
Maya caught his eye from across the courtyard. She'd cleaned up for the exam, found clothes that didn't advertise poverty quite so loudly. But her birthstone was still black, still broadcasting her fundamental inadequacy to anyone with eyes.
She mouthed something. Couldn't parse it. Then she smiled, bitter and beautiful, a girl accepting her punchline before the joke finished.
"Candidates, attention!"
The voice belonged to a woman who radiated violence. She stood on the gate's raised platform, purple birthstone visible even at distance, her military uniform tailored to perfection. Instructor Kael, according to the rumors. Veteran of the eastern campaigns, collector of scars and dead students' names.
"The entrance examination consists of three trials," Kael announced, her voice carrying the particular clarity of someone accustomed to speaking over screaming. "Physical conditioning. Essence control. Combat evaluation. Fail any trial, you're downgraded clerical or infantry candidate. She glanced at the Blackstone's with derision, Pass all three, you're conditionally accepted pending tuition payment."
The last part got muttered reactions. Conditional acceptance was a polite fiction. If you couldn't pay, you couldn't stay. But they let you pass the trials anyway, let you taste possibility before economics crushed it.
Cruelty dressed as kindness. The system's favorite costume.
"Physical trial begins in ten minutes. Prepare yourselves."
The candidates dispersed, some stretching, others praying, a few vomiting nervously into convenient corners. Orin found a patch of wall and leaned against it, conserving energy, studying the competition.
The green-stones would dominate. Their essence enhancement gave them speed and strength that baseline humans couldn't match. Blue-stones would cluster in the middle, respectable but unremarkable. Blackstones would fail spectacularly, confirming everyone's prejudices and relegating them to token entrance if they were lucky, this came with an upside of not needing exorbitant amounts of money but the downside was you'd probably die either during training or as fodder on hunts.
Except Orin's attributes were green-stone level now. Maybe higher in durability. The void stone had given him advantages that shouldn't exist.
He just had to use them without anyone noticing the impossibility.
*Balance,* he thought. *Fail too badly, you're dismissed, or worse selected to be an expendable distraction. Succeed too obviously, questions follow. Thread the needle.*
"Candidates, form up!"
They assembled in ragged lines before an obstacle course that looked designed by someone who hated youth. Walls to climb. Trenches to cross. A rope suspended over a mud pit that probably had aspirations of drowning people. At the course's end, a bell mounted on a post. Ring it, you passed.
Time limit: five minutes.
"First group, go!"
Ten candidates launched themselves at the course. Green-stones hit the first wall at enhanced speed, scaling it like gravity was a suggestion. Blue-stones followed, slower but competent. One blackstone made it halfway up before his grip failed. He hit the ground hard, didn't get up immediately.
Orin watched mechanics, angles, technique. The wall had handholds, but they were spaced for essence-enhanced reach. The rope swing required strength beyond blackstone capacity. The final sprint was pure endurance, punishing anyone who'd spent their reserves early.
Groups cycled through. Green-stones rang bells, looking bored by the ease. Blue-stones mostly passed, a few failing at the rope. Blackstones failed universally, their inadequacy confirmed before they'd crossed twenty yards.
Maya went with the fourth group. She attacked the course with desperate precision, refusing to accept defeat gracefully. Made it to the rope, arms shaking, determination carved into her expression. Swung, reached for the far platform.
Fell short.
The mud accepted her with wet finality. She emerged filthy and crying, rage and humiliation mixing until they became indistinguishable.
"Next group!"
Orin's turn.
He stepped to the line with six others: four green-stones who'd probably trained together, two blue-stones trying to look confident. They sized him up, saw the blackstone, dismissed him as irrelevant competition.
Good. Underestimation was armor.
"Go!"
Orin exploded forward, thirty-seven strength points translating to acceleration that surprised his own nervous system. The first wall appeared, vertical and hostile. He hit it at speed, fingers finding holds, muscle memory from climbing warehouse exteriors merging with essence-enhanced capability.
*Too fast. You're moving too fast for a blackstone.*
He deliberately slowed, letting a green-stone pass him. Technique over raw power. Make it look like effort. Grunt, strain, sell the performance.
Over the wall. A cargo net stretched across a pit. Green-stones were already across, their enhanced speed carrying them. Orin took careful steps, testing each section, moving methodically. Not slow enough to fail, not fast enough to question.
A blue-stone overtook him, breathing hard. The kid's birthstone was glowing, essence flooding his system. Expensive, burning reserves for temporary advantage. Orin kept his own stone deliberately dull, hidden beneath cloth and discipline.
The rope swing. Green-stones had made it look trivial. For blackstones, it was elimination.
Orin grabbed the rope, felt rough fiber bite his palms. Stepped back, calculating angles. Thirty-seven strength, twenty-six dexterity. The math worked. Probably.
*Commit.*
He swung, momentum carrying him across the gap. For one suspended heartbeat, he hung over the mud pit, gravity negotiating with physics. Then the far platform arrived, and he released, landed in a crouch that absorbed impact without collapsing.
Behind him, a blue-stone missed. The splash was tragic and final.
Two obstacles left. A balance beam suspended three feet up, narrow as vengeance. Then the final sprint to the bell.
Green-stones were already ringing bells, finishing in under three minutes. Orin crossed the beam carefully, arms out for balance, moving like someone for whom this was genuinely difficult. Technique compensating for limited enhancement. Plausible for an exceptional blackstone.
Final sprint. His lungs burned, muscles screaming. Not from exertion exactly, more from forcing himself to hold back. Twenty-three speed could've carried him faster, but faster meant questions.
He crossed the finish line, slapped the bell. The sound carried across the courtyard, clear as judgment.
Four minutes, forty seconds.
Instructor Kael was watching him. Her expression gave nothing away, but her eyes were calculating, measuring, finding discrepancies.
*She knows something's wrong.*
Not what, maybe. Not yet. But something in his performance had tickled her professional paranoia. A blackstone passing the physical trial wasn't impossible, just improbable. Worth noting. Worth watching.
Orin kept his breathing labored, sold exhaustion he didn't feel. Just another desperate kid who'd gotten lucky, nothing more.
The other candidates finished or failed. Final count: eighteen green-stones passed, seven blue-stones, and Orin.
One blackstone from a field of seven. Maya watched from the failed candidates' section, her expression unreadable through the drying mud.
"Passed candidates, recover," Kael ordered. "Essence control trial begins in twenty minutes."
The survivors dispersed, some celebrating, others treating injuries. Orin found a water barrel, drank carefully, mind racing through problems.
Trial one, complete. But essence control would be different. Harder to fake, easier to expose. They'd measure output, purity, technique. His void stone absorbed essence better than any birthstone on record. But output? Control? He'd been feeding the thing for days, never trying to use it.
*Should've practiced. Should've tested capabilities before betting life on competence.*
But hindsight was just regret wearing reading glasses. He had twenty minutes to figure out how to channel essence without revealing his birthstone's fundamental impossibility.
A hand touched his shoulder. Orin spun, instinct translating to threat assessment.
A boy stood there, maybe seventeen, his green birthstone visible on relaxed fingers. Handsome in the way aristocratic genetics engineered, his features assembled by generations of selective breeding. But his eyes held something sharper than inherited arrogance. Curiosity, maybe. Or recognition.
"Impressive performance," the boy said. His voice was cultured, each syllable precisely placed. "Particularly for a blackstone."
"Luck."
"Was it?" The question landed soft, a blade sliding between ribs. "Because luck doesn't usually include perfect form on the rope swing. That's training. Technique."
Orin met his eyes, refusing to flinch. "You calling me a liar?"
"I'm calling you interesting." The boy extended his hand. "Caius Vermillion. My family sponsors the academy's advanced cultivation program."
*Vermillion.* The name carried weight like a millstone around necks. Old nobility, military lineage, the kind of people who considered casual brutality a family tradition.
Orin didn't take the offered hand. "Orin Fox. My family sponsors nothing."
Caius smiled, acknowledging the rejection without offense. "I know who you are. The blackstone who absorbed two essence vials during his weaving ceremony. The one Instructor Kael has been muttering about since reviewing applications."
Ice crystallized in Orin's stomach. "The weaver confirmed minimal capacity."
"She confirmed what bureaucracy required." Caius leaned closer, his voice dropping. "But absorption rate like yours doesn't happen naturally. Doesn't happen at all for blackstones. Which makes you either a prodigy, an anomaly, or something I haven't categorized yet."
"Maybe I'm just trying to pass an exam."
"Maybe." Caius straightened, casual as discussing weather. "Or maybe you're something the system hasn't seen before. Either way, you've got my attention. That's dangerous, Fox. But potentially useful."
He walked away before Orin could formulate response, leaving behind implications that felt like threats.
*He knows. Doesn't know what, but knows something.*
The void stone pulsed beneath its cloth wrapping, responding to stress or proximity to another essence user. The silver specks swirled faster, hungry and restless.
Twenty minutes until the essence control trial. Twenty minutes to decide if passing was worth the exposure, or if strategic failure was smarter survival.
Orin looked at the other candidates, at Maya watching from the rejected section, at Instructor Kael reviewing notes with professional suspicion, at Caius Vermillion studying him like a puzzle worth solving.
The academy's teeth were showing now, and he was already between them.
The bell rang, summoning candidates to their next elimination.
Orin walked forward, each step a negotiation with consequence, and wondered if hunger and ambition were just different words for the same suicide.