Far, far away, in a place unrecognisable by man, in a place morphed so much by the devil that virtues stopped carrying any meaning, a droid knelt before its master.
"How is the progress on the Solistair Academy Front?"
"Everything is proceeding according to the plan of the king my lord. Headmistress Alana is struggling to keep the students safe from our repeated incursions into her territory."
"And what of the damages we've suffered?"
"We've lost two generals so far my lord."
"Hmm… then we won't be able to keep up the same strategy for long. Let us switch to plan formation C after the next attack."
"As you order my lord."
/–/–/
Ashish awoke from his slumber feeling disjointed and uncomfortable.
It felt as if someone had pressed gently but firmly on his chest, holding it in place and forcing him to take deeper breaths to be able to breathe normally.
"What was that…"
"Who were those people?"
"Wait… Where am I?"
Ashish's eyes fluttered open wide as he looked around the sanitized futuristic room he was in.
The cupboards and shelves were all sleek white, rounded and hovering in air filled with various trinkets like corporate digital image frames and holographic books.
A curious plant littered the window sill from where the artificial light generated by the Sunlight Diffuser aboard the Astro Nautical 1000 poured in.
"Astro Nautical 1000…?"
The unfamiliar but familiar words rolled off Ashish's tongue as he mumbled his confusion out loud.
"How do I know what this is?"
Curiously, it was as if Ashish suddenly had a second set of memories. One that belonged to an entirely different life that he seemed to have lived without realising it.
"I'm on a parallel Earth where Demonic Aliens invaded the planet and took over most of it, forcing the human race to evacuate into the Astro Nautical 1000, into a geostationary orbit around the planet?"
Ashish's heart started beating faster, not by much but considerably enough that he could feel the pulse throbbing in his veins.
His mouth opened to speak, to attempt to describe the situation to himself, to rationalise the insanity of what had happened to him but words fell short.
Instead a kind of deep sense of loss and regret gnawed at the edges of his heart.
"Mom… Dad…"
Tears welled up in Ashish's eyes and he was about to cry.
Only, before he could break down into tears his heart hammered away arhythmically.
A stringent ache clenched his chest, as if someone had pinched his insides and pinned it together into a hold with a safety pin.
Panic welled up in Ashish's mind and a deep sense of fear fueled his senses.
"Medicine…" Ashish choked out before slipping off the bed and crawling towards the floating shelf in the distance, following the new memories in his mind to reach his stash of ancient outdated adrenalin syringes that he carried everywhere and had placed in the shelf before falling asleep.
As if noticing his state, the lights in the room dimmed to a deep red as an autonomous voice spoke out to him.
"Detected arrhythmia. Administering fullerene nano bot shock to return pace."
"Error. Account balance negative eighty thousand and eighty five mentos. Not enough funds to perform cardiac reset."
"Moving onto last rites protocol."
"According to the selected option, now playing the song - 'Don't let me die. by Call Emergency Services' until you die."
A song Ashish had never heard before began playing in his room but his mind barely registered it. Instead as soon as Ashish reached the shelf he grabbed onto the drawer and yanked it open with force enough for the hydraulic pistons inside it to fail.
Grabbing onto a syringe he stabbed his neck with the orange end, all while murmuring, "Blue to the sky, orange to the thigh."
A sharp cool chill spread from his neck, down all over his body.
It felt like something icy was slithering in his veins.
But the effect was immediate.
The arrhythmia died down and Ashish could finally breathe properly again.
He sat on the floor leaning against the wall, listening to a song he did not recognise with a listless gaze that he could not draw himself out of.
"...what a shitty day."
Nevertheless, after about a minute of moping around on the floor, Ashish managed to push himself up. He slowly stood up and walked to the central command station where he spoke in a rather weak voice.
"Stop playing music."
"Stopping music." the AI responded back.
The music slowly died down as the room slowly regained its pale white colour but the harm was already done, a bright boy that had once admired working for the Astro Nautical 1000 was now cursing at whoever had programmed the AI system for his room.
"I guess this is what one gets from a standard assigned room for the Solistair Academy Entrance Exam."
Solistair was the sole academy of the human realm aboard the Astro Nautical 1000. It was on the highest level of the mother ship, under the starry dark skies of the universe.
Being the sole academy it handled everything regarding the Astro Nautical 1000, from training new students to manage the mother ship to working on its innards so that when one generation passed away or was wiped out as a result of a demon invasion, the next could take up the mantle.
Given the lack of space for all the humans in the ship and the lack of land to construct new facilities in the already tight space, the academy entrance exam that happened every year used the separate orbiting inflatable space pods for its applicants.
The applicants arrived a few days before the exam and stayed in the pods until they gave the test.
This was to prevent anyone from using any stimulants before the exam to temporarily improve their intelligence.
Ashish was in one such pod right now.
It was completely disconnected from the mother ship and simply orbited around the landing station.
He would attend the virtual test in a few minutes after which he would have to take the infamous Fate Test which would reveal how long he had left to live and if he could contribute in the final fight against the demon king.
Humans actually didn't know if it was the final fight, but since the seers and fate probers always saw a majority of the human race's deaths at the end of the next five years, it was assumed that the human race would fight its final battle against the demon king during that period.
So if a student could survive until that point, he would automatically be enlisted in the fight against the demon king and assigned a role where he would be heavily invested in to turn him into a Constellation Mage.
Not that Ashish's predecessor had much of any hope since he expected to die long before that because of his congenital heart condition.
'...given this world has magic… there has to be some cure for me in it.'
'Maybe the Millennium Fruit of the Elven World Tree, or the elixir of the Dwareven Philosopher's Stone.'
'There has to be something.'
Ashish sighed softly and spoke out loud, "How much time until the entrance exam starts?"
"The exam begins in twenty minutes." the AI responded.