The first thing Roman Wolfe did every morning was check how long he could last.
He'd been testing his stamina since he was fifteen — pushing raw Soul Essence through his body without any inscriptions to guide it, feeling the burn build in his chest until it got too hot to ignore.
Three years later, he could last forty-seven seconds.
Not exactly the kind of number that got you recruited by Hunter guilds. But it was his number, and it was forty-seven seconds more than people expected from him.
He rolled off his bed, cracked his neck twice, and looked at the clock on his wall.
6:52 AM.
'I should probably start leaving earlier.'
He didn't move for another six minutes. The next thing he did was check how hard it was.
The sun. Through his curtains.
If it was grey outside, wraith activity on the outer districts could be high. The checkpoints would be backed up. Being late would have a real, documented excuse.
Today, the sun was blinding.
'Great. No alibi.'
He stared at the strip of gold on his ceiling and made the same choice he made every morning.
'Five more minutes.'
Forty-one minutes later, Roman was flying down the cracked road of Sector Twelve on a bicycle that had no business still working. Backpack on one shoulder. Half a piece of toast in his mouth. The face of a man who was not late — if you used the right framework.
Nobody else used his framework.
The city stretched around him in every direction — towers of glass and reinforced alloy catching the morning light, guild banners hanging from municipal poles in colours that told you everything about who owned what piece of this place.
Gold for Tier-One guilds. Silver for Two. The rest fought over the scraps.
Above it all, if you squinted past the high-rise residential blocks, you could see the faint smear of purple on the northern horizon.
Always there. Like a bruise that never fully healed.
Hell Seven. The Crown.
Close enough that the city built its walls twice as high as any other Sanctuary. Close enough that every kid grew up knowing exactly what lived just beyond those walls and exactly what happened to people the walls didn't protect.
Roman didn't squint at it. He'd stopped doing that years ago.
He had enough problems at eye level.
---
He made it through the front gate of Aurelius High at 8:09 AM.
Class started at 8:00.
He walked through the corridor at exactly the speed of someone who did not feel bad about this at all.
The hallways were mostly empty since everyone had gone to their respective classes. His footsteps echoed against scuffed tile floors, past the motivational posters the school kept plastered on every wall.
[YOUR SEAL IS YOUR FUTURE.]
[INSCRIBE YOUR PATH TO GREATNESS.]
[EVERY PAGE IS A PROMISE.]
Roman passed them without looking. He knew them by heart. He'd spent three years trying to figure out which one applied to a person with zero pages and decided, eventually, that none of them did.
He pushed open the door to Class 3-A.
Thirty-two heads turned.
Mr. Desmond, who was standing at the board mid-sentence, turned last. He had the particular expression of a man who had been hoping, for once, to be wrong.
He was not wrong.
"Wolfe."
"Morning, sir."
"It is, in fact, eight-oh-nine."
"Interesting. I thought it felt like an eight-oh-nine kind of morning."
A few people near the back swallowed laughs. Someone didn't quite manage it.
Mr. Desmond pointed at the empty seat in the third row with the quiet authority of a man who had given up on winning and was simply trying to maintain dignity.
Roman sat down.
---
He was aware, in the way you become aware of weather, of the glances.
They weren't cruel today. They rarely were anymore. Cruelty required novelty, and Roman Wolfe had ceased to be novel approximately two years and eleven months ago.
He was just the anomaly. The boy with the Adamantium Seal that couldn't do anything.
The story everyone in Sanctuary Seven had heard at least once: fifteen-year-old manifests the highest-grade Seal in recorded human history. Assessment machines break. Sanctuary Council dispatches representatives. Researchers arrive. Three weeks of testing.
Conclusion: zero pages. Nothing to inscribe. Nowhere for that extraordinary power to go.
The most gifted. The most useless.
It had been funny to people for a while. Then it became background noise. Then it became the kind of thing politely not mentioned, like a distant relative's embarrassing situation.
Roman had gone through all three phases and come out the other side somewhere he couldn't quite name. Not bitterness. Not peace either.
Just... forward.
'Keep moving. That's all there is.'
He pulled out his notebook and wrote the date at the top.
---
Mr. Desmond was mid-lecture on Descent Formation theory when he paused, turned, and looked directly at Roman with the expression of a man who had been building toward something for a while.
"Wolfe. What are the four pre-descent signs?"
The class went a little quieter. Roman looked up from his notes.
"Purple atmospheric discoloration. Spatial fractures that look like black lightning. Complete silence from animals up to forty-eight hours before rupture. Electronic interference within five kilometres."
A beat.
"Good," Mr. Desmond said, like he was slightly annoyed that he couldn't catch him. "And why does that matter for Camp Seven?"
'Ah. Here we go.'
Roman leaned back slightly. "Because if we're near a descent site and we miss the signs, we die."
"Correct. Which brings me..." Mr. Desmond set down his chalk and looked at Roman with the expression teachers reserved for conversations they'd been rehearsing. "to my actual concern. You are, as of this year, officially a graduating student. Camp Seven is in six weeks. You are aware of this."
"Very aware, sir."
"Are you also aware that Camp Seven has a thirty percent casualty rate?"
"Twenty-eight point four, historically. The thirty is rounded up."
Someone in the front row turned to look at him.
Mr. Desmond's eye twitched. "The number, rounded or otherwise, implies you should be present and engaged in preparation. Not arriving at eight-oh-nine every morning like you're doing me a favour by showing up at all."
"I'm always on time relationally, sir. I'm the same amount of late every day. That's basically a schedule."
"That is not what a schedule is."
"I'd argue consistency is the foundation of all scheduling—"
"Wolfe!"
"Sir."
The class had fully given up pretending not to listen. Mr. Desmond pinched the bridge of his nose.
"You are the only student in this school—possibly in the history of this school—with an Adamantium-grade Seal. Whatever your page situation, that Essence output you're walking around with is real. And Camp Seven doesn't care about grades or pages or potential. It cares whether you come home." He paused. "I'd prefer you came home."
The room was quiet now. Not the performative quiet of people watching something entertaining, this was actual quiet.
Roman looked at him for a second.
'He means it.'
"I'll be on time tomorrow," Roman said.
Mr. Desmond studied him. "Will you?"
"...I'll aim for eight-oh-five."
"That's not —"
"Eight-oh-three."
"Wolfe —"
"Eight-oh-one. Final offer."
Mr. Desmond turned back to the board. "Sit up straight and take notes."
Roman sat up straight. He took notes.
In the back of his mind, though, something about Camp Seven sat differently than it had this morning. Like the idea had weight now that someone else had said it out loud.
---
Lunch was the part of the day Roman actually liked.
Not because of the food, which was edible at best. But because the roof of the east wing's storage building had a ventilation panel that didn't fully close, and if you timed it right, you could sit up there for forty minutes with nobody asking you anything.
He sat cross-legged, eating a rice box, looking out over the district.
From here you could see three guild towers. You could see the outer wall, pale grey and enormous, running along the northern edge of the city like a second skyline.
And if you looked long enough, you could see the purple smear again.
Roman chewed slowly.
Six weeks until Camp Seven. An expedition into one of the outer Descent zones for final-year assessment. You had to go. Everyone had to go. Even him, the boy with the empty seal.
Most years, the casualties were mostly due to overconfidence. Students who had high grade Seals and real pages and thought that made them ready for something that had spent a hundred years trying to end the world.
Roman was not overconfident. He had nothing to be overconfident about.
What he had was forty-seven seconds. And two fists. And the ability to read a room or a battlefield faster than most people could register they were in danger.
'Maybe that's enough.'
He ate the rest of his rice.
'Probably not. But it's what I've got.'
---
The final bell went at 3:30.
Roman was outside by 3:30:48.
His bicycle was chained to the rack at the side of the building, scratched and slightly dented on one side from where he'd misjudged a corner two years ago. He'd never fixed it. It still worked. That was the criteria.
He was halfway through unlocking it when a voice came from behind him.
"Oi. Shorty."
Roman's hand stopped on the lock.
'Not that.'
He turned around slowly.
Two third-years he vaguely recognized, both with guild badges already on their lapels, which meant their Seals were at least Silver and their pages were somewhere above six. They had the look of people who'd had things come easily and found it boring when things didn't come easily for other people.
"You're the zero-page kid, right?" the taller one said. He had a Silver-grade badge. Genuinely talented. Genuinely aware of it. "Saw you in class with Desmond. You've got some nerve showing up late every day with a Seal that can't do anything."
Roman looked at him.
Then he looked at the other one.
Then he looked back at the first one.
"You called me shorty."
"...What?"
"You called me shorty." Roman's voice was perfectly even. "Everything after that, I didn't really register it. I got distracted."
The Silver-badge frowned. "I'm talking about your Seal—"
"Five-two is a completely functional height," Roman said. "I'm still growing. The doctors said." He paused. "One doctor said. He seemed fairly confident."
"I—" The guy blinked. "That's not what this is about—"
"Then don't open with 'shorty!'" Roman turned back to his bicycle. "You want to talk about my Seal, come find me when you've got something new to say. Everyone's already done the zero-pages bit. I've heard it!"
He unclipped the chain and looped it through his bag. "The height thing, though. That one actually bothers me. Just so you know. And you don't want to bother me."
He pushed off and started down the road.
Behind him, he heard nothing. Which meant they didn't have a follow-up.
They never did.
---
He coasted down the hill with the afternoon air cutting past his face, the city spreading out on either side.
Camp Seven. Six weeks.
'Twenty-eight point four percent.'
He pushed a little harder on the pedals.
The purple smear on the horizon didn't move. It never did.
But he was starting to think—not for the first time, and probably not for the last—that at some point, he and that smear were going to have a proper conversation.
He just needed to still be alive for it.
'Eight-oh-one. I can do eight-oh-one.'
He turned onto his street and let the hill carry him the rest of the way home.