Dawn on Trial Day arrived with the sterile cheer of a public spectacle. The grand plaza before Celestial Ascent Academy's main gate was a riot of color, noise, and nervous ambition. Thousands of candidates from across the city-state, flanked by proud or anxious families, milled beneath floating banners that displayed the Academy's crest—a stylized tower piercing a ring of stars. News drones buzzed like metallic insects, capturing footage for the public streams.
Arlan stood alone at the edge of the crowd, a still, dark point in the swirling chaos. He wore standard-issue trial gear—dark grey, form-fitting syn-thread with basic mana-weave for durability. His face was a mask of neutral focus. Inside, the cold engine of his purpose hummed.
Umbral Sight, dialed to a subtle background scan, painted the scene in a hierarchy of power. Most candidates were fuzzy 1st or bright 2nd Order auras. A few—the obvious scions of great families or hidden prodigies—burned with the controlled intensity of 3rd Order. Proctors in distinctive silver-trimmed robes moved through the throng, their auras dense and varied, all 4th Order or above. And scattered throughout, like cancers in the vibrant energy field, he spotted three more of the pulsing grey-green auras. Silent Accord watchers, blended into the crowd as parents or vendors.
And then, he saw her.
She moved with a grace that seemed to bend the crowd around her, not through force, but through a kind of gravitational pull. Her hair was the color of spun moonlight, her eyes a piercing, crystalline blue that held a depth belying her apparent age. Her aura was unlike any he'd seen—a swirling, silvery nebula, shot through with threads of starlight and hints of profound, ancient violet. It was beautiful, vast, and utterly alien. It screamed of an affinity not just rare, but other. She was at least 3rd Order, Rank 9, on the very cusp of the 4th Order where Classes were granted.
A name rippled through the crowd near her, spoken with awe. "Lyra Solara… the Stellarae heir…"
One of the great houses. The ones who supposedly communed with cosmic energies. Of course.
Their eyes met across thirty meters of bustling space. Her gaze wasn't curious or assessing like the others. It was… penetrating. For a heartbeat, he felt a cold pinprick in his mind, as if a needle of starlight was trying to pierce his shadow-cloaked core. He instinctively thickened his mental barriers, the shadows within him coiling defensively. Her brow furrowed slightly, a flicker of confusion in those stellar eyes, before she was swept away by an entourage of other elite candidates.
A threat. Or a puzzle. Either way, she was not his concern today.
A resonant chime echoed across the plaza, silencing the crowd. A holographic figure, fifty feet tall, materialized above the gate—the Academy's Head Proctor, a man known as Overseer Kaelen (no relation to his uncle). His voice boomed, amplified by mana.
"Candidates! You stand at the threshold. The path to Ascension is not a right; it is a privilege earned through merit, will, and power. The trials you face today are designed to test the core tenets of an Awakened: Resilience, Ingenuity, and Combat Prowess. There are three stages. Failure in any stage means elimination. The rules are simple: there are none, save for the prohibition of lethal force against fellow candidates. All else… is sanctioned."
A murmur ran through the crowd. No rules.
"Stage One: The Gauntlet of Resilience. You will cross the Shattered Fields. You have one hour."
With a final, deafening chime, the massive academy gates groaned open. Instead of a pathway, a swirling vortex of distorted space and blinding light awaited—a teleportation array.
The crowd surged forward. Arlan hung back, letting the desperate tide flow past him. He activated Shadow-Slip, not to hide, but to conserve energy and move with fluid, unobstructed ease through the press of bodies. He was one of the last to step into the light.
The disorientation was instant and violent. It wasn't a simple teleport; it was a brutal, tumbling journey through a kaleidoscope of compressed space. His dormant spatial affinity recoiled in nauseating protest, while his Umbral core remained chillingly stable, an anchor in the chaos. He landed hard on one knee, the breath knocked from him, on the edge of a nightmare.
The Shattered Fields were aptly named. It was a vast, artificially maintained pocket dimension—a hellscape of floating, rotating islands of jagged rock, connected by crumbling stone bridges, swaying ropes, or nothing at all. Geysers of superheated steam erupted at random. Gravity seemed to shift in patches; he saw a candidate ahead of him leap for a ledge only to be flung sideways into a pit of glowing magenta fungus. The shriek was cut short. Not lethal force, he thought coldly, but the environment is under no such restriction.
The goal was clear: a distant, shimmering archway on the far side of the chaotic panorama. Thousands of candidates were already scrambling, leaping, falling. A few with relevant affinities had an immediate edge—air manipulators gliding between platforms, earth shapers creating temporary bridges.
Arlan had none of that. He had shadows, and a ruthless pragmatism born of loss.
He didn't join the chaotic rush for the most obvious, crowded bridges. Instead, he sought the paths of darkness. He used Umbral Sight to analyze the fields not as a physical challenge, but as an energy map. The geysers blazed white-hot, but their喷射 cycles left brief, cooler shadows in their steam plumes. The gravity anomalies warped light, creating pools of deeper shadow at their edges. The crumbling undersides of the islands were veiled in perpetual gloom.
He moved not across the tops of the islands, but through their skeletal underbellies. Using Shadow-Slip and enhanced strength from his tempered body, he swung from shadowed outcropping to shadowed crevice, traversing gaps with silent, controlled leaps where the darkness was deepest. He avoided conflicts, seeing other candidates not as rivals, but as obstacles or, occasionally, tools.
He saw a burly boy with stone-like skin (a 2nd Order Earth-Shaper) struggling to maintain a bridge he'd created across a chasm for his friends. Arlan, clinging to the shadows beneath the chasm's rim, waited. As the last of the boy's group crossed, the earth-shaker's mana faltered. The bridge began to crumble. The boy panicked, pouring everything into maintaining it.
Arlan didn't help. He didn't sabotage. He simply used the distraction. As all eyes were on the failing bridge, he launched himself across the chasm in the shadow it cast, landing silently on the far side and melting into the rocks without a backward glance. The boy's eventual failure and elimination were not his concern.
He passed candidates trapped by strange flora, ambushed by illusory beasts spawned by the field's magic, or simply paralyzed by fear. He offered no aid. Each one was a lesson, a data point on what not to do. His empathy, once a core part of him, had been buried under the cold strata of his purpose. Saving them wouldn't bring back his parents. It wouldn't hurt the Silent Accord.
Near the halfway point, he encountered his first direct conflict. A candidate with a bestial, feline aspect—a low-level beast-kin from one of the minor clans—had cornered a smaller girl with a plant affinity against a dead-end rock face. The beast-kin's aura flared orange with predatory glee. "Give me your hydration kit, twig, and I'll just knock you out. Otherwise, I throw you down there."
The girl trembled, holding up vines that seemed withered in the desolate landscape.
A week ago, Arlan might have intervened. Now, he assessed. The beast-kin was 2nd Order, Rank 6. Strong, fast, but reckless. His aura was a mess of aggressive spikes. The girl was irrelevant.
Arlan needed to pass. The only path was through the narrow ledge they blocked.
He didn't announce himself. He didn't challenge. He simply stepped from the shadow of a leaning monolith, Shadow-Slip making him a blur. As the beast-kin turned, sensing movement, Arlan's hand was already shooting out. Not a fist. A spear-tipped index and middle finger, aimed precisely at the nerve cluster below the ear. He'd studied anatomy. He'd practiced the strike on dummies.
He channeled a minuscule spark of Umbral energy—not enough to be detected as an attack, just enough to carry a shock of numbing cold.
Thwack.
The strike landed with surgical precision. The beast-kin's eyes rolled back. He collapsed, not in pain, but in sudden, total neurological overload, a marionette with its strings cut. He'd be out for ten minutes, with a killer headache and no memory of the blow.
The plant-girl stared, mouth agape, at Arlan. He didn't look at her. He stepped over the fallen body, his expression as blank as the stone around them.
"H-he… you…" she stammered.
"The path is clear," Arlan said, his voice devoid of warmth. He didn't wait for thanks. He moved on, leaving her with the unconscious aggressor. Her survival was now her own concern.
He continued, a specter of efficient, amoral progress. He used a Dark Tendril to trip a candidate who was about to leap onto his chosen shadow-path. He let the fall take the candidate out of the race. He stole a dropped grappling hook from a pile of debris, using it to swing across a gap where the shadows were too thin, then discarded it.
He emerged from the shimmering archway with twenty-three minutes to spare. He was not the first—a handful of elites like Lyra Solara were already there, meditating or drinking water, barely winded. But he was in the first hundred. A proctor at the archway, a man with a hawkish face and wind-aspected aura, marked his ID chip and gave him an appraising, slightly puzzled look. Arlan's gear was barely scuffed, his breathing even. He showed none of the frantic exhaustion of the others who stumbled through.
He found a quiet corner in the staging area for the next stage, a cavernous hall of white stone. He sat, closed his eyes, and began to regenerate his Umbral Mana. The cries of triumph and despair from later finishers were just noise.
The first cut of the trials had culled the weak, the unlucky, and the slow. Over a third would fail the Gauntlet. Arlan had passed without ever revealing his affinity, using only his body, his mind, and the quiet, cruel economy of the dark.
He had learned his first true lesson: in a world with no rules, the only morality that mattered was the morality of success. And he was a very fast learner.
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**Stage 1 Complete. Ranking: 87th percentile.**
**Objective Updated: Top 5 requires significant deviation. Prepare for Stage 2.**
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He opened his eyes. They held no excitement, no relief. Only the patient, cold watchfulness of a predator waiting for the next gate to open.
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