Day eight.
Progress report.
Dressing time: five minutes. Down from eleven on day one. The buttons were automatic now—I didn't think about them, which freed up mental bandwidth for more important things, like not dying.
Walking speed: seventy meters in six minutes. Down from nine. The route was optimized as far as it could go without finding a shortcut that didn't exist. The gains from here would have to come from the legs, not the path.
Frost holds: three per day. Thirty seconds each. The alignment was coming faster—twelve seconds now, down from thirty on the first day. The melt zone had grown from a coin to roughly the size of my palm. Still pathetic. Still less ice manipulation than a child could manage. But the curve was moving in the right direction, and the curve was all I had.
Corruption advance: half a centimeter per session, retreating fully after the evening tonic. Stable. Not worsening. Hagen's three-rep limit was holding the line.
Core recovery time: four hours after depletion, down from six. Something in the cracked engine was learning to refill faster, like a leaking bucket that had found a slightly larger tap.
Caloric intake: up. I was eating everything on the tray now—every grain of soup, every piece of bread, every chunk of whatever mystery meat the kitchen served. Not because I enjoyed it. Because I'd noticed that eating more correlated with a slightly faster core recovery, and faster recovery meant a longer functional window, and a longer window meant more time upright, and more time upright meant more data.
Data was currency.
I was still broke, but I was earning.
***
The problem was that I was earning in coins and needed to pay in gold.
Five weeks had become four. Four weeks until one thousand applicants entered a Rift Domain for seventy-two hours, and five hundred came out. I'd been melting frost on a wall for eight days. The people I'd be competing against had been training for years. Some of them had been training since childhood, in families that had invested thousands of hours and tens of thousands of crests into producing combat-ready mages.
I could melt a palm-sized circle of frost.
They could split stone dummies in half from thirty meters.
The math wasn't just bad. The math was the kind of bad that made calculators file for emotional distress.
Which meant the math had to change.
I couldn't close the raw power gap in four weeks. That was a fact, not a limitation I could optimize around. A cracked core with four mana was never going to match a stable core with forty. The body's STR of 8 was never going to compete with someone who'd been drilling swordsmanship since they could walk.
But Lyra had said something that stuck.
Seventy-two hours. One thousand applicants. Five hundred pass.
Not "five hundred win." Not "five hundred defeat the other five hundred."
Pass.
...What were the actual rules?
What was the evaluation criteria? How were applicants scored? Was it pure combat? Survival? Points? Objectives? Was there a minimum threshold or was it strictly competitive—top half advances, bottom half is eliminated?
I didn't know. And not knowing was, in its own way, the most dangerous part of my situation. I was preparing for a test without knowing what was on it. Training my body for an event without understanding what the event demanded.
I needed information.
And there was exactly one person on this estate who had voluntarily given me any.
***
East wing. Third floor.
The walk took nineteen minutes.
The Ashworth estate was larger than I'd mapped. My exploration over the past eight days had covered the route between my room, the training yard, and the corridors connecting them—a small triangle that represented maybe ten percent of the total compound. Everything else was uncharted territory, and uncharted territory in a household where the staff had been trained to ignore me meant navigating without being able to ask directions.
I navigated anyway. The estate had a logic to it—the main building was a central block with four wings extending outward, and the wings were labeled by direction. My room was in the north wing, upper floor. The training yard was south, ground level. East wing meant right from the main entrance hall, and third floor meant stairs.
More stairs.
My relationship with stairs had not improved.
The east wing was different from the north. The stone was the same—always the same dark, cold, perpetually unwelcoming stone—but the corridors here were narrower, the crystal fixtures spaced further apart, and the air had a different quality. Drier. Warmer. It smelled like old paper and candle wax and something metallic that I couldn't identify.
The doors on this floor had plaques. Small, brass, mounted at eye level. Names I didn't recognize, followed by titles—Professor this, Instructor that, Department of something I couldn't translate because the words existed in a language I could read but not contextualize.
I found Hagen's door at the end of the corridor.
Professor Alaric Hagen
Combat Theory & Applied Mana Kinetics
Office Hours: By Appointment
By appointment.
I didn't have an appointment. I didn't even know how appointments worked here—was there a system? A secretary? A bird you sent? A crystal you tapped?
I knocked.
Silence. Long enough that I considered turning around.
Then: "It's open."
The same voice. Flat, precise, no wasted air. I pushed the door and entered.
The office was small. Smaller than my room, which was saying something given that my room had been designed to make its occupant feel stored rather than housed. A desk—heavy, wooden, buried under stacked papers and open books. A window that looked east toward a different section of the mountains, gray and sharp against the overcast sky. Two chairs. A bookshelf that covered the entire back wall, crammed with volumes of different sizes and ages, some of them leather-bound and cracking, others newer with stiff spines.
And weapons.
Not on racks. Not displayed. Leaning against walls, tucked into corners, hanging from hooks behind the door—swords, a spear, what appeared to be a weighted chain, something curved that I didn't have a name for. The office of a man who collected instruments of violence the way other people collected souvenirs, and kept them within arm's reach out of habit rather than paranoia.
Hagen sat behind the desk. Same face—sharp, scarred, gray-eyed. He was holding a pen and had been writing something before I interrupted. The pen was still in his hand, hovering over the paper, as if he hadn't fully committed to acknowledging my presence.
He looked at me.
Same expression as the training yard. Nothing. The absence of an expression. A man waiting for data before allocating a reaction.
"The F-minus," he said.
Not "Caelum." Not "Ashworth." Not "young master." The F-minus.
I should have been offended. Wasn't. It was honest, and honest was in short supply around here.
"Professor Hagen."
"You walked here."
"...Yes."
"East wing. Third floor."
"Yes."
"That's a nineteen-minute walk from the north wing for someone in your condition."
'He calculated my travel time from my starting location.'
"Closer to twenty today. The stairs on the second-floor landing have an uneven step that I didn't account for."
Something moved in his eyes. Not amusement—recognition. The micro-expression of a man who had asked a question he expected a vague answer to and gotten a specific one.
He set the pen down.
"Sit."
I sat. The chair was hard, wooden, uncomfortable. Perfect for a man who didn't want visitors to stay long.
"I need information," I said.
"About?"
"The Astralion entrance examination."
He leaned back. The chair creaked. His eyes stayed fixed on me—not warm, not cold, just... present. The focused attention of someone who was professionally obligated to teach and personally disinclined to waste effort on lost causes.
"Why?"
"Because I'm taking it in four weeks and I don't know what it is."
"You know it's a Battle Royale in a Rift Domain."
"I know the format. I don't know the rules."
"The rules are survive."
"That's the summary. I need the details."
Silence.
Hagen studied me. Not the way Helena studied me—calculating cost and liability. Not the way Lyra studied me—looking for the brother she remembered underneath the damage. Hagen studied me the way he'd studied the wet spots on the training yard wall.
Measurement. Assessment. The question of whether the data justified the investment.
"The examination," he said, "is conducted in a Rift Domain—a controlled dimensional pocket maintained by Academy staff. The terrain varies by year. Forest, tundra, urban ruins, subterranean caverns. You won't know the environment until you're inside."
I listened. Filed.
"One thousand applicants enter simultaneously through distributed entry points. Each applicant receives a Crest Token at entry—a mana-infused badge worn on the chest. The token records vital signs, location, and combat data. If an applicant's vitals drop below a critical threshold, the token activates an emergency extraction barrier and removes them from the domain."
"So you can't actually die."
"You can." Flat. No hesitation. "The extraction barrier has a three-second activation delay. Three seconds is enough time to die in combat. It's happened. Not often, but it's happened."
...
I filed that under "things to not let happen."
"Scoring is based on three metrics," Hagen continued. "First: Crest Tokens collected. Each applicant has one. If you take another applicant's token, you receive their points. High-value targets—strong applicants, team leaders—carry bonus multipliers. The more tokens you hold, the higher your ranking."
"So it rewards aggression."
"It rewards results. Aggression is one path. Not the only one."
"What are the other paths?"
"Second metric: survival time. Every hour you remain active in the domain adds to your score. An applicant who survives the full seventy-two hours with only their own token will outscore an applicant who collects five tokens but gets extracted at hour twelve."
...
'Survival time.'
I turned that over. Slowly.
"The third metric?"
"Objective completion. The Academy seeds the domain with tasks—resource caches to secure, environmental hazards to neutralize, strategic positions to hold. Each completed objective adds a fixed point value. Some objectives are public—announced to all applicants. Others are hidden."
He paused. Looked at me with an expression that was almost—almost—something more than neutral.
"The examination is designed to evaluate three qualities: combat ability, strategic thinking, and endurance. Applicants who excel in all three rank highest. But the threshold for admission is top five hundred out of one thousand. You don't need to be the best. You need to be in the upper half."
Upper half.
Five hundred out of a thousand.
"Most eliminations happen in the first twelve hours," Hagen said. "The weakest applicants—those without training, without stable cores, without basic combat skills—are extracted quickly. Usually by other applicants hunting for easy tokens."
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
We both understood what he wasn't saying.
I was the easy token. I was the weakest applicant who would walk into that domain. I was the name that other applicants would see on whatever display showed rankings and think: free points.
"How do I not be the first one eliminated?"
The question was direct. Blunt. No pride, no pretense. The question of a man—a boy, in this body—who knew exactly where he stood and was not interested in pretending otherwise.
Hagen was quiet for a long time.
The clock on his wall—mechanical, brass, ticking with a rhythm that sounded like it was counting something other than seconds—marked ten beats of silence before he spoke.
"The combat gap is uncloseable," he said. "You will not learn to fight in four weeks. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or trying to sell you something."
"I know."
"Your mana capacity is four. After depletion, recovery takes hours. In a domain with constant threat pressure, you will not have hours."
"I know."
"Your body's endurance is a six. The average admitted applicant is between fifteen and twenty-five. The terrain alone will break you."
"I know."
"Then you understand that your only viable strategy is the second metric."
Survival time.
"Don't fight," he said. "Don't engage. Don't be where other applicants are. The domain is fifty square kilometers—that's a significant area. The density of applicants is roughly one per fifty thousand square meters in the first hour, decreasing as eliminations occur. If you can avoid contact, manage your resources, and remain active for the full seventy-two hours, survival time alone will place you in the top five hundred."
"You're telling me to hide."
"I'm telling you to survive. There's a difference. Hiding is passive. Survival is active. It requires route planning, environmental awareness, resource management, threat assessment. It requires knowing when to move, when to stay, what to eat, where to sleep, how to avoid detection."
He leaned forward.
"It requires intelligence."
...
INT: 47.
"The examination," Hagen said, "is designed to find the strongest fighters. It does this very well. What it also does—unintentionally—is penalize fighters who are strong but stupid. Every year, high-ranked applicants get eliminated because they overextend, chase too many tokens, ignore terrain hazards, or walk into ambushes set by applicants who are weaker but smarter."
He looked at me.
"You will not outfight anyone in that domain. But you might outlast them."
Might.
Not "will." Not "can." Might.
The most honest assessment I'd received. The most useful thing anyone had said to me since waking up in this body. And it came with no encouragement, no warmth, no false hope—just a probability assessment delivered by a man who dealt in probabilities and didn't believe in rounding up.
"The frost exercises," I said. "Are they enough?"
"For what?"
"For anything. In the domain. If I can melt a palm-sized patch of frost in forty seconds, is there any combat application?"
Hagen's expression shifted. Barely. A millimeter of movement in the eyebrows that could have been surprise or could have been the first stage of disappointment.
"At your current output? No."
"At what output?"
"If you could sustain a hold for three minutes—not thirty seconds, three minutes—and direct the mana externally instead of passively, you could produce a localized frost effect in a two-meter radius. Enough to make footing treacherous. Enough to slow someone chasing you."
Three minutes.
I could hold for forty seconds.
"That's a four-hundred-percent increase in duration in four weeks," I said.
"Yes."
"Is it possible?"
"For a healthy F-rank with a stable core? Difficult but achievable. For you?"
He paused.
"Come back when you can hold sixty seconds. We'll discuss it then."
He picked up his pen. Returned to his paper. The conversation was over—not rudely, not dismissively, but with the clean finality of a man who had allocated a specific amount of time to this interaction and had reached the end of it.
I stood. The chair scraped against stone.
"Professor."
"Mm."
"Thank you."
He didn't look up.
"Don't thank me. Pass the exam."
I walked to the door. Opened it. Paused.
"Professor."
"What."
"The frost exercise you prescribed—three holds, thirty seconds, morning only. You said it was correct."
"I did."
"How did you know? You saw me for less than two minutes. You saw three wet spots on a wall. How did you know the exercise was appropriate for my specific condition?"
Hagen's pen stopped.
For the first time since I'd entered the office, something that wasn't clinical neutrality crossed his face. It was brief—a shadow, a flicker of something older and heavier that passed through his gray eyes and left before I could name it.
"Because I've seen cracked cores before," he said. Quietly. "And the ones who made it were always the ones who started small."
The pen resumed.
I left.
***
The walk back took seventeen minutes. Faster than the walk there, because I'd mapped the uneven step on the second-floor landing and adjusted my stride.
Marginal gain.
I returned to my room. Ate the midday meal. Drank the tonic. Lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
The information organized itself.
The exam had three metrics: tokens, survival time, objectives. Tokens required combat I couldn't perform. Objectives required mobility and capability I didn't have. Survival time required endurance—not STR, not MNA, not combat skill. The ability to stay alive, stay hidden, and stay functional for seventy-two hours in hostile terrain.
INT: 47.
The highest stat on my sheet. The only stat that mattered in a survival scenario.
Hagen had given me a roadmap. Not a generous one—a survivable one. Don't fight. Don't engage. Use intelligence. Use the terrain. Outlast.
And a benchmark. Sixty seconds. If I could hold a frost exercise for sixty seconds—up from forty—he'd teach me something that might actually be useful.
Sixty seconds.
Twenty more than my current maximum.
Four weeks.
'Okay.'
'New training protocol.'
'Three holds. Push for forty-five seconds instead of thirty. Accept the extra corruption. Manage it with the tonic.'
'If the veins advance past mid-forearm, pull back.'
'If I cough blood, stop.'
'If the core goes silent for more than six hours, find Hagen.'
His rules. My timeline.
I closed my eyes.
'Four weeks.'
'Sixty seconds.'
'Five hundred out of a thousand.'
'Don't fight. Don't engage. Don't be where other applicants are.'
'Survive.'
...
For the first time in eight days, the task in front of me didn't feel impossible.
It felt improbable.
And improbable was an upgrade.
I'd take it.
***
The static buzzed that night.
Not while I was awake. In the space between consciousness and sleep, in the dark, in the silence—it came. Longer than before. A full three seconds of that dead-channel hum, like a frequency searching for a receiver.
And this time, underneath the buzz, I heard something.
Not words. Not a voice.
A rhythm.
Tap. Tap. Tap-tap.
Like a heartbeat.
Not mine.
I opened my eyes. The room was dark. The crystals on the walls had dimmed to their nighttime glow—barely visible, pale blue, the color of something drowning.
The tapping stopped.
I lay still. Breathing. Listening.
Nothing.
'...What the hell are you?'
No answer.
I didn't sleep well that night.