The morning sun hit the iron gates of Crystalpeak Vanguard Academy, baking the smell of pastries and snacks from nearby stands into the crowded outdoor courtyard. Thousands of eighteen-year-olds stood in tightly packed lines, their shoes shuffling over the cobblestones.
Up on the raised stone dais sat three heavy brass conduits, each connected to a glass booth housing a medical-grade mana scanner. This was the Resonance Ceremony. Every citizen turning eighteen was legally required to step into those booths to have their Core evaluated.
A student walked in alone. Inside, the scanner read the crystalline Core seated behind their sternum, the organ every human carried and only ever used once. A rank came back.
A rank.
Then the booth’s dispenser did its work, and the student walked out holding a skill disk, a small manufactured disc containing a single ability drawn from the body of some creature that had died in the Dead Domain, ready to be bound into their Core and carried for the rest of their life.
That was the whole of it. Walk in a stranger to your own power. Walk out already decided.
For the entire city, the eighteenth birthday was the only day that mattered. Parents took the morning off work to stand behind the gallery rail. Younger siblings skipped school to watch. It was the one guaranteed spectacle every family got to witness once, the day a kid stopped being just a kid and became whatever the scanner said they were, forever.
It was also the day everyone secretly dreaded. The scanner didn’t care whose child you were. It didn’t care how hard you’d studied or how much your parents had saved. It read your core and there was no second scan, no appeal, no do-over. Rich or poor, the booth treated everyone exactly the same on the way in. What happened on the way out was where things stopped being equal.
The process was framed as a benevolent civic right, but the reality was written in cold numbers. While the scan itself carried a standard fee, the real trap was the skill disk itself. The one handed out that sealed your fate on what power you would get and what you’d become.
Monsters found in rifts were dangerous, and the cost of refining their cores into stable skill disks was astronomically high. The state masked this extortion under a generous name: the State Indenture Grant. They handed over a disk, called it a grant, and quietly slapped a twenty-five-thousand-credit debt onto the recipient’s back to cover the disk’s exorbitant market price alongside the scanning overhead.
If a student scanned high, a private guild stepped in on the spot. They paid off the entire grant debt in a single transaction, handed the recruit a high-tier combat disk, and signed them to a lucrative corporate contract.
If a student scanned low, the state handed them a basic F-rank utility disk, printed out their twenty-five-thousand-credit debt manifest at four percent annual interest, and assigned them to municipal labor to pay off the cost of the very disk they were forced to take.
A heavy hydraulic hiss echoed across the yard as the nearest glass booth slid open. A boy in a tailored suit stepped out. Above his booth, a broad display board flashed bright crimson: B-RANK CORE COMPATIBILITY.
Before the boy even reached the stairs, three men in dark silk coats stepped up from the private guild canopy, handing him a velvet box and a gold-leaf fountain pen. The crowd in the gallery cheered, parents clapping furiously as the boy signed away his contract to have his massive grant debt cleared on the spot.
Ten feet away, another glass booth hissed open. A girl stepped out, her face dead pale. The board above her flashed dull grey: F-RANK LOW DENSITY.
An automated dispenser at the base of the booth clicked. A thin slip of yellow paper spat out—her debt contract—followed by a cheap grey plastic case. The proctor didn’t even look at her as he waved his hand toward the exit stairs. She picked up the slip of paper, her fingers trembling as she read the itemized breakdown of her new twenty-five-thousand-credit obligation for a disk she never chose, walking off the stage with her head down.
On the far edge of the courtyard, sitting on the lowest concrete step of a dry fountain, a boy watched her go.
He kept his own grey plastic case snapped shut between his palms, resting his elbows on his knees. On his lap lay his yellow paper manifest, the ink still warm from the printer, the twenty-five-thousand-credit balance tied to his government-issued F-rank disk printed in flat black type below it.
Footsteps crunched on the loose gravel nearby.
A second young man approached the fountain, his shoulders hunched against the noise. He wore a faded jacket with frayed cuffs, a dull grey case held loosely in his left hand, his own yellow manifest sticking out of his coat pocket. Without asking, he dropped down onto the stone step next to the first boy, leaving a few inches of space between them.
For a long time, neither of them said anything. The proctor’s mechanical voice echoed over the loudspeakers, calling the next batch of numbers up to the scanning booths.
The older-looking boy tilted his head back against the concrete fountain lip, eyes fixed on the clouds. "Hey... what did you get?"
The first boy popped the latch on his case, revealing a flat, silver disc etched with a faint arrow icon.
"F-rank Impulse," he said. A genuine grin pulled at his mouth as he turned the case to catch the sunlight. "Moves air. It’s actually pretty cool. At least we got something, right?"
The older boy stared at his wide smile, his brow furrowing as if the sight physically pained him. He snapped his own case open with a loud click. Inside sat a brass-colored disk marked with three parallel grooves.
"Friction Reduction," he said flatly. "Lowers surface drag."
"I’m Rain," the first boy said, sticking a hand out between them.
The older boy glanced at the hand like he wasn’t sure what to do with it, then gave it one loose shake and let go. "Sen."
"Well, Sen," Rain said, leaning over with a bright, stubborn spark in his eyes, "at least we aren’t the guy in batch three whose scanner flagged a light-bulb disk. He owes twenty-five grand for a disk that just illuminates a dark closet."
Sen didn’t laugh. He snapped his case shut so hard the plastic latch cracked under his thumb. The sheer spark in Rain’s eyes—the bright, desperate optimism—seemed to grate against his nerves, driving a visible wedge of irritation into his jaw.
"They act like they’re giving us a grant," Sen muttered, his voice tightening with suppressed anger, "and you’re sitting here cracking jokes."
Rain blinked, pulling back slightly but keeping his tone earnest. "I couldn’t even pay the registration fee today without the orphanage’s state sponsorship voucher. Now it’s twenty-seven thousand total. But man, it’s an actual disk! We’re officially registered!"
Sen looked over at him properly, his mouth set in a hard, miserable line. "No family outside?"
"Just me," Rain said, a fierce little nod backing his words. "No parents to be proud, no parents to be disappointed. Just me, the paper, and a way forward."
Sen shifted his weight on the hard stone, his knuckles turning white around his case. "I had to work two years after high school just to save up enough to cover the late-awakening fee. Stacking crates at the docks. My dad told me I was throwing money away. Turns out he was right. Twenty years old, two years late, and I just bought myself a twenty-five-thousand-credit disk to keep stacking the same crates."
"At least you tried!" Rain insisted, leaning back in with that same unyielding fire. "And you got in! We can register for the Vanguard common dorms today. It’s base-tuition lodging. We do perimeter gate maintenance, salvage scrap from the low-level rifts—"
"They charge you for the safety gear, Rain," Sen interrupted, his voice rasping. He glared at Rain’s glowing expression, the raw enthusiasm on Rain’s face clearly pushing him past his limit. "They charge you for the rations! My uncle took an F-rank gate grant ten years ago, and he’s deeper in debt now than the day he walked out of this yard! Stop looking at it like a gift!"
Rain stood up from the step, offering an open palm. "I’m not giving up before we even start, Sen. We can figure a way out."
Sen stared at Rain’s open palm, then looked up at his face, at the stubborn, unshakeable light shining in his eyes. Something inside Sen snapped, his irritation curdling into complete, black despair.
"There is no way out!" Sen shouted, surging up off the step so fast his knees slammed into the concrete fountain edge. His face was flushed red, tears welling in the corners of his eyes as he looked at the brass case in his hand. "The whole system is built to bury you! You think you’re going to figure something out? You think your little smile is going to pay off four percent annual interest?"
"Sen, lower your voice," Rain said, stepping forward with his hands raised. "Let’s just walk over to the registry office—"
"Take it," Sen rasped, his voice breaking down the middle.
He yanked the yellow manifest out of his coat pocket, crumpled it against the brass case in his other hand, and shoved both straight toward Rain’s chest.
Rain froze, stepping back. "What? No. What are you doing?"
"Take it!" Sen screamed, shoving the case and the crumpled manifest forward again, his face contorting in agony. "You want to fight it so bad? You think you’re going to figure something out with your stupid optimism? Take it, all of it! If I keep this thing, I’m just going to sell it on the black market tomorrow for cash! Then the state guards will track me down, arrest me, and throw me in the labor camps with twice the debt! It’s all the same useless hell anyway!"
"Are you out of your mind?" Rain grabbed Sen’s wrist, trying to force his arm down. "Your name is printed on that manifest! If you walk out those gates without your assigned grant disk—"
"I don’t care!" Sen yelled.
He lunged forward, throwing his full weight into Rain. It wasn’t a clean martial strike; it was a desperate, panicked shove, Sen’s heavy forearm slamming hard into Rain’s chest. Rain’s heels caught on the edge of the concrete step, his balance breaking as he tumbled backward.
Sen’s right fist swung blindly through the air, catching Rain square on the point of his jaw with a dull, wet crack.
Rain hit the gravel hard, his elbows scraping against the sharp stones, the air exploding out of his lungs in a sharp gasp. Pain bloomed across his cheek, tasting like iron in his mouth.
Before he could push himself up, something hard and heavy slammed onto his sternum, knocking the rest of his breath away. The case. The manifest, folded around it, landed against his chest and slid down into the gravel beside him.
Sen stood over him, tears cutting dirty tracks through the dust on his cheeks. His chest heaved, his knuckles bloody where he’d caught Rain’s face.
"Better you have it than me selling it and rotting in a cell!" Sen sobbed, his voice completely raw. "At least you’re dumb enough to try!"
Sen stared at Rain, tears streaming down his face now.
"I’m probably going to check out of this hellhole anyways. Would be a waste if nobody used it. You could sell it discreetly or use it. We both know my skill is better than yours."
He turned on his heel and ran.
"Sen!" Rain pushed himself off the gravel, his head spinning, his jaw throbbing with every pulse of his blood. He scooped up Sen’s brass case and the crumpled manifest from where they’d landed beside him, his fingers scrambling over the plastic and paper, and forced himself to his feet. "Sen, stop!"
Sen was already twenty yards away, cutting through the dense crowd of weeping students and angry parents. He hit the main stone archway at a full sprint, his dark jacket flapping behind him as he shoved past a guard at the turnstile and vanished into the crowded street outside.
"Sen! Wait!" Rain shouted, his voice swallowed by the roar of the Academy loudspeakers calling the next set of numbers.
Rain ran. He pushed through arms and shoulders, his lungs burning as he burst out through the heavy iron gates and onto the gray concrete of the public plaza. He turned left, then right, scanning the ocean of commuters, street vendors, and departing families.
Elevated trains shrieked overhead. Delivery trucks honked on the lower roads.
The boulevard stretched for miles in both directions, choked with thousands of people moving under the pale morning sun.
Sen was gone.
Rain stopped at the edge of the curb, out of breath, his chest heaving as the cold wind swept up from the lower wards. He stood there alone on the sidewalk, his scraped elbows bleeding into his sleeves, holding two plastic disk cases and two yellow debt manifests in his hands.
’How did the world come to be such a shit show?’