The Caldris Academy grounds didn’t look like a school so much as a small, well-organized army camp that had decided, at some point, to also teach algebra.
Training fields stretched in overlapping rings behind the main hall, each ringed with its own scorch-marked dirt and its own cluster of supervising instructors, and above them all a set of numbered banners hung from tall iron poles Cohort One through Cohort Nine.
Riya had explained the logic on the walk over, still visibly getting used to being the one who knew things instead of the one asking.
Cohorts weren’t sorted by birth year at all they were built around which abilities actually worked well together, offense next to support next to whatever covered the gaps, since a training group that couldn’t cover for each other’s weaknesses wasn’t much of a group.
Age mattered only as a boundary condition on top of that: the guild kept the spread inside any cohort narrow enough that nobody was training years above or below the rest of the room’s maturity, which was usually why cohorts ended up clustering by awakening-age anyway, even though that was never the actual rule written down anywhere.
Nine, as it happened, produced an unusually consistent mix of complementary kits most years, which was most of why it had ended up as its own dedicated tier Cohort Four, and also why nine-year-olds tended to get watched a little closer than everyone else.
Not unheard of, the way eight was unheard of eight barely happened at all, once a generation if that but early enough to notice.
Riya’s old cohort, five years ago, back when nine was the number attached to her name instead of fourteen.
Eight had held the record for as long as anyone could remember, right up until a very specific seven-year-old made it look almost ordinary by comparison.
Varun had expected rows of desks.
This looked more like the training yard at home, except someone had built it at ten times the scale and then invited three hundred strangers to watch.
“You’ll be fine,” Riya said, walking him as far as the placement hall’s steps before peeling off toward her own year’s wing her last one, technically.
She’d passed the hunter exam and held her license two years now, but the academy didn’t care about that; it wanted three full years out of everyone regardless of when you qualified, license or not, and this was hers.
Fourteen looked entirely at home here in a way that made Varun briefly, uselessly jealous.
“Bexley runs placement.
She’s blunt, but she’s fair.
Don’t let her flat voice fool you into thinking she’s bored she’s not, she just sounds like that.”
“Noted.”
“And don’t” She hesitated, which wasn’t like her.
“Just don’t show more than you have to.
You don’t have to prove anything to a room full of nine-year-olds.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.
I’m allowed to say it anyway.” She squeezed his shoulder once, entirely too briefly for how much it apparently meant to her, and disappeared into the crowd headed for the upper wing.
The placement hall smelled like chalk and ozone in roughly equal measure, and Instructor Bexley turned out to be exactly what Riya had described a narrow, sharp-eyed woman behind a desk stacked with files, working through a line of new students with the flat, unhurried efficiency of someone who had done this every year for longer than most of them had been alive.
“Name.”
“Varun Den.”
Bexley’s eyes flicked down to whatever file was already sitting open in front of her, and something in her posture changed by exactly one degree not surprise, not quite, more like the specific recalculation of a person confirming a rumor she’d already half believed.
“Restricted file,” she said, mostly to herself, and didn’t elaborate, which told Varun the restriction was holding, at least here, at least today.
“Soul Beast Control” She looked up.
“You’re seven.”
“Yes.”
“Placement’s not usually decided on ability alone.” She said it like a rule she’d recited a thousand times and mostly agreed with.
“But the guild flagged this file for instructor-discretion placement rather than standard age-cohort, which means somebody senior already decided your age isn’t the number that matters here.” She made a short note, unbothered, the way a person notes weather.
“Cohort Four.
That’s a jump of two full tiers over standard age placement.
You’ll be the youngest in the room by some distance.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not a compliment or a punishment,” Bexley added, already looking past him toward the next name in line.
“It’s just where the file says you’ll do the least damage to yourself or anyone else.
Go on through.
Door on the left.”
Cohort Four’s practice hall held nine other students clustered in loose, still-forming groups small on purpose, the way every cohort was capped, since synergy only meant anything if the group stayed tight enough for everyone to actually know each other’s kit.
They’d only been a cohort a few months themselves, Varun would learn later, barely long enough to have settled into who trained with whom, and it showed in the way the whole room reorganized around him instantly, like a shape that hadn’t quite finished setting.
Every single one of them noticed him within about four seconds of walking through the door, in the specific way a room notices something that doesn’t match its own math.
He felt it before he heard anything a ripple of attention moving outward from the door, the particular quiet that came right before people decided whether to say something out loud.
A boy broke off from the nearest cluster first nine, like everyone else in the room apparently, but carrying himself with the easy confidence of someone who’d been the best in every room he’d stood in until approximately right now and he crossed the space between them without any of the polite hesitation Varun had gotten from Garrick or Bexley.
“You’re lost,” the boy said.
Not a question.
“New batch orientation’s not in here.”
“I’m placed here.”
“You’re placed here.” He said it back flatly, like the words needed to be repeated before they’d fully land.
“How old are you.”
“Seven.”
That got a laugh out of somewhere behind him short, disbelieving, quickly swallowed when nobody else joined in.
The boy himself didn’t laugh.
He looked Varun over instead, the specific assessing look of someone trying to find the trick, and said, “I’m Tobias.
Top rank in this cohort since the day they formed us, three months ago.
So when I say something doesn’t add up, it’s usually because it doesn’t.”
“I didn’t ask you to add anything up.”
“No,” Tobias agreed.
“The instructors did that part for you, apparently.” He didn’t say it unkindly, exactly it was worse than unkind, it was genuinely curious, the tone of someone gathering data rather than picking a fight, which somehow made it land harder.
“We’ll see.”
He walked off before Varun could decide whether that had been a threat, a promise, or just an observation, and left him standing in the open middle of the room with nine students still not entirely finished staring and the distinct sense that he’d just become the tenth member of a group that had barely finished becoming a group at all.
“Don’t mind him.” A girl detached herself from a different cluster and fell into step beside him like they’d already been mid-conversation, dark hair pulled back in a braid that had clearly been re-done at least twice that morning in the specific way of someone who cared more than she wanted to admit.
“He does that to everyone new.
Honestly he did it to half of us too, back in our second week, so it’s less personal than it sounds.”
“Feels pretty personal.”
“He once told me my stance was ‘aesthetically confused.’ You’re getting off easy.” She stuck a hand out, easy and unbothered, like this was the most normal thing in the world.
“Wren.
Same age as everyone else in here, before you ask we’ve all only known each other about three months, so don’t feel too behind.”
“Varun.”
“I know.
Everyone knows.
You’re the seven-year-old, that’s basically your whole introduction at this point, sorry.” She said it without any cruelty in it at all, just plain fact delivered kindly, and somehow that landed easier than either Bexley’s flatness or Tobias’s calculation.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t actually care how old you are.
I care whether you’re going to be weird about partnering for drills, because I’ve had three partners quit on me already and we’re not even a full term in yet.
I’m getting a complex about it.”
“I’m not going to quit.”
“Good.
Low bar, but good.” She grinned, quick and genuine, and it was the first thing all morning that hadn’t felt like being measured.
The instructor running Cohort Four’s floor a broad-shouldered man Varun hadn’t caught the name of yet called the room to order a few minutes later with the particular efficiency of someone who’d been running this exact routine since the cohort was assembled three months ago and had already learned precisely how much patience it required, and the morning’s actual purpose became clear fast: every new placement got one brief demonstration in front of the cohort, on record, so the instructors knew what they were working with going forward.
Tobias went first, because Tobias apparently always went first.
Whatever his ability was, it moved fast and cut clean and drew the exact kind of appreciative murmur from the room that Varun suspected he’d been chasing since this cohort’s very first week.
Then it was Varun’s turn, and the whole room’s attention swung back onto him at once, Tobias’s included, sharp and waiting.
Riya’s voice was still sitting somewhere in the back of his skull.
Don’t show more than you have to.
He called Stormfang Alpha just the blade, gold-black light folding open into storm-grey steel and ran through the plainest, most unremarkable drill sequence he could produce without it looking deliberately unremarkable, technique correct, nothing more, the kind of clean-but-ordinary form a genuinely talented seven-year-old might show on a good day and nothing beyond it.
It was, he thought, a reasonably convincing performance.
You held back so hard just now I actually felt insulted on your behalf, Wolfy said, private and delighted, the moment Varun finished.
That was maybe forty percent of what either of us can do.
That was the point.
I know.
I’m just saying, somewhere out there, a much cooler version of this drill is sitting unused, and I think about it sometimes.
The room’s reaction was polite, mildly impressed, nothing more exactly what he’d been aiming for.
Nothing more, except for Tobias, who hadn’t joined the polite applause at all, and was watching Varun with the same look he’d worn in the doorway five minutes earlier, except sharper now, like a number that still refused to add up correctly no matter how many times he ran it.
“Something’s off about that,” Tobias said, quiet, mostly to himself, but not quite quiet enough.
Wren, standing close enough to hear it, just raised an eyebrow at Varun, silently asking a question he had absolutely no intention of answering honestly today.
He smiled instead, easy and unbothered, and said nothing at all which, he was starting to suspect, was going to become something of a habit here.