The summit was unrecognizable.
What had been, that morning, a wide stone plateau with a clear view of the surrounding mountains and a row of red flags snapping in the wind — was now something else entirely.
Roots covered everything.
Not scattered roots.
Not the natural emergence of underground systems disturbed by footfall or combat.
These were deliberate — massive, interlocking, risen from the earth with the specific purposefulness of architecture.
They coiled around each other in layers, the lower ones as thick as old trees, the upper ones branching and narrowing into a canopy of wood that filtered the afternoon light into fragments.
The plateau had become a forest that hadn’t existed an hour ago.
And at the center of it, atop the largest root — wide enough and flat enough to serve as a platform — sat Erick.
One leg crossed over the other.
His jacket still somehow unwrinkled.
His glasses slightly askew from the wind but otherwise suggesting that he had simply found a comfortable place to sit and intended to remain there for as long as the situation was interesting.
Five golden books rested beside him in a neat stack.
The red flags were visible behind him — close enough to see, close enough to make the distance feel deliberate.
Unreachable.
Around the base of the wall, the remaining participants had been attempting to change that for the better part of an hour.
Blitz hit the wall first.
He always hit things first.
It was less strategy than temperament — the particular disposition of someone for whom speed had always been the solution and who had not yet encountered enough problems that speed couldn’t fix to fully update that belief.
His Fast Feet activated and the ground disappeared beneath him.
One second he was twenty meters from the wall.
The next he was directly in front of it, fist already moving, weight already committed.
CRACK.
The impact was solid.
A section of root the width of his torso split and splintered under the strike, the wood giving way with a sound like something structural failing.
Blitz grinned.
That was all it took.
One good hit.
He’d have a gap in thirty seconds, he’d be through in forty, he’d have his flag before anyone else reached the—
CRACK.
CRACK.
CRACK.
Three new roots emerged from the earth at the base of the split, growing upward with the unhurried certainty of things that had been waiting to be needed.
They reached the damaged section.
Merged with it.
Filled it.
Fifteen seconds.
The wall looked as though he hadn’t touched it.
Blitz stared.
“…What.”
He hit it again.
Then again.
The wall absorbed both, regenerated both, and returned to its previous state with the same patient indifference.
Above him, Erick hadn’t moved.
“The mountain has a great many roots,” Erick said conversationally, as though narrating something he found genuinely interesting rather than directly causing.
“Most of them are connected to each other underground. Damaging one section simply redirects resources from elsewhere.” A brief pause.
“It’s quite elegant, actually.”
Blitz looked up at him.
“Get down here.”
“No.”
“I will throw something at you.”
“You could try.”
Blitz threw something.
A root emerged and caught it.
Blitz made a sound that was not a word.
Riven and Gale had coordinated.
This was unusual — most participants in the upper section of the examination had spent their energy either competing with each other or recovering from doing so.
But the wall had introduced a shared obstacle that briefly outweighed individual competition, and coordination had followed naturally.
Gale thrust both hands forward.
The wind that emerged from them was not the casual, atmospheric wind of someone creating a breeze — it was compressed, shaped, moving with the focused force of something that had been given a specific direction and enough energy to commit to it.
Beside him, Riven had been working on the water sphere for two minutes — drawing moisture from the air, from the soil, from every available source within range, compressing it into a mass that floated above his head and waited.
“Now.”
The wind hit the wall.
The sphere hit the wall.
Both at the same time, at the same point, combining force rather than simply adding it.
BOOM.
The impact sent a visible shockwave across the root surface.
A section five meters wide cracked, buckled, split.
Roots above it fell.
The participants nearby flinched from the displaced air.
For exactly four seconds, there was a gap.
People surged toward it.
Erick sighed quietly.
CRACK.
CRACK.
CRACK.
CRACK.
CRACK.
Five new root clusters emerged simultaneously — two from below, two from the sides, one from above — meeting in the center of the gap and sealing it with the thoroughness of something that had simply been waiting for the opening to appear so it could close it.
The surging participants stopped.
The gap was gone.
Riven stared at it.
“That’s impossible.”
“It isn’t,” Erick replied.
He had turned slightly on his root to observe the attempt with what appeared to be genuine appreciation.
“You did well to create the opening. The timing was good. The combination of elemental forces was intelligent.” A pause.
“The problem is that the mountain has significantly more material to work with than you do.”
“Then what are we supposed to do?”
Erick tilted his head.
“That,” he said pleasantly, “is what I’m curious about.”
Riven’s jaw tightened.
Zed had not made noise. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Zed rarely made noise.
He had spent the early part of the examination as he spent most things — quietly, at angles other people weren’t looking from, in spaces other people weren’t thinking about.
His Shadow Step had allowed him to travel the mountain faster than almost anyone else, slipping between the darkness beneath trees and the shadow cast by boulders, appearing and disappearing without the friction of terrain.
He had reached the summit early.
He had watched the wall emerge.
He had spent the time since then looking for the thing that everyone else had been too frustrated to look for.
The edge.
Because the wall extended across the summit — that was visible, obvious, the thing everyone was responding to.
But nothing extended infinitely.
There was a point where the roots met stone.
A point where the architecture ended and the natural mountain continued.
And at that point, there might be something.
He found it on the eastern side.
A section where the root wall met a natural outcropping of rock — not smoothly, but awkwardly.
The geometry was imperfect there.
The roots had worked around the stone rather than through it, leaving a narrow gap between the bottom of the wall and the rock surface below.
Not large.
But large enough.
Zed melted into the shadow beneath the outcropping and moved toward the gap.
He was three meters away when the darkness beneath him moved.
Not his darkness — something else, something that had been waiting inside the shadow he was using, having arrived there first and simply remained.
CRACK.
Roots exploded upward from within his own shadow.
WHAM.
WHAM.
WHAM.
They caught him before he could react, wrapping around his limbs with the specific efficiency of something that knew exactly how his ability worked and had made arrangements.
He was lifted.
Brought to approximately chest height.
And then deposited — carefully, without particular force, but with complete authority — back on the participant side of the wall.
He lay there for a moment.
Breathing.
“You’re the first person who found the gap,” Erick said.
His voice carried genuine respect.
“Most people don’t look for edges. They look for weak points in what’s in front of them.” A pause.
“Finding the edge was the correct approach.”
Zed stared at the sky.
“You were already there,” he said.
“I anticipated someone would look.”
A beat.
“I put something in the shadow to confirm it.”
Zed closed his eyes.
“I hate you.”
“That’s reasonable,” Erick said.
The plateau filled with the sounds of continued attempts.
Seraph unleashed his feathers — hundreds of white-gold blades that rained from above with the density of a downpour, each one hitting with enough force to cut stone.
The roots absorbed them.
Nova covered her fists with electricity and struck the wall in rapid succession — each impact leaving scorch marks that lingered for a moment before the wood beneath regenerated and the marks went with it.
Dante used his body the way he always had — directly, fully, without reservation.
The sound of his hits were the loudest in the clearing.
His fists left the deepest temporary damage.
And the wall healed him every time with the same patience it had shown everyone else.
Onyx turned his skin to stone and threw his full weight against the wall in a running charge that shook the ground and produced a crack that ran three meters in each direction before closing.
Each attempt.
Each result.
Above them, Erick sat with his books.
He watched.
And occasionally noted things.
The way Nova’s electricity affected root conductivity and might, in sufficient sustained quantity, interfere with the growth signal — but she couldn’t sustain sufficient quantity long enough.
The way Dante’s strikes were creating micro-fractures that accumulated slightly before healing — not fast enough to matter, but present.
The way Seraph’s feathers were finding the natural seams between root sections and occasionally lodging there, briefly impeding the regeneration.
None of it was sufficient.
But he observed all of it.
Because this was the thing Erick did — he watched systems operate until he understood them, and he understood them until he could predict them, and he predicted them until the prediction became boring, and when it became boring he either left or changed the variable.
He hadn’t changed this one yet.
Because something was still coming.
He could feel it.
Not magically.
Not through any ability.
Simply through the same logic that had told him to check for shadows at the wall’s edge — the reasoning that said: this examination has produced several people more interesting than the average.
Several of them are on this mountain.
The most interesting one hasn’t arrived yet.
He looked toward the paths leading up to the summit.
Waiting.
The explosion reached the summit before the people did.
BOOM.
Then voices.
Then footsteps — multiple sets, coming from different directions, converging.
Then figures emerging from the tree line.
Elana first, moving with the quick, assessing scan of someone entering an unknown situation.
Lyra behind her, staff in hand, eyes already on the wall.
Several other participants who had been climbing behind them.
And then — slightly slower than the rest, moving with the careful steadiness that had characterized his entire day — Leigh.
He stepped onto the summit plateau and stopped.
Looked at the wall.
At the roots.
At the scale of what had been built here in the time since the examination began.
Then looked upward.
At Erick.
Erick looked back.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Around them, the plateau was loud — other participants shouting at the wall, shouting at Erick, shouting at each other. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The sounds of renewed attempts and renewed failures.
None of it registered in the space between those two.
Erick had been waiting for this.
He hadn’t entirely admitted it to himself, but he had been.
Because Leigh was the variable he hadn’t accounted for.
The one he didn’t understand.
The one who had crossed a battlefield by being hit repeatedly and simply not stopping.
The one who had given away something that should have had limits and apparently didn’t.
The one who had said, in a forest clearing, that he was here because he wanted to see what freedom looked like.
Erick studied him across the distance.
Leigh studied him back.
Then Leigh tilted his head slightly — a small, questioning angle.
Why?
Not spoken.
Just present in the tilt, in the quality of the attention.
Erick considered the question.
He had given Blitz an explanation.
He had given Riven an explanation.
He had given Zed something that functioned as an explanation.
But those had been descriptions of mechanism.
Of what he was doing.
This was different.
Leigh was asking why.
Erick looked at his books.
At the five golden qualifications stacked beside him.
At the summit flags visible behind him.
At the participants surrounding the wall he had built.
Then he looked back at Leigh.
“I’m curious,” he said.
The same words he had used in the forest.
Simple.
Honest.
Completely insufficient as an explanation and somehow entirely accurate as one.
“What would happen…”
He gestured at the plateau — at the wall, the participants, the flags, the whole arrangement of it.
“…if only one person passed?”
Leigh looked at the participants.
At the wall.
Back at Erick.
Something moved through his expression — not judgment, not anger.
Something more like the careful consideration he brought to problems he was genuinely trying to understand.
“You want to see the answer.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know what the answer is.”
“No.”
A pause.
“That’s why it’s interesting.”
Leigh was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: “That will hurt a lot of people.”
“Yes,” Erick agreed.
“Probably.”
“And you’re doing it anyway.”
Erick looked at him.
“Are you going to try to stop me?”
The question wasn’t a challenge.
It was a genuine inquiry — the kind Erick asked when he actually wanted to know the answer.
Leigh looked at the wall.
At the participants still attacking it.
At the flags behind Erick.
Then he said something that Erick hadn’t expected.
“I don’t know yet.”
A pause.
“I’m still thinking.”
Erick blinked.
Then, despite everything — despite the wall and the flags and the hundred people trying to break through what he had built — something happened to his expression.
He laughed.
Quietly.
Briefly.
The laugh of someone who has encountered something that genuinely surprised them.
“You’re still thinking,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“About whether to stop me.”
“Yes.”
Erick looked at him.
“Most people just attack.”
“I know,” Leigh said.
“But attacking without understanding seems inefficient.”
The sounds of the plateau continued around them.
Erick sat with this for a moment.
Then he smiled.
The same small, genuine smile from the forest.
“You really are interesting.”
Leigh looked back at him steadily.
“You’re very strange,” he said.
“I know.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
“I know that too.”
The wind moved across the summit.
Somewhere behind Erick, a red flag snapped in the gust.
And somewhere in the clearing below, the sounds of continued attempts continued — because the wall was still there, and the flags were still unreachable, and the examination was still unresolved.
But in the space between the boy on the wall and the boy below it, something had just begun that neither of them had entirely planned for.