Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The sound of footsteps echoed through an enormous silence.
The auditorium had held two hundred students that morning.
Now it held only wreckage.
Rows of overturned chairs stretched across the stone floor.
Cracks spread through the tiles in jagged lines — some shallow, some deep enough to catch a boot heel.
Scorch marks darkened the walls in irregular patches.
The smell of burnt wood and something metallic hung in the air, thick enough to taste.
And blood.
Quite a lot of blood.
It had pooled in the low points of the uneven floor and dried at the edges, darkening from red to brown in the way blood always did when left alone long enough.
The afternoon light coming through the tall windows caught it at angles that made it impossible to ignore.
Lilly walked through all of it without hurrying.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Her heels struck the stone floor in a steady rhythm, unhurried, as though she were crossing an ordinary room rather than something that looked like the aftermath of a small war.
Her medical bag hung from one shoulder.
Her expression was the particular kind of neutral that came not from indifference but from long practice — the face of someone who had learned that reacting to the scene before treating the patients helped neither.
A boy leaned against a pillar with one hand pressed to his shoulder.
The fabric around the hand was dark and wet.
A girl sat on the floor nearby, her back against an overturned chair, her face the specific pale of significant blood loss.
Several students were unconscious.
Others made small sounds — not screaming, not crying.
Just existing inside their pain with the resigned quietness of people who had learned that making noise about it rarely changed anything.
Nobody came from ordinary places.
That much was obvious.
Lilly stopped beside a young man lying on his side near the center of the room.
Both hands were pressed against his abdomen.
Blood seeped continuously between his fingers despite the pressure, pooling against the stone beneath him.
His breathing was shallow and irregular — the breathing of someone working very hard at something that should have been automatic.
“Help…”
The word came out thin.
Almost not a word at all.
Lilly crouched beside him.
She looked at him for a moment — not his wound, him.
His face.
His eyes.
The particular expression of someone who had arrived at the outer edge of what they could withstand and was looking for confirmation that the edge wasn’t the end.
She tilted her head slightly.
“Oh?”
A pause.
“You’re still alive.”
The young man’s eyes found her face.
In them: hope and fear and pain, layered together in the way those things always were in moments like this — inseparable, simultaneous.
Lilly looked at him for another moment.
“I remember you.”
Something shifted in his expression.
Not relief.
Something more complicated.
“You were the one who murdered twenty nobles,” she said, “over the course of eleven years.”
Silence.
His hands tightened against his wound.
Lilly glanced at the injury.
Then back at his face.
“Most of your victims died from stab wounds.”
Her voice remained entirely even throughout.
Not cruel — simply precise.
The voice of someone stating observed facts.
“So.”
She tilted her head the other direction.
“How does it feel?”
The boy froze.
For the first time since receiving the wound — perhaps for the first time in a long time — genuine fear appeared in his eyes.
Not of the pain.
Of something else.
Something that the question had pointed directly at.
“That’s enough, Lilly.”
The voice came from across the auditorium.
Calm.
Unhurried.
The particular tone of someone who had said those exact words before, in other rooms, under other circumstances, and had learned exactly how much weight they needed to carry.
Lilly exhaled — a small, theatrical sound.
“Ah, fine.”
She stood and turned around.
At the far end of the auditorium, the Headmaster sat in one of the few chairs that remained upright.
His cane rested against his knee.
His posture was entirely relaxed — the blood, the damage, the smell of the room registering in his expression as something between mild interest and familiar resignation.
“You’re no fun.”
“Do your job.”
Lilly pouted.
Then she raised one foot and brought it down against the stone floor — not hard, just deliberately.
BOOM.
The sound was larger than the action that produced it.
A massive magic circle erupted outward from the point of impact, spreading across the entire floor of the auditorium in a single expanding ring.
The lines were clean and precise — not carved but drawn, as though the geometry had always existed in the stone and Lilly had simply reminded it of itself.
Brilliant green light flooded the room.
Every injured student reacted simultaneously — not in pain but in its opposite.
Eyes that had been half-closed opened fully.
Hands that had been pressing against wounds lowered as the wounds beneath them simply ceased to be wounds.
Cuts sealed.
Bruises faded.
Broken things straightened and rejoined.
Even the knives embedded in two students near the back wall withdrew themselves and dissolved before touching the floor.
It happened in seconds.
The young man with the abdominal wound sat up slowly, his hands moving automatically to where the injury had been and finding nothing.
He pressed against the smooth skin beneath his torn shirt twice, as though checking a sum that kept coming out wrong.
Then he stood.
And ran.
He wasn’t the only one.
Within thirty seconds, every student who had been conscious — and several who hadn’t been — were on their feet and moving toward the exits.
No conversations.
No acknowledgments.
No pausing to process what had just happened to their bodies.
Only urgency.
Because they were behind.
Because somewhere on the mountain above them, one hundred flags were waiting, and the number of people still competing for them had not changed.
Lilly watched them go.
The last set of footsteps disappeared through the exit.
The auditorium, which had briefly been full of movement and sound, returned to silence.
She turned back toward the room — the overturned chairs, the cracked floor, the dried blood that no healing magic had seen fit to address.
“Pointless,” she said.
“Hm?”
“They’re already behind.” She crossed her arms.
“Running now won’t change how far back they started.”
The Headmaster smiled.
“Not necessarily.”
Lilly looked at him.
He gestured toward the floating surveillance spheres drifting near the ceiling — crystal bubbles, each displaying a different section of the mountain in real time.
Students running through forest.
Students fighting on rocky outcroppings.
Small groups forming and dissolving.
The mountain rendered in miniature, the examination visible from above.
The Headmaster pointed toward one specific sphere.
“There’s still one student who didn’t go through here.”
Lilly turned toward it.
The image inside showed a single figure on a narrow mountain path.
Moving slowly.
Unevenly.
Stopping occasionally to rest against whatever surface was nearby.
The moment she recognized him, something changed in her expression.
“Wait.”
She stepped closer.
“That’s…”
“Yes,” the Headmaster said.
“The boy you treated last night.”
Lilly stared at the sphere.
Then stared again, as though a second look might produce a different image.
“You’re serious.”
“Very.”
Her expression didn’t shift dramatically.
But something behind her eyes did — a quiet recalibration, the face of someone updating their assessment of a situation they thought they had already understood.
The previous night came back to her in pieces.
Heavy rain.
The Headmaster arriving at the academy gate well past midnight, carrying an unconscious boy through the dark.
The boy’s condition when she first examined him — not simply injured, but comprehensively damaged, in ways that suggested not a single event but an accumulation spanning years.
Surgical scarring beneath the bandages.
Internal bruising in patterns she had seen before only in documented case studies.
A body that had been subjected to things bodies weren’t designed to endure, repeatedly, over a long period of time.
She had worked through the night to stabilize him.
And now he was climbing a mountain.
On a leg that was still healing.
Alone.
Lilly covered her face with one hand.
“His body is a disaster.”
“It is.”
“The fact that he’s even walking is—”
“A miracle,” the Headmaster agreed pleasantly.
“That too.”
Lilly lowered her hand and looked at the sphere again.
The boy — Leigh — had stopped beside a large root and was leaning against it with his eyes closed.
His chest rose and fell visibly even through the crystal display.
“He chose to participate,” the Headmaster said.
“That’s not a justification.”
“No,” he agreed.
“It isn’t.”
Lilly watched the sphere in silence for a moment.
Something moved through her expression that she didn’t entirely keep off her face — something that, in someone else, she might have called worry.
“If he collapses up there—”
“He won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” the Headmaster said.
“I don’t.”
He continued watching the sphere with the same calm expression he brought to most things — not unconcerned, but settled.
The expression of someone who had learned the difference between the things that could be controlled and the things that simply had to be witnessed.
“But I know what I saw on that bridge.”
Lilly said nothing.
The sphere showed Leigh opening his eyes again.
Pushing himself upright against the root.
Taking one step forward.
Then another.
On the mountain, Leigh had no awareness of being watched.
Hah.
Hah.
Hah.
He moved through a section of forest where the trees grew close together, their roots breaking through the surface of the ground in irregular ridges that required constant attention underfoot.
Each one was a potential ankle turn.
Each one required a small adjustment.
He made each adjustment and continued.
The examination was not going well by any conventional measure.
He was slower than almost everyone.
His body was providing consistent and detailed feedback about its objections to what he was doing.
He had no combat ability worth mentioning, no allies, no information about where the five books were hidden, and no clear strategy for reaching the summit.
He continued anyway.
Not from stubbornness exactly.
More from the simple fact that stopping and turning back were not options he had genuinely considered.
The Headmaster had said the examination was the beginning of something.
Beginning things required moving forward.
So he moved forward.
BOOM.
Another explosion — closer this time.
The sound hit the air and kept going, rolling through the trees, followed by the crack of something structural giving way.
Then a human sound, short and sharp, then silence.
Leigh stopped.
Smoke again.
Thicker than before, rising in a dark column visible through gaps in the canopy.
He stood still and listened.
More sounds reached him — multiple sets of footsteps moving quickly, voices carrying the specific cadence of people in the middle of coordinated action.
A sharp metallic sound.
Someone giving an instruction.
Coming toward him.
He assessed the terrain in the seconds available.
The path he was on offered no cover.
The trees on either side were too sparse.
The root system was usable but not ideal.
Then he found it.
A depression in the ground twenty meters to his right, partially concealed by a fallen trunk and the undergrowth that had grown up around it over years of being undisturbed.
Not invisible.
But overlooked — which was a different thing.
He moved toward it without running.
Settled in.
Waited.
The group passed within fifteen meters of him — seven people, moving in the loose formation of individuals with a shared direction rather than a genuine team.
Two carried weapons with recent use on them.
None of them looked in his direction.
He watched them until they were gone.
Then he stayed still for another two minutes, in case there were others following.
There weren’t.
He emerged.
Continued upward.
And somewhere far below, in the empty auditorium where the morning’s first casualties were still drying on the stone floor, Lilly watched the crystal sphere with her arms crossed and said nothing.
Because the boy was still moving.
Slowly.
Unevenly.
But forward.
Always forward.