A moment later, Aria stepped up to the next one. She was close enough that he could have caught her eye, but her attention was turned inward, her brow furrowed with whatever unresolved bullshit was simmering between her and Vincent. She vanished through the gate without a single glance in his direction.
Cane filed the look on her face away. Perfect. The bigger the crack, the easier it was to get a finger in.
He turned to Cassius, an easy smile on his face. "We’ll see how the bravado holds up."
Then he stepped through the gate.
Cold hit first. Not the clean cold of winter air, but something deeper, a chill that started in the marrow and worked outward, as if the gate had taken him apart and forgotten to warm the pieces before putting them back. For a heartbeat he had no body at all, only the thrum of the runes stretched into one endless note. Then his stomach dropped out from under him like a missed stair, and the note cut off.
The world resolved around him into open air and the smell of damp earth. He stood in a modest-sized field, a perfect circle of green hemmed in on all sides by a dense, dark treeline. It was clearly a purpose-built arena, the grass already dewy enough to soak the hem of his trousers. He’d arrived later than most of his group. A good number of students were already milling about, but they weren’t organizing. They were arguing.
At the center of the clearing, their flag hung from an iron post sunk into a low stone plinth, a square of plain grey cloth, limp in the still air. Nobody was standing anywhere near it.
He drifted closer, his hands in his pockets. The source of the argument was a standoff between two clusters of students.
One cluster was anchored by a girl with a sharp face and an even sharper posture. Yelena Ayula. She was short, her build more regal than soft, with narrow hips and a chest so flat her uniform blouse lay against it without a single wrinkle. She carried herself with the ramrod-straight spine of a noble daughter drilled from birth.
Her voice, when she spoke, was the practiced, warm tone of someone used to being listened to. "Rushing into conflict before we understand the terrain is how teams lose their flag in the first ten minutes. The responsible path is to secure resources first. A team scrambling to survive can’t possibly out-think a team that’s already comfortable." She was surrounded mostly by other girls, their heads nodding along with her reasonable, cautious-sounding plan.
Opposite her, a broad-shouldered guy named Marcus cut her off, his voice thick with impatience. "Sitting still just hands every other team a head start. The whole point of a three-way match is that whoever moves first controls the tempo." His followers were a rougher-looking bunch, fewer pristine uniforms and more visible scars. "We send out scouts now, find the other two teams before they dig in, and hit the weaker one hard and fast. A fight you start is a fight you control."
Yelena’s composed warmth cooled by several degrees. "Sending a scouting party out blind isn’t decisiveness, it’s recklessness. You’ll get them ambushed and picked apart before they find anything useful."
A girl next to her, one with a pair of surprisingly heavy-looking tits that bounced emphatically as she nodded, added, "Nobody wins anything by being the first to bleed."
Marcus shot back, "And nobody wins anything by sitting on their asses hoping the enemy doesn’t find them. Hope isn’t a strategy. By the time your resource-gathering party finds a few berries and a clean stream, someone else’s flag-runners will be standing over ours."
The argument devolved from there, the two of them repeating the same points with rising volume. Cane listened, arms crossed, genuinely impressed with how solid both their arguments were. Yelena’s caution sounded smart right up until you realized the other teams weren’t waiting for her to be ready. Marcus’s aggression was good until you wondered who was guarding their flag while he was off playing hero. Both had built a good plan around a single, massive blind spot.
But the real problem, the one that made both their strategies useless, was the fact that this group had fractured into two hostile camps within minutes. They were the bottom of the barrel, the dregs of the academy, and this was proof. Whatever plan they chose, half the team would execute it resentfully, just waiting for the chance to say ’I told you so.’
And it wasn’t even a clean split. Cane watched the edges of the two camps and saw the real shape of it. Three of the boys on Marcus’s side weren’t committed. They glanced at Yelena every time she landed a point. Two of her girls had drifted half a step toward the scarred crowd the moment Marcus said "strike first." Nobody here was loyal to anybody. They were just following whichever voice sounded surest in the moment, and they’d switch again the second things went wrong.
One of Yelena’s acolytes, a mousy girl with a surprisingly prominent cameltoe straining the fabric of her trousers, caught him watching. "Do you have an opinion on the matter? You seem to be listening awfully closely."
Cane raised both hands in a gesture of mock surrender. "I wouldn’t dream of getting between two people who both sound so convinced they’re right. I’m neither smart enough nor brave enough for that."
She pressed again. "But you must have a preference. Resources or aggression?"
He just shrugged. "Whichever one you pick, you’ll probably still lose for the same reason neither of them has bothered to name out loud."
The answer clearly confused her, and he didn’t bother clarifying. Marcus shot him an assessing look, catalogued him as useless, and returned to his argument. That suited Cane just fine. There was nothing for him here. No leader to depose, no faction worth joining. He turned his back on the squabbling nobles and started walking the perimeter of the field, a faint, private smile on his lips. The smartest move he could make in this entire exercise, it seemed, was to simply not be a part of it.