Fifteen minutes. That was how long it took for the academy’s idea of "wilderness" to stop lying to him.
The first stretch of trail had been suspiciously tidy for something billed as an exam ground — packed dirt, the occasional helpful arrow of trampled grass, trees spaced just far enough apart that nobody with two working eyes could actually get lost. Cane had clocked it for what it was almost immediately: a buffer zone, a place to sort the eager first-years from the ones who’d trip over a root and cry about it. Groomed. Safe. Boring.
Then, without any particular ceremony, the trees closed ranks.
The canopy thickened until the afternoon light came down in coin-sized scraps instead of sheets. The underbrush stopped being decorative and started being an actual obstacle, thorned vines looping low enough to catch an ankle, fallen trunks slick with moss that hadn’t seen a groundskeeper’s blade in years. Cane grinned. This was it. This was the real forest — the one that actually showed up in the book, Chapter after Chapter of Vinny stumbling into ambushes and convenient plot-relevant caves. If any part of this exam had allies worth finding, it wasn’t going to be in the sanitized part.
He picked his way forward, and the forest made him pay for every step.
A root he didn’t see clipped his shin hard enough to make him hiss through his teeth. A branch he did see whipped back into his face the second he let go of it, because apparently thirteen points of Strength did not come bundled with basic hand-eye coordination. He caught himself against a tree trunk crawling with something that bit, swore, and kept moving. The original Cane’s memories supplied a passable stance for light magic — hands loose, weight forward, the specific little flick of the wrist that made the mana behave — but muscle memory only carried a man so far when the muscle in question had never actually won a fight worth remembering. The real Cane Valerian, Cane reflected sourly, had been an arrogant coward with a sword rank barely above decorative. Borrowing his instincts was like borrowing a car with three flat tires. Technically transportation.
Sleep schedules are for bitches, but apparently so is cardio, the system offered, unhelpfully, as he peeled a thorn out of his palm.
He ignored it, mostly because it wasn’t wrong, and pushed on.
The ground softened as he descended into a shallow gully, and that was where he saw the first print.
Just one, at first — a boot heel pressed into a patch of mud gone the colour of weak tea. Then another, six feet on. Then a scattered handful more, overlapping, crossing, the unmistakable clutter of more than one person moving with purpose rather than wandering. Cane crouched over the clearest of them and reached, uselessly, for the novel. He’d read Heartsteel Paladin start to finish twice and skimmed it a third time during a slow week at his old job, and he could not for the life of him remember a single sentence that told him where anything in this forest actually was. The book had never cared about geography. It cared about Vinny’s feelings and how tight everyone’s uniform was. Thanks for nothing, he thought, and slowed his pace to something closer to a stalk.
He knew, in the abstract, that a decent chunk of the story’s early violence happened somewhere in these woods. He did not know if he was standing in the part where people got maimed by wildlife or the part where people had a nice picnic. Given his luck so far, betting on the picnic seemed unwise.
He kept low, kept quiet, and kept following the trail — until one print stopped him cold.
It wasn’t the shape of the sole that caught his eye. It was the wear pattern: a distinctive scuff along the outer edge of the left heel, the kind that came from a very specific, very unfashionable habit of walking slightly pigeon-toed. Cane had stared at that exact scuff mark every single morning for weeks, usually while waiting for the bathroom. Kai’s shoes. He’d have recognized them blind.
Which meant, unless some other unfortunate soul in the academy had developed the identical gait and bought the identical boots, this was Kai’s group.
He turned the thought over as he crept forward. Kai ranked a notch above him — not by much, nothing that would embarrass either of them at a dinner party, but enough that if Cane’s own group had landed in the bottom bracket of this exercise, Kai’s had probably landed one tier up. Second from the bottom, maybe. Third if the academy was feeling generous. Either way, not exactly a murderer’s row of prodigies. Manageable, if it came to it.
If it came to it. That was the part that kept his pace slow and his hand loose near his sword. He didn’t actually know every pair of shoes in a school with several hundred students — that would require a level of dedication to footwear that even he found alarming — so the odds that this was Kai’s group rather than some stranger with an unfortunate coincidence of gait were good, not certain. And even if it was Kai, there was no guarantee a group mid-exam would be thrilled to see Cane Valerian materialize out of the treeline like a bad omen. Exam groups eliminated each other for points, as far as he understood the rules, and "capture the scumbag noble and interrogate him for whatever he knows" sounded like exactly the kind of creative scoring opportunity some overachiever would leap at. He had no interest in finding out what counted as enthusiastic interrogation in this world.
The sounds ahead confirmed his suspicion had been correct in the worst possible way: it wasn’t Kai’s group at all.
He heard them before he saw them — low voices, the specific rustle of people trying and failing to be quiet in a forest that punished quiet — and dropped behind a rise thick with fern.