Two students trailed behind them like guilty ducklings, trying not to stare.
"Wasn’t luck," one murmured. "I was right there. His foot hit, the tiles twitched, and he just... wasn’t where he’d been."
"People don’t move like that," the other said.
"Yeah. That’s what I mean."
Esen fell in step backwards, engaging in the conversation.
"I put chalk where his toes hit," he said, delighted. "The pattern’s rude. Like he told geometry to wait outside."
"Can you do it?" one asked.
Esen grinned. "I can annoy geometry itself. It’s a start."
Raizen heard them without wanting to, but he smiled, them not knowing the toll it had on his body. Kori took them beneath a set of carved arches into a long. Stained glass threw petal colors over the flagstones - crimson, rose, amber - and the images never repeated - each pane was the same badge they wore, in different forms. Four points at first, then the points lengthening until a crescent grew to cradle the star from below, then the full star nested inside the crescent, and finally a second crescent curving down from above, the true Vanguard crest complete. Raizen’s eyes caught that final pane and held there for a heartbeat too long.
"You’re not allowed to stare at that one for more than three seconds," Kori said lightly. "It gets ideas."
"About what?" Keahi asked.
"About making you feel important before you’re useful."
Hikari looked like she wanted to be useful yesterday. They came out into the eastern court where the training grounds spread in order. Spar rings inlaid with dark wood. Archery lanes with targets painted like stylized petals. An enormous climbing tower with handholds that looked random until you realized they formed a pattern if you squinted, watched over all of the academy. Students were already working - forms that were more tradition than function, drills that made muscles learn to obey on command. Chapters first released on novel★fire.net
Two squads moved in unison near the far wall, something between a dance and a threat. Their blades flashed, then pinned still in a shape that made a humanoid shape, if you looked closer. The instructor tapped a staff twice and the pattern shattered back into motion.
Raizen felt the urge to move sink into his bones - old habit, maybe, or hunger. His calves made a small, private complaint. He folded it away.
"Public grounds," Kori said. "You can spar anyone here as long as you sign the form that says you won’t blame me when you trip over your own destiny. The huge climbing tower’s called Crown Spine. Don’t ask why unless you want to hear Arashi deliver a lecture on architecture."
"It’s named for the crest line of the western facade," Arashi said on cue, without sounding smug about it. "Gothic curves want to meet at a point. The spine makes them behave."
"See?" Kori chirped. "Never opens his mouth unless he can sound like a museum. I love it and hate it for us."
They then entered a hall tucked behind the courts. It breathed cool air and ink. The first library appeared with no warning - a nave of shelves so tall they felt like trees, brass staircases curling up to galleries, lanterns that flickered with a light that didn’t smoke.
Raizen tilted his head. If he closed his eyes he could feel a faint thrum under the floor – strange, but not magic. A machine’s heartbeat buried far below the stone. When he opened his eyes again the column of glyphs drifted sideways as if a breeze had touched it, though there wasn’t any breeze at all.
"Main stacks," Kori said, keeping her voice to the library’s idea of quiet. "Don’t touch the books if you don’t have permission unless you want to get yelled at by an archivist who has been alive since before sarcasm was invented. We have more libraries than sense. Half the city’s research heads got their first bad grades here. It’s sweet."
Lynea seemed to stand taller among the shelves. "We’ll be assigned reading lists?"
"You’ll be assigned reading lists, watching lists, crying lists, and nap lists," Kori said. "Yes, Raizen, even you. Especially you. People who cut the world in straight lines need to learn how to read curves."
They wandered past tables where students hunched over blueprints and old maps, past a cluster of first years arguing about the correct way to inscribe a line of Eon so that it didn’t get ideas and rewrite your intentions. When Kori tugged her forward by the sleeve, Hikari almost apologized to the books.
"You’ll get your turn," Kori promised. "For now, we’re collecting impressions. Library number one - impressive. Library number two - haunted. Library number three - has a tree in it for reasons nobody will explain to me."
"Trees improve cognition," Lynea said.
"Trees drop leaves on my notes," Kori said. "The relationship is adversarial."
They left the stacks for a corridor lined with arched windows. Beyond the glass, Neoshima fell away in levels, the older stone pressed up against new transparent planes like two centuries had decided to share a wall. A tram streamed by on an elevated rail, lit from below so it looked like it was flying on a line of sunlight. Far below - much farther - the sea clenched its fists against the base of the cliffs. The Academy sat high enough to see the horizon pretend it was straight. In the next building, a long room held training dummies posing in rows, their surfaces scored with old cuts and new repairs. Each dummy could be dialed to a different resistance, stance and action. Keahi reached out, pressed a palm to one, then drew back like it had surprised her.
"They reset themselves," she said.
"Obviously! Everything in here resets itself," Kori said. "Except my tolerance for people who decide they’re experts because they read half a page. There." She pointed to a wall where the Lotus emblem had been hammered into copper so many times it had started to look like it could flex and stand on its own. "That’s where you put your hand if you want to take a private session with an instructor. You’ll get a list of names. You’ll want to pick your favorite. You won’t get your favorite. That’s part of the lesson."
Esen rolled his shoulders like he was warming up for a joke. "And our instructor is you, right?"
"Yeah, most of times" Kori said. "Sometimes you’ll get a professor. Sometimes the Headmaster is bored and decides he wants to watch you cry. But yes. You’re in my class."
Esen flashed a grin that had charmed people into bad bets. "So why you?"
Kori tilted her head. "Because I’m very good at teaching people where the knife is before they notice they’ve been cut."
"Or because you’re not the strongest Phalanx left," Esen continued. "And maybe the Headmaster wanted the heavy hitters on the upperclassmen. Nothing personal. Just trying to understand allocation of assets."
The room went still in that particular way rooms go still when someone says the thing everyone else wanted to avoid. The air didn’t change temperature. It changed texture.
Kori’s smile didn’t move. Her hand did. It was a flick so small, but so instant. Esen’s badge vanished from his chest like it had never existed. At the same instant, the sharp little pin that had secured it got pinned into the wooden dummy beside him so close to his eye that Esen’s eyelashes stirred.
Nobody breathed for exactly two seconds.
"Asset allocation," Kori said, still sunny. "Lesson one - don’t weigh a knife by the shine. Lesson two, this is a fun fact – I don’t like to say this, but I am, in fact, the strongest Phalanx."