I could hear it. The reckoning of a building crumbling to dust. The children's screams being cut short as they met a gruesome end. John, and the way the machete hit his skull making a sploosh sound as he laid dead on the floor, his hollowed eyes staring straight into mine.
The figure.
The bull.
It was all terrifying.
I floated somewhere between sleep and consciousness for a while, my brain doing the slow, tedious work of turning itself back on while my body was resisted to keep on sleeping. The images kept arriving in no particular order. The corridor. The cages. The locks clicking open one by one. John shouting at me to move. The endless stairwell. The sound of the building collapsing as dust flew in the air. The cold air outside with the multitude of trees surrounding the building. As well as the machete grazing past my ear almost hitting me.
'Did those things even happen?'
The question arrived with genuine uncertainty attached to it. I had woken up in a cage at the start of whatever this was and I had taken the situation largely at face value because there had not been time to do so otherwise, but lying here now in the grey space between sleep and consciousness, my brain was finally circling back to the more fundamental question.
Was any of it real in the first place?
I slowly started to open my eyes.
I was met with a ceiling. Made out of pale stone, smooth, and lit from the side by the thin morning light coming through a window to my left. A mattress beneath me that felt real enough, firm and clean, nothing like the cold floor I had last woken up to.
I was alive.
I was laying down on a bed.
The panic arrived shortly after. My eyes moved quickly, shooting glances at every corner of the room, locating exits, I was searching for any way to escape as if I were still being chased. Maybe it had just become a habit after being chased by the figure for too long.
Then a voice came from my right.
"You're safe, kid."
My head turned instantly toward where the voice had come from.
How had I not seen him?
The man sitting beside my bed was not what I expected. He had broad shoulders and was somewhere in his mid 20's by the look of him, he had short dark hair, and his pupils seemed to gleam with a honey blonde color. His clothing seemed to be one of a militant uniform. The uniform was a deep slate grey with structured shoulders and a small insignia stitched into the collar that I didn't recognize but that suggested rank. He was resting on a nearby chair, leaning back with both of his arms on both arm rests and his legs crossed.
"Easy." He said, as I forced myself to sit up. I had sat up too fast and immediately regretted it. "You had it rough. Don't push it."
I settled back down and rested on the bed again. it felt nice and cozy like the one I had back in my old world.
"Where am I?" I asked. My voice came out gruff.
"Hospital ward. You've been out for a couple of days." The man said. "My name is Aston Mitchell. I'm a sixth ranked Shaper serving under the Aurelian Empire." He said pridefully, in a tone of someone that was flaunting his greatest achievement to whoever cared to listen.
"So, what's your name young man?"
"Noah Wilson" I replied to his question before looking at him again.
"Are you the one who found me?"
"I am." He leaned back slightly in his chair. "We had some reports a few days back about a village being raided. Adults killed, children taken in caravans. We had been trying to track the assailants." He paused. "I was in the area when I heard a scream. I flew over and dealt with what was in the building's vicinity. The bull-type anomaly and the masked individual both." He said it with the same tone a person might use to describe having dealt with a minor inconvenience, just like it was a minor inconvenience. "Found you unconscious in the grass outside. Brought you here directly."
I laid there staring blankly at the ceiling trying to process that information.
So, everything really did happen. I thought, my face darkening ever so slightly.
"The building." I said quietly. "The other kids."
Something in Aston's expression shifted. Not much. But just enough for me to notice the change.
"I went back after I brought you here. I searched through the wreckage thoroughly." He gave me an apologetic look. "You were the only survivor, Noah. No one survived the buildings collapse."
The room went silent for a moment.
I felt a little nauseous, that time I spent in that building had felt like a fever dream but now that the scope of the situation finally sunk in. Kids died, children my age had their lives taken from them and for what, the amusement of that damn figure.
"Honestly," Aston continued, "with what I found in that building, the fact that you made it out with nothing worse than a broken arm is something truly miraculous."
Broken arm?
I looked down at my left arm.
I turned it over. balled my hand into a fist before letting it go shortly after. Nothing. No wrap, no ache. The arm looked and felt like I had never broken my arm in the first place.
"My arm is completely fine." I spoke, mainly to myself than to him.
Aston let out a short quiet sound that sounded like the restrained version of a laugh. "Yeah. Those healers are truly something else. They fix up injuries in the blink of an eye. You probably wouldn't even have known if I hadn't told you."
I stared at my arm for another moment.
In my old world, a broken arm meant six weeks in a cast and a story to tell at parties. Here apparently it meant an afternoon's inconvenience. I filed that away alongside everything else that this world seemed to treat as unremarkable.
I reached for the cup of water on the left nightstand. After taking a sip of water asked.
"So." I said. "What now?"
Aston raised his eyebrow slightly.
"I have nowhere to go." I said, with no hint of emotion. It was just a fact. Whatever Noah Wilson's village had been, whatever life he had lived before the accident, it was all gone now. I had nowhere to return to. No family I could locate. No belongings to call my own besides the rags you could barely call clothes that I had on. "I'm not sure what the standard procedure is for a situation like this."
Aston was quiet for a moment, studying me with an expression that was difficult to read. Then he reached up and scratched the back of his neck briefly.
"About that." He said. "How old are you?"
"Sixteen." I answered, which I was decently confident was true for Noah even if it could also be applied to me.
He nodded slowly. "And I can sense it already. Your Shaper abilities have awakened recently." He said it as a statement rather than a question, in a matter-of-fact way. "Given your age and your awakening, you should be eligible for enrollment." He paused. "There's an academy. Best institution in the kingdom for young Shapers. They take students your age, train them properly, and give them somewhere to develop and grow."
He looked at me intuitively, waiting for a reaction.
I kept my face still.
Academy.
Something lit up in my eyes that I did not have the discipline to fully conceal.
Ah, finally. This is when I'm told I am a once in a century genius, and that I will have a harem of girls chasing after me. It is finally the time for me to live my best life.
A wide smirk surfaced on my face before I had even realized it.
Aston stared at me strangely.
I cleared my throat and attempted to make my expression neutral again but failing miserably at it. "That sounds reasonable." I said in a calm tone but my face still grinning ear to ear.
He continued staring at me for a moment longer with the expression of a man who had seen many things in his career and was now adding this to the list. Then he seemed to decide against pursuing the issue, exhaling quietly through his nose before rising up from his chair.
"Alright." He said, straightening his back. "Rest up. You've had it pretty rough. We'll handle the details of your enrollment tomorrow."
He said it with the finality of someone who deemed this conversation to be over, I laid back against the pillow and stared at the pale stone ceiling with the smirk still quietly present at the corner of my mouth.
Academy.
Oh, I wonder what cool nicknames I will get after being told I am once in a century genius.
Noah let out a maniacal cackle, making the nurse who was about to enter the room shiver for a moment.
***
The uniform arrived the following morning, it was folded neatly and left on the chair beside my bed while I was still waking up.
I picked it up and got dressed.
It was the first time since being transmigrated that I finally had the chance to look at my new appearance. I had short black hair and grey eyes and... that was pretty much it, everything else about his face was rather unassuming. Although he did look pretty snazzy with the Academy uniform on.
Aston met me at the entrance to the ward, took one look at me, and gave a single approving nod before leading me out of the hospital.
The portal gate was a twenty-minute walk away from the hospital ward, and the city itself was something I was not prepared for. Wide stone streets. Buildings that rose in styles I didn't have names for, old and deliberate and built to last. People moving through the morning with the ease of people who had lived there their entire lives, Shapers among them, the occasional crackle of an ability used casually on some menial tasks catching my eye at every intersection.
I kept my expression neutral through most of it through sheer will.
The portal gate stood in a wide courtyard at the city's northern edge, ringed by low stone walls and attended by two uniformed officials who checked names against a ledger without looking up. The gate itself was taller than I expected, a standing archway of dark stone with a surface that did not behave like a surface at all. It moved. Slowly, almost lazily, the way deep water moved in low current, a shifting curtain of pale blue-white light that caught itself and refracted inward in patterns that didn't repeat. Looking at it directly for too long produced a sensation behind the eyes that I suspected was the visual equivalent of trying to read something in a language you almost understood.
In my old world something like this existed in games. In novels. In the specific kind of fiction that a sixteen-year-old stayed up until two in the morning reading when he had homework due the next day. It was the kind of thing that came with orchestral music in the background and a loading screen.
Here it just stood in a courtyard on a Tuesday morning while a city moved around it.
My heart had picked up pace without my permission.
The official checked my name against the ledger, found it, marked it, and gestured toward the gate with the energy of someone directing foot traffic at a crossroad. Aston stood a few feet back and watched with his arms folded, his expression carrying the particular quality of a man who had accompanied a great number of young Shapers to this gate and had learned not to invest too heavily in the moment.
The line moved forward.
Then it was my turn.
I stood in front of it. The light moved against itself in that slow, deep way, the pale blue-white of it washing over the charcoal of my new uniform. I could feel something coming off it that was not quite warmth and not quite pressure, more like the air just before weather changed, a charge that sat on the surface of the skin and waited.
I took a breath.
And I stepped through.