Out of two thousand candidates who had sat the written exam, three hundred had passed.
Rudra had done the arithmetic while waiting and had arrived at a number that was both impressive and sobering — the written exam had eliminated eighty-five percent of the field in a single sitting. Three hundred people out of two thousand. He had been one of them, by the narrowest possible margin, with a score that Edward had described using words like "embarrassing" and "barely" and "I don't want to discuss this further."
He was choosing to focus on the "passed" part.
The second exam was held the following morning, and its location was nothing like the institutional hall of the first phase. The remaining three hundred candidates had been transported to the very edge of Shambala — the far boundary of the city, where the last buildings gave way to open ground, and beyond that open ground, something else entirely.
The Hungry Forest.
Even from a distance, before anyone had explained anything about it, the name made immediate sense. The trees were enormous — not pleasantly enormous the way ancient trees could be, but wrong-enormous, dense and dark and packed together in a way that suggested the forest had been growing aggressively inward for a very long time and had no intention of stopping. The light changed at the treeline. The quality of the air was different on the forest side of the boundary — not cold, not warm, but aware in some way that Rudra's soul training had made him sensitive enough to notice without being able to name.
Normal civilians are not allowed to enter this forest because it's home to many monsters.
Edward had mentioned the Hungry Forest only once during their training, in passing. Rudra had been present enough to retain the key point: a former Forest Stone holder had created it deliberately, for exactly this purpose. The forest was not natural. It had been designed, shaped over decades or centuries to produce specific conditions — an environment that could not be safely navigated without ability, training, and the kind of decision-making that no written exam could teach.
Three hundred candidates stood in front of it in the early morning light and were mostly very quiet.
Rudra looked along the line of them — faces he didn't know, postures ranging from controlled to visibly nervous, the occasional person who had the specific stillness of someone who was either completely calm or had decided to look like it. He let his soul awareness extend outward, not trying to read individuals but taking a general impression.
They were strong. Significantly stronger than the averages he had trained against in the early months with Edward. The written exam had filtered for knowledge, but the people standing around him had passed that and were also fighters. That combination was a different category of opponent from anything he had faced in Bhoo Lok.
He filed this away without dwelling on it.
A man stepped onto the raised platform at the front of the assembly area and produced a silence without raising his hand — just presence, the particular quality of someone who has been doing this long enough that people quiet down before they've made a conscious decision to. He was tall, built in the specific way of career fighters, wearing the Soul Fighters uniform with a rank insignia Rudra didn't yet know how to read.
"Silence!"
It was already mostly silent.
"My name is Lieutenant Roan. I am the instructor for the second exam. I will explain the process once. Pay attention."
Nobody moved.
"You will enter the Hungry Forest. You will survive there for four days and three nights." A pause of exactly one beat — the kind that communicates that what follows is important. "During those four days, you will collect gems. These gems are located inside monsters currently roaming the forest. You cannot retrieve them without engaging the monsters that carry them."
A slight shift passed through the crowd — not fear exactly, but the recalibration of three hundred people adjusting their mental image of what the next four days were going to involve.
"There are four colours of gem," Roan continued. "Each colour corresponds to a tier of monster difficulty and a point value. Red gems carry fifty points and come from the weakest tier — manageable for any trained fighter. As the colour lightens, both the difficulty and the point value increase. Orange, then yellow, then white." He looked across the assembled candidates with an expression that was not quite kindness but was adjacent to it. "White gems carry five hundred points and come from monsters I would strongly advise you not to engage unless you are genuinely confident in your abilities. I am not saying this to diminish your ambitions. I am saying it because I have run this exam many times and I prefer candidates to return from it."
He let that settle for a moment.
"You will not enter alone. You will be assigned to teams of five, randomly selected. Your accumulated points are pooled — what one teammate earns, the team earns. The top twenty teams at the end of four days advance to the third and final phase."
He moved through several additional rules — boundaries within the forest, the protocol for emergency extraction, the conditions for disqualification. The rules were clear and not complicated. The exam itself, everyone in the field was beginning to understand, was where the simplicity ended.
"That covers the process," Roan said, his tone shifting into something more direct than it had already been. "My final instruction is this. It is your responsibility not to die."
He stepped off the platform.
The field absorbed this for a moment. Around Rudra the specific sound of people talking quietly and trying not to be heard — quick conversations, reassurances, the occasional short laugh that served no purpose except to discharge tension.
Rudra looked at Arjun. "Not to die," he repeated.
"Encouraging," Arjun said.
Team selection proceeded immediately. Organisation staff moved through the field distributing numbered balls — one per candidate, drawn from a large box. The number on your ball was your team number. Every candidate who drew the same number was on the same team. Simple, clean, and completely outside anyone's ability to influence.
The lines formed and moved efficiently. Rudra found himself in front of the box sooner than he expected.
He reached in.
'Please. A good team. Decent fighters, people who know what they're doing, nobody who's going to freeze on day one—'
He withdrew his hand.
The number on the ball was 7.
He moved aside and began looking for his team. The field was reorganising itself into clusters now, candidates finding their numbers, the crowd resolving from one mass into sixty smaller groups. Rudra moved through it with his ball held up where people could see it.
He found Arjun almost immediately, which produced a relief significant enough that he allowed himself to feel it. Whatever else the team turned out to be, at least they were together. The two of them could work around most problems if they had each other as the foundation.
He said as much to Arjun, who agreed while reasonably pointing out that three bad teammates could create problems that no foundation offset, and that they still didn't know who the other three were.
They began looking.
Rudra scanned faces — team number held up, a nod, moving on. Looking for the other three sevens. The field had thinned enough that finding a number was mostly a matter of patience. Most of the faces he passed were strangers with the focused expressions of people doing the same thing he was doing.
Then he saw a familiar face.
Not the face of a strong fighter with a calm demeanour. Not the face of someone who had arrived with a plan and the training to execute it. A face with long messy hair and dark circles significant enough to suggest they had been there since birth, attached to a person wearing loose clothes and holding a ball in one hand — waving it with the specific energy of someone who has just spotted exactly the people he was looking for.
'Not that guy again.'
"Hey! Brothers! We meet again!"
Rudra and Arjun both took a small step in the same direction at the same moment, which suggested they were briefly considering the same option.
Then Rudra's eyes dropped to the ball in the waving hand.
The number on it was seven.
He looked at Arjun. Arjun was looking at the ball with an expression Rudra had never seen on him before and hoped, privately, never to see again — the expression of a man watching something he had specifically considered and concluded would be unfortunate, happening anyway, in real time, with no available mechanism to prevent it.
Arjun's worst fear had come true.
Karlos, candidate number 691, was on their team.