The academy towers seemed to grow taller the closer he got. He had noticed it yesterday and filed it away as a quirk. Today, running on no sleep and math he had not wanted to finish, the effect felt personally irritating.
Thirty-seven minutes from the edge district to the main gate. He counted without deciding to. Speedrunners count everything, including things that change nothing, because counting is the difference between staying inside your own head and whatever happens when you stop.
The chat went quiet until he stepped through the gate.
[nachtfalter]: you look terrible
[IsoldeSimp47]: did you sleep
[coldfront44]: he did not sleep
"I slept," Eloy said, at a volume intended for no one visible.
He had not slept. He had pushed through every fragment of resonance-binding lore he could remember and theorize with the Chat until three in the morning, realized the gaps in the documentation were specifically in the parts that mattered, and then watched the ceiling until staying in bed stopped being an option. The +1 Strength and +1 Dexterity from yesterday felt like something added to a save file that was already running at a deficit.
He dismissed the stat window and walked directly into a crowd.
The entire first-year class had been gathered in the main courtyard. House colors on everyone. Mission scrolls clutched in both hands. Students arranged in that specific way people stand when attendance is actively being taken and everyone knows it.
Director Caldwell occupied the raised platform at the north end, hands clasped at his back. Two locked doors and one blackmail negotiation between them, and the man looked identical to before: the administrative stillness of someone who had already accounted for every variable and found the result acceptable.
"...the tradition of the first mission week, unbroken for one hundred and twelve years..."
[Persimmon_Drop]: bro is at a school assembly
[ghostrunner_x]: find isolde
[nachtfalter]: before the crowd disperses
[IsoldeSimp47]: SCAN. THE CROWD.
Eloy was already doing it.
The problem with scanning for someone who had spent years deliberately minimizing her footprint was that she was stupidly good at it. He swept left, then right, checked the stone pillars lining the courtyard's edge.
Caldwell's gaze passed through the crowd and stopped.
Two seconds, precise. Then it moved on.
"...we expect nothing less than the excellence that earned you a place here."
Eloy abandoned the scan and moved sideways through the crowd immediately.
Three minutes, maybe less, before students rotated toward the mentors stationed around the perimeter. He was completely off-route. If Isolde got absorbed into an official pairing ceremony, he would burn at least twenty minutes he did not have trying to find her afterward.
She was at the far edge of the courtyard, back against a stone pillar, arms crossed over her chest, watching the ceremony with the fixed attention of someone present specifically because absence would have consequences.
[IsoldeSimp47]: CALLED IT
[val_writes]: he found her
[blinkfire99]: parallel positioning. right now.
[LMAO_cat]: @blinkfire99 bro saw one (1) body language video and memorized everything
Eloy stepped in beside her, matching her stance so they both faced the ceremony.
She ignored him. That was expected. He waited.
"You look like you didn't sleep," she said, still watching ahead.
"Everyone keeps saying that."
"Because it's visible."
Around them, students were beginning to drift toward the mentors.
"Did you?" Eloy asked.
"Did I what."
"Sleep."
The silence that followed was its own answer.
[nachtfalter]: two disasters, one mission
[IsoldeSimp47]: they are literally the same
[LMAO_cat]: @IsoldeSimp47 except one of them would throw the other into a wall
Eloy was not, technically, just making conversation. He watched the way her attention moved across the courtyard, passing over Caldwell entirely. She was tracking positions. Who had shifted, who had looked in her direction in the past minute, how often, and for how long. She had been running this process the entire time, and she had made it look like stillness.
He kept his voice low. "The Mugen-Za."
Isolde's arms tightened fractionally against her chest. Not a flinch. A controlled response, the kind that takes a long time to develop.
"What do you know about them," she said. Same flat register.
"Enough to know this mission has a clock on it. Do you?"
She said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
[ghostrunner_x]: she knows something
[IsoldeSimp47]: eloy. don't push it.
He backed off. The lore had been confirmed: she knew the name, and she had not denied what it implied. He let the silence carry the rest. They watched the courtyard empty in stages.
Mentor and student. Mentor and student. Mentor and student.
Until three people in the space had not moved.
The man who came through the western gate looked like he had spent time somewhere worse than here and had not quite finished leaving. He moved forward in a travel coat with a scorched hole in the left sleeve that he had clearly decided was not worth addressing, carrying the loose-limbed momentum of someone who had absorbed too much damage in their twenties and reached a comfortable peace with it. He was lighting a cigarette as he crossed the courtyard, cupping the flame against a morning breeze that posed absolutely no real threat. Pure habit. The whole entrance was pure habit.
He stopped in front of them. Looked at Eloy. Looked at Isolde. Checked the mission scroll in his free hand. Looked at both of them again.
Long drag.
[LMAO_cat]: WHO IS THIS
[coldfront44]: the cigarette man
[FenrirBites]: burn hole in the coat. I already love him.
Valen Croi. The name meant nothing to ordinary people in Aethelgard. In the back-channel community wikis, among anyone who had actually traced Arthur Gildhart's early history in any detail, it meant quite a lot: the scout who found him, the one handler in the official record who treated the kid like a person with a future instead of a walking resource.
"You're Rank E," Valen said.
"Yes," Eloy said.
Another drag. The exhale drifted sideways.
"Both of you."
"Yes," Isolde said.
Valen looked at the empty courtyard. Then at the scroll. Then at the cigarette briefly, as though checking whether it had formed a separate opinion on the matter.
"I told Caldwell to send two Rank Bs minimum," he said. Conversational. Like he was describing a scheduling conflict. "He forwarded me the forms yesterday. I assumed someone had made a clerical error."
[nachtfalter]: bro thought it was a typo
[IsoldeSimp47]: wait is he just going to leave
[blinkfire99]: he's going to leave, he's going to leave
"It wasn't an error," Eloy said.
"No. Apparently not."
He finished the cigarette and pressed it out under his boot with a heel.
Valen took in the raw liability of his assigned team by staring at the exit gate with a specific, world-worn acceptance that was somehow worse than alarm would have been.
[ghostrunner_x]: why isn't he scared
[val_writes]: he already did the math
[nachtfalter]: or he thinks the outcome is already decided
"Rank E," Valen said again, quieter. The way someone confirms a number they have already built an approach around. "Alright."
He turned toward the gate. Tilted his head once, a single come on gesture, and started walking without checking whether they were behind him.
Eloy looked at Isolde.
Isolde looked at Eloy.
Their eyes locked for a second and a half, which was exactly long enough to silently establish that they were in significant trouble and neither of them had a solution yet, and then they both broke contact.
They followed him.
The gate clicked shut behind them with ordinary, final weight.
Eloy fell into step half a pace back and ran the same calculation he had been running all night. Resonance-binding required a controlled environment, isolation from any competing magical interference. Which meant Arthur was probably still intact. Probably. The word was doing a lot of structural work.
"The boy's affinity is already compromised."
Valen said it without turning around. He kept his pace, coat moving with the motion.
Eloy nearly missed a step. "You knew about—"
"I've been tracking the Mugen-Za for four years." Still forward. "Arthur wasn't a random selection. They had already decided Arthur's fate before he even enrolled."
The city opened ahead of them. Morning vendors ran their routines, entirely unbothered by three people with a Rank A problem walking through.
[IsoldeSimp47]: FOUR YEARS
[coldfront44]: HE KNEW
[ghostrunner_x]: eloy. he knows more than you.
Valen glanced back. The expression he wore belonged to a person who had decided honesty was faster than comfort and had been operating that way long enough it no longer felt like a choice.
"The binding won't complete for another eighteen hours. Approximately." He faced forward again. "Which means you're not as far behind as you thought."
Three more steps.
"But the window is specific. And Caldwell knows it's specific."
He left the sentence there.
Eloy turned it over. Caldwell knows the exact operational window. Caldwell issued a mission against a faction he has been officially unaware of for four years. Caldwell assigned the two lowest-ranked students in the entire cohort, one of whom is the daughter of the man whose drained mana literally powers the city they were walking through right now, to run it with eighteen hours remaining.
This mission was designed to fail from the beginning.
He did not say it. Isolde was one step to his left, her silence carrying the particular density of someone running hard calculations and keeping all of them behind her face.
Valen lit another cigarette.
Isolde walked two steps ahead of both of them and did not look back.