Chapter 64: Aptitude Test (16)
“THERE! Under the stone- there’s an arm!”
“No, don’t just grab it, you’ll tear him apart-!”
Voices.
Hands.
Chaos.
The search party scrambled, shoes skidding over broken marble and soot-streaked stone.
Balt nearly fell flat trying to lunge for the edge of the collapsed rubble, only for Corin to yank him back by the collar.
The slab covering Lucien was massive.
Cracked from the fall, but still heavy enough to crush a small carriage.
The kind of weight no one man should ever survive.
Lucien hadn’t.
Not entirely.
They found his face first, barely visible beneath the edge of the stone.
Eyes open, glassy, frozen halfway between a blink.
Lips parted like he had tried to scream and never finished.
A sickly grayish-blue haloed his skin.
The girl with the wand dropped to her knees beside him, both hands trembling.
“Is he…-”
He didn’t answer.
His body didn’t move.
For a terrifying moment, no one breathed.
Then.
A shudder.
A twitch.
A flicker of breath so faint it barely stirred the dust on his lips.
Alive.
But only just.
Balt sobbed and fell forward onto the stone, forehead pressed to its ice-cold surface.
“You- freaking idiot- you absolute idiot, what were you thinking-!”
“Don’t crowd him!” someone shouted.
“Help me lift-!”
They tried.
Oh, how they tried.
Shoulders strained.
Arms locked.
Two, then three, then five of them braced against the edge of the boulder, trying to roll it off.
It barely budged.
“Corin- get over here!”
The broad-shouldered warrior grunted, striding forward.
“Everyone stand back.”
A girl with twin braids, Stella, one of the other melee fighters, stepped up beside him, hammer in hand.
They nodded once.
Then swung.
CRACK.
Stone splintered.
Dust billowed.
Lucien didn’t make a sound, but his body twitched, just barely, as chips of the stone broke off.
Again.
And again.
Bit by bit, they carved it down, chiseling carefully around his limbs, scraping off chunks and peeling away the shell of debris.
Until at last.
“It’s small enough to lift,” she whispered, breathless.
“We, we can carry him…”
But the moment they tried to pull him free.
A scream tore from Lucien’s throat.
His body arched, convulsed, and where they touched him, skin came away in strips.
“STOP!”
Balt shrieked.
“He’s frozen to it! His body, his skin- it’s fused to the stone!”
Everyone froze.
A breathless silence followed, broken only by Lucien’s pitiful whimpers and the wet, peeling sound of skin half-torn from the slab.
Corin clenched his jaw.
“Then we don’t take him off it.”
Everyone blinked.
“What?”
“We take the whole damn thing. Stone and all.”
“But- how do we-?”
“We lift it,” Corin said.
“Together.”
No one questioned him.
Not this time.
The examinees circled the slab, shoulders brushing, hands pressed against jagged edges.
Corin reached down, wrapping one arm beneath the stone, the other around Balt’s waist, much to Balt’s dismay.
“Hey- HEY- What the hell are you doing-?!”
“Don’t wiggle, squirt. You’ll throw off my balance.”
“I am not a sack of potatoes!”
“You’re acting like one.”
Balt shrieked.
Corin laughed.
Others joined in, weak chuckles mixing with sobs.
Some were still crying.
Some couldn’t stop.
But they lifted.
And they marched.
***
The road ahead was long and uneven, scarred by battle, strewn with ash and memories.
Lucien lay across the slab like a shattered offering. His condition was worse than any of them had expected.
His clothes were burned nearly to threads.
Skin sloughed off in patches.
Angry red burns criss crossed his arms, his neck, flesh and skin, some blistered, some raw, some… missing altogether.
His legs were purple with frostbite.
His lips split.
His eyes barely moved.
But he was breathing.
And they would not let that breath go.
So they carried him.
Step by aching step.
Voices hoarse.
Arms shaking.
Feet dragging.
Some wept openly.
Some mumbled prayers.
Some just kept moving.
And slowly, slowly.
Laughter returned.
Quiet.
Broken.
But real.
Like spring cracking through the frost.
They stumbled, barked a curse, and someone caught her.
Stella tripped and nearly dropped her end of the boulder, then giggled like a madwoman.
Balt kept elbowing Corin and yelling about personal space, and Corin just smirked wider every time.
Their pain didn’t vanish.
But it dulled beneath something stronger.
Something warmer.
Hope.
And as the sun dipped low, casting long shadows over the ruined stone and the bleeding horizon, the road narrowed to a final bend.
A gate stood there.
Not golden.
Not glorious.
Just a battered archway.
But to them.
It might as well have been the gates of paradise.
Corin heaved, adjusted his grip.
“End of the road, folks.”
“Finally,” Balt muttered.
“Put me down before I puke.”
“Only if you promise to carry me next time.”
“No.”
Corin grinned.
And with Lucien still bound to the stone, his friends still holding him up, their bodies aching and their hearts full, they walked the last steps together.
Shoulders brushing.
Tears drying.
Voices rising, not in pain.
But in song.
In laughter.
In life.
***
The tower thrummed with residual energy as dozens of projection mirrors flickered with unstable illusions, flickers of the battlefield still stuttering in and out of focus.
The smoky wreckage of the ruined road pulsed across crystalline displays, each one tuned to a different angle, magnifying the last moments of the final trial.
And every eye was on Lucien Crowley.
Or rather, what remained of him.
Someone let out a low whistle as the battered stone slab, still faintly glowing with guardian-forged runes, was hoisted by trembling examinees.
Lucien’s scorched, frost-bitten form lay atop it like some half-dead martyr.
“…Well,” drawled one of the invigilators, arms crossed as she stared at the carnage below, “that was unexpected.”
“Unexpected?”
Grunted another, his bear-like frame still leaning on his hammer-shaped cane.
“The boy just hard-overrode a Tier-3 sentient construct mid-combat. That’s not unexpected. That’s insane.”
One of them adjusted his monocle, muttering, “It shouldn’t even be possible. The instruction hierarchy is hardwired into the glyph matrix. The Lions aren’t supposed to be tricked like that, especially not by a kid with no formal command over construct linguistics.”
A younger invigilator, barely out of her apprenticeship, tilted her head in confusion.
“Wait, so he managed to override the instruction hierarchy of the statue?”
“No,” the other clarified.
“He confused it.”
“Brilliantly,” the first invigilator added, a smirk curling on her lips.
On one of the suspended screens, the replay of the key moment looped: Lucien, bloodied and frozen, barely conscious, clinging on to the underbelly of one of the guardian lions, as the wind-forged behemoths squared off.
One paused mid-charge.
Its head jerked.
Its runes flashed a strange color.
And then, like a thunderclap, it turned.
Right on its twin.
The tower had gone silent when it happened.
Even now, none of the senior faculty could quite agree on how the boy had done it.
“The winged guardian was set to target the strongest hostile present,” murmured one of the invigilators as she checked the recordings.
“But Lucien somehow corrupted its perception matrix. It reclassified the other lion as hostile based on raw threat evaluation. He forced a contradiction between ‘Ally Designation’ and ‘Threat Priority.’ The combat logic chose power over protocol.”
“Which shouldn’t have worked,” she grunted.
“Still did,” said the other.
Others weren’t so impressed.
“Please,” one of them scoffed, arms folded behind his back.
“He got lucky. One-in-a-thousand chance, nothing more. A brute-force gamble with no actual guarantee.”
“He rewrote the battlefield,” someone muttered.
“He could’ve died,” another pointed out.
“He should have died,” countered another.
“If that statue had picked him instead of the other lion, he’d be paste. And look at him now, he’s being carried like a dead emperor on a makeshift stone casket.”
That drew a few uneasy chuckles.
“Gods,” someone muttered, “they look like a funeral procession.”
“Don’t say that,” the young invigilator hissed.
“I’m just saying,” an older invigilator said dryly, “I’ve seen more cheerful pallbearers.”
Down below, the Ruby Sector examinees staggered forward, feet dragging, clothes torn, tears streaked across soot-covered cheeks.
But still they carried him.
Together.
Stone and all.
As though letting go would break something more important than bones.
Silence fell again.
Then the quiet click of boots echoed from the marble stairs behind them.
Administrator Vaencel was no longer in the tower.
He stood at the road’s edge, just before the archway.
Tall.
Immaculate.
And waiting.
Flanked by the head healers and an array of enchanters with glowing staves, Administrator Vaencel cut a striking figure in his long black coat, the Academy’s crimson insignia glinting on his chest.
His hands were folded behind him, posture crisp, face unreadable.
But as the funeral-like procession came into view, examiness dragging their battered friend and the slab he was frozen to, something flickered across his face.
A smile.
So small it could’ve been a trick of the light.
So brief it could’ve been a memory.
But it was there.
And it held pride.
Not loud.
Not celebratory.
Something quieter.
Sterner.
The kind of pride one has for those who defy the odds without permission.
“Make room,” he said quietly.
The healers parted, moving toward the group with practiced urgency.
Lucien’s team collapsed to their knees as they passed the final threshold.
Someone finally let out a sob.
Another broke into laughter.
“Administrator,” one of the senior healers murmured, “he’s, he’s barely hanging on. We’ll need to cut off the parts of the fused stone before we can stabilize-”
“I trust your judgment,” Vaencel replied.
“Do what must be done.”
He watched as they surrounded the slab.
Watched as they treated Lucien with the reverence due a soldier, not a student.
And still, he said nothing.
Not yet.
But he would.
Later.
When the boy woke up, if he woke up, Vaencel had questions.
