Chapter 134: Eldrath Is Hungry
Hunger came before awareness.
Not a thought, a physical sensation, his stomach tightening, reminding him that a seventeen-year-old body couldn’t stay in scholarly monk mode forever.
"Shit."
Haru stared at Vandris’s journal in his hand, then looked around at the empty space of the Hall of the Dead—dust, cobwebs, forgotten objects, the diagonal beam of light that had been beautiful hours ago was now nothing but darkness because the sun had disappeared without warning.
"What the hell was I thinking, planning to stay here until the test started? What kind of stupid enthusiasm is this?"
"I need to eat."
He stood up. Stored the journal in his inventory. Stretched, bones cracking, that specific exhaustion that came from sitting on a stone floor for hours without realizing how long it had been.
He took a step toward the exit.
A hand rested on his shoulder.
Gentle. Heavy. Both at the same time, in a way that made no physical sense but every other kind of sense.
"Where are you going?" The voice belonged to an old man, not weak, not trembling. The kind of old man who reached that age because he survived everything that tried to stop him. "Not enjoying our company?"
Everything slowed down.
Haru knew fear had degrees. He understood that in theory, had felt it before in other situations. But there was something specific about the way this fear arrived: from zero to one hundred, with no step in between, no warning, no chance to prepare.
Just: there was no fear.
And then: there was.
His eyes slowly turned toward the exit.
The room’s lights, which weren’t many, only the crack in the ceiling, turned blue.
Not gradually. Instantly. As if someone had changed the nature of the light instead of the light itself.
Then, through the crack, he saw the sky outside change as well.
The entire academy.
...
The dome descended over the buildings like a mist that was almost invisible, dark blue, dense enough to see but not dense enough to be a wall. Enveloping everything.
Genius had arrived at the main gate at exactly the wrong moment, or the right one, depending on your point of view.
He saw the dome forming, recognized the mechanism before fully understanding it. He crossed through before it completely closed.
And the exact moment he crossed the perimeter, he felt that leaving through the same route was no longer an option.
He stood in the middle of the courtyard, watching the entire academy change color.
"Alright, I got here early, right when it started." He thought.
In the cafeteria’s service wing, Kira was washing dishes.
Besides the duty she’d been assigned—cafeteria assistant... there were still only a few students having dinner.
She washed with a steady rhythm, hot water, the smell of detergent that had long since stopped bothering her.
The cafeteria lights changed.
Kira stopped.
Not by choice, her body stopped on its own, beastskin instinct. Every beastskin in the academy felt the same thing at that exact second.
A full-body shiver, not from cold, from recognition.
"Something ancient."
She left the cafeteria service wing and stepped into the dining hall itself.
She stopped...
A spirit was there.
Too large, almost as large as the cafeteria itself. A belly that seemed to have its own gravity, armor, a stained apron that should have been white but had the color of something that had gone through too many wars, an axe as thick as a tree trunk resting on his shoulder with the casualness of a light object.
He stood at the cafeteria entrance and looked, not specifically at Kira, but at the entire room, with the expression of someone returning to a place after a very long time and finding everything changed.
A voice came from inside the helmet.
"Fi fai fait..." The voice came out louder and deeper than expected. "Who took my food away? Eldrath is hungry now. With the flesh of invaders I’ll make him proud, for the war has taken what the harvest found."
Absolute silence filled the cafeteria.
It lasted two seconds, then whispers:
"That’s the fat knight!?"
"He wasn’t supposed to be that huge..."
"The book said he was fat, but not like that..."
"Someone said he was a cook, they didn’t say he was..."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up..."
Seline was in the south courtyard when the dome descended.
She saw the veil spreading, and with it, spirits emerging from every corner of the academy like vapor deciding to take shape. Walls releasing presences that had been walls for so long that the stone had learned their forms.
"I know this veil... with it, anyone can see any spirit regardless of strength." She thought, calculating. "That equalizes those who can perceive them and those who can’t."
"The academy is being fair with this test... or it’s being cruel. Probably both."
A dragon flew overhead.
Not fast, with that specific speed of something enormous that didn’t need to hurry because its size was already enough of a message. Wings that moved the air before they appeared visually. A shadow that arrived before the body.
Seline looked up.
"Look at the size of that dragon!!?"
On the other side of the courtyard, Armand saw the same thing from a different angle.
The dragon landed on the library roof, its form changing as it landed, scales retracting, structure compacting until it became something that looked human but not completely. Half-draconic by nature, human by choice.
It stood on the roof like a monument.
Armand watched for a second.
"This is going to be more interesting than I thought."
...
The head janitor looked out the window.
He watched the academy turn blue.
He saw a shadow pass across the sky.
He turned off the lights in his wing. Went to sleep.
No spirit entered that wing. Maybe something old was still protecting it... Or maybe spirits had common sense too.
...
Golden was at the window when the first groups arrived.
They didn’t knock, they shoved the door open and came in, six, seven, eight... many of the same people who had tried to negotiate their way onto his team just hours earlier and had been turned away with different shades of indifference.
Now they wore different expressions.
"That thing..."
"Did you see the..."
"The dragon on the..."
"So now you need a team, right, Mr. Golden?" one of them finally managed to say.
Golden never took his eyes off the window.
On the library roof, the dragon’s demi-form stood motionless, watching the entire academy with the calm of something that hadn’t been in a hurry since before any of them had been born.
"We’re forming a team." Golden said.
A surprised silence.
"But... you didn’t want one this morning..."
"Fuck that, did you see the size of that dragon?" Golden said, without turning around, without changing his tone. "We’re going to kill a dragon that size..."
"But the plan was the weaker spirits..."
"Fuck that." He repeated, and this time there was something different in his voice, that specific vibration of a decision already made. "Anyone who wants to stay with me is going to kill a dragon."
He jumped out the window, slid down the wall until he landed, then shot off in a burst of lightning, leaving a massive trail of golden electricity behind him.
From where he stood, Genius watched a crowd rush across the courtyard screaming toward the dragon on the library.
"...Interesting." He said to the air.
The hand on Haru’s shoulder didn’t have normal fingers.
He noticed that once he was finally able to process information again. It felt like a hand. It had the temperature of a hand. But the weight was distributed just slightly wrong. More like the impression of a hand than an actual hand.
He turned slowly.
An old man.
Not frightening in an obvious way, not grotesque, not twisted, not the kind of thing horror movies would use. Just old. Very old. The kind of old that visibly carries the weight of time, that bears history in his posture before he even opens his mouth.
"The Hall of the Dead." Haru thought. "Of course someone was here."
The old man looked at him without attacking. Without threatening. With the patience of something that had waited for a very long time and had learned that another moment made no difference.
"You stayed here all day." He said. An observation, not an accusation.
"I did." Haru confirmed.
"Reading."
"Reading."
The old man remained silent for a moment.
"What did you read?"
Haru thought about the answer for two seconds.
"About what you’re all still trying to finish." He said.
The old man became completely still.
"This boy..." He thought. The thought reached Haru like an echo, not direct words, like standing near a radio and picking up a frequency you weren’t looking for. "...came prepared."
The entire academy was blue outside.
The test had begun.
And Haru was in the oldest room in Eldrath, with perhaps the quietest spirit of them all, having the conversation no other student was having, because no one else had spent the entire day here.
Vorath materialized in Haru’s hand, not summoned, simply appearing, as though the old man’s presence had awakened something sleeping inside his inventory.
The old man looked at the sword.
Haru gripped the hilt.
Not in an attacking stance. Just holding it.
"I didn’t come here to defeat you." He said.
The old man didn’t answer.
"But if I have to..." Haru looked him in the eyes, "...I know how to do that too."
The core in the old man’s chest pulsed once, powerfully, dark blue matching the light flooding the entire academy.
Then the old man smiled.
Not happily.
In recognition.
Haru struck.
Fast, not out of anger, not out of desperation. Technical. The strike he had spent hours calculating while reading Vandris, while thinking of the Knights as people carrying unresolved burdens.
The old man vanished on impact.
Leaving behind a core.
Haru picked it up.
Swallowed it.
He felt, not pain, not immediate power, but the weight of a memory that wasn’t his arriving all at once, a fragment of a life that had lasted longer than it ever should have and was now searching for somewhere to rest.
A hundred voices became a hundred and something for a moment.
Then they balanced out.
"This is going to work." He thought with that specific clarity.
"This is my greatest scam."
More spirits began appearing in that room... living up to its name, after all. From what Haru had learned, it had once been an ossuary back in Eldrath’s time.
"I wanted to go to the cafeteria... but it seems I’ll be fed right here."
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