Chapter 41: The Arrival
The morning at Pathfinder Academy proceeded as mornings at Pathfinder Academy proceeded.
Roland Hayes walked the western corridor with a cup of tea and a folder of enrollment documentation. Around him were students crossing the main courtyard in clusters of familiarity, older years reconnecting with the ease of people who had survived something together and were glad to see each other again.
The transport convoys had been arriving since dawn. Roland had processed four of them already: registration at the East Gate, beast verification, dormitory assignment, the forms that needed the forms that came before them.
Standard procedure.
The final convoy was expected shortly, which meant perhaps another two hours of processing before he could sit down.
He stepped into the open courtyard and tilted his face toward the morning light.
"Professor Hayes." A first-year with a nervous expression and a small owl on her shoulder was holding a stack of documents toward him. "Is it true the Greenleaf convoy had a notable candidate?"
"All convoys have notable candidates," Roland said, without looking at the documents she was holding. "That’s the point of the examination."
She did not appear satisfied with this answer but Roland did not push because he had a bad feeling about it. He nodded at her and continued walking. Then a student near the observation platform pointed upward.
"Professor."
Roland stopped.
He looked.
The final convoy was visible above the Academy plateau, descending in the natural arc of wyverns completing a long flight. He watched it for a moment and noted the approach angle. "They’re early," he said.
Then the clouds above the convoy lit up.
It spread through the clouds in three seconds. Thousands of bolts crawled through the sky in terrifying patterns that illuminated the sky in colors of white, blue, and gold. Yet somehow the multiple convoys and wyverns were still moving through the sea of bolts.
The pressure arrived a moment later, rolling down like a wave! The beasts on the Academy grounds felt it before anyone else.
A first-year’s rabbit contract retreated immediately. Another student’s thunder hawk pressed flat against the training field dirt. Several contracted beasts across the main courtyard simply ceased being present, pulled back by their Tamers or retreating on their own.
The professors who had been discussing schedules looked at each other.
"What is that?" one of them said.
Nobody answered.
Roland was already moving. "Everyone away from the open fields," he said, loud enough to carry across the courtyard. "Move toward the buildings. Now! All of you, move!"
Students moved without asking why while Professors began directing people toward the covered structures along the courtyard’s edge. Several senior Beast Tamers among the faculty had already summoned their beasts and were moving toward the fields to establish defensive positions.
Roland stood at the edge of the covered walkway and watched the convoy. It was still there. The wyverns were still flying. The carriages were still intact. For some reason none of the bolts were hitting them which was a big relief to him.
"Just a bit closer. And then we can–"
Then the shockwave arrived.
The sound reached them a full second after the visible effect. A concussive wave that crossed the sky, blowing through the sea of bolts and making some of them scattered out. Roland’s eyes widened when he saw the clouds parting with the sea of lightning on the edge and the convoy in the middle of it.
He felt it in his chest before his ears registered it. On the Academy grounds, students stumbled while Professors already braced themselves.
When he looked up again, the lightning was gone.
The sky above the convoy was simply sky.
And the convoy was no longer flying.
"No," Roland said.
The carriages were descending like it was plummeting. He could see the wyverns weren’t moving and then he realized they had been knocked out by the blast. The emergency alarms activated from the Academy’s observation tower at the same moment he reached for his own beast.
"Get the aerial units up," he said to the professor beside him. "All of them. Now."
Flying beasts launched from the Academy grounds in a wave, professors and senior students directing them upward to intercept.
But it was too late.
The first carriage hit the corner of the eastern enrollment tower before tearing through the administration building and then crashing into the fields before them. But if that wasn’t enough, the others came rushing down in a similar fashion.
One after another.
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
The ground shakes before a massive dust cloud rises over the Academy.
Silence.
The kind of silence that a loud thing left behind.
Roland stood in the covered walkway and looked at what the Academy grounds had become: two towers missing structural sections, an administrative building with no roof, training fields that had been rearranged by a significant number of heavy objects arriving at speed. Dust everywhere.
Dust still moving.
Nobody spoke.
Then someone nearby whispered. "Are they alive?"
Roland looked at the dust cloud.
A shape appeared in the dust. Everyone blinked when they saw it moving up from the ground. And then another shape which was slightly tower and moving differently. Then a third, with something on its head.
The crowd at the Academy’s edge held its collective breath in the specific way crowds held breath when they were waiting to find out which direction the next thirty seconds were going to go.
Arthur Cornwall walked out of the dust cloud. He was covered in dust with his blond hair spread out wildly with patches of dust. Still supporting Mithra, who looks like she’s questioning every life decision that led to this moment.
Behind them...
Vedas climbs out coughing.
Melo is still firmly attached to his head.
Neither seems willing to let go.
Arthur looks around to see half a tower was missing. He looked right. There wasn’t supposed to be a hole in that building. Then he looked down and see they were standing inside a crater.
"I don’t think this is where we’re supposed to check in," he said.
Mithra closed her eyes. "Please stop talking."
Complete silence spread from the area immediately around them outward through the gathered crowd, the silence of a large number of people processing the same image at the same time.
Then students began climbing out of the other carriages. One after another, shaken and dusty but present. Some of them came out fast, climbing over the broken edges of the doors with the urgency of people who needed to confirm they were no longer falling.
Some came out slowly, sitting at the edge and not moving for a moment because their legs had not yet decided to work.
One student got up before laying on the grass and covering his face as he kept repeating: "Thank god, I’m alive. Thank god, I’m alive."
The girl who had kept her eyes closed came out and immediately found the person nearest to her and grabbed their arm without asking.
The person did not pull away.
They stood there holding on to each other in the dust with the simple relief of two people who had been very frightened and were glad to have someone to hold onto. A student quietly helped another put their glasses back on. A boy checking whether his contracted beast is breathing before checking himself.
A handler who had been on the convoy sat with his back against the ruined carriage and his wyvern’s head resting in his lap, one hand gently stroking the creature’s neck after it finally woke up.
His fingers were still shaking.
Another handler walked over. "...Is everyone alive?"
The first handler slowly nodded. "...Some injuries."
"...But we’re alive." He looked toward Arthur. "If not for that boy..." His voice was quiet. "...None of us would’ve survived."
Silence.
Several nearby professors immediately turned.
One frowned. "...What?"
The handler pointed toward Arthur.
"He saw the pattern."
"He organized the evacuation."
"He ordered everyone into the middle carriages."
"He even had that Goblin Commander take control of the wyverns."
Another handler nodded. "If he hadn’t..." He looked back at the destroyed outer carriages. "...Those lightning bolts would’ve killed every one of us."
The professors stared at Arthur.
One of the Silver-Rank Beast Tamers narrowed his eyes.
"...You’re telling me..."
"He wasn’t frozen by that pressure?"
Another slowly shook his head.
"...Not only did he stay calm..."
"...He came up with a plan?"
A third professor looked toward the ruined convoy.
"...And saved an entire transport formation."
For a brief moment...
Nobody looked at Arthur as a first-year anymore.
Everyone looked shaken.
Silence settled over the courtyard once more.
Nobody spoke.
Not after hearing what the handlers had said.
The Academy’s gaze slowly drifted back toward Arthur.
A first-year quietly whispered, "...That’s him?"
Another swallowed. "...The one who made professor Roland run away?"
A senior student frowned. "...Impossible."
One of the professors spoke almost absentmindedly. "...He’s only eighteen."
No one argued.
Because standing in the middle of the crater... The boy certainly didn’t feel like just another first-year.
One of the students from Arthur’s carriage rubbed his head before looking around blankly. His eyes found Arthur before blinking and then his eyes widened. "Wait," he said.
The student beside him followed his gaze. "What?"
The first student pointed at Arthur. "That’s him."
Several heads turned simultaneously.
"That’s Arthur Cornwall," someone said, from toward the back.
A second student’s eyes widened. "The partner of the Goblin Commander."
"The one whose Goblin defeated Leon’s Golden Dragon."
"The one who evolved his beast twice."
"On the first day."
A third student put both hands on his face. "We were on the same convoy as him," the student said.
His companion stared. "What?"
"The entire trip. The rumors we were talking about... Arthur Cornwall this, Arthur Cornwall that. He was sitting ten feet away."
The silence following this had a different quality than the previous silence. It was the silence of a crowd experiencing a shared realization that was too large to be processed individually.
"We were talking about him," someone said.
"To him," another corrected.
"Well, near him."
"He was right there."
A student looked at Arthur. "Did you hear us?"
Arthur looked at him with a raised brow. "No? But I don’t mind hearing them now or later."
Nobody answered that question immediately.
The realization continued spreading through the survivors and then through the crowd that had gathered at the Academy’s edge. What spread was not just the identity of Arthur Cornwall but recognition of everything that name is now attached to.
One by one, more heads turned toward Arthur.
Dozens.
Then hundreds.
The entire Academy was looking at him now.
Arthur looked back at all of them.
"Did I miss something?" he said.
Roland stood at the edge of the covered walkway. He looked at the two towers with missing sections.
At the administrative building with no roof.
At the training fields that now had a been destroyed,
At the dust still moving across the courtyard.
At the students sitting in the dirt.
At Arthur Cornwall, standing in the middle of all of it, covered in dust, looking at the crowd with the polite attention of someone waiting to be told where to check in. Twenty-three years.
Thousands of students.
Hundreds of arrivals.
Never...
Not once...
Had someone enrolled by crashing through two Academy buildings.
He lets out a long sigh. "...Of course it’s him."
...
On a balcony above the main courtyard, a figure stood with both hands resting on the railing, watching the scene below with the patient attention of someone who had been watching things for a long time and had developed a sense for which things were worth watching.
The balcony was high enough that the dust from the crash had not reached it. The figure had watched the lightning in the sky and watched the convoy fall and watched the dust settle and watched a young man with messy hair walk out of it and look around at the destruction he had somehow survived and make a comment that was clearly inadequate to the situation.
A small smile appeared.
"Interesting," the figure said, to no one.
Arthur didn’t just arrive at the Academy.
He came crashing through it.
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