Chapter 23: The Economics of Violence
The obstacle trial began at the fourth-hour alarm, before any conscript had eaten.
Eshiren stood at the base of the Vertical Spire and looked up. The structure climbed nine hundred feet through the centre of the second ring, a brutal column of volcanic stone studded with narrow ledges, recessed handholds, and sections of sheer, polished basalt where no grip existed at all. Magnetic anchor-points dotted the column at irregular intervals, glowing a faint violet where they drew power from the ring’s mana conduits. Each anchor held a thin, retractable cord that would catch a falling climber and slam them into the wall at bone-bruising velocity.
The safety system was designed to prevent death. It did nothing about broken fingers, dislocated shoulders, or the systematic humiliation of dangling from a cord while three hundred conscripts watched from the staging platform below.
Instructor Ghorzhen paced the base of the Spire, a thick-necked Dragon with iron-grey scales and a voice that carried the permanent rasp of someone who had spent decades breathing volcanic particulates. He held a slate tablet in one clawed hand. The other hand rested on the hilt of a disciplinary baton strapped to his thigh.
"Thirty-two minutes," Ghorzhen barked. "Reach the summit platform before the bell. Fail, and you run the trial again tomorrow with half rations. Fail three times in a term, and your record receives a black mark." His reptilian gaze swept the assembled conscripts. "Three black marks. Expulsion. You know what expulsion means for lesser nobles."
He did not elaborate. The word expulsion carried its own gravity in the lower rings. For a conscript of minor house standing, it meant the Bone-Gardens. Fertiliser. A useful death, if not a dignified one.
Eshiren flexed his hands. The suppression collar hummed against his throat, siphoning his ambient mana to a trickle. His muscles ached from insufficient sleep. He slept in three-hour intervals, his back wedged into a corner, rotating between four sleeping locations. The paranoia had not eased since crippling Tharok. If anything, it had intensified. The bounty remained active. Tharok’s crew had splintered into smaller, less predictable groups, each one hungry for the fifty tokens and the prestige of bringing down the conscript who had broken their leader’s knee.
Beside him, Saelis tore a strip of dried ration leather into three equal pieces. She chewed the first. Her dull silver scales caught the bioluminescent strips overhead, reflecting the green light as a faint, sickly shimmer. She spoke without moving her lips, pitching her voice below the ambient noise of three hundred restless bodies.
"Nine hostiles confirmed. Four are from Tharok’s old crew. The ones who didn’t run. Two from an unaffiliated gang on the eighth ring who smell a payday. Three I can’t place." She swallowed. "They’ll move during the climb. Gravity does half the work for them up there."
"I know."
"You can’t fight on a vertical surface with that collar draining you."
"I know."
Saelis paused, grinding the second piece of ration leather forcefully between her teeth. She said nothing else, which was her version of be careful distilled to its purest, most economical form.
The horn sounded.
Three hundred conscripts surged toward the Spire.
The first twenty feet were chaos. Bodies jammed together at the base, claws scraping stone, elbows driving into ribs and throats as the climbers fought for position on the lowest handholds. Eshiren went wide, skirting the main crush and finding a seam in the basalt where water erosion had cut shallow grooves into the surface. The grooves were barely deep enough for fingertips, but his Dragon physiology gave his grip the tensile strength of industrial cable. He climbed fast, pulling ahead of the crush within the first thirty seconds.
Forty feet. The grooves ended. Smooth basalt. He jumped sideways to the nearest anchor-point and used the magnetic housing as a foothold, launching upward to catch a recessed handhold carved into the stone. His left shoulder joint still carried a deep ache from Krazmakor’s ice-mana penetration weeks ago. It protested, but it held.
Seventy feet. The crowd thinned. Faster climbers had separated from the pack, ascending in loose columns along their preferred routes. Eshiren mapped them by their thermal signatures, tracking the orange-red shapes against the cooler stone. Most ignored him. Their focus was on the clock, on the thirty-two minutes ticking away in their heads.
Nine of them were not focused on the clock.
He spotted the first saboteur at the eighty-foot mark. A broad-shouldered conscript with obsidian horn-ridges. He was one of the group that had been watching him in the mess hall three weeks ago, climbing parallel to Eshiren on the left, maintaining an identical altitude. Too deliberate. A natural climber would vary speed based on the available holds. This one was matching pace, waiting for a narrowing in the route where their paths would converge.
Second saboteur. Right side, ten feet below. Amber scales. One of the unaffiliated pair from the eighth ring. Climbing slowly, conserving energy, positioned to cut off Eshiren’s retreat if he tried to descend.
Pincer formation. Horizontal squeeze on a vertical surface.
Eshiren adjusted his route. He angled upward and to the right, aiming for a section of the Spire where the handholds clustered more densely, sacrificing the direct path for one that gave him room to manoeuvre. The move cost him time. The thirty-two-minute bell was already six minutes gone.
One hundred and twenty feet. A ledge. Eighteen inches wide, running in a partial ring around the Spire’s circumference. Eshiren pulled himself onto it and crouched, catching his breath. His forearms burned. The collar’s constant drain made every muscle fibre work harder, pulling from caloric reserves he could not afford to spend.
Two shapes appeared on the ledge ahead of him.
They had been waiting. Pressed flat against the stone above the ledge, their thermal signatures masked by the residual heat radiating from the Spire’s volcanic core, invisible until they moved. A pair of stocky conscripts with matching ritual scars across their snouts. Tharok’s old crew. They blocked the ledge in both directions, their bodies filling the narrow path, leaving Eshiren with a wall behind him and a two-hundred-foot drop in front.
The larger of the two grinned. "Bad luck, Seven-Nine-One. Crowded up here."
Eshiren measured the gap between them. Three feet. Wide enough to pass if one of them moved. Neither would move.
From below and to the left, the sound of loose gravel. Saelis was climbing a parallel route, twelve feet away horizontally, her thin arms hauling her body upward with the grinding, tenacious efficiency of someone who had spent a lifetime compensating for inadequate strength with mechanical precision. She reached the same altitude as the ledge and paused, clinging to a recessed hold, her flat eyes scanning the situation in a single sweep.
She adjusted her pack.
The heavy canvas satchel, loaded with the mandatory climbing gear every conscript was required to carry, slipped from her shoulder and fell. It struck the ledge with a solid thud, bouncing off the stone and slamming into the legs of the larger proxy. His stance broke. One boot slid off the ledge’s edge, and for a half-second his weight shifted backward over the drop.
He grabbed the wall. Recovered. But the gap he created in recovering was enough.
Eshiren moved through it. Three strides on the ledge, then back onto the vertical face, fingers finding holds with the desperate accuracy of a boy who had spent fifteen years navigating the vertical architecture of Sector Four’s crumbling tenement blocks. The two proxies cursed behind him but did not follow. The clock was pressing them now, and chasing a target upward cost more energy than they could spare.
"Clumsy," Saelis called down to the proxy, her voice carrying the flat disinterest of someone apologising for a genuine accident. "The strap must be fraying."
Two hundred feet. Two hundred and fifty. The handholds grew sparser. The Spire’s surface shifted from rough basalt to a polished volcanic glass that rejected grip unless a climber channelled mana through their fingertips to create micro-adhesion. Eshiren’s suppressed output made each grip a gamble. Hold, slip, hold. The collar buzzed harder against his throat each time he drew on his diminished reserves.
Three hundred feet. Fourteen minutes remaining. He could see the summit platform above him, a flat disc of reinforced stone jutting from the Spire’s apex, ringed by a low wall where Instructor Ghorzhen’s assistant stood with a bell and a recording tablet.
He was going to make it.
The air-burst hit him from the right.
A sharp, localised concussion struck. Someone had channelled a compressed pulse of wind-mana and released it in a tight cone aimed at the section of wall where Eshiren’s right foot was braced. The pulse was tiny, barely enough force to ruffle hair at ground level, but at three hundred feet on a polished surface with minimal grip, it was a sledgehammer.
His right foot slipped. His left hand, already straining against the glass, lost adhesion. For a quarter-second he hung by three fingers of his right hand, his body swinging out over the void, the staging platform a distant geometric shape far below.
The fingers gave.
He fell.
The magnetic cord caught him at two hundred and sixty feet. The harness snapped taut around his torso, arresting the fall with a violent jerk that drove the breath from his lungs and wrenched his left shoulder hard enough to grind the joint in its socket. He slammed sideways into the Spire’s surface. His ribs took the impact. One cracked. A sharp, clean line of pain radiated outward from his left side and made his vision blur at the edges.
He hung there, dangling from the cord, spinning slowly in the updraft from the volcanic vents below.
Above him, a conscript with sand-coloured scales glanced down and then looked away, her expression studiously blank. The air-burst caster. She climbed on, unhurried, and crossed the summit platform with two minutes to spare.
Laughter drifted up from somewhere below. Scattered, performative, aimed at the mongrel swinging from a safety line like a broken marionette.
Eshiren pulled himself back to the wall. He climbed the remaining distance in twelve minutes, arriving at the summit platform forty-one seconds after the bell.
Ghorzhen did not look up from his tablet.
"Time?"
"Thirty-two minutes and forty-one seconds," the assistant confirmed.
"Failed." Ghorzhen scratched a mark onto his slate. "Conscript Seven-Nine-One, second ring. First black mark."
Eshiren’s cracked rib throbbed. He stood on the summit platform, breathing through his teeth to avoid expanding his ribcage more than necessary, and tasted blood where he had bitten the inside of his cheek during the fall.
"The air-burst," he said. His voice came out flat, controlled, stripped of the anger simmering behind it. "A student fired a concussive pulse at my position. That’s interference."
Ghorzhen’s stylus paused. His iron-grey eyes lifted from the tablet and settled on Eshiren with the ancient, glacial indifference of a man who had watched a thousand conscripts fail and had never once cared about the reason.
"Did you see who cast it?"
"No."
"Then it didn’t happen." The stylus resumed its scratching. "If you are too weak to maintain your grip against minor atmospheric disturbance, you deserve to fall. The Spire does not care about fairness. Neither does the Empire." He tapped the slate twice, finalising the record. "One black mark. Two more, and your designation is transferred to the Bone-Gardens. The Academy’s nutrient recycling division is always looking for raw material."
The words landed in Eshiren’s chest beside the cracked rib, cold and precise as a surgical instrument. Two more failures. Two more proxy attacks that he could not prove and the Academy would not investigate. The system was the weapon. Krazmakor did not need to touch him. He just needed the machinery of institutional indifference to grind Eshiren down until the boy’s body became worth more as compost than as a student.
Saelis reached the platform thirty seconds after him, inside the time limit. She walked past the assistant without making eye contact, collected her fallen pack from where a proxy had kicked it to the platform’s edge, and stopped beside Eshiren.
She gripped his arm to steady him as he stepped away from the registration point. Her fingers pressed against the cracked rib through his tunic, a brief, clinical touch that could have been mistaken for a casual grab.
Her hand lingered for half a second too long.
Eshiren glanced at her. Saelis was staring at the bruise spreading across his left side where the fabric had ridden up. The skin was already yellowing at the edges, the deep purple fading into green-brown at a rate that no suppressed conscript should have been capable of producing. Broken bones took days to show surface healing under normal Dragon physiology. His was showing it in minutes.
Her flat eyes moved from the bruise to his face. A question formed behind those eyes—sharp, clinical, dangerous—and died unasked. She released his arm.
"You need to eat," she said. "Your caloric deficit is showing."
The non-sequitur was deliberate. A deflection. The real observation had been recorded and filed away behind that calculating stare, and Eshiren understood with a cold certainty that Saelis would not forget what she had just seen.
They descended the Spire’s interior staircase in silence, two bruised shapes moving through the volcanic gloom, one of them carrying a question she had chosen not to ask and the other carrying the knowledge that his body was betraying secrets his mind could not afford to share.
The black mark burned on Ghorzhen’s tablet. One of three. Forty days left in the term.
Two more, and the Bone-Gardens would add a new ingredient to their soil.
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