No, Solan Elric had something worse. He could fall asleep anywhere .
Passing out in the library? Which, okay. Nothing new. But Solan had managed to do it standing up, in the middle of the physics aisle, holding a copy of College Physics like it was a lullaby. And what made it weirder? His head kept nodding. Like he was still solving problems. Like the sleep was just... a deeper form of thinking.
Matt found him once at a corner desk on the second floor of the Aleksei and Elouan Library, hunched over a copy of Foundations of Draconic Factor. The book lay open, pages barely touched. Solan was trying. Emphasis on trying . Head down, left hand over his eyes, right hand still robotically copying notes from the board. The notes? Just a long stretch of dots.
Which, by itself, wasn’t that weird. What was weird was that he’d fallen asleep. In the main wing . Everyone knew you didn’t nap in the Aleksei and Elouan unless you had a death wish or tenure. It was basically sacred ground—complete with two life-sized bronze statues of the Academy founders, Aleksei Mirov and Elouan Grasse, downstairs, both permanently mid-glower. Students touched their shoes for luck before midterms.
Some Scratchlist upperclassman once gave Elouan sunglasses during finals week. Campus laughed. The photo hit group chats within minutes. By morning, he was off the list. Not even injured. Just quietly, efficiently dethroned by an unlisted Institutionalist—one of those unnervingly clean types who still quoted the founder’s code and believed in things like decorum and duty .
There was a renovated east wing now, with soft lights and recliner chairs and a little corner that smelled like chamomile. That was the designated nap zone. But Solan? Of course not. He’d picked the coldest desk in the quietest aisle like he was trying to offend the ghosts of academia directly.
Eventually Matt stopped reacting. Just changed his contact name for Solan to “God of Sleep.”
They had a conversation once—well, more like Matt interrogated him—where Solan said he was taking Stabilin.
“Regularly?” Matt pressed.
“Yeah,” Solan said, after a pause that was just a beat too long.
Matt practically clapped. “Maybe you’re overusing your Kamuy and under-dosing. Your neurons are deep-frying themselves.”
Solan shrugged. “I’m out for this month.”
That did it. Matt lost his mind. He spent the next hour tearing through his wardrobe, muttering to himself, before finally unzipping the lining of an old coat and pulling out a single packet of oral Stabilin. He held it up like a prize.
“Got this off some sketchy guy,” he said. “Works. I think.”
He wasn’t a Kamuy-bearer. Most people awakened between twelve and eighteen—if it was going to happen, it usually did by then. He used to wonder if he’d missed something. Now he figured the Kamuy probably just looked him over and said: “Nah. Too chaotic already.” But hey, Stabilin was hard to come by. And Matt was the type to stock up on things “just in case.” Solan took it. Promptly spent the night vomiting into a toilet. Matt deleted the seller’s number right after. And maybe felt a tiny bit guilty.
But today… today crossed a line . Matt was walking past the dorm courtyard when he saw a crowd forming around a boulder. Some students were filming. Others were grunting, bent over like they were trying to wrench a tree root out of concrete. He pushed through to see what was going on. Then sighed so hard it could’ve killed a plant.
It was Solan Elric’s damn sword. Again. The third time this week. The Black Blade—infamous, cursed, inconvenient as hell—was lodged into a rock. Deeply. At an angle. Like some bootleg campus version of King Arthur: Budget Cut Edition .
One freshman had gone completely red in the face, both hands gripping the hilt. “I can feel it calling to me,” he gasped. “It’s choosing me!”
Another chimed in: “I think it’s whispering. It wants something...”
Matt pinched the bridge of his nose. “It wants you to book a psych consult,” he muttered. Then turned and bolted for the main building.
At the Academy, you didn’t just whip out your Kamuy for fun. There were two reasons for that. First, the social one: if your power was that flashy, people expected you to duel and climb the Scratchlist. Otherwise you just looked like a poser. Second, the practical one: campus security would be on you in minutes. Most of them were retired military, and most carried firarms. Honestly, He liked it that way. Growing up in New Jersey, he’d seen worse. A lane change could escalate into WrestleMania on asphalt.
He found Solan slumped at the far end of the hallway, half-fused with the wall next to the water cooler. A bottle of unopened cold brew rested by his foot. An ethics textbook sat open beside him: The Border Between Kamuy and Moral Law.
Solan blinked awake like he’d rebooted from sleep mode. First words out of his mouth: “Who are you?”
Matt grabbed his collar and shook him. “You lost your sword. Again. ”
Solan blinked, then gave a vague, guilty nod.
“Were you up all night practicing summoning again?”
“Mmm...” Solan raised his hand. Black glyphs glimmered faintly beneath the skin of his left forearm—like tattoos drawn in ink that wasn’t meant for daylight. “It’s... fully linked now. Comes when I call it…” He didn’t finish. Just tilted sideways and passed out cold.
Matt stared at his arm. The glyph looked like it was etched into him. Metallic. Alive. He stepped back instinctively. Last time Solan summoned the blade in his sleep, he nearly took out the dorm’s west wall.
And now? The damn sword was stuck in a rock like it was trying to split the continent. Matt stared at his unconscious roommate, then toward the window.
“One day,” he muttered, “that thing’s gonna cut the Earth in half. And I’ll still be the guy explaining to campus security that you ‘just forgot where you put it.’”