Matt had once told him he should join a club. Any club. The truth was, just keeping up with the homework and assignments was already killing him, never mind the looming midterms. Add the Black Blade’s gift for wrecking his sleep schedule, and the idea of “extracurriculars” felt like a bad joke.
Good thing he could summon the Blade now without even thinking. Like breathing. Like blinking. Like cursing under his breath — a skill set with exactly zero real-world use. Not that it was helpful. The thing still drained him like a leech on caffeine. But at least he no longer passed out for twelve hours after every summoning. Progress. Supposedly.
Today, though, it felt like none of it mattered. Like everything had been reset to zero. He lay sprawled across his bed like a houseplant someone had forgotten to water. When Matt leaned over the top bunk, what greeted him was Solan’s vacant face, eyes half-lidded and soul clearly on sick leave.
"Hey," Matt said, thwacking the bed frame with a broom handle. "If you’re dying of the flu, give me a heads-up, man. I’ve got IMAX tickets with Luna tomorrow. Interstellar . Don’t you dare infect me."
Normally, Solan would’ve kicked the bedframe back by now. Today, he just blinked—slowly—eyes fixed on the mold stain above like it held the key to all cosmic mysteries.
He hadn’t even gone to Disaster Response Theory —his only 8AM class, the one he kept attending just in case a certain someone showed up.
Matt went still. Not his usual kind of pause—this one felt heavier. Like maybe even he could tell something was off.
It started yesterday. Dinnertime. Solan had been walking past the glass hallway outside the dining hall when he saw Clara Vale. And someone else. A guy. Tall. Too tall. With silver hair that caught the sunset like burnished thread.
And it looked good on him. Solan hated how good it looked. If that man was Sephiroth, then Solan was infantry. Except he wasn’t Cloud. Just someone meant to fill the space around him.
They were standing beneath the ginkgo trees, framed like some accidental painting. The dude reached out and plucked a leaf from Clara’s hair with practiced ease. Not flirtatious. Not performative. Just... familiar.
Solan hadn’t meant to watch. His eyes just happened to catch the moment—Clara laughing, head tilted back, all sunlight and crinkled eyes. Then the guy said something. Touched her back. She laughed harder. He stood still for maybe a second. Maybe less. But it was enough for something to snap—softly, like a twig underfoot. The kind of pain you could ignore, if you weren’t the kind of idiot who felt things. Which, unfortunately, he was.
There was something about their ease—about the way they understood each other without words. Like history. Like a shared language. It made him feel shut out, like he’d walked in halfway through a song everyone else knew by heart.
When he turned and walked away, he could’ve sworn he stepped on something sharp. Invisible, but real enough to bruise.
Now Matt had had enough. He slapped a glossy pass against the edge of Solan’s bed. “Global Ecological Variance field trip, remember?” he said. “The Effigies exhibit’s open today. You don’t get up now, I’m dragging your corpse there myself.”
Solan stared at the gold-foil ticket. New Elysion Underground Archive – Special Access. Outside, a crow screamed—ragged and sudden. Like some omen that had shown up too early. He sat up slowly. The Black Blade flickered into his palm and vanished again, silent and sharp.
This time, he didn’t feel tired. He felt something else. Something thinner. Tighter. Worse.
The northern end of campus sat slightly elevated—just enough to catch the light differently, just enough to feel like it stood apart. The Hall of Living Memory was built here, perched like a crown above the slope. Beneath it ran the New Elysion Underground Archive—sealed, hidden, or maybe just ignored.
Technically, the Hall belonged to the Academy. But on most days, it played the role of a public museum. Residents came. Tourists wandered. It was all allowed, as long as no one asked too many questions.
The plaza out front followed a strict classical aesthetic: rows of white stone columns in perfect symmetry, flanked by statues holding torches of varying styles—each one frozen mid-gesture, as if rehearsing for a ceremony that never arrived.
The stone tiles were laid with surgical precision. Too clean. Too straight. Like something from an art textbook—an architectural rendering drawn by someone with no appetite for error. Solan found it unsettling. The way his footsteps echoed here made him feel like he didn’t belong.
Off to the left, a path broke away from the plaza, curving toward the edge of the northern ridge. That’s where the iron gate stood—black wrought-iron, sunken into the rock face like a scar. There were no signs. No lights. Only a small brass nameplate, tarnished and half-erased, as if time itself had been told to keep its mouth shut.
Beyond the gate, something loomed in the distance. A shape, all hard lines and sharp angles—part fortress, part castle. Towering spires rose into the pale sky, but the light did nothing to reveal them. If anything, it made the silhouette seem flatter. Colder. Less real. Like the shadow of a place that shouldn’t be remembered.
Solan Elric inched along with the rest of the student group, a slow-moving knot of bodies pressed into a narrow passage that led down—beneath the surface, beneath the school, beneath the lie of sunlight. Security checkpoints loomed ahead like some ancient line-up of torture devices.
It had started above. They’d entered through the Hall of Living Memory—its polished floors and marble silence echoing with curated reverence. A few statues. A few glass cases. Names carved into clean white walls like they meant something permanent. Most students had barely looked up. The real interest lay below.
Now the floor sloped underfoot. The walls narrowed. What began as a museum had turned into something else. Older. Quieter. Less inclined to explain itself.
He passed under a reinforced archway. The air shifted—cooler, drier. Like a breath held too long. Somewhere behind the walls, you could almost hear the hum of containment fields.
Security checkpoints loomed ahead like some ancient line-up of torture devices.
“All electronic devices.” The guards repeated it mechanically, their bulletproof vests crinkling with movement. The metal detector glowed an uneasy blue—too cold to feel safe.
Solan handed over his phone, eyes flicking to the guard’s gloves—where the outline of a callus, thick and ridged like old bark, peeked from under the seam. A trigger blister .
“Unusual material scan.” A second voice. Female. One of the guards leaned in, facemask filtering her breath into silence. The scanner in her hand whined as it passed over his jacket pocket—where the summoning sigil of the Black Blade lay dormant.
The device shrieked. Solan’s blood ran cold. “Belt buckle,” the woman said flatly, prodding the metal at his waist. She didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. Already moving on.
At last, the final hydraulic door hissed open—releasing a breath of stale, metallic wind. Rust. Age. Something older than either.
The air was wrong here. No matter how loudly the ventilation roared overhead, it still felt used . Like something had died and been boiled clean, again and again.
“Welcome to sublevel E-B3.” The voice sliced the dark like a scalpel.
Their guide stood under the emergency lighting—pale white against the deep navy of her uniform. The Academy’s insignia on her breast glinted like a cold tooth. She looked like she belonged to a different decade. Or a war.
“You’re now standing on what used to be the primary quarantine zone during the 1967 lockdown.” Her heels struck the metal floor with surgical rhythm. Each step echoed like a nail in wood.
“Do not touch any surfaces stained dark red. That’s the chemical residue of blood and decontaminant. The reaction never fully faded.”
Solan’s fingertips stung suddenly.
He looked down. His shadow twisted across the blast-glass flooring, warping under the emergency lights—
Something beneath the floor, deep beneath the layered alloy, was watching. He didn’t know how. But he knew .
The second lighting tier blinked on. And the exhibit fell into an awful hush.
Solan’s breath caught. Not from fear. From something older. An ancestral, instinctual thing that rattled in the spine.
The creature in the display wasn’t standing. It had been positioned . Curated like cruelty in motion.
Its bones didn’t follow human logic. The joints were misaligned, bent inward as if folding toward something unseen. The ribcage doubled in layers, cross-woven like a cage for a heart too dangerous to live loose. One vertebra protruded beyond the spinal end—like a bayonet. The shoulder blades curled backward into something that might have been wings—once.
The exposed bone shimmered faintly. Metal. Or metal-turned-flesh. Or something that refused to pick a side. Its neck bent backward at a perfect, rigid 75-degree angle. The kind that could kill a man—or freeze one in place.
It was pinned there—literally. Seven tungsten bolts driven through critical motor nerve clusters, anchoring it to the internal frame behind the bulletproof glass.
Not display. Execution.
And then Solan saw the chest. Shattered. Split open like a blown flower made of steel. The ribs flared outward in symmetrical violence, each shard angled back as if something had tried to burst free and never made it.
At the center: a glistening, half-translucent mass, cloaked in membrane that pulsed slightly in the breeze of the air systems like jellyfish skin. Like something still deciding whether to keep breathing. It gleamed with a sick, pearlescent light.
“Effigies-Z-α3,” the guide’s voice snapped in beside him. Too loud. Too close. “Was discovered kneeling. We restructured the posture for clarity.”
Her fingernail tapped the glass with a bright, hollow tick . “Audiences prefer monsters that stand on two legs.”
No one really knew what they were. Each one looked different—like evolution had taken a hundred wrong turns on purpose. No two matched. No patterns. No rules. Just... forms. They didn’t reproduce. Didn’t grow. Didn’t rot. They just sat there, sealed behind reinforced glass or locked in underground vaults, moving maybe once every few weeks—if that.
Sometimes they turned toward people. Sometimes they stopped moving altogether when someone entered the room. No reason. No explanation. Just a flicker of attention—wrong and silent and unmistakable. That was the part that messed with people the most. Not the bodies. The noticing.
The official response? Quarantine. Observation. Zero contact. No one was dumb enough to treat them like relics. Or gods. Or machines. They weren’t any of those things. They just were. And that was the scariest part.
Behind him, someone laughed—too loud for the air in this place.
A small group of students had gathered near the front of the glass, huddling under the emergency lights. One girl held up her phone, angling it for a wide shot. “Okay—Effigy in the back, now everyone look terrified,” she said, flashing a peace sign. The others posed immediately. One guy even mimed getting grabbed by the creature, leaning dramatically sideways.
Click. Flash. Laughter.
Solan didn’t turn around. He felt the moment split cleanly in two—like a seam opening between what this was and what it meant . Some things weren’t supposed to be backdrop.
The sound of their joking bounced off the metal walls and skittered down his spine. Not mocking. Not cruel. Just… belonging. The kind of shared ease that came naturally to people who hadn’t spent the morning feeling like exhibit glass might crack under their breath.
So he walked. No direction. No map. Just forward—deeper into the Archive’s underbelly. Away from the laughter. Away from himself.Then froze—mid-step, mid-thought, mid-breath—at a corner deep in the museum’s underbelly.
He backed up a half-pace without thinking, tilting his face instinctively away. Like a startled animal trying not to be noticed. Or cataloged. Or emotionally flattened.
Oh no. Oh no no no.
God? Buddha? Anyone upstairs still taking calls?
Please. Just... don’t let her turn around.
“You’re here too?” A familiar voice. Light, even. Too casual for the emotional landmine it just triggered.
Nope. Too late. Worst-case scenario achieved: he now had to stand in the same ten-square-foot patch of space as Clara Vale—and the guy towering a whole head above him beside her.
He felt his soul start to levitate. Just quietly leave his body through the top of his skull. “Oh, hey ! Uh... yeah. Matt shoved a ticket at me.” The excuse stumbled out like homework chewed by a drunk rodent. He wanted to punch himself mid-sentence.
Clara’s companion turned slightly, narrowing his eyes. Solan finally registered his face—and regretted it immediately. It wasn’t handsome in the heartthrob sense. It was blade-sharp. Presence like a drawn weapon. Shoulders built to survive traffic accidents. Posture upright enough to qualify as architectural reinforcement. Eyes that didn’t look at people so much as through them—like scanning for structural faults.
Solan had no idea how many gym hours that took. He didn’t want to know. He already needed to lie down. “Friend of yours?” Solan heard himself say. The words felt like they were coming from somewhere very far away.
“Damien Vale,” the guy said. Calm. Precise. “Her brother.”
Solan’s brain just... shut off. Hand extended before he could stop it. Damien shook it—dry palm, warm skin, perfect grip. Not too soft to feel dismissive. Not too hard to feel hostile. Just right. The kind of handshake that said I know exactly how much pressure this interaction requires .
Most people, meeting that kind of gaze—steady, neutral, dissecting—would probably feel intimidated. Solan, meanwhile, had one single thought pinging around his skull: If I drop to one knee and kiss the back of his hand, would that read as sincere respect? Or just public breakdown?