It woke. And the resonance didn’t stay in that dorm room. It rolled outward—through the walls, across the city, over the ocean—until it brushed every instrument, every sensor, every Kamuy-bearer above the threshold.
Seven early-warning satellites over the Pacific registered a surge in Draconic Factor resonance. The alerts tripped so fast the sound stacked over itself. In one monitoring center, a shift tech spilled hot coffee down his uniform and didn’t even flinch. Every Kamuy-bearer whose Draconic Factor exceeded the critical threshold felt it. Not fear. Something deeper. Something that bypassed thought and went straight to the soul. Submission. Not to a person. To a presence.
The polished shoes made no sound in the hallway outside his dorm suite. He always walked like that—measured, effortless, like he owned the floor.**Felix Marr doubled over in the hallway outside his private dorm suite. It hit him like a twist in the stomach. Sudden. Wrong. His Draconic Factor flared out of rhythm—burning cold, like a skipped heartbeat across the whole nervous system. Sweat poured down his spine.
Every nerve screamed the same word: Retreat.
He stumbled to the bathroom, one hand over his mouth. The door clicked shut behind him. Then—vomiting. Hard. Violent. His knees hit the tile as his body purged something it couldn’t name. Bile. Cold sweat. Tears. He clung to the sink like it was the only thing anchoring him to the present. When he looked up, his reflection stared back. Bloodless. Hair askew. Eyes—wrong.
Something about his Kamuy, Temporal Memory Enhancement, was still spinning. It was a textbook cheat code: memorize a book an hour before the test, ace it, and forget it by dinner. It didn’t matter. He never had to remember anything. He’d already won.
But this time it didn’t forget. His memory didn’t know where to land. His memory kept looping—images crashing into each other. The simulation. The gun. A boy’s face—panicked, pathetic, shoving himself into the line of fire like it meant something. Faces blurred. Events crosswired. He blinked, and couldn’t remember which year it was. What floor he was on. For one sick second—he couldn’t remember his own name.
His lips moved before he meant them to. “...What the hell was that?”** **Behind him, the world continued like nothing had changed. ButFelix Marr knew something had. Something had seen him. And it hadn’t liked what it saw.
[The Celestial Society Restricted Zone]
A man stood in a silent training yard, long blade slung across his back. The air was still. But he stopped mid-step and turned toward the sky. The moon was thin and pale above him. The trees didn’t move. But the scabbard on his back was trembling.
[Elsewhere · Rooftop Balcony]
A boy in fine wool stood in the wind, holding a warm glass of wine. He looked like a statue carved from snow. Impeccable. Unmoved.
Above him, the sky was silent—too silent. Clouds curled like breath held in a glass jar, moonlight caught in their seams.
The cold didn’t touch him. It rarely did.
He turned his face slightly, as if offering it to the wind. Not for comfort. Just for proof that he could still feel it.
Somewhere far below—too far for sound, too far for light— something shifted.
Not violently. Not yet. But like a line in the world had just redrawn itself. Like a door, very old and very locked, had just begun to open. And the air rippled. Soft as silk being pulled.
Then— a heartbeat. Or something close enough to pretend.
It touched the bones behind his ribs. Didn’t hurt. Didn’t linger. Just… reminded.
He smiled faintly. As if recognizing an old song playing again after years of silence. As if someone, somewhere, had finally picked up the blade.
“So,” he said, quietly.
“It begins.”
Solan Elric was late to the first official event of the semester. The night before, he and the black blade had completed their first real “recall.” It moved like a living thing—turning fluid, shifting into black markings that coiled back into his left forearm, like some cold-blooded creature tucking itself into his bones.
Technically, the moment the blade re-entered his body, he lasted maybe two more minutes. Sleep just... took him. He couldn’t even remember if he pulled the blanket over himself. Just a dead drop into sleep that felt more like being… stored. No flashy effects. No divine light. Just a gravitational pull through the spine. As if something had finally accepted him. Or swallowed him.
When he opened his eyes, the room was already flooded with light. He blinked at the clock, then jolted upright. He was still in yesterday’s shirt. He jammed his feet into sneakers and was out the door before his head caught up to his body.
Outside, he checked his phone. A text from Matt: “Avoid the dining hall today. Something’s up. Half the floor got sick last night. School says it’s not the food. No one believes them.”
Solan frowned. He’d eaten that weird potato salad last night. The kind that left an aftertaste like old glue. And there was still that low thrum under his skin—where the black blade had returned. Not loud. Just there. Like a wire left plugged in. Coincidence, probably.
He kept walking. But the air felt... denser somehow. The kind that stuck to your clothes. Even the light looked different—too sharp where it landed. And his footsteps echoed like they didn’t belong to him.
By the time he reached the auditorium, the opening ceremony had been going for twenty minutes. That president woman—he could never remember her name. Buda… Budapest? She was up on stage, wearing a crimson suit, giving some rousing speech.
Solan slid into a back-row seat near the wall and tried to breathe like someone who’d been there the whole time. The part he caught—like all of them—opened with the sky splitting open.
Winter of ’66. Something massive crashed through the clouds and landed in the ocean. They gave it a name long enough to sound official—Draconic Primary Entity—then shortened it to the Dragon, like that somehow made it less horrifying.
It didn’t die. It just hung there. Leaking something into the air, the water, into people. They gave that leak a name too. The Draconic Factor. Like a label could make it safe. They always said the world didn’t change overnight. Sure it didn’t. It cracked. All at once. And no one’s stopped pretending since.
Then came the usual history dump. Soviet battlegroup. Alaska incursion. And then, in ’72—just as Stabilin started flooding the world—burned-out soldiers and the first Kamuy users carved out their own flagless city-state on the Malaspina coast. But the port stayed warm, and so did the rush: scientists, traders, and drifters from every corner of the globe poured in, chasing what was left of the miracle.
The factory went up first—patched together from old barracks and prefab steel, humming day and night. Then came the warehouses, the bars, the markets selling anything from bootleg stabilin vials to half-legal dragon bone powder. Languages bled together on the docks: Russian curses, clipped American drawl, Tokyo street slang, Norwegian sing-song. The flags on the ships didn’t matter—everyone here was after the same thing. And for a while, it felt like the end of the world had decided to park itself in one warm, crowded harbor.
New Elysion. A defection written in concrete. The U.S. called it a “temporary autonomous zone.” Solan rolled his eyes. He’d sat through this story too many times. The names changed depending on who told it. Sometimes it was a miracle. Sometimes it was a warning. This version sounded like a eulogy written by a PR firm.
Somewhere in the speech, the President mentioned the Dragon still being out there. He didn’t care. Wherever it was now, it wasn’t here. And that was enough. Right as the President hit “a refuge of free will,” Solan’s head thunked gently against the seat in front of him. The applause almost masked it.
“Ow.” He jerked upright, blinked once, twice. Tried to smooth out his face like someone who’d been listening. A few heads turned nearby, but no one really looked. He sat back, spine too straight, jaw tight, eyes fixed somewhere above the stage.
But inside, the haze was already rising again—slow, thick, like mist rolling in behind his eyes. A heaviness, not loud, not sharp. Just steady. Inevitable. It was the blade. That quiet, heavy thing now stitched into his bones—settling in. Testing the seams of his body. Like it was folding itself into the blueprint of who he was, and deciding where to rest. Finding its place.
When he got back to the dorm, the cold air was still spiraling across the floor like even the ventilation system had decided to keep its distance. Solan sat with his back against the bedframe, legs drawn in, hands resting loosely on his knees. He was staring at his left arm. The mark was still there. A black line just beneath the skin, elegant and strange.
Great. Step one toward being mysterious: grow your own haunted body art. He laid a hand over it. It felt cool. Smooth. Faintly electric—like a snake waiting for the right nerve to twitch. He didn’t know if that meant he’d finally taken the first step toward controlling his Kamuy—or if something he’d managed to slip past until now had finally written his name down.
The sword was inside him now. Not as a wound, not an object, not even a weapon. Just a line. A thin black mark curled like a stylized burn across the inside of his elbow, almost elegant the way it threaded under the skin. He pressed his palm to it. The line felt metallic, cold—but there was a softness to it too. Like a snake half-awake, coiled and listening.
A news article surfaced in his mind. Some Kamuy user—cold-type—had refused Stabilin too long and her lungs started deteriorating. She could freeze air straight from her breath, supposedly shatter bulletproof glass with it. Doctors recommended monthly injections to regulate it. Her Draconic Factor had started dragging her own lungs into the process—trachea, bronchioles, everything. The term they used was interstitial cryo-fibrosis. Ice Lung, in layman’s terms. Her lungs became a battlefield.
Solan looked down at himself. He’d barely used the blade. Or… was it even his Kamuy? Was the Kamuy the act of calling it, or swinging it, or just holding it? Didn’t matter. None of that mattered. Last night was the first time the sword had returned on its own.
The real question was: did that mean he had to start taking Stabilin now?
But again—no one really knew how it worked. There was no clean link between Kamuy usage and dosage. Some people used their powers every day and still needed barely anything. Others barely activated theirs and had to inject Stabilin weekly. The Draconic Facotr levels didn’t help either—high or low, dependency could be the same.
Some people got skin lesions. Some lost their short-term memory. Some just... smiled through the day and collapsed into pills at night. He had never touched Stabilin. That fact alone was why he could afford to live here—New Elysion, **housing, meal plan, the basics That unused prescription **was his cost of survival.
But what if that changed? What if the blade really had “activated”? What if next month, a dose became must? He’d lose that income. Need a job. Apply for aid. But would financial aid even cover meal plan?
A slow headache began to press against his temples. He glanced again at the black line. It didn’t glow. Didn’t move. Just lay there like nothing had happened. “…Maybe one more try.”
He wasn’t planning to use it in combat. He just wanted to see what would happen—when he called. Would it slice out of him? Slide gently again? Or maybe… nothing at all. He held his breath. Focused. Tried to recall the weight, the shape, the sensation of it threading back into him. Like petting a snake that might bite. Or approaching a neighbor’s cat that definitely would.
His left arm twitched. The line flared once. And the sword appeared . It came out wrong. Like the world hadn’t finished loading it yet, but the process didn’t care.
CLANG—!
The blade landed tip-down on the floor, rattling the wooden boards. Dust leapt from beneath the bed.
Solan stayed frozen, hand still in the summon pose. He stared at the blade. Then let out a long, uneven sigh.
“…Well. At least there’s no blood.”
And just like that, the exhaustion hit again. Heavy. Relentless. Like his body wanted nothing more than to shut the world out and pretend none of this had ever started. He slept like he’d been unplugged. No dreams. No blade. No answers.
Sunday moved like a fever dream.
New Elysion’s drinking age was eighteen. That fact alone explained half the chaos. The other half was money—real money. The Academy was technically private, but flushed with public funds from the New Elysion education department. Generous scholarships. Subsidized tuition. “Merit-flexible” admissions. Every year they pulled in a strange mix: scouted prodigies, exchange students from collapsed areas, rich kids with Kamuy, and broke kids who tested just high enough to qualify for the free ride.
And every year, the weekend before classes started… they all lost their minds.
According to Matt, by Saturday afternoon, the central quad was a zoo. Kamuy users lighting up like stage effects, some practicing, most just showing off. Flames, forcefields, airborne stunts. A guy levitated over the reflecting pool with his shirt off, narrating his own life story in real-time like it was a podcast. A freshman girl burst into tears when her Kamuy misfired and covered a food truck in frost. Nobody helped. People just filmed it.
Security drones hovered outside windows, scanning for heat signatures and blood. Solan asked if someone was going to shut it down. Matt just laughed. “As long as no one crashes through a government building, they’ll let it ride.”
That was the rule here: keep it contained, and no one cared. Kamuy weren’t banned, just discouraged from being obvious. Power was tolerated the way noise complaints were—only punished if someone important noticed.
Campus security tried to enforce a “soft crackdown” Saturday night. It didn’t work. By Sunday, the party had simply migrated—off-campus bars, friends' apartments, rooftops.
That night, Matt dragged him out with the urgency of someone who’d just discovered God was hosting a flash sale.
“Come on,” he said. “You need to see this.”
Solan didn’t ask questions. He figured it was safer not to.
They ended up beneath an unfinished metro line—just off-campus, under steel struts and the echo of reverb. Jury-rigged floodlamps cast the whole place in uneven gold. Portable speakers buzzed with distortion. Students were already packed around the ring—leaning off railings, sitting on half-installed benches, some still wearing their orientation shirts like they’d wandered into the wrong part of campus and decided to stay.
The fights had already started. Two students circled each other inside the makeshift ring. One had some kind of metal crawling slow across his chest—like it was growing, or maybe being forced out. The other hadn’t moved. Just stood there barefoot, smaller, wiry—maybe a girl? Her eyes stayed half-lidded, like she was listening to something no one else could hear.
Then came the impact. A shockwave cracked through the concrete and rolled through the crowd like bass. Dust spiraled up. Someone behind Solan whooped like they were at a concert. Another voice started live-commentating the moves like it was a televised sport.
Solan’s face twitched. He didn’t say anything, but in his mind, he saw himself taking a hit like that—launched backward like a kite with a broken spine.
It was chaotic. Loud. Raw. But it wasn’t random. Every blow was weighted. Measured. Practiced.
Telekinetics. Hardlight users. Skin that shifted on contact. Someone with windstep movement, like she was skipping between seconds. Another snapped the ground upward with a palm strike—like the floor had veins, and he knew exactly where to tap.
No guns, though. Solan noticed that. New Elysion didn’t have a Second Amendment—they had policy. Whatever that policy actually said, no one here seemed worried about breaking it. Kamuy, blades, hand-to-hand, even someone with what looked like a spine mod—no one stopped them. Apparently that was fine. Apparently you could do anything here. You’d just bleed more if you weren’t fast.
Matt leaned in, yelling over the noise, grinning like he was part tour guide, part cult recruiter. “This one’s legit,” he shouted. “It’s re-ranking weekend.”
Solan gave him a look. “That’s a thing?”
“Unofficially.” Matt shrugged. “Also not really secret. School acts like it’s an urban legend. Students treat it like gospel.”
He pulled out his phone, thumbed to a corner feed, and held it up like a holy relic. “The Scratchlist,” he said. Solan squinted. It looked like a glorified leaderboard: names, ranks, a glowing scroll of match histories, some already updating in real time. Matt tapped the screen. “Top hundred fighters in the student body. Ranked. Public. Updated whenever someone wins—or gets humiliated.”
Solan arched a brow. “So an underground fight club.”
“Exactly how it started”. Matt went on “Back in the ‘80s, couple of freaks in the South Wing basement just wanted to prove whose Kamuy hit harder. Probably had a chalkboard and everything. It was said the original list only had ten names. No one even admitted to writing them down, but the fights kept happening, and eventually someone started tracking them. Now, the Dean probably gets weekly analytics. You win, you rise. You lose in public, you fall. It’s stupid. But it runs everything.”
He started ticking off perks on his fingers. “Internships. Research opportunities. Professors who never reply to emails suddenly ‘see potential.’ Some private club parties even require a list number for entry.”
Solan stared at him, unimpressed.
“And, y’know. Sex. ” Matt added dramatically, wagging his eyebrows. “Girls or guys. Whatever your deal is. You won’t be lonely.”
Solan sighed. “Of course.”
“No, seriously,” Matt said. “You make this list, you’re vetted. You don’t need to be nice. Or smart. Or functional. Just throw one good punch in the right direction—and bam.”
Matt said. “You should give it a shot. At least your blade looks intimidating.”
“I would”—Solan inhaled sharply, the way you do when you see someone take a fist to the stomach—“if I had the good kind of insurance.”
He turned his gaze back to the screen. The list wasn’t glamorous. It looked kind of dumb. But the students crowding around it didn’t think so. Neither did the ones whispering, or glancing, or quietly adjusting their stances like they were already planning their own ascent. He just kept one hand in his pocket. Resting near the place where the mark still sat beneath his skin. A black thread of something that didn’t quite belong to him. Not yet.
By the time they walked back, his ears were still ringing from the shockwave. His ribs ached from something that hadn’t touched him. And the blade? Still where he left it. He didn’t summon it. He didn’t sleep well either.
The first day of classes came too soon. Solan pushed open the lecture hall door, his stomach was still curling from that carton of questionable milk. He wasn’t sure if it was the dairy, the blade he’d left in the dorm… or the slow, bone-deep fatigue that hadn’t let up since. The same kind of uncertainty that made him wonder if choosing Disaster Response Theory was an act of self-preservation… or just another bad decision Matt had talked him into.
“With your stamina? If you don’t learn how to survive a stampede, they’ll be scraping what’s left of you off the sidewalk by midterms.” That was Matt’s pitch. The kind only an American could deliver without irony.
The lecture hall looked hungover. Students slumped in chairs, half-listening, half-dissolving into coffee steam and second guesses. The whole place smelled like budget coffee and mild regret.
Solan slumped into a middle row seat. Dropped his brand-new textbook on the desk like it owed him something.
“Is this seat taken?” The voice was soft. So soft it landed more like snowfall than sound.
He looked up—and forgot to breathe for a second.
She stood just beneath the light from the aisle window, black hair falling past her shoulders, the school insignia stitched neatly into her collar. Her fingers were curled around the edge of a weathered notebook. There was nothing commanding about her expression—just a kind of tentative, almost hesitant poise. Like she wasn’t really asking if the seat was free, but quietly hoping not to be turned away.
“N... no,” Solan stammered.
She was already seated. A jasmine-scented breeze brushed past him as she settled in, flipping open a dog-eared copy of Disaster Response Theory. The inside cover was scribbled with dense notes—lines, arrows, and symbols in pencil so fine they looked like a second language.
Solan’s fingertips twitched. That profile. That movement. That— That was the girl from the bunker. Wasn’t it?
No. Not possible.
She wouldn’t remember.
Just a coincidence.
The air felt warmer than it should. His collar scratched at his neck. He tapped the desk, trying to shake off the silence.
She turned, eyes curious, voice soft. “I heard this professor’s tough. Is that true?”
“Huh? I—uh—dunno.” He nearly bit his tongue.
She smiled, just a little. Her lashes cast faint shadows in the morning light.
“Last semester’s fail rate was 48%.”
“What?!” His voice cracked through the nearly empty room. Someone in the front groaned and shifted in their seat.
“…should never trust a guy named Matt.”
“Matt?” she asked.
“My roommate. He said you could basically nap through it…”
“Oh.” She blinked once, then tilted her head. “Then maybe you should start reading the textbook yourself.”
Solan stared. It wasn’t mean. It wasn’t even teasing. It was… advice. Plain and honest and kind. She bent back over her notebook, already taking notes from the opening slide. Solan, on the other hand, was still trying to process her first “harsh” sentence—which didn’t sound harsh at all. More like… a soft tap on the shoulder in a burning building.
And then, it hit him. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen her. It was yesterday. Outside the administration building. He’d dropped his documents for the third time. The wind slapped half the stack into his face, and he was gearing up to swear when he caught a whiff of lemon laundry detergent. Then she stepped out through the revolving glass door. White shirt. Black hair. The sun hit her like she was still being sketched in. Unfinished. Untouchable.
He’d ducked his head and pretended to read file numbers. His cheeks stung from wind and embarrassment. His heart was doing something it absolutely shouldn’t have been doing. She passed him without even looking. Now, she was sitting next to him. Asking him if the professor was strict. As if this was nothing.
Solan looked down at his pristine, plastic-wrapped textbook. His throat felt tight. She leaned forward again, taking notes in a calm, practiced hand. A strand of her hair slipped to one side, revealing the pale line of her neck. His hand moved before his brain caught up. He reached for the edge of the book. The plastic sleeve tore with a slow, shhhhlick .
“Damn thing’s sealed like a blade sheath,” he muttered under his breath.