Year 782, Imperial Calendar of Vorakh
Looking back on the days when I was forced to forge my own path, I can only say one thing:
"It wasn't easy."
Disgrace has a metallic aftertaste, persistent, like dried blood on the palate. By the age of twelve, I had already grown accustomed to swallowing it in silence.
While my cousins learned to summon obsidian plates capable of halting an artillery shell, and my brothers awakened lethal gifts worthy of our lineage, I—the firstborn, the fallen heir—rotted away amidst forgotten stacks of books.
My world had shrunk to the Stragglers' Wing of the majestic Belisarius Academy. That place was supposed to be the cradle of glory, the furnace where the Empire's great generals and war heroes were forged. But for someone like me, it was a gilded cage lined with thorns.
In an environment saturated with testosterone and ambition, ingenuity was valued, yes—but only if you could use it to kill more effectively. Therefore, priority was given to the academic study of siege tactics, ballistics, war magic, and domination.
The libraries where I resided, haunting them like a ghost, held no such "prestigious" texts. My shelves were stocked with theoretical records, speculative anatomy, and the principles of fundamental magic. They were books of science, scorned by warriors who only cared about how to pull a trigger, brandish a sword, or cast a more volatile spell.
Sometimes, I thought my life might have been different at the Imperial Athenaeum of Vesalius or the Celsus Laboratories. There, surrounded by scholars, perhaps I wouldn't have been so alone in my pursuit of knowledge. Those academies were the vanguard of intellect in Vorakh.
But in this Empire, "better" does not mean "important." In Vorakh, the only thing that matters is strength. Everything else is just decoration.
You might wonder why I didn't request a transfer during those three years of hell. The answer is simple and brutal: I couldn't.
For House Acheron, having a useless son was a tragedy. But having a son who fled a military academy to become a "bookworm" was high treason. If I had tried to abandon Belisarius, my father wouldn't have simply disowned me; he would have taken my head himself to cleanse the stain.
Such was the crushing weight of honor in this savage, dominant, power-addicted empire.
I closed the book with a sharp thud, kicking up a small mote of dust. My fingers traced the title embossed on the worn leather: "Treatise on Cellular Dissonance and Mana Flow."
A dense, theoretical text, and absolutely useless to a warrior. Just what I needed.
I headed to the shelves, eyes scanning the spines greedily, until I pulled down another heavy volume: "Paradoxes of Elemental Alchemy: Volume IV."
Back then, my focus was chaotic. I didn't know exactly what I was searching for, so I devoured any subject the others despised.
I sat down and resumed my reading, losing myself in diagrams and formulas, until the distant blare of a war horn shattered my bubble of peace. The time for combat training had arrived. Or, to put it another way: the moment of my daily humiliation was here.
I closed my eyes for a second, feeling the familiar knot tighten in my stomach.
There was a time when I wept, when the injustice burned in my throat. But complaining or blaming fate was a thing of the past.
That was for children, and I had ceased to be a child the day I accepted reality and decided to alter my future.
Until I found a way to turn my mind into a weapon, my weakness was my fault. My sin.
I stood, adjusting my uniform, and walked toward the exit. Crossing the threshold, I looked up at the stone archway where the creed of Belisarius Academy was carved in deep, severe lettering:
"Weakness is a choice; greatness, a duty."
I read the phrase with a bitter grimace and left the library, heading to the training grounds to serve my shift as an unpaid punching bag.
Upon crossing the reinforced oak doors of the library, the solemn silence was instantly devoured by the ceaseless roar of the Academy.
I walked along the outer corridors—a network of steel and stone gantries suspended over the lower levels of the campus. The air out here didn't smell of old paper; it reeked of ozone, engine grease, and the distinctive coppery tang of blood.
Vorakh was not an empire of fairy tale castles. It was a machine.
To my left, beyond the academy walls, the smokestacks of the Imperial Foundries belched columns of dense smog that merged with the perpetual gray sky. Cargo airships, their armored hulls gleaming under searchlights, plowed through the air like iron leviathans, ferrying supplies to the front lines.
I looked down toward "Zaragoza Avenue." A military transport convoy was passing at that moment. The vehicles didn't use simple wheels, but magnetic tread systems that hummed with unstable red energy. Mana combustion engines. They were loud, dirty, and brutally efficient. Just like a standard Vorakh citizen.
Around me, the academy's architecture was oppressive. There were no soft curves or floral ornamentations. Everything was brutalist: massive blocks of concrete reinforced with warding runes, gargoyles that were actually heat sinks for defense systems, and thick brass pipes running along the walls like exposed veins, pumping thaumaturgic energy to the laboratories and arsenals.
The other students passed me by, but no one looked at me. They were equipped with the latest military tech: partial exoskeletons to boost their stride, tactical retinal sights, and swords that hummed at high frequencies. They were the shiny, chrome future of the Empire.
I, with my unmodified standard uniform and books tucked under my arm, was a glitch in the system.
The training ground loomed before me, a vast oval arena ringed by containment barriers of crackling energy. The air thrummed with the impact of spells and the clash of metal on metal.
I veered into the antechamber, a dim locker room that smelled of liniment and cold sweat. I stowed my books in the locker with reverent care and faced my reflection in the polished metal of the cabinet.
There was no heavy armor for me; my muscles couldn't bear the weight. Instead, I took the only things I could handle: a short, light-alloy dagger and a pair of kinetic pulse pistols.
I sighed, checking the magazines. The metal felt freezing against my palms.
I stared at the bluish reflection on the barrel of my pistol. So much sophistication, so many mana reactors and perfect alloys... and it all served a single, primitive purpose: to make the butchery more efficient.
It was a cruel irony: I held in my hands the pinnacle of ballistic engineering, yet I knew that in a few minutes, I would be spitting blood in the sand like a savage.
I flicked the safety off with a dry click that echoed in the empty locker room. There was no glory waiting for me out there, only stacked odds and calculated pain.
Numbing my mind to the inevitable, I walked toward the arena.