The gates of the Imperial Academy loomed before Luke, a towering arch of black steel etched with the Federation's eagle sigil. His wrists ached from the shackles, shoulders stiff from hours in the armored transport. The air here smelled different - sharp with antiseptic and the metallic tang of ionized energy that made his teeth hum.
A hard shove between his shoulder blades sent him stumbling forward. "Move, rat." Commander Dain's voice carried the bored menace of a man used to obedience. The Ironborn officer's boots crunched gravel beside him, his dark uniform lined with faintly pulsing silver circuits.
Luke kept his mouth shut. The Academy sprawled before them - a fortress of plasteel and glowing runes. Barracks lined the outer yard like teeth in a jaw, their sealed doors hiding whatever horrors waited inside. Beyond them, training fields stretched out, littered with obstacle courses and the skeletal remains of decommissioned mecha. At the center stood the Crucible, its domed arena casting long shadows across the compound.
"You're lucky," Dain said without looking at him. "Most gutterborn don't make it past first screening."
Luke's throat was too dry to respond. The testing chamber waited behind a featureless steel door. Inside, a medic in a white biosuit stood beside a steel table, adjusting a holographic display. On the table sat the black cube from the orphanage.
"Sit." The medic didn't look up as she clamped a neural cuff around Luke's wrist. The metal bit deep enough to draw blood. "This determines your classification. Don't resist."
The cube hummed to life. A needle-thin probe extended, glinting under the sterile lights. Luke barely had time to tense before it struck.
White-hot pain exploded through his nervous system. His vision blurred at the edges as symbols scrolled across the cube's surface too fast to read. Just when he thought his bones might shatter from the pressure, it stopped.
The probe retracted. The cube went dark.
"Genetic anomaly confirmed." The medic studied her displays. "Primus-class."
Dain exhaled through his nose. "Hell of a lucky rat."
They took him to the branding chamber without ceremony. The machine stood center-room, its emitter arms poised like a spider about to strike. "This will hurt," the medic said, shoving him onto the platform.
Fire lanced between his shoulder blades as the brand seared into his flesh. Luke bit through his lip to keep from screaming as the nano-tech burrowed deep, weaving into muscle and bone. When it finished, the medic shoved a mirror into his shaking hands.
The helix-shaped brand pulsed faintly under his skin, its edges glowing with embedded runes.
"Congratulations." Dain's smile showed too many teeth. "You're Imperial Academy now."
Barracks 9 smelled of sweat and disinfectant. Rows of steel bunks held exhausted recruits in identical gray fatigues. Most ignored Luke as he found an empty cot at the far end. His brand still throbbed, the nano-tech humming beneath his skin like a second heartbeat.
"You're the new one." The voice came from the next bunk over. A boy with close-cropped dark hair and a scar across his cheekbone watched Luke with calculating eyes. "Kieran. Secundus-class." He nodded at Luke's brand. "Primus means they expect you to die first."
Luke pressed a hand to his still-aching back. "Why?"
"Primus trials break people." Kieran leaned closer. "Last one screamed for three days before his heart gave out."
Luke met his gaze. "I don't scream."
Kieran studied him for a long moment before grinning. "Good. Maybe you'll last a week."
The mess hall served protein paste that tasted like wet cardboard. Luke forced it down while Kieran tore into his rations like they might be his last meal.
"Gutterline, right?" Kieran spoke around a mouthful of paste. "Only gutterborn get that look." He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "They're desperate. War in the Drift Zones is chewing through soldiers faster than they can replace them."
Luke's grip tightened on his fork. "What's that got to do with me?"
Kieran's eyes dropped to Luke's brand. "That's not just for show. It's alive. And it's hungry."
The lights flickered twice before turning blood-red. A voice boomed through the hall: "All Primus recruits report to the Crucible. Immediate deployment."
Kieran paled. "Already?"
The Crucible stank of old blood and burnt metal. One hundred recruits stood in the arena's center, their brands glowing faintly under the harsh lights. Luke's pulsed in time with the countdown flashing above:
00:30...00:29...
To his left, a girl with white cropped hair muttered prayers under her breath. To his right, a hulking recruit with a glitching brand cracked his knuckles.
"See the gates?" Kieran nodded at the six steel doors ringing the arena. "Each one's a different hell. They open random. Last ten standing get promoted."
00:05...00:04...
"Initiate Trial 7819."
Gate 3 exploded open. Heat rolled out in visible waves as the Scorchers emerged - wolf-sized drones with plasma-glowing shells. Their vents hissed scalding steam as they swarmed.
The first recruit died screaming when three latched onto his legs. Flesh blackened and sloughed off bone in seconds, the stench of cooked meat thick in the air.
Luke dove behind a concrete barrier as a Scorcher skidded past. His brand burned hotter, sharpening his vision. There - the cooling vents underneath. He lunged, driving his boot into the exposed plating. The drone shuddered before detonating in a fireball that sent him sprawling.
Gate 1 disgorged the Ironjaws next - mining mechs retrofitted with hydraulic pincers. One clipped the white-haired girl across the ribs before she could react. Blood sprayed as she crumpled, her torso nearly severed.
Luke rolled as another's pincers snapped where his head had been. His brand flared, time seeming to slow. He grabbed a fallen spike from the arena wall and jammed it into the mech's joint. The machine spasmed before collapsing in a shower of sparks.
Not all threats came from the gates. A recruit with a rust-red brand - Crow - fought dirty. He'd already shoved two others into Scorcher swarms, his knife flashing as he picked off the weakened.
Luke saw him gut a boy from behind before turning on Kieran. The impact of Kieran's punch cracked bone, but Crow's knife still arced toward his throat. Luke tackled Crow from the side.
They hit the ground hard. Crow's blade grazed Luke's ribs before he wrenched the wrist back with a sickening snap. The spike through Crow's eye silenced his screams.
Only twenty remained when the final gate opened. The Reaper wasn't a machine - it was a failed Ironborn experiment, flesh fused with jagged metal plating. Its single rolling eye locked onto recruits as it moved faster than anything human.
A recruit's shock-baton to its chest did nothing. The Reaper tore his arm off at the shoulder.
Luke backed away, his brand screaming warnings. The white-haired girl - still alive somehow - dragged herself toward a fallen mech's power core. "Distract it!" she coughed.
Luke charged without hesitation. The Reaper turned, claws outstretched - just as the girl slammed the power core into its back. The explosion lit the arena white.
When the smoke cleared, ten recruits stood among the carnage. Luke, Kieran, the white-haired girl - Lira, he'd learn - and seven others. The rest were meat and melted metal.
Officers descended from the observation decks. Dain stopped before Luke, visor retracting. "Primus-class confirmed. Report to the armory at dawn."
As they marched the survivors out, Luke glanced back at the charred remains. Kieran wiped blood from his mouth. "First rule of the Academy - don't get used to breathing."
Section D Observation Deck
The one-way glass overlooked the Crucible's carnage as medics dragged away the broken bodies. Centurion Sir Ramos di Nolan sipped his bitter black kaff, the steam curling around his scarred face.
"Ninety percent attrition rate," he mused. "Higher than last batch."
At the tactical holo-table, Tetrus—the combat instructor with knuckles like welded iron—snorted.
"Soft generation. That Reaper unit barely lasted three minutes." He rewound footage of Luke tackling Crow. "Though this gutter rat's got spine."
Caldrian, the one-eyed officer who'd retrieved Luke, tapped his temple where a mech-grade ocular implant whirred.
"Scanned his vitals during branding. Kid's nano-uptake rate's nineteen percent above spec. And rising."
Neon, the alchemy master, leaned over Ramos' shoulder, her neon-blue hair extensions flickering with bioluminescence.
"His bloodwork's weirder. Shows traces of..." She hesitated.
"Spit it out," Tetrus growled.
"Dead Sea Scroll sequence."
The room went still. Even the humming consoles seemed to quiet.
Ramos set his cup down carefully.
"You're saying that orphan's got ApotheoNexus contamination?"
Liam, the nano-array specialist, threw up a hologram showing Luke's genetic markers.
"Not contamination. Integration. These sequences match fragments recovered from Crucible Drift raiders last quarter." He zoomed in on a spiraling DNA strand. "They're trying to trigger the Next Evolution."
Tetrus spat on the floor.
"Heretics. Fusing AI with cultivation ain't natural."
"According to who?" Neon countered. "The Primacy burns their labs, yet we use their stolen tech every day." She pointed at the still-smoking arena below. "That Reaper unit? Hevelen tech. Our 'gutter rat' survived it bare-handed."
Caldrian's implant whirred as he pulled up security footage from Luke's orphanage.
"Sector 7 slums. Exactly where ApotheoNexus hit that research vault last month." The image showed shadowy figures in hybrid mech-robes hauling away Federation crates.
Ramos stroked the old burn scar across his jaw—a souvenir from the Drift Wars.
"You think they tagged him as a carrier?"
"Or an accident," Liam said. "These sequences are... conversational. Like they're learning from his cultivation base."
Below them, Luke limped past a pool of someone's liquefied remains.
Tetrus cracked his neck.
"So what's the play? Grind him up for analysis?"
"Too valuable." Ramos stood, his officer's cloak swirling. "Primacy's offering a dreadnought's weight in godbone for live specimens. But the High Marshal wants him tested first." He tapped a command into the table.
The hologram shifted to show a black-market feed—mech-priests of the ApotheoNexus chanting before a floating corpse-god hybrid. Their mantra scrolled beneath:
THE SIMULATION MUST REBOOT
Neon traced the glowing words.
"You know their doctrine. They think the universe is some ancient cultivator's abandoned experiment."
"And we're the bugs in the code," Liam muttered.
Ramos shut off the display.
"Enough philosophy. Caldrian—double his training load. I want to see what breaks first: his body or those Drift-forged genes."
As the instructors dispersed, Tetrus lingered, watching Luke help the white-haired girl—Lira—to the medbay. His comm buzzed with an encrypted message:
Subject 7819 matches the Catalyst parameters. Proceed to Phase 2.
He deleted it with a grunt. The Crucible's fires reflected in his eyes as he whispered the heresy they all feared.
"Maybe the heretics are right."
Footsteps echoed as Ramos returned, slower this time. He stood beside Tetrus, watching the arena screens flicker.
"You hear the latest chatter out of Hevelen?" Ramos asked.
"Which part? The Pope's divine condemnation or the part where they arm rebels in the Drift?"
"Both." Ramos glanced at the growing casualty report. "The Primacy's doctrine says they're cleansing the soulcode. But they're funding half the terrorists blowing up Rune Wells in the Order's sanctuaries."
"Just last week," Tetrus said, "a Rune Well in Kalden collapsed. Thirty-seven acolytes dead. Terrorist signature matched Hevelen-backed zealots."
"Spiritualists blame the Crucible, the Crucible blames Hevelen, and all the while the Drift burns," Ramos muttered.
"They're not just playing religion anymore. This is psychological warfare."
"Then we hit back harder. They want to rewrite the soulcode, we'll show them the cost."
Below, Luke and Lira reached the medbay doors. The lights flickered once, then held.
"Keep him alive," Ramos said. "The boy may be the weapon we need to survive what's coming."