Chapter 123: Brutal First Period.

The mountain didn’t look real.

Ren stood at its base with the rest of his year, craning his neck back until his spine complained, and still couldn’t find the summit. Grey rock climbed into a bank of low cloud that never seemed to thin, its surface a brutal geometry of sheer faces, jagged overhangs, and narrow ledges that from this distance looked barely wide enough for a bird to land on, let alone a person.

"Mount Shredder," Zephyr had called it, back at the villa, in a tone that suggested the name wasn’t a joke.

Ren was beginning to believe it.

"First lesson," said the instructor standing at the base — a broad, weathered woman with forearms like bridge cables and a voice that didn’t need any magical amplification to carry across one thousand four hundred assembled first-years. "Physical Conditioning. I am Instructor Grael. You will learn to hate me within the hour, and that is by design, so save your complaints."

A ripple of nervous laughter went through the crowd. Grael did not smile.

"Extend your dominant wrist."

Ren did, and a moment later a band of dull, unornamented grey metal materialized around it, cool and heavier than its slim profile suggested. He turned it over once, studying the faint runic etching along its inner surface, already cataloging.

"These are suppression bands," Grael continued. "For the duration of this class, they will sever your connection to any carved rune’s physical enhancement. Strength, speed, durability, reflexes — whatever your rune grants your body, it is gone the moment that band activates. You will climb this mountain with exactly the physique nature gave you. Nothing more."

Ren felt it happen almost the instant the words left Grael’s mouth — a subtle, sickening drop, like a held breath finally released. The faint, ever-present hum of enhanced strength he’d stopped consciously noticing weeks ago simply vanished. His shoulders, which had carried Bloodsucker’s brutal weight through hours of drilling without complaint, suddenly remembered they belonged to a body that had, until recently, been dying of old age in a laboratory on Earth.

Beside him, Lia flexed her fingers with a small, betrayed noise. "That’s — that’s so much weaker."

"That is the point," Grael said, apparently hearing her anyway. "Basic and Elite class, proceed to the marked starting points. You will attempt to summit before the bell tolls. Failure to reach the marked checkpoint by morning results in immediate academic penalty."

She turned, and her gaze swept over a smaller cluster near the front — Ren, Mirabella, and roughly thirty other Imperial and Supreme students standing slightly apart from the main body.

"Imperial and Supreme class," Grael said, and something in her tone sharpened. "Extend your ankles and wrists."

Four separate weights materialized around Ren’s limbs with a heavy metallic clink, chained tight and unyielding. He tested one experimentally, shifting his weight, and felt the drag of it immediately — not crushing, but present in every single joint, a constant, deliberate tax on every motion he’d make for the rest of the day.

"Talent earns you a harder climb, not an easier one," Grael said flatly. "That is the only lesson this academy has ever needed to teach about privilege."

Mirabella exhaled slowly through her nose, testing her own weighted limbs with clinical detachment. "How much?"

"Fifteen percent of your natural body weight, distributed across all four limbs," Grael said. "Scaled individually. Adjust your climbing accordingly, or you will fall, and the nets below will catch you, and you will restart from the base."

Ren looked down — really looked, for the first time — at the base of the mountain’s near-vertical face, and understood, with the cold clarity of someone doing fast mental arithmetic, exactly how bad this was about to be.

The rock wasn’t a single clean ascent. It folded and buckled in on itself, a maze of chimneys and overhangs and narrow traverses that offered no single obvious route. Some sections bulged outward, forcing climbers to hang nearly parallel to the ground, relying on nothing but grip strength and friction.

Others narrowed into cracks barely wide enough to wedge a shoulder into. And threaded through all of it, faint but unmistakable, was a low, directionless wind that gusted without warning, strong enough to visibly stir loose scree along the exposed ledges.

’No safety line,’ Ren thought, cataloging the details with the same detached precision he’d once applied to failing lab equipment. ’Just the nets, far below, which means every fall costs real distance and real time, not just pride. No visible route markers past the first hundred meters. Wind unpredictable in both timing and direction — possibly magically influenced, which means it’s not going to behave the way normal wind behaves.’

He flexed his fingers, testing the new, unfamiliar weight of his own unenhanced body, and felt something settle in his chest that was equal parts dread and something closer to grim anticipation.

"You may begin," Grael said, "the instant the bell sounds."

Gong!

The bell rang a heartbeat later, low and resonant, rolling out across the base of the mountain.

One thousand four hundred students surged forward at once toward the rock face, and Ren went with them, already scanning the first stretch of stone for a route that wouldn’t kill him in the first ten minutes.

Beside him, Mirabella had already found her first handhold, silver hair whipping in the gusting wind, expression set into the same fierce, focused calm she wore before every real fight.

"Race you," she said, not even glancing over.

Ren huffed out something between a laugh and a groan, found his own first grip in the cold stone, and began to climb.

By the time he reached the first true difficulty — a slanted overhang roughly sixty meters up where the rock simply refused to offer any convenient handholds — his forearms had already begun to burn in a way his enhanced body had never once made him feel.

He hung there for a moment, wedged into an awkward stance, and forced himself to actually think instead of just grinding uselessly against the stone.

’This isn’t a strength problem,’ he realized, studying the overhang’s angle. ’It’s a leverage problem. My center of gravity is wrong for a direct pull. I need to redistribute load through my hips, not my arms.’

He shifted his stance, dropped his hips closer to the rock, and reached for a hold he’d previously dismissed as too far — and found, to his intense relief, that the new angle brought it easily within reach. The overhang yielded, grudgingly, one careful adjustment at a time.

Below and around him, the mountain was a chorus of struggle.

A cluster of Basic-class students had bottlenecked at a narrow chimney crack roughly forty meters up, shouting instructions at each other that mostly amounted to panicked contradiction.

Somewhere off to his left, a girl’s foot slipped on loose scree with a sharp cry, and Ren’s stomach lurched before he registered the shimmer of a containment ward catching the falling student mid-air, lowering her gently back toward the base, where she would presumably have to restart from zero.

’That’s the real punishment,’ Ren thought, watching the girl’s face crumple in defeat far below. ’Not injury. Time. Every fall costs you the entire climb.’

He redoubled his focus.

The weights strapped to his limbs made themselves known constantly, subtly recalibrating every motion he attempted — a reach that would have been trivial a month ago now required careful weight-shifting, a controlled swing of momentum rather than a simple extension.

He found himself, almost without meaning to, applying the same principles he’d drilled into himself for months with Bloodsucker’s chain — using controlled momentum rather than raw strength, letting his body’s motion do work his muscles alone couldn’t.

Mirabella climbed roughly ten meters to his right, and even in his peripheral vision, even soaked in sweat and straining, her technique was maddeningly elegant — economical, precise, every motion stripped of anything wasteful. She wasn’t fighting the mountain the way most of the surrounding students were. She was negotiating with it.

"You’re thinking too hard," she called over, not even sounding winded, which Ren found personally offensive given the state of his own lungs.

"I’m calculating," he corrected, hauling himself up another meter through pure stubbornness. "There’s a difference."

"Is there?"

"Ask me again once I’ve reached the top and I’ll explain the epistemology."

She actually laughed at that — a rare, bright sound, quickly swallowed by the wind — and pulled slightly ahead.

The wind chose that exact moment to turn genuinely vicious.

Boom!