Chapter 124: Brutal First Period 2.

It came without warning, a sudden violent gust that seemed to originate from nowhere and everywhere at once, slamming across the exposed face of the mountain hard enough to send loose gravel rattling past Ren’s head.

He flattened himself instinctively against the rock, fingers locking into their holds with a desperation that had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with pure survival instinct.

Somewhere above him, a scream cut through the roar of the wind.

Ren’s head snapped up in time to see a girl — Basic class, judging by the absence of limb weights — lose her grip entirely on an exposed ledge nearly a hundred meters up, her body tumbling backward into open air with the horrible, silent slowness that terror always seemed to produce.

The containment ward caught her three seconds later, an ugly, visible shudder of magic snapping taut beneath her like an invisible net, and she was lowered — safely, if roughly — back toward the base.

But those three seconds, Ren realized with a cold, clinical detachment even as his own heart hammered against his ribs, had felt like an eternity to everyone watching.

’The wards work,’ he thought, forcing his breathing to steady. ’Nobody dies here. But that doesn’t make it feel safe. That’s deliberate too. Fear is part of the lesson.’

He pressed on, muscles screaming in protest, the weights on his limbs feeling heavier with every passing meter as fatigue compounded on top of them. Somewhere far to his left, he caught a glimpse of Lia, wedged stubbornly into a narrow chimney crack, using raw, grinding physical persistence to make up for whatever finesse she lacked — a technique that was, frankly, working, if inelegantly.

By the time the sun crossed its intended point, Ren’s arms had gone past burning into something closer to numbness, a dull, distant ache that no longer registered as urgent so much as simply permanent.

He’d reached, by his own rough estimate, somewhere around two thousand meters — less than a third of the mountain’s true height, if the cloud-shrouded peak was any indication.

He clung to a narrow ledge, forced himself to breathe, and looked up at the endless grey stone still stretching above him.

’Halfway to the checkpoint,’ he thought grimly, ’and I already feel like I’ve run three of Grael’s endurance circuits back to back.’

Beside him, close enough now that he could hear her ragged breathing beneath her usual composure, Mirabella pressed her forehead briefly against the cold stone.

"Tell me your calculations have a conclusion," she said, voice tight with exhaustion. "Because mine have started to just be numbers with no point."

Ren managed a hoarse laugh. "Working on it."

Above them, the mountain kept climbing into the clouds, patient and utterly indifferent to how much either of them had left to give.

The checkpoint bell rang somewhere above the cloud line, and Ren heard it more than saw any marker, a low resonant tone rolling down through the mist like a verdict.

Morning. The disqualification threshold.

He was, by his best estimate, still forty meters short of wherever that checkpoint actually was, and his body had entered a state that no longer felt like exhaustion so much as complete negotiation failure between his brain and every muscle he possessed.

’Move,’ he told himself, fingers finding another hold through willpower alone. ’The band doesn’t care how tired you are. The weight doesn’t care. Move.’

He’d learned, over the last several hours, to read the mountain the way he’d once read failing experimental data — not fighting the parts that resisted him, but searching instead for the specific angle, the specific micro-adjustment, that turned an impossible hold into merely a difficult one.

It was slow. It was humiliating, compared to the effortless power his rune usually granted him. But it was, he was slowly realizing, teaching him something his rune never had.

’This is what my body can actually do,’ he thought, hauling himself over a narrow ridge with arms that shook violently from the strain. ’Not what the enhancement lets it do. This.’

The cloud bank swallowed him whole somewhere past the checkpoint, visibility dropping to almost nothing, the wind howling louder here, colder, carrying a faint, acrid tang that made his throat tighten with something that wasn’t quite fear but lived in the same neighborhood.

He nearly missed the hold that saved his life.

His foot slipped on wet, cloud-slicked stone, weight shifting wrong, and for one horrible, weightless instant Ren felt his entire body begin to tip backward into open air — the same slow, silent horror he’d watched happen to the girl hours earlier, except this time it was happening to him, and there was no analytical detachment available for a mind that had gone entirely, animally quiet with panic.

His hand found the crack by pure, desperate reflex, fingers jamming into stone hard enough to tear skin, and his fall arrested with a violent, spine-jarring lurch that left him hanging one-armed over open, cloud-shrouded nothing, heart slamming against his ribs so hard it hurt.

For three full seconds, Ren simply hung there, breathing.

’Alive,’ he thought, distantly, absurdly grateful for something so basic. ’Still climbing.’

He hauled himself back onto solid stone with the last dregs of strength his arms had left, and did not allow himself to look down again.

Somewhere nearby, muffled by the cloud, he heard Mirabella’s voice, tight and controlled in a way that told him exactly how close she’d come to her own version of that same moment. "Ren?"

"Here," he called back, hoarse. "Still climbing."

"Good," she said, and he heard something in that single word that wasn’t quite relief but was adjacent to it. "Don’t stop."

They climbed together after that, close enough to hear each other’s ragged breathing through the mist, neither one speaking much beyond the occasional warning about loose stone or a hidden crevice — an unspoken agreement that conversation cost energy neither of them could spare.

The peak, when it finally came, arrived almost anticlimactically — the cloud simply thinning, then breaking apart entirely, revealing a modest flat plateau where a handful of instructors waited beside a simple stone marker etched with the academy’s crest.

Ren dragged himself over the final ledge and simply collapsed onto solid ground, chest heaving, every muscle in his body screaming in unified, exhausted protest. Beside him, a heartbeat later, Mirabella did the same, silver hair plastered to her face with sweat, violet eyes closed against the pale afternoon light.

For a long moment, neither of them said anything at all.

"We made it," Ren finally managed, voice cracked and disbelieving.

"Barely," Mirabella rasped. "I have never in my life wanted to hit a mountain as much as I wanted to hit that one."

A soft chime sounded from Ren’s suppression band, and the crushing absence he’d carried in his limbs all day finally lifted — his rune’s enhancement flooding back into aching muscles like warmth returning to frostbitten skin, a relief so profound it nearly brought tears to his eyes.

He lay there a moment longer, staring up at open sky for the first time in hours, and let himself simply feel the specific, hard-won satisfaction of a victory that had cost him absolutely everything he had to give.

’No shortcuts today,’ he thought, exhausted and strangely proud in equal measure. ’No Forge. No borrowed power. Just this body, and whatever it actually turned out to be capable of.’

Below them, scattered across the mountain’s vast grey face, hundreds of other first-years were still climbing — some nearing the peak, others turning back in defeat, a few, Ren knew grimly, already caught by containment wards and lowered back to the base to try again another day.

An instructor approached, checking names off a floating ledger with brisk efficiency. "Kisaragi. Frostweave. Noted."

"That’s it?" Ren asked, still flat on his back, too exhausted to sit up properly.

"That’s it," the instructor confirmed, already moving toward the next arriving student. "Rest here until transport clears you for descent. Your second lesson begins in Five minutes."

Ren’s head fell back against the stone with a groan that had absolutely nothing dignified about it.

"Five minutes," he repeated numbly.

Beside him, Mirabella laughed — a raw, exhausted sound with real warmth buried underneath it. "Welcome to the Imperial curriculum, Ren."

Somewhere far below, the mountain kept claiming its slow, patient toll on everyone still climbing, indifferent as ever to how much any of them had already given it.