Chapter 3: Noise
1355 Words
Lucien found his room on the third floor of the east dormitory and stood in it for about four minutes before someone knocked on the door.
He opened it.
Pink hair. Black eyes. A smile that had no business being that confident on someone who barely came up to his chin.
"You're the new one," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Commoner status, unranked, arrived under weird circumstances, and you've already got half the corridor whispering about you." She tilted her head. "Cool. I'm Nina. Fourth Crown. I'll be your guide today because Miriella said it would be spiritually irresponsible to let you wander alone and I lost the coin flip."
Lucien stared at her.
"What does Fourth Crown mean," he said.
Nina's smile got wider. "Oh good. You know nothing. This is going to be fun."
She was already walking away before he finished deciding whether to follow.
He followed.
She talked the entire way down the stairs. Nonstop. Not nervous talking. Comfortable talking, the kind where the person genuinely doesn't mind if you respond or not because they're enjoying themselves either way.
"Okay so there are three things you need to understand to survive here," she said, taking the stairs two at a time without looking down. "Social rank, academy rank, and power rank. They don't always match up and that's where everything gets messy."
Lucien said nothing.
"Social rank first because it's the most annoying one." She held up fingers. "Commoner. Noble. Royal. That's the whole list. You're a Commoner, which means you start with zero automatic respect and a high number of people looking for an excuse to test you." She glanced back at him. "You look like you already knew that."
"I've been alive for twenty years," he said.
"Fair." She pushed through a heavy door at the bottom and they came out into a wide courtyard. "Academy rank is the one you earn. Unranked at the bottom, then Bronze, Silver, Gold, Crown, and Sovereign at the very top." She said it fast, like a list she'd gone through before. "Sovereign barely exists as a real thing. Most people cap out at Gold if they work hard enough."
Students sat in clusters on the stone steps around them. Several were looking at Lucien. He was starting to expect that now.
"Power rank measures your ability," Nina continued, hopping onto a low wall to walk along it with her arms loose at her sides. "Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary, Mythic, Divine. How rare your power is, how dangerous, how much ceiling you've got." She paused. "Yours is unclassified right now."
"How do you know what mine is."
"I don't. That's my point." She jumped off the wall, landed clean, kept moving. "Unclassified means they ran tests while you were unconscious and got something that didn't fit their chart. So they left the box empty." Casual. Like that was a minor paperwork issue and not something significantly stranger.
Lucien filed it away without comment.
"What's yours," he said.
She stopped walking.
Then she was just gone.
No warning. No sound. No blur. Gone.
Something tapped his left shoulder from behind. He turned. Nothing there. Something touched the right side of his face. He turned again. She was standing directly in front of him, same spot, same expression, like she hadn't moved at all.
"Velocity Phantom," she said. "I manipulate acceleration and momentum. I'm the fastest person in this academy by a distance." Not bragging. Just stating. "Legendary Class."
He looked at the space where she had been standing and then back at her.
"Don't do that again," he said.
She grinned. "I'm going to do it constantly."
They walked further into the grounds. She pointed out buildings as they passed. Training halls, classroom blocks, the medical wing he had already woken up inside, and further back a massive dark structure that she called the Eclipse Arena.
"That's where ranking battles happen," she said. "Public. Everybody watches. If you're going to embarrass yourself or do something incredible, it'll probably happen in there."
It was enormous. Built from the same dark stone as everything else but taller, with open arched entries that showed darkness inside even from this distance.
"Crown students," he said. "You said you're one."
"Fourth Crown." Same easy tone. "There are six of us at the very top. The Apex Crowns. Below us there are other Crown students, maybe twenty or so total, but the six of us sit above them." She waved a hand. "It's a whole thing."
"What separates you from the other Crowns."
"Ability level. Combat record. And the fact that most people who try to fight any of us end up in the medical wing for a while." She glanced at him. "No offense to the medical wing. Valerie practically runs it and she's genuinely great."
"The other five," he said. "Who are they."
Nina counted on her fingers. "Elena, Kaela, Miriella, Ravenna, Valerie. Elena holds the first Crown position which means she carries the most political weight." She paused. "She's also the most dangerous person in this building to make an enemy of. Different kind of dangerous from me."
"Different how."
Nina actually thought about it for a second. "I'm fast. Elena is strategic. She doesn't react to things immediately. She responds to them, sometimes weeks later, in ways you didn't see coming." She looked at him sideways. "A Gold student giving you trouble, teachers can handle it. If a Crown student decides they want you gone though?"
She let it sit there.
"Teachers usually arrive too late," she said. Simple. Honest.
Lucien looked at her.
She looked back without any apology in it.
"Okay," he said.
"Just thought you should know early." She shrugged. "Better than finding out the hard way."
They were crossing back through the main building when Nina stopped to argue with someone she apparently knew about something Lucien didn't follow. He stood to the side and let his eyes move over the crowd.
He was tired. Not the physical kind. The kind that made ordinary things feel slightly unreal, like he was watching everything from one step behind himself. He'd been inside this academy for less than a day and already had more information rattling around than he knew what to do with.
He was also aware, in a quiet background way, that he hadn't thought about the symbol carved into the corridor wall since Nina first knocked on his door.
He was thinking about it again now.
Eight lines. Circular center. The exact same one.
A shift in the corridor pulled him out of his head.
Not a sound exactly. Just a change in the way the space around him felt. Like a room adjusting to something walking into it.
He looked up.
A girl stood at the far end of the corridor. She had a natural stillness about her that was different from everyone else moving around her. Dark red hair, dark red eyes, brown skin, and an expression that gave away absolutely nothing. Two or three students stood nearby but she wasn't talking to any of them.
She was looking at Lucien.
Not the way everyone else had been looking at him all day. Not that sideways curious glance people gave things they didn't understand.
Direct. Unhurried. Like she was reading something written on him that he couldn't see himself.
He held her gaze because looking away felt like the wrong instinct.
She didn't look away either.
Then something shifted in her expression. Small and controlled. Not quite a smile but something in that direction.
She said one word. Quiet, across the length of the whole corridor.
He shouldn't have been able to hear it.
"Interesting."
She turned. Her group moved with her and in fifteen seconds she was gone around the corner like she had never been standing there.
Nina appeared at his shoulder.
"Oh," she said. And for the first time all morning she actually sounded surprised. "Elena noticed you."
She looked at him with something new in her expression.
"That's either very good or very bad for you." A pause. "It usually ends up being both."
- Writer
