The ground trembled long before the trains appeared.
Two lines of smoke carved across the horizon — one gilded in gold and silver, the other in black steel and rust. The twin locomotives roared through the valley like beasts in motion, cutting through the early mist until the forest opened before them.
The first train — the nobles' — gleamed beneath the sunlight, its sigil of the Radiant Crown etched across each carriage.
Every window shimmered with crystal glass, every compartment carved with luxury.
The second — the commoners' — rattled behind it, forged from iron and grit, the paint half-faded, its whistle echoing like a cry through the wild.
And then both came to a slow halt.
Before them loomed a wall — vast and terrible.
It stretched for miles, its golden plates dulled by battle scars and time, its gates engraved with sunbursts now cracked by age.
Above it, thousands of armored warriors patrolled the ramparts.
Each bore a blade that shimmered faintly with contained sunlight — the mark of the Sun Blades, elite sentinels of the Kingdom of Sion.
The air thrummed with Veil energy. Banners snapped in the wind.
Somewhere beyond the wall, the forest whispered — old, alive, and waiting.
Cassiel muttered under his breath, "So this is the frontier…"
Gareth stepped off the train, eyes narrowing at the golden wall.
Even from here, he could feel it — the tension between order and the wild.
The air shimmered with heat and tension as over two thousand cadets stepped down from the twin trains .
A sea of white and black uniforms spilling across the clearing before the golden wall.
The nobles stood radiant in robes of white and gold trim, their insignias glinting in the sun like small crowns.
The commoners, by contrast, wore dark uniforms of black and silver, plain but practical — the colors of endurance rather than prestige.
For a brief moment, the two groups only stared at each other, some with disgust, some with hate, some with anger, some with uninterested faces.
Two sides of the same kingdom — divided by heritage, bound by duty.
"Cadets!" a voice thundered from the front.
Ranks of Sun Blades motioned them forward toward a towering structure rising behind the wall — the Sentry Spire
A colossal watchtower built of obsidian stone and golden braces.
One by one, the cadets entered its vast hall.
Inside, the walls were lined with hundreds of portraits — framed in iron and dust, their surfaces lit by slow-burning braziers.
Faces stared back from another age: warriors, scholars, explorers… and fallen heroes.
Students slowed as they walked. Some whispered. Some stared too long.
Then Cassiel stopped, his voice faltering.
"Hey… look at this one."
Gareth turned.
Before them hung an old, faded photograph — a group of five young figures standing before what looked like an academy gate.
Three girls, two boys, and one unmistakable face among them — Joren.
He was barely older than Gareth was now, his black goggles crooked over his messy hair, a half-smile tugging at his lips.
One girl hung from his shoulder laughing, another was mid-shove at the boy beside her, and the last leaned in trying not to laugh.
The photo radiated something rare — warmth. Youth.
A strange, fleeting happiness untouched by the world's decay.
Gareth stared at it for a long time.
"So Joren was here too", he thought quietly.
"Not as the teacher… but as one of us. Interesting".
The heavy doors at the far end of the hall creaked open.
A wave of light spilled in — not sunlight, but something sharper, purer.
The room fell utterly silent.
Boots echoed slowly against the marble floor.
A man stepped inside — tall, broad-shouldered, his armor forged from gold and black veiled steel.
His very presence seemed to bend the light around him, a faint aura shimmering like molten dawn.
Even the portraits seemed to dim in his presence.
"The Sun Blade Commander…" someone whispered.
"No way — that's him."
Gareth's breath hitched.
Through the shimmer of his Veil-sense, he saw it — a golden current coiling around the man's body, steady, unyielding, radiant with terrifying calm.
Rank 1.5, Gareth realized.
He's at the peak of mortal command.
The man's eyes swept across the gathered cadets — steel-gray and unreadable.
His face carried the sharpness of battle scars, the authority of a thousand victories… and the stillness of a man who had seen too much to be impressed anymore.
Then — impossibly — he smiled. Just slightly.
It wasn't kind. It wasn't cruel. It was simply true.
When he finally spoke, his voice rolled through the tower like thunder laced with iron.
"I am Commander Arcten Solveil of the Sun Blades," he said.
"And I do not teach the weak. I temper them."
He paused, letting the weight of his words sink into their bones.
"Remember this — the sun does not rise to comfort you.
It rises to burn away those too afraid to face its light."
A murmur rippled through the ranks — half fear, half reverence.
Gareth couldn't look away.
That aura. That voice.
That certainty.
For a moment, it felt like he was standing in the presence of something not merely strong, but inevitable.
So this is what power looks like, he thought.
Unshakable. Unforgiving. Alive.
Arcten's gaze swept the room again, slow as a blade sliding from its sheath.
The golden aura around him thinned to a sharp line—no longer warm light but a blade-edge watching them.
He planted both palms on the polished rail, leaning forward as if the space itself were a table he could test their resolve on.
The silence tightened, compressing the breath in every chest.
"Tell me," he said, voice like iron dragged across stone, merciless and precise.
"How many of you here would give up now? How many would prefer a quiet life, a safe bed, a warm hearth? Raise your hands."
He let the word hang, a gauntlet thrown. The cadets shifted—nervous motions, sheepish glances at one another.
A few fingers twitched at the edges of sleeves. No one moved.
"Good." Arcten did not smile this time. "Then tell me this:
how many of you would die for glory? How many of you will march until your name is a bloodstain on the ground and the world remembers it?"
He stepped down from the rail, the light around him flaring like a pulse. His shadow fell across the ranks like an eclipse.
One by one, tentative at first, then with growing conviction, fists rose.
Not a roar—yet—but a steady, spreading storm of hands:
Cadets who had trained through winter frost, who had listened to lullabies of steel and oath, who'd come to the academy with nothing but hunger and a blade.
Arcten's eyes found Gareth in the crowd. The commander's look was not pity; it was a measurement. A weighing of weightless things.
"Good," he repeated, quieter, closer—so close that the cadets felt it in their teeth.
"Glory is not promised. Glory is demanded. It will take your joy, it will take your blood, it will take what you hold dearest—sometimes without asking."
He let the statement cut, then finished like a verdict.
"Choose now." His voice hardened into a command. "Choose whether you will stand and be forged—or kneel and be forgotten.
There is no third option in the light of the Sun Blade."
The hall hummed. The hands stayed aloft. Faces set like hammered metal.
Arcten straightened, the aura cooling into something like a crown.
"Then follow me. The plain awaits. Let us see if your hands are as steady as your promises."
A low hum rippled through the tower — deep, resonant, almost alive.
Commander Arcten stood at the center of the platform, his eyes half-lidded, his hands opening slowly to either side.
Then — his Veil unfolded.
It wasn't summoned. It erupted.
A blinding gold tore through the air like sunlight condensed into pressure, slamming through every corner of the hall.
The light wasn't warm — it was heavy. Every breath became molten, every heartbeat dragged against gravity itself.
The air shimmered like glass on the verge of breaking.
Cadets staggered backward, their uniforms rippling under the weight of his presence.
Arcten's voice cut through the brilliance — clear, commanding, and cruelly calm.
"If you fall down… you fail."
The gold light thickened, flooding into the cracks of the stone walls, tracing ancient runes that pulsed like veins.
"Your teachers," Arcten said, stepping forward, "have handed you over to us — the Sun Blades — to see if you are fit to stand in the kingdom's light."
Then, finally, his mouth curved into something close to a smile.
But it wasn't kind. It was sadistic, a commander's grin at the edge of carnage.
And the Veil — oh, the Veil — pulsed once more.
This time it consumed.
The golden rays burst outward, cascading over the entire hall.
Hundreds of cadets gasped, their eyes going wide as streams of pure energy sank through their skin — uninvited, unstoppable.
Some tried to resist, but the radiance flooded their own veil faster than instinct could react.
Their knees buckled. Mouths opened in silent screams.
The first to fall collapsed instantly. Then the next hundred. Then hundreds more.
A wave of unconscious bodies hit the marble floor — thud after thud — until nearly half of the two thousand lay still.
Overwhelmed by the sheer force of his unleashed power.
The gold dimmed, slowly fading into the air like burning dust.
Arcten looked over the ruin of students, his expression unreadable at first.
Then disappointment crept in — quiet, profound.
"This…" he said, his tone low, almost weary, "is an uninteresting generation."
He turned away, golden embers drifting from his shoulders like dying stars.
"You believe war has ended," he murmured, more to himself than to them.
"But war never ends. It simply waits… for the next generation foolish enough to forget it."
Silence lingered — thick and heavy.
Only half the cadets still stood, trembling under the lingering pressure of his Veil.
The others lay unconscious — living proof of how cruel the light could be.
Arcten's eyes swept the hall like a blade.
"If no one here can handle this," he said, voice cold and absolute
"then they will die quickly when the war returns. I will not let the people of Sion be torn apart by fools who thought the sun never sets."
His words landed like iron. For a moment, the only sound was the slow settling of dust and the distant drip of water from the tower rafters.
Then the nobles began to laugh.
It started as a ripple — a throat-clearing, a conceited smile here, a quiet snort there — and swelled into the thin, high laughter of privilege.
They stepped back from the fallen forms as if the light had been an inconvenience rather than a reckoning.
Faces tilted, shoulders eased.
A dozen boys in white uniforms exchanged smug glances, the sort of amusement that smells of centuries of being given second chances.
"Looks like the commoners can't stand the sun," one of them called, voice lacquered with malice.
Another clapped slowly, mockingly. "Perhaps the academy sent the wrong freight to the front."
The hall's atmosphere curdled. The nobles' mirth, brittle and sharp, cut through what little dignity the prone students had left.
But not everyone laughed.
A few noble faces hardened, eyes narrowing with something like unease, or perhaps something closer to shame.
An older trainee — a girl with hair braided tight and silver-threaded cuff — folded her arms and stared down at the fallen. Her mouth pressed into a thin line.
Beside her, a noble youth swallowed, his jaw working.
Even some of the laughing nobles felt the ripple of conscience and pulled their smiles thin, but the majority leaned into it, clinging to the illusion that power meant immunity.
Arcten's smile returned — slow, surgical, and merciless. He folded his hands behind his back as though observing livestock.
"You find humor in this?" he asked softly.
The question carried no shock; it carried the barely concealed threat of something far worse than inconvenience.
The laughter stuttered. A hush fell over the more rowdy nobles.
Those who had laughed now laughed less confidently, like men caught mid-theft.
Arcten stepped down from the platform. The golden aura around him dimmed to a glittering haze, but something in the stone still thrummed with residual force.
He walked among the bodies, boots echoing with certainty, and looked each standing cadet in the eye — noble and commoner alike.
"You may think this is a test of strength," he said, voice low so every ear had to lean.
"You are wrong. Strength without backbone is worth nothing on a battlefield.
If we send cowards to fight, they die. If we send arrogant fools, they slaughter our people."
He paused directly before the block of nobles who had jeered.
Up close his presence felt like a hand pressing the throat.
"You call yourselves heirs of Sion," he said, "but Sion's heirs protect the weak.
They do not laugh while blood pools on their doorstep."
A silence that felt like a verdict swallowed the hall.
Then Arcten raised a single hand and pointed toward the fallen commoners.
"Guards," he ordered. "Tend to the wounded. Carry the rest to the infirmary. We will not leave them in the dust."
Hundreds of armored Sun Blades moved with efficient mercy.
They began hauling the unconscious cadets with practiced care, and the laughter died entirely as the reality of the situation — the human weight, the smell of singed cloth, the hollowed eyes — filled the space.
"Listen well," Arcten said, voice sharpened now into command.
"Only those who remain standing will continue. The rest will be held until the Headmaster decides their fate. If you think you can scoff at death today because you wear white and were born in silk, remember this: light does not care for lineage."
Gareth watched it all, jaw tight. The room spun with shame and anger and that peculiar, hot ember of something else — relief.
He had pockets of power, raw and ragged, but he had seen what the Veil could do when a true master opened it.
The memories of the book's five words pressed feverishly at the edge of his mind.
THE ECLIPSE IS ALMOST HERE — and the commander's golden display had just given those words weight.
Around him, nobles shifted, eyes flicking to one another. Pride curdled into calculation.
The commoners who remained — the hundred still upright — found themselves center-staged.
Some glared back, faces set like steel. Some bowed their heads and breathed shallow prayers.
A few let a grin break through, not of mockery but of feral determination.
Arcten's gaze landed on Gareth for a heartbeat longer than necessary.
An unreadable flicker passed through the commander's eyes — approval, curiosity, or the cold recognition that here.
Perhaps, were the "two sparks" the Headmaster had feared.
"Prepare," Arcten said finally, stepping back to the platform.
"The real test begins at dawn. Survive until then, and you will have given us reason to keep you."
He turned, and the lingering gold dimmed into ordinary light.
The hall remained raw with aftermath — the groans of the wounded being carried away.
The embarrassed whispers of nobles who had laughed too soon, the rigid silence of those still standing.
Gareth felt the words in his chest like a new armor: survive. Protect.
The hall's light finally dimmed, leaving only the soft hum of exhausted Veil residue clinging to the air.
Arcten's footsteps faded into silence, the echoes swallowed by the vast chamber.
Around Gareth, the survivors stood in uneasy quiet — a hundred faces caught between awe and fear, pride and trembling resolve.
The wounded were carried away, the laughter gone, the air heavy with something unspoken.
Gareth exhaled slowly, eyes lingering on the golden dust that still floated in the air where Arcten had stood.
It shimmered faintly — like the last breath of a dying sun.
Cassiel elbowed him lightly. "You look pale."
"I'm fine Cassiel," Gareth muttered, though his hands were still trembling.
He looked toward the gates where the commander had gone, where the real test waited beyond the dawn.
The golden wall glowed faintly in the distance — vast, silent, unyielding.
A chill crawled up his spine.
"...I don't want to go there," he whispered.
"It sounds horrifying."
The words fell quiet — half a joke, half the truth.
For a moment, even the Veil seemed to agree.