The final bell was a death knell.
Its shrill, electric screech echoed through the reinforced concrete halls of the military academy, not signaling freedom, but a two-day reprieve. A forty-eight-hour countdown to hell. In two days, Mark and his entire year group would be shipped forward to the military camp, where the real training would begin. They wouldn't be students anymore.
Mark kept his head down, his threadbare backpack clutched to his chest like a shield. The hallway seemed to stretch into infinity, a grim, gray tunnel lit by flickering fluorescent bars—a testament to the academy's decaying priority for anything but producing soldiers. It was absurdly long, designed, he always thought, to make you feel small and insignificant, to remind you that your journey from one place to another was always a march.
He was lost in the grim arithmetic of his future—the statistical probability of his survival past the first month at the frontline (vanishingly small), the likelihood of a mutation manifesting this late (nonexistent)—when he walked straight into a solid, unyielding mass.
The impact jarred him, snapping his head back. He stumbled, his backpack falling to the floor with a dull thud. Looking up, a cold dread instantly washed away the daze. It was Kael, a seventeen-year-old boy whose mutation had manifested at twelve, granting him skin that could shift into various armored reptile textures. Behind him were his two usual sycophants, Jax and Rourke.
Kael looked down, a slow, cruel smile spreading across his face. "Well, look what the Null dragged in." His voice was a low rumble, like grinding stones. "Not watching where you're going, defect? Think you're too good to look where you're stepping?"
"S-sorry, Kael," Mark stammered, his voice barely a whisper. He bent to grab his bag, his hands trembling. "I didn't see you."
"Didn't see me?" Kael chuckled, a sound devoid of warmth. "Maybe those null eyes of yours are as useless as the rest of you."
Before Mark could straighten up, Kael's hand shot out and grabbed him by the front of his uniform, hauling him up until his toes barely scraped the floor. The fabric strained under the pressure.
"I think you did it on purpose," Kael hissed, his face inches from Mark's. His breath smelled of cheap protein paste. "I think you little nulls are getting bold. Thinking you're our equals."
Mark's heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird in a bone cage. "No, I swear, I wasn't—"
It happened too fast. Kael's grip on Mark's shirt didn't loosen, but his other hand clenched into a fist. A horrifying metamorphosis took place. The skin on his knuckles darkened, taking on a glossy, green-black hue. It thickened, spreading up his fingers and wrist, forming interlocking scales as tough as forged iron. The nails elongated into short, brutal claws.
There was no warning, no wind-up. Kael drove the reptilian fist sideways across Mark's temple.
Mark world exploded in a supernova of white-hot pain. There was a sound, a wet, sickening thwack that seemed to come from inside his own skull. The force of the blow was absolute, inhuman. His body went limp in Kael's grasp before he was released, crumpling to the cold linoleum floor.
For a moment, there was nothing but the ringing. A high-pitched, deafening whine that swallowed all other sound. Then the pain rushed in, a tidal wave of agony that centered on the side of his head. He could feel a warm, sticky wetness already matting his hair and trickling down his neck, pooling in his ear. His vision swam, the gray hallway blurring and tilting nauseatingly.
Tears welled in his eyes, hot and shameful, spilling over and tracing clean paths through the dust on his cheeks. He couldn't stop them. He curled into a fetal position, a low, broken whimper escaping his lips. Each throb of his heart sent a fresh lance of pain through his skull.
Through the blur of tears and the haze of pain, he saw the polished boots of students gathering around. He heard the laughter. It wasn't just Kael and his friends now. It was a chorus. Muted at first, then louder, crueler. Someone mimicked his whimper. Someone else kicked his fallen backpack, sending it skittering down the hall.
"Look at him cry. Pathetic." "Should have rolled over and shown his belly." "Nulls shouldn't even be allowed to walk the same halls."
The voices swirled around him, a jagged symphony of contempt. Kael's scaled hand reverted to normal flesh. He spat on the floor near Mark's head. "Remember your place, defect. The monsters will be less merciful."
Then, the boots moved away. The laughter faded, echoing down the interminable hallway until it was gone, leaving only the relentless ringing and the sound of his own ragged, hitching breaths.
He didn't know how long he lay there. Time had lost all meaning. Eventually, the urge to be anywhere else, to be invisible, overpowered the pain and the humiliation. Using the wall for support, he pushed himself up. The world tilted violently. Nausea churned in his gut. He touched his temple, his fingers coming away slick and red with blood.
He found his backpack, shouldered it, and began the long, unsteady walk home. He kept his head down, avoiding the few remaining students, each step a miniature earthquake in his skull. The blood dripped onto the shoulder of his uniform, a dark, spreading stain.
His home was a single room in the student barracks. It was a bleak, utilitarian cube: a bed that folded into a desk, a small kitchenette with a cold induction plate, a bathroom with a rust-stained shower stall. It was all one room, all his. His sanctuary.
He dropped his bag by the door and went straight to the small sink, running cold water over a clean-ish rag. He pressed it to his temple, hissing as the cold met the throbbing wound. The water in the basin swirled pink. He stared at his reflection in the small metal mirror—pale, terrified, with eyes red-rimmed from crying. A nobody. A null.
The gnawing emptiness in his stomach reminded him he hadn't eaten. Mechanically, wanting the mindless distraction of a task, he pulled a single, wrinkled root vegetable and a small knife from a cupboard. He stood at the small counter, the rag still held to his head with one hand, and began to chop with the other.
His mind was elsewhere. On the frontline. On his parents. On the ring. His right hand, the one holding the knife, still had the golden band on its finger. It was his ritual, his secret rebellion. He never took it off, not even for chores, not even for fights. It was his tether to a world where he was loved.
A sudden, sharper pulse of pain from his head made his hand jerk. The knife, which had been mindlessly slicing, slipped.
The blade bit deep into the tip of his left index finger.
"Ah!" he gasped, dropping the knife with a clatter. He pulled the hand away, a bright, welling bead of blood already forming on the cut. It was deep. He fumbled for the rag, moving it from his head to his finger, applying pressure.
In his haste, he squeezed the finger, and a single, fat drop of blood welled up and escaped, falling directly onto the golden ring on his other hand.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then, the ring grew warm. Not just warm—scalding hot, like a band of molten metal around his finger.
Mark cried out in shock and pain, trying to pull the ring off, but it was fused to his skin. The single drop of blood on its surface sizzled and was absorbed, vanishing into the gold. The ancient, simple script along the band began to glow with a fierce, inner light.
Then, the world erupted.
A light, not of gold, but of the deepest, most vivid crimson he had ever seen, exploded from the ring. It didn't illuminate the room; it consumed it. It was a solid, blinding wall of pure red energy that swallowed the bed, the sink, the walls, the very air. There was no sound, only an immense, silent pressure that filled his ears and crushed in on him from all sides. He couldn't see, he couldn't breathe, he was nothing but a consciousness adrift in a sea of blinding crimson.
He blinked.
The light was gone. The crushing pressure was gone. The metallic smell of his dorm was replaced by an overwhelming, organic symphony of scents: damp earth, pine resin, wildflowers, and clean, thin air.
The throbbing in his head and his finger were distant memories.
Mark was no longer in his room.
He was standing on a gentle slope, ankle-deep in soft, green grass. Before him, a vast, ancient forest of immense, towering trees stretched as far as he could see, their canopy a vibrant tapestry of green and gold against a crystal-blue sky.