The courtyard of Halcyon had always been a place where power was something you witnessed from a distance—something that belonged to others, to people who seemed carved from different clay. But standing there now, feeling the pre-dawn cold seep through his thin grey tracksuit, Elijah understood with crystalline clarity that this place had become something else entirely.
A crucible.
The kind of place where things either hardened into something stronger or shattered into pieces too small to ever reassemble.
The Running Field
Dawn hadn't quite broken when Elijah found himself standing at the edge of the field. The world existed in that strange in-between state—not night anymore, but not quite day either. Everything was painted in shades of grey and silver, the kind of colorlessness that made reality feel slightly unmoored, dreamlike.
The grass beneath his feet was cropped so close it almost felt like carpet, each blade heavy with dew that soaked through his cheap canvas sneakers within seconds. The moisture was shockingly cold, a liquid chill that made his toes curl involuntarily. The field stretched out before him like an accusation, a flat expanse that ran all the way to the tree line at least two hundred meters distant. Morning mist clung to the ground in lazy patches, giving the whole scene an ethereal quality that might have been beautiful if Elijah's stomach wasn't currently trying to climb up into his throat.
His breath came out in visible puffs, small clouds of warmth that dissipated almost instantly in the frigid air. He wrapped his arms around himself, the thin fabric of the tracksuit offering about as much protection as tissue paper. The shivers started in his shoulders and radiated outward, making his teeth want to chatter. He clenched his jaw to stop them, not wanting to show weakness.
Not that it mattered.
Standing beside him was Dr. Nina Isley, and the contrast between them was so stark it felt almost cruel, like the universe was making a point about the distance between what Elijah was and what he was supposed to become.
She looked like a different species.
Where Elijah's tracksuit hung loose and shapeless on his frame, Nina wore compression gear that seemed engineered by scientists who understood things about the human body that normal people didn't. The fabric was matte black, so dark it seemed to absorb the weak dawn light rather than reflect it, making her appear like a void cut out of reality. Her hair was pulled back in that same severe braid he'd seen yesterday, not a single strand out of place despite the early hour. Her posture was perfect—spine straight, shoulders back, weight balanced evenly on both feet.
She wasn't shivering.
In fact, shivering implied a passive response to cold, an involuntary reaction. What Nina radiated was something entirely different. She seemed to be vibrating with a barely-contained readiness, like a bowstring drawn back and held, waiting for the moment of release. Her eyes were sharp and alert, scanning the field with the focus of a predator assessing terrain.
Elijah suddenly felt very, very small.
"A strong self," Nina said, and her voice cut through the morning quiet like a blade through silk—clean, precise, allowing no room for doubt or argument—"doesn't start with a strong punch. It starts with the will to command your own breath. To tell your burning lungs 'no, you will not stop,' and for your legs to obey. It starts with disciplined cardio. Your mind breaks before your body does. We train the body to outlast the mind's weakness."
Each word landed with weight. This wasn't a motivational speech. This was a statement of fundamental truth, delivered with the certainty of someone who had tested these principles against reality and found them unshakeable.
Elijah wanted to say something—maybe ask how far they'd be running, or whether there would be a warm-up, or literally anything to delay the inevitable. But Nina didn't wait for a reply. She never did, he was learning. She simply acted, and the world rearranged itself around her actions.
"To that tree and back," she said, gesturing toward a massive oak at the far edge of the field, its branches spreading like dark veins against the grey sky. "Match my pace."
And then she was moving.
It wasn't an all-out sprint—Elijah's panicked brain registered that much through the surge of adrenaline. But calling it a "jog" felt like a criminal understatement. It was a punishing, steady rhythm that devoured ground with terrifying efficiency. Her footfalls were nearly silent despite the speed, each step placed with precision. Her arms pumped in perfect ninety-degree angles, her breathing already settling into a controlled pattern even as she accelerated.
For a moment, Elijah just stood there, his brain struggling to process the command and translate it into action.
Then survival instinct kicked in.
He scrambled after her, his body jerking into motion with all the grace of a puppet whose strings had been yanked by an amateur.
Elijah's initial burst was pure chaos given form.
Adrenaline flooded his system, that primal cocktail of fight-or-flight chemicals that made his heart hammer against his ribs like it was trying to escape. His legs pumped frantically, strides too short and too quick, feet slapping against the wet grass with graceless desperation. Each impact sent cold water splashing up against his shins, making the fabric of his tracksuit cling to his legs.
He kept her in sight—barely. The black figure ahead of him seemed to glide across the field while he floundered, all wasted motion and inefficient angles. Already his arms were doing something weird, swinging across his body instead of straight back and forth, throwing off his balance with each stride.
But he was moving. He was doing it. A tiny spark of something that might have been pride tried to kindle in his chest.
It was premature.
One Minute In:
The first stitch hit him like someone had driven a hot needle directly under his ribs on the right side. The pain was sharp and specific, making him gasp and instinctively curl his body away from it. The shift in posture threw off his stride even more. His breathing, which had started ragged, now became desperate gulps of cold air that seemed to bypass his lungs entirely. Where was the oxygen going? Why couldn't he catch his breath?
His form, already poor, began to deteriorate completely. His arms, tired from the frantic pumping, started to flail slightly, no longer moving with any purpose. His head bobbed with each step, chin jutting forward as his body unconsciously tried to pull more air into his burning lungs. His shoulders crept up toward his ears, tension building in muscles that should have been loose and efficient.
The black figure ahead pulled further away. Nina was a machine, a perfectly calibrated instrument designed for exactly this purpose. The gap between them widened with each passing second, each of Elijah's struggling breaths.
Two Minutes In:
The tree line ahead, which had seemed achievable when he started, now looked like a cruel joke. It wasn't getting closer. If anything, it seemed to be receding, moving away as fast as he moved toward it, some kind of sadistic treadmill trick.
And then—humiliatingly—Nina was already on her way back.
She passed him somewhere near the halfway point, moving with that same relentless efficiency, and for a brief moment their eyes met. Elijah expected mockery, or disappointment, or something that would confirm what he already knew—that he was pathetically inadequate for this.
Instead, her expression held only assessment. Clinical, detached evaluation, like a scientist observing data. Somehow that was worse. It meant his struggle didn't even register as worthy of emotional response. It was simply information to be processed and cataloged.
Her breathing was a controlled, rhythmic hush-hush, perfectly timed to her steps. Her footfalls were nearly silent against the grass, barely disturbing the morning mist. The disparity between them hit Elijah like a physical blow, adding psychological pain to the mounting physical agony.
His legs, which had been heavy before, now turned to lead. Each step required conscious effort, a deliberate command from his brain to muscles that were loudly protesting the arrangement. His feet dragged through the grass as if it had transformed into thick mud, each blade catching and pulling.
Three Minutes In:
The return journey became a descent into personal purgatory.
Elijah's vision began to tunnel, the world narrowing until it lost all peripheral detail. Colors bled away, leaving only that essential core of grey field and distant finish line. His brain, struggling to process the overload of pain signals, started shutting down non-essential functions. Peripheral vision? Non-essential. Awareness of his surroundings? Non-essential. The ability to think in complete sentences? Definitely non-essential.
What remained was purely physical. The burn in his thighs had progressed beyond pain into something else—a deep, nauseating ache that radiated all the way down to his bones. The fire in his chest consumed everything, making each breath feel like he was inhaling shards of glass. A metallic taste coated his mouth, the distinctive flavor of pure exhaustion that seemed to coat his teeth and tongue.
He wanted to stop.
God, he wanted to stop.
The desire wasn't just a thought—it was a physical craving, an overwhelming need that made every other want he'd ever experienced feel trivial by comparison. He wanted to crumple onto the dewy grass and never get up. He wanted to lie there and let the cold seep into his bones and maybe just cease to exist entirely because existing hurt too much.
One foot in front of the other. That was all he could manage. The most basic possible motion, stripped of any technique or efficiency. Just the animal mechanics of forward progress.
A faint shimmer began to seep from Elijah's skin, particularly concentrated around his neck and the crown of his head. It wasn't quite smoke and wasn't quite light—more like a distortion in the air itself, the same kind of visual warping you'd see rising off hot asphalt in summer. But this had color, or something like color. Unstable hues that flickered and shifted: sour yellow, the color of frustration and bile, mixing with cold frightened blue, the shade of inadequacy and self-doubt.
The shimmer formed a thin, pathetic cloud around his stumbling form, pulsing weakly in rhythm with his ragged breathing.
Elijah didn't notice it. He couldn't. His entire consciousness had contracted to the immediate demands of survival—breathe, step, breathe, step. There was no room for awareness of anything else.
But from the viewing window of a distant administration building, certain eyes with certain augmentations might have seen it clearly. Nina Isley, her own run completed with minimal effort, stood watching the struggling boy make his agonizing way across the final hundred meters. The faint shimmer around him pulsed, flickered, and then—
It was drawn downward.
The energy, if that's what it was, seemed to be sucked back into his body through the base of his skull with an almost audible sensation, a psychic slurp that defied physical description but nevertheless happened. The Orrhion chip, that foreign technology embedded in his nervous system, fed.
A cruel smile touched Nina's lips, barely there and gone in an instant, but unmistakable in its meaning.
The Final Push
Elijah's will had guttered down to almost nothing. The finish line—really just an imaginary point where Nina stood watching—was thirty meters away. It might as well have been thirty miles.
His next step was an impossible mountain to climb. His leg refused the command, muscles simply not responding to neural signals. This was it. This was where he stopped, where the weakness won, where—
A thought cut through the pain-fog like a knife through butter.
It was bizarre. It didn't feel like his own thinking, didn't have the familiar texture of his internal monologue. It was cold and clear and utterly compelling, arriving in his mind with absolute certainty.
You can do this. The pain is data. The weakness is a lie. Move.
It wasn't encouragement, wasn't a pep talk. It was a command issued with such authority that disobedience didn't even register as an option.
And his body, functioning on some level separate from his breaking mind, obeyed.
He didn't sprint. He didn't suddenly find a reserve of energy or experience a dramatic second wind. None of that happened. He simply didn't fall. His legs kept churning in that same mechanical, shuffling rhythm. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. Basic locomotion reduced to its most fundamental components.
He crossed the imaginary finish line where Nina stood, perfect and composed and not even slightly winded.
Then his legs gave out completely.
Elijah collapsed forward onto his hands and knees in the wet grass, his body convulsing as it tried to expel something from his stomach. Nothing came up—he hadn't eaten anything—but the dry heaves wracked him anyway, his abdomen contracting violently, his throat burning.
Sweat mixed with dew, running down his face in streams. His arms trembled, barely able to support his weight. His lungs sucked air in desperate, wheezing gasps that didn't seem to satisfy the overwhelming need for oxygen.
He'd never felt more pathetic in his entire life.
Nina's footsteps approached, those same nearly-silent steps, and then she was beside him. Her hand settled on his heaving back, the touch surprisingly gentle despite everything. Warm through the thin fabric of his tracksuit.
"You finished," she said, her voice neutral, clinical, stating simple fact. "The first time is always the hardest. Remember this feeling. This is the boundary of your old self."
Through the haze of exhaustion and humiliation, somewhere in the part of his brain that was still functioning, Elijah understood what she meant.
This moment—gasping in the wet grass, tasting failure and metal and something darker—this was the threshold. The old Elijah, the weak one, the observer who never participated, ended here.
Whatever came next would be something different.
Something forged in this crucible.
If he survived it.