Elias left the office with hands that wanted to shake but refused on principle.
Forty to sixty percent mortality rate. That meant roughly half the team might not return. But which half? The experienced Saint and Ascended? Or the Awakened disciples sent to prove themselves?
The mathematics were cold: Kieran and Thaddeus would likely survive anything short of direct confrontation with the Authority itself. They were too skilled, too powerful, too essential to continental defense to waste on a reconnaissance mission that went bad.
Which meant the mortality projections were primarily aimed at Dante, Kaël, and himself.
One or two of them might not come back.
He found himself walking toward the eastern training yard without conscious decision. Three hours until dawn. Three hours to process what agreeing to this mission meant.
The yard was empty. Silent. Just stone and shadows and the memory of a thousand practice sessions.
Elias sat on a training bench, staring at the folder in his hands.
Inside were maps marking ritual sites. Demon territorial patterns. Evacuation routes. And buried in the tactical assessment, a single line that made his blood run cold:
Intelligence suggests coordinated activity between northern Authority and unidentified Pact Bearer(s) with access to academy operations. Potential internal security compromise.
Traitors. Inside Aspencrest.
Feeding information to demons. Coordinating attacks. Maybe even sabotaging defenses while disciples like Dante and Kaël were deployed on missions that might be traps.
His hands clenched around the folder.
Three days to prepare. Seventy-two hours to train with a team, master the brief, and somehow become ready for the kind of mission that killed forty to sixty percent of participants.
Three days before he potentially walked to his death in the northern darkness.
But the alternative—staying safe behind walls while something patient and powerful prepared to tear those walls down—that wasn't an option. Not for him. Not for disciples.
Not after three years learning what real darkness looked like.
He stood. Tucked the folder inside his coat. Started running through combat sequences alone in the predawn darkness, body remembering patterns that survival had burned into muscle and bone.
Because if he was going north in three days, he'd go ready.
And if one of them had to be in that forty to sixty percent who didn't return—
Then it wouldn't be because Elias Kane hadn't prepared hard enough.
* * *
SEVENTY-TWO HOURS LATER
Dawn broke cold and merciless.
Elias stood at the northern gate with his pack checked three times, every strap secure, every weapon positioned exactly where instinct could find it without thought. Three days of intensive preparation. Seventy-two hours of maps memorized, protocols drilled, contingencies reviewed until they existed more in muscle memory than conscious planning.
He'd said no goodbyes. The disciples he'd been training—Marcus, the handful of others who'd started gathering in the eastern yard each morning—didn't know where he was going. Safer that way. For them and for operational security.
But Marcus had noticed. Of course he had. Two years stuck at Awakened rank taught observation skills that academy stars often lacked.
He'd appeared at Elias's dormitory door last night. Said nothing. Just placed something on the desk—a small carved wooden token, rough but sincere, with the reinforcement symbol etched into its surface.
"Come back," Marcus had said. That's all. Then left.
The token now rested in Elias's inside pocket, against his heart. Not because he was sentimental. Because it reminded him what he was fighting for.
Not glory. Not advancement. Just the chance to keep forging weapons from wasted potential.
One hammer strike at a time.
Footsteps announced company. Dante and Kaël appeared from the barracks, both wearing expressions Elias had learned to read over the past weeks. Dante's jaw was set with that particular tightness that meant he'd run every calculation sixteen times and still couldn't eliminate the uncertainty. Kaël moved with forced lightness, compensating for the electric tension that wanted to bleed through his carefully maintained composure.
They were afraid.
Good. Fear was honest. Fear kept you alive.
"Ready?" Dante asked. Not really a question. Just confirmation that the time had come.
"No," Elias said. "But when are you ever ready to walk toward something that might kill you?"
Kaël laughed—short, sharp, genuine despite the tension. "Brother, that's the most honest thing I've heard all week."
Kieran Holt emerged last, that perpetual smile firmly in place. But Elias
noticed things now that he'd missed at first meeting. The way Kieran's eyes
swept the courtyard—not casually but tactically, counting exits, assessing
threats, evaluating defensive positions even here, even safe behind Aspencrest's
walls. The way his hands never quite relaxed, always positioned to reach weapons
that weren't currently drawn.
Twenty years in the field. Fifty-two Class Three Authorities sealed. Eleven
near-death experiences.
The smile should have been armor. That's what Elias expected—a mask worn for
disciples who needed to see confidence. But something about it felt... wrong.
Not false. Wrong in the way that truth sometimes felt wrong when you'd learned
to expect deception.
Because the smile reached his eyes. Even when no one was watching. Even when
tactical assessment should have demanded grimness.
Elias had seen performative joy in Ashwell—dealers smiling at customers,
predators grinning before violence. Those smiles died the moment the audience
looked away.
Kieran's didn't.
It persisted. Genuine. Deliberate. The smile of someone who'd seen darkness deep
enough to drown in but had chosen—actively, consciously chosen—not to let it
dictate his expression.
That was either profound strength or profound insanity.
Elias suspected it was both.
"Final headcount," Kieran said, voice carrying that military precision. "Thaddeus."
"Present." The big Ascended hefted his warhammer—a brutal thing of reinforced steel that had probably caved in more demon skulls than most disciples saw in their entire careers. At Ascended rank, Thaddeus could bench-press a horse. Probably had, just to prove a point.
"Dante."
"Here." Dante's hand went to the sword at his back—checking, adjusting, that habitual verification he made whenever preparation shifted to action. As if ensuring the blade would still sing for him when darkness came.
"Kaël."
"Yo." Kaël appeared from behind a supply cart, twin daggers hanging at his hips, that practiced casualness trying very hard to pretend this was just another mission. Just another three days in hostile territory. Just another forty to sixty percent mortality rate.
Nobody believed it. But the performance mattered.
"Elias."
"Present."
Kieran's eyes swept over them.
His gaze lingered on Elias.
Something passed between them. Not words. Not even acknowledgment. Just the recognition of two people who'd both learned the hard way that survival wasn't guaranteed, preparation wasn't protection, and sometimes all you could do was walk forward anyway.
Then Kieran turned toward the gates.
"Mount up."
* * *
They rode north as dawn broke properly, painting Eldivarn's medieval countryside in shades of gold and shadow. Beautiful, if you didn't know what was waiting out there. If you couldn't feel the weight of something patient and powerful, pressing down from forty kilometers distant like atmospheric pressure before a hurricane.
Elias rode in silence, mind processing everything Aldric had shared in that midnight briefing. The maps. The projections. The single terrible line about internal security compromise.
Traitors. Pact Bearers. Humans serving demons, feeding them intelligence, coordinating attacks from within the very walls meant to protect against darkness.
Who? How many? How deep did the infection go?
No answers. Just questions. And the cold certainty that this reconnaissance mission served multiple purposes.
Find the Authority. Assess its capabilities. Gather intelligence.
And—unspoken but implicit in Aldric's final words—survive as a team. Prove that disciples could still function when darkness pressed close. Demonstrate that Aspencrest's next generation wasn't just status-seeking students playing at war.
Show that real champions still existed.
Elias glanced at Dante and Kaël riding ahead. At Kieran leading with that smile fixed in place. At Thaddeus bringing up the rear, warhammer across his shoulders, eyes scanning the forest with the perpetual vigilance of someone who'd survived too many ambushes to ever fully relax.
But looking at his companions now—at the way Dante's hand never strayed far from his blade, the way Kaël tracked movement in the tree line with electric-blue eyes that saw patterns most people missed, the way Kieran and Thaddeus moved with the economical precision of veterans who'd earned every scar—
Elias found himself thinking: Maybe it won't be us.
Maybe we'll be the ones who prove the statistics wrong.
Maybe survival isn't about being powerful or prepared or perfect.
Maybe it's just about refusing to quit when everything says you should.
He'd spent three years in the Divine Trial learning exactly that lesson.
Time to see if it still applied in the real world.
Where demons didn't just test you.
They killed you.
And the difference between those two things was razor-thin and measured in split-second decisions that either saved your life or ended it.
The horses' breath misted in the cold morning air.
And ahead, somewhere in the darkness beyond sight, something waited.
Patient.
Powerful.
And very, very interested in what five disciples might reveal about Aspencrest's readiness for war.