Chapter 5: The Price of Zero

The ceremony went on for four more hours, and the hall never quite stopped laughing at him.

One by one, the first-years climbed the steps. Darius Holt awakened an A-rank class called Hawkblade Duelist, and the cheering was almost as loud as it had been for Vivienne. On his way back to his seat, he looked straight at her, clearly waiting for her to say something, and she pointedly didn’t. Most of the noble children came out with B or C classes. A few came out with D and tried very hard not to cry.

Near the end of the day, Mira climbed the steps. She drank her tonic as if it had personally insulted her, slapped her hand on the crystal, and lit it up with a warm orange glow that rose well past the middle.

Class: Hearthwarden

Rarity: B

Commoners never really got cheers. Still, a few people clapped, some of the teachers wrote things down, and a B-rank class out of the lower city was the kind of thing people would talk about later. Aren clapped as loudly as he possibly could. Mira looked straight at him from the platform, and something in her face eased for the first time in a week.

She found him on the steps outside afterward, while the crowd thinned. Students kept walking past and trying out his new name. Nice class, Zero! Carry my bag, Zero! Mira gave one of them a look that made him walk noticeably faster.

"Hearthwarden," Aren said. "That’s a good class. A really good one."

"It’s a defense class. I get to stand in front of people and get hit." She shrugged, trying hard not to smile. "Fits me, I guess."

"It does."

She studied him with her arms crossed. "I don’t care what that crystal says. You hear me? You’re the smartest person I know. You’re not a servant."

"I hear you."

"Good." She punched him in the shoulder, not gently. "Now stop carrying that girl’s jewelry."

She was gone before he could answer. He watched her march down the hill, and he thought, a little miserably, that Mira believed in him. She always had.

’And I’m going to spend the next few months lying to her face.’

The next morning, the first-years were sorted by rank.

There were five classes, named by letter. Class S had exactly one student, who sat alone in a beautiful room on the top floor of the east tower with her own private instructor. Class A held Darius and a handful of others, and the rest of the nobles filled B and C.

Class D lived in the basement of the old building, next to the laundry. It took the D and F classes, which meant mostly commoners plus a few unlucky nobles who looked like they wanted to die. Mira, with her B-rank class, should have been on the second floor, but twenty demerits from the trial had cost her the right to choose, and somebody had made sure she landed in the basement too.

Their instructor for basic combat was Professor Crane.

"Some of you," Crane said on the first morning, walking slowly between the desks, "will become useful Awakened. You will guard caravans. You will clear small Rifts. You will serve the kingdom in modest ways." He stopped beside Aren’s desk. "And some of you will carry things for the people who do."

The class laughed, and Aren laughed with them, because it was easier.

That afternoon, Crane assigned him to haul the training gear up to Class A. It was a long climb with a crate of practice swords on his back, and when he reached the top yard, Darius was waiting. He watched Aren set the crate down, picked up a wooden sword, and rapped him on the back of the knee hard enough to drop him.

"Careful, Zero. Servants should kneel properly."

Aren stayed obediently on one knee and said nothing. Behind Darius, the rest of Class A smirked. Vivienne wasn’t among them, since her class trained alone.

[Darius Holt. Hostility: 82%.][Anchor slots full. Darius Holt cannot be anchored.]

’Not yet,’ Aren thought, and got up, and walked back down the hill.

He waited until midnight to test it.

The night before, lying awake after the ceremony, he had received one more message from the System.

[Class Skill unlocked: Reduce to Zero (Lv. 1).][Bring one property of a target to zero for one second.][Uses: 1 per day.][Cost: The same property of the Host is reduced to zero for the same duration.]

The old practice yard behind the scholarship dormitory was always empty at night. It had a broken fence, weeds between the stones, and a single training post in the middle: a pillar of black iron as tall as a man, enchanted so first-years could hit it as hard as they liked without breaking it. Last week he’d watched a C-rank student swing at it with everything he had and leave nothing but a small scratch.

Aren took a practice sword from the rack by the fence, a cheap one, dull and badly chipped. He stood in front of the post and tried to slow his breathing deliberately.

’One property. Hardness. Bring its hardness to zero.’

Nobody had ever taught him how to use a skill. But when he raised the sword and looked at the post, something answered inside him, like a door opening in a room he hadn’t known was there.

He swung.

"Reduce to Zero."

For one second, the world went strangely quiet.

The cheap sword went through the iron post like soft bread. There was no sound and no resistance at all. The top half of the post slid sideways and hit the stones with a crash that echoed off the dormitory walls.

At the same moment, Aren’s own body went strange.

The stones under his bare feet were suddenly sharp, and even the air felt sharp. His wrist was still turning from the swing, and it turned a little too far, and the dull edge of the practice blade brushed the inside of his left arm and opened the skin like paper.

Then the second was over, and blood ran freely down his arm and dripped onto the stones. He dropped the sword and clamped his hand over the cut, breathing hard. It was long and deep, and a blunt training sword had done it with a single light touch.

For one second, his own hardness had been zero. A falling roof tile could have killed him.

He sat down beside the ruined post and started to laugh, very quietly, so nobody in the dormitory would hear.

He had cut through enchanted iron with a chipped practice sword, and he had very nearly taken his own arm off doing it. One use a day, one second at a time, and every time he used it, he would be standing in front of his enemy with nothing at all between them and his heart.

It was easily the most dangerous tool he had ever held, and he absolutely loved it!

He tore a strip off the bottom of his shirt, tied it tight around his arm, and dragged the top half of the post into the weeds behind the fence. Tomorrow the groundskeeper would find a training post sliced cleanly in half, and Aren had already decided he would be extremely surprised to hear about it.

The next morning, the whole Academy was talking about two things.

The first was the iron post behind the scholarship dormitory. Some said it was a prank by the older students. Some said it was a monster from the training Rift. One girl in Class D swore it was the ghost of a dead swordsman who walked the grounds at night. Aren listened to every theory with great interest and agreed that the ghost sounded the most likely.

The second was that Pell, the alchemist’s assistant, had run away from the Academy during the night without a word to anyone.

Aren heard it at breakfast and calmly kept eating. When he looked up, Darius Holt was standing at the entrance to the dining hall with the man in the dark coat, the one with the silver hawk on his collar. The man was murmuring in Darius’s ear, and Darius’s eyes moved slowly across the room until they found Aren, and stayed there.

[Darius Holt. Hostility: 82% -> 91%.]

’He knows I was the night porter. He doesn’t know what I did. But now he’s going to wonder.’

That afternoon, Crane sent him to the library with a stack of old ledgers for the third floor. It was a long climb, and the books were surprisingly heavy. At the top, he stopped in the doorway of the reading room.

Vivienne Ashgrave was sitting alone at a table by the window. In front of her lay an open ledger from the alchemy wing, the kind the alchemist signed for every tonic he brewed. Beside it stood a small glass vial, empty, with a paper label still tied around its neck.

She was comparing the handwriting slowly, one letter at a time.

She looked up when she heard him. Her grey eyes rested on the servant from the basement, with his armful of dusty books and the bandage on his arm, and there was nothing in her face at all, not even contempt. She looked at him the way you’d look at a chair.

Then she went back to the label.

Aren set the ledgers on the shelf very carefully and walked out without hurrying, and his heart didn’t slow down until he reached the bottom of the stairs.

She didn’t know yet. But she had found a thread, and Vivienne Ashgrave didn’t seem like the kind of person who ever let go of threads.