Crisp blue light from the alchemical lanterns made the stony rooftop as bright as day, the otherwise quiet evening marred by the warcry of the charging noble in silver robes. He was steps from me, now, his flaming greatsword already beginning its downward trajectory. The rush of air preceded the nobleman's attack by a fraction of a second. In that moment, I made my decision.

Crossing swords against the ruling class wasn't something to do lightly, even if you were a sword artist. Especially if you were a sword artist. I'm sure there was an honest noble somewhere, but all the ones I had met were idiots, to put it mildly.

Having too much money wasn't the problem. Having too much power--literal, physical, death-dealing power--was. The nobles couldn't fight each other, since their alchemical purchases left them as essentially untrained babies with superhuman strength and speed. They would inevitably injure or even kill one another while sparring, so that left them to practice fighting with lowly sword artists without friends in high places. I had faced a few of them already in the street fights.

Those who craved bloodshed searched for other victims, the kind whose accidental deaths wouldn't invite lawsuits or vengeful relatives.

A lone bandit. A thief. In other words, what I was presently looking like.

Winning against a noble wasn't much better, either. At best, an angry noble would do his best to make life in the city miserable. At worst, an injured noble would seek claims from the courts. I mean, yes, I might be able to escape the city guards, but being put on the wanted list wouldn't exactly be conducive to my stay here in Sanctum. Not to mention, the stain to the clan's honor.

I knew what I had to do, even if I was tempted to cross swords with the nobleman. Terminus was already sheathed at my left hip, and I had every intention of leaving it there. I waited until the last moment, then rolled to the right and dropped off the building.

The nobleman's sword crashed into the rooftop as I fell to the ground, sending a shower of broken rocks tumbling down after me. While I couldn't walk as easily as the thief along the walls, I wasn't exactly helpless, either. I kicked off the stone surface behind me, hurtling across the street to land on the first-story ledge of a window. Someone screamed from inside the brick house, but I was already on the ground.

I turned to sprint down a side street, but the soft glow of a bobbling light lit up my shadow on the paved street. I glanced over my shoulder to find the nobleman chasing after me, his burning sword still held aloft. One look was enough to tell me that I wouldn't be able to outrace him.

The thief had been quick and slippery. The nobleman, though, was brimming with raw power, and I could sense the rage in his aura from far down the street. Enormous, unnatural reservoirs of qi drove his etching-laced legs far faster than my top speed.

I glanced ahead. Unfortunately, the street I had chosen to turn onto wasn't exactly empty.

"Sorry!" I shouted as I leaped over a crowd of shoppers holding baskets filled with vegetables. There were screams as I passed by, and I ducked as something round and hard, maybe a yellow onion, went sailing over my head.

"Thief!" the nobleman shouted.

A shaggy shape streaked towards me from the side, barking. Someone's dog. More people shouted, and I spotted other small shapes hurtling towards me in the corner of my eye. The pungent odor of the lumps flying past my head told me that they weren't only throwing vegetables.

"Thief! Thief!" The chorus grew louder as more people took up the cry.

Windows opened. Lights turned on. More screaming and shouting ensued.

I was going to kill the real thief if I ever saw him again, metaphorically speaking. Or maybe for real, depending on how this turned out.

I veered left, outracing the incoming dog. Empty jaws clacked together inches from my legs right as I jumped. I used the uneven surface of a cobbled wall as footing to jump off the wall once more, then grabbed the wing of an ugly corner sculpture to swing myself back up onto the rooftops. I changed direction, backtracking at an angle. With any luck, I would lose the nobleman as well as the crowd's attention.

The ruckus died away behind me as I leaped from rooftop to rooftop like I had done earlier in the evening, except this time I was the one running away. I would never hear the end of it if Elder Gri got word of what had happened. After a few minutes, I had crossed a dozen blocks, and there was still no sign of pursuit. I slowed to a walk, then slipped down to the ground in an empty section of the street.

"Running on the rooftops. How boorish, thief."

I whirled. A figure in a dark tunic stepped out of a darkened alley. The wide-paned window of a house across the street was the only source of lighting here, casting a pale blue square onto the street.

She was rather attractive, and the right age, too. But what caught my attention more than the large blue eyes, porcelain nose, and pouty lips, all casting a rather unpleasant expression in my direction, were the flames that began to flicker up and down the blade of her drawn greatsword. That, along with her blonde hair tied into a thick long braid was enough for me to guess her identity.

"Vox's daughter, I presume?" I asked. I gave a slight nod of my head, not willing to take my eyes off her sword.

"Watch your tongue, rogue. That's Lord Vox to you."

Ugh. Vox wasn't even a regular noble, but a lord. This whole evening was getting worse and worse.

I bowed, a bit more deeply this time while keeping my eyes on her. "This is a mistake--"

"Your last mistake." The young noblewoman advanced with a two-handed grip.

My eyes darted to the sides to search for an escape route, but if she had somehow followed me all the way here, I doubted I could run from her so easily.

"Not my mistake," I said. "Lord Vox's. Now yours." I took a step backward with one palm raised toward her. "Look, I'm a traditionalist, not a thief."

That made her pause. Her brows furrowed. "Liar."

"That's the thing. We don't lie--"

She sprang forward, and I barely had enough time to draw Terminus, send a current of qi into its blade, and block the downward slash. Even so, the strike sent me bowling over backwards. I exaggerated the roll to disperse the momentum, then punched the ground hard, my fist pulsing with golden light, to flip myself back to my feet.

My eyes flicked over Terminus. It was undamaged, but if I hadn't strengthened my sword with qi just now, it would have likely snapped from the force of that blow.

The noblewoman smiled. "See? A liar, thief, and fraud. A traditionalist wouldn't lose that easily."

I shook the dust from my tunic and took a low sideways stance with my right sword arm facing her. "I haven't lost yet, Lady Vox."

Fighting a noble was dangerous, but she had left me with little choice. Seeing as she wasn't screaming her perceived grievances at the top of her lungs to draw a crowd, I figured it would be better to deal with her, rather than her father, anyways. Maybe I could reason with her, eventually, teenager to teenager? I could share stories about how strict my elders were, and she could go on about how demanding and overprotective her father was.

Wait a minute. I snapped my finger.

My sense of what was proper and what wasn't was a bit distorted compared to the latest society trends, and it was true that traditionalists were a bit, well, traditional. But even my meager understanding of Sanctum high society was enough to know that nobles generally didn't approve of their daughters running around swinging swords.

That's why she wasn't raising a ruckus. I mean, what noble who was so assured of her winning wouldn't want an audience? They lived for that sort of thing.

The noblewoman scowled. "I don't like the way you're smiling."

I smiled even wider. "Let's fight somewhere else. Somewhere with a few more eyes."

I ran down the street towards a more well-lit intersection. "Sword artists coming through!" I shouted. "The duel of the century featuring Lady Vox!"

I rolled to the side as the paved street beneath me split open with a loud crack. A deep, jagged crevice lit with golden fire swept past me through the pavement. I turned to find the noblewoman pulling her greatsword out of the ground.

The noblewoman's attack hadn't been subtle. There were shouts from the houses around us. Windows lit up, and a few heads started to peek out.

I beckoned with Terminus. "Shall we?"

I held my breath as the noblewoman's face turned red, her nostrils flaring. The golden flames around her greatsword burned even brighter than before, and a soft yellow glow spread over her entire body, bright enough to shine through the dark fabric of her clothes. I stared in surprise and jealousy. She could strengthen her body and sword at the same time, as only a Grandmaster could do. This wasn't subtle, either like my trick with Terminus. She was brimming with power. What kind of alchemy was this?

For a moment, I was worried that I had misjudged the situation and made things even worse, but when the door to one of the nearby houses opened, the qi shimmering around the noblewoman's weapon and body vanished abruptly. She disappeared into the darkness without a sound.

The graying head of an old woman popped out of the open doorway. She rubbed her eye with a gnarled knuckle and peered at me. Her eyes widened as she spotted the cracked street.

"Did you do this?" she asked, pointing to my sword.

I considered giving the name of Vox. Word would travel back to her father, probably. But I had won, in a way, the encounter. That was enough.

"Not me." With that, I turned and ran before any more trouble showed up.

Exam qualifications: 3/3

I wasn't quite as surprised by the third time the words had shown up. It was unnerving, really, to have someone take over my sense of sight like that, and, if I was interpreting correctly, having someone spy on my actions. I looked about and cast my senses for any hidden auras, but I couldn't spot whoever was sending me these strange words.

I wasn't aware of any technique remotely similar to what was happening. This was beyond sword artists. Had someone invented a new alchemical procedure or device? Or discovered a new artifact?

I patted Terminus, which hung from my side, for reassurance. Unlike the flashy weapons the nobles wielded, Terminus was one of those ancient artifacts, a sword that was found, not made. Our clan had oral histories, legends really, of what had happened before the first clans had formed. Stories of gods and superhumans, of sword artists performing feats far beyond what a Grandmaster could achieve. Sundering whole worlds. Achieving immortality.

The stories could contain a kernel of buried truth, but I tended to treat them more as fables than facts. However, Terminus was proof that a world we didn't know, and might never know, had existed even before the sword clans. Sanctum itself had been built upon sacred land, the supposed home of the mythical Swordgeists who had fashioned these artifacts. But any consecrated ground had been swallowed up by the growing city long ago.

The words could have been some kind of twisted prank, a show of supremacy by the alchemists. Whereas most simply held their nose at the idea of traditionalists, alchemists outright hated us. I didn't blame them. For all of recorded history, the sword clans had dwarfed the alchemical sects in power and treated them not too kindly.

Something changed a generation ago. No one knew what, or no one would say, but the alchemists made great bounds in a single generation, enough to produce weapons and devices matching, or perhaps even exceeding, the power of artifacts like Terminus. Along with advances in alchemical surgery, the time of the sword clans had come to an end. We faded away, as a new breed of sword artists fueled by alchemy rose up to take our place.

Or what if this was something beyond even the alchemists? Elder Gri would know. He knew all the legends, all the stories that I had dismissed from my childhood.

I hurried back towards the poorer east side of Sanctum where I had left Elder Gri. He could still care of himself, for the most part, but life as a sword artist carried many dangers known and unknown. The blue letters glowing in my vision disappeared along the way.

***

I sat on the wooden floor with my back against the rough, uneven wall of the room. Some of the gaps between the boards were wide enough to stick a hand through and had been filled with mud. I had chosen my spot carefully to avoid the occasional rusty nail that protruded from sections of the rotting wood.

Elder Gri sat on the low wooden bed on the other side of the small room we had rented, the cheapest we could find that didn't have bed bugs. The bed didn't even have a mattress, which was probably the only reason it wasn't infested to begin with. We had no alchemical lanterns. A single fat tallow candle in a clay cup provided the sole lighting for our dim room, as well as our only source of heat, for the room came with no blankets or bedding.

I sucked at a piece of squab stuck between my back teeth. The bird had tasted rancid and overly salty, as if it was buried in seasoning to hide the fact that it was on the verge of spoiling. Still, it was meat and food bought with the coins I had recovered, a somewhat satisfactory, if not exactly glamorous, ending to an eventful day. Even in the best of times, we traditionalists tended to lead austere lives. It was good for building discipline, the elders would say.

I waited now for Elder Gri's reply after telling him everything that had happened. I left nothing out. We were fellow clansmen, after all, alone in our struggle to survive in this turbulent place.

Elder Gri pinched the end of his graying beard, rolling it between his fingers. It must have been five minutes since either of us had spoken a word.

"The Swordgeists," he said at last. "They must have returned."

Swordgeists? I wanted to shout my incredulity, but that would have been a good way to earn a quick cuff to the ear. I kept silent.

"Yes, they're real," Elder Gri said as if reading my mind. "They gave us this." Elder Gri held up his good hand. Yellow light shimmered briefly in his palm. "And that." He pointed at Terminus, now laying across my lap in its sheath.

The Swordgeists. Gods of the sword. The spiritual ancestor of all sword artists. There were...a couple of them? I had a decent grasp of the basic legends, but they were children's stories, simplistic and filled with hyperbole. They had supposedly taught the first sword artists, forged artifacts for them to wield, and disappeared ages ago.

That was the part that made me question the whole idea of some founding deities of sword artists. If they had gone to the trouble of setting up the whole thing, why would they just go away? Elder Gri was a very practical sort, but if he insisted that they were real, I had an even more disturbing objection. Why would they come back now, of all times. And why bother me?

Objectively, I was a decent sword artist. I had reached the rank of Lesser Master by seventeen, full Master by eighteen. Sure, that put me in the upper echelons of traditionalists, but Masters, or at least what passed for one these days, were becoming more common, not less with the rise of alchemy.

"What do they want?" I asked.

Elder Gri pursed his wrinkled lips. "I wouldn't dare to guess what the Swordgeists desire. But from your words, I can guess what they'll do. Test you. And teach you."

I nodded. That sounded more ominous than it should have. Teaching could be troublesome, even painful at times. The Koroi elders, including Elder Gri, had inflicted more than a few burdens and bruises upon me during my childhood. So, what would it be like to receive lessons from the Swordgeists, assuming things turned out as Elder Gri predicted?

I suppressed a shudder. I liked learning, generally speaking, but the Swordgeists were hardly human, if they had ever been human. They were more akin to a force of nature than a person, based on the stories of how they had reshaped our world and worlds beyond ours. They had conquered death itself and could walk through the Void unscathed. What could a man teach an ant? Or rather, how? The thought was unsettling.

Another part of me, though, was curious, excited even. If the Swordgeists were real, what kind of power could they bestow? I needed something to push me to the next stage of a sword artist. What better way to spur me to a higher rank than the Swordgeists themselves?

"Do we wait for it to resolve, or ignore it?" I asked. Somehow, I didn't think a Swordgeist who had waited for countless years would be bothered to hurry up and settle the matter. Nothing could happen for decades.

As I finished speaking, I caught movement from the small square window of our rented room. I jumped to my feet with Terminus drawn two inches from its sheath. Few lights shone throughout the city in the middle of the night, but when I peered out the window, I gasped at the dazzling sight.

In the distance, towards the heart of Sanctum near the wealthier areas, a brilliant column of white light, nearly as bright as the sun, rose from the ground up high into the sky for as far as I could see. I shaded my eyes with my hand as I looked on, and the column of light grew wider and wider, filling the whole city with an unnatural light. Raised voices carried through the rickety walls of the inn as others caught sight of the spectacle as well.

Elder Gri came up behind me and placed a hand on my left shoulder. "There'll be no waiting, Talen. Your time has come."

I fully expected the blue letters that appeared in my sight a moment later, but the message itself was more than I had imagined.

The entrance examination for the Sword System Academy begins at sunrise. Do not be late. Failure to comply will result in the eventual destruction of this world.

With an invitation like that, how could I refuse? The only question was whether I would be getting any sleep between now and tomorrow morning.