Greg folded his arms in front of his chest, studying John with all the care he could muster. His amber eyes, more like headlights than anything else, searched the boy’s face for any untruths he might have hidden. After an entire minute of searching and repeated questions about the accident that had happened in the morning, the old man closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.

The sun was shining through layers of clouds into the window, deepening the wrinkles on the old teacher’s face into canyons. A suffocating silence filled the room, with neither of the two (or three, as the marble assured John) participants speaking.

Finally, after minutes of silence, Greg’s eyes opened and fixated upon John’s face. “This shouldn’t be happening,” he said. “What you have just described is something that should happen much, much later. In months at the earliest.” He held a finger up to stop John’s coming interruption. “We call it Germination, for it is at this time that your channels spread their roots into your entire being, thus enabling you to sense aether even without having to concentrate. Normally, it isn’t even all that important to teach you something like that. Because in addition to being in the far future, it’s just one of the things that happen once your body has been saturated with a certain amount of aether. There shouldn’t be any side effects, like your aether rebounding. Or horrible pain.” The old man frowned, once again sinking into his thoughts.

“What does ‘entire being’ even mean? I mean, my channels are already connected to every part of me, right? Where else could they possibly go to?”

Greg blinked, then sighed. “Right, this wasn’t part of your curriculum.” He cleared his throat, his face becoming even more serious as he entered what John liked to call ‘Teaching Mode’. “A person is not just composed of their physical parts, or there wouldn’t be any warriors in the first place.” A transparently hollow figurine appeared on his palm. “This is your body. Your anchor in this world that lets you interact with it.”

A long, intricate web of thicker and thinner strings that culminated in the head appeared inside the figurine, vaguely tracing the outline of a human’s circulatory system. Like the roots of a three, they were the thickest at the core and torso and became increasingly thinner the further you got away from them.

“These are your channels and core, and they are what allows your aether to interact with the physical world.” A smirk, not his trademark smile, but a genuine one appeared on his face. “They are tricky things, for a dissection of a human body will only show the core. Where the channels run and how they do it without affecting the flesh around them is a mystery as old as humanity. The only reason we even know their vague form is due to powerful warriors demonstrating it to us.”

The old man shook his head. “Anyway, the soul is arguably the most important part of your being, for without it you would be but a drooling mess.” On his upturned palm, a ball of dark mist filled the rest of the figurine. “It is the connection between your mind and body, the glue that binds the aethereal and corporeal into one big whole. When Germination is achieved, your channels become capable of affecting even the incorporeal.”

The core erupted with a white light. It travelled down from the head into the torso, lighting up the bulkier channels along its way through the body. More and more sections turned white, until the network of channels were glowing brightly in the dark fog. Nothing seemed to happen after that, so John squinted his eyes and looked closer. It took a few seconds, but he finally noticed: The fog was gradually turning white, too, but at such an intolerably slow pace that it might as well not be doing so in the first place.

Abruptly, the lightshow stopped, and the figurine returned to its previous, lifeless state. “Once the channels breach the invisible barriers separating them from the soul the process of Germination has been completed. Not only will your ability to manipulate aether improve tremendously, you will also gain the ability to either see, hear, smell, taste or feel the aether around you, which is, I assure you, a most useful ability. You can vaguely assess your opponent’s strength, see traps before they hit you and lose your dependence on things like light or sound. Aether is everywhere, after all, and you can’t reasonably block it out unless you literally shower someone in it.”

Greg sighed. “But I’m getting off-track here,” he said, studying John with his eyes as if he were a rare animal. “Like I said, your problem shouldn’t be occurring at all. Unless…” The old man hummed to himself, putting a hand to his chin. “Unless there is something that prevents your channels from connecting to the soul. A barrier beyond the natural ones, preventing a process that should be normal, perhaps.”

He shook his head. “Too much speculation and not enough information. I’ll try to contact some of my more medically versed friends. Maybe they can help you.”

John grimaced. “And what am I supposed to do until that happens?”

Greg’s face lit up in a smile. His trademark one. “Well, Germination requires a relatively large amount of aether and control, which makes it that much easier to interrupt. This means that someone whose mana senses are acute enough could monitor you to prevent that from happening. As it so happens, there are two people in charge of you who fulfil those conditions.”

Every alarm bell and instinct inside John’s mind began ringing and screaming. “B-but just because it happened once doesn’t mean it would happen again, right? You already said that my early Germination was a freak accident, right? So maybe it won’t happen again if I’m just really careful?”

The smile he got in response told him more than words ever could.

Two days later, John was crouching between tall weeds and other grasses, staring into an empty clearing where a battle had taken place not too long ago. Uprooted weeds, spots of blood on the grass and bushes as well as a thousand other tells could probably have told someone more experienced than him what had happened here not too long ago.

But it didn’t really matter to him, and neither did it to his classmates scattered in a loose semicircle around him. After days of waiting and attending briefings and hours of rudimentary group training that went wrong more often than not, they were now here, on their first hunt. Their target was a wolf which had been separated from its pack after a confrontation with their upperclassmen.

It was being herded towards them by Franziska, with Teacher looming somewhere in the shadows, where he was hopefully ready to intervene should anything go wrong. And oh boy were there many things that could go so, so wrong.

Aside from the horrifying fact that they were letting small children fight against a rabid, aether-strengthened animal, outnumbered as it might be, their prepared tactics were laughable.

“Throw your javelins at it when it appears. If it doesn’t die from that, let the poor idiots who chose a spear or halberd form the first row of encirclement and the other lucky souls the second line. What an absolutely brilliant plan! What could possibly go wrong?”

Regardless of John’s grumbling, he gripped the javelin fitting perfectly into his hand – courtesy of their teacher, who provided both ammunition and provisory armour for those who hadn’t made their own yet – tighter and regulated his breathing.

He felt someone tap his armoured shoulder, quickly moving through the grass to repeat the action to the others. It meant that the wolf was close now. Almost in hearing range, which was surprisingly close in the dense foliage and other background noises like the raging battles in the distance. He stared pumping as much aether as his channels could handle into his body.

His senses sharpened, and suddenly he heard it. Faint sounds of branches rustling and breaking. Frenzied panting as it rushed closer. His heart hammering blood and adrenaline through his body. The shifting of weeds as he and his classmates prepared to jump up at any moment.

It came closer and closer, until it could break out at any-

With a snap, the bushes parted and a brown wolf burst into the clearing. Faster than he thought possible, John stood up, drew his arm back and threw his javelin at the animal in one smooth motion. In a split-second, nineteen other blurs joined his own, sailing through the air at speeds even normal adults would be hard-pressed to compete with.

One, two, three four and more bounced off its fur or landed on the ground. Only a few managed to penetrate its thick hide and lodge themselves in its flesh, and most of those were dislodged when the animal jerked and growled in pain. Its yellow eyes darted around and instantly took in the gathered group of children, most of them barely taller than itself and probably half its weight.

‘Fuck!’

John’s body reacted before his mind did, dropping the reserve javelin and drawing his halberd, holding it out in front of himself protectively whilst advancing with cautious steps. Somewhere in his peripheral vision, he could see six or seven others do the same. They advanced together, their other classmates trailing behind not too far behind.

The wounded beast bared its teeth and snarled, inching backwards as it slowly retreated towards the bushes. Emboldened by its behaviour, John and the others quickly managed to form a rudimentary battle line and drove it back further by feinting and occasionally stabbing at it.

However, its retreat stopped dead once it reached the bushes it came from. The wolf’s ears twitched backwards, and its snarl grew wider. It laid lower, preparing to pounce at a moment’s notice.

For a moment, a stalemate was formed between the two sides. Neither party was willing to fully commit, knowing that advancing just one step further would mean the outbreak of a lethal conflict.

But the moment quickly passed, and the children advanced as one, their weapons levelled at the cornered animal.

The wolf leaped, and as luck would have it, it headed straight towards John.

His heart skipped a beat, but it didn’t matter. His halberd drew back and shot forth in the same motion he had practiced over and over again, until it became ingrained in his body. The spearhead unerringly punched into the wolf’s shoulder after a moment of resistance, only stopping once it was three quarters in and hit something hard. The resulting collision nearly wrenched the shaft out of John’s hands as his entire body resisted the wolf’s momentum, but in the end he managed to stop it in its tracks.

The wolf let out a yelp that quickly turned into a howl once the other weapons managed to close in on it, slicing and stabbing and crushing its body from all sides. One spear managed to stab it in its neck, whilst the blade of a halberd sliced deeply into its back. Another club broke a paw, and soon John could no longer make out individual weapons as they interweaved into a bloody mess, the sound of metal hitting wood or other metal becoming more frequent than the dull thuds of metal biting into flesh.

John pulled his halberd out, his hands jerking with the dying wolf it was lodged inside, and stabbed it into it once again with a roar. And again. And again. Until it stopped jerking and howling, and his arms were too weak to strike anymore. The surge of blood spurting out of its innumerable wounds had been reduced to a trickle and the beast had become little more than a mutilated carcass.

John panted, leaning onto his spear for support as the adrenaline ebbed away and his awareness of his surroundings returned.

Killing something so up and close was vastly different from shooting at your enemies from a distance. It was far, far more visceral. The feedback he felt whenever he stabbed, hacked or sliced, informing him of the tissue he was slicing through. The despair in its eyes once it realised that it wasn’t going to get out of the encirclement. The final whimpers that were cut short by a hammer crushing its skull like a watermelon. They burned themselves into his memories, clinging onto them like a hollow spectre hounding him from beyond the grave.

The battlefields of the future were vastly different. No less terrifying, but in a different, more detached way. The droning of artillery, the buzzing of your own energy weapons and plasma rounds flying all over the place, too fast to be caught by the naked eye robbed one’s sense of control. You never knew when a stray round would hit you, or where the artillery would hit next. So what if you were the strongest, fastest and fittest member of your squad? All it took to melt you into a pile of slag was a single round hitting you when your shields were down.

A heavy hand settled on his shoulder, turning his focus to reality once more. He didn’t need to look up to know whom it belonged to.

“Good job,” his teacher said. His voice was loud and penetrating to the core, filled with so much praise and confidence that it jolted many of his classmates out of the stupor that set in once the adrenaline ebbed away. “You’ve just killed your first beast. Be proud of it! You just helped rid humanity of another monster that could have killed innocent people! In the future, you will remember this day and look upon it fondly, for it is your first step towards real warriorhood!”

Franziska, who had probably appeared sometime between the wolf’s appearance and its bloody death, started clapping and cheering. The children, innocent and influenceable as they were, looked at each other. John met the eye of many a classmate, their weapons and parts of their clothes still bloody from the brief fight. ‘How can such a small body contain so much blood?’ he wondered as the first of his classmates starting hesitantly cheering, becoming louder and louder as the others joined in.

Off to the side, Greg and Franziska were watching with smiles as the bloodied children celebrated their first kill. But the only thing John could feel as he stood there, surrounded by his laughing and crying and hugging classmates, was an exhaustion that pervaded more levels than he thought possible.

This was his life now, he realized. One filled with death, for that was, in the end, what he was being trained for. What he was being raised for. What all of this would amount to, in a few years.

John closed his eyes and sighed. Perhaps he was just getting senile. These kinds of things hadn’t bothered him so much when he first enrolled, so why did they now, in a different world with a different body?

Maybe it was just that. Fate, that cruel mistress, had driven him towards bloodshed once more. And worse yet, a small part of him actually wanted this. Because this time he wouldn’t be just another cog in a huge war-machine whose greatest contribution had been the loan of a power that wasn’t his in the first place, too hesitant to use the terrible powers it could wield.

No, old age had eroded the youth of those times away, only leaving the bitter core of someone who realized he could have been more. He had his chance now, hadn’t he? It should have been time to man up and face reality. To let the past go and embrace the future, for that was what a child’s life was.

But he wasn’t a child anymore, not in spirit, at least. And it was in the nature of senile fools to cling to the things they knew. Even if those things were useless and outdated, fit only for sentimentally gazing upon them.

The marble said something, but it was drowned out by Ronnie wrapping his arms around John and heaving him off the ground. “We did it! We did it we did it we did it! Man, how you stopped that beast with a single thrust…”

The others crowded in too, praising each other and themselves while chattering away. Logan and Jessica were, once again, bickering. Probably about who had managed to inflict the most damage on their poor enemy.

The familiar sight brought a smile to John’s face. The marble was right. He really was letting the children have all the fun, choosing to sink into his gloom instead.

His mind suddenly clearing like the sky above him, John cheered with his classmates, laughing and celebrating like only a child could.