Quartias Fulvion had taken over the Navita Pilot’s cockpit after we had wrenched the dented captain’s cabin door open, partially caved in by my kicking the female flight attendant into it earlier in the fight. We had found the Pilot dead inside by suicide and Clodias’s sharp sense of smell had detected the remnants of a used poison capsule hidden in one of the Navita’s back molars. It had contained a toxic powder once inhaled after the false tooth was cracked open that would quickly end the life of someone with a Gold Foundation and a lesser Path than ours.

Pollixa took the broken cockpit door and moved it to seal the gaping hole in the back of the aircraft, at least partially, anyways. It cut down on the noise of the wind.

“Must have been in on it too.” Aurelia commented as she nudged the dead captain’s webbed fingers with her boot as the corpse sprawled on the floor where we had moved it to make room for the clone. Quartias had apparently had the best reputation for flight simulators amongst us.

“Why bother with those… freaks… or whatever those things the Slaves became? Couldn’t the Pilot simply have crashed us into a building if he was in on it?” Caesia asked.

“Or couldn’t they have smuggled in a bomb or something?” Kato said.

“They would not have gotten a bomb big enough to kill us past security, even if they got their monster making injectors in.” Kastor said.

I shook my head at Caesia and Kato’s ideas, adding on to what Kastor Gallion had said.. “A airship crash wouldn’t have killed us, even at high speeds. We would be bruised, have some bones and ribs broken, and some hefty concussions until our healing factors kicked into full gear, but we would live, even if whoever were in the skyscraper we hit would not. Neither would a bomb work with our natural Imperator resistance to heat, fire, and force. The advantage that whatever those syringes were gave the attackers were their claws and teeth, more than just the added strength and quickened regrowth. Their claws and fangs were sharp enough to pierce and slash our skin and the poisons and acids they were coated in and producing would be the only thing to take us out when they couldn’t hide Keenblades.”

My left eye and other wounds had finally healed back to normal, taking an alarming amount of time to reject the laced venom and stitch my components back to full form.

“And look what happened to Lucias, it’s proof that their plan worked well.” I continued, looking over to the clone’s dead body, his ruined throat a deep black with ragged tooth marked edges. The rotten, disfiguring mark on his neck was a visual shock compared to the rest of his marble white body.

Caias Fulvion, the one with canine and Hunter DNA, glared up at my words and gaze as he held Lucias in his arms, tears threatening to well up in his eyes as he clasped his brother’s lifeless body to his chest.

Quartias, on the other hand, was looking completely unaffected by his fellow clone’s death, seemingly just happy to be sitting in a pilot’s command chair.

“Do you think we should swing back to pick up Andarias?” Septimia Iapion fretted.

Clodias waved a hand. “He’ll be fine. I’ve been in contact with the Administrative District’s helpline on my communicator and I gave them his rough location of where he was thrown out. They’ll triangulate his monitor and pick him up. We should just keep our course.”

We reached the above the waves docking area for the oceanic decoy site soon after, Quartias expertly landing us down on the floating platform. We were immediately swarmed and beset by a horde of Medici and investigating officials who took down our reports of the event, removed the empty syringes and remaining slime of the dead monsters as evidence, and catalogued any remaining injuries any of us had.

None of us were able to get any answers out of the adults as to what had happened besides that dark alchemy involving Infernal Beast renderings and remains and invocations to the Corpsefather and the Curegiver being implicated in the monstrous mutations of the flight crew.

More of our class arrived later, similarly each and every one of the flights had had assassination attempts done by Servi with transformative syringe injections. The rest of the students came either under their own power as they had managed to use their piloting skills to finish the flight or had stopped their Navita captain from killing themselves to escape justice, or through additional rescue craft plucking them from their sinking ships out of the North Sea. Andarias was returned to us halfway through, stinking of sea salt and fish, not that I could really say I was glad to see him back. He had taken Lucias’s death better than Caias, but far worse than Quartias’s empty and unmoved response to their brother’s passing.

When all was said and done and our class was reunited and finished with questioning, I learned that we had lost twenty-three members of our group. An average of almost seven-point-seven percent of our total, with more severe casualties being allotted to the airships with more members of the back half of the three hundred with lower average scores. Our airship had had the very bottom with my friends from Sunburst Station, but it had also had the very top of the class in greater proportion and we had responded quickly and efficiently in reaction to the terroristic attack by our flight attendants and as a result had only lost Lucias.

It was decided by representatives of the Scholarium and the Evaluation Committee that we would continue on and rather than dilute the first-year class with lesser candidates by pulling the next ranked Bronzes down the list, the two hundred and seventy-seven young Imperator chosen left would carry on as a smaller class size. We entered elevators that descended to the sea floor and a mock Scholarium facility for show in the depths, and then pressed into the train that ran on the sandy bottom of the North Sea that would take us back in secret to the Administrative District.

The underwater train ride was quiet, I sat in a four-person cabin with Antonias, Caesia and Kato, but they had not wanted to talk after a long day of ups and downs. They had gone through brutal examinations and testing, convinced throughout it that they weren’t good enough and would fail both myself and themselves and be sent home in shame, been shocked to discover they really were getting the coveted spots at the officers’ school despite their inadequacies, and then were nearly killed by lowly Servi turned into hideous monsters from legend by abominable science. It was a lot to process.

“We did it, Adri.” Caesia managed weakly in celebration to me, using my nickname, before succumbing to a fitful sleep.

“Yes, you did it, Cee. You all did it.” I said softly to them, proud of my friends for having come so far from spoiled rich kids and drug addicts to entering the most hallowed training halls in the solar system.

Hours later when the high-speed train slowed to halt having reentered land and burrowed back down below the surface of the Governor’s Palace and the Administrative District, we stood and trudged sleepily out of the transportation.

“Back where we started.” I remarked, still finding this whole process of deception silly. “Or at least right below it.”

Antonias grunted in response.

Clodias and Thorania rejoined us as we walked to our next destination, two great bronze doors marked with a blazing sun emblem and two snarling lions’ faces. The gates had to be at least forty feet high and they were guarded by a large number of heavily armed and armored soldiers and warriors from combat Paths. As far as I could tell they were all from the Militares Soldiers with the exception of one hulking, eight-foot-tall Campeador. Both Paths were part of the Dauntless Ones, which including our Path, the Soldiers, the Champions, and the Hunters. The four Dauntless Paths had special diverging evolutions at Gold that specialized and modified themselves beyond just another advancement in Rank. Those diverse subsections of Gold Rank were called Orders.

The Militares all had their Path’s characteristic traits of grey skin and steel teeth, the metallic teeth naturally grown rather than implanted as I had once thought as a child when I had heard stories of the Soldier caste, but they divided from each other after that. Those Militares of the Chevalier Order were slightly taller than the standard six feet of their lesser Soldier brethren and would have the grace and agility comparable to a Venator Hunter. The Soldiers of the Militiamen Order were marked by the lack of regular Jovium-iron armor, instead they had permanent bone carapace concealing their bodies and protecting them from advanced weapons. Finally, the last of their three Orders, were the Butchers who had simian, apelike builds and short, stocky legs.

All of the Militares Soldiers carried their signature Ember rifles. The Ember rifles were projected energy launchers that would shoot a bolt that on slowed down footage resembled a glowing coal. The burning bolt would fly at velocities of three thousand miles per hour or nearly Mach four, had a contact heat greater than the surface temperature of Terra’s sun, and the coal-like projectile would explode once having penetrated a target with the force of twenty tons of TNT. The resulting fireball radius would be sixty-five feet and a swift followoing four hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot radius for third degree burns for Copper lesser and non-combat Paths like Servus Slaves or Hetaira Courtesans or Faber Artisans. All from a single shot.

Ember rifles were designed to kill things that the gods and modern science had commanded to be virtually unkillable. They were anti-Imperator and anti-exo armor weapons of destruction.

The Golden Campeador on watch was of the Aesir Order of Champions, marked by the wings growing past her ears, her blond hair, and her blue-white eyes that crackled with electricity. The three Campeador Orders were named the Aesir, the Jotunn and the Svartalfar after the false myths of the Jermanik and Norzkan peoples that the Old Thaekyrian Empire had conquered on Terra prior to the rise of the Dominium.

The great bronze doors stamped with the sun and the lions slid open with glasslike smoothness, revealing a rippling screen of silverish mercury held levitating into place like the surface of a mirror. Our reflections of all two hundred and seventy-seven of us stared back at us. We all looked tired, a few appearing depressed and a few seeming rather pissed off at their long day.

“What is it?” I asked the others.

“A Janusian teleportation gate.” Clodias stated.

“Why do they need teleportation? Couldn’t they just have a hallway?” Kato asked.

“I told you guys, the Scholarium isn’t actually under the Governor’s Palace.” Clodias said.

“Well, where is it then, smartass?” Thorania said.

Clodias shrugged, a sly look on his face. “Haven’t a clue.”

“Stop being annoying and just tell us.” Thorania said, but Clodias merely whistled with his hands in his pockets.

The female Champion waved us forward and we moved forward to walk through the mirrored teleportation gate. I hoped it would not suck as much as the other form we had used today.