Alec awoke much earlier than he should have done the next day; for a moment, he lay confused and tangled beneath his sheets, wondering what on earth had caused his abrupt return to consciousness. Then he heard it again — a loud, harsh blaring, echoing through the hallways, reverberating from the dark walls. The other boys were stirring around him too.

"The hell is that?" Jonah said groggily, rubbing his eyes.

"Fire alarm?" Javon suggested tentatively, but Alec didn't think this very likely: surely a simple fire wouldn't have caused this much fuss in a school of experienced, superpowered inhabitants?

They could hear dozens of feet thundering outside in the hallway, and a sharp rapping on the door rang out over the racket. "Are you awake in there?" a voice called. "Come on, let's go!"

Confused looks were exchanged throughout the room, then the boys flung their sheets aside and heaved themselves from their beds, not even changing out of their nightclothes before they joined the pool of students streaming along the corridor. Alec stole a quick glance at the alarm clock before he exited the room: it read 12:43.

"Hey, uh, what's going on?" Alec asked a boy slouching along beside him.

He shrugged, looking bad-tempered. "No idea, Jax just told us to get downstairs."

"Jax," Alec knew, was a fifth-year prefect from the Hades Dorm, a tall, skinny youth with wiry brown hair and iron-grey eyes. The fact that they were supposed to line up according to his instructions confirmed Alec’s suspicions that this was some stupid exercise from the teachers. It was just his first week, but he had had quite enough of this school already.

"There you are."

Alec, Javon, Jonah, and Zachariah turned as they reached the bottom of the staircase, looking across the common room, which was lit by the emerald glow of the huge fire roaring in the marble fireplace, and saw Maddison stalking towards them from the girls' staircase.

"What is going on?" she demanded.

"How're we supposed to know?" said Ethan, who had just materialized out of nowhere on their right, yawning hugely.

"We've got nothing, they just told us to get up and get down here, same as you, I suppose," Zachariah told her.

"Let's go, let's go!" a voice roared above the noise, and they saw the very prefect they had mentioned earlier at the common room doorway, ushering students outside. They shuffled forward as quickly as they could with the massive crowd ahead of them, then when they had reached Jax, who was dressed in his Dorm uniform, Alec hissed, "Jax, what the hell is going on?"

"Language, Michaels!" the prefect replied sternly. "And just go on, you'll find out soon enough."

Alec tried to protest, but Jax shooed them along, continuing to direct the endless flow of students forward so that they were swept up in the tide and carried outside of the Dorm into the chilly night air. More prefects were outside. Strangely, they were directing the students exiting the Hades Dorm towards the playing field, along with the students from the other two Dorms, who were marching down the path ahead, also in their night things and looking extremely grumpy and confused.

"Have you noticed," Javon asked after a few minutes, "that only first-years are here?"

Alec, Jonah, Zachariah, Maddison, and Ethan all looked around. It was only now that he mentioned it that Alec realized it was true. The overwhelming crowd of students surging down to the field was comprised only of the students that had enrolled this year. An ominous feeling of foreboding fell over Alec as they marched.

At last, they reached the gates. As they forged through, Alec suddenly became aware of the eerie silence that had settled over the students in front, as though their voices had extinguished the moment they had crossed the threshold. Even as they walked, their swathe of students stopped talking, and soon the noise behind them had died out too. The field ahead was layered with velvety darkness, and the eerie silence was pressing upon their ears as though dozens of invisible hands had been clamped over the sides of their heads.

Finally, the whole mass of students was spread out along the field, all Dorms jumbled together. Everyone was looking around, nervous, anxious. The distant sound of waves on the island's shore did not help; it crashed against the banks, beating against the land like a great death drum. The moon was hidden behind a stretch of clouds.

Then all around them, light erupted through the darkness, and the field was illuminated by a gold and crimson flare. Several towering pillars had been set at intervals around their square of the field, with large bowls of bronze, silver, and gold perched atop each, from which plumes of fire were flickering, casting their light over the crowd. Their pale faces looked ghostly in the firelight.

"Good morning."

Everyone jumped, and several people shrieked. The students, whose attention had been focused exclusively upon the sudden bursts of flame around them, now looked around to see that a new student had appeared before them, a Zeus fifth-year prefect, standing on a tall, three-legged stool so that he was visible to the entire crowd.

His hands were laced behind his back, his mouth twisted into a cruel smile.

"You may be wondering what you are all doing here," he said. He did not shout, he did not need to: his voice was carried towards the silent audience on the chilly night breeze. "The answer is simple. Exercise."

"You called us out of our beds to jog?" someone roared indignantly from the back of the crowd, and he was met with many approving mutters.

"Oh you'll be running, all right," said a new voice to their left, and again they turned in alarm, finding yet another fifth-year, this time from Poseidon, but looking down at them with the same wickedly amused expression. "This will be a practical exercise, one that tests your current physical and mental attributes, what you've learned since being here."

"Didn't we already have tests like that?" another surly voice said. "Inn't that how we were streamed?"

"This test won't be anything like that." Once again, all heads turned, though most people had been expecting this after the last two appearances, and nobody jumped. A Hades fifth-year stood on their right, a female prefect named Alencia.

"And why won't it be?" another voice said.

"Because that initial test was just to gauge your abilities, see what level you were at without formal education. Now, we're going to see what you can do in a survival period."

"Survival?" Javon gasped.

"So she said," said the Zeus boy. "For the remainder of the night, everyone here will be participating in this exercise. A select number of students from the fourth, fifth, and sixth years will be waiting for you in the designated area. Your objective is to evade them, avoid capture, or simply manage to escape from the field, before daybreak."

"What happens if we don't?" another voice rang out, timidly.

The prefect's horrible smirk widened. "Well, that depends on who you meet."

"You can't do this!" the Poseidon boy beside Alec cried mutinously, stabbing a finger in the prefect's direction. "We just woke up, we didn't even have any warning, there's no way the teachers approved of this!"

The Poseidon prefect laughed. "Approved? This was their idea! And Derek here forgot to mention, a few of the teachers will be joining forces with the upper school students as well, waiting for you below. You're training to be heroes, aren't you? Well, here's some friendly advice for the future: you're not going to be pre-warned before you have to stop a building from collapsing, or before some idiot villain tries to level a city. The sad truth is that Heroes just don't act, they have to learn to react. And that's where this exercise comes in."

An outbreak of furious muttering rose from the crowd, but ceased almost immediately. An audible beeping had sounded above the din, and they all looked around to see Alencia holding a large, black device with a bulb-like protrusion extending from the top, flashing scarlet. She held it up, smiled, and tapped the button in the center. A horribly familiar whirring, clattering noise reached their ears, and a moment later the whole playing field broke apart and they plummeted into the depths below, their screams lost amid the rushing of the wind in their ears.

# # #

Alec stirred, groaning, feeling the cold, hard ground beneath his fingers.

"Get up," said a gruff, vaguely familiar voice from overhead. Alec pushed himself into a sitting position, aching all over, and looked around.

"What the — what's going on?" he said hoarsely. His eyes adjusted to the dim light filling the room, and he looked up to see a handsome face framed beneath a crown of sandy hair turned towards him, a pair of meadow-green eyes glaring down at him. "Damon?"

"One and only," Damon Messus drawled. "Get up."

Alec rose, dusting himself off as he peered around. They were standing in a long, low, roughly carved stone tunnel, with torches set in brackets at intervals along the walls to provide illumination.

"What are we doing down here?"

"Take a guess."

Alec tried to remember. Slowly, pieces of the conversation earlier came back to him, all fitting together in one shining moment of realization —

"We're under the playing field. This is the place they were talking about, when they said we'd have to hide from the older students until dawn."

"Yippie, now you're all caught up," Damon said in a flat, monotonous voice.

"Where's everybody else?"

"How should I know? Looks like they separated us . . ."

"And they stuck me with you?" Alec muttered to himself, but Damon turned to him, scowling, and said, "I didn't ask for it either, Princess. I could just leave right now."

Be my guest, Alec wanted to say, but he restrained himself. Damon had, after all, stayed with him long enough for him to regain consciousness when he had no reason to, and Alec didn't feel too well about navigating this strange place on his own. He wasn't scared, by any means, but remembering what had happened with Wildfire, he understood that if he was confronted by a teacher or an older student he would stand absolutely no chance by himself — and Damon was supposedly the best student in the year, at the top of the list with Maddison.

"Fine, what are we doing?"

"What do you mean?"

"Where are we going? This way or that way?" Alec said, pointing down either end of the tunnel.

Damon raised an eyebrow. "You want to move?"

"Why not? They said if we made it out on our own —"

"There is no way out, moron," Damon said calmly. "They were tricking us, preying on the naive ones in the group. They want to lure us out of hiding so it'll be easier to pick us off. Our best bet is staying where we are?"

"For five hours?" Alec said incredulously. "What about food? Water? Going to the bathroom?"

Damon shrugged. "Don't know what to tell you, Hades. You wanna go take a whiz, go right ahead. At least if they get you I'll know which path not to take."

"You're ridiculous," Alec said. He changed his mind. He would fare better on his own. Damon would probably push him out into harm's way and run off if they were confronted. He began to walk down the southern path.

"Where are you going?"

"Anywhere that's not here," Alec said irritably, without turning around.

"Making a mistake," Damon called after him in a low singsong voice. Alec ignored him. He turned right and began to forge along the corridor. His footsteps echoed loudly off the walls, his slippered feet slapping against the cold stone. He turned another corner, wondering, though he knew there was little to no chance of it, if he could somehow run into Javon, Maddison, Ethan, or any of his other roommates on the way.

He was so caught up in his own thoughts that he barely noticed the flicker of movement that he caught in the corner of his eye, and by the time he had registered what he'd seen and whipped around, several blazing balls of light were soaring towards him.

He leapt aside instinctively, but it hardly mattered: the projectiles slammed into the wall with explosive force, sending Alec flying down the hall. As he skidded across the rough, jagged rock, his clothes snagging and ripping, he heard a loud, maniacal laugh from the other side of the tunnel that filled him with dread.

Hoping, for the first time in his life, that his ears were playing tricks on him, he looked up, and his heart seemed to sink through the stone underneath him. Professor Sheilds was standing on the other end, aiming a gigantic blaster at him.

"Hello, Michaels!" he called genially, waving.

"Hi, sir," Alec said lamely from the floor.

"You understand, right?" he said, gesturing at the blaster. "No hard feelings?"

"I suppose," Alec sighed.

"Excellent!" he said cheerfully. "Glad we've sorted that out! Well, I must be moving along now, Michaels, other students to apprehend. Brace yourself now!" And the blaster surged with energy; three more balls of light flew from the blaster in sequence, illuminating the corridor with a harsh, bluish-white glare as they streaked towards him.

Desperate thoughts raced each other in Alec’s mind: dimly, he registered that he was about to die; then he remembered that this was merely a practical lesson, and that it was a teacher who was aiming at him; then he remembered that that teacher was Professor Sheilds, who was quite mad, and realized that he really was about to die, before feeling the chilly ground beneath his arms and remembering where he was.

Another colossal explosion ripped through the corridor. Dust rose in plumes towards the low ceiling as rocks rained upon the ground. When it had cleared, Alec was lying on the ground, in the same position as earlier, but now with skin and clothes alike coated in the same material as the cave floor, as though he were a statue carved from the ground. He looked up at Professor Sheilds, who was scratching his head, gazing bemusedly at his blaster.

"Ah!" he said, as though he suddenly realized something, and he reached to turn a knob on the weapon's side. He turned back to Alec with an apologetic grin. "Forgot to move it from 'obliterate' to 'stun,'" he announced, as though this was as innocent a mistake as any.

How is he still employed? Alec thought incredulously.

"Now where were we? Ah yes!" And he turned the blaster upon Alec again.

Alec was thinking quickly. He still didn't know the limits of his powers. What else could he do in this moment? He remembered how Wildfire had created a whip out of flames, how he had shot fire from his nostrils, cocooned himself in heat to purge Ryu's venom, cleaved a tree in half using a flame saw.

His mind cast wildly around for something, anything, and the vision of Professor Sheilds entombed in the earth flitted into his mind's eye. As Professor Sheilds fired again, Alec dug his fingers into the earth, concentrating deeply.

The ground at the teacher's feet shifted into something like quicksand, swallowing him to his neck with an "Umph!" of surprise and instantly solidifying, so that his entire lower body was buried in the rock. At the same time, the three balls of light, smaller and duller than the first, bounced harmlessly off of Alec's earthen armour.

"Sorry, Professor," he called, grinning as he got to his feet. "No hard feelings, right?" And without waiting for a response, Alec strode away, leaving him trapped in the cave floor. As he rounded another corner, he found Damon leaning against the wall, his arms folded, smirking.

"Not bad."

"You were there the whole time?" Alec said furiously. "He almost killed me!"

Damon tapped the side of Alec's face teasingly. "But he didn't," he said, winking. "Now, how about we get going. Still got four hours and 37 minutes to go."