The distant roar of the crowd faded behind thick oak doors.

  Caleb followed Captain Hatch down a corridor deep within the Deadfall Garrison, his boots striking polished stone in rhythm with the officer's measured stride.

  I'm being processed.

  The thought wormed its way through his exhausted mind. Conscription was the obvious answer. The Legion had just watched a lowborn kitchen worker perform feats that shouldn't be possible. They'd want to claim that power, mold it into something useful for the Dominion.

  Or maybe they think I cheated somehow. Used some illegal alchemical concoction.

  He cataloged every step, every turn. Three rights, two lefts, ascending one flight of stairs, another right. His [Perfect Memory] recorded it all, mapping the labyrinth even as his conscious mind spiraled through worst-case scenarios.

  Runic sconces provided sterile illumination, their pale blue light casting shadows across row after row of identical weapon racks. Legion-issue spears stood in formation, their steel tips gleaming with fastidious care. Not a single shaft was out of alignment.

  The sight made his skin crawl.

  Hatch's posture remained impeccable, his fists clasped behind his back as he marched through the hall. The man radiated quiet discipline with every breath, his very presence an indication that this wasn't a casual invitation.

  The corridor opened into a wider hallway. Through a barred window, Caleb glimpsed a training ground that looked like where he'd spent his mornings for weeks. The space appeared different from this angle.

  Just another piece of the machine.

  They stopped before a plain wooden door, indistinguishable from a dozen others they'd passed. Hatch produced a key. The lock clicked open with finality.

  Maps covered every wall in the spartan room, each depicting the Virethane Forest. Colored pins dotted the parchment—red for known spirit beast and monster lairs, blue for foraging sites. Lines of neat script annotated patrol routes and the delver's trace. Caleb made sure to get a good, long look.

  A single desk dominated the room, its surface bare except for a leather-bound ledger and an inkwell. Two chairs faced each other across the weathered wood. Behind the desk, a narrow window offered a view of the grounds below, the bars across it reducing the outside world to a grid of controlled segments.

  No personal effects. No decorations.

  Hatch moved behind the desk, settling into his chair. He gestured to the seat across from him.

  "Sit."

  Caleb obeyed, his body moving on autopilot. His mind raced, trying to calculate angles, prepare defenses, find some way to turn this conversation to his advantage.

  The captain leaned back, resting his chin on a loosely clasped hand. His clear brown eyes regarded Caleb with the same focused intensity he'd used during their training sessions.

  "Do you know why I brought you here, Caldorn?"

  The words hung in the air, a classic interrogator's opening. Give the subject a chance to incriminate themselves, to reveal what they think is the problem.

  Caleb met the captain's stare directly, forcing his spine straight despite exhaustion.

  "I do."

  Hatch's eyebrows rose fractionally.

  Caleb pressed forward before the man could respond. "But before we discuss the Legion's business, I have questions of my own."

  "Questions." Hatch's voice remained neutral. "Ask."

  Caleb drew a breath. "The tournament. I understand the need to test combat readiness. I understand that real fights aren't clean or fair. But what I saw the last four days wasn't testing." He paused. "Narbok crippled Isella when she was already beaten. Rielle tortured Valen. I—" He stopped himself. "Why was that allowed?"

  The captain's expression shifted. The professional mask remained, but something distant and hard settled behind his eyes. His hands moved from their flat position to rest on the arms of his chair as he leaned back, fingers drumming once against the wood.

  "I've been in the Legion for seventy years, Caldorn. Do you know what that means?"

  Caleb shook his head. Internally, he couldn't believe the captain's age. The man didn't look a day over thirty-five.

  "It means I've seen things that would break most men." Hatch's voice remained level. "Three gates north of here, there's a D-tier dungeon the locals call the Deep Warren. Twenty years ago, my cohort was tasked with clearing it before a break."

  The captain's gaze never wavered.

  "The creatures inside fed on fear. On suffering. They didn't kill their prey quickly—they took them apart slowly, keeping them alive through the entire process." Hatch leaned forward slightly. "By the time we reached the core chamber, we'd lost half our company. The survivors weren't the strongest or the fastest. They were the ones who could function while listening to their brothers scream."

  Caleb forced himself not to look away.

  "The Legion doesn't encourage cruelty for its own sake. We don't celebrate sadism." Hatch's tone hardened. "But we acknowledge it as a reality of the world we live in. Sheltering recruits from that truth is a disservice that gets them killed. Better they encounter it here, in a controlled environment with healers standing by, than in a dungeon where mercy is a luxury no one can afford."

  Caleb hated that the words made a barbaric kind of sense.

  "The purpose of the Reaping tournament isn't to produce winners… it's to produce survivors." The captain's voice softened fractionally. "Those who can face cruelty and keep fighting. Those who understand the stakes and choose to walk the path anyway. Narbok, Rielle, even you—all of you were useful in demonstrating that to the others."

  Silence stretched between them.

  "Anything else?"

  Caleb nodded slowly. "Narbok. The racism." His jaw tightened. "You hear what he calls me. Why does the Legion tolerate that?"

  The change in Hatch was immediate.

  The professional distance cracked. Pain flickered across his features, old and deep, before his training reasserted control. But Caleb had seen it.

  When Hatch spoke again, his voice had lost its edge.

  "I spent five years attached to the Mycari kingdom. Before the betrayal, when the Dominion still treated them as allies." He paused, his fingers tracing an absent pattern on the desk. "I was young then, arrogant, convinced of my own righteousness. The Mycari disabused me of those notions within a month."

  "I met my wife there. Silvyra." Hatch's eyes grew distant. "She was a healer in the Mistblood training core, tending warriors who came back from the deep forest with wounds that shouldn't have been survivable. She saved my life after a sporecap shambler ambush—spent three days purging the spores from my blood while I hallucinated and wailed." A faint smile touched his lips. "When I woke up, she was asleep in the chair beside my bed, still wearing dirty aprons stained with my filth."

  The captain's hands clenched into fists on the desk.

  "We were lucky to have been on a mission when Emperor Caelverax decided the Mycari had outlived their purpose." He let out a quiet breath. "After things settled down, we returned here, thinking the worst was behind us."

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "We have two children. A boy and a girl." Deep, quiet pain surfaced on his face. "Their skin has that soft green tint, their ears just pointed enough to mark them as other. And this village never let them forget it."

  Caleb felt a touch of sympathy, but maintained his silence.

  "They endured it for years. The whispers, the insults, the stones thrown by other children." Hatch's fists tightened on the desk. "They're grown now. They left as soon as they could, went east toward the provincial capital. Found places where people don't spit on the ground when they see them walk by."

  "Silvyra wanted to stay. This is her home, her family's land. She won't leave it. And I won't leave her." He finally looked up, his gaze locking with Caleb's. "So I stay here, and my children live a dozen gates away. I sometimes get letters. I haven't seen my son in five years." He paused.

  "I wear this uniform because I still believe in what it represents, even if I don't always agree with the methods. And while I have a deep personal hatred for the kind of treatment my children received, the Dominion stopped trying to police the sentiment years ago when officials and soldiers received knives in the dark for their troubles. It's just how it is here."

  Heavy quiet filled the room.

  Caleb felt something shift in his chest. He found himself wanting to trust this man.

  The moment stretched.

  Caleb broke the silence, his mind latching onto a detail from the captain's story to steer away from the emotion. "Can I ask one more question?"

  Hatch nodded.

  The word from Hatch's story repeated in Caleb's mind. Gates. An unwelcome memory then: Thal's father, Rufan, smelling of ale and bravado, telling Meriel about a three-month caravan guard job. The word "gate" had been central to his boasting, but Thal hadn't understood it then, and the memory offered no new clarity to Caleb.

  Caleb pushed the remembrance down, gambling on a lie to cover the gap in his knowledge. "You said your children live a dozen gates away. I've heard the term before, but I never really understood what they are. Can you tell me?"

  Surprise flickered across Hatch's face, quickly suppressed.

  "A fair question." Hatch's voice took on a formal tone. "The rune gates are the foundation of the Dominion. They are colossal, ancient archways scattered across the world, relics of a forgotten age. When active, they create spatial corridors that allow for instantaneous travel across massive distances."

  He held up two fingers, a few inches apart. "Imagine being able to step from my thumb to my forefinger in a single moment, even if they were a thousand miles apart. That is what a gate allows. The entire network is under Dominion control. They are how armies move, how trade flows, and how the Emperor's will is enforced across Veraxus."

  Then Hatch let out a long breath. He didn't put the vulnerability away so much as let it settle, reshaping the lines of his face from a soldier's mask to something more paternal. He looked at Caleb, his eyes clear and direct.

  "Alright, son. Now we need to talk about your future, because you have a serious problem." His gaze was intense. "Do you have any idea what you really did out there today?"

  The sudden shift from shared grief to urgent warning caught Caleb off guard.

  "I… lost?"

  "You haven't looked at your notifications, have you?"

  Caleb's mind reeled back to the fight, to the cascade of chimes he'd been subconsciously dismissing in the heat of combat. Holy mackerel, there's a lot of them! He'd been so fixated on the fight that he'd ignored the System's warnings entirely.

  His stomach twisted.

  He pulled up his status screen. The notifications were there, dozens of them, queued in chronological order.

  The first one made him pause.

  [New Ability Gained: Crimson Overdrive (F) - Novice]

  A moment of pride slipped through his apprehension. So that's what it was called. The System had recognized his desperate innovation, his synthesis of multiple techniques into something new.

  Then he saw the rest.

  [Channel Erosion: +0.50%]

  [Channel Erosion: +0.50%]

  [Channel Erosion: +0.50%]

  The notifications scrolled past, each one incrementing the debuff by half a percent. The number climbed with horrifying regularity.

  [Channel Erosion: 17.00%]

  The text remained fixed in his vision.

  Seventeen percent. But what does it mean?

  Caleb's breath caught as understanding hit him. Channel Erosion. The term was unfamiliar, but the moment he read it, something in his spirit knew. He turned his awareness inward, examining the pathways through which his Stamina flowed.

  The sensation was nauseating.

  His channels, the spiritual conduits that should have felt smooth and strong, were raw. Abraded. Like pathways that had been scoured by high-pressure friction. He mobilized Stamina experimentally, pulling it from its diffuse state and directing it through his body.

  The energy moved, but not cleanly. He could feel it leaking, precious power bleeding out through microscopic tears in his spiritual infrastructure. What should have been an easy flow was now riddled with losses.

  I broke something. I actually broke something in myself.

  The realization came on a wave of nausea. This wasn't like Spiritual Contamination, that poison slowly working its way out of his system. This was structural damage.

  "Crumb," he whispered.

  Hatch remained silent, letting the data deliver its own verdict.

  After a few moments, the captain interrupted his spiraling thoughts. "You're beginning to understand. What you did out there—that body enhancement Ability you spontaneously developed—requires channel fortitude you don't possess. The constant flow of Stamina throughout your entire body generates immense spiritual friction." He paused. "You were forcing power through pathways not yet reinforced to handle that kind of repeated stress."

  The captain stood, moving to the window. He clasped his hands behind his back, staring out at the training grounds below.

  "That technique, whatever the System decided to call it, requires the strengthened energy channels of a D-tier warrior. Specifically, it requires successful completion of the Internal Crucible, the E-to-D breakthrough trial. That's where a practitioner permanently scours and fortifies their pathways to handle advanced techniques."

  Caleb's throat had gone dry. "But I'm F-tier."

  "Exactly." Hatch turned back to face him. "You performed a D-tier feat with an F-tier body. The Channel Erosion you're experiencing is the direct consequence—every second you maintained that state, you were grinding your spiritual pathways down like sand scours skin."

  The image didn't help Caleb's stomach.

  "If the match had gone on another ten seconds, you would have permanently crippled yourself." Hatch's voice was low. "The damage would have been irreversible short of treasures worth more gold than this entire village generates in a year." He shook his head. "I was seconds from calling the match. From stopping it myself."

  The words hung between them.

  Caleb latched onto the first coherent question he could form. "But how did you know? What do you mean you knew I was about to cripple myself?"

  Hatch turned to face him, expression hardening with a different kind of gravity.

  "The arena was full, Caldorn. Every seat occupied." The captain began to pace with restless energy. "Every noble family with interests in Deadfall was watching. The Gilded merchants who control the trade routes. Delvers passing through, looking for talent to recruit. Legion scouts searching for potential. Every one of them capable of reading the energy flow of an F-tier like an open book."

  "They didn't just see a trainee lose a match, son. They saw the impossible." Hatch stopped pacing, his eyes burning with intensity. "It's one thing to learn an advanced technique through years of training at the proper tier. It's another thing entirely to invent one on the spot, under duress and under-tiered, by combining the principles of other Abilities you've barely mastered."

  The captain took a step closer. "The technique you developed isn't what's important here. It's that you could develop it in the first place. It's the emergence of a prodigy. Of a level of innate talent and spiritual intuition that might appear once in a generation."

  He let the words sink in. "That kind of potential is a beacon, Caldorn. And in the Dominion, a beacon doesn't attract moths. It attracts vultures, and it attracts chains."

  Caleb's blood ran cold as he understood how seriously he may have screwed up.

  Hatch stopped pacing and leaned his hands on the desk, his weight forward.

  The captain's voice dropped, each word heavy with warning. "The Legion does not let an asset of your potential go unclaimed. That's a fact of life, and it's the problem we now have to solve."

  The captain’s statement lingered. We. The sudden inclusion felt wrong, a verbal trap Caleb didn't understand. His exhaustion and fear morphed into suspicion.

  "What do you mean, 'we'?" Caleb asked. "Why are you helping me?"

  Hatch's expression was unreadable for a moment before it softened wearily. "The Hearthsongs have always been a friend of half-elves, and were ever good to my children. Cassia speaks highly of you, and I value her counsel." He straightened up, his eyes holding deep pain. "And I have no desire to see another talented kid shipped off to the meat grinder."

  The bluntness silenced Caleb's suspicion.

  His tongue felt thick. "What does that mean?"

  "It means that right now, in offices and private chambers throughout this village, powerful people are discussing you. Calculating your value. Determining how best to acquire and utilize your talents." The captain's stare was unflinching. "The Legion has protocols for this—procedures designed to secure exceptional individuals before rival factions can make their claims."

  Conscription.

  "The Legion recruitment office could have your name on a docket before dawn," Hatch continued. "You'd be processed and shipped off within a week. It would all be perfectly legal. Perfectly within regulation." He pushed off the desk. "The Dominion Youth Preparedness Mandate gives the Legion first claim on any individual who demonstrates advanced potential."

  Caleb's hands tightened on the arms of his chair.

  "Noble houses would protest, of course. Some might even attempt to make counter-offers." Hatch paused. "But in the end, the Legion's claim supersedes all others. Unless you have a patron powerful enough to challenge military authority." He tilted his head. "Do you?"

  The question was rhetorical. They both knew the answer.

  Caleb thought of Cassia and Gareth, successful E-tier powerhouses in the context of Deadfall, but ultimately inn-keepers with no political leverage. He thought of Selara, but didn't think she was invested in him enough to tangle with the Legion.

  He had no one.

  "That's what I thought." Hatch's voice held no satisfaction, just sober acknowledgment of reality.

  The captain stopped pacing and returned to the desk, this time sitting on its edge, closing the distance without being threatening.

  "And that, son, changes everything. Your life as a simple village boy is over. But you're not without hope. Your performance wasn't just exceptional… it was extraordinary. And it just so happens there is a tradition that has been passed down since time immemorial for extraordinary individuals. A tradition that even the Dominion dare not challenge."

  Hatch held his gaze for a tense moment.

  "Tell me, Thalorin Caldorn." The captain's eyes gleamed. "What do you know of The Sovereign Path?"