The classroom was almost full.
Rows of occupied chairs, the noise of a room that had not yet been told to be quiet. He scanned the back row first. Every seat taken.
He sighed once and sat in the front.
In the thirty seconds between the door and his chair he looked at the faces out of habit. None registered. No names, no connections, no encounters from the six days prior worth filing. He was among complete strangers.
He found that satisfying.
He unpacked his bag and placed his book on the desk. After God. He had been reading it since he was fourteen and had never finished it, not because it was long but because certain pages required time he was not always willing to give them. He found his page and read.
Ten minutes passed.
He felt eyes on the back of his neck at least twice. He did not turn around.
Then the door opened.
The woman who entered was wearing white. Not the white and black of Van Silvestria's uniform. Complete white, a different cut entirely, with a precision that spoke of a different institution and a different set of priorities. He registered the crest on her chest before anything else.
An eye encircled by two wings and three hands.
The Western Kingdom.
He closed his book.
She was tall, close to six feet, with black hair cut short and green eyes that moved across the room with the efficiency of someone who had long since stopped seeing people as individuals first. She appeared to be in her early thirties, the kind of face that had earned its expression rather than inherited it. There was no performance to the authority she carried. It was simply there, and the room responded to it without being asked.
She was beautiful in the way of someone who had never once considered it relevant.
She set her things down on the professor's desk and turned to face them.
The room went quiet on its own.
Myra : "You can call me Myra. I'll be your head professor for the year."
She let that sit for one second.
Myra : "As for what we do here, I shouldn't have to explain it. We survive. That's it. Anyone in this room hoping for something more than that is an idiot with a comfortable relationship with disappointment."
The silence that followed was different from the one before. Someone shifted behind him. Someone else exhaled slowly. The sound of a room absorbing something it had not expected.
She was not wrong. Everyone in the room knew it. Knowing it did not make it easier to hear at seven in the morning on the first day of class.
Myra : "Four years. That is how long this war has been running. In those four years the angels have not slowed down, have not negotiated, have not shown a single indication that they intend to stop. The kingdoms stand. And every year we send more of you into the field and every year the numbers come back smaller than they left."
She picked up a piece of chalk and wrote a single number on the board.
Myra : "That is the percentage of humanity that no longer exists. Not wounded. Not displaced. Gone. In four years."
She set the chalk down.
Myra : "So when I tell you that surviving is the only objective worth having, I am not being cruel. I am being accurate. There is a difference. You will learn it."
She moved to the side of the board and began writing without looking at them. Dates, coordinates, names of engagements that Solandre recognized from his own reading and several he did not.
Myra : "During my service I watched people pray. Good people, mostly. Sincere ones. You should know that it accomplished nothing. We are at war with what you were praying to. Keep that in mind before your next moment of inspiration."
A voice from the middle rows, low enough that it was clearly not intended to carry.
Student : "That's a bit much for a first day."
Myra : "You're welcome to leave."
No one left.
Solandre exhaled slowly and leaned back in his chair.
Is this how the army motivates people? By dismantling every reason they had for showing up and seeing what remains?
Actually. Yes. Probably.
Myra continued. The lesson moved into angel engagement mechanics, approach patterns, the vulnerabilities that four years of Eastern Kingdom research had documented. Information Solandre had encountered scattered across books he had read the year before the academy. Here it was assembled into something more coherent, delivered without drama, without the reverence that civilian accounts applied to anything involving the angels.
She talked about them the way a physician talked about a disease. Clinically. With interest but without fear. He found that more reassuring than anything hopeful she might have said.
His attention drifted inward. Myra's voice continued at the front. Chalk moved across the board. Someone behind him was writing quickly.
He was thinking about a question he had carried since he was old enough to form it properly.
It had no satisfying answer. It had never had one. The question was simple in the way the worst questions were simple, fitting in a single sentence while containing something entire libraries had failed to resolve.
Can a creature beat its creator?
Not survive. Not endure. Not build a barrier and call it victory.
Beat.
The kingdoms stood. Humanity had responded to being condemned by immediately demonstrating every quality it had been condemned for, with the addition of more engineering. And the angels kept coming. And the numbers kept shrinking. And in classrooms like this one, sixteen year olds were being taught how to survive a war they had not started against an enemy that did not get tired.
The angels had not been wrong about us.
He had thought that before. He thought it again now, with the same result as every time, which was no result at all. Just the thought, sitting there, refusing to become anything more useful than itself.
Outside, through the high window above the board, the morning light came down clear and cold over the city below.
He opened his book again.
Myra was still talking.
The question stayed where it was.
It always did.