The Merit Board occupied the entire east wall of the main hall.
It had been there, according to the fourth-year who explained it to Roman on day two, for longer than anyone currently teaching at Selvinina could remember. A vast panel of dark wood covered in small brass plaques — student names, merit counts, rankings that updated weekly. At the top the numbers were large. At the bottom they were small. In the middle was where most people spent most of their time.
The system was simple.
Merit points determined privilege — room upgrades, access to restricted library sections, priority equipment allocation, the right to request specific instructors, the quality of your meals if you cared about that, the size of your training allocation. The academy did not give these things. It sold them, at prices denominated in merit, and merit came from one place.
Missions.
The mission board was beside the merit board — a second panel, this one covered in paper slips that changed daily. Retrieval jobs, escort contracts, survey work, threat clearance. Every mission had a location, a difficulty rating, a merit value, and a distance requirement: the teleportation arrays that sat in the academy's lower level could drop a student anywhere in the empire, but the mission site had to be within ten miles of a known array anchor point.
Most first-years spent the first month reading the mission board carefully and attempting nothing.
Aren read it for two days and then looked at Colis.
Colis had been looking at the same slip.
Northern region. Forty miles east of the Iron Fort.A herb gathering but they knew north the simple herb gathering mission could turn into a life or death struggle with barbarian horde it may be Bandit company or a lesser drake — attacking on supply convoys . Merit value: substantial. Difficulty rating: moderate, with the caveat that the terrain was difficult and northern conditions applied.
Aren pulled the slip.
---
The teleportation array felt like cold water and lasted less than a breath.
They came out in a clearing. Snow on the ground, treeline tight on three sides, the particular quality of northern silence that Aren had grown up inside — the kind that wasn't empty but full, pressed down by cold and distance and the weight of how far you were from anything.
Colis looked at the treeline. Looked at the sky. Read the light.
"Camp's northeast," he said. "Wind's coming from the east. We approach from the west, we're upwind."
Aren was already moving.
---
There was no long approach, no extended reconnaissance, no careful planning session in the treeline. They had both grown up in the north. They both understood what bandits operating in northern terrain meant — not an abstract threat rating on a mission slip but a specific and familiar category of problem. Men who raided supply lines.
Aren had no particular feelings about what followed. He had stopped having particular feelings about this category of thing in a forest three months ago when sixteen men had decided he was worth selling.
They entered the camp from the west as Colis had suggested.
It was brief.
Colis fought the way his uncle had trained him — aura at the blade, cold and precise, each movement the minimum necessary and no more. He did not perform. He did not hesitate. He moved through his half of the camp like a frost line moving across water, inevitable and quiet.
Aren fought differently. Faster, less systematic, the kind of movement that came from a body that had been learning at an accelerated rate across three months of mornings and was still integrating everything it had absorbed. Eagle Blade's diagonal geometry surfaced twice without him deciding to use it — his body finding the angle because the angle was correct, the style already becoming instinct rather than technique.
Twenty men.
It took less time than the walk from the array drop point to the camp.
---
Afterward they stood in the quiet of the cleared camp and the snow continued to fall with the complete indifference of northern weather to everything that happened beneath it.
Colis cleaned his blade with a piece of cloth from his coat pocket. The motion was practiced and unhurried, the way someone clean a blade when cleaning a blade is simply something you do and has been for years.
Aren looked at the camp. Looked at the treeline.
Neither of them said anything about what they had done. There was nothing to say. This was not their first time and they had both known that before they pulled the mission slip and that was, in part, why they had pulled it together and not offered it to the others.
Roman would have come. Jordan would have come. The difference was it would have been their first time and first times changed people in ways that didn't unhappen, and Aren had no interest in being responsible for that.
"We should check the supply logs," Colis said. "If there's documentation of the convoy raids it adds to the merit claim."
"Northeast corner," Aren said. He had noted the structure that looked administrative when they came in. "There'll be a box or a satchel."
They found it in four minutes.
---
The teleportation array brought them back to the lower level of the academy at the second bell of the afternoon. They came through into the grey stone room that smelled like chalk and ozone and walked up the stairs and submitted the mission documentation to the hall monitor's desk with the complete calm of two people returning from a routine errand.
The monitor looked at the herb. Looked at them. Looked at the merit value on the slip.
"First-years," he said. It was not a question.
"Yes," Colis said.
The monitor wrote something down. Updated the merit board without further comment. The two brass plaques near the bottom of the first-year section moved upward by a substantial increment.
They walked to dinner.
---
At the table Roman noticed the merit change before they sat down — he had a habit of checking the board numbers when he passed — and looked at them with an expression that asked the question without asking it.
"Northern mission," Aren said.
"Mm." Roman poured himself water. Did not push.
Makhon looked at their hands. At the particular way they both sat, slightly settled, the specific stillness of people who had been physical and had finished being physical. He understood. He said nothing.
Irisa passed Colis the bread.
Lura, across the table, looked at Aren for a moment.
He met her eyes briefly. Nothing in his expression. She looked back at her plate.
She was a princess. She had grown up understanding, abstractly, that the empire ran on things that happened in places she did not see. She had the truth element. She could read the shape of what people carried inside them.
She did not reach in.
Some things deserved to be left where they were.
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— End of Chapter 12 —
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