From the white-haired boy, to number 56, to Maledic Thorne.
Landen thought about the name. Thorne. His name. On someone else.
He couldn't believe it.
Across the room, Maledic leaned his greatsword against the wall. He caught Landen watching him from the corner of his eye — and then, somehow, Landen was just there, standing right next to him.
Maledic closed the remaining distance himself. In his experience, the only reason someone stepped into your space like that was because they wanted a fight.
But Landen didn't move. He held Maledic's gaze without flinching, though his expression wasn't hostile. If anything, he just looked curious.
Maledic's jaw tightened. "What do you want?"
"Your last name," Landen said, "is Thorne."
"...Yes."
"My last name," Landen continued, pointing at himself, "is also Thorne."
Maledic stared at him. "Okay."
"Maledic Thorne," Landen said, like he was reading it aloud for the first time. "Landen Thorne." He said his own name just after, letting them land side by side. Then slowly, the pieces finished assembling.
His whole life, he'd been alone in the truest sense. No siblings. No cousins his age. No one who'd looked at him across a dinner table and shared something in the bone-deep, unspoken way the family did. As a kid, he'd imagined it — really imagined it, the kind of fantasy you don't tell anyone about — that somewhere out there, there was someone. A brother. Separated by some cruel twist of fate. And someday, against all odds, in the most unlikely of places—
They would find each other.
"...Brother," Landen said.
Maledic blinked. "What?"
"You're my long-lost brother."
Maledic's expression cycled through several distinct phases — confusion, the specific confusion of someone who thinks they may have misheard, then the harder confusion of someone who didn't mishear. He looked away briefly. Then looked back.
"I've always felt it," Landen said, with full conviction. "You know? The feeling that my brother was out there."
A pause.
"That was you. You're my brother."
Something shifted in Maledic's face. Because the truth was — and he would never say this out loud, not to anyone — he had felt it too — the odd hollowness of being the last of a name with no one else to share it.
He had told himself it was nothing.
Brother.
The word knocked something loose in his chest.
"Brother?" he repeated, quieter this time.
"Brother," Landen confirmed.
Maledic grabbed him and pulled him into the most aggressively sincere embrace Landen had experienced in either of his lives. "BROTHER!"
"BROTHER!" Landen hollered back, hugging him just as hard.
"Landen." The system's voice rang in his head, flat and unamused. "This individual is not your brother. He originates from an entirely different world. You share a surname, which is — in all measurable likelihood — a coincidence. The biological connection you are implying is, quite literally, impossible."
Landen didn't listen, and it didn't matter. Call it intuition. Call it fate. They both were already convinced that they were brothers.
— — —
The next day, there were no classrooms.
Landen had half-expected a lecture — some professor at a board drawing diagrams. Maybe a handout. Instead, the assignment notification read: Report to Simulation Block C. 0700. Halvek Team B.
It was the first time that phrase had applied to him.
He'd seen the roster. He knew the names. But knowing names and standing next to the people attached to them were different things. As the five of them assembled in the corridor outside the simulation block — Landen, Elle, Jareth, Veya, Ember — he had the distinct and specific feeling of a group of strangers who had been told they were already friends.
The academy's standard approach was to skip the classroom entirely for this one. In a real battle arena, players entered physically. But for freshmen learning the rules for the first time, they used the simulation rooms: same mechanics, close enough to count.
It made sense. It was also the most elaborate tutorial setup he'd ever seen.
— — —
The green suits were ugly.
Landen hadn't said anything about it yet, but he was thinking it very loudly, and he suspected he wasn't alone. The thick white stripes running along every seam were supposed to look sharp.
"They're kind of cute, actually," Elle said, tugging at her sleeve. "Like, very sporty. Very, we mean business." She glanced at Landen. "Do I look sporty?"
"You look like a traffic cone," Landen said.
"Oh thank god, so does everyone else." She seemed genuinely relieved.
The stairwell stretched above and below them — a long spiraling column of students in matching green, moving in a slow shuffling line that clinked with every step. Clink. Clink. Clink. Metal grating under two hundred pairs of boots. Landen looked up and could see three more floors of it. He looked down and saw three more below that.
"Move in an orderly fashion." The woman's voice came from everywhere at once — smooth, unhurried. "Proceed to your designated room."
And then the music kicked in. Deep, dramatic, the kind that belonged in a film about something that actually mattered. Landen felt his pulse tick upward despite himself.
"Okay," Elle said, "the music is doing something to me. I feel like I'm about to do something incredible."
"You're walking," Ember said flatly, from ahead of her.
"I'm walking intensely."
Jareth said nothing. He took up most of the width of the stairwell by himself, and he moved through it the way large things tend to move. Veya was directly behind him, watching the students on the floor above them, her expression looking slightly nervous with her large puppy eyes.
They found their door on the fourth landing — a flat gray panel, no handle, a small placard with their team designation. Other teams filed into position on either side. For a moment, the whole stairwell went still: everyone facing their door, matching green, the music swelling beneath all of it.
Landen looked at his team. "I just want to say—"
"Stop talking," Ember said.
Landen stopped.
She turned just enough to look at him directly.
"There is no way in hell," she said, "that I will listen to anyone weaker than me. The captain should be the strongest. And that person is me."
No one argued.
"Please be ready to enter."
The door slid open.
"Countdown starting — ten — nine — eight—"
Inside: a dim room, six reclined seats arranged in a shallow arc, and six large helmets resting on stands beside each one. The woman's voice followed them in, but it no longer bounced off distant walls.
"Sit down and put on a helmet."
Landen dropped into the nearest seat. The helmet was heavier than it looked. He settled it over his head.
Then his MOBA System sent a notification.
"—three—"
|| QUEST: SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETE THE BATTLE ARENA TUTORIAL ||
"—two—"
|| REWARD: 20 EXP ||
"—one—"
Then: silence.
Next: A sky so clean and wide it made his chest ache. Actual clouds. Actual sunlight, warm on his face. For exactly one second he thought: I'm back home.
Then he heard the music, like a soundtrack for battle preparation. He saw NPCs move in their looping patterns around buildings.
He stood in a circle along with four other people, none of whom he recognized.
There was a giant in full plate armor, a greataxe resting across one shoulder like it weighed nothing. Beside him, a lean, wiry man with a long-barreled gun and the posture of someone who'd just discovered they had fast hands. Next to them — a large insect-like creature with angular limbs and compound eyes that caught the light in multiple directions at once. And a woman — blue skin, bright yellow hair exploding upward in a fountain of spikes, muscles that suggested she could throw a horse.
Realizing what happened, Landen looked down at himself. At his chest. His large—plumpish chest.
He was wearing a short dress. His legs were very long. His hair — he could see it at the edges of his vision — was substantially more than he was used to having. And there, front and center, undeniable, were two large melons.
He looked up.
He looked back down.
He touched them — purely for scientific observation.
"Argh," he said, the curse seal activating. "I probably should have done that."
"Interesting," said the giant in plate armor. Ember's voice, completely flat. She slammed her fist against her large axe, then threw it over her shoulder. "This is more like it."
The lean figure with the gun spun it once and caught it clean. "Oh." Jareth's voice, louder than usual, but with something new in it. Satisfaction. He shifted his weight, and it transferred quickly, efficiently. He shifted again.
"Do not—" The bug creature's voice cracked. Veya's voice, except that her voice had never done anything like this before. She was holding her own forearm — her own long, angular, chitinous forearm. Her compound eyes communicated pure panic. "Do not — what is — why are my hands—" She made a sound that was almost a word. Then another. "I have — these are — what are these—"
"They're arms," Ember said.
"These are not arms—"
"Arms," Ember said again.
Elle, the blue woman, was not listening to any of this. She had already identified Jareth and was chasing him around with open arms. Elle's voice rang out like a bell. "You're so small, and I'm so big, and I need to hug you right now—"
Jareth ran. "I don't think so." He ran faster.
"—just one hug—"
"No."
Landen watched this and touched his chest again, continuing his research.
"That's the third time," Ember said, holding her axe.
"I'm just—"
"I know what you're doing." I know what you're doing." She approached him, axe in hand. "Do it again, and I'll cut your head off."
Landen raised both hands. "Okay — okay—"
He thought about every male player he had ever encountered in an online game who had chosen a female avatar without hesitation. He had never fully understood the impulse until this exact moment. It made sense now. It made complete and total sense.
The town kept going. The NPCs walked their loops. Veya was still audibly distressed about her limbs. Elle continued to chase Jareth around a building.
Then the voice came — the same voice from the simulation room, but now it rang through the open air of the town like an announcement at a festival.
"Welcome to the World Battle Arena tutorial."
Everyone stopped.
Landen straightened up. He looked at his team — the giant, the creature, the gunslinger currently being held tightly by the blue woman. Then he looked up into the blue sky.
Finally.
He touched his chest one more time.
Just to be sure they were still there.