The shards of the Aether Evaluation Monolith’s quartz empty pocket tube lay scattered across the sand like crushed sea salt.
In the VIP box, Senior Instructor Gregory Vance leaned over the stone railing, his knuckles whitening against the carved railing until the stone groaned under his grip. His face was mottled with dark crimson patches, his pomaded hair disheveled by the sudden rush of cold wind rising from the arena floor. Behind him, the gold-trimmed banners of House Vance fluttered in the autumn gale, their silver frost-coils mocking the frozen disaster below.
“Invalid trial!” Gregory roared, his voice amplified by the brass speakers along the terrace. “The match is void! The cadet smuggled an illegal combat stimulant into the pit! No F-Rank stray possesses the bone thickness to withstand a Gold-Rank drake’s driving force! Marshals, seize that hound!”
Two Vanguard court guards clad in gray composite plate stepped onto the sand, their magnetic shock-batons humming with ten thousand volts of blue spark discharge. Their heavy boots kicked up plumes of white sand as they fanned out, attempting to bracket Arthur and Grimm from both flanks. They were veteran guards accustomed to terrorizing poor students who had fallen behind on lab fees, their expressions set in cruel, office indifference.
Grimm didn’t bark. He simply shifted his balance, lowering his balance point by two inches. A low, sub-bass deep ring shook in the dog’s chest. It shook the loose grains of sand around his front paws. The surrounding light around his jet-black coat seemed to bend. It cast an eerie, shadow-fringed dark shape against the pale limestone.
Arthur didn’t draw a weapon. He took two steps forward, placing his left hand on Grimm’s muscular scruff. Meanwhile, his right hand retrieved a thin sheet of greaseproof parchment from his work pocket.
“Section Twenty-Four, Subsection D of the Central Vanguard Code,” Arthur declared. He projected his voice with cold and exact clarity toward the judging pavilion. “A formal challenge in the Stage I Appraisal Arena is supervised by a self-running ringing monolith. The machine recorded a clean moving subjugation without artificial aetheric residue. Plus, any party alleging pharmaceutical contamination must submit the sample to immediate needle aspiration on the arena floor.”
He looked directly at the two advancing court guards.
“You have six seconds to draw a sterile joint fluid from my beast’s hock, court guards. But if your analysis returns negative for foreign synthetics, Section Twenty-Eight stipulates that the accuser forfeits three months of working salary to the defendant’s ledger. Are you prepared to sign the indemnification bond, Instructor Vance?”
The two court guards paused, their boots grinding to a halt in the sand. They glanced nervously up at the VIP balcony. Neither man was eager to wager ninety days of pay against a cadet who had just dismantled a four-ton drake in under four seconds. They knew the Central Vanguard regulations were written by frontline marshals who despised office interference.
“Insolence!” Dean Horatio Pendelton sputtered. He rose from his velvet armchair with his handkerchief clutched to his sweating jowls. “Cadet Arthur Vance, your tone is a breach of institutional decorum! The board has full power to impound questionable specimens for careful review!”
“Then you’ll conduct that review in the presence of an independent guard post judge,” a new voice cut through the shouting.
From the shadows of the referee tunnel emerged Professor Bramwell Heseltine.
The Scalpel Dean was a sight of disheveled power. He wore his blood-spattered rubber cutting-open apron over a rumpled tweed coat, a half-burned clove cigarillo clenched between his yellowed teeth. A fourteen-inch black glass bone-saw hooked casually into his tool belt. A cloud of pungent, fragrant smoke drifted around his stooped shoulders as he shuffled onto the sand, his unlaced boots crunching rhythmically against the grit.
“Bramwell,” Dean Pendelton gasped, his small eyes widening. “This is an internal punishment proceeding—”
“This is an arena trial conducted under the 132nd Military Vanguard Charter,” Heseltine rasped, his voice scraping like coarse sandpaper. He stopped beside Arthur, plucked the smoldering cigarillo from his mouth. Then he exhaled a stream of gray smoke toward the VIP box. “I witnessed the strike with my own eyes. The boy used an oblique levering maneuver against an uncalcified knee insertion. Standard beast-doctor body leverage. If Julian’s breeders spent more time checking growth-plate ossification and less time polishing scales with man-made lacquer, his drake would still be standing on four legs.”
Heseltine kicked a loose piece of drake scale across the sand with the toe of his boot.
“The match is legal. The moving reading is checked. If the Clan Board wants this boy’s charter, they will have to file an appeal with the High Garrison Court in Sector 1. And considering the guard post marshals are currently rationing ammunition on the frontier, I doubt they will entertain your bunkhouse eviction dispute.”
A murmur of agreement rippled through the cadet stands. Several commoner cadets from the lower wards began stamping their boots in rhythmic applause, the sound growing until the tiered arena rumbled like an approaching freight train. These were the cadets who had lost their beasts to hungry loan rates and corrupted feeds. Watching a commoner cadet shatter the golden scion of House Vance was a catharsis they had waited years to witness.
Julian Vance was already being hauled onto an air-powered medical gurney by four trembling attendants. The scion was half-conscious, his pale officer’s tunic soaked with cold melting frost and draconic blood. As the gurney rolled toward the tunnel, Julian’s bloodshot eyes locked onto Arthur with a look of shattered, blazing bright hatred.
“Clear the sand,” Heseltine barked at the herald. “The boy won. Record the ledger.”
The herald swallowed hard, tapped his console, and announced into the microphone:
“Test Trial One: Winner, Cadet Arthur Vance. Charter status: Confirmed. Debt levy: Dismissed under Check Clause Nine.”
Arthur gave Heseltine a short, respectful nod. He turned on his heel and walked toward the exit tunnel, Grimm trotting silently at his side.
In the shadows of the hall stood Toby Mallow.
The seventeen-year-old cadet logistician was pale as curdled milk. His taped tortoiseshell glasses slid down his sweating nose. He clutched his massive brass-bound accounting ledger to his chest with both arms. His fingers shook so wildly that the parchment pages rustled like dry leaves. Toby had been Arthur’s roommate for two years, ever since Arthur’s father died on the border. While Arthur had spent those years buried in anatomy charts, Toby had survived by doing the arithmetic for every commoner bettor in the lower tiers.
“Arthur...” Toby squeaked, his voice cracking three times in two syllables. “Arthur, you... You broke the drake. The betting board... The commoner pool had you at one hundred and forty to one.”
“Did you place a slip, Toby?” Arthur asked, pausing beside him in the cool gloom of the tunnel.
“I... I put in four credits,” Toby whispered, his eyes wide behind his thick lenses. “Our dinner money for the week. Arthur, the bookmaker owes us five hundred and sixty Vanguard credits. Five hundred and sixty! We can buy three sacks of dried oats and a whole bushel of salted turnips!”
Grimm walked over to Toby, lowered his massive head, and sniffed the boy’s frayed trouser cuff. Toby froze, his breath catching in his throat as the midnight-black hound gave his shoe a wet, friendly nudge with its nose.
“He... He doesn’t want to eat me, does he?” Toby whimpered, pressing himself flat against the brick wall.
“He wants dinner,” Arthur said with a faint smile, scratching Grimm behind the ear. “And so do I. Let’s go collect our winnings before the bookmaker leaves town.”
They made their way to the outer concourse beneath the eastern grandstand. There, an underground bookmaker known as Sump-Nose Kroll operated out of an iron ticket cage. When Kroll saw Arthur and the black hound approaching, his greasy face blanched. He tried to argue that the match was under office contestation. His stubby fingers grabbed a wooden cash box.
Grimm took two silent steps forward. The hound placed both forepaws on the wooden counter of the cage, leaned his massive head through the iron bars. Then he let out a single, sub-heard chuff at twenty Hertz.
The brass counter scales shook wildly, rattling against the iron bars. Kroll’s knees buckled. Without another word of protest, the bookmaker shoveled fifty-six crisp blue five-credit vouchers and a stack of copper tokens into Toby’s trembling satchel. Toby clutched the canvas bag to his stomach as though guarding an infant from artillery fire. His eyes were wide with triumphant terror.
Arthur led the way out into the cold autumn sunshine of the outer courtyard. Commoner cadets and upkeep mechanics parted respectfully to let them pass. Arthur looked down at Grimm’s left flank. There, a patch of frost crystals clung to the black glass fur. He ran his bare thumb along the hair shafts. The sub-zero blast had not pierced the epidermal barrier. The dog’s newly condensed skin had faded away the heat shock entirely. That left only a faint trace of cool water that evaporated into the dry wind.
Behind them, high up in the office spire, Gregory Vance’s dark shape stayed against the tall arched window. He watched the orphan cadet and the black hound disappear into the lower city. The senior teacher’s fingers tapped an encrypted comms slate, transmitting a high-priority dispatch to the House Vance security calm distance in Sector 4.