"Glad to see that none of you have broken down from last week's training," Sir Kaelen said in his usual deep, resonant voice as he stood before the assembled first-years. They were gathered once more in the forest clearing that had become all too familiar to them over the past week—a place where sweat, grit, and exhaustion had soaked into the earth itself.
"You've proven that you are, at the very least, physically and mentally capable of calling yourselves students of the Dark Knight Academy," Kaelen continued, his sharp gaze sweeping across the lines of young knights and mages before him. "Surviving the regimen placed before you was not an accident, nor was it luck. It was endurance. Discipline. Will."
