Connor drifted along the edges of the Academy training grounds, searching for the scattered members of his group. The arena, usually brimming with noise and energy, felt strangely fractured—each student wrapped in their own struggle, their own method of taming power.
It was there, sitting motionless on the dirt floor, that he found the figure he sought. A black-furred werewolf, broad-shouldered and raw with unrefined power, sat beneath the open sky. His torn uniform strained against his frame, silver shackles clasped around wrists and ankles. The faint gleam of those restraints—sacred alloys etched with runes—spoke of their purpose: to hold back the tides of instinct that could drown a beast-child when the moon called.
This was Lug, the delinquent, the boy whose perpetual scowl masked a storm of hunger and resentment. Yet, in this moment, he was quiet—locked in what he called patience training. The sight was surreal, for daylight transformations were rare, and rarer still were werewolves who dared expose their true forms without violence.
Connor studied him, recalling the way silver suppressed lunar frenzy, remembering another werewolf—Cole, his comrade in the Carleo Mercenary Group. Cole had been reckless and untamed, yet loyal in ways words could never capture. Connor thought of the times Cole had forgotten his bracelet under a full moon, rampaging through forests like a drunkard until dawn, leaving the camp sleepless but unharmed. Those memories bled into the present, shaping the way Connor looked at Lug: not with fear, but with familiarity.
Lug, for his part, bared his fangs as if daring the world to flinch. Most did. The Academy's students, however, did not. Only Anastasia, the pale vampire girl, seemed a figure he acknowledged—her obsidian aura stretching thin threads of blood in endless, futile practice nearby. She was a reminder that monsters wore uniforms too, and that the Academy collected them all.
As the silence stretched, Lug's mask cracked. Beneath the sharp teeth and coarse voice was something simpler, heavier: desperation. He confessed a truth more binding than silver shackles—he needed money. Not a little, but enough to drown the hollowness carved by years of gnawing hunger. His childhood had been a litany of black bread and cold water, a life where survival itself was luxury. To him, mercenary work—dangerous, bloody, uncertain—still seemed brighter than starvation.
Connor, hardened by his years with Carleo, spoke of the mercenary's life: of contracts that paid in coin or corpses, of months where silver rained and months where nothing came but silence and hunger. It was no golden path, only one of survival. Yet Lug's ears caught only fragments—bread, coin, escape from the suffocating weight of poverty. For a moment, the beast-boy's eyes lit with yearning, as if he had glimpsed freedom through another's scars.
But that light dimmed when Connor pressed the truth: the mercenary's road was paved with graves. Death followed every step, sometimes for the reckless, sometimes for the innocent beside them. At those words, Lug fell quiet, expression unreadable in his lupine mask. When he finally spoke again, it was only to hint at the secret of his admission into the Academy. He had not been chosen for talent alone. There had been a deal—a transaction with Principal Parcaso, the man whispered to devour living clay like a grotesque god. Whatever that bargain was, Lug would not say. His silence was its own chain.
Connor left him there, seated once more in forced patience, the silver glinting in the sun. Yet the mercenary's mind was restless. Kyle, his regressed self, stirred within him, asking the questions Connor dared not: what deal bound Lug to this place? What price had been paid? But Connor chose ignorance, not from weakness, but because some truths corroded more than they enlightened. Some things were better left sealed.
Further along the grounds, Connor found Myael. The princess of sky-blue hair sat beneath the breeze, her expression bright as if unburdened by the weight of bloodlines. She was not swinging her sword, but seated, eyes focused with razor stillness. Her training was not of blade or brawn, but of perception—an observation exercise designed to sharpen the mind behind her gift. Her ability, Quick Learner, was a seed that thrived only when planted in diverse soil, forcing her to watch, adapt, and internalize everything around her.
The Academy whispered of her as "Genius," but in her own words, she was far from mastery. Her secret was not brilliance, but emptiness—a confession that she knew less than anyone imagined. Yet it was in that emptiness that her gift bloomed, absorbing the world like ink spilling across a blank page.
As Connor watched her, he felt a strange calm. Lug carried chains of poverty, Anastasia bore the hunger of cursed blood, and Myael wore the gilded crown of expectation. Each carried their burden differently, yet all were bound by invisible threads that the Academy tugged and tested.
Connor realized then that his group was not a band of students, but a collection of contradictions—wolves in chains, vampires in shadows, princesses of hollow genius, and mercenaries haunted by past and future selves. And somewhere, behind it all, the unseen hands of Parcaso's "deals" pulled the strings, weaving fates into knots too tangled to unravel.
And so the day's training continued. The clatter of effort echoed across the grounds, yet beneath the sound was silence—the silence of choices unspoken, of hunger unhealed, of destinies bound to collide.