Rena slipped out of the treeline with the tablet in her left hand and the watch mapping a pale ribbon of light across her vision. The jungle behind her took back the space she'd occupied, leaves knitting, shadows realigning as if she were a passing rumor. She checked the task panel again—third objective of the day, a field-care assignment flagged a few hundred meters to the south of her camp and open for the next hour. Reward: +35 achievement and +3 trade if completed cleanly. Straightforward. Useful. The kind of work that built momentum.
She set off at a brisk walk that was, by ordinary standards, closer to a jog. Half-dragon legs took the ground in confident, elastic steps; her balance lived in her hips like a coiled promise. The path—if it could be called that—ran along the shoulder of a little limestone rise scabbed with pale rock and dotted with spiky shrubs that grew in tight defensive mounds. The island's mood had shifted since morning: the light warmer, the air thicker with sap and salt, the insect chorus switching from tentative to declarative. Every ten or twelve strides, a breeze came up from the south with a tang of seaweed and hot rope. She could smell sun-baked shells somewhere beyond the treeline, the faint copper of brackish pools, and the resin of casuarina needles underfoot.
She hopped a narrow rivulet—really a thread of water unraveling itself over pebbles—and angled around a stand of screw pine whose stilt roots made a labyrinth for small creatures. Something scuttled—hermit crab, or perhaps a very opinionated beetle. Overhead, a line of fruit bats creaked and shuffled in their high shade, upside down and unimpressed with the world of the upright. Rena smiled to herself and kept moving.
A turn of the ground revealed a problem: a low, shimmering field of vines had claimed an open patch ahead, interlacing across the soil in a slick green mat and climbing the shrubs in itchy spirals. Poison ivy's island cousin—not identical to the plant she'd learned to avoid in academy textbooks, but the oil-sheen on the leaflets and the red-tinged petioles told a clear story. The patch stretched wide, end to end, with no obvious clean detour. Looping around would cost her fifteen minutes, maybe more, and the task clock would not care about botanical excuses.
Rena stopped on the safe side and gave herself five seconds to think. The watch pulsed. The tablet blinked a gentle reminder. She took a breath, tasted the air, then flicked her eyes up and down the corridor of green.
Fine.
She lifted her right hand and drew a tight spiral in the air—a sign her body knew better than her conscious mind. Heat answered as if she'd tugged a cord on a hanging lamp. A thin film of mana spread from her sternum outward, sheathing her skin in a second, shimmering layer. The aura formed glass-smooth and kept a precise five-centimeter buffer beyond her body, hugging her like custom armor. She colored it with what was hers: a silvered, smoky hue for the lunar discipline she'd studied to exhaustion; a deeper bruised-metal undertone that answered to the dragon heart's furnace; and, licking at the edges, the orange-gold ghost of phoenix flame—not the savage white of a killing burn, but the low, steady cooking heat of renewal and protection.
Air warped faintly around her. The leaves nearest her boundary crisped at the edges and curled in on themselves as the oils flashed to nothing. Five centimeters wasn't much, but at walking speed it was the difference between rash and clean passage. She moved, testing. The aura hummed at a tone that only her bones heard, adjusting the instant a vine tip leaned toward her. A smell like green tea and campfire drifted up—resin, chlorophyll, a whisper of caramel from sugars in the leaves surrendering to heat.
She stepped carefully, placing her feet where the sticky exudate looked fullest so the aura could char it before it touched her boots. She kept her hands loose and close to her body, elbows in. A few leaves tried to brush her thigh; they smoked and recoiled, falling away like ash moths. Behind her, the vines recorded her passage as a darker, dry-edged corridor through the glossy field, but she didn't look back. No time to admire tidy work. The aura held. The heat never barked or flared; it whispered, it reasoned, it chose.
Then, as abruptly as it began, the ivy's dominion ended. The jungle resumed its usual lazy generosity—ferns at knee height, a lace of shade, the occasional rude root demanding tribute in attention. Rena stepped off the last stubborn tendril, waited three beats to ensure no residue clung to the suit's lower hem, then exhaled and willed the aura down. The light faded; the air cooled against her skin. The silver-black veil thinned, thinned, and was gone, leaving only a prickle along her forearms like the memory of sun.
She quickened her pace. The ground opened into a low hammock dotted with sea almonds whose broad leaves flashed green above and rusty below when the wind flipped them. Fallen almonds cracked crisply underfoot, surprisingly fragrant—like raw cookies. Red hibiscus flared in the understory. A pair of skinks chased each other over a sun-warmed limestone slab, tails writing cursive in the dust.
The task site came into view just beyond a droop of lianas: a tidy field station thrown together with competence—shade tarp, three folding tables, a collapsible water stand, a bright orange med kit the size of a toolbox, and two camp chairs. A small flag with the academy crest tipped in the light breeze. The woman seated under the tarp wore clinic whites tailored for heat, sleeves rolled, hair in a neat bun so black it had blue in it. Her ID clipped to her collar read Yuki. Her eyes took in Rena with trained efficiency—gait, breath rate, sweat pattern, no wasted interest in the glamour of red-tipped hair or the way the adaptive suit traced Rena's lines.
Rena closed the distance and dipped her head. "Good afternoon."
"Afternoon," Yuki returned—the word a cool, clean blade. "Tablet."
Rena placed it in her palm. A flicker of network glyphs danced between the device and the medic's ring. Yuki's brows lifted one millimeter when the name populated: Rena Emberhart, Solo, First-Year. She passed the device back and flicked her wrist toward a second chair, but she was already looking beyond Rena to the patient sitting with both hands in her lap and her posture welded to the chair-back.
Rena followed the glance.
The girl couldn't have been older than Rena: orange hair cut blunt at the shoulders, a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, green eyes magnified by round red-rimmed glasses that made her look like a particularly alert forest sprite. She had one pant leg sliced to mid-thigh and a sleeve torn away from the shoulder, both makeshift modifications done with a very dull knife or a very urgent hand. The flesh at her shoulder wore an ugly scrape: shallow but wide, the kind that radiated heat and indignation rather than deep danger. Her outer thigh fared worse—an oblong gouge with weeping edges where rock had argued successfully with skin.
"Patient presents with second-degree abrasions," Yuki said, already snapping on gloves. "Contamination risk moderate. Task parameters: clean, close, analgesia optional. Solo practitioner, supervised. You're clear to use academy-approved healing methods. If you pull a resurrection trick, I will deduct points out of spite." Her mouth quirked at her own dry humor and then flattened again. "Proceed."
Rena crouched in front of the girl, balancing on the balls of her feet so she could be level with her gaze. "Hi. I'm Rena. I'm going to help. Where hurts worst?"
For a heartbeat, the girl simply stared—eyes wide, mouth caught mid-swallow, her gaze tracing Rena's face as if mapping it would help her answer questions better. Then the spell broke and color rose under the freckles. "I—I'm sorry," she stammered, fluster softening the edges of her words. "I didn't mean to stare. I'm Misha. It's my shoulder and, um, here." She indicated the thigh with two tentative fingers and then winced as if even pointing at it tugged the raw edges. "I slipped off a rock near the creek. There was slime. And gravity."
"Both famous for being rude," Rena said calmly. She didn't smile; calm was its own kindness. "Okay, Misha. I'm going to use a phoenix technique. It'll feel like warm water poured through your skin. Nothing dramatic."
Yuki's eyes flicked up, interested. Fire healers varied from showmen to surgeons. She'd seen too many students mistake spectacle for care.
Rena inhaled, set her palm two inches from Misha's sternum—no contact—and coaxed the phoenix flame forward. Not a bonfire. Not a spotlight. More like a cup of spring light tipped into a basin. Orange-gold swam into being at her hand, translucent, steady. It was the color of a hearth kept for stories rather than battle. She fanned it with a thought, letting a thin sheet of warm radiance pass through bone and blood without scorching. The technique was part art, part math, part a thing she could only call listening: finding the vibration of pain and singing just a hair above it until the body climbed the scale to safety.
Misha's shoulders eased by degrees. The muscles that had been locked around the scrape let go their iron and resumed their normal argument with gravity. The raw red along the shoulder's abrasion gentled, losing its angry sheen; the body's clotting chorus found its tempo; capillaries knit their tiny mouths. Rena moved the field in a slow drift to the thigh. The deeper gouge resisted—edges swollen, stubborn. She adjusted: a whisper more heat, tight around the wound's lip, then a cool sweep to remind the nerves they were not going to die today. Misha's hands unclasped in her lap. Yuki's chin tipped, a fractional nod.
Thirty seconds. Forty. A minute.
Rena drew the flame back, slow, until the orange thinned to a veil and the veil to a suggestion. She turned her hands over to show there was no sleight, no burn. The air smelled faintly of citrus peel and the clean, metallic aftertaste of pain leaving a room.
Misha looked down. The shoulder wore only a pink blush, as if the day had patted it too long. The thigh was closed—not perfect, not erased, but edges met, a light seam like a line drawn in milk, the skin's voice quiet again. Her eyes filled very suddenly with tears. She blinked them away with the roughness of someone who did not like crying where others could see.
"Thank you," she said, as if the words had been stored for years and had finally found a job. "I mean—thank you."
"Don't sprint on it for an hour," Rena said evenly. "If you have to climb, lead with the other leg. And eat salt. You look like a person who forgets salt."
Misha gave a startled, watery laugh that was half accusation. "How did you—"
"Your lips," Rena said. "They're pale at the corners. And your hands are a little too cool." She rose, joints uncoiling easily, and glanced to Yuki.
The medic had already logged the outcome. A few quiet touches on her slate and the network concurred. Rena's watch chimed against her skin, the sound neat and satisfying:
+35 Achievement +3 Trade
Yuki snapped off her gloves. "Clean technique. Controlled temperature. No scarring if she behaves." She paused, eyes sharpening with a not-unpleasant curiosity. "You didn't over-rely on the flame. You let the body do some of the lifting."
"It remembers how," Rena said. "Sometimes it just needs the noise turned down."
Yuki's mouth almost smiled again. "Get out before I assign you more patients, Emberhart."
Rena inclined her head once more to both of them—Misha's gratitude a warm little lamp behind her—and stepped back into the heat.
She didn't immediately run. There was no danger now and she liked letting the body choose its own gears. The jungle opened a shy hand to her and she took it, moving at the kind of pace that made the suit hold its breath and listen to her muscles. She pushed past the last of the medic's shade and found herself again in sun-beaded green, the light coming down through leaves in a million versions of yellow. The path home felt shorter—work finished always folded distance—and yet she let it stretch for the pleasure of it.
A kingfisher, blue as a fresh bruise and twice as bold, scolded her from a snag. She scolded back, and the bird seemed satisfied with the quality of her accent. A vine—different from the oil-slick ivy—looped overhead like a gymnast's ring; she swatted it absently as she passed and it swung forward, slow as thought. Lizards flicked across her vision like commas. A small snake the color of moss slid off a warm stone the instant her shadow touched it, writing paragraphs in the dust with its belly scales. Far off, where the land curved toward the sea, she heard waves arguing with rock and rock refusing to be impressed.
When she was well clear of the field station, she adjusted her stride and went. Not a sprint meant to tear the air; a clean, ground-eating speed that made her shadow elongate beside her and tug at her heels. The world blurred in peripheral greens and snapped clean in the center: this leaf, that root, this gap, that stone. Her breathing settled into a song she knew from childhood—steady, unshowy, the kind that rolled over distance without spitting out fatigue receipts later.
The camp came up all at once, as familiar places do when you approach them with purpose. Her tent sat where she'd pitched it: a low, practical wedge in the half-shade, door flap rolled and hooked, guy lines tidy. No animal had decided to audit her pantry while she was gone; no other student had left a calling card in the form of footprints or a careless candy wrapper. The creek still told its same story beside the black stones, occasionally improvising a phrase when a leaf fell into it.
Rena paused at the perimeter to listen the way predators and caretakers do: for wrongness. There was none. She stepped inside the circle of her things and unlatched the tent, ducking in with the comfort of someone who knew exactly where her body ended and the fabric began. Inside, the air held the faint scents of canvas, sun, and her own clean sweat, with a whisper of coconut from the milk she'd used at noon.
She touched the suit's collar, locating the subtle control node just beneath the clavicle, and double-tapped. The adaptive weave sighed—there was no other word for the way it relaxed—and flowed back from her like water climbing uphill, ribbons of smart fiber folding themselves into a compact cuff at her wrist. What remained on her body were the ordinary intimacies of underwear—simple, functional pieces chosen more for honesty than for romance, soft on her skin and in a palette that didn't argue with the Silver-white with red tips in her hair.
She set the suit cuff on the folded blanket she used as a shelf and sat on the inflatable field bed, which gave obediently and then held. The pillow—one of the few concessions to actual comfort Naoko had tucked into her spatial bracelet—crinkled in a way that made her think of napkins and kitchens. Rena didn't lay back yet. She had a ritual.
She cupped her hands, drew a breath, and shaped a simple water conjuration between her palms—a palmful-and-a-half of clear liquid that obeyed her mind more than gravity. It wasn't drinking water. Conjured water had no mineral memory; it could cool, rinse, soothe, and sanctify, but it could not trick a tongue into believing in rivers. She tipped it and let it pour across her fingers, knuckles, wrists, watched the thin streams lace around her skin and carry away the invisible films of jungle and work. She summoned another measure and washed her face, starting at the hairline and sweeping down, eyes closed. It was like laying down a thought and picking up a new one.
Across the tent's threshold, the jungle practiced its own ablutions. The light shifted from gold to a pared-down honey as the sun considered the first steps of descending. Cicadas changed key. A pair of doves punched their soft question into the air—who cooks for you—and the creek answered with laughter. Something biggish moved just beyond sight; it resolved into a wild pig the color of old tea leaves, nose to ground, mind on roots. It didn't like the smell of canvas and left with a rustle of fern that sounded like a politician's cough.
Rena dried her hands on a corner of cloth and finally let herself lie back. The bed gave a little complaint in tiny plastic squeaks and then settled. The watch pressed the soft inside of her wrist with the most polite of pulses to tell her it had already recorded her task, already banked her points, already adjusted her fuel gauge for tomorrow's marketplace temptations. Achievement +35. Trade +3. She could buy rope if she needed redundant rope; she could trade for better salt; she could bribe luck with tea.
She turned her face toward the tent's open flap so she could watch the sky's color lesson. A dragonfly coasted past at chest height, balancing on the air like a coin on its edge. The red at the tips of her hair glowed as if catching a private sunset of its own, each strand a thin wick in a lamp only she knew how to light.
Fifty-six days.
She did not count them aloud. She did not sigh in a way that asked for pity from the leaves. But the number moved through her head like a bead on a wire, stopping briefly at each rib. Four days gone since the last time she'd seen Jin, since the last thoughtless, affectionate crime of his humor, since the last casual touch that he pretended did not mean anything and then stared at her with eyes that said it did. She imagined him as he should be: asleep, maybe, or concentrating, or too proud to admit he missed her. She imagined not imagining him and failed.
"I'll show you," she murmured, to the canvas, to the scent of pandanus, to the slow cooling of the day. "I'll show you what I did when you weren't looking."
The island lifted a breeze to her face as if in benediction. Frangipani somewhere nearby had let go of a handful of blooms, and the air wore the buttery-sweet perfume of their surrender. From the creek, a tree frog began to practice; another joined it; then a third, until the space around her bed was stitched in call-and-response. Rena let the music loosen the tether between body and thought.
Somewhere far away on the island, a shout rose and fell—students at a checkpoint, or at a disagreement. Farther still, the sea kept time in its ancient way, pushing and pulling, writing its long, patient argument line by line on the rock. Overhead, the sky's blue thinned until a first star found courage. A gecko made its open-mouthed, laughing click on the tent pole and then froze, splayed toes on fabric, sovereign of a tiny kingdom.
She thought of Sarafina exactly once, and in the thought there was no fire, only a clean, hard plane. Challenge was a craft, not a tantrum. She would practice the craft. She would eat well, move well, think clearly. She would hoard her strength like a story's last page and reveal it only when the reader had to know.
The field bed had one trick she liked: a valve that let it release the smallest amount of air if a weight settled over time, so it never pushed back wrong. She felt it relinquish a sigh and felt her spine unscroll another centimeter. Muscles that had behaved all day admitted to being made of meat rather than wire. Her hands, which preferred to be busy, lay quiet on her stomach.
She closed her eyes.
Outside, the island made its promises in smells and small sounds: the wet iron of the creek; the green pepper of crushed leaf; the sugar-electric breath of flowers bruised by night insects; the deft, dry tick of gecko toes on canvas; the spill and hush of waves arguing with coral teeth. Inside, the tent held her like a pocket.
Sleep came not as a fall but as a dimming—a lantern's wick turned down with care. On the far side of it, she dreamed of lines that turned into roads and roads that turned into rivers and rivers that led over a curve of world so clean she could almost see the mathematics of it printed on the air. She dreamed of hands—hers—lit with orange-gold that healed without scarring and burned without hatred. She dreamed of silver-black light that kept danger five centimeters away, always, and that could be tuned down to nothing when a friend reached out to touch her wrist and whisper a stupid joke.
The watch kept its own vigil, counting breaths and heartbeats and the long glide of minutes into the shallow bay of evening. The jungle breathed with her, paced her, accepted her as a thing that belonged, for now, to this patch of ground.
Tomorrow would come with new task pings, new paths to map, new small mercies to find in leaves and stones and the honest weight of rice in a palm. Tomorrow would shave another day from the fifty-six. Tomorrow might carry a glimpse of her would-be rival through mangrove pillars or across a ridge—just a flash of silver hair and blue eyes cooling the air. Or it might not. The island had its own reasons for showing you things when it did.
For tonight, Atlas let Rena keep the quiet. And she kept it, the way she kept everything that mattered: firmly, with intention, with the unshowy fierceness of a girl who had learned both how to endure and how to devour.
When she turned in sleep, the red at the tips of her hair streaked the pillow like the last light on the underside of a cloud. The gecko laughed once more. The creek told a joke only stones understand. The sea, unimpressed, continued its old work, pulling the world gently toward morning.
In the half-dream right before deep rest took her, Rena's mind returned to the moment in the ivy field: the clean boundary, the heat negotiating with the world rather than conquering it. She smiled in her sleep. That, she thought without words, was the entire project. Not to annihilate, but to choose. To move through a treacherous patch without letting it claim you. To know when to burn and when to be a mirror.
The island held its breath for a heartbeat, as if listening to the same thought. Then everything exhaled together—the palms, the frogs, the bats turning on their hooks—and the night finally belonged to itself.
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First day points table
The mission | points
1- Handicrafts | 20+
2- 24-hour stay points | 10+
3- Math test | 25+
4- Treatment | 35+
= 90 point
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Trade points
Math test = +4 TRADE +2 ACHIEVEMENT (session leader bonus)
Trad points = 6
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Reward = rice
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Heat: Do you like the new writing style and also how I wrote the points on the first day?