The clearing still hummed with whispers long after Leonidas stepped through the gates. Boys stared, some wide-eyed, some envious, some fearful. His squad alone looked at him not with doubt but with awe.
The overseers stood in their cloaks, arms folded, faces carved from stone. For a long moment they said nothing. Only the crunch of Leonidas' steps carried across the ground, steady despite the blood that streaked his skin.
Then old Megakles leaned forward, his voice a growl that carried.
"Alone," he said. "Wounded. Hunted. And yet he returns."
Stergios nodded, eyes fixed on Leonidas. "Not just returns," he murmured. "He comes back draped in his enemy. Like Herakles in the lion's skin."
Another overseer exhaled, his hard mouth twitching toward a smile. "The wild tried to claim him. It could not. Remember this, boys — Sparta bends to no wilderness."
Their words rippled across the field like a command. The awe already clinging to Leonidas hardened into something heavier. Even Diodoros, proud and swollen with stolen strength, looked away, his jaw set tight.
Leonidas stopped before the overseers, his shoulders squared beneath the Alpha's pelt. He said nothing. He did not need to.
The eldest overseer lifted his hand in acknowledgment. "Leonidas," he said, his voice solemn and cold. "Remember this night. You have stepped beyond boyhood. Sparta has seen you."
The words sank into the gathered boys like fire into dry wood. The trial was over, but its memory would remain.
---
Later, when the overseers dismissed them, Leonidas' squad found him by the water trough. Nikandros stared at him for a long moment, his usual fire gone quiet. Then he thumped his chest with a fist and said, voice thick, "You did it. By the gods, you did it."
Menon smirked, though his scar pulled tight. "Herakles himself would have taken longer."
Doros' voice shook as he added, "I thought you were dead. I… I truly thought it." His eyes flicked to the Alpha's head draped across Leonidas' chest. "Now I see you're something else."
Leonidas only drank, water streaming down his chin, the weight of their words heavy but unacknowledged. His eyes were tired, hollow, but unbroken.
For the first time, even among his own, he stood apart.
---
Weeks passed.
Leonidas' body healed in silence. His ribs knitted back together, his wounds closed into angry scars, his muscles returned with meat and rest. The Alpha's pelt was cleaned and hung in the barracks — a reminder to all of what the forest had demanded, and what Leonidas had paid.
But Sparta gave no boy long to linger in recovery.
By the turn of the next moon, the overseers drove them harder than ever. Days began before the sun rose, filled with runs across stone and mud, sparring drills that left skin bloodied and teeth broken, endless recitations of law and obedience. They carried stones until their shoulders buckled, fought each other with wood and iron until their arms swelled purple, and were fed just enough to keep breath in their lungs.
Leonidas bore it without complaint. Pain was no stranger now. Where others cursed or faltered, he pushed forward, silent and steady, his eyes harder than before.
The boys whispered still, sometimes when they thought he could not hear. Wolf-slayer. War-made. More than us.
And though he ate with them, trained beside them, bled with them — the gulf between Leonidas and the rest had only grown.