The first breath felt wrong.
It was too clean. Too open. Too bright.
Sahil's lungs expanded sharply, a violent reflex as if he had been drowning for hours and was only now allowed to break the surface. A sting of cold, sweet air raced down his throat, burning in its purity. His fingers clenched instinctively, expecting to scrape against the jagged, suffocating rocks of the cavern. instead, they slid across smooth, warm stone.
For a long, terrifying moment, his mind refused to align with reality.
The last image burned into his retinas was the Titan collapsing—molten light exploding, the cavern cracking open like a dying planet, and the crushing weight of earth coming down to bury them.
And then—nothing. Just darkness swallowing him whole.
Sahil forced his eyes open, bracing for the dark.
A sky stared back at him.
Not the suffocating granite ceiling of the Scantum. Not the trembling cavern roof. But an actual sky. It was a pale, impossible blue, framed by lazy drifts of white clouds. It was endless. It was the kind of sky that belonged to a lazy Tuesday morning, somewhere far away from death, monsters, or ancient forces buried beneath the crust of the earth.
He lay on a wide stone platform, circular and seamless, as if carved by a laser thousands of years ago.
His heart stalled in his chest. This isn't possible.
He jerked upright, his body tensing for the phantom pain he expected to feel—broken ribs, bruised legs, fractured fingers. He waited for the agony.
But there was none.
His body was intact. Calm. It was as if someone had taken an eraser to the last twelve hours of his life and wiped away every injury he had rightfully earned.
"Harun…?" Sahil whispered. His voice sounded thin in the open air.
A ragged groan answered him from a few feet away.
Harun lay sprawled across the same platform, one arm thrown over his eyes to shield them from the sun, the other curled protectively around his chest. His hand was still gripped tight around the brass knuckle.
It was dull now. No glow. No heat. Just a hunk of cold, battered metal.
Harun blinked up at the sky, confusion warping his features. He looked like a man waking up from a nightmare only to find the nightmare was real, but the setting had changed. "Where… the hell are we?"
Sahil scrambled toward him, his boots skidding on the stone. "You're alive."
Harun snorted, pushing himself up on one elbow and rubbing his temple. "Barely. Last thing I remember, I punched a volcano-god in the chest and got launched like a cricket ball."
Sahil swallowed hard. He could still feel the tremor in his bones from the Titan's last roar.
"How are we alive?" Harun whispered, looking at his own hands, turning them over. "And where's the cavern? The stalactites? The dust? Everything collapsed, Sahil. We should be pancakes."
"Harun," Sahil said, his eyes scanning the horizon. "We're outside. Somehow… we're outside."
Harun pushed himself fully upright, his jaw tightening.
They were high up. The platform they sat on was raised above a valley of strange, melancholic ruins. Massive stone pillars formed a broken circle around them, curving inward like the ribs of a fallen giant. Vines, thick as pythons, coiled around crumbled archways. The stone was etched with carvings that hurt the eyes to look at too long—geometry that defied standard physics. The air was cool, but it carried a faint, metallic scent. It smelled like ozone. Like the aftermath of a lightning strike.
This wasn't any exit they had entered. This wasn't a rescue site.
"Someone brought us here," Sahil murmured.
Before Harun could argue, the sound of footsteps cut through the wind.
Click. Click. Click.
Sharp. Measured. Confident.
Both boys spun around, scrambling to their feet. Harun instantly raised his fists, shifting into a brawler's stance.
A man was approaching them from the far edge of the platform.
He was tall—imposingly so. He wore a dark, high-collared coat that seemed to absorb the sunlight rather than reflect it, engraved with patterns that shimmered faintly as he moved. His hair was streaked with silver, not from age, but in a way that felt earned—like he had walked through storms no normal man could survive and the lightning had left its mark.
But it was his eyes that froze them. They were calm, calculated, and ancient. They were the eyes of a man who had seen civilizations rise, burn, and rise again, and had simply taken notes.
He stopped ten feet away, hands clasped loosely behind his back.
"Good," the man said. His voice was a low baritone that seemed to vibrate in Sahil's chest. "You're awake."
Sahil and Harun didn't move.
The man's gaze swept over them—clinical, analytical. He looked at Harun's stance, then at Sahil's terrified alertness. He nodded, once.
"You passed," he said.
Harun narrowed his eyes, not lowering his fists. "Passed what?"
The man smiled faintly. It didn't reach his eyes. "The Bhramm Test."
The words fell like stones into still water.
Sahil felt the platform under him shift—not physically, but in meaning. Test. The word implied intent. It implied that the horror they had just survived wasn't an accident. It was a syllabus.
Harun stepped forward, his aggression rising to cover his confusion. "Hold on. That voice we heard in the Scantum—that humming, that… thing speaking to us—was that you?"
The man raised a single, manicured eyebrow.
"You assume too quickly," he replied smoothly. "The Scantum does not need me to speak. It is alive in ways your minds cannot yet comprehend. But yes… some of that guidance was mine."
A chill crawled up Sahil's spine. So they weren't hallucinating. The whispers in the dark had been real.
"You brought us out?" Sahil asked, his voice steadying. "Healed us? How? And why us?"
The man exhaled softly, the way a professor might sigh at an impatient student.
"First," he said, taking a single step forward. The air pressure seemed to increase with just that one movement. "Allow me to introduce myself."
He stood straighter, his presence suddenly filling the massive platform.
"I am Gohan—Chairman of the Dravillian Council."
The name hung in the air like a stamp of absolute authority.
Harun muttered under his breath, barely audible, "…Chairman? As in… the big boss?"
Gohan's lips twitched. "Something like that."
Sahil couldn't let it go. The logic didn't track. "You still haven't answered. How did we survive? How did we escape a collapsing mountain? Why were we chosen? We're nobodies. We're students."
Gohan's expression hardened. The faint amusement vanished.
"You were not chosen."
Both boys froze.
Gohan lifted a hand. His long fingers traced a small circular motion in the air.
Instantly, the air around them ignited. Glowing runes flared to life like hard-light holograms—maps of different Scantums, rotating diagrams of stones, energy signatures swirling like captured constellations.
"The world does not choose bearers," Gohan said quietly, his voice echoing against the ruins. "The Stones choose you."
The platform vibrated faintly, responding to his voice as if acknowledging a truth too ancient to deny.
Sahil unconsciously touched his left forearm. The place where the green stone had burned itself into his skin still felt faintly warm, a fever heat beneath the dermis.
Harun flexed his fingers. The brass knuckle didn't glow, but Sahil saw him wince slightly, as if he could feel the white stone pulsing deep beneath his palm, an echo of a second heartbeat.
Gohan continued, his eyes moving between them.
"The Dravillian Scantum you entered is only one of many. They appear rarely. In unpredictable places. They call to those capable of awakening power—though most who enter simply… end."
Harun's breath hitched. "End?"
Gohan nodded gravely.
"This Scantum alone saw one hundred and fifty thousand entrants over the last cycle. Warriors. Scholars. Criminals. Hopefuls. Many seeking power. Many seeking fate."
He paused, letting the silence stretch until it was painful.
"Only fifteen returned."
Sahil felt his stomach drop out of his body. He looked at Harun, whose face had gone pale.
"Fifteen," Sahil whispered. "Out of… one hundred and fifty thousand?"
Gohan looked directly into Sahil's eyes, his gaze sharp as polished obsidian.
"Yes. And you two… are among them."
Harun swallowed, the fight draining out of his posture. "Us? But… we're not trained. We're not special. We didn't even know what a Scantum was until yesterday."
Gohan tilted his head, studying Harun like a rare specimen. "That is precisely why the stones chose you."
Harun blinked. "That… makes no sense."
Gohan stepped forward, closing the distance. The air around him seemed denser, heavy with gravitational weight.
"Power does not choose skill," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper that carried on the wind. "It chooses potential."
Sahil's pulse quickened. A memory flashed in his mind—fire, destruction, a city crumbling.
"Then the vision I saw… the future… that city burning…" Sahil whispered, looking up at Gohan. "Was that part of the Test too?"
Something flickered in Gohan's eyes. For a split second, the mask of the Chairman slipped, revealing something else. Recognition? Concern? Or perhaps, fear?
For the first time, he didn't answer immediately.
Finally, he spoke. "Some Scantums show glimpses of what may come. The Bhramm Test… reveals truths the mind is often not prepared for. Whether what you saw was past, present, or future—only time will answer."
Harun clenched his fists, the metal of his knuckle creaking.
"So what now?" he asked, his voice rough. "We're 'chosen,' okay. We survived. Great. But for what? What are we supposed to do with these… things?"
Gohan turned away, walking toward the edge of the platform where the view dropped off into the valley.
Below them, the ruins stretched endlessly—the remains of an empire swallowed by time, waiting to be woken up.
He raised his hand again.
Far in the distance, the landscape responded. Structures awoke—blue lights flickering to life in sequence, mechanical gates grinding open, towers humming with the vibration of forgotten machinery.
"Now," Gohan said softly.
He turned back to face them, the wind catching the edges of his coat.
"Now, you begin your training. And you meet… the other thirteen."
Sahil felt a shiver race through him that had nothing to do with the cold.
Fifteen bearers. Fifteen chosen. Fifteen people who had walked into hell and walked back out.
And he and Harun were two of them.
Gohan's eyes hardened, the teacher replaced by the general.
"The real test," he said, "begins now."