"Kai."
He came back from wherever his head had been — somewhere between the ceiling and nothing in particular — and found thirty pairs of eyes on him, plus one belonging to Mr. Hess, who stood at the front of the room with a piece of chalk and the jaw of a man who'd been waiting long enough to start taking it personally.
Right. Class. I should probably look like I've been paying attention.
"The four primary classifications of Calamity Beasts," Mr. Hess said. "In order."
Kai straightened up. His elbow slid off the desk.
"Fringe, Breach, Titan, Void-class." The words came out clean, automatic. "Fringe appear near inhabited zones and are containable with standard practitioner response. Breach require coordinated teams. Titans trigger regional emergency declarations. Void-class are the reason the Federation maintains a standing fleet in every sector."
Mr. Hess held his gaze for a moment. Then he turned back to the board and kept writing.
That was it. That was all he got.
A nod would've been nice. A 'well done.' Anything. Nothing. Cool. People in this world were cold.
Kai settled back into his chair.
Marcus, one seat to his left, leaned over by approximately two centimetres. "You were somewhere else the whole time, weren't you."
"I knew the answer."
"That's not what I asked."
He's right. I've been turning the date over in my head all morning.
Today was the evaluation. Combat Division or General Studies. The fork in the road. The inciting incident.
The beginning of my legendary life. What boy, after catching a glimpse of his own fate, could sit still?
The short version of how Kai ended up in a dead-end classroom on R-207, a minor planet in the Verath Sector, went like this:
He was sixteen. Earth. Standing on a street corner on a Tuesday, scrolling through a generic isekai manga while he waited for the light to change — he'd just hit the part where the hero gets summoned — and the thought had surfaced, clear and selfish: Man, I wish that were me.
The signal held red.
A truck swerved, cutting across three lanes at speed.
Through the windshield, he saw the driver's face.
The man wore a wide, deliberate smile.
Their eyes locked.
As the truck closed the distance, the driver shaped the words with slow precision, each syllable visible on his lips:
I heard your wish, kid.
---
Mr. Hess continued the lecture. The Convergence Period. The thousand-year war. Archival footage filled the screen: burning buildings, people running, a massive shape moving through smoke.
It started with first contact. Humanity had barely reached its own moon when they were found — found by a civilization that had already decided what to do with them.
The war that followed lasted a thousand years. Cities fell. Entire continents went dark. Species after species joined the coalition against them.
Some came for resources. Some came for territory. Some harvested humans simply because they tasted good. Some came for sport — humanity, it turned out, made for interesting prey, just intelligent enough to run, just weak enough to catch. A few joined because the coalition was winning, and winning civilizations remembered who stood beside them.
Through all of it, humanity sent signals. Distress calls. Diplomatic packets. Offers. Pleas. The stars answered with silence — or with weapons. Every transmission that came back carried hostility. Whether anyone had tried to answer and been silenced no longer mattered. What humanity received was war.
By the midpoint of the conflict, extinction was no longer rhetoric. It was projection.
Then he appeared.
A single man. The Veilbreaker walked into the heart of the coalition alone and did not stop until its command structure was ash and vacuum. History recorded the campaign in three volumes. The third was mostly silence. He had been given three names — The Veilbreaker, The Starforged, The Ashen Crown. Historians argued over which was most accurate. They agreed on nothing, except that he had been real, and that nothing after him was the same.
The war ended. For humanity.
The surviving civilizations scattered. Some fled to the outer edges of mapped space. Some went dark, abandoning their systems, their signals, their names. The hunt followed. Humanity's standing fleets moved sector by sector, and the gap between fleeing and caught narrowed every decade.
But some never fled.
Some had been here long before the pursuit began — embedded in human populations, wearing human faces, learning human languages, living inside human cities. The exact number was unknown. Detection methods improved. The Practitioners tasked with identification called it the quiet war, fought in apartment blocks and transit hubs and government offices, one body at a time.
What followed hardened into doctrine. A thousand years of near-extinction calcified into something simple and absolute: humanity eliminated non-human life on sight. The classification process was procedural — identify, confirm, eliminate. Whether the universe contained anything else was irrelevant. The stars were theirs now, and they intended to keep them that way.
Source energy compatibility had appeared in a small percentage of the population during the war. Those individuals survived at higher rates and fought at higher efficiency. In the Veilbreaker's wake, they were given a name: Practitioners — those who could channel source energy into combat, ability, or craft. Over generations, the trait spread.
Humanity entered the interstellar age on the back of a single man's violence.
It is now Interstellar Year 300.
Next slide. A distribution graph. Most of the population clustered between eighteen and twenty-two percent compatibility. Fewer at the extremes.
"Today's assessment determines your starting tier on this scale," Mr. Hess said. "Your score sets your initial ranking and resource allocation."
"In previous years, students with low source compatibility have still chosen the Combat Division. The program does not bar them." A brief pause. "Ninety-nine percent did not complete it."
He advanced the slide. A second column appeared.
"And do not misunderstand the other end of the graph. High compatibility is not immunity. Even among top-tier candidates, the recorded mortality rate stands at eighty percent."
"I speak as a survivor," Mr. Hess said. "If you choose Combat, do it with full awareness. Statistics are not numbers. They are names. War is not a game."