As I traversed the portal, I could see my surroundings starting to twist and turn, my vision becoming muddled. It felt as if I were becoming one with the atmosphere, the way my body itself started to shift just like how the surroundings did just a second ago. I closed my eyes because if I had kept them open any longer, I would have thrown up.
Time passed in that strange, untethered way. No sound, no sensation of movement, no reference point for how long any of it lasted.
Then it stopped.
All at once, cleanly, like something being turned off.
I opened my eyes slowly, the way you would open them when seeing a bright light after just waking up. letting the light in a little at a time, my vision adjusted bit by bit. The surroundings looked like a blurred mess as at first but quickly the shapes of things started to unblur, soon after my vision completely came back.
I stopped breathing for a moment.
I had seen many things that were beautiful before. But my breath hitched. Nothing and I mean absolutely nothing could compare to the sight that I was witnessing right now.
The capital spread out below and around us in every direction, vast and deliberate. The buildings rose in layers with their lines clean and their proportions considered in a way that suggested centuries of engineering perfection. Bridges connected towers at tremendous heights. Below them the streets moved with the quiet industry of a city in its morning rhythm, Shapers among the crowds, the occasional flash of an ability catching the light like something struck a match in the middle of the day. Toward the east, a range of low mountains sat against the horizon with their peaks just reaching the clouds.
"Wow." The word came out on its own, I was awe struck by the view.
"Yeah." Aston said from beside me, with the tone of someone who had seen this view many times before. "A lot of people have the same reaction the first time they see the capital."
I turned to look at him. He was standing with his back straight and composed, his hands behind his back, scanning the city below with the ease of someone getting hit with nostalgia.
"So where is the academy from here?" I asked. "And when do I start?"
He raised his right hand and pointed east, toward a vast plot of land which was slightly set apart from the rest of the city. Buildings arranged around a central open space, grounds that extended further that I couldn't fully track from here.
"There." He said. "And the inauguration ceremony is today."
I looked at him shocked. "Today!?"
"Today."
"As in the same today that is currently happening right now."
"You're going to be late if we stay here for much longer." He said, already moving.
I followed closely behind.
The walk to the academy took us down through two of the city's central plaza which was even more bustling than any other part of the city, kids running around and adults enjoying their time as well. I kept my eyes moving the entire way, trying to absorb everything without looking like I was a country bumpkin, which was pretty difficult when almost everything I saw was something I had never seen before.
Finally, the academy's entrance came into view gradually, first as a gate set into a long perimeter wall, then as the full scale of what laid beyond the gate began to render. The main gate was tall, precise and unornamented in a way that suggested strictness. Above it, worked into the arch in raised lettering that had darkened with age, were the words: "Solcrest Academy."
A clerk at the front office looked up from her desk as we came through the door and her expression immediately shifted from professional to something considerably warmer.
"Aston." She said, with the tone of someone greeting a person they were genuinely pleased to see.
"Mrs. Mara." He replied, and something in the set of his shoulders eased slightly, as if meeting with someone you were glad to see.
I looked between them. "Um... do you know each other?"
"Alumni." Mrs. Mara said, glancing at me with a smile. "Aston was once a student here too. One of the better ones, though I would never tell him that directly."
"You just did." Aston pointed out.
"I know." She said pleasantly and pulled a registration form from beneath the counter. "Now. What's your name?"
The registration process was straightforward and quick, eased considerably by the fact that Mrs. Mara seemed to treat anything Aston vouched for as settled before the paperwork had finished processing. She filled in Noah's details with the efficiency of someone who had done this hundreds of times before, issued a student identification card printed on thin card stock with the academy crest in the corner, and sent us on our way with the directions to the boy's dormitory and a reminder about the afternoon's ceremony delivered in the same breath.
The boy's dormitory sat on the academy's eastern edge, a long rectangular structure, made of luxury concrete, steel, and well-furnished wood, four floors with a covered walkway running the length of its front. Inside it was clean and quiet, the corridors wide enough that a crowd of people could comfortably fit, the doors evenly spaced and numbered.
Aston led me to room one-fourteen on the second floor, pushed the door open, and stepped aside.
It was simple. A single bed against the left wall with a proper mattress and folded linen stacked at the foot of it. A desk and chair beneath the window. A wardrobe. A small bookshelf currently empty. A window that looked out over the academy grounds toward a stretch of open training field in the distance.
It was, without question, the most ordinary room I had been in since arriving in this world.
But I liked it. It was nothing too grandiose and over the top which I was thankful for.
"The ceremony starts in three hours by the way." Aston said from the doorway. "Auditorium is the large building at the campus center. You won't miss it." He paused before continuing. "Get settled. You've earned five minutes of not running from something."
Hearing about my traumatizing experience there was something that I wanted to say that I didn't have the right words for yet. Something about the building, and John, and the fact that this man had arrived from the sky at the last possible moment and had not made a significant thing of it since. I couldn't find the shape of it in time.
"Thank you... For saving my life." I said instead. It was insufficient and we both knew it.
Aston looked at me for a moment. Then he gave a smile, "Just doing my job." Then he turned, and walked back down the corridor, his footsteps fading as he got farther away from my dorm room.
The door swung gently closed behind him.
And for the first time since waking up in that cage, I was alone.
I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the room and let the quiet settle around me.
No more footsteps following closely behind me. No more counting the agonizing screams of children my age. No more of the machete cutting the air besides my ear. It was just a room, a room with a window and nothing but morning light coming through it.
I laid back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
My brain finally freed from the immediate work of keeping me alive promptly began trying to catch up on everything it hadn't had the time to process properly. The world outside that window was not my world. That was the foundational fact from which everything else extended. I had known it since the moment I had opened my eyes in the cage; it wouldn't make any other sense to why me out of all people would wake up in a random cage if not by transmigration.
But lying here now with the noise removed I could actually look at it properly.
This world was nothing like my world. That much I deducted easily. But the question that had been living in my head rent free was whether it was a world I recognized from a Novel or a Video game.
My first thought, in those first disoriented moments, had been Star-Fall: Protocol 0. The game. The last thing I had been looking at before my chest had decided to stop cooperating. It would have made a certain kind of sense, sensibly speaking. Fall asleep at your computer playing a game, wake up inside it. Clean. It was almost expected.
But it wasn't Star-Fall. Star-Fall took place in space, across planets, with technology that made the things I had seen in this city look ancient in comparison. The building outside my window was made out of wood and iron. The people in the streets used abilities that came from inside them rather than from any form of equipment. The portal gate I had walked through had no mechanical component to it that I could properly identify.
This was not a game world. Or if it was, it was not one that I recognized.
I racked my head through everything else I had. Every novel I had read, every game I had spent too many hours in, every piece of media that I had built up in the background of seventeen years of being the kind of person who is addicted toward fantasy and spent spring break gaming for twenty-eight hours straight. I pulled at every thread I had and held each one up against what I had seen since waking up but none of them fit the criteria.
The Shapers. The ranking system. The academy. The anomalies, the bull-type creature, the masked figure. The kingdom's structure. The portal gates.
None of it matched anything I could place.
I was not inside a story I recognized.
I was somewhere entirely new.
That should have been more frightening than it was. Maybe it would catch up to me later. For now, it settled into something that felt closely akin to curiosity.
I stared at the ceiling for a while longer.
I knew nothing of this world's story line. No plots. No main characters. And especially no early advantages that I could take advantage of.
Then I got up, put my academy identification card on the desk, and looked out the window at the training fields until it was time to go.
The auditorium was not difficult to find. I simply followed to where the crowd of students were moving to, and so I crossed the campus grounds toward the largest building at its center and let the crowd carry me there. There were more first years than I had expected.
Inside, the auditorium was larger than it looked from the outside, the ceiling enclosed like a dome and the seating tiered in a wide arc around a raised stage at the front. I found a seat toward the middle of the auditorium, not too close and not too far, the default position of someone who had not yet decided how he felt about his surroundings.
The seats filled around me quickly. The noise of chattering heightened as more students came through the doors. I sat with my hands resting on my knees, watching the stage, I let the noise wash over me without trying to pick anything specific out of it.
Then the lights turned off.
Not all of them. Just enough that the stage became the focus point of the room and the conversations between the students died down.
A figure stepped up to the front of the stage.
He looked to be roughly my age, which was the first thing I realized. The second was that he carried himself with the kind of ease that was either entirely natural or had been practiced to the point where it had become natural, and I couldn't tell yet which one it was. His hair was gold-blonde, the particular shade that caught light well, and his eyes when they swept across the room were a deep and striking red that I was reasonably certain I had not seen on a person before. His uniform was the same charcoal and navy as everyone else's, but it sat on him differently, with the addition of a small additional insignia at his collar that I didn't recognize the meaning of yet.
He looked out at the full auditorium without any apparent adjustment period.
Then he spoke.
"Hello to everyone of Solcrest Academy." His voice carried without effort, clean and measured and warm enough that it didn't feel like a performance even though it clearly was one. "I am Micheal Valeheart. And I am the first-year class student representative."