The thin girl's Gladius result faded from the screen. She walked back to her seat with her head down. No one clapped. No one looked at her.
"Next: KIRAN. No family record."
A dark-haired boy stood up. His skin was bronze, his hair black as polished jet. He walked to the obelisk with a quiet confidence and pressed his palm against the stone. Amber light crawled up the runes—steady, warm, unspectacular. The screen displayed:
"KARTIKEYA EDGE — ELITE GRADE — INDIAN FAMILY."
Bronze letters. Elite. The Indian in saffron robes opened his eyes for the first time that morning. "The war god's blade chooses well," he said, his voice like distant thunder. The Olympian raised an eyebrow, then looked away. The Roman tilted his head a fraction, then dismissed it. No one fought. Elite was respectable, but it did not make kingdoms lean forward.
Kiran walked back to his seat. By the time he sat down, the hall had already forgotten him.
---
"Next: CATT. No family record."
The name fell into silence. No one had heard of a Catt.
Then a boy rose from the back of the benches. His hair was the color of burning copper—wild, untamed, exploding from his scalp like a corona of fire. His shirt was too small, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing forearms crosshatched with old scars. Not the scars of labor. The scars of training. Of hunger. Of someone who had been preparing for this moment his entire life.
He walked to the obelisk. His steps were slow, deliberate, as if he was walking toward something he both craved and feared.
He pressed his palm to the stone.
The runes did not flicker. They ignited.
A deep, resonant blue light burst from the carvings, racing upward like a living thing—like a serpent of lightning uncoiling from the earth. The light did not stop at the top of the obelisk. It kept rising, spilling into the air above, and for one breathless moment, the entire hall was bathed in cold, ancient blue.
The Sword Index flickered. Then it screamed.
"GRAM — EPIC GRADE — NORSE FAMILY."
Silver letters, bold and sharp as a blade's edge. Gram. The dragon-slaying sword of the Volsungs. The blade that cut through the iron helm of the dragon Fafnir. A weapon that had tasted the blood of a legend.
Below the name, a single line of text appeared: Dormant bloodline. Awakening in progress.
The hall erupted.
Not in applause—in sound. A wave of gasps, whispers, and the scraping of chairs as minor family representatives leaned forward. But the gallery—the gallery was where the real storm broke.
The Norse woman did not speak. She rose from her iron seat, and when she rose, her ghost wolf rose with her. The wolf's smoke-fur bristled, and its ice-blue eyes locked onto Catt with an intensity that made the air itself tremble. For the first time, the woman's scarred face showed something other than indifference. She looked hungry.
"Blood of the North," she said, her voice low and resonant, carrying across the hall without effort. "The dragon's bane has slept too long. Come home."
The Olympian stopped turning his ring. His lazy smile widened, but his eyes—his eyes were no longer lazy. They were the color of a storm about to break. He gestured with one finger, and the glass sphere behind him—the one with the frozen lightning bolt—began to hum louder. Cracks of static leaped from his shoulder-mounted thunderbolt to the armrest of his throne.
"Home?" he said, amused. "The North is a graveyard of ice and old bones. Olympus offers glory. Dragons the size of mountains. A seat at the table of gods." He looked directly at Catt for the first time. "Name your price."
The Roman unbuttoned his coat. Not one button—all of them. Beneath the dark wool, his crimson tunic gleamed like dried blood. He did not smile. He did not speak. He simply reached up and tapped the brass eagle on his collar. Behind him, his attendant's shadow stretched across the gallery floor—and kept stretching, growing longer and darker, until it touched the base of the obelisk. A shadow that far exceeded its source. The message was clear: Rome did not need words. Rome took.
The Egyptian's stillness sphere contracted. The dust mote in front of his golden mask finally fell—not drifted, fell, as if gravity had suddenly remembered it. He turned his masked face toward Catt. Behind the mask, something breathed. His ankh pendant rotated faster, sending ripples of dark light through the air. He did not speak. He did not need to. The silence was his offer.
The Chinese old man opened his eyes.
Not just opened them—focused them. His pale gray irises fixed on Catt with the weight of centuries. His jade sword, which had rotated once per minute without fail, now spun three full turns in a single breath. The air around him grew thick, attentive. He spoke seven words, slow and measured:
"The dragon you are meant to kill is not in the West."
No one understood what that meant. But everyone felt the weight of it.
The Celtic woman stopped humming. Her small brown bird went silent. The yellow flower beneath her bare foot shivered, then grew a second bloom. She tilted her head at Catt, birdlike, curious. "He has the old hunger," she murmured to no one. "The kind that eats a man from the inside."
The Indian's mandala stopped spinning. His flame hovered lower, dimmer, as if paying respect. "The wheel turns," he said quietly. "A dragon-slayer always comes when the old scales tip."
The Persian girl did not rise. She did not speak. But her seven silver stars changed their orbit—tightening, clustering, then spreading into a pattern that looked like a constellation no one had ever seen. The old man beside her whispered something in her ear. She nodded once.
Eight families. Eight claims. And Catt stood in the center of it all, his red hair glowing in the dying blue light of the obelisk, his fists clenched so tight that his knuckles had gone white.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I…" His voice cracked. He was fifteen. He had trained for this. But no training prepared you for eight of the most powerful families in the world tearing at you like wolves over a carcass.
The Norse woman stepped forward—actually stepped, her boot touching the edge of the gallery railing. "You do not need to decide now," she said, softer this time. "But know this: Gram chose you. Not them. You. That bond cannot be forged by politics."
The Olympian laughed. "Oh, it can be broken. Everything can be broken for the right price."
The Roman's shadow retracted. He rebuttoned his coat. One button. That was all.
Catt looked down at his palm, still pressed against the obelisk. The blue light was fading now, retreating back into the runes. He pulled his hand away. His fingers left a faint imprint of sweat on the obsidian.
"I need to think," he said. His voice was steadier now. "After the ceremony."
The Norse woman nodded. "Find me."
Catt turned and walked down from the platform. His legs were shaking. He passed through the crowd of staring children like a ghost. As he passed ATLAS, their eyes met for a single heartbeat. Catt's eyes were deep green, like moss after rain, and inside them was something ATLAS recognized: not pride, not fear, but the stunned silence of a boy who had just realized his life would never be his own again.
Then Catt was swallowed by the swarm.
ATLAS looked away. The Persian girl was still watching him. Not Catt—him. Her silver stars had returned to their slow orbit. The corner of her lips twitched upward by a pixel. Then she looked away.
---
The next tests slid by like stones dropped into a deep well. Common. Common. Common. A boy with a Roman blade—Common. A girl with a Greek xiphos—Common. No one cared. The hall was still buzzing about Catt.
ATLAS was not listening. He was pressing down. The warmth in his chest—the warmth he had felt since childhood, the warmth he had learned to bury under layers of stillness and silence—was stirring again. Not like a snake this time. Like something larger. Something that had been waiting.
He crushed it. He had to.
"Next: ATLAS. No family record."
The name barely registered. A few heads turned out of habit, then looked away. He was no one.
ATLAS stood. His legs were soft, but he forced them hard. Step by step, he walked to the platform. The obelisk loomed above him, blacker than black, its runes still faintly glowing from Catt's touch.
He pressed his palm against the stone.
Cold. Deep cold. It seeped into his skin, his veins, his marrow. And then—nothing. The runes flickered once. Twice. A gray-white, hesitant light crawled upward from the point of contact, slow as a dying insect. It reached one-third of the way up the obelisk. And stopped.
The screen flickered.
"XIPHOS — COMMON GRADE — ATLANTIS·EXTINCT BRANCH."
Silence. Not the awed silence of Catt's moment. An awkward silence. The kind where no one knows how to react.
Atlantis. The name that had been extinct for ten years. The ninth empty chair. The lost kingdom at the bottom of the sea. And the result was a Xiphos—the most common Greek short sword. The same blade the freckled girl had awakened at the very beginning of the ceremony.
Worse, in fact. Because that girl at least had no affiliation. Her sword was just common. ATLAS's sword bore the stamp "Extinct Branch"—as if the sea had spat up a corpse and called it a gift.
Someone laughed. Very soft, but in the quiet hall it landed like a pin on stone.
Then more laughter. Not cruel, exactly. The relieved kind. The "of course" kind. The laughter of a crowd that had expected nothing and was delighted to be proven right.
ATLAS took his hand off the stone. His fingers did not tremble. He turned and walked back to his seat, each step steady. He had practiced this walk for ten years. The walk of a nobody.
He sat down. The pock-faced boy beside him patted his shoulder. Said nothing.
On the gallery, the Olympian had already looked away. The Roman rebuttoned his coat fully. The Norse woman's gho