Whatever had been created after my prompt, I didn’t get the chance to see it physically. The domain replacement had happened again, and that right there was apparently where my claim to equipment on the mortal plane ended.

Everything was back to normal. Bunk beds upright and balanced. The disturbing white lights running overhead — which, genuinely, made me miss the darkness I’d woken up to. I was standing in the exact spot I’d been before the domain dropped me in, right where I’d been standing after the slime boss hit the floor.

I heard breathing behind me. Charged. The specific rhythm of someone who’d been watching something intensely for longer than was comfortable.

I turned around expecting Malik.

Got six pairs of eyes instead.

The dorm room was otherwise empty, but these six guys were all staring at me like I’d just finished some kind of live performance nobody had consented to attend. I recognised the look immediately. The weirdo-badging look. The one that preceded questions I wasn’t prepared to answer.

"What’s going on?" I looked past them at Malik. "And why are you breathing like that?"

"You’re back to normal?" He straightened from whatever crouching position he’d been in, wide-eyed. "Man. You had me genuinely scared. I thought you were possessed."

"Possessed."

"Yeah, possessed. You were getting thrown around the room without control. Your eyes were glowing red. You crashed into that wall—" he pointed at the east wall, which had a visible impact mark on it, "—twice. You didn’t even look like you registered either of them." He looked at me with actual concern. "Doesn’t your back hurt?"

The wall damage was real, even if lighter than what had happened during the replacement. That answered something I hadn’t been sure about — the domain replacement wasn’t a separate world. It was an illusion overlaid onto reality. One that could genuinely kill me if I lost inside it. The whole thing still sounded like the most horrific VR game ever designed by a psychopath, which tracked with everything else I knew about the system.

The more immediate problem was the six pairs of eyes still watching me.

If Malik was accurate about the glowing red — and he seemed like exactly the kind of person who was accurate about details — then I had a real problem. They were already making calculations. I needed to give them something that landed before the guessing started.

"About that." I let the words come out slowly, reading the room. "Actually, I..."

"Your face looks like you’re trying to lie," Malik said, helpfully. "Eyebrow arched down. Side frown wrinkles. And is that a bead of sweat coming down your right temple—"

"Yeah, I see it, thank you." I deepened the frown at him, then held it neutral. "I have the syndrome." 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

That was the best I had on short notice. The syndrome was a condition that developed from prolonged exposure to ability attacks — and the specific detail that made it useful as a cover right now was that it only affected cripples.

The theory being that ability energy, when absorbed repeatedly by someone without the genetic framework to process it, started producing adverse effects. Skin irritation. Anxiety. And at the worst end, a recurring episode called a lucid nightmare — where the person was fully aware they were dreaming but couldn’t break out of it.

Most people had heard of it. Almost nobody actually knew what it looked like up close.

"Oh." Malik processed that. "But then how were you being thrown into the walls? Didn’t you say the reflex—"

"I had control over it." I stopped when I noticed how hard he was concentrating on my face. Then, with the most genuinely neutral expression I could arrange. "It was a reflex response from the nightmare. Now can you please leave me alone?"

I moved before he could assemble a follow-up question. My stomach had begun to register its opinion at a volume that was difficult to ignore.

"Where are you going?" Malik called after me. He was genuinely asking for a punch to the face. "It’s not even time for the enlightenment meeting yet."

"I’m going to grab breakfast."

"It’s 9:04. Breakfast ended four minutes ago."

I stopped walking.

Every bone in my body stopped too, out of solidarity. The hunger that had been quietly accumulating since last night’s porridge incident chose that specific moment to make itself very loudly known — beating against my intestines with the enthusiasm of something that had been patient for long enough and was done.

"What?!!"

***

"There are no two reasons everyone has gathered here today." A voice with the specific energy of someone who had been told they were important for long enough to believe it. "An orientation meeting, as culture demands, to welcome every participant into the academy camp."

Ymir James. Camp director. The final boss of this particular hellhole. He looked exactly how a director was supposed to look— ruffled grey hair, thick beards doing their best to conceal his expression, hazel eyes that sat in his face like they were lit from behind.

And then there was the height. He was short. Short enough that half his body disappeared behind the bulk of the hill he’d chosen to stand on. He had both arms folded behind his back, projecting the energy of a man who was not aware that the hill was doing significant structural work for his authority.

"Now... why do we hold these examinations during random years?" He asked it like a question he’d been answering for a decade and had run out of patience for. "The BHA operates on one core principle. Unpredictability. Confronting the unpredictable is what separates a good hunter from someone who just trained hard in controlled conditions.

Readiness matters, yes. But readiness built on adaptation and flexibility is what the BHD is actually looking for." He paused. "We need a generation of hunters who can protect civilians regardless of the conditions, not just in the scenarios they prepared for."

Murmuring erupted across the camp ground. Three thousand students produced a lot of ambient noise even when they were whispering. Even compounded whispers at that volume hit like a low beacon.

"Quiet down." Ymir’s voice fought against it and won. The silence came. "I know many of you have questions, but we don’t have time for all of them, and frankly, we don’t have time for any of them. I’ll cover the basics."

A staff member walked up and handed him a large folder with a green cover. He opened it, scanned briefly, and looked back out at the crowd.

"The examination is separated into three individual trials. Each trial tests a different category — tactical intelligence, physical skill, and mental composure.

Every trial carries a maximum score of 100 points, totalling 300 across all three. Your points are assigned based on performance and the judges’ decisions. Points are not equally distributed — they become harder to earn as the trials progress.

The primary objective is to stay flexible, accumulate points, and position yourself as highly as possible in the final ranking. At the end of the examination, every candidate receives a final assessment, and from that, ten students are selected for the chance to enrol in the BHA."

He closed the folder. "Questions?"

Hundreds of hands went up. Mine included.

"Excellent. Since there are no questions, I’ll use this time to introduce the judges." He said, ignoring every single raised hand with the practised ease of someone who had done exactly this before. "Unfortunately, most of the Apex Corps had prior assignments that conflicted with today’s schedule. However, one member was able to make time."

He let the silence sit, watching the anticipation move across the crowd like a wave.

"Please welcome — our hero of the void — Kade Cross."

The camp ground came apart. Girls screaming. Guys whooping into their own palms. I’d spent years reading comics about the Apex Corps, and some part of me had been secretly holding onto the image of what it would feel like to actually see one in person. The kind of moment that turned out to be exactly as impressive as you’d imagined.

Fate, as it turned out, had a different assessment of what I deserved.

Kade Cross walked up to the hill and shook hands with Ymir. His dreadlocks were long and unkempt, moving wherever the wind decided. He had a long face. Sore eyes underlined with dark circles. A lean, slightly crooked posture that suggested his spine had opinions about the way he carried himself that he hadn’t addressed in years.

He looked nothing like the comics. The comics had given him a built, commanding presence — shadow control rendered across the panels with serious dramatic weight. What was standing on this hill looked like a man who was currently three months behind on rent, hadn’t eaten a proper meal since Tuesday, and was processing a low-grade anxiety attack in real time.

"Umm..." His eyes twitched slightly as he stared out at the crowd. "Umm... y... you guys got this..." He produced a slow thumbs up with the energy of someone whose arm was doing the work without full cooperation from the rest of the body. "I guess?"

The smile on his face had the quality of the specific smile people wear when they are concealing something that would alarm others if it were visible. I wasn’t the only one noticing. There were students around me who had already started making quiet assessments — whispering about whether he was unwell, whether something was wrong, whether the hero of the void was experiencing some form of digestive crisis.

He stood there for what felt like a long time — frozen, thumbs up, smile fading incrementally toward pale — until Ymir stepped forward and reclaimed the audience before the horror could deteriorate further.

The camp director dismissed us with a genuine recommendation to enjoy the camp as much as possible. He said it like he meant it, like this was a location that people looked back on fondly. Like the porridge and the sore bunks and the lights that stole sleep were character-building details rather than punishments.

Memorable, I’d give him that. Just not in the way he intended. And just when I thought things couldn’t be worse than it already was;

"Everyone, to the training hall. Now."