Alira stood beside her scarecrow, rolling the stiffness from her shoulder. She rubbed into the sore muscle on the side of her neck. The weight of the sword in her hand felt foreign, and she held it awkwardly, but the plan in her mind was crystal clear.

  “Honestly, I don’t really have to do this. Such a pain,” she murmured, her gaze fixed on Cinnamon across the arena. “But I guess I will. Might as well win the bet too since I’m already at it.”

  “Begin!” Professor Sora’s voice cracked through the air. The space went into an uproar, but Alira’s focus didn’t falter.

  In a synchronized motion, both Alira and Cinnamon reached for their respective cast drawings of Injury Exchange. Alira pulled at the leather patch tucked into her belt. As Cinnamon slapped his cast onto his scarecrow’s back, Alira did the same. Alira didn’t blink and triggered the right cast reserved in the front of her mind.

  Two flashes of light erupted in the arena on the two scarecrows. The casts were active in them.

  Alira didn’t wait. She knew she had one chance at this. A card flew from her hand. The moment it reached the peak of its speed at its furthest run, she triggered a Position Exchange, blinking to its location while Cinnamon kicked off the ground in a dash. He was a blur of motion, a rabbit’s speed carrying him past her in a gust of wind. He was fast, faster than she could try, but she didn’t need to.

  She dropped a coin on the ground where she stood and threw another card, then another, teleporting in short, dizzying hops towards his scarecrow as he raced for hers. Her vision swam from the strain, but her goal was in reach. She didn’t need to glance back to know Cinnamon’s sword was slicing through the empty air where her dummy had been half a second ago.

  Her fingertips brushed a single stray straw on his scarecrow.

  Contact.

  She turned to face him, gasping with her cheeks so flushed from excitement that the calm smile on her face seemed out of place. She saw his sword cleave nothing but sand. “Position Exchange,” she said softly. “Whoosh. Close.”

  Cinnamon stood frozen, her eyes darting from her dummy, now safely in the center of the arena, where she’d dropped her coin, to her. Then his gaze flicked toward his own dummy.

  As someone who would soon be taking his first Trial, he should know very well that an object couldn’t hold more than a cast at a time. Since she’d placed Position Exchange on her dummy and it had already been used up, it was now completely defense. He could run and cut it down with no complications.

  But his feet were rooted. He waited, watching for her next move.

  When his face twisted, she knew it wasn’t what he expected. Slowly, deliberately, Alira raised her sword and pressed the sharp edge against her own throat. Like she was offering a performance to the Divinities themselves and more. Like she was offering herself so long as she got what she wanted.

  She held Cinnamon’s shocked gaze.

  ‘Do you see me now?’ her actions asked.

  She drew the blade across her soft neck.

  Her skin didn’t break; it didn’t tear. Instead, the Injury Exchange cast just a minute ago, herself the anchor and his dummy the recipient, flared to lie. The one clean slice she had inflicted upon herself was transferred, manifesting as a deep cut across the straw neck of his scarecrow.

  A short buffer before the flow of the cast shifted.

  A split-second later, Cinnamon’s own Injury Exchange triggered in a chain reaction. The fatal injury on his dummy was pulled to its intended recipient: him.

  A thin line of blood welled on Cinnamon’s pale neck, streaming down his throat. His scarecrow’s stilled, the damage no longer applied to it, but the cut straws didn’t reattach the way torn skin would have in case of a living target.

  “Sword down, Alira Ravon!” Professor Sora’s voice roared, shattering the silence with breath held. “Cinnamon’s scarecrow has suffered a fatal wound! The match is over!”

  Alira lowered her blade, her point proven, her victory sealed.

  “I won the match,” Alira said, arm crossed as she leaned against a pale brick wall. For once, she wasn’t the one on the clinic’s bed. “Think I won the bet, too?”

  Cinnamon huffed a laugh, his breathy laughter joining the dry scratches of graphite on rough paper in the otherwise empty room. His fingers around the pencil were smudged with dark streaks as he sketched lines and blended shadows.

  Alira tried her best to ignore the fact that at the center of his work was herself, with a smug smile on her face and a sharp blade to her own throat. Striking pencil strokes drew her fluffy ears upright and tail up and curled at the tip. Did she really look that stoked?

  “I guess I could let you,” he said. “It did make me wonder what you’ve been up to before the Duke adopted you.”

  He could let me, he says.

  Alira rolled her eyes. “What? You want to bond over our sob stories or something? Sorry, but I’m not in the mood for it.”

  “Well. I guess I could wait until the first Trial then.”

  First Trial... Alira recalled the Trials of the Wills would always target the takers’ weaknesses. The Trial would welcome its takers in a small world constructed specifically to test their will. The higher the Will Favorability, the greater influence the taker had over the theme. Alira hoped Raine’s Middle Prismatic would hog all the attention and spare her backstory about Earth from leaking.

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  It would be a little awkward if they found themselves in a completely unfamiliar world.

  “What’s your favorability?” Alira asked.

  Cinnamon hummed. “Lower Prismatic. Why do you ask?” He looked up at her, brows raised, without turning his head away from his sketchbook.

  Having a Lower Prismatic might lower the chances in her favor. It wouldn’t hurt to bring him along, whether they took the Trial with the Academy’s permission or not.

  Oh, well.

  She could think about it if they managed to come out alive from what she and Raine would be up to soon. Alira’s gaze flicked toward Cinnamon’s neck, wrapped in a clean bandage.

  “Why are you still wearing that, like you aren’t already healed? Well, whatever. I’m leaving,” Alira turned with a wave. “See you around, bunny boy.”

  Cinnamon let out a soft chuckle. “See you, kitty girl. Come back alive.”

  Alira almost skipped a step and tripped on her feet. No one was supposed to know about the fact that she was leaving. No one other than Maria, to be more precise, but Maria wouldn’t do that to her. It seemed he’d been putting his long ears to use.

  Alone at a bench beside the desolate corridor leading to the storage area, Alira found herself unusually alert.

  Maria, in her desperate attempt to tag along after finding out where Alira was headed, had told her all about the fantastic little stories she’d picked up from the group of commoner girls she had made good friends with. Something about how a staff member was locked inside Storage room 217 and was long dead when he was found.

  Alira’s gaze flicked to the number on the door across from her, 202, then down the empty hallway stretching beneath a crimson veil. Friday nights were always eerie with the moon bleeding red in devotion to Divinity Sky Giant. His ruling energy over the night made every being on and beneath Staywes’s surface feel small, minute, in the presence of something truly gigantesque.

  With just herself to accompany, Alira almost missed the voice in her head named Xia. Only so that he could talk nonsense and distract her from thinking about the one alchemic cast that went wrong, an incident Maria had filled her head with. No way such a large-scale event that killed all five second years actually happened on this floor.

  Maria must have used up every ounce of her creativity to scare me into bringing her along...

  She kept her ears perked up for movement, so she turned at the exact moment Raine’s footsteps echoed toward her from the far end of the hallway, shrouded in reddish shadow. A frown formed on her face when she heard a second pair of footsteps, slower yet sloppier.

  Since Raine had decided on such a haunted meeting point, she’d assumed that they would be doing some special casts or using some mysterious artifacts that shouldn’t be seen by others, but now he was bringing someone else with him.

  Seriously, would it kill him if he spares me a couple of words about how even we’re leaving?

  She could only calm herself down since it was just the way Raine was. And if someone could fix him, there wasn’t such a person up to the end of book three, and it wouldn’t be her either.

  Two figures soon emerged from the distant shadows. Raine wore a worn and loose lace-up shirt, the cords at his collar left untied. Alira’s eyes flicked downward for half a second. The artifact he had was sure handy. Gender bender female protagonists would normally have to bind their chest, and a good chunk of the plot and tension came from moments where it could get exposed.

  “And look at this guy, strolling around showing off his muscles...” she mumbled.

  Raine’s clothes were loose and shabby, like Alira’s own worn brown dress she’d bought from a staff member for the sake of their mission to act like some street urchins out and about to be kidnapped. Without her usual high-class getup, she looked more like a background character, which she was, but of course, the protagonist himself remained unaffected by such a thing.

  I look more like an orphan than an actual orphan.

  “What are you muttering to yourself?” Raine asked as he made it to her.

  Alira didn’t answer him, instead turning toward the shifty older man with darting eyes behind him. She looked up to meet Raine’s eyes and widened her eyes in question.

  “What?” Raine said, his voice flat. “You told me to find a way out of the Academy, and so I did. He’s our way out.”

  The man took the lead in front of the two without a word, striding down the corridor with careful steps.

  “He looks like a staff. What did you do to get him to sneak us out?” Alira whispered.

  It sure would get annoying if they were caught. Raine extended his thumb and index sideway to form a tilted L, or half a diamond.

  Half a Lia... He decided on a pay-to-win option, it seemed.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered back. “I will turn him in when we get back.”

  “Ha,” Alira laughed once at that.

  The three of them took a turn around the corner before the man stopped before a room to fumble for a set of keys.

  “217...” Alira read the room number as the man used a key to unlock the weathered wooden door with a rusty clack. The door creaked open, and there wasn’t the smell of rot that Alira had expected, thanks to her imagination of the dead staff member from the silly ghost story. Only the scent of mold and dust assaulted her sensitive nose.

  “There was an accident here long ago,” the man began as he moved to push an old cupboard aside. With a groan, he continued, “Because of that, this part of the Academy is barely maintained or renovated for use.”

  Alira pulled her cape around her, feeling the temperature drop right on cue at the mention of the accident she’d hoped was just another made-up campus ghost story. Though it was more likely from the cool night air that had crept in through the open wall now exposed when Raine, seeing the old man struggle, stepped in to pull the cupboard away with one hand.

  “There you go,” the man grunted. “Careful jumping down. The tall grass down there will soften your fall, but we’re still one floor up. Go along the wall to the left—you’ll find a hole big enough to crawl out.”

  Raine tilted his head at Alira, motioning for her to go ahead.

  Good old hole in the wall. Here I was hoping for something cool.

  Alira strode toward the dilapidated wall, placing her hand on the chipped brick as she glanced down. As the man said, lush green covered the ground, which was pretty far down. But she’d jumped from a height higher, and it’d already cured whatever mild case of acrophobia she had. She climbed a step onto the frame and turned back with a wave.

  “Come back alive, you two,” the man’s voice came. “You still have half a Lia to pay me once you’re back.”

  “Only if you keep your mouth shut.” Alira heard Raine say before she leaped off.

  Slight pain shot through her ankles as she landed with a thump. Alira straightened herself up and shook it off, hoping random pain in the legs wouldn’t alert Sir Cion. She placed her hand on the tall black wall a step before her and turned her head to the right.

  Raine landed right beside her, barely making a noise.

  “Let’s go get ourselves in trouble, shall we?”