Ten Minutes to Midnight - Nobles, Veterans, and Mud-Bloods

The dawn over

Veterans, and

The dawn over

Solitude didn’t arrive with a grand burst of golden light; it seeped into the valley like watery ink spread across grey linen.

Cold mist clung to the damp canvas of

Tent #42, dripping rhythmically onto the muddy turf outside.

Inside, the air smelled of wet wool, cheap mutton fat, and the stale, nervous sweat of four teenage boys who had slept in their boots.Felix sat on the edge of a low wooden cot, rubbing the back of his neck.

His shoulders still ached from the bone-rattling carriage ride across the

Ridge, but his mind was sharp, ticking through the events of the previous night.

Barnaby’s violent, glowing knuckle-strike at the boundary stone—shattering that noble carriage driver’s nose in a spray of blood—was still fresh in his memory.Across the cramped space, a round, freckled face popped out from beneath a greasy pile of rabbit-skin blankets.”You’re the guy who came in with the scarred old bastard, right?”The voice belonged to

Finch—though he had introduced himself five minutes after

Felix walked through the flap as “Gid.” The boy was impossibly round for sixteen, his cheeks flushed with a persistent rosy hue that made him look like an overfed farmer’s boy, despite his surprisingly crisp, tailored linen shirt.

He was currently trying—and failing—to wedge a swollen foot into a scuffed leather boot.”He’s an old border veteran,” Felix corrected mildly, leaning back against the central support pole. “And his name is

Barnaby.””Potato, pot-ah-to,” Gid grunted, giving a final heave that sent him tumbling sideways onto his elbow.

He sat up, unbothered, wiping a spot of grease off his nose. “Point is, your driver hit a

High-Born’s retainer.

In front of the boundary wardens.

That makes you either the bravest idiot in the

Basin, or a corpse waiting for the exam to start.”From the darkest corner of the tent, a low, rasping voice cut through the damp chill.”The driver deserved it.

High-Borns think their carriage wheels are meant to run over men’s toes just to hear the crack.”The speaker was

He was lean to the point of emaciation, his pale yellow hair chopped jaggedly short, as if he’d cut it himself with a rusty hunting knife.

He sat on a straw pallet, methodically rubbing a dark sharpening stone down the edge of a notch-marked iron hunting dagger.

His eyes had the flat, hyper-vigilant stare of someone raised in a frontier town where people locked their shutters before dusk.”Careful,

Kaelen,” said the fourth occupant,

Vance, who was quietly sitting near the entrance lantern, carefully wiping down a small set of bronze-tipped calipers.

Gid’s nervous chatter or

Kaelen’s barbed hostility,

Tristan possessed the neat, deliberate posture of a merchant’s clerk. “If the camp monitors hear you talking about the nobility like that, you’ll be assigned latrine duty before the

Stone even lights up.”“Let them assign it,” Kaelen muttered, not breaking his rhythm against the whetstone. Scritch.

Scritch. “My father cleared corpses out of the muddy trenches at

Steppe for eight copper coins a day.

I’m not bowing to some velvet-sleeve from the capital just because his grandfather owned a silver mine.”Felix listened silently, observing the subtle lines drawn between them.

In just ten minutes, the social hierarchy of

Academy’s three thousand examinees had begun to crystallize.”It’s not just about velvet sleeves,

Kaelen,” Gid sighed, finally giving up on his boot laces and sprawling out on his blanket like a cast-up seal.

He looked over at

Felix. “You’re from the south, right,

Inland merchant territory?””Oakhaven,” Felix said. “Small place.

Lots of timber and rain.””Right.

So you don’t know the pecking order here yet,” Gid said, leaning forward and lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The academy calls us all ‘candidates,’ but out on the grass, there are three distinct herds.

And if you mix them up, you end up with broken ribs or a duel behind the latrines.””Go on,” Felix said, genuinely curious.”First, you’ve got the

Gold-Spooners,” Gid said, holding up a chubby finger. “The high nobility from the

City and the provincial seats.

Vance—the bastard your driver pissed off last night.

They’ve been eating high-tier nutrient pills since they were four, tutored by retired

Weaver-rank masters, wearing

Black-Iron weave vests under their coats.

They look down on everyone, but especially on us.”He held up a second finger, smeared with a bit of dried plum jam. “Second, you’ve got the

Border-Rats—like

Kaelen over there, or the kids from the

Rough, bloody-minded, grew up around iron and arrowheads.

Gold-Spooners hate ’em because they smell like horse sweat and don’t care about court manners, but nobody fucks with ’em too hard because they’ll literally slit your throat over a loaf of rye bread.”Kaelen didn’t deny it.

He merely offered a grim, faint twitch of his lip.”And then,” Gid groaned, slapping his own round belly with a wet thwack, “there’s us.

Earth-Sacks.

Local commoners, small-town merchants, tax-collector nephews, and lucky bastards with governor recommendations.

We don’t have the deadly combat instincts of the border kids, and we don’t have the raw core-cultivation resources of the nobles.

We’re the filler.

The grass beneath the horses’ hooves.””Spoken like a true coward,

Gid,” Tristan remarked mildly, putting his calipers away into a neat velvet pouch. “Some of us are here for the

You don’t need to slay a desert beast to design a decent rune-brace.””Maybe not,” Gid shot back, “but when the

Vanguard instructors start throwing us into the trial pits tomorrow, do you think they’re going to separate us by career goals?

They’re going to lump us together, and the

Gold-Spooners are going to treat us like live training dummies.”Felix adjusted his posture, looking out through the parted flap of the tent.Outside, the mist was beginning to lift, revealing the sheer scale of the encampment.

Thousands of identical white canvas tents stretched across the muddy shores of

Solitude, framed by the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the

Teeth range in the distance.

Groups of boys and girls in expensive fur-trimmed coats walked along the raised wooden walkways, their boots spotless, laughing loudly as they pointed toward the muddy lower camp where the commoners were washing their faces in frigid water buckets.He thought back to his quiet life in

Oakhaven—catching bird nests, reading ledger books, and playing the part of a slightly odd, mild-mannered merchant’s son.

He had used his ten-minute rewind ability sparingly back home, mostly to avoid minor embarrassments or save a falling bowl.

But looking at the cold, vast reality of this academy, he felt a strange, quiet weight settling into his chest.This wasn’t a game, and it certainly wasn’t going to be peaceful.”Hey,” Gid said, nudging

Felix’s knee with his unlaced boot. “You’re awfully quiet for a guy whose driver shattered a nobleman’s retainer’s face.””I’m just thinking,” Felix said softly, a faint, ironical smile touching the corner of his mouth.”About what?””About how much mud those

Gold-Spooners are going to have to eat if an

Earth-Sack ends up taking the top spot.”Kaelen stopped sharpening his dagger.

Tristan paused with his leather bag half-closed.

Gid stared at

Felix for three solid seconds before bursting into a breathless, wheezing chuckle.”Man,” Gid wheezed, shaking his head in disbelief. “You really are going to get us killed.”