The equipment section was a long stone building close to the residences. Inside, it was all storerooms and counters. Rows of shelves ran back into the gloom behind the counters, stacked with folded uniforms, boots, belts, and other supplies, all of it sorted and labelled.
The air smelled of new cloth and leather and polish. Staff moved back and forth behind the counters with registers in their hands, pulling things down from the shelves while the new cadets queued in front of them.
Shaw stood off to one side, watching.
A quartermaster climbed onto a step at the front of the room so they could all see him.
"When you’re called," he said, "come to the counter. Show your identification and confirm your details. You’ll be issued everything on the list under your name. From the moment you take it, it’s your responsibility." He held up a finger. "If something doesn’t fit, or something’s missing, you tell us before you leave this building. Not tomorrow. Not during training. Before you leave."
The names began.
Owen waited with Elias. Ahead of them, the staff checked every cadet against their registers, measured a few of them, sent one back to a different counter, swapped a pair of boots for a larger size.
"Ferrers."
Owen stepped up.
The man behind the counter checked his name, then turned and began taking things down from the shelves behind him. A folded uniform. A pair of boots. A belt. A small plate of metal stamped with his name and the Academy insignia, for identification. And a thin bundle of papers tied with string.
Owen picked up the uniform and unfolded it.
It was dark navy, cut close and plain, with a high collar. Silver piping ran along the edges of the collar and cuffs, and on the left breast, the Academy’s sword and laurel had been stitched in silver and gold. There was nothing on the shoulders or the sleeves. No rank. Just the uniform of a cadet.
He ran the cloth between his fingers. It was heavy and tightly woven, every seam stitched double. It wasn’t meant to be impressive. It was meant to last.
A quiet warmth settled in him as he held it.
He had fought for this.
"Try the jacket on," the quartermaster said. "Over your shirt. I want to see the shoulders."
Owen put it on. The quartermaster looked at the fit across his shoulders, tugged at one sleeve, then nodded and made a note in his register.
"Next."
Elias was called a few minutes later. He came away from the counter with his arms full, already holding his things up beside Owen’s to compare them.
Then he stopped.
"The boots," he said. He pushed at the toe of one with his thumb. "They’re tight."
He went back to the counter.
Marianne had come up behind them with her own bundle. She watched Elias trying to explain the problem to the staff.
"Training hasn’t even started," she said, "and he’s already got trouble."
"I’d rather find out now," Elias called over his shoulder, "than halfway through some exercise when I can’t feel my feet."
"That’s actually sensible," Eveline said.
"It is," Owen said.
Elias turned around, looking enormously pleased with himself. "Thank you. Finally, someone appreciates me."
Marianne rolled her eyes. But she let it go.
* * *
Once they had all been issued their kit, they were sent back to their rooms to change.
Owen closed his door and laid everything out on the bed.
He put on the uniform piece by piece, then buckled the belt and settled it, and pulled on the boots. The jacket fit well. He rolled his shoulders, then raised his arms over his head. It moved with him far better than the torn, stiff clothes he had worn through the examination.
There was a small mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door. He looked at himself in it.
Seeing the sword and laurel on his chest made it real in a way nothing else yet had.
He wasn’t a candidate anymore, waiting to find out whether he had done enough.
He was an Officer Cadet.
When he came out, Elias was already in the corridor in his own uniform, turning one way and then the other, trying to see as much of himself as he could in the polished stone.
"Well?" he said. "How do I look?"
"Like a cadet."
"That’s it? I think I look considerably more impressive than that."
"Looking like one isn’t the same as being a good one."
"I don’t see why I can’t manage both," Elias said, and straightened his collar.
* * *
The training ground they were sent to was not far from the residences. It was smaller than the one Owen had seen the night before, with marked squares on the stone underfoot, stations set out with equipment, and plenty of open space. A handful of soldiers were laying things out around the edges, and other members of staff stood watching as the first-years came in.
Shaw gathered them in front of her.
"This next part," she said, "is about formation. Discipline. Working together. You’ll be put into temporary sections. You will learn to assemble in your positions, respond to commands, keep your spacing, and account for everyone in your section." She looked at them. "This is not about finding out who’s the strongest. I don’t care who is the strongest. A unit has to be able to move together and do what it’s told. It doesn’t matter how good any one of you is with your armament. If everyone runs off on their own, you’re useless."
She split them into sections of ten, reading the names off her roster, and named a section leader for each.
Owen and Elias ended up in the same one. Eveline and Marianne were each put in a different section, farther down the ground.
The first exercise started.
It didn’t take Owen long to work out that some of the others had done this before. A sandy-haired boy in their section, from a military family by the sound of what he said, picked up the commands at once. He moved without hesitating, and when the boy next to him turned the wrong way, he quietly nudged him back into place.
Owen understood what they were trying to do. He had done things like it before. But the commands weren’t quite the ones he remembered, and on the third movement, he took his line from the wrong person and ended up a full step out of place.
"Ferrers," the instructor said. "Your marker is the man on the right of the front rank. Not the one in front of you."
"Yes, sir."
He moved. He didn’t make that mistake again.
Elias was struggling with the spacing. On the first pass, he kept drifting too close to the cadet in front of him. Owen watched him look across at the sandy-haired boy, see how far back he was keeping himself, and quietly match it.
They went through it again. And again.
Slowly, the sections began to look like sections.
Owen noticed that some of the others were concentrating so hard on their own feet that they weren’t looking at anyone else at all. When their section was told to change positions and reform, he took a quick look around before stepping into his place, saw that Elias was about to fall in one space too far left, and caught his eye with a small shake of the head.
Elias shifted over without a word.
Owen didn’t try to take charge of anything. The section had a leader. He just did what he was told and helped where he could see it was needed.
Down the ground, he saw Eveline lean over and murmur a few words to a girl in her section who was looking around in obvious confusion. A moment later, the girl moved to the right place.
Marianne’s section was having a harder time. Owen saw them have to repeat the same movement three times, because each time, one or two of them had stepped off early. Marianne had done it right every time. By the third repetition, her jaw was tight.
But when the instructor corrected them, she kept her mouth shut and did it again.
At last, after many repetitions, every section managed to get through the whole exercise without falling apart.
Shaw walked along the front of them, looking at the final arrangement.
"That’s an improvement," she said. "A real one, compared with this morning." She stopped by one section. "Your spacing is still too loose at the back. You." She pointed. "You’re still watching your feet. Look up." She turned to face them all. "These are the mistakes you’ll keep making until you stop making them. That’s what training is for."
That was all. Nobody was praised, and nobody was punished.
But Owen had the feeling that the instructors watching from the edges had learned a great deal about all of them. Who listened. Who could be corrected, and who couldn’t.
"Ten minutes," Shaw said. "Rest."
Elias came over to Owen, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
"I didn’t think standing in a line could be this much work," he said.
"It gets easier," Owen said. "Once you’ve done it enough."
Marianne joined them, still looking slightly put out. "I hope they let us use our armaments soon. I didn’t come here to walk in straight lines."
"I think that was the point, though," Eveline said, coming up behind her. "Did you see? Some of the best fighters out there couldn’t manage it at all. Everyone kept doing their own thing."
Owen thought about the boy in his section who had been so absorbed in his own feet that he had walked straight into the person beside him.
"She’s right," he said.
* * *
Later, they were brought into a lecture hall for a briefing.
It had rows of seats rising up from an instructor’s platform, with large boards along the wall behind it for displaying schedules and diagrams. Shaw led them in and waited for them to sit, then introduced the instructors who would be handling the next stage of their induction.
One of them was Captain Pike. He gave the briefing himself.
He kept it short. Over the next three years, he told them, they would study cultivation and how to develop it. They would learn to control their bonded armaments properly. They would study military tactics and leadership, and condition their bodies. They would learn fieldcraft and monster studies. And, in time, they would go out on supervised expeditions.
"Some of it will be in a classroom," he said. "Some of it will be out on the ground. Most of it will be both. You’ll be assessed regularly, on all of it." He looked out over the seats. "You got in on your examination results. That’s done. From now on, what matters is what you learn."
Their schedules were passed along the rows.
Owen studied his. Classroom sessions. Cultivation studies. Physical training. And, scattered through the week, practical armament training.
He read those lines twice.
Firearms was open to him now, and he had barely scratched the surface of it. A single rifle, used once. He remembered how the scope had shaken in his hands on that slope. He had hit the creature. But one shot didn’t mean he could rely on it. In this body, with that weapon, he was still a beginner.
He wanted to practise somewhere controlled. Somewhere he could try things without anyone getting hurt.
Then Pike moved on to safety regulations.
"Nobody manifests or discharges a bonded armament in the residential buildings," he said. "Or in the dining halls, or any other shared facility, without authorisation. There are training grounds for that, and supervised areas. If you want to train on your own time, there are procedures for using them. Follow them."
Owen listened closely to that. After what that rifle had sounded like in the open forest, he had no wish to find out what it would sound like inside a stone corridor.
Beside him, Elias turned his head and looked at him.
Owen didn’t need to ask what he was thinking about.
He kept his eyes on the platform.
* * *
At the end of the briefing, Pike paused.
"Tomorrow," he said, "you’ll have your first assessment. Cultivation and armaments."
The room went quiet.
"It is not another admission examination. Every one of you has already earned your place here. Nobody is going to lose it tomorrow." He let that sink in. "The point is to see where each of you is starting from. We’ll look at your cultivation control, at how you manifest your armaments, and at how you handle them in practice. That tells us what each of you needs to work on. And it gives us something to measure you against later."
The whispering began almost as soon as he stopped.
Some of the cadets looked confident, especially those whose names Owen remembered from the top of the board. Others looked far less certain about having their abilities picked apart in front of the instructors.
Elias leaned over. "Do you think they’ll make us fight each other? Or just show them what we’ve got, one at a time?"
"They’ll tell us in the morning."
"Finally," Marianne said, from the row behind. "Something where I actually get to use my spear."
Eveline had a slight frown on her face. "I wonder how they’ll compare everyone," she said. "Fairly, I mean. A spear and a bow aren’t anything alike. How do you assess them the same way?"
Owen had been wondering the same thing.
The officers had seen his sword. They had seen the firearm, too, and he had already told them what it was. There was no pretending now that nobody knew.
Would they want him to show them both tomorrow? Or would they let him start with the sword?
He had no way of knowing yet.
But practising with a gun under the eyes of proper instructors might not be such a bad thing. As far as he knew, nobody else in Asteria had ever held one. Any help he could get, he would take.
Pike finished explaining the arrangements for the morning and dismissed them.
All across the hall, the talking started up at once. Elias was already wondering aloud what armaments all the others had. Marianne was talking about which of her techniques she might use. Eveline said she was looking forward to seeing how many different kinds of armament there were among them.
Owen gathered up his schedule.
He knew much more about this place now than he had this morning. He had his uniform. He had stood in his first formation, and been corrected, and corrected himself. And he had begun to understand that the Academy was going to teach him a great deal more than how to beat a strong opponent.
It might also be exactly what he needed for the Infinite Arsenal. Somewhere with proper grounds, and proper instructors, where he could work through it methodically, instead of only ever discovering what it could do in the middle of a fight.
They filed out of the hall together.
"So," Elias said, as soon as they were outside. "Tomorrow. The assessment. Do you think I’ll finally get a proper look at that thing?"
Owen didn’t promise him anything.
"We’ll find out tomorrow," he said.
Elias grinned anyway.