A shriek cut through the air. It didn’t seem too close by, but Julia ducked down beneath a solid wooden table, and I hurried to follow her. It was a cramped space, and we ended up close enough that I could feel Julia’s breath on the side of my face.

“Hm, they’re getting impatient,” she whispered. “For the most part, the white-haired boy had only been firing off his power when I let him see me.”

I boggled at her. “You let him see you?”

“Yes. I was worried that if they thought they’d lost me they’d bring down the building completely, and I wouldn’t be able to finish the task. Been giving them the runaround and searching for the place that’ll turn the broadcast back on at the same time. I found what I believe to be the control room barely a few minutes ago, but had to lead them away from it.”

I let my head fall back, but stifled a groan. “There’s more important things than that damn task.”

“Like what?”

“Uh. Your life?”

Julia leaned to one side, eyes narrowing. “You have a low estimation of my abilities, I see.” She shook her head, the opalescent sign of her active power leaving a faint after-image, like a long-exposure photograph. “You didn’t come here to finish your final task, did you?”

“That was the last thing on my mind. I came here to save you.”

If there was a more perfect non-verbal expression of disbelief, Julia’s face right then would’ve given it a run for its money. She made a ‘go on’ motion with one hand.

“It’s my fault you felt the need to be here,” I continued, my whispers getting more harsh, self-reproach building. “You wouldn’t have been here facing off against people willing to go lethal if I’d been more honest about how this test was going to shake out. There was no way I could leave you here alone.” I shrugged. “Otherwise, I had zero intention of coming all the way back out here.”

Julia nodded. “Okay. The possibility that you may end up with a higher score than I first thought is nice. What does it change?”

My head snapped round to stare at her face-to-face. Her eyes didn’t flinch from me.

“It means the points for the A-rank don't matter!”

"According to whom? Do you have any kind of confirmation that you'll receive bonus points for your heroic sacrifice?"

"Well... no. But I think it's a reasonable assumption to make."

Julia was quiet for a long moment, expressionless. Eventually, she sighed, turning away and leaning back against the wall.

“Even if you pass with flying colours, even if you never needed to complete any of your tasks to begin with, you deserve to be repaid.” She paused, her expression darkening. “I wasn't joking, when I left. The fact that no one offered to reciprocate your generosity disgusts me. As far as I'm concerned, none of the wannabe heroes in our batch of examinees deserve to pass to the next stage aside from you. Fifty people, and not one made the offer. It's a fucking disgrace.”

She was breathing heavily by the time she finished talking.

I hesitated before asking, “Hit close to home, somehow?”

“You could say that," she said after a second.

For a long moment, only silence reigned.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I know, and I’m not going to.”

“Oh. Um. Okay. That’s fine.”

“It’s not like you need to know anything about me.”

“No, of course not.”

Another lull of silence.

“I just hate seeing anyone get taken advantage of. Leeches disgust me.”

“... I wouldn’t go so far as to call anyone leeches.”

“What else would you call them? What did they give you in return for what was, as far as they were aware, your sacrifice? Any decent person with a modicum of social grace knows about reciprocity. Or so they should.” She sighed. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been disappointed by people, and it won’t be the last.”

I took a moment to consider my words. “You’re not the only one who’s been disappointed today. All the sabotage going on? I didn’t see that coming one bit. Thought everyone here would be noble and stuff.”

Julia snorted. “A lot of people seem to forget that Herakles isn’t the only one with influence over this place.”

I gave her a questioning look, but she just shook her head.

Filing that away for later, I changed tack. “But I’ve been encouraged, too. I’ve met good people. People who lived up to what I was expecting from Aegis candidates. Hell, our alliance was still twenty strong by the end, all working together. That’s a good sign, right?”

“I've just given you my opinion of them,” Julia said flatly. “If they're a sign of what's to come... well. I fully expect that my years at Aegis Academy, provided I make it, won’t be substantially different from what I’ve seen and experienced in my life so far. Today is just more confirmation of that.”

“We’re only teenagers. We’ve got a lot of life left to live. Lots of time to prove you wrong.”

Julia just smiled.

Silence reigned once more, right up until another screech sliced through the calm, spilling out a sudden rush of fear. I flinched, my gaze snapping towards the source. There was no getting used to that sound, especially not with the way the building seemed to sway once more.

“We need to finish the task quickly.”

“We need to leave.”

Julia and I spoke at the same time, then turned to glare at each other.

“I’m not leaving here without finishing that task. I hate wasting effort.”

“And I’m not leaving here without you.”

“Then you’ll have to help me finish the task faster, won’t you?”

“Why? Even with just the other, uh, however many tasks complete?”

“Four. Unblocking the obstruction for your C-rank was a massive pain, by the way.”

“Right. Four tasks should get me some decent points, and then hidden scores should be enough to get me to pass.”

Julia leaned forward until she was so close that her unblinking eyes filled 75% of my vision, framed by lines of multicoloured light. “Are you willing to gamble on that, Emmett?”

I shifted, opened my mouth to speak.

But Julia talked over me. “You’ve been dreaming of being a hero since you were a child, you said, because your father used to work here, and you would visit. That seems like an extremely deep emotional connection, something very, very important to you.” Somehow, she got closer. The light of her power sign was dazzling. “Is that something you’re truly willing to gamble on? What will you do if your exam results arrive in a few weeks, and you’ve failed? How do you think you’d feel about missing these points then?”

Her words hit me like a brick to the face.

Before coming here today, in the weeks and months leading up to the exams, throughout all the stress and anxiety, I’d had a mantra. Any time I had a bout of laziness, or was too tired, or felt a little under the weather, or something was too sore, I’d repeated it over and over in my head.

No regrets.

I’d been resolved to give it everything for years. Even a rating on the Shimada Scale that had been handed to me with the solemn weight of a terminal diagnosis had only shaken my determination for as long as it took Ashika to lose her patience and break my nose.

It was a simple concept, wanting to be able to look back on the past without bitter feelings. Hardly a desire unique to me.

But it was easier said than done. There was a saying that you couldn’t tell you were in the good times when you were living them, and by the same token you could never truly be sure you were making a decision you would regret.

Now, one of those choices was in front of me.

Stay or go.

The risks for both were great, the rewards unclear.

We could stay and fail, and we mightn’t even live to regret it at all. We could leave, and in a few weeks I could get a letter in the mail informing me I hadn’t passed the test, and I’d be forever left to wonder if that A-rank task could’ve pushed my score over a passing grade.

But we could also stay and win, and I could be content knowing I’d done everything I could to maximise my chances. On the other hand, we could leave, lowering our chances of clashing with a boy who had lethal power and the ruthlessness to use it.

I closed my eyes as another shriek tore through the air, sending a rumble through the walls and a wave of displaced air through the stale atmosphere. The building swayed, and stone groaned deep below us. The place didn’t seem likely to hold out much longer.

The answer was obvious, really.

I opened my eyes and turned to Julia.

“The A-rank tasks are designed to be extremely time-consuming for the person they’re assigned to,” I said, straight to business. “This one has been tailored to me, so it’ll be something that takes my skills and knowledge into account. For one thing, I have no fucking clue how to work a radio tower. Don’t even know where to begin.”

Julia waited with one eyebrow raised.

“But that doesn’t mean the task will be difficult for everyone. I’m assuming part of what makes this task so difficult for me is finding a control room for the tower, let alone figuring out how to work it. Hopefully, you have some insight?”

Julia grinned, one finger tapping against her glowing power sign. It seemed to ripple under her touch, sending straightened lightning bolts of every colour along the ethereal wires. “I just might.”

It took a few minutes for Julia to run me through the layout of the building, where she suspected the control room might be along with how it might be operated, and the tactics our two antagonists tended to employ.

From there, we made a plan. We wasted no time putting it into action.

On the first point, even Julia hadn’t got a perfect image of the radio building’s floor plan—she made sure to emphasise her memory was not eidetic—but her power had indeed let her build up a workable idea.

We snuck out from the room, keeping ourselves low, our footsteps quiet. We were in no rush, not while we could still hear periodic screeching that sent a thrum through the building. The way sound travelled here could be deceptive, Julia whispered to me with a wry smile, but the aftershock of Taeyong’s power gave us a way to guess how far he was.

With that in mind, stealth was the name of the game. Julia led me on a winding route, stopping periodically in out-of-the-way rooms to wait for another blast of screeching power, cautious to ensure we didn’t lose track of our enemies’ location. We stole through offices, crawled along corridors, and creeped up and down staircases.

We even enacted the mother of all cliches. Let me tell you: crawling through air vents wasn’t anything like how they portrayed it in action flicks. By the time we were out, I felt like I had a second skin of dust, and my limbs were sore from spending so long in that claustrophobic space. I’d spent at least half the time in there worrying I’d get stuck.

But Julia knew what she was doing. We saw not a hair and heard not a peep from Taeyong and Sooyoung, and soon Julia was gesturing me into a room filled with old electrical consoles I couldn’t hope to make heads or tails of. I stepped up anyway, fiddling around with the buttons, dials, and switches, but there was no hint of life in the machines. No light, no sound. The curved glass screens were nothing more than black mirrors.

The room itself bore no hints: the walls were bare of any posters, there were no manuals or guides in the row of cabinets, and none of the buttons on the console were even labelled. There was a ladder leading to a hatch in the ceiling, but I assumed that was just a way to access the tower itself rather than some kind of loft holding the console’s secrets.

The door had been open when we arrived, and Julia pushed it closed behind her. It was made of thick metal, heavy enough that she had to put her weight into it. It clunked once it was shut.

I sighed, fighting off despair. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas?”

Without a word, Julia crawled beneath the console. Wrenching it open, she started rummaging around inside. There was a spark, a few beeps, and the console’s screens flickered to life one by one.

Julia emerged a moment later, smirking. “How long do you think this would’ve taken you?”

For some reason, I felt a little indignant. “Hey, don’t give me that. This test was literally designed to stump me. You cheated.”

“Apparently they think a cable being unplugged would’ve held you off.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Yeah? Well, your A-rank obstacle was a pond.”

“So it was. It would’ve kept me occupied for hours on my own. How about you?”

“Shut up and activate the tower,” I grumbled.

Julia had it running in what felt like no time at all, screens reading ‘connection’ established in bold white font. Just like that, with the mother of all anticlimaxes, my A-rank task was complete. It was a heady feeling, like my body had suddenly gotten a few kilos lighter. Relief surged, but I tamped it down.

We weren’t in the clear yet.

The shriek just outside the door behind us proved how true that was. This close, it was deafening, a storm of metal scraping together inside my eardrums. The aftershock was immediate, powerful enough to throw me off my feet, my back striking hard against the console. Everything shook, rumbling like an earthquake. Cabinets toppled, tiles fell from the ceiling, cracks spread along the walls and fissures yawned open. Only by a miracle did the heavy door stay on its hinges.

The door. I stared at it, head tilted to one side. The walls had been battered and beaten, but it was immaculate, practically untouched. Had he held back?

Julia had fared no better than me, but she was already on her feet by the time I managed to peel myself gingerly off of the console, still staring at the door. The screens had all smashed to pieces, and my hands were stinging and wet.

“Nowhere to run, bitch!” I heard Sooyoung’s voice echo down the corridor, two sets of footsteps rapidly approaching.

Julia and I shared a grim look, then we turned our attention back to the heavy door.

Things had been going so well, our simple plan working so flawlessly, that I’d forgotten the deadliest adage in our prospective line of work.

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

There was a high chance we wouldn’t survive either.