It had been three months that I had been at the Scholarium now, three months of walking up the forcefield stairs of light to go to my classes or extracurriculars or mandatory school events and then back down to Tertius Mons and to my villa where my Helots, myself and Livia stayed. Classes had gone mostly well, I was acing Swordsmanship and Marksmanship, passing Cultivator Anatomy, Logistics and Tactics, managing Xenobiology and Jovium Alloy Material Science well enough. Advanced Mathematics and Cryptography were a pain in the ass though, a personal trial that I struggled with while our team counselor, Justinias, laughed until he choked at my difficulties as he got our grades from the computer system.

I had sworn to catch up to the other students in the mathematics class and found that the universe had decided to prove me a liar. It had not gone well to say the least. Cryptography was as cryptic as its name suggested in both the instructor’s teaching style and its content, though at least that teacher did not take ten minutes of every class to demean my attempts like the mathematician did.

Lastly, my final extracurricular had finally met today. Beginner Theurgy. Supposedly it was to teach us how to tap into the attention of the gods to perform miracles. We had actually had it for the first time in all the months we had been here, and it had been a thoroughly bizarre experience for all of us from beginning to end. The circus had started with the instructor’s arrival, an old Servus woman, a Copper of all things, in a ratty shawl and who wore worn flipflops that let you see her gnarled, yellowed toenails. The other Imperator students had just been about to riot at the thought of having a Copper Servus who looked like a hobo be their teacher before she had coughed like a plague victim to clear her throat and then told us if we sat through this one class, she would give us an A for the rest of the year.

I had never seen a group of people flip so quickly from racial prejudice to rapt attention.

The instructor had passed out candles and told us to attempt to light them by invoking the Broken Smith, patron of the Artisans, god of the forge and metalworking and fire. People had of course immediately attempted to cheat with psychic fire, but the candles would not light despite their attempts to do so.

I had tried praying to the Smith, and then the Skyfather and then, thinking if I was going to call out to gods I might as well try the one I had just had some kind of experience with and encounter, I called out in my head to Athena, the Grey Eyed One, to beg her to light the wick.

A flame three feet high had shot out of the candle and the wax had melted to a puddle.

The Servus instructor clapped her hands gleefully and pinched my cheeks and said to me,

“I thought I saw you behind those silly violet eyes, Diomedes. Enjoying rebirth?” Before walking out of the class halfway through and leaving me bewildered.

My group of subordinates, Team Nine, had adjusted to my presence over time. Kato and Andarias were the only ones of them I could really call friends, and Aurelia ignored my every order during team events, but the others were more accepting. They had picked up odd behaviors though, I heard them calling me “the Drake” when they thought I was not using my enhanced hearing.

Other than that, there was not much to report about my journey at the school so far besides my periodic lessons with Lilliana Kaesarion in psychic body amplification. We met about three times a week, sometimes four, at night in the tower and I had progressed from three minutes of enhancement to five minutes.

My wrist communicator beeped as I neared the location I had put in it, reminding me of the only other thing that was new. Today was my birthday, I had turned seventeen. I had not wanted to celebrate it, the day did not have much meaning to me, but Caesia had wrestled the truth out of me a week ago. Just in time to force me to agree to a birthday party at one of the Citadel’s restaurants on the fourth tier of the floating castle. I had managed to whittle her down from a guestlist of nearly fifty people, some of whom I had never even had a conversation with, to four.

Five now, I amended my thought as I walked into the restaurant and walked over to the table my friends were sitting at. The original planned group was Kato, Caesia, Antonias and Clodias, but Andarias had somehow found out and had invited himself. The others did not like him, and I knew the clone found my friends to be weak and puny, so I had ordered everyone to be civil.

Fulvion’s and my friendship had gone well, carried mostly by the fact that I was able to assert my dominance without killing myself with divine power through using judicious bursts of physio-augmentation to beat the clone.

The five of them cheered as I walked over to them, drawing other patrons’ eyes and causing a rush of embarrassment to roll over me.

“Hey, guys.” I said, sitting down at the empty place in the booth right next to Caesia.

They managed find a way to beat their own record at the fastest way to make me uncomfortable by loudly singing “Happy Birthday” off key and only stopping when a waiter asked them to stop scaring the other people in the restaurant.

The rest of the dinner was pleasant enough, I had to say, and I enjoyed it for an hour before excusing myself for a nighttime walk.

As I wound my way through secluded streets, I came across Diokletian Claudion for the first time in months, vandalizing more public property. This time he was burning poetry into a building that compared the Dominium to a STD ridden Hetaira.

I gritted my teeth and went over, but he disappeared again.

I focused my senses and detected the barest hint of movement and sound. It was like… it was like Diokletian had turned himself formless and invisible like air. Tracking him like a bloodhound on the scent of a juicy steak, I pursued the third year.

Claudion moved faster, his windform more agile than my Bronze body, so I activated physio-augmentation, willing trillions of emerald flames to engulf my cellular nuclei and grant me power.

It still was not fast enough, and I braced myself for what might have been a foolish decision and ignited Heracles’s fire for the second time. A chain reaction built as the psychic physio-augmentation and the pyre’s energies mingled and intermixed with each other and a scarlet fireball exploded from me. Windows shattered from the force of the blast. All thoughts went out of my head, leaving only rage and determination.

I caught up to the other Imperator and tackled his nearly intangible form, gripping the very air of Diokletian Claudion’s being itself more with my will and the heat of Heracles than my physical touch and my grasping hands and the weight of my body. He reformed into flesh and blood, a shocked expression on his face.

I got you now! I growled in my head.

Diokletian shocked me again with psychic lightning, bringing with it a thought of: Get off me, Firstie! I persevered unflinchingly though, barely feeling the pain.

“Eímai to aíma enós theoú kai to érgo tou Vasiliá ton Vasiléon!” I ranted and raved at the third year in a language I had never learned.

I am the blood of a god and the work of the King of Kings, is what I had mean to say in Dominese, the unified language of the peoples of the Dominium, but what had come out was something far older.

“What? What did you say? I don’t understand you. Speak normally.” Diokletian said, looking up at me confused.

“Prospathó.” I protested in that strange, ancient tongue of the Haellenes of Grecia. I am trying, I had attempted to say.

“Get off me, jerk, you’re scorching the crap out of me.” He complained, his shirt burned off from my touch and my hands leaving blistered marks. He had fared better than Andarias Fulvion had at the very least in contact with my burning body as it seared in the glory of the Divine Champion.

I sat back in a crouch, letting him lean up.

“We have to get out of here, you just exploded like a bomb and I can hear sirens on the way.” He said.

We ran together.

“Turn off your fire, idiot, you’re leaving molten footprints behind you that will lead investigators right to us!” The young man said to me.

I struggled to do this, my body amplification and the pyre of Heracles was melding into something vibrant and chaotic, something with a will of its own. I forced them apart and killed the augmentation and then the pyre’s heat.

The Governor’s son took me to a hiding place, levitating us up to a hole in a wall and we tunneled in.

“What the hell was that?” Diokletian asked me.

“Physio-augmentation.” I replied.

Diokletian snorted. “I know how to do that and what it looks like in action. What did you do, really?”

“Genetic modification.” I said, keeping my cards close to me.

Diokletian gave me a look. “That looks like a little more than mundane genetic engineering for someone without Red Halos.”

“I am the grandson of the Regent.” I admitted.

“What are you doing out here away from Terra?” The Governor’s son asked me.

“I was born in Apollo system.” I said. “I have never been to Terra.”

Diokletian whistled. “Family on the rocks with Big Auggie, eh?”

“Something like that.” I said. “How did you turn invisible and become like the wind?”

“I have a pact with the Messenger.” He explained.

“Who?” I said, confused.

“Hermes.” He answered.

“Who?’ I said again.

He groaned. “Gods, the education system has gone to shit. Hermes is the god that Heracles replaced to become one of the twelve Olympians of Heaven’s Peak just as long ago Dionysus took Hestia’s seat when he ascended to become god of the vine.”

I winced at him saying their holy names aloud.

Diokletian rolled his eyes. “Stop being weak. If the gods killed off every person who ever mouthed off at the heavens, they would run out of free entertainment.”

“I guess that makes sense.” I said.

“Say the Skyfather’s name aloud if you’re not a coward.” He dared me, a gleam in his eyes.

I gathered my nerve and said, “Zeas.”

Diokletian snorted. “If you’re going to invite tribulation, you might as well say the Skyfather’s real name, not the Thaekyrian butchering of it.”

“Zeus.” I whispered. There were no thunderbolts falling from the sky, no booming sounds.

He laughed. “You’re alright, Firstie. At least this place has not made you lose your balls yet.”

He reached out a hand for me to shake. “What’s your name, first year?”

“Adrias Lucion.” I said, shaking it.

“Lucion? Not Heraklion? Guess your mom and pop changed the family name.” The Governor’s son said. “You can just call me Dio instead of Diokletian, bit of a mouthful.”

Both of our wrist communicators went off with siren alarm noises and flashing lights on the screens.

“We’ve been identified! I knew there must have been cameras!” I said, panicking.

“Calm down and listen.” Dio said. “There are sirens from communicators going off all over the Citadel. It must be being sent out to every student. It’s too big to just be about us.”

I looked at the screen and it merely showed a location.

…

The location was a colosseum on the Citadel and all of the three years of students had been brought here. The headmaster was at a podium on the arena floor.

“Students!” The Golden Magister said loudly, “Just this evening, a widescale Servi uprisal has occurred throughout the entire Dominium using alchemical bioenhancers. In addition, the treacherous Subgovernor of the planet of Amatius, home of Apollo system’s Militares legionary training grounds, has used the chaos and discord to secede from Apollonian rule as well as the Dominium. As a result of this widespread insurrection by Slaves and rebellion by treasonous Imperators, every student at the Scholarium has been promoted to active duty. First and second years will be given the designation of the new position of Hemistrategos, half-officers, and the third years will be promoted to full Strategos.”

The students broke into a hundred conversations at once and the Headmaster raised his hands to silence us.

“Our Governor, Theseas Claudion, has given the order for the Apollonian Guard to mobilize immediately to quell the uprising on Iulius and then move to crush the Amatian rebels and the Subgovernor who leads them.”