The smell of soup.

  It spread through the house: hot steam curling from a black pot, the sharp tang of preserved meat, thick bread warming on a tray. Students who had been moving in slow, sleep-heavy loops around the room straightened, noses leading them toward the table. A little life returned to them with every breath.

  Wor-en stood by the fire, spoon in hand, steam haloing his shoulders. He looked more like a field officer than a cook, but the bowl in front of him spoke otherwise.

  “Didn’t know you could cook,” Suri said, dropping onto a bench and already angling her spoon toward the pot.

  Wor-en lifted a shoulder the way a man lifts a shield. “Let’s just say,” he answered, “cooking is not my wife’s forte.”

  Rin snorted, her house was near Wor-en. “I’m gonna tell your wife.”

  “If you do,” Wor-en said, the corner of his mouth twitching into something like a threat, “I’ll make sure you don’t graduate.”

  The students laughed—half mockery, half relief—then fell on the meal. The fortress outside could be cold and unyielding, but the room filled with the small, human heat of shared food.

  Leo, who had the air of someone who expected praise to be measured in coin and titles, nevertheless paused to lift his spoon. “This is actually good,” he said, and the compliment stuck in the room like a coin on cloth.

  They ate until the bowls were clean. Suri took seconds; Kana watched, thoughtful, as if cataloguing the way a good broth held together.

  When the plates were stacked and fingers wiped on coarse cloths, Wor-en unrolled a map on the table. The paper was old and soft, its lines worn by hands that had trusted it in worse weather than this. The students leaned in.

  “As you all know,” Wor-en said, and his voice took the cadence of a man used to giving orders, “each group will act on its own. One agenda: help the garrison. Trim the monsters from dungeon overflow.”

  He tapped the map with a callused finger. Red ink marked outposts—more than twenty of them—small, angry dots like wounds. “We’ll back up the troops here,” he said. The students nodded at that; it was concrete, manageable. “You’re first years. You’ll face the weaker monsters at the outposts. That’s the training part.”

  Then he touched a brown blotch farther in, darker than the rest. The paper seemed to thicken under his fingertip. “This is the source,” Wor-en said. “The hole the monsters crawl from. We don’t stop at the outposts. We go to the mouth of the dungeon and we close it.”

  Silence pooled around the table, heavier for the steam that had once warmed them.

  Kana’s hand was still. “This is different than we expected,” she said quietly. The map had changed the terrain of their plan; it had turned their little skirmish into a march.

  Yuri’s face folded into the honest confusion of someone who reads only what is given. “We thought we were to just patrol and come home.”

  Wor-en’s eyes moved over them. There was the practiced calm of a teacher, the warm patience that kept students from seeing every fracture, but there was another thing there—an edgier sound in his chest that the map could not hide. He spoke softer, leaning in as if to lower the world around them. “We will not pretend this is safe. The path to the mouth is dangerous. You are not the only ones who will pay attention.”

  He flattened his palm on the map, a small, steady press. “But we have help. Each group has a silver-rank and a professor. Soldiers will back you. This is not a sneak. This is a hammer blow. We go quickly. We go hard. We have a talented generation this time. This is a surprise operation. Because we are confident with your help, we’re going to pull it off.”

  He let the last words hang—thin, almost a whisper. A few of the students caught the weight in them. Wor-en’s voice had dipped; a shadow moved under it that only some would notice. “This should buy us time,” he added, and for a breath the map looked less like paper and more like the thin hope of a plan.

  Outside, through the window, the fortress held its own quiet—stone and wind and the distant clank of armor. Inside, the students bent closer to the map, their breaths small clouds that vanished into the low light. They were still children in many ways, but the map drew lines they now had to cross. The rest of the trip—training, fear, whatever else—would be the work of living up to that crossing.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  …..

  The northern morning bit deep.

  Even inside the stone walls of the fortress, the cold felt alive—thin, sharp, and merciless. It clawed at the lungs with every breath, a kind of chill that made the sound itself brittle. Kana had thought she knew what winter was, but the north was something else entirely—a creature that breathed frost.

  She stood by the window, her fingers still fumbling with the last strap of her cloak. Beside her, Rin, Suri, and Yuri were layered in scarves and padded armored jackets, muffled so thickly that only their eyes showed. Their breaths came out in pale plumes, already frosting the air between them.

  And then there was Zia.

  Nothing changed about her.

  Her simple hooded cloak hung loosely around her frame, light armor gleaming faintly beneath it. A staff rested across her back, two curved daggers on her hips as if the cold had never dared touch her.

  “Do you not feel cold at all?” Yuri finally asked, half in awe, half in disbelief.

  Zia tilted her head, eyes gleaming faintly beneath her hood. “Hmm… After some time,” she said, her tone almost thoughtful. “Hot and cold stop meaning much. My body learns to ignore it.”

  Rin rubbed her hands together. “I guess that’s true. My grandmother said something similar...”

  Zia’s gaze drifted to her. Then, quite suddenly, she placed a hand over Rin’s. Her palm was warm—unnaturally so. “It’s been a while since I’ve been among humans,” she said, voice soft but deliberate. “Sometimes… I don’t understand their humor at all.”

  Rin stiffened. For a moment, she wasn’t sure if Zia was serious or teasing. “I—I was just kidding, Miss Zia,” she said with a forced chuckle.

  Then Zia smiled—a sharp, quick grin that transformed her expression entirely. “So was I,” she said, and laughed.

  Kana, who had been fastening her gloves, caught the exchange from the corner of her eye.

  Hot and cold don’t affect her… she thought. That sounded like resistance—like something earned, not given. Maybe a class ability, or a threshold you only reached after surviving enough extremes.

  Could she learn that too? The thought lingered, half hope, half curiosity.

  They clattered down the stairs, boots thumping against the wooden steps, the air growing colder the closer they got to the door. Outside, the fortress stirred—soldiers moving through snow, smoke rising from the mess halls, and the faint clang of metal echoing through the frosty streets.

  The boys were already waiting near the entrance, huddled together and visibly irritated.

  “You girls are taking too long,” Toby complained, his breath fogging the air. “We’re starving.”

  “Let’s hurry,” Wor-en called from ahead, his cloak snapping in the wind. “I heard the northern soldiers’ stomachs are just as bottomless as Suri’s.”

  That made Suri snap to life immediately. “What’s that supposed to mean?!”

  But before anyone could answer, her stomach betrayed her with a loud growl. The boys burst out laughing, and even Kana couldn’t help but smile as Suri’s face turned crimson.

  “Move!” Suri shouted, stomping into the snow first. “If you’re gonna make fun of me, at least do it after breakfast!”

  Wor-en grinned. “There’s the motivation I was hoping for.”

  Laughter followed them into the biting air as the group set off toward the military outpost—boots crunching through the snow, breath visible in short bursts. Despite the cold and the exhaustion, something about that moment felt alive again.

  The journey ahead might be brutal, but for now, in that sliver of morning light over the northern walls, they were simply students—loud, laughing, and just a little less afraid of the cold.

  …

  Ryle Greece arrived at the outpost with his classmates.

  The place was alive with sound—thick laughter, clanging cups, and the low rumble of northern soldiers trading stories. The men were enormous, every one of them built like the stone walls surrounding the fortress. Their armor gleamed with frost, and steam rose from the cauldrons of soup and skewered meat they devoured by the fire.

  Ryle’s eyes swept the area, sharp and careful, as if counting every blade and soldier.

  “Hey, Ryle! Let’s go!” one of his classmates called, waving him over to the food line.

  He forced a smile. “Go ahead. I just need to take a quick piss.”

  The professor glanced over his shoulder. “Make it fast. I heard the northerners don’t leave scraps once they start eating.”

  Ryle chuckled faintly, nodded, and jogged toward the treeline. The moment the campfire glow faded behind him, his expression hardened. The soft crunch of his boots sank into the deep snow, and he stopped only when the woods swallowed all noise but the faint whistle of the wind.

  He knelt down, drawing a quill and a piece of parchment from under his coat. His fingers trembled—not from the cold, but from urgency.

  The empire had already heard of them—the new generation of Gold Badgers. Promising, dangerous, and worth eliminating. Each student group took a different route, each ending near the dungeon overflows. Tracking them all was difficult—but not impossible for someone on the inside.

  He scribbled swiftly, marking potential camps and rest stops across the map, then rolled the parchment tight.

  A long, heavy sigh escaped him. The mist of his breath curled upward.

  He hated this. He hated them. And yet… he understood the order too well. The Empire’s unseen hands worked everywhere—merciless, methodical. He had witnessed what happened to those who refused.

  He knelt near the base of a pine, scraping away the fresh layer of snow. He buried the parchment, covered it again, and pressed it firm with his palm.

  A single whisper escaped his lips. “Sorry.”

  Then he turned back toward the light of the outpost.

  Moments after he vanished among the trees, the air stirred.

  Five hooded figures stepped silently from the shadows between the trunks. Their movements made no sound. One of them knelt, brushed aside the thin layer of frost, and retrieved the rolled parchment.

  A single nod.

  And then—like smoke—they were gone.