The first hours of the trial passed quietly. Groups of students stayed near the road, hunted weak beasts and argued over points. I headed for the marshes, where the air was too toxic for most beasts.
Styx endured the miasma. The soldiers did not.
The first broods dropped into the water as soon as they entered the green mist. Styx gathered the survivors near the hot springs. After several feedings, some of the offspring developed swollen sacs of acid. The new forms flew more slowly, but burst on impact and burned through the shells of the marsh beasts.
The System named the variant and offered figures. I watched the cycle: how much carcass each clutch required, how long the wings took to strengthen and how many soldiers died before the next group acquired the venom.
By evening the swarm was no longer a cloud around Styx. It lived as broods. Those nearby heard my commands; those farther away copied the captains' movements several seconds late.
On the second day, beasts began fleeing from the north. Small ones at first, then the predators that normally hunted them. The ground trembled. An entire field became an avalanche of fur, horns and shells.
To the hungry swarm it was food, and Styx reached for it before I did.
I directed the broods towards the edge of the torrent. The explosive forms brought down the leading beasts, the carcasses obstructed those behind, and the soldiers drank the blood and carried it back to the clutches. Our numbers grew faster than I could distinguish the groups.
The feeding continued for hours. The swarm moved beside the avalanche like a dark river running alongside another. Whenever a beast fell, some of the soldiers stayed on the carcass while the rest flew on. Captains began to emerge without a separate command: the oldest soldiers held a stable pattern around themselves and passed it on to the young.
I checked a distant brood and found a delay. The order to stop reached it only after the soldiers had finished off two more beasts. In an open field, that did not matter. Near people, such a delay could turn a defence into a slaughter.
Styx felt my concern. In answer, she showed me several separate circles instead of one enormous cloud.
We reorganised the swarm as it moved. Each captain received a simple task and returned for another only after completing it. I lost some speed, but the broods stopped changing targets at every stray impulse.
But the avalanche had not started by itself.
Leon's students burst out of the forest. Their defensive beasts were wounded, and several people carried companions on their shoulders.
Leon himself was already making for the stone ridge on the Void Dragon. The others could not fly over the torrent.
Lily saw me and shouted for us to retreat towards the garrison. Shadow leopards were following her group. They were not running blindly. They were picking off stragglers.
The bulk of the swarm was feeding farther ahead. To save the students, I had to pull the broods off their prey and send them back across the torrent. The command would not reach them at once.
Styx felt my decision.
She turned the nearest captains towards Lily herself.
Five hundred soldiers engulfed the first leopard. The second leapt at a student and vanished beneath a red cloud in mid-air. The explosive forms scorched the earth in front of the third, forcing it to turn aside.
We got the group onto a boulder. Lily counted the students while I held the beasts below.
"Leon left us," one student said.
Lily looked towards the ridge. She said nothing.
One student tried to run after him and demand help. Lily caught him by the belt.
"He's already chosen a safe distance for himself."
"He's the heir to the Li family!"
"That's why he left first."
The answer was harsh, but her voice shook. Before the trial, Lily had defended Leon in every argument. Now she kept watching the empty ridge as though she still expected the dragon to turn back.
It did not.
The swarm kept growing on the carcasses. The air around the boulder darkened. The students looked at the sky and slowly realised that every moving speck belonged to me.
Cole's garrison arrived by evening. The sensors showed tens of thousands of biological signals, and the radio operator decided the instrument was broken.
Cole saw the captains, the separate feeding groups and the chain of clutches beside the hot springs.
"That isn't one beast," he said.
"One species."
"No. That's an army now."
Then a tree fell on the northern slope.
The head of a thunder-spined titanic lizard rose above the forest, the blue spikes along its back flaring before every breath. The beasts had not been fleeing the swarm.
They had been fleeing it.
The garrison began retreating towards the wall. Cole ordered the students to leave with the soldiers.
I stayed.
A lord's carcass was worth enough to clear the debt, buy a house and never return to the slums. That was how I explained to myself why I stayed.
Styx watched the lizard. What came through the bond was not hunger.
A challenge.
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