Chapter 4: The Currency of Fear

Chapter 4: The Currency of Fear

The walk from the blood-soaked Fear Pens was a silent, shuffling procession of ghosts. Of the fifty-odd Neophytes who had entered the darkness, only twenty-seven remained. Kael walked among them, the sharp rock still clutched in his hand, its edges sticky with the strange, ichorous residue of the Nyctomorph. The others gave him a wide berth, their gazes a mixture of awe and suspicion. He hadn't just survived; he had fought back. In a place like this, that made him an anomaly. That made him dangerous.

They were led to a cavernous, sterile chamber and issued simple, dark-grey uniforms. The act of shedding his familiar hoodie and jeans felt like shedding the last vestiges of his old life. As he pulled on the stiff, high-collared tunic, he finally had a moment to himself, a moment to focus on the impossible blue screen that had saved his life.

He concentrated, willing the interface to expand. It responded instantly, a larger window unfolding in his vision.

[STATUS] USER: Kaelen 'Kael' Vance SYSTEM: Phobos (Resonance: Atychiphobia) RANK: Neophyte (Unranked) TERROR POINTS (TP): 631

[STATS] Strength: 8 [Upgrade Cost: 10 TP] Agility: 10 [Upgrade Cost: 10 TP] Endurance: 9 [Upgrade Cost: 10 TP] Cognition: 13 [Upgrade Cost: 20 TP] (Note: Stats reflect baseline human averages. 10 is considered the median.)

[SKILLS] Precognitive Strike (Lvl. 1): Foresee and target failure points in actions and entities.

• Activation Cost: 50 TP/sec
• [Upgrade Cost: 500 TP]

Kael’s breath caught in his throat. It was a character sheet from a video game, but the character was him. The numbers weren't arbitrary; they represented his very being. His Cognition was slightly above average—no surprise, he’d always been a quick study—but his physical stats were painfully normal.

And then he saw it: the upgrade costs. Terror Points weren’t just a score. They were a currency. The fear he had felt, the overwhelming dread of failure that had nearly paralyzed him, had been converted into raw potential. He could literally buy power with his own terror.

Hesitantly, he focused on the line for Agility. A prompt appeared in his vision.

[Upgrade Agility from 10 to 11 for 10 TP? Y/N]

He thought Yes.

[-10 TP]

A strange warmth flooded his limbs, a subtle but undeniable sensation. It felt like shedding a heavy weight he never knew he was carrying. He flexed his fingers, rolled his ankles. His movements felt smoother, quicker, more certain. It was a minuscule change, but it was real. He had just made himself better. The implications were staggering.

A harsh bell tolled, pulling him from his discovery. The survivors were herded out of the changing rooms and into a colossal dining hall. The sheer scale of the place was intimidating. Soaring gothic arches held up a ceiling lost in shadow, and long, darkwood tables stretched out like ribs in the belly of some great beast.

The brutal reality of Aethelgard’s social structure hit him like a physical blow.

At the far end of the hall, on a raised dais, sat the upperclassmen. They wore ornate variations of the standard uniform, trimmed with silver and gold. Before them were plates piled high with steaming, nutritious-looking food—roasted meats, vibrant vegetables, fresh bread.

The rest of the students, hundreds of them, sat at the lower tables. Their food was progressively worse the farther it was from the dais, devolving into unappetizing grey gruel served in plain metal bowls.

And then there was them. The Neophytes. They weren't even given a table. They were directed to a line against the wall, where a grim-faced attendant ladled the same grey sludge into their bowls. This was their place. The bottom. The weak, left with the scraps.

Dominating the entire hall, hanging suspended in the air above the dais, was a massive, multifaceted crystal. Names and numbers swirled within it, glowing with an inner light. It was a live leaderboard, a constant, public declaration of every student's worth.

“That’s the Nexus,” a voice whispered beside him. It was the girl with the pink hair from the courtyard. Her face was pale, streaked with grime, but her eyes were sharp. “Your rank determines everything here. Your food, your quarters, what classes you can take, what training manuals you can access. Your very life expectancy.”

Kael looked from the vibrant names at the top of the Nexus to his own unranked, powerless status. He was nothing. Worse than nothing. He was just another mouth to feed gruel to, another body to throw into the meat grinder. His success in the pens felt hollow now, a brief flare of light before being plunged back into the abyss. The familiar, sickening squirm of Atychiphobia twisted in his gut. To be at the absolute bottom… it was intolerable.

As if summoned by the oppressive atmosphere, Instructor Seraphina Voronova strode into the hall. A hush fell instantly. Even the high-ranking students on the dais straightened their backs. She moved to the front, her ice-blue eyes sweeping over the new survivors with dismissive contempt.

“Congratulations,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “You have proven you are not so fragile as to die from a mere shadow. Do not mistake this for an accomplishment. You have simply passed the absolute lowest bar for existence at this academy.”

Her gaze roamed the faces of the Neophytes, lingering on their fear and exhaustion. “Look around you,” she commanded. “Look at the weak, trembling beside you. These are not your comrades. They are your competition. The resources of Aethelgard are finite. Every meal they eat, every training slot they occupy, is one stolen from you. The weak are a burden, and they will be culled, one way or another.”

Her chilling words solidified the academy's ethos: this was a zero-sum game of survival.

Then, her eyes locked onto Kael. The idle chatter in the hall died completely. Every eye turned to him.

“Kaelen Vance,” she said, her voice ringing with cold clarity. “The one who fought back.”

Kael felt a hundred pairs of eyes on him, a weight of expectation and envy. He stood straighter, his jaw tight.

“Do you think you are strong?” Seraphina asked, taking a slow step towards him. “Do you think you are special? Let me tell you what I see. I see a cornered rat who got lucky. A spark of desperation born from abject terror. It was not skill. It was not strength. It was a fluke.”

Each word was a hammer blow to Kael's fragile confidence. She was invalidating his survival, his one and only victory, in front of the entire student body. She was branding him a failure who had stumbled into success by accident.

The familiar, potent fear of being seen as inadequate surged through him.

[Terror Points Acquired: 45]

“Flukes are dangerous,” Seraphina continued, a thin, cruel smile playing on her lips as she stopped directly in front of him. “They breed complacency. They create an illusion of competence where there is none. And in our war, illusions get you and everyone around you killed.”

She leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that everyone could somehow still hear. “Your luck has just earned you a most unfortunate prize, Neophyte. You have earned my personal, undivided attention.”

A wave of shocked gasps and pitying murmurs rippled through the hall. Even the arrogant students on the dais looked unnerved. Seraphina’s “personal attention” was legendary, a euphemism for a training regimen so brutal, so psychologically scarring, that few ever fully recovered. It was designed to shatter students and rebuild them as weapons—or leave them as broken husks.

“From tomorrow at dawn,” she declared, her voice rising once more to address the hall, “you will be joining my special training. We are going to find out if that little spark of yours was a fluke, or if there is anything inside you worth forging. We will grind you down to your very core and see what, if anything, remains.”

She turned and strode from the hall, leaving Kael standing alone in a sea of fearful, pitying eyes. He wasn't a hero. He wasn't even a survivor anymore. He was a specimen, singled out for a grueling experiment with a very low chance of success. He had clawed his way through the first terror, only to be thrown into the crucible of the most feared instructor in Aethelgard.