Chapter 22: The People Beside Him

  By the third week, the academy stopped feeling new.

  Not familiar—never that—but established. The stones no longer demanded attention. The schedules no longer surprised. Even pain arrived on time, predictable enough that it could be planned around.

  That was when Laurent started noticing people instead of procedures.

  Aila was always early.

  Not by much. Never enough to be remarked on. She arrived, checked the ground, rolled her shoulders once, and waited. When training began, her movements were clean—no wasted motion, no unnecessary strain. She rarely pushed first, but she never fell behind either.

  She didn’t compete.

  She measured.

  Cael, on the other hand, treated every session like a personal argument.

  He lifted heavier than instructed. Took fewer breaks than allowed. Complained loudly, then did it anyway. By the end of most days, he looked like he’d gone a round with the ground and lost.

  “Worth it,” he’d mutter, through clenched teeth.

  Laurent wasn’t convinced it always was.

  Seris spoke less as the days went on.

  He still followed instructions. Still performed adequately. But his attention had shifted—from the exercises themselves to the people performing them. Laurent caught him watching others during rest periods, eyes narrowed slightly, expression unreadable.

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  When Seris did speak, it was usually late. After something had already happened.

  Dama filled the space between them.

  Not physically—emotionally. He joked when silence grew too heavy, deflected tension with humor sharp enough to cut but never deep enough to wound. He worked hard, failed often, and laughed at himself before anyone else could.

  “Better me than the other Irel,” he said once, wiping sweat from his brow.

  No one argued.

  Eren was harder to place.

  He didn’t excel. Didn’t fall behind. He showed up, endured, and left without comment. His presence was easy to forget—and impossible to miss once noticed. He never complained. Never pushed. Never quit.

  Laurent found himself checking whether Eren was still standing during the hardest sets.

  He always was.

  Orin Valecer worked well with anyone.

  That was his talent. He adjusted his pace to match others, took positions that made group drills smoother, and filled gaps without drawing attention. Instructors didn’t praise him. They didn’t need to.

  The drills ran better when Orin was involved.

  Laurent noticed all of this without quite understanding why it mattered.

  What he did understand was that pain stripped people down. Whatever remained afterward—that was who they were.

  And in that stripped-down space, no one looked at him the same way anymore.

  Not openly. Not accusingly. But eyes lingered longer. Questions were left unasked. Comparisons formed quietly, without being spoken aloud.

  Laurent didn’t feel superior.

  If anything, he felt behind—still clumsy with technique, still uncertain with control. But his body carried him through the days with a reliability the others didn’t yet have.

  That difference unsettled him.

  It should have felt like progress.

  Instead, it felt like standing slightly out of step with a march that hadn’t decided its rhythm yet.

  At night, as the dormitory settled into uneasy sleep, Laurent lay awake listening to breathing patterns around him—some shallow, some steady, some interrupted by pain.

  He wondered which of them would still be here in a month.

  He wondered which of them he would miss if they weren’t.

  And without meaning to, he realized that the academy wasn’t shaping him alone.

  It was shaping them.

  Together.