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A few moments later… (more than an hour)

They reached the staging post at the edge of the black jungle as the second bell slouched toward the third. The proctors' board was a scarred plank slung between two iron stakes, pocked by a hundred names and a thousand ambitions. Cores clinked into tally boxes, slips slid under brass clips, and one very tired upperclassman recorded totals with the glassy stare of someone who had forgotten what beds look like.

Rhea had already laid their slips on the rail: Stonecoil, Bramblehorn, Hisscat, Barkback, Ridge-back, Snarl Ape, Snaptail. The proctor counted, lips moving, then nodded once. "Seven cores logged. Day one is not a liar."

Ray shifted his weight like a man negotiating a treaty with his ankle. He eyed the chalk title, then Rhea, then John. "Team Lord Fizz," he said, as if tasting a medicine that might also be candy.

Fizz planted tiny paws on tiny hips. "Brand cohesion is crucial. Also it is my name."

The proctor stamped the slips with a thump that felt like permission. "Camp register," she said, jerking her chin toward a second board. "Claim a spot before the clever ones remember they slept through cleverly."

They did. No one argued when Fizz placed the peg under a stand of ironwoods away from the main knot of tents and ego. The ground there was packed hard by old roots; the wind threaded without catching. Rhea approved because it was clean. Ray approved because it was defensible. John approved because the air moved like it remembered math.

They raised a lean shelter with canvas and patience. Fizz insisted the central guyline tie include a small, tasteful bow. Rhea did not roll her eyes. She simply tightened the bow until it did a useful job.

"Team Lord Fizz orientation," Fizz announced once the last knot passed inspection. He floated above their little square like a chandelier, solemn as a judge and twice as glittery. "Rule one, do not die. Rule two, if tempted to die, do it quietly so as not to attract larger things. I can sense some very large things in the jungle. Rule three, snacks are morale and morale is half of war."

"Rule four," Rhea added, "is that we rotate watches. And we actually rotate them, rather than telling pretty stories about discipline."

She drew a quick grid in the dirt. "John first until the moon clears the ridge. Ray second until the wind shifts. I will have the third watch until dawn comes with the shining sun. Cute Fizz does all of them because he is impossible to discourage and sleeps like a punctuation mark."

Fizz saluted, entirely pleased. "Correct. Also I hum softly for predators. It confuses them. Maybe I will roast them too."

Ray eased down onto the bedroll he hadn't earned but was grateful for. Pride prodded him into speaking before gratitude locked the door. "I did not agree to worship anyone," he announced to the sky. "But… the name can stand for now."

"Promotion achieved," Fizz said. "From worship to reluctant respect in one day. Tomorrow we ascend to 'brings sweets unasked.'"

John left them to their bickering with the kind of half-smile you only give teams that might actually work. He walked the immediate perimeter, palm brushing bark to read the day's last heat. The jungle's evening voice tuned itself — cricket saws, frog bells, a branch giving a slow, tired complaint.

On his second loop he stopped where a smear glistened on a low vine like the memory of meat. He crouched. The line inside his chest tipped, the way a scale tips when a coin does not weigh what it claims. He sniffed — iron and something cheaper, a market stall's honesty.

Fizz drifted in. "Discovery," he said, serious now. Jokes telescope fast when danger comes close. He sniffed, blew on it, and watched the way droplets clung. "Bait," he said. "Painted with a butcher's gossip. It wants a boar. Maybe something with wings that thinks blood is a conversation."

Rhea came on silent feet and glanced once. "Students," she said. "Or the kind of adults who think like students."

Ray, limping but present, frowned. "Why here."

"Because here angles us toward the hornet run and the briar sink," Rhea said, eyes cutting through brush. "Push a panicked boar that way and you get a problem that does not care about surnames."

John wiped the smear with a damp rag and folded it in on itself. "We will not be pushed," he said. "We will push back."

They did not stand. They were redirected. Rhea marked two invisible heat lines with the lightest breath of power — warnings for boar noses without leaving a banner for human eyes.

Fizz conjured a whisper-thin film of water on a line of rocks leading away from camp; anything barreling through at speed would find its plans unseated.

John took the rag with the bait stink, stepped twenty paces, and pressed it against a different vine on a different trail that led toward a pocket of fallen timber he had noticed earlier — old storm damage that made hornets very protective.

He did not lay a trap. He told the truth to an ugly plan and let cause meet effect.

Back at camp, they ate without ceremony. Rhea rationed protein like a quartermaster who'd seen boys forget that tomorrow exists. Ray forced himself to chew slowly because Fizz announced that chewing slowly made you look wise. Fizz nosed through Rhea's sweets pouch and produced a honey biscuit as if conjuring a treaty.

John took first watch. He sat with his back to the ironwood and his knees long. He didn't meditate — didn't chase stillness like a prize. He let it arrive if it wanted to. The void inside him settled like a black lake under stars. Far back, the egg turned once, a quiet planet.

The first interruption came as a suggestion rather than a footfall: air thickening, a shape trying not to be a shape at the edge of hearing. John turned his head half an inch. "Good evening," he said to the darkness. The darkness decided it had urgent business elsewhere. Sometimes predators just need to be told no with confidence.

Midway through Ray's watch, the night registered a different mood: the collective, outraged hum of hornets who had found a poem they didn't like. A scream rose and fell somewhere down a trail that did not belong to them. It was the delicate, keening soprano of a man encountering small justice.

Ray glanced toward the sound with guilty relief. "Serves someone," he muttered.

"Indeed," Fizz said from the roofline of their shelter, eyes slitted, pleased as a cat who had set a moral on fire. "Nature is very educational."

Dawn arrived wearing ash-blue and the promise that sweat has to make at breakfast. They packed the camp in the order Rhea preferred — fire cold, lines down, ground swept with a spring so it doesn't look like people were ever stupid there. Fizz counted their cores like a banker with a happy secret. Seven logged. The goal for the day was simple: deliberate, not dramatic.

They angled along the west ridge where the ground wore granite like knuckles and the brush backed away a respectful yard. Fizz flew point, tongue tasting for something wrong. Ray kept his flame tight, a lesson still fresh enough to hurt. Rhea's hand hovered above her belt knife the way a pianist leaves fingers above keys when the music is about to tell the truth. John mapped the slope in his head, changing the world by increments nobody saw.

The day's first beast presented itself with bureaucratic punctuality: a Thornback tortoise, plate-fused and unembarrassed by its silhouette. It eyed them with that cold herbivore disdain that says very clearly I did not come here to be eaten, please be literate.

Fizz saluted it. "Sir. Madam. Your thorns are excellent."

Thornbacks are made of patience and mistakes. Rhea obliged the first and prevented the second. "Don't get behind," she said. "Don't get in front. Bleed it sideways."

They did. Rhea heated the air just above the ground to make the tortoise lift its head. Fizz laid a cool line on the stone so its forefoot slid half an inch at the worst moment. John leaned like the meaning of weight, at the instant the beast tried to trust a joint. Ray, learning, slid the flat of his heat under the chin when the throat showed. Steel did the end quietly. The core came out like a coin exactly minted.

"Eight," Fizz said, newly fond of arithmetic.

The second was uglier, as they usually are. A Vinejack —part cat, part vine, part insult— dropped from a branch with all the declension of gravity and none of the manners. It would have gotten a shoulder if not for Ray's hand appearing at the right time in the right place with the right amount of burn.

He hissed as claws tore a ribbon out of his sleeve, then grinned despite himself when Fizz hit the beast with a compacted puff of air that turned a lethal pounce into an unplanned tumble.

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