The blunt force of Radomir's Blight Palm sent Miroslav Bogdanov skidding across the grit-strewn sparring circle. His back scraped against the coarse stone, sending a fresh throb through his skull. A gasp of recycled air left his lungs in a wheeze. Above him, the minor Guildmaster's son preened, chest puffed out, a grin splitting his face like a ripe melon. Sickly green vapors curled off his knuckles, souring the draft with bile and sulphur. Miro, meanwhile, felt nothing but a dull ache and the familiar sting of impotence. “Still rolling in the dust, Bogdanov?” his opponent crowed, the shout bouncing against the arena's carved ribcage arches. “Even the lowest rats in Kostyanagrad’s undercity have more fight.” Miro pushed himself onto an elbow, a wobbly grin already plastered across his face. His left eye puffed shut beneath a split eyebrow. “Ah, always so concerned with my posture. Perhaps you should try a career as a etiquette instructor. Though, I admit, your form is rather… pedestrian for a show-off.” The crowd of students, a mix of bored scions and sneering aspirants, offered a few desultory snickers. They knew the routine. Miro, the notorious scion of a fallen house, always lost, always clowned, always walked away with a bruised body and an intact, maddeningly defiant smirk. He was an embarrassment to his lineage, a blight on the roster, and utterly, unreachably immune to shame. Zorya Morozova stood at the edge of the circle, her posture ramrod straight, a single strand of obsidian hair escaping her severe braid. Her silver eyes, usually cool and analytical, held a flicker that Miro couldn't quite decipher—disgust? Pity? Or perhaps, just the raw, unadulterated judgment that had been her constant companion since they were children. The boy's chest expanded another inch, emerald mist flaring along his forearms. This performance, Miro knew, was for her. Always for her. “Pedestrian?” the boy snarled, his composure cracking. His Aura solidified around his fist, a swirling vortex of emerald energy. “Let’s see how pedestrian this feels, you talentless lout!” Miro didn’t even try to rise fully. He just braced himself, the grin never leaving his face, though a cold knot tightened in his stomach. He was a zero. His Aura was a flatline. He had nothing to fight with, nothing to defend against the torrent about to land. The strike came, a focused torrent of Aura that slammed into Miro’s chest. His breath left him in a ragged gasp. He felt his ribs protest, a sharp, searing pain blossoming through his entire torso. He tumbled backward, striking the pavers with a flat smack. His vision swam, the fluted pillars blurring into gray sludge. The cheers, the victor's triumphant roar, Zorya’s fixed stare—all of it faded into a buzzing hum. Darkness welled from within his skull, dragging him under. He awoke to total stillness. Not the muffled quiet of the infirmary, nor the cold hush of his bunkroom, but a dead vacuum that flattened his inner ears. He lay on a cold, uneven surface, tasting dust and something metallic. His eyes fluttered open to a landscape of impossible ruins. Jagged pillars of calcified bone, impossibly ancient, jutted from the floor like petrified teeth, their surfaces scarred with geometric patterns that seemed to shift and writhe at the edge of his vision. The air was still and dry, carrying the scent of pulverized stone and something else, something like rust and forgotten things. He pushed himself up on aching wrists. The crack across his ribs had faded to a dry ache. Where was he? This was no part of the Spire. There were no tallow lamps, no sentries, no ringed masonry. Just endless decay and a sky that seemed to be cracking, showing glimpses of a void beyond. Then, a sudden, sharp pain flared in his vision. A faint, glowing script materialized before his eyes, ethereal and impossible, hovering in the air without support: [Aura: 1] Miro blinked, then blinked again. One? His Aura had always been zero. A flat, unyielding zero. His family’s shame. He rubbed his eyes, then stared again. The text remained, a stark, undeniable truth in the desolate space. “A hallucination,” he muttered, his hoarse rasp swallowed by the vast, empty dark. “A fever dream from getting my clock cleaned.” He stumbled to his feet, a shard of panic starting to burrow through his usual nonchalance. The flagstones beneath him groaned. A sound like grinding teeth echoed through the Chasm, growing louder. Above, one of the colossal bone-pillars, already fractured and leaning precariously, began to shudder. Dust rained down, thick and choking. Miro snapped his head up as a chunk of ruin, easily the size of a barge, sheared loose with a screech of grinding calcium. It plummeted directly towards him. He didn't think. He reacted. He dove, rolling desperately to the side, throwing himself behind a smaller, but still massive, outcropping of petrified rib. The floor jolted under his boots as the mass smashed into the spot where he had stood. A cloud of dust and pulverized rock exploded outwards, tasting like bitter ash. Miro sucked down chalky air, sweat stinging his brow while his knees twitched. He lay flat against the chalky grit, panting. He was alive. He was alive! The impact had been close enough that he felt the displacement of air, the tremor through the ground. He had faced death, truly faced it, and somehow, by sheer dumb luck, evaded it. His mind, usually a chaotic mess of witty retorts and carefully constructed apathy, was utterly blank, a primal scream echoing in its place. Then, the glowing script reappeared, brighter this time: [Aura: 10] Miro stared. Ten? What in the blazes? He just got nearly crushed, and his Aura, that pathetic, non-existent thing, jumped to ten? What kind of twisted logic was this? He closed his eyes, forcing himself to breathe, to calm the frantic beating in his chest. He focused on the raw, terrifying experience, on the brush with oblivion, on the cold dread that still gripped him. When he opened his eyes, the text changed again: [Aura: 11] A strange, prickly heat prickled behind his collarbones. This wasn't a dream. This place, this silent, decaying prison, was different. Danger, terror, survival—it was all feeding *something* inside him. Even the simple act of focusing, of *existing* here, seemed to stir that dormant energy. A horrifying, exhilarating truth began to dawn. Then, a new line of text appeared, a stark, red warning below his Aura count: [Chasm Collapse Timer: 12:00:00] Miro swallowed dry. Twelve hours. He wasn’t just trapped; he was trapped in a dying place. His escape wasn’t just difficult; it was on a timer. His mouth stretched into a defiant, terrified grin. So, he had twelve hours to become strong enough to shatter the walls of a collapsing dimension. Fine. In this godforsaken prison, even breathing was training.

The Zero and the Chasm