Chapter 9 - 8 — A Father’s Smile
POV: Jace
For several seconds the stadium stayed quiet in a way that seventy thousand people should not have been able to manage.
It did not feel like silence so much as weight. The air above the platform was still hot from the sphere, dry and close against my face, and my ears kept reaching for a sound that never arrived.
What I got instead was my own pulse, and the thin electrical hum of the lighting rigs hanging somewhere over the floor, which is not a thing anybody should be able to pick out inside a building that size.
The gold went on climbing through my palm, steady and warm, throwing my shadow long across the boards.
Then it broke, and the whispering rolled outward from the nearest student sections.
"Of course he awakened. Have you ever heard of a Nolan who didn’t?"
"That isn’t the part you should be looking at. Look at the color."
"Gold. That’s gold."
"Somebody check the board. When was the last SSS at a regional ceremony?"
"What did he even get? Can anyone tell from the sphere?"
Nobody could, and that was the point of the thing. The sphere had shown them a grade and nothing else, so Aten’s name and its effect and everything else about it stayed exactly where it had been ten seconds earlier, which was inside me.
Somebody in the Chiron Academy section started clapping.
Two more joined, and then the rest of my school stood up together, and the sound spread out through the families and the teachers and the guest seating until the whole stadium was making noise at me.
It came down off the upper tiers like weather, loud enough that I felt it in the boards under my shoes and in the bones of my hand where it rested against the sphere.
I stayed where I was, because I had no idea what a person is supposed to do while thousands of people applaud him.
The last time I stood on this platform, it had been the beginning of six years of being pitied. The same people were on their feet now.
I looked toward the guest section.
My father was smiling.
Not the short nod he gives the cameras after a Gate clear, and not the flicker of satisfaction that shows up when a clan operation lands the way he planned it.
He was smiling straight at me, openly, in front of every lens in the building.
I had not seen that expression on him since I was small enough to be carried.
My breath caught somewhere under my ribs, and my feet stayed where they were long after there was any reason to keep standing there.
Eventually I took my hand off the sphere.
The gold drained out of it slowly, sinking back toward the center before the surface went clear again, and the noise in the stands never quite settled.
The examiner leaned in close enough that only I would hear him.
"Say ’Status’ when you’re somewhere private. Your System window will appear, and only you will be able to see it."
I nodded once so that he knew I had understood, and I walked off the platform without trying the word in front of anybody.
Behind me he was already calling the next name, since there were still thousands of students waiting and the ceremony did not stop for me.
Another PSB officer was waiting at the bottom of the steps with a tablet under his arm.
"Congratulations. Every successful awakener has to complete Player Registration with the Bureau, though you don’t need to do it here."
He tapped something on the screen without looking up.
"We already have your identity, your school records, your contact details, and today’s result. You’ll receive the appointment by text."
"Understood."
"You’ll attend with the rest of today’s cohort."
Then he let me go, and I started the walk back up toward my school’s section.
The guild recruiters watched me the entire way, along with the corporate representatives and the scouts in the observation boxes, and not one of them came down.
It took me a moment to remember why, and then it was obvious.
I was already the recognized heir of the Myrmidon Clan, which had funding and equipment and instructors and Gate teams and political protection and every connection worth having in the region.
There was nothing an ordinary guild contract could offer Christopher Nolan’s only son, so they spent their attention on the awakeners who had nobody standing behind them.
A few of them kept looking anyway, and I understood that too, because an SSS resonance in a clan that strong changes numbers that scouts are paid to keep track of.
The students near my seat shifted over to make room I had not asked for.
Two of them congratulated me, and both of them started with my first name and then corrected themselves into something more formal halfway through, which was worse than if they had said nothing.
Everyone I had spoken to that morning was now working out how a person is supposed to address someone who had been ordinary at breakfast.
The ceremony ran on for another two hours across the platforms and the connected halls.
Most spheres stayed transparent, and every so often one took color and another name climbed onto the central board while its section made noise.
Two more came after mine, exactly the two I remembered, in the same order and the same colors.
Then the last candidate stepped down, and the board settled into its final line.
[Total Successful Awakenings: 10.]
I kept my eyes on that number while the stands started emptying around me.
Originally it had been nine.
Seven before I ever stepped onto the platform, and two afterwards, and every one of those nine had awakened today with the same color I remembered them getting the first time.
The tenth was me.
Nothing else in the entire ceremony had moved, so that number was the first thing in the world I could point at and say it was different because I had come back.
The schools were dismissed in groups, and I met my father near the private exit so we could walk out to the car together.
We did not get there quietly.
The reporters broke off from the media section and packed the secured path, and though the clan guards and PSB security kept them back, the microphones still came at us from both sides.
"Jace! What Ability did you awaken?"
"Mr. Nolan, did you expect an SSS result from your son?"
"Will he be entering Gates with the Myrmidon Clan immediately?"
"Is it lightning? Is the Ability lightning like yours?"
I glanced at my father.
He did not answer a single one of them for me, and he did not tell me to keep walking either. He just watched, with something in his face that looked a lot like curiosity about what I would do.
So I raised one hand and thought about Aten.
White-gold flame gathered above my palm and sat there, turning slowly, close enough to my skin that I could feel where the heat stopped.
The nearest reporters pulled back when it reached them, and the cameras went off in a wall of light while the questions changed shape in mid-sentence.
[Ability Activated: Aten.]
[Mana: 150/150 → 148/150.]
I kept it small, since they had asked a question and I was answering it rather than putting on a demonstration.
Then I closed my fingers, and the flame went out.
I lowered my hand and kept walking beside my father while they shouted after us about fire and sunlight and solar Abilities, and neither of us gave them anything else.
The guards opened a path, and we got into the car.
The doors shut, and the shouting and the applause dropped away into a muffled hum somewhere outside the tinted glass.
My father looked across the seat at me, and then he laughed under his breath, quietly, the way a man does when he has been holding something in for a while.
"You did well today."
He was still looking pleased with himself when he said the next part.
"Tell me what you want as an awakening present."
I stared at him for far too long.
The first time I made this drive, nobody spoke. He gave me one cold sentence about how not everybody awakens, and then he watched the window the rest of the way home.
I spent the next six years trying to earn back something I had never actually been given.
Now he was sitting across from me laughing and offering me anything I asked for.
"Let me think about it," I said. "I’ll tell you when I decide."
"Don’t take too long."
I had no intention of wasting it on the first thing that came into my head, because whatever I asked for needed to be the thing that made me strong fastest, and I did not know yet what that was.
Back at the estate, I went straight up to my room and shut the door behind me.
Then I stood in front of the mirror and remembered what the examiner had told me.
"Status."
A translucent window opened in the air in front of my reflection.
[STATUS]
Name: Jace Nolan Age: 18 Level: 1 Player Rank: SSS
Attributes: Strength: 18 Endurance: 20 Agility: 17 Perception: 16 Willpower: 32 Mana: 150/150
Abilities: Ouroboros — EX Mimesis — SSS Aten — SSS
I read it against everything the clan had drilled into me since I was old enough to sit through a lesson.
A newly awakened student usually starts somewhere around ten across the physical attributes, so my Strength and Endurance and Agility and Perception all sat higher than they should have.
That part made sense, since the Nolan heir gets put through physical and combat preparation for years before anybody hands him a sphere to touch.
Willpower was the number that did not belong.
Thirty-two, against physical stats in the teens, and the System was not measuring the boy who woke up in this bed yesterday morning.
It was measuring the mind I actually had, which had lived another six years, watched the clan burn, felt Aurelian’s fist go through it, and come back carrying every second of that.
The Mana sat high as well, though that one lined up with an SSS awakening rather than with anything I had done.
None of the rest of it had followed me. The body I had built across six years of swinging a weighted sword in the rain was gone, and these numbers belonged to the eighteen-year-old standing in front of this mirror.
Then there were the three names at the bottom.
Ouroboros and Mimesis sat there beside Aten, which meant the gold the stadium had seen was one third of what I was carrying, and the sphere had never come close to the rest.
The window was private, though, and everything the public had on me was something I had handed over myself.
The sphere gave them a grade and nothing more, so seventy thousand people walked out of that stadium knowing only that I had awakened at SSS.
The flame I raised outside the exit was what told them it was solar, and I was the one who chose to raise it.
Neither of those things was a name, or an effect, or a condition, and nobody outside this room knew there were three entries on that list instead of one.
I dismissed it with a wave and spent the rest of the evening turning the day over.
I was getting ready to sleep when my phone went off against the table.
[PLAYER SECURITY BUREAU]
[PLAYER REGISTRATION]
Date: 20 October 2101 Time: 9:00 a.m. Location: North Atlantic Regional Headquarters Attendance Group: Regional Awakening Cohort — Ten Players
I read it twice.
Registration was the door into all of it, into Gates and resources and teams and everything the official Player world would let me touch.
I smiled at the date glowing on my screen.
My path to becoming strong enough to change the future had finally begun.