The track was a quarter mile loop around the field periter.
Garrett stood at the start line with his tablet and his two remaining fingers on his right hand wrapped around a stopwatch that probably cost forty dollars and had outlasted three guilds.
"Four laps," he said. "One mile. Go."
We went.
I lasted approximately forty-five seconds at pace before my body filed a formal complaint.
The complaint included: my lungs, which had apparently been storing air as a courtesy and not because they knew how to use it efficiently; my thighs, which communicated their displeasure through a dium I could only describe as fire; and my feet, which were doing their best but resented the entire project.
Around , the field thinned as people pulled ahead.
Blair Davenport ran like she had been engineered for it, back straight, stride long, her red hair in a tight braid that didn’t move. Hikaru was already fifteen ters ahead of the pack and pulling further, her movent so economical it looked like she was barely trying. Naomi ran with the slightly panicked efficiency of soone who had spent years hauling fishing nets and was applying that energy to forward montum.
I ran like I was moving furniture uphill.
"Monroe."
Garrett didn’t look up from his tablet.
"You’re shuffling. Pick your feet up."
I picked my feet up. My knees offered a counterproposal, which I rejected, and kept going.
The first lap took three minutes and so change.
A reasonable runner does a mile in seven to eight minutes.
I was not a reasonable runner.
I was a man in a body that had spent a year and a half treating the walk from the couch to the refrigerator as aningful cardio, and now I was on lap two of a mandatory fitness evaluation in front of two hundred people who ranged from indifferent to actively entertained.
Charles Leone lapped .
He ran past with the easy, long-limbed stride of soone who had a personal trainer from age ten, and as he went past, he looked over at with an expression that wasn’t quite a smirk but was doing everything a smirk does without committing to the paperwork.
"Hang in there," he said.
The way he said it removed all nutritional value from the words.
I kept running.
On the far end of the second lap, two Obsidian boys I hadn’t t yet ran past having a conversation, actual words between them, full sentences, while I was rationing breath like it was warti currency.
"Wild that lottery slots go to people who can’t even run a mile."
The other one said sothing I didn’t catch.
The first one laughed. "Academy’s a charity now, apparently."
They pulled ahead without looking back.
I noted their faces for later.
Not because I was going to do anything dramatic about it. I wasn’t the revenge fantasy type.
I just found it useful to know exactly who had been comfortable saying sothing in front of while I was physically unable to respond, because that information was relevant to how I filed them in the long-term ntal ledger of people worth investing in.
The answer was not very.
Lap three.
My vision had acquired a slight shimr at the edges that I chose to interpret as a visual artifact of intense effort and not a dical warning.
My mouth tasted like copper and sports drink, which was an interesting flavor combination that I was not enjoying.
My thighs had stopped complaining and moved into a different phase that I suspected was acceptance.
The system pinged.
I almost stumbled.
A small notification appeared in the lower right of my vision, translucent and blue-white, the way all the system text looked.
◆ PHYSICAL TRAINING DETECTED ◆
Duration: 12 minutes sustained cardiovascular activity
Endurance \[E\] progress: 0.5 segnts
Current: \[E\] ▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱▱ (3/10)
I looked at it for two full strides.
Half a segnt. In twelve minutes. From running badly.
In the gym this morning, forty minutes of lifting had given half a segnt in Endurance. Running, apparently, was more efficient. Or my body was burning through the conversion faster because it was completely unaccustod to sustained output.
Either way.
Half a segnt.
I did the math while my lungs staged a small protest. If the system updated on a roughly ten-minute cycle for sustained cardio, and each update gave half a segnt, a full lap around this track took about three and a half minutes, four laps was fourteen minutes of active running, which ant roughly one update per mile.
One segnt per mile.
Endurance sat at E-rank with three segnts now. Ten segnts per rank. Seven more segnts to D-rank.
Seven miles of sustained running.
That was a terrible thought for a person currently struggling with mile one.
Lap four.
The pack had largely finished ahead of . A cluster of students stood near the finish with water bottles, cooling down, watching the stragglers. I counted four people still behind on the track, which was not as comforting as I had hoped because two of them were walking.
I was not walking.
This was a low bar and I was claiming it.
Belle stood near the finish line with her blue hair loose now, having pulled it out of the ponytail during the run, and she was watching with an expression I couldn’t read from this distance.
I crossed the finish line.
Garrett looked at his stopwatch.
"Fourteen twenty-two," he said, and wrote it down without additional comntary.
I walked four steps and put my hands on my knees because my body needed the geotry and I needed a mont where the horizon stopped tipping slightly to the left.
"Not bad for your first lap," soone said.
I looked up.
Jordan Wayne stood beside with his hands in his pockets, barely a hair out of place, his expression carrying the profound serenity of a person who had coasted through the run on whatever unholy combination of long legs and absolute indifference to physical discomfort he’d been born with.
"That was the whole mile," I said.
"I know," Jordan said. He did not elaborate.
"What’d you run?"
"Eight forty."
"Of course you did."
He pulled sothing from his pocket. A small candy, one of those fruit chews. He offered it to without speaking.
I took it because I had burned approximately all of my blood sugar and the gesture was functional regardless of the reason behind it. The candy was waterlon. It was extrely good. I kept that opinion to myself.
"Those guys," Jordan said, not pointing, just tilting his head slightly in the direction of the two Obsidian boys who had run past during lap two. "Rennick and Park. Rennick’s family runs a supply guild in Denver. Park’s just an."
"You got all that from a lap?"
"I got it from the student directory this morning." He looked at the field. "I like to know who I’m dealing with."
I stood up straight. My lungs had forgiven , conditionally.
"Do they pull this with all lottery kids or just the ones they can see struggling?"
"From what I can tell," Jordan said, pulling out another candy for himself, "they escalate based on response. You didn’t respond."
"I was busy running."
"Right." He chewed the candy slowly. "That worked in your favor. They wanted a reaction. You just kept going."
Across the field, Garrett was recording tis on his tablet, his massive fra blocking the sun at this angle, making him look like a monunt soone had constructed and then decided to put in a gym instructor uniform.
The system pinged again.
◆ ENDURANCE UPDATED ◆
\[E\] ▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱ (4/10)
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