After six months of hellish training, Rudra and Arjun stood in front of the gates of the exam centre.
Those six months were not something either of them would ever forget. Every day had followed roughly the same structure — meditation in the early hours to settle and strengthen the mind, hours of actual combat that left bruises in places Rudra hadn't known could bruise, long sessions learning the constitution and laws of Dev Lok that Arjun absorbed faster than Rudra ever managed, and Edward's music. The music took up more of their time than anything else, mostly because recovering from it took longer than the sessions themselves. There had been entire days where the only thing either of them accomplished was lying still afterward, waiting for their bodies to stop ringing. Also the shape train him time to time teaching new attacks using the stones.
But it had worked. That was the part that mattered. The soul that had once flared out of Rudra in a chaotic, formless burst now held its shape when he asked it to. The detection range that Edward described in their first lesson — sensing presence and intent through walls and obstacles — had gone from theoretical to something Rudra could actually do, however imperfectly. None of it felt like enough. But it was real, and six months ago it hadn't been.
The result of all that was visible, if you knew where to look. Rudra had put on noticeably more muscle, his frame filling out in ways that made his old clothes sit differently across his shoulders. Arjun looked almost exactly the same as he had six months ago — no visible change at all, the kind of person whose progress lived entirely beneath the surface. But both of their souls had stabilised in a way that mirrored Edward's own. Calm. Controlled. No longer the restless, formless thing it had been the day it first awakened.
They stood at the gate and looked at what was waiting for them.
Even from outside, they could see thousands of candidates filtering through the entrance — a steady, continuous stream of people that suggested this exam was significantly larger than either of them had pictured. They went in and found a registration line that stretched far enough that estimating its length felt almost pointless. Half an hour, at minimum, just to reach the front of it.
But there was no alternative. They joined the line and waited.
An hour later, Rudra's patience had worn thin enough that his jaw had started to ache from clenching it, but their turn finally arrived.
Ahead of them was a desk, and behind the desk sat a man working at something that resembled a computer without fully committing to the resemblance. The screen was thick and oversized, mounted at an angle that seemed designed for a different kind of posture than the one the man had adopted. A large camera pointed directly at whoever stood in front of the desk, and the keyboard beneath his hands had a shape that was almost familiar and somehow not quite right — keys arranged in patterns that made sense once you looked closely but seemed wrong at a glance, as though whoever built it had only ever seen a description of a keyboard rather than an actual one.
The man operating it was an angel. That much was easy to tell — a pair of white wings folded against his back, not large enough, Rudra suspected, to actually carry him anywhere. Edward had mentioned that angels were the craftsmen of this world, the ones responsible for tools and devices that blurred the line between magic and technology, and it didn't take much imagination to guess that the strange machine in front of them had come from exactly that tradition. Functional, slightly impractical, built by people who valued cleverness over convention.
The man looked exhausted. More exhausted, even, than Rudra felt after standing in a line for an hour — which made sense, Rudra supposed, given that the man had likely been doing this exact task since the gates opened, processing an apparently endless stream of candidates with no end in sight and no thanks for any of it.
"Your name?" the man asked, his voice flat with fatigue.
"Rudra Thakur," Rudra said.
The man typed for a moment, then paused. "Rudra Tha—" He stopped and looked up. "What kind of name is that?"
'Of course. That name is going to sound unusual here.'
Rudra tilted his head slightly. "It's my real name. Common, where I come from."
The man studied him for a beat longer than the question required. Then he asked, in the same tired, flat tone, "By any chance — are you one of those rumoured Bhoo Lok people who've started showing up here?"
Rudra felt the question land differently than its casual delivery suggested it should. He was aware, suddenly and completely, of how exposed standing at this desk actually was — how many people behind him in the line could hear this exchange, how quickly information could move through a crowd this size. He gave a crooked smile and simply nodded.
That was apparently all it took.
The attention arrived almost immediately — heads turning, conversations shifting, a ripple of interest spreading outward from the desk in both directions. Rudra didn't enjoy being looked at this way. It wasn't the same as the crowd outside P.R.I.S.M., people drawn by spectacle and amazement. This was something colder. Evaluative.
Murmuring started, low at first, then less careful about being overheard. It spread the way these things always spread — one cluster of candidates leaning toward another, a word passed sideways, the information arriving at the back of the line faster than any of them could have walked there.
*"How can they let mere earthlings join the Soul Fighters?"*
*"Are they even strong?"*
*"I heard one of them is the holder of the Power Stone."*
The last comment landed with particular weight, rippling further through the crowd than the others had. People who hadn't bothered turning around for the first two comments turned around for that one. Rudra kept his expression neutral and let it pass over him. None of it bothered him as much as it apparently was meant to. He had stood in front of five Devas and a man called the God of War and survived that conversation. A crowd of strangers murmuring opinions about his origin was, by comparison, almost restful.
Beside him, Arjun hadn't reacted at all. If anything, the murmuring seemed to amuse him slightly — the corner of his mouth had moved in the particular way that meant he found something quietly funny and had decided not to share why.
The man behind the desk, apparently unbothered by the small disturbance he had caused, lifted something that functioned as a camera and took Rudra's photograph. A moment later, a piece of paper printed itself out from somewhere within the machine. On it was a number.
701.
Arjun stepped up next. The process repeated itself — name, a slightly less surprised reaction this time since the crowd had already absorbed the first shock, photograph, paper. His number was 702.
The man gave them directions toward a holding area, and they walked.
"Edward told me the exam runs in three phases," Rudra said as they walked, mostly to fill the silence. "And that this year's candidates are stronger than usual. Apparently it's going to be the hardest one in years."
Arjun glanced sideways at him. "Does that worry you?"
Rudra thought about the six months behind them. The meditation, the bruises, the lore, the music that had nearly killed them both more than once and had instead given them something neither of them fully understood the shape of yet. He thought about the blue fire around his hands, larger and more restless than even Edward's, still searching for the form it wanted to take. He thought about the conversation in the endless water, the demon's voice telling him he would need to become stronger than any other Deva — stronger than God itself. Whatever this exam was, it was a much smaller mountain than the one waiting beyond it.
"We're not the same people who walked through that market gate six months ago," he said. "Whatever this exam throws at us — we'll manage."
'How hard can it really be?'
It was hard.
Rudra would spend the next few hours understanding, in increasingly specific and uncomfortable detail, exactly how thoroughly he had just jinxed himself.