The morning Leo was supposed to enter the Catacombs, he woke up earlier than usual.

  Tom had texted him the night before. Tom and the rest of the team were inside, waiting at one of the staging areas outside Garrison Boston. The teammates Tom recruited, Vivian and Matthew, had gone ahead to start reassembling their transport semi, which had to be broken down into smaller segments just to fit through the spatial tunnel.

  The shuttle from New Haven to Boston took forty minutes. From there, a military transport bus carried him and about thirty other high school students toward the exclusion zone.

  Boston, like every other city with a Catacombs entrance, no longer resembled the city it had once been.

  The original downtown had ceased to exist decades ago. Where historic brownstones and gleaming skyscrapers once stood, there was now a massive ring of emptiness. Ground Zero. The exclusion zone stretched for miles in every direction, a carefully maintained dead zone surrounding the spatial tunnel that connected Earth to the Catacombs.

  The reasoning was simple and grim. If a Catacombs entrance was ever lost, if enemy cultivators poured through in numbers too great to contain, Earth's response would be nuclear. Repeated nuclear strikes, as many as necessary, until nothing remained standing. The exclusion zone existed to minimize collateral damage when that day came.

  Leo watched through the bus window as they passed the outer fortification ring. Concrete bunkers. Artillery emplacements. Flak cannons pointed inward, toward the entrance they were supposed to be defending. It was a strange thing, seeing all those weapons aimed at your own city center.

  "First time?" The kid sitting next to him was maybe sixteen, Qi Refining like most of the others on the bus. He wore an Andover jacket.

  "Yeah."

  "Same. I'm Jacob, by the way."

  "Leo."

  Jacob's eyes widened. "Wait, Leo? Leo from Exeter? The guy who beat Mateo Thandril?"

  Several heads turned.

  Leo sighed internally. "That's me."

  The questions came fast after that. What was the fight really like? How did he break through those fire techniques? Was it true he had a flying sword that could break the sound barrier?

  Leo answered as best he could, trying to be accurate without sounding like he was bragging. He described the moment he realized Mateo's snakes couldn't track his movements. The decision to close distance rather than fight at range. The final exchange that had ended the match.

  "So what's your plan down here?" Jacob asked. "Are you leading a team of other Exeter students?"

  "Running my own team, actually. Squad of four."

  Silence.

  "Four?" One of the seniors spoke up. He had the weathered look of someone who had spent serious time underground. "For transport missions? That's... ambitious."

  "We got the authorization."

  "Authorization isn't the problem." The senior shook his head. "It's the workload. A standard squad runs eight for a reason. You need drivers, navigators, mechanics, and enough combat specialists to handle anything that hits you on the road. Cutting that in half means everyone's doing double duty."

  "The combat side is covered," Leo said simply.

  The senior studied him for a long moment. Then he laughed, not mockingly, but with genuine appreciation. "Yeah, I guess it would be, wouldn't it? Must be nice. Half my team is nothing but spell arts users who can't do anything except fight. They're pretty much dead weight during the transport part, but we need them to meet minimum combat standards."

  "If you had someone like him," Another senior said, jerking his thumb at Leo, "you could probably cut two or three people and still pass inspection."

  "Don't remind me." The senior leaned back in his seat. "You have any idea how much more we'd all be making if we could run lean like that? Merit income would be double. It's like he has twice the immortal potential of all of us!"

  The conversation drifted to other topics. Upcoming missions. Supply routes. The quality of food at various outposts.

  Then someone mentioned the Dao Discussion Tournament.

  "You guys think the prodigy from your school has a shot this year?" one of the seniors asked. "He's been training like crazy since regionals."

  "Maybe quarterfinals," someone said. "But the Ashford Academy kids are ridiculous this year. They've got like three people who could take the whole thing."

  Leo leaned forward. "What's The Dao Discussion Tournament?"

  The bus went quiet for a moment. All the students stared at him like he'd just asked what the sun was.

  "You don't know about The Dao Discussion Tournament?" Jacob shook his head in disbelief. "It's only the biggest 1v1 fighting competition for high schoolers in the country. Maybe the world."

  "Dao Discussion just means fighting," a senior added. "It's an ancient term from the cultivation world. Makes it sound more refined than 'beating the crap out of each other,' but that's basically what it is. You discuss the Dao with your fists."

  "And your swords," Jacob added. "And your spell arts. And whatever else you've got."

  Another student, a girl from one of the Boston prep schools, jumped in. "The rewards are insane. First place gets like half a million in prize money, plus sponsorship deals, plus guaranteed recruitment offers from every major sect and military branch."

  "But honestly, the reputation is worth more than all of that. Winners get fast tracked for everything. Missions, resources, internships. It's like a golden ticket."

  "Even just making it to the later rounds is huge," Jacob added. "Top sixteen gets national broadcast coverage. Scouts from everywhere watching. It can make your entire career."

  A tournament designed entirely around 1v1 combat, testing individual skill against the best cultivators in Leo's age group. That sounded exactly like the kind of free money he'd been looking for.

  "How do I sign up?"

  Jacob grinned. "Last round of registrations open next month. You'd need to submit your combat record and get a recommendation from your school's cultivation department. With your ranking, you'd probably get seeded straight into..."

  "He can't sign up."

  Everyone turned to look at the student who had spoken. He had his phone out, scrolling through something.

  "What do you mean he can't sign up?" Jacob asked.

  "Leo Chen, Exeter Academy." The student turned his phone around so everyone could see the screen.

  "Banned by name. Effective as of... wow, the day of the high school playoff semifinals. They moved fast."

  Leo stared at the screen. There it was, in official tournament documentation. His name, his picture, and a simple designation:

  INELIGIBLE FOR COMPETITION.

  "That's insane," Jacob said. "They can just do that?"

  "Apparently." The senior scrolled further. "There's a note here. Something about 'preserving competitive integrity' and 'ensuring meaningful participation for all entrants.'"

  He snorted. "Translation: they already had Mateo Thandril ruin one year by stomping everyone. They weren't going to let the guy who beat Mateo ruin another one."

  "That's completely unfair," Leo said.

  "Hell yeah it's unfair!" The girl from earlier looked genuinely angry on his behalf. "You aren't even ranked! You should be able to compete like everyone else."

  "They're basically admitting you'd win," Jacob explained. "That's why they banned you. They know if you entered, nobody else would have a chance."

  "Still unfair," Leo repeated. "I didn't ask to be banned. I just wanted to fight."

  "You should seek compensation," the senior said. "Seriously. If they're going to deny you entry to a public tournament, they owe you something."

  "File a formal complaint," another student suggested. "Get your school involved. Get your coach to raise hell."

  Leo pulled out his phone and texted Coach Williams.

  "Hey Coach I wanted to enter the Dao Discussion tournament but it looks like I'm banned by name. This is a great injustice."

  He hit send and leaned back in his seat.

  Injustice.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Arthur must have been rubbing off on him.

  The other students were still discussing the unfairness of it all, throwing around ideas about lawsuits and appeals and media pressure.

  A few minutes later, his phone buzzed.

  "Already heard. I'll ask, but don't expect much. You'll probably just get the first place prize money. A few hundred thousand."

  Leo stared at the message. A few hundred thousand for doing nothing. It was more cash than he'd ever made in his life.

  But there was something deeply frustrating about being told he was too good to compete. That his presence alone would ruin things for everyone else.

  He put in his cPods and pulled up his music playlist. The bus still had another twenty minutes before they reached the tunnel entrance.

  ---

  The tunnel itself was anticlimactic.

  Decades of optimization had transformed what was once humanity's most terrifying discovery into something resembling a well-oiled assembly line. The spatial fluctuation that had first appeared in downtown Boston, the tiny crack between worlds that scientists had probed with fiber optic cables, had grown into a stable passage roughly seven feet in diameter.

  The passage was too small for conventional trucks. Which was why everything had to be transported in specially designed cylindrical containers that could squeeze through single file.

  Leo used his third person perspective to get a good look at what was happening around him. Hundreds of identical containers stretched ahead of them, each one packed with supplies, equipment, or personnel.

  The line moved with mechanical precision, one cylinder entering the tunnel every few seconds, the timing synchronized down to fractions of a second to maximize throughput.

  The transit itself lasted maybe thirty seconds. A moment of pressure, like passing through a membrane of warm gelatin, and then they were through.

  He even tried to see if there was anything interesting via third person perspective. But there really wasn't anything besides the weird spatial tunnel he couldn't make sense of.

  On the other side, the cylinders fed into an even longer tunnel, this one carved through formation enhanced steel and concrete that blocked his divine sense. The tunnel ran for nearly a mile before finally emerging into open air.

  Or what passed for open air in the Catacombs.

  The sky was wrong. That was Leo's first impression. Not sky at all, but space. Stars blazed overhead in impossible clarity, their light undimmed by any atmosphere. Nebulae swirled in distant purples and reds, and the Milky Way cut across the void like a river of diamonds.

  Yet somehow there was atmosphere and light covering the surface. Unfortunately, there was no good explanation for why it occurred. The best guess was "ancient cultivator magic," which was without a doubt the right answer.

  But the sky was a distant concern compared to what waited on the ground.

  Garrison Boston rose from the Catacombs floor like something out of a fantasy novel.

  Concentric walls of gleaming white stone climbed toward the violet sky, each ring higher than the last. The architecture was distinctly human, modern sensibilities blended with classical fortification principles, but the scale was almost mythological. Leo was reminded of Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Rings films, as if Minas Tirith had been designed by the Pentagon.

  The walls were broken at regular intervals by massive artillery emplacements. Rail guns and directed spiritual cannons the size of city buses. Missile batteries capable of launching payloads across continental distances. And threading through all of it, visible as a faint shimmer in the air, the permanent bubble shield that protected the entire complex from orbital to below ground.

  Leo flew up on his Moonrider to get a better look.

  He knew the shield extended underground. Deep enough to prevent tunneling attacks from Catacombs forces. Rumor had it that there was a constant battle happening beneath the surface, engineering teams from both sides digging and counter-digging, collapsing enemy tunnels while reinforcing their own. A hidden war that never made the news.

  But the fortress itself, impressive as it was, wasn't what made Garrison Boston impenetrable.

  That honor belonged to the drone launching pads.

  They surrounded the garrison in concentric rings, thousands upon thousands of platforms stretching toward the horizon. Leo estimated there were at least fifty thousand Gold Core level drone pads in the immediate vicinity. Each one capable of launching a combat drone that could allow a Foundation Establishment cultivator to display Gold Core power from the safety of Garrison Boston.

  And scattered among them, far fewer but significantly more intimidating, were the Nascent Soul drones. Leo recognized the design from the semifinals of the high school playoffs. Three hundred feet of launch rail, each one housing a drone that represented the peak of power allowed after the Treaty of Great Restraint.

  "Beautiful, right?"

  Leo turned. Jacob had somehow gotten his hands on a flight talisman and had drifted up beside him.

  "The drones are the key," Jacob continued, clearly eager to show off his knowledge.

  "Catacombs cultivators can jam communications over distance. Makes it almost impossible to control drones more than a few hundred miles from their base station. But this close?" He gestured at the fortress below.

  "Unjammable. Any force that tries to assault Garrison Boston has to fight through the equivalent of fifty thousand Gold Cores and several hundred Nascent Souls before they even reach the walls."

  "And if they get past the drones?"

  "Then the walls have real Nascent Soul cultivators and heavy artillery." Jacob grinned. "Garrison Boston is impossible to take. We've held it ever since it was created, and there's never been a serious attempt to breach it."

  Leo looked past the fortress, toward the endless expanse of the Catacombs beyond. Miles and miles of factories and warehouses dotted the landscape, the industrial infrastructure that transformed raw Catacombs resources into usable materials.

  The stream of cylindrical containers flowing through the tunnel suddenly seemed pathetically small compared to the sheer volume of production happening on this side.

  "All those factories," Leo said. "We are manufacturing weapons here?"

  "Lower tier ones, yeah. The theory is that we can't beat the Catacombs using Earth's resources alone. Their realm is richer in spiritual veins than ours. So we have to fight using their resources instead."

  "Problem is, only Foundation Establishment density Qi is available right now. Good for lower tier weapons and maintaining basic cultivation for the garrison troops, insufficient for anything higher tier." Jacob's expression turned serious.

  "The real war starts when the T3 veins condense. That's when both sides will have the resources to actually push."

  Leo's radiation counter started beeping.

  "Should probably head back inside," Jacob said. "Environmental radiation has been cleaned up as much as they could, but prolonged exposure isn't great for Qi Refining cultivators."

  They descended back toward the transport area, where their transport cylinder was being unloaded alongside dozens of others. The other students from the bus had already disembarked and were gathering their equipment.

  Leo found himself surrounded again, answering more questions about Garrison Boston, about his first impressions, about what he'd seen from the air. Even the seniors who had been to the Catacombs before listened with interest. There was something different about hearing it from someone who was seeing it all for the first time, apparently.

  The conversation continued as they processed through the intake checkpoint. Leo answered honestly, describing the scale of the fortifications, the impossible number of drone platforms, the factories stretching toward the horizon.

  But even as he spoke, he couldn't shake what Jacob had said.

  All of this was just the surface. A tiny foothold in a realm that stretched far beyond and below what Earth could currently contest.

  ---

  Tom was waiting outside the security checkpoint, bouncing on his heels.

  "Leo! Over here!" He waved frantically, pushing through the crowd of cultivators and military personnel streaming through the intake area. "Come on, come on, don't waste your time trying to look inside the garrison. The others are waiting outside."

  Leo shouldered his bag and followed. Tom led him through a maze of prefab buildings and temporary structures until they reached a row of civilian taxis idling near a transport hub.

  "We're meeting the others at Staging Area 7," Tom explained as they climbed into the back of a taxi. "About twenty minutes out. Gives me time to brief you on the team."

  The taxi pulled away from the checkpoint, merging into a stream of vehicles heading away from Garrison Boston's main complex. Through the window, Leo watched warehouses and factories scroll past, each one humming with activity.

  "So," Tom began, pulling out his tablet, "a transport semi usually requires a crew of eight."

  "Eight?"

  "Eight." Tom ticked off the roles on his fingers. "Driver, co-driver, communications, navigator, mechanic, forward gunner, rear gunner, and commander. That's the standard configuration for a T4 Nascent Soul grade transport running supply routes through the Catacombs."

  "Eight roles and we have four people." Leo said.

  "We have three, since you'll be handling combat outside." Tom corrected. "Good news is, I found the only two Juniors in our entire class who could actually pull it off."

  He swiped to a profile on his tablet. The photo showed a young woman with glasses and an expression of intense concentration.

  "Vivian Xin. Top student in our grade by a significant margin. Not even close, really. Her specialty is multitasking. She can operate as pilot, co-pilot, communications, and navigation all at the same time."

  "All four?"

  "And better than either of us could. While maintaining optimal route efficiency, and quick responses." Tom shook his head. "I've seen her run simulations. It's honestly kind of terrifying. Her brain just works differently than everyone else's."

  "Can she handle the other roles too?"

  "Technically, yes. She's qualified for everything, including mechanic, which is the hardest role on a transport crew. But here's the problem." Tom leaned forward.

  "If something breaks and Vivian has to fix it, we lose our pilot, co-pilot, communications, and navigator all at once. The transport would have to stop completely. In contested territory, that's basically a death sentence."

  "So we need a dedicated mechanic."

  "Exactly. Which brings us to our second problem." Tom swiped to another profile. A young man with messy hair and the kind of eager energy. "The transport itself. Running a reduced squad only works if we have a vehicle good enough to compensate for our lower headcount. That means Nascent Soul grade at minimum. T4 quality."

  "That's expensive."

  "Very expensive. We're talking high seven figures just for the base chassis, before modifications." Tom shrugged. "So we need someone rich enough to finance the transport, but also willing and able to serve as our mechanic. You know how many wealthy cultivator kids want to be mechanics?"

  "I'm guessing not many."

  "Zero. Literally zero. Being a mechanic is dirty work. You're crawling around in engine compartments, covered in spiritual lubricant, replacing burned-out formation arrays while everyone else gets to do the glamorous stuff." Tom grinned. "Which left exactly one person in our entire school who fit both criteria."

  He tapped the profile. "Matthew Stammer. New money, family's been very successful running an HVAC business. Apparently they have key patents in keeping radiation out of the AC. He actually enjoys working on machinery. He'll serve as our forward gunner and primary mechanic."

  "Forward gunner and mechanic," Leo repeated. "That's a lot."

  "To be honest, if we are fighting something that you can't handle, we would have jettisoned the component which contains the guns."

  The taxi turned onto a wider road, heading toward a cluster of larger buildings in the distance.

  "That leaves me," Tom continued. "Rear gunner and commander."

  "Commander?"

  "Someone has to coordinate everything. And before you say Vivian could do it better, let me explain." Tom pulled up a scheduling interface on his tablet, dense with overlapping colored blocks.

  "Four people, three shifts, continuous operation. Everyone needs sleep, everyone needs cultivation time, everyone needs to eat. Interruptions happen constantly. Combat, maintenance, route changes, orders from command."

  The schedule looked like a nightmare. Blocks shifted and overlapped, with dozens of conditional branches and contingency plans.

  "Juggling all of that while maintaining optimal efficiency is a full-time job," Tom said. "I'll also be talking to the chain of command, and finding future jobs too."

  "Sounds complicated."

  "It is. But I have to prove I belong on the team." Tom smiled.

  He closed the tablet and turned to face Leo directly.

  "Now, outside of combat, you're going to be on shift with me. For now, that just means you're an extra set of hands. But eventually, you'll need to learn the basics of piloting, co-piloting, communications, and navigation."

  Leo raised an eyebrow. "All of them?"

  "The non-combat versions only. When we're in safe territory or during low-threat transit windows, we will split into three shifts, allowing us to cultivate and sleep eight hours a day. It's going to be hard at first, but once we get the hang of it, running these missions will be just like cultivating in our dorm."

  Tom waved a hand dismissively. "It's pretty easy to pick up. Following a pre-plotted route, acknowledging routine traffic control pings, keeping the transport pointed in the right direction. Nothing fancy."

  "And if something fancy happens?"

  "Then we wake up Vivian and Matt and you go outside to kill whatever's causing problems." Tom grinned. "See? Simple division of labor."