TaiwoAbdulRazaq
Magnus counts his money twice before he gets out of bed. Not superstition, the count was wrong once, in his favor, and he's still paying for it.
Aegis has stood behind one wall for seven hundred years, and every eighteen-year-old is graded and sorted to keep it standing. Family sons get postings that matter. Magnus gets nothing, no ability, no Family, a D-rank talent, except one thing no examiner can grade: watch a man fight for a few seconds, and he can call the exact move that man reaches for when he's tired.
He can read a fight before his body is ready to answer it.
He chooses the City Sentinel Force, the only place that will pay him to be hit by strangers he's never met, because it's the one tuition he can afford.
Then a masked girl the city calls the Phantom decides he's worth watching. She calls herself Diana to him and no one else.
She takes him to a courtyard held by retired soldiers of the Infernal Legion, men who've carried his exact rank for forty years in the worst posting Aegis has.
They beat him in nine seconds. They won't train him. What they tell him instead is harder to hear:- his reading is the best they've seen in decades, but his body is half a beat behind it, and rank was never the stat.
Back in the Sentinel Force he reports something that shouldn't exist, exactly the way he was trained to, and finds out doing it right is the fastest way to become a target.
The order to remove him is already signed by the time he hears about it.
He runs where the warrant can't follow, outside the wall, on a convoy nobody volunteers for, carrying a dead boy's name.
Somewhere past that wall is a fortress, and inside it, a stone that hasn't answered a single hand in seven hundred years.
It's about to answer his.