Chapter 5: The First Blood (1)

The forest swallowed them whole.

One thousand children scattered across the white landscape like ink drops bleeding into snow, and Lien watched from his elevated position on the rocky outcrop as the weak began dying almost immediately. A boy stumbled into a concealed ravine thirty meters to his left. Two girls fought over a fallen branch, trading blows until one stopped moving. The northern wind carried their screams like prayers to gods who had never answered.

Lien counted the ways they would fail. Hypothermia. Falls. Dehydration. The violence of stronger orphans claiming territory and resources. By nightfall, one hundred and fifty would be corpses frozen into the landscape, their bodies left as markers for next year's intake.

He had seen this exact pattern play out six times before.

From his vantage point, he could track the major clusters. Elara moved with a group of seven toward the frozen stream that cut through the eastern sector. She gestured as she walked, her lips moving in what he recognized as tactical suggestions—share body heat, search for pine needles to burn, establish a defensive perimeter. The leadership instinct that had made her valuable in Loop 2, before she bled out in his arms with a smile that thanked him for trying.

Lien felt nothing looking at her now. Six deaths had burned that capacity away.

Vrix gathered his followers near a stand of dead trees in the western sector. Twelve children orbited him like moons around a planet, drawn to his natural dominance. He pointed and they moved. He struck and they flinched. The prodigy who would become a General in three of Lien's previous loops, hunting him across battlefields with the single-minded focus of a predator who had found worthy prey.

In this loop, Vrix would be useful. Then expendable.

Sia sat motionless against a snowbank in the southern sector, already shaking from cold. Her lips moved in what might have been prayer or the first stages of hypothermia-induced delirium. She would be dead within two hours if left alone. Had been dead within two hours in five previous loops, a nameless corpse he had stepped over without thought.

But this loop, she had positioned herself by that window. This loop, she was an anomaly worth investigating.

Lien descended from the outcrop and began moving through the forest with the supernatural silence of seven lifetimes' training. His nine-year-old body executed infiltration techniques perfectly—weight distribution that left no tracks, breathing patterns that produced no visible vapor, movements timed to the wind's rhythm to mask sound. The muscle memory was flawless even if the frame was inadequate.

He shadowed Elara's group from a distance of forty meters, close enough to intervene if necessary, far enough to maintain deniability. They reached the frozen stream and paused to debate crossing points. Elara suggested following the bank to find a narrow section. A larger boy argued for crossing immediately. The discussion dissolved into shouting.

Standard. Predictable. Not his concern.

Then Vrix's gang emerged from the treeline upstream.

Lien stopped moving. He watched Vrix position his twelve followers in a semicircle that cut off retreat routes. Tactical competence that confirmed his natural instinct for violence. The prodigy approached Elara's group with the swagger of someone who had never lost a fight, his breath steaming in the cold air.

"This is our territory." Vrix's voice carried across the frozen stream. "You want to pass, you pay the toll."

Elara stepped forward. "There are no territories. The instructors said—"

"The instructors aren't here." Vrix smiled. "Your coats. Now."

Lien calculated vectors. Seven children in Elara's group, twelve in Vrix's, numerical advantage to the aggressor. Elara had no combat training. Her group would surrender or scatter. Natural selection would proceed as designed.

His feet did not move.

Vrix's lieutenant grabbed Elara's arm and began stripping her coat. She struggled. Two other children tried to intervene and were beaten back by Vrix's followers with practiced efficiency. The sounds of impact—fist on flesh, body on frozen ground—echoed through the trees.

Lien's hands flexed. Muscle memory cycling through blade grips he had not consciously recalled.

Elara screamed as the lieutenant twisted her arm behind her back. The coat came off. She fell to her knees in the snow wearing only the thin prison shift all orphans received.

Forty meters away, Lien watched a girl he had held while she died in Loop 2, promising her it would be different next time.

His body moved.

The decision happened somewhere below conscious thought, in the part of him that seven lifetimes had carved into permanent reflex. One moment he stood concealed in the treeline. The next he crossed forty meters of open ground in complete silence, his child's legs covering distance with efficiency that defied their size.