Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 329: The First Gauntlet (1).

The staging area was a cleared field half a mile outside Liedenstorm’s western gate, and at dawn it was cold enough that the breath of two hundred candidates hung in the air above the assembled crowd like something half-solid.

They had marched out in the dark, in groups, by garrison — a long procession through the city’s pre-dawn streets while the city itself was still mostly asleep, the only sounds the tramp of boots on cobblestone and the distant bells of the morning watch. Nero had walked between Arthur and Jacob, none of them talking, the cloth-wrapped shape of Gungnir under his arm and his rations in the pack on his back, and the city had closed behind them through the western gate and then there had been the road and then the field.

Church administrators were stationed at long trestle tables along the field’s western edge, and the candidates filed past them in an orderly way that had clearly been designed to feel more official than it was. Equipment was recorded. Rations were confirmed. Weapons were noted.

A thin administrator with ink-stained fingers looked at the cloth-wrapped spear, then at Nero, then back at the spear. "Open it."

Nero unwrapped it.

The man looked at the blunted practice weapon — the same one he had taken home from the rack weeks ago — and noted it down and waved him through. Nero wrapped it again and kept walking, and Gungnir stayed where it was, in the Mark, which had no physical presence to examine and no weight to detect and which had been holding considerably more dangerous things than one spear for considerably longer than this process had been running.

He collected his three days of rations on the other side and went to find Arthur and Jacob.

They were standing together near the field’s edge, and Jacob was eating something from a cloth he had produced from his coat, unhurriedly, in the manner of a man who had decided that the time before a seven-day survival exercise in a corrupted zone was a reasonable time for a snack. His waraxe was racked across his back, the deep amber runes along the blade dim in the early light. Arthur stood beside him with his arms folded and his longsword at his hip, watching the rest of the field with the systematic quality he brought to crowds.

"How was the equipment check?" Arthur said, when Nero reached them.

"Fine."

Arthur looked at him briefly and did not ask anything further, which was a form of the same quality that made him useful in situations that required not asking things.

Jacob offered the cloth. "Dried pork. I brought extra."

"I have rations," Nero said.

"Three days of rations for seven days," Jacob said. "Take the pork."

Nero took a piece.

They stood in the cold field and ate and watched the rest of the candidates organise themselves across the staging area, and the light came up slowly from the east and the Garden’s treeline became visible in the distance — dark against the brightening sky, irregular and dense, the outer edge of something that went a very long way in all directions before it became anything other than itself.

Nero had been inside it before.

This was different from being inside it before, in the way that most things were different in retrospect than they had been in the moment. Before, he had been moving through it alone, without a fixed endpoint, with the particular kind of focus that survival reduced everything to. Now he was standing in a field with two hundred people around him looking at the same treeline, and the treeline looked back at all of them with the same indifference it had looked at him with when it had been just him.

He thought this but did not say it, because it was not a useful thing to say.

"Seven days," Jacob said, still looking at the treeline.

"Seven days," Arthur confirmed.

A Church official called the candidates to attention from the centre of the field, and the assembled crowd resolved into something approximating order, and the official read the rules of Stage Two in a clear, carrying voice that suggested he had read them many times before and expected to read them many times again. No Relics. No team assignments — every candidate was operating individually. Church observers at the zone boundary would not intervene except in the event of a candidate attempting to leave before the seven days concluded. Points for confirmed kills, graded by specimen. A base allocation for surviving the full duration.

"Candidates who do not emerge at the designated boundary point at the conclusion of seven days will be considered to have failed to complete the stage," the official said. "The Church wishes you a productive seven days."

There was no ceremony after that. The candidates were directed toward the treeline in a long, staggered line, and they walked, and the field shrank behind them, and the Garden came forward to meet them.

At the treeline Nero stopped briefly. To his left, perhaps thirty feet away, Arthur and Jacob separated — Jacob heading north along the outer edge without looking back, Arthur angling toward a different entry point with the decisive stride of someone who had already decided where he was going. They did not say goodbye, because saying goodbye had not been discussed and because there was no particular reason to.

Nero looked at the treeline for a moment. The smell reached him before he crossed into it — that particular combination of damp earth and something underneath the damp earth, organic and complicated, the smell of a place where the normal processes of growth and decay had been running under different rules for a long time.

He stepped through.

*** 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The outer edge was quieter than he remembered, and then he understood why.

The Abomination population had been agitated before the candidates arrived — herded toward the entry points, the official had said, as though this were a logistical note and not a deliberate calibration of how dangerous the first two days would be. What that meant in practice was that the creatures normally distributed across the outer sections had been compressed and disoriented, and a compressed and disoriented population of Abominations was not quiet in the way that a settled one was quiet.