Chapter 174: 174: Academy Life Starts XXXI

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Back in the disposal room, they ate a quick breakfast — mess hall bread, a ladle of thick morning stew, and two apples they saved for later. Fizz tried to steal half of John’s apple, failed, and declared that not stealing made it taste better anyway.

They opened the storage door and went back to work.

What had felt like a mountain the night before felt like a long hill now. Crates that had loomed became items. Labels that had been threats became lists. John ran the void-mill on a steady cycle — feed, grind, pause, breathe — the egg humming faintly against his sternum between rounds like a small drum in a far room.

[System: Hatch Progress: 18% → 20% → 22% → 24%. Mana 58% → 46% → 39% → 35%.]

Fizz kept the ledger like a tiny tyrant. He wrote real words for once. He added little drawings of a happy egg in the margins and then crossed them out because the ledger felt like it would frown. He sang two new songs, both short, both loud.

March of the Mighty Mop-

Left, right, left, right, push,

Mop makes rivers, mop says shush.

Dirt says "later," mop says "now,"

Mop is queen, we take a bow.

And made another song.

Lullaby for a Hungry Rock-

Eat, small stone, eat slow and strong,

The world is rude, but you belong.

Sleep between the bite and sip,

Wake as something life can’t tip.

By noon, the storage room was showing signs of empty. By midafternoon, it was almost empty. By the start of dusk, John closed the void, set down the last of the "MISC." bundles with a grunt, and wrote a neat line:

Storage: cleared. Bin scrub begun.

— John, Fizz

They scrubbed the storage floor with quick strokes, not for show, just to erase the worst of the old spills. Fizz blew the place dry with a patient, warm breeze and then drew a tiny, almost invisible crown in the dust on the door jamb and then wiped it away because crowns make wardens sneeze.

[System: Hatch Progress: 27%. Mana 41%.]

John leaned against the frame and let his head rest for a half breath. His hands shook the way hands do when work has been honest.

Fizz floated up, tapped his cheek with two soft paws. "One more feed," he said. "Then we close our hole and open our bucket."

John checked the well. He felt the edge. He nodded.

He opened the void one last time that day — a small mouth over a neat line of sweepings. The egg drank. The numbers moved.

[System: Hatch Progress: 27% → 29%. Mana 36%.]

"Done," John said. He sealed the mouth with the same slow care he would use to put a lid on a jar that held bees. The room felt ordinary again, which was a kind of victory.

"Night," Fizz said, suddenly formal. "We keep the door and beat the floor."

John lit the lamps, signed the night ledger line, and set his back to the long job. The brush bit. The water ran. The air blew. The floor began to remember it was a floor not the gusts’ dustbin.

Midway through Section Five, the door knocked again. A different knock. Knuckles that knew their business.

"Slip," John said, already reaching for the book.

A square of stamped card slid under the door. "Two third-years," a voice said in a bored tone. "Disposal drop. One cart of boar bones from Practical Defense. Instructor mark is on the back."

John slid the card up with the brush tip. The mark was real. He unbarred the smaller hatch door — the one made for carts — and opened it just enough. Two boys he had never seen before oiled a handcart through with the careful speed of students who have been told clearly what happens if they break things in the wrong room.

"Back wall," John said. "Row Twenty. We’ll process before dawn."

They nodded, placed the bones, and left without comment. Fizz signed the ledger with suspiciously good handwriting. "No one will say we ate inventory," he whispered. "We will say: we ate with permission."

The night lengthened. Work took it. The brushes wore down; the quartermaster would get two tired heads in the morning and give them two bristly replacements without praise. The egg sat warm. The tether hummed like a string under a finger. John kept his well above the red line and refused the urge to push when "one more feed" whispered to him like an impatient friend.

At the darkest hour, when the lamps have to remind themselves they are brave, the door opened again. Warden Lutch. She did not say hello. She looked at the floor. Then at the drain. Then at the hooks. She smelled the air for lies and found none.

"Ledger," she said.

Fizz presented it like a butler presenting a sword on a cushion. She read quickly, one brow lifting half a scale at "MISC.—unknown old bile — processed." She set the book down and looked at John.

"You will make it in time," she said. It was not a question.

"We will," John said.

"Do not get clever," she added. "Clever breaks brooms. Finish what you started. Sleep in pieces only. No whole nights."

John nodded. "Yes."

She left. The click sounded approving.

A little before dawn, John and Fizz stood by the door and listened to the quiet. The room did not breathe easier yet. It would need another night. Two. Then it would.

Fizz leaned his head against John’s arm. "You did good," he said into the cloth.

"We did," John said.

Fizz’s ears flicked. "We are going to make the warden blink," he whispered. "She will try not to. But she will. And I will see it. And I will not say anything. But I will think very loudly about her funny face."

John’s mouth made that small, private smile he saved for Fizz’s best jokes. He set the bar on the door and turned the lantern down.

"Sleep," he said.

They climbed the steps as the first bell rolled, low and certain, across the campus. The sky was the color of a clean bucket. The cat on the wall did not ask for tribute this time; it nodded as if to say: you two are finally doing something respectable with your lives.

Back in the dorm, John washed his hands with soap that did not bite and wrapped the egg in a clean cloth before setting it back in his pocket. Fizz fell face-first into the pillow and said a word that was probably supposed to be "nap" and came out "map." Ray wasn’t present in the room.

John lay down, closed his eyes, and let the line in his chest go quiet without slack. The last thing he felt before sleep took him was the faint pulse against his sternum.

[System: Hatch Progress: 29%. Mana sheath is steady. Recommended feed in 8 hours.]

The egg kept his feed. It was eating from the void. There isn’t much left. All the energy from the beast’s parts had been eaten by it.

The disposal room far behind them held its silence. Morning climbed the walls. "Later" had been moved again, and this time it had a ledger line and a clean square to prove it.