Compatible. The word kept buzzing in Brando's mind like an annoying insect. Compatible with what, exactly? Sitting on a bench positioned about a hundred meters from Office 117, he petted Rusty's fur while staring at the ceiling.

  "Compatible," he murmured without seeking an answer. Rusty, curled at his feet, lifted his head emitting a low sound, almost worried. Right after, Brando sighed in a truly annoyed manner, then stood up and began pacing back and forth in the room.

  "I'm tired of all this," he said to Rusty, who followed him with all three eyes. "Since I set foot in this Academy, it's been a constant 'do this,' 'watch out for that,' 'don't trust him.' First Esposito who hates me to death, then Bianca with her warnings, Ripa, now even the Protector telling me who or what to distrust!"

  Rusty barked in response, as if he perfectly understood his frustration.

  "And the best part is that everyone seems to know something about me that I don't," Brando continued, feeling anger building. "Karanti? What does that even mean? I feel like a book that everyone's read except me, and I'm the protagonist."

  A beep from his KryoWatch interrupted his thoughts. A message from Giordano:

  "Meet you down at the entrance in 5 minutes?" Brando quickly typed an affirmative response.

  Giordano was leaning against a column in the main hall with his usual carefree air. When he saw Brando, he straightened with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

  "Hey, you look like someone who just found out caffeine's been banned."

  "Funny," Brando replied, glancing around to make sure no one was watching them. "We need to talk." Giordano nodded and they went for a walk.

  They headed toward some gardens just outside the Academy, a place where students rarely gathered. Rusty clearly followed them, keeping a few steps away and standing guard like an attentive sentinel.

  "So, what happened in Office 117?" Giordano asked as soon as they were far enough from prying ears. "Did they give you the third degree? Threaten you? Offer you ice cubes?"

  "De Luca was there," Brando replied curtly.

  Giordano stopped dead in his tracks, his smile morphing into a fully alarmed expression. "What?! The Protector?!"

  "In the flesh," Brando confirmed. "And he wasn't there by chance. He was there for me, specifically."

  "Fuck," Giordano murmured. "What did he want? Tell me everything, don't skip even a comma."

  Brando recounted the entire conversation: Ferretti's nervous behavior, the way De Luca had dismissed the woman, and especially the strange words about compatibility and Karanti.

  "He showed me a vial with a liquid that looked like my Predator Ice," Brando concluded. "He said it's the same thing that flows in Bianca's veins, but that she's 'unstable' while I'm 'compatible.' And then he warned me not to trust 'that thing' and what it whispers to me."

  Giordano looked genuinely shaken. "What thing? The Artifact? And compatible with what, exactly?"

  "I think he was referring to the entity I encountered in the Daedalus," Brando replied, realizing he'd never told Giordano that detail. "There's something I haven't told you. In Jason's Chamber, a presence appeared. A shadow with a red eye, the same thing I saw in the Artifact. It called me Karanti and said things that didn't make sense, talking about a seal and me as its herald. And now De Luca uses the same name."

  "This makes our library excursion even more urgent," Giordano said, lowering his voice. "We need to find out what all this means."

  "What if it's a trap?" Brando asked. "De Luca might expect us to do something like this after his warning."

  "It could also be a test," Giordano suggested. "To see how you react. Either way, we don't have much choice, do we? Unless you want to keep being manipulated like a pawn."

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Brando sighed. "But we need to be very careful."

  "Always," Giordano smiled, regaining some of his spirit. "Meanwhile, though, we have a lesson with the ice cube devourer."

  Brando looked at his KryoWatch. "Shit, it's almost time. Let's go."

  The Cryokinesis classroom was the same as always, but the atmosphere was charged with anticipation. No one knew what to expect from the new instructor.

  The door opened one minute late. And here she was: the cadence of those steps was so measured it seemed like a metronome, and the sound of her heels marked the perfect rhythm of a military march. She carried a folder under her arm and a small silver thermal bag gripped in her left hand.

  "Good morning, class," she said with a tense voice, positioning herself exactly at the center of the teacher's desk. "I am Captain Aurora Ferretti, badge number AF-7842-B, Cold Soldiers Operative section, transferred to the educational department under ordinance 583-J."

  She cleared her throat, opening the thermal bag to extract an ice cube that she put in her mouth with a movement that seemed like a nervous tic.

  Crunch. Crunch.

  "You're well aware that Lieutenant Esposito has been temporarily assigned to other duties," she continued, pronouncing every syllable with perfect enunciation. "I have received detailed instructions about the class curriculum, which will proceed according to the directives established by the Cryogenic Teaching Protocol."

  She extracted from the folder a bundle of papers with some slightly crooked pages.

  "I will proceed to take roll," she announced, crunching another ice cube when the silence in the classroom extended beyond a few seconds.

  For the next few minutes, she called each name checking a list, making a small checkmark with a blue pen. Occasionally, her eyes would rise abruptly, as if she'd heard a noise only she could perceive, only to return immediately to the list.

  "Now," she said after completing roll call, "we'll move on to today's topic." Crunch. "We'll focus on geometric precision in cryogenic materialization."

  She extracted from the bag she'd brought a series of metal molds, arranging them on the desk with millimeter precision.

  "Precision," she continued, finding the thread of her discourse, "is essential when you materialize ice. For example, a cube with irregular angles can fracture more easily under pressure. I've seen Bearers lose fingers because their ice broke at the wrong moment. During a mission outside the Dome, precision can make the difference between life and death."

  Marco Ruocco raised his hand with the expression of someone used to questioning everything. "With all due respect, Captain, that seems like an exaggeration. Lieutenant Esposito always taught us that power is more important than form. Strong but imprecise ice is better than weak but perfect."

  Silence fell over the classroom. Students held their breath, waiting for Ferretti's reaction. For a moment, Captain Ferretti's eyes seemed to cloud over, as if she were looking at something very distant. Then she set down the ice cube she was about to eat on the desk and unbuttoned her left cuff. With a slow but decisive movement, she rolled up her sleeve, revealing her forearm.

  The students collectively held their breath. From the middle of her forearm to her wrist, the skin was a network of shiny, whitish scars, as if the limb had been reassembled after being shattered.

  "You're Ruocco, right? In 2086, I was [Blue Two] and I thought exactly like you. I believed that only power mattered for us Bearers." Ferretti said with a suddenly firm and detached voice. She then extracted an ice cube that this time she didn't put in her mouth, but held between her fingers. "We had spotted a level two Glacial half a kilometer from the barrier."

  The cube between her fingers began to shape itself, transforming into a perfect and frightening miniature of an aberration of a bear standing on its hind legs, with details so precise you could even see the fangs.

  "Since I relied on strength, I remember creating an ice shield to parry a swipe. I made it as solid as possible, to the point of being completely unbalanced toward resistance, without looking at precision. The problem is that our ice isn't like normal ice, it's charged with cryogenic energy. When built with precision, this energy distributes evenly. But in imprecise points? It accumulates like electricity in a damaged cable. In any case, my shield's strength wasn't sufficient to parry the swipe and when it broke, those points released all that energy instantly and it exploded like a grenade. The fragments were overcharged with cryogenic energy, powerful enough to penetrate even the reinforced skin of a Blue Stage Bearer like me. I found myself with twelve centimeters of exposed bone, all because I thought strength was more important than precision."

  The ice statue she had created disintegrated with a movement of her fingers, transforming into shards that piled on the table.

  "I only survived because my partner was a [Green Three] and had the strength to take it out." She lowered her sleeve, rebuttoning the cuff. "He died anyway three months later during another mission. His ice was perfect but he had the misfortune of encountering a Glacial far stronger than him."

  The class remained in absolute silence. Even Marco Ruocco seemed to have lost his usual arrogance.

  "I don't teach you precision to follow protocol, Ruocco," Ferretti concluded. "I teach you precision because out there, in the real world, even a millimeter wrong can be the difference between coming home or ending up as a statistic in a report."

  She took another ice cube, this time putting it in her mouth with a movement identical to the previous one.

  Crunch. Crunch.