Chapter 127 - The Blood School
Ned POV
The records called it an academy.
The children called it the Blood School when they thought no master could hear them.
It hung inside a hollowed asteroid beyond Qar-Tel's outer route, hidden behind dust fields and false mining claims. Varis found it in captured supply ledgers. Not by name. Sith rarely named sins plainly in documents. He found the pattern: nutrient shipments too high for staff, sedative orders too high for beasts, replacement shackles too small for adults.
Omega read the list once.
"Children," she said.
Not question.
Sentence.
We went immediately.
The asteroid opened under us like a bad memory. Training rings cut into stone. Dormitories without windows. Ritual chambers. Medical rooms. Incinerators. A central arena where children were taught that pain was language and obedience the only grammar that kept them breathing.
"They will fight us," Varis said.
"They are children."
"Yes."
He did not soften the word. That was one of Varis's cruelties and one of his uses. He refused to make horror less functional because it offended hope.
We breached through the lower ventral dock.
Order killed the lights in three sectors. Drones crawled ahead, marking heat signatures. Acolytes followed in units now, not cleanly, but better. Lana's group moved left. Sorel took center. Teryn, still sore from his failed betrayal, guarded the rear with the grim expression of a boy discovering usefulness had survived humiliation.
The first children attacked with practice blades and real terror.
They came screaming old Sith catechisms.
Do not retreat.
Pain proves form.
Weakness feeds the worthy.
Their voices broke on the words.
I could not use the sword as I wished. That made the battle harder. Killing adults who have made choices is one kind of arithmetic. Stopping children trained to die as locks around your mercy is another.
I moved through them with open hands.
Wrist turn. Elbow pressure. Blade disabled at the hilt. Force push against the floor, not chest. A kick to the knee light enough to fold, not break. Armor taking cuts that would have opened a human body. Nanites sealed shallow slices before blood could frighten them further.
One boy leapt at my throat with a shard of red glass.
I caught him by the tunic and held him in the air.
He bit my hand hard enough to crack his own tooth on the armor.
"Good," I told him.
He froze.
"Bite masters. Not rescuers."
He began to cry and hated himself for it.
The real masters waited in the central arena.
One instructor. Four handlers. A war-breeder in surgical robes. Behind them, thirty children stood in collar lines, each collar linked to a dead switch in the instructor's hand.
"Another step," the instructor called, "and they complete their final lesson."
Omega's presence changed beside me.
Not larger.
Sharper.
Varis whispered, "The switch is not the only trigger."
"Where?"
His eyes moved over the arena, reading symbols I had not learned as quickly as I hated them. "The children have been conditioned to respond to the third line of the oath. If he speaks it, half will attack, half will seize. They believe surrender ruptures the soul."
"Break it."
Varis walked forward.
The instructor laughed. "Traitor."
Varis did not raise his blade.
He spoke instead.
Not Basic. Not the court Sith tongue. Something older, uglier, intimate as a knife under a pillow. The children went still. The instructor's face changed.
Varis continued, voice calm, elegant, merciless.
He was not comforting them.
He was taking the ritual apart from inside.
The instructor shouted the first line.
No child moved.
Second.
Lana cut one handler down before he reached a collar chain.
Third.
Silence.
The oath died in the air like a god discovering it had no believers left.
Then Omega moved.
She crossed the arena faster than the instructor's thumb.
Her blade took the hand holding the switch.
I took the instructor's voice.
Not his life. Not immediately. A controlled Force crush around the throat, enough to silence, enough to drop him, not enough to kill before the children saw that he could be lowered like any other thing.
The acolytes fought the handlers.
They tried, for the first time, to protect rather than prove.
It was messy. One child was cut. Sorel took a blade through the forearm shielding a smaller boy. Lana killed too quickly, but she killed the right people. Teryn dragged three children behind cover and looked furious that compassion had made him useful again.
When it ended, the arena smelled of blood, fear, and burnt collar wire.
Omega knelt before the child lines.
"You are not weapons," she said.
Some did not understand.
Some did and did not believe her.
The war-breeder laughed from where I had pinned him against the wall.
"They will always be weapons. That is what blood is for."
Omega stood.
I have seen planets fall with less finality.
She walked to him and asked, "How many?"
He smiled. "Enough."
She killed him.
No speech. No lesson. No satisfaction. Just an end.
Later, as Order cut the collars and the rescued children were moved to the ship, a small girl with ritual scars down her scalp looked up at me.
"Are you death?" she asked.
I almost said no.
But children deserve fewer beautiful lies than adults.
"For them," I said, looking at the dead masters. "Not for you."
"Then what are you?"
The acolytes listened. Varis listened. Omega listened most of all.
I looked at the Blood School, at the rooms where childhood had been mined like ore, at the children learning that air could exist without permission.
"I am what comes after your masters fail."
Present me knows how close that sentence stood to kingship.
At the time, I thought it mercy.
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