First Blood
The alarm never gets the chance to ring. I'm already awake at 4:47, thirteen minutes before it would have gone off, lying in the dark and staring at the ceiling the way I do every morning, waiting for my body to remember it belongs to someone with a schedule to keep.
Ironpoint Academy sleeps around me. The dormitory hallway outside my door is silent except for the hum of the radiator and the occasional creak of old pipes settling into the cold. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed before my mind has fully caught up with the decision, because hesitation is a habit I trained out of myself years ago. My father used to say that champions don't deliberate. They act, and the acting becomes the deliberation.
I dress in the dark—compression shirt, joggers, the academy's crimson half-zip with IRONPOINT stitched across the chest in gold thread that's started to fray at the edges from years of washing. Small imperfections nobody but me would notice. I notice everything about myself. That's the job.
The gym is two floors down and across the courtyard, and the walk there is my favorite part of the day, though *favorite* feels like the wrong word for something that carries so little joy…
