
by Nikki D
Twelve years ago a sixteen-year-old student walked through the Temple of Ryss at night. Twelve guards. One cut each. He put the Viceroy on one knee, never spoke a word, and was gone before the second watch arrived. By morning they were striking his name from the records. The name was Ren. Hiro was never supposed to matter. A foundling from the cargo docks, raised in the Temple by the same Viceroy, brought up on archive scrolls and other people's aphorisms. Today is the examination — the one day he has to prove he wasn't a mistake. He puts his hands on the sword, reaches down into the planet's living current, and lights three dobas at once. The Order has seen that exactly once before. Nobody tells him what it means. He gets a School — Seirin, the green path — two comrades named Kai and Mick, and a mentor with reasons he doesn't share. Everyone on Ryss says Ren went mad. Hiro, alone by a fire with three empty slits in his own hilt, counts what he knows — twelve men, twelve clean cuts, not one wasted — and stops believing it. What this is: - Swordsmanship that runs on Senshi — the planet's living energy, drawn up through the body into Orel steel through the dobas cut in the hilt. No chants, no status screens, no menus. The "System" in the title is a star system: one sun, five planets, and a humanity living on them on terms it never set.- Progression you can count. A student fills one doba. Not every master fills six. Every one costs something, and when a blade is asked for more than the man holding it has, it goes to glass in his hands.- A mystery that starts with the official story and a boy who doesn't fit it: what actually happened that night, and why someone who never met Ren keeps ending up where Ren stood.- More than one set of eyes. Most of the book is Hiro's. Some of it belongs to the people deciding what to do with him — and, in time, to Ren.- Dark and adult. Graphic violence, profanity. Nobody in this story is safe because they're young. On the AI-assisted tag: the story is mine — plot, world, characters, every fight. English isn't my first language; I write in Russian and use AI to translate and edit. That's what the tag is for.
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