It had been seven years since Counselor Leptimus had been to the Illustrious Torus. But now as his spacecraft zoomed in closer to the large circular launchpad, and the glistening metallic megastructure of the Academy loomed in front of him, he recollected the first time he had arrived at the Academy.

The enrollment in the Illustrious Academy had been the single biggest pivotal point in his life. He had come from a modest background. His father had held a clerical position in a bank. During his tenure, as part of the galactic consolidation, all financial institutions had been assimilated under the umbrella of the organization that eventually became the Magisterium. Thankfully, he had survived the numerous rounds of layoffs that had followed, and they were never left wanting for essentials, yet neither their wealth nor their social standing had been enviable by any standards.

Decades later, he had retired from the same institution as his father, only their designations had differed by three hundred and seventy-four levels. When his father had retired, five of his close friends had come together and offered him token gifts. When Leptimus had retired, it had been a lavish ceremony attended by five hundred plus people.

And the glorious institution in front of him was responsible for the difference.

"Never ceases to amaze you, does it?"

Leptimus turned towards the source of the voice. "No, it never does," he smiled at the lanky young person who approached him. There was a hint of intelligence in those wide brown eyes, but the wide carefree smile and tangle of hair on their head clearly marked them as someone who was quite early in their journey into the elite society of Irvania.

Their starry eyes were glued to the hull of the torus, shining bright in the afternoon sunlight. In their excited gaze, Leptimus saw the young student he had been decades ago.

"You excited about your upcoming dissertation?" He asked.

"Partly. Also, nervous. Can’t help double-checking and triple-checking the calculations."

"Of course. Any mistake can mean the difference between a glowing grade and disqualification."

Leptimus assumed that they were a student of the academy, and Eli did nothing to correct him.

Truth was, Eli had wanted to get into the Academy. That had been their dream - to infiltrate the Illustrious Torus with Kiri. And they had studied hard for five years. But one mistake in their calculations in the entrance exam had squandered their dreams. Had changed the path of their life.

They had missed a small error in the first stage of a ten-step workflow. The skew it had introduced was too small to get noticed in the first few phases, but because the derived result was used in an exponentiation at a later stage, it introduced a drastic deviation in the final outcome. Eli had frantically searched why the results were way out of bounds after seeing the final result. They worked their way backwards from the last stage. Before they could reach the initial steps, cross verifying every calculation in between, they had run out of time. Kiri had gotten in, Eli had not. And now they didn’t know if their childhood crush was even alive.

They had led dangerous lives. They knew that when they had signed up for the Helicon insurgency. They were aware that their lives would be fraught with danger. But in the years they had spent in the camp, isolated in their quarters, studying for the insanely difficult entrance exams day in and day out, they had developed a close bond. They had wondered if, alongside their shared dream for justice for Helicon, they could carve out a slice of happiness for themselves. That was a dream Eli still believed in. And if to get to that dream they would need to clear their path through treachery, deceit or gunfire - they didn’t care.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The wearable they had strapped around their wrist glowed faintly. The device had managed to capture the elderly gentleman’s soul signature. It had been a close call. The device Eli had originally built to capture soul signatures had been too bulky and too noticeable to sneak into the academy. Their original plan had been to sell the design to a Kaiyaathian Vizier and use the money to fabricate something more refined. But that plan had backfired.

Apparently, while they were trying out the device in a covert mission, some random prisoner had managed to get hold of it and escaped, while also assassinating the highest leader of their religious order. The fallout from the chaos had been so great that the Vizier Eli had been in touch with had been imprisoned, his authority revoked and all his property confiscated.

Cutting their losses, Eli had purged the fake identity they had been using so as to not get embroiled into a conspiracy against the Kaiyaathian crown. That was another motive for them to venture into the Illustrious Torus. The Kaiyaathian elite force - the Fangshahat, would not dare venture into the most secure academic establishment of Irvania.

But that still left them without a means to enter the institution themselves. Their previous designs were effective, but could not easily be camouflaged. But then, they had gotten lucky with Flavia. The deal they had brokered with her enabled them to fabricate a sleeker device which could be masked as a standard issue wearable.

By the time the passenger craft docked onto the Academy’s landing station, a sophisticated intercepting software running in their device had established an MITM (Man-in-the-middle) proxy, linking itself with Leptimus’s own device, inheriting its security context and subverting its communications.

Concluding the casual exchange, Eli followed behind the elderly man, completely unaware of his status. Once Leptimus passed through the automated security checks, Eli closely stepped after him. With their hack tricking the sensors into ignoring Eli’s own soul signature completely, and tagging their device as an extension of the one that Leptimus carried, they had no trouble getting in.

Once out into the wide elliptical pad, Eli kept their gaze steady and followed the crowd through the connecting tunnel.

The landing pad led to a large connecting plaza that served as a junction point. The wide area was enveloped in a large transparent dome, a seamless composition of transparent triangular tiles that glimmered in the late afternoon light. As the commuters and travelers wandered beneath it, their reflections shimmered like ghostly apparitions on its surface.

The plaza led to a platform, beyond which was the tubeline through which the famed levitating train of the Illustrious Torus continuously orbited the planet.

Though Eli had no love for the Irvanian administration, it was hard for even them to not be awed by the elegance of the technological marvel that the Illustrious Torus was. In Naasdal camps, their people had had to conserve rations for years on end. The commanders of the rebel groups had endlessly hammered out the details of the sacrifices that their people had to endure to make it possible for them to even be eligible for an attempt at the entrance exams.

Eli had to put in every ounce of effort they could muster to prevent themselves from gaping at the surroundings. Forcing themselves to appear as disinterested and bored as the other passengers, they blended in with the crowd and boarded the train. Once the train gates closed behind him, and slowly the magnetically levitated vehicle picked up momentum, they allowed themselves a brief smile. They were the second of Helicon to get into the Illustrious torus.

People often believed that to achieve great results, you had to come up with grand innovations backed by colossal plans. But often a long chain of small tricks was just as effective.