The first rays of sunlight to creep over the hills surrounding Kelsai found Albanos finishing up the night's work -- pulling the razors out of the wall, cleaning out the handholds, disarming the few booby traps the students had not been lucky enough to find, and trying the best he could to clean the blood out of the cushions he'd used to break everyone's fall. Though the exam ended promptly at midnight, he'd spent the rest of the hours before dawn cleaning up the mess he had gleefully made. It meant he was running on no sleep, but decades of a fugitive's life had hardened him to that, and it'd been well worth it anyway.
When all was said and done, there were 11 papers on Albanos's desk. Conversely, there were also 29 other students in various levels of pain, limping around the Academy and avoiding eye contact with each other. The latter was especially true of those who had spent the majority of the night lying on top of one another in unconscious heaps, which led to a bit of confusion come morning before everyone remembered what had happened.
Eleven was far better than Albanos had expected, for which he was both grateful and slightly annoyed. It meant his kids had at least some idea about what they were doing, but it also gave him more to grade. Once he began looking at their answers, though, he realized that the number of people who would make it into the class would be significantly lower than those who had just managed to turn their papers in. If nothing else, many of the tests provided a great deal of entertainment and would later be framed and hung on the office wall to serve as an example to others.
It was around lunchtime, which more often than not passed for breakfast at the academy, when the principal's assistants began tracking people down and informing them that they were to report to the steps of the main building in precisely one hour. All eleven students who had succeeded in handing something in were summoned because Albanos would not have it said that he didn't give everyone's test a good going over.
Ms. Elwhite was waiting in the doorway to collect them, and once they were all present, she led them straight out of the gates without a word. They hung an almost immediate left, off the road and into the rolling, trackless hills, and kept on in that direction for some time. Any questions about where they were going went unanswered, save for a sharp "If you don't want to be here, you can turn around and go back at any time, but I think that would disappoint Mr. K'hras a great deal." No one left.
When the afternoon was growing old, and the shadows were creeping toward early evening, they crested a rather steep hill overlooking something that was not so much a valley as a crater. Other hills had risen around it to form a nearly perfect ring, tapering steeply down into a space in the center, roughly the size of the Academy courtyard. The westernmost half of the hill-formed ring, across from them, was completely covered in forests. The whole place looked greener than most of the land around it, for that matter, which made the flatland in its midst even more curious.
The base of the deep valley was utterly barren, consisting of nothing but gray, lifeless, loose soil and rocks. Its only notable characteristics were a large ring of stones with ancient, weather-scarred pillars rising among them and a black-clad figure sitting on the prominent slab in the center of the formation. None of the students, including the fourth-years who had spent a great deal of their free time exploring the lands nearby, had any idea where they were. Even Lillith looked puzzled, which the other students never considered a good sign. After a few moments to enjoy the view, Ms. Elwhite prodded them forward, down among the hills to the bottom, made prematurely dark by the shadows of the veritable wall of trees rising straight ahead.
Albanos looked up at them thoughtfully as they entered the stone circle. He had a cigarette in one hand, and a stack of papers in the other. The remains of nearly a dozen other cigarettes were strewn about his feet, and Ms. Elwhite noticed once more that sometimes, the man could look incredibly old and worn. In fact, for a moment as they'd entered, she thought he'd looked like he was in pain, though there didn't seem to be any trace of it now. Perhaps it was just the general gloom of the place.
"Did we keep you waiting that long?" she asked, nodding at the discarded butts lying all around him.
"No...no, I smoke when I think. And I do a lot of thinking out here."
Albanos crushed the last of the roll-up he'd been working on when they arrived and began sorting the papers into eleven piles at his feet, three sheets each.
"I see they all decided to come along. That’s good. Dedication is an absolute necessity in our line of work. There is no room for half-assing anything when dealing with extremes such as life and death. You all turned in your papers; you should stick around long enough to see how you did. But I fear some of you will be turning around and leaving very soon. Consider this a field trip of sorts, a pleasant hike, although you will miss my undoubtedly fascinating speech about precisely what this place is.
"Wait, what do you mean?" Elayna interrupted. "We've come all this way, get shown something we've never seen before, and now we may not even find out what it is?! I've studied the whole history of this region in the library's records and don't recall ever reading about anything that resembled this place!"
Albanos smiled reassuringly. "Elayna, I know how much you hate not knowing something; it goes against your very nature, which is why I've put your test at the front of the line to spare you further misery. As I call your name, I will either ask you to come over here and stand by me or tell you which of my questions you got wrong and tell you to stand by Ms. Elwhite. When this is over, if you are standing by Ms. Elwhite, she will take you back to the Academy, and unless you are a fourth-year student, you may try out for this class again next year. But as for this year, only those standing by me are going any further."
He picked up the first pile, nodded approvingly, and set it on the rock beside him.
"Elayna, would you be so kind as to join me over here?" She did so, beaming the whole way. He picked up the second pile.
"And there's no sense in putting it off since it's just a paraphrased version of Elayna's exam anyway, but since all I said was you couldn't have the exact same answers, Willam, please come stand over here."
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
He did so with less beaming and considerably more whimpering. Albanos briefly wondered if he'd ever get tired of the boy's mewling and if Elayna would babysit him his whole life. He felt like there was potential there. It simply needed to be adequately refined. These were issues for another time, though. He gathered up the third stack of papers.
"Jaycen? Is there a Jaycen here?" A young man bearing the markings of a fourth-year assassin stepped forward. "I found your response to my question about whether, based on your observations, Ms. Elwhite and I were in a relationship quite interesting."
"You still owe me an apology dinner for that, by the way," interjected Ms. Elwhite, turning noticeably red even in the fading light.
"Please, I'm trying to carry out school business here," Albanos replied, flashing her a mischievous grin before returning to the now markedly uncomfortably looking Jaycen. "As I saidd you like to share your response with the class?" The student shook his head, mutely.
"Well, I would because I think it bears repeating. Let's see...ah yes, here we are. 'I think you two are probably dating, and I can't say I blame you because Ms. Elwhite certainly isn't hard on the eyes if you know what I mean.' While the latter part of your answer is certainly not inaccurate, it's also not what I was looking for. You also overestimate how much of your remarkably male view of the world I happen to share. We are not dating, and I prefer you show your teachers more respect than that. Are we clear?"
Jaycen, apparently addressing his shoes, gave a sheepish "yessir" and immediately shuffled over to stand beside Elwhite without needing to be told to do so.
"Apologize to her while you're over there. Now, who do we have next? Ah, yes. Michael. Which one of you is Michael Sartan?"
"That'd be me, sir!" said a voice that Albanos immediately classified as far too enthusiastic for this or any time of day. The sophomore assassin strode confidently forward. He was a head shorter and generally unkempt, with hair that a family of rats would be proud to call home and a scraggly beard made uneven by either exposure to flames or odd skin diseases. Albanos couldn't really be sure. It could very well have been both. He did move with the kind of purpose and lack of self-consciousness you only got from someone who had stopped paying attention to what others thought long ago. You had to give him that.
"I'm so glad you got my message, I was a little concerned that I may have overpowered the delivery system and--"
He didn't get to finish the thought. Before anyone could react, Albanos drew his crossbow and fired directly at Michael, who froze in place. The bolt lodged into a pillar behind him a split second later in a puff of chalky dust. Several hairs, previously sticking up from the top of his head, were pinned behind it. No one moved or even breathed for several moments. They were unsure what caused the outburst and feared they might inadvertently trigger one, too. Albanos eventually broke the silence.
"You did overpower it a smidge. But now, my friend, I believe we are even. Your test was fine, and I'd like to talk to you about exactly what that delivery system of yours is, as well. If you don't mind, would you come stand over here by me, please?" He did so without another word, still stunned enough not to notice Willam and Elayna sidling slowly away from him—just in case.
The rest of the tests were reviewed in much the same way, although perhaps with less excitement. Lillith's was the last, and the only thing Albanos commented on was her response to why she should be allowed into the class, which simply read, "Because you can't afford not to know what I'm up to." According to him, it was the most honest answer he'd gotten to that question. She, too, was called over to stand next to him. And that was that.
"Elayna, Willam, Michael, and Lillith may stay with me," Albanos declared, the evening's shadows deepening further every second and the brightest stars sparking to life. "I thank the rest of you for participating and look forward to seeing some of you back here next year. Ms. Elwhite will lead you all home now."
"That's it?" Jaycen asked as the rest of his group began to shuffle away dejectedly. His early public humiliation had left him stewing for a while, and he was now on the verge of boiling over. "What did any of those questions even have to do with our abilities?! They didn't even make sense!"
Six other pairs of eyes who'd been silently wondering the same thing turned to watch the exchange.
"Absolutely nothing. Your grades alone qualified you for the class in that respect." That was not the response they'd expected.
"Well then, what was the point of all this?! Or are you just as sick and insane as they say you are?"
Jaycen abruptly found himself in a ring of empty space, everyone else having gotten well away from him almost instantaneously. Albanos only smiled and began moving slowly towards him. Jaycen's hand strayed toward his dagger sheath, but his survival instincts managed to stay the blade. He was hot-tempered but far from stupid, as his grades indicated. The old assassin put a hand on his shoulder.
"Because in my class, with the things I was going to teach you, I needed a certain kind of person. If I asked you to jump off a cliff, I'd need you to be analytical enough to understand the reason immediately or at least trust me enough to do it. You would have stopped to ask why, and that will get you, or the people around you, killed. The questions I asked, and making you submit your answers in a particular manner, were tasks designed to find the people whose minds work a certain way. Outside the textbooks. Unorthodox methods of finding the most orthodox way of doing things. Maybe that makes no sense to you. That’d be why you’re going home.."
Albanos turned to walk off but stopped after a few steps.
"And it is quite possible that I am, indeed, every bit as sick and insane as you've heard,” he added over his shoulder, “which is something you should probably think about before you insult me again. Especially in this, of all places. Ms. Elwhite, get them home. And try not to be too late. It is a school night, after all."