Anyone who said that being an educator was a lower calling than being a Guardsman in front of Andrel Wujing, Dean of Cloudscraper Academy and one of the leading figures of the international anti-Kaiju operation known as the Goliath Guard, would very quickly find his walking stick leaving dents in their skull.

  Students were just as dangerous as Kaijus and much harder to pacify. Politics was a battlefield that made him long for the most bloody parts of the Kaiju Coast. And paperwork was his own personal Monster King, one that never died.

  And yet Dean Wujing persisted. He had been fighting this fight for more than forty years and held his current office for half of that. At the ripe old age of forty-two, he'd retired from the front lines to nurture the brightest young minds of the next generation . . as well as the endless deluge of useless brats he had to sort them from. He was now well into his eighties, not that he felt it.

  After all, he had peaked at Level 97, just a hair short of the legendary triple digits.

  But his level didn't matter. It was just a number. He had years left yet before his vitality ran dry. His body was fit and spry, if a bit wrinkled. His mind was as sharp as ever.

  It was his purpose, his calling even, to be the whetstone that sharpened the blades which would defend the future. The world would spin on, safeguarded by the best and brightest of the young men and women at Cloudscraper, the children who trusted him and his colleagues, his friends, to equip them with everything they would need to keep up the neverending fight that let civilisation carry on.

  He could see from the window of his chambers at the top of the staff housing building that the ceremony was beginning. The three cohorts of students were assembling in crowds across the four fields that surrounded the main stage building, each student at the centre of a marked area large enough to accomodate an Armour Core at size five.

  The reason for this, of course, was that all students were expected to attend the opening ceremony with their Armour Cores running. It wasn't merely ceremonial, but also a test; who among the cohort had the Mana reserves, or the foresight to bring Mana potions that they would need to endure the ceremony, and who would lose their armour midway through the speech?

  It was time to go.

  The Dean stepped off the balcony and into mid-air, calling on his Armour as he went.

  There was no transition, no transformation. His mastery was such that great copper wings were catching him before he'd even begun to fall.

  The crest on his helmet tasted the sky and metallic pinions spread to a wingspan of eighty feet. Fine, dextrous fingers flexed, relishing the wind. Golden clouds cascaded around his lower body, forming ribbons that rained dust on the ground below. The Angel of Sand shone in the morning sun, swooping across the distance in a scant few seconds and landing in the centre of the stage.

  Wujing had no need of a microphone. Armour Cores had the inherent function of relaying words to others nearby. So he spread his arms wide, turning to face the two fields that contained the largest cohort, those in their first year of training, who hadn't had the weaklings drummed out yet. He was satisfied to see that the faculty had done their job; every student was standing in the centre of one of the large spaces.

  "All you who would stand before me and call yourselves Goliaths; prove it. Show me your helmets. Show me your weapons. Show me the tools you will use to defend this land!"

  The fields around him erupted with lights of every colour.

  Dean Wujing couldn't help but smile as he looked out at the field of first-cohort Armour Cores through the eyes of his Angel of Sand. His mind, enhanced by his powerful Statistic scores, drunk in the details of each of the dozens of massive projections. Over the years, he'd learned to divide them into what he considered four informal categories.

  More than a quarter of the projections were near-identical copies of each other, differentiated only by the colour of their users' aura. He counted fifty-one of the Moonlight Claws this year, and half of them were also equipped with the Huntress' Embrace. Every year he lamented what the culture of the City of Roses was doing to generation after generation of youngsters.

  Secondly were the other noble scions, sent to Cloudscraper Academy for the prestige of having graduated as technically-just-barely members of the Goliath Guard. They would go back to their safe, quiet cities with some fancy tricks to show off and expensive equipment paid for by their parents. These were easy to pick out from the crowd, as their Armour Cores were unique but shared the trappings of gaudiness. Embossed family crests on their breast or shield, capes hanging from shoulders or waists, spikes evoking crowns on their brows and gratuitous amounts of weaponry - did that one have six ornamental sword scabbards hanging from his hips? When Sword Cores didn't even need scabbards? How ridiculously egregious.

  The third group were the locals, the ones who would go on to become the rank and file of the Goliath Guard. They would only be at Cloudscraper for a single year, rather than the full course of three years, and were the only one of his four groups who were truly segregated from the rest. They'd signed up to do a few years of guard duty in exchange for training, equipment and a pension before retiring to whatever life their parents had left them. It was the same at the lesser schools scattered around the Kaiju Coast; they always needed more guards, competence be damned. All their equipment was the same, bog-standard and basic Amber Sentinels, and he knew that most of them would never use anything better than the cheap lab-grown Cores.

  The Amber Sentinels were fodder who prayed to go their whole lives without ever seeing a real fight. Wujing hated enabling that system, but he understood its necessity. There just weren't enough people who were truly willing to dedicate their lives to defending the civilised lands.

  And lastly, he had the promising youngsters gathered from across the Kaiju Coast, each recognised as diamonds in the rough and sent here by some wealthy patron. These bore eclectic arrays of armour and weaponry, and always captivated his interest. These were the self-taught geniuses, or the apprentices of some esoteric frontier fighting style. These were the ones truly worth watching, the next generation of heroes. Perhaps he might find his own successor among this rainbow-coloured crowd.

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  He could see an orange mass of flowing robes woven into the shape of a man, adorned with a samurai helmet and raising a katana in the air. Nearby was a bulky tank of an Armour Core, with a huge visor and hexagonal holes in a pattern covering its body.

  A slim and spindly figure was partly obscured by the veils hanging from its wide-brimmed hat, standing in the shadow of a golden knight that brandished an orange lance. A lithe figure the colour of bone stood at rest nearby, with one arm extended to support an eagle perching on its shoulder.

  His eye was drawn to figure adorned in blinding colours, their body all stretched and curved like billowing canvas around a comically oversized jester mask. And next to that, there was . . was that a Black Knight Core?

  Dean Wujing took a second to stifle his surprise, relieved that no one could see his shock behind Angel of Sand's clouded visage. That was rare. Most people didn't dare to wear armour patterned after the Black Traitor. That had to be an heirloom, passed down out on the frontier, a Armour Cores used by some maverick who'd grown so proficient with it that they'd rather bear the Traitor's shame on their shoulders than retrain with some other Armour Cores. Fascinating. He could only imagine the bloody history of that Armour Core. He would be watching that one with interest.

  He wondered which of these was the Stranded girl that the faeries had sent him. Wherever she was, he hoped she wasn't too overwhelmed by all this.

  He cleared his mind of the distractions. The moment of reflection and assessing the newcomers had lasted only a couple of seconds, and it was time for his speech.

  "Welcome, one and all," His voice was broadcast across the field by the magic circle carved into the central podium, projected directly into a hundred helmets.

  At the back of the first-year cohort, there was a faint groan that only one girl heard. "What is that? It's as though someone else speaks using my tongue! I detest it!"

  "Nocty, keep it down, someone might hear you!"

  Oblivious to the discomfort he was causing a certain ghost, Wujing continued. "I see many familiar faces, and just as many new ones. But that does not matter," he insisted.

  "Whether you are part of our esteemed faculty or a student. Whether on the verge of graduation or a fresh-faced recruit. You are the swords and shields of civilisation. You are the armour that protects those who cannot protect themselves. Stand tall, and stand proud. For we, each and every one of us who dares to wear an Armour Core, are the descendants, the inheritors, of those who slew the first Monster King, and we will be the ones to slay the next Monster King!"

  His words precipitated an outpouring of cheers, hundreds of boots stomping and weapons shaking the air.

  Dean Wujing weathered the noise impassively, waiting for it to die down before he continued.

  "There is a story, about Nicholas the Red. When his vitality was exhausted, and he could no longer muster the strength to stand from his bed, someone asked him a question,"

  Inside the Black Knight, Mikayla felt Nocturnus sharply inhale. She wasn't surprised that he was eager to hear the words of his long-dead comrade. He had to bitterly regret not being there with the rest of the Five Heroes at the end of their lives.

  "They said to him, if you could have your time again, what would you do differently? What do you regret? Do you feel your legacy was one to be proud of?"

  Wujing paused for effect. "He said that he felt it was too soon for him to die. He said that his one and only regret was that he wasn't able to save the world with his own two hands. That he had no choice but to entrust the Kaiju Collapse, the crisis that continues to this day, to those who would follow after him,"

  Nocturnus rumbled. "That's just like Nicholas. Always trying to support the whole world with his own two hands,"

  "And yet, he could not be more proud of what he left behind," Wujing continued, "because even though he failed in his self-appointed mission, he created the Goliath Guard. He created us. And he had the utmost faith that someday, no matter how long it took, we would fulfil his life's mission,"

  "He sounds like a great guy," Mikayla quietly mused.

  "He was the greatest," Nocturnus' voice was tinged with pain and guilt.

  "These were the fervent wishes of the Goliath Guard's founder, our eternal leader who rests contentedly in death because we, all of us, are his legacy. Remember this. Whether you have come here from the City of Roses, the lands of Guili, the Kaiju Coast, or perhaps further away than we can imagine, it does not matter,"

  Mikayla winced. "Please don't out me, please don't out me!"

  "I thought we were making no secret of your Stranded status?" Nocturnus questioned.

  "Doesn't mean I want that to be the first thing that the whole school knows about me!"

  Oblivious to Mikayla's distress, Wujing continued. "You are here, and that means that you have chosen to shoulder the responsibility of protecting this world and its people. And I congratulate for that, because there is no higher calling than defending the place we call home. At the same time, I must ask - nay, demand - that you take your studies seriously. We are Cloudscraper Academy, and you will find no better school of monster hunters anywhere in the world. That is a lofty reputation to live up to, but I am certain that all of you can find it within yourselves to find new and greater heights than those achieved by any who came before you,"

  He surveyed the crowd of students once again, noting that an unlucky few had been unable to hold their Armour Cores for the duration of his speech. Their teachers would have made note of them, but he remembered their faces anyway. Overall, it was a much lower proportion of the new student body than usual that had failed this little test. That was good. Perhaps this year's cohort really would be something special.

  "That is all. Go now to your first class of the year. I look forward to seeing the achievements that each and every one of you will produce,"