A red iron gate marked the border between an outside and an inside, and passing it he left one large world for a smaller one. Johan let his eyes take in unfamiliar buildings, two lines of trees and lawns, several training fields in the distance, and, more importantly, a horde of teenagers all clad in the same gaudy red and green uniforms he wore himself. And it was a scenery just for his eyes because here he had perfect sight, not the glasses-enhanced one he grew up with in Outworld. In this world, both Sweden and Japan were part of a legendary elsewhere.

  Gravel shifted under his feet as he walked toward what had to be an administrative building. Or rather, crunched under his feet. Perfect sight wasn’t the only thing different. He was half a head taller and heavily muscled in a way he had no experience of from the life he left behind a year ago. This body was also at least ten years younger. Oh, and his name was Ioha, not Johan. All first names ended in a vowel. Why Ioha rather than Joha? Because that was what his status display said. Another difference from back home.

  Ioha trampled the ground under him with all the grace of a Norse giant, and eventually wound up in front of a three-story stone building that screamed of rural power. Granite stone building, because using the locally available sandstone would actually have made sense instead of importing the absurdly expensive granite that made the school about as welcoming as a high security institution for the mentally unstable. But hey, it sure looked like something from a fantasy world. It wore the attitude of an empire coupled with the finery of a dung heap. Here the lords and ladies of Spellsword Academy held court, but in contrast to the vulgar building they resided in, they themselves were supposedly the real deal and hence the reason for him being here.

  He walked up oversized stairs which fed double doors far too small to do them justice. Just as he reached the top of the stairs, a gust of wind unhooked the latch to the doors and one half of them rushed to slam shut in the face of one of his new fellow schoolmates. Ioha slid into the path of the door and felt it hammer into his shoulders.

  The young boy he had just saved backed away, arm in arm with an equally young girl.

  “Sir, are you hurt?”

  What a great hero I am! The door had indeed hit his shoulder hard enough to hurt, but with all his extra bulk in this world, it didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as back on Earth.

  “Don’t worry. I’m just happy that I was of help.” He’d pay for saving the kids with a bruise later on. Nothing big. Ioha had similar experiences back from home, but the bruises tended to get uglier there.

  The couple nodded and rushed inside.

  “What’s his problem?” Ioha heard the girl ask.

  “Knightage student,” the boy answered. “Protect the weak, you know.”

  “Isn’t that just insulting. I mean, here, of all places.”

  The conversation grew more muted as they vanished inside, and Ioha blushed. He had tried to protect the weak, after all. It was a bad habit of his. He had tried to protect the weak, who enrolled in an elite magic military close range combat academy. It was a horrible habit of his.

  He sighed, re-hooked the latch, and followed the couple through the doors.

  Inside, Ioha found himself in a reception area with dark hardwood desks spaced out for easy handling of dozens of students at a time. His ears hurt a little from the hard echoes of voices, an experience he remembered from public spaces with too many flat surfaces. Just live with it. He searched among the reception desks for a free one and headed to the closest.

  ”Ioha, outworlder,” he said to a spectacled woman in her thirties.

  She looked up, and up again. “Oh, my. You’re a sturdy one,” she said and flashed him a grin. “Put your hand on the globe!”

  He stared as a black sphere with a strangely translucent quality came floating through the air and slowed to a standstill in front of him. Magic, and a lot of people knew how to use it. Another thing that was different from home. He thrust out his hand and placed it on the ball. It felt cool to his touch.

  On the other side of the desk, the woman looked down at what he guessed was a monitor of sorts. ”Strategy and logistics. Building three.”

  He expected this. Back at home, he held a master's degree in product development with mathematical statistics as a minor. Not because he had ever been interested in it, but because it was easy, and he was very good at it.

  “Spellsword,” he said. “I’m studying to become a spellsword.” He hadn’t journeyed between worlds to become a glorified military administrator with an officer’s title.

  ”You, a cat?” the woman said and stared at him. She used the nickname born of the inhumanly acrobatic ability of a trained spellsword. “Your aptitude-reading clearly shows you have an affinity for rear guard, camp and logistics planning.”

  ”Spellsword,” Ioha repeated. One word was enough. Explaining how he fell in love with fencing a few years earlier took too much time. It still hurt how he never managed to replicate his results from competition kendo, but here, he hoped, magic would compensate for whatever made him lacking with a rapier in his hand. “It’s my dream,” Ioha admitted. A surge of heat rushed to his cheeks. Two dozen years of life experience or not, right now, he looked just like a middle school student caught in something shameful, and Ioha grudgingly accepted that the very dream of his might be better suited to someone really carrying the age of his looks. Swashbuckling fantasies weren’t for people with university degrees.

  The woman removed her glasses with two fingers and massaged the bridge of her nose with her other hand. Then she sighed. “You’re accepted to this academy, and I can’t force you to attend a program you dislike. However, spellswords must pass a test first. If you fail it, would you please consider the recommended one?”

  Ioha nodded. “If I don’t pass, I’ll attend the logistics program,” he confirmed.

  ”Good.” She smiled, wiped her glasses clean and put them back on again. “Tests start tomorrow after breakfast. If you have any questions, please direct them to the advisors in building one.”

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  ”Thank you,” he said and tried to keep his face as neutral as possible. Inwardly, he shook and shivered, but he didn’t want to show how relieved he was not to have been forced into a field not of his liking. Not of my liking, my arse. The mere thought of attending classes in the high school misconception of corporate administration, almost made him puke. They were bad enough at a graduate level.

  The admission tests weren’t worrying. Knightage and spellsword students had to pass them, and they weeded out anyone who weren’t serious about studying here. This was an elite academy, students were on average fanatically serious, and Ioha was no exception.

  The upcoming god's day was a little more worrisome. Gaining your own patron god, but then again, everyone who lived here did. A little like confirmation, back home, with the main difference that almost no one went through that one any longer. Ioha shook his head. That was a later problem.

  He left the building through the opposite doors from those he entered earlier, cut across what served as a combined school yard and marching grounds, and made his way to a wooden single-story building squeezed into the corner between two tiled five-story stone buildings. The one facing the administrative building he just left stretched out forever and looked more like a grey, forbidding and oversized wall than the combined school and dormitory it was. A gust of wind tore at his clothes with the memories of a summer lost, but it still lacked the sharpness of autumn.

  Back at the familiar life at school, and yet not. In this world, he was an outworlder, a stranger even though there were quite a few residents who called Earth home, or at least place of origin. No matter what he called it, it meant he didn’t come from here, and thus everything he had, down to his underwear, was made here. For that reason, he had an errand to the shabby building, including the aforementioned underwear.

  A dark opening welcomed him, and he ducked inside the door and waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloominess. There was a faint smell of cloth and leather stored for too long.

  “How can I help you?”

  Ioha almost missed the clerk sitting on a stool behind a desk that had seen better days. “Outworlder. I have a requisition request.” He showed the clerk a paper proving he was indeed an outworlder, handed over a sealed pouch with silver coins in the local currency, together with another paper stating he was the owner of said pouch and had fulfilled his obligation towards that ownership. The last part was important. He wouldn’t have to work off what amounted to a rather hefty debt for anyone penniless.

  The pouch changed owners, and Ioha watched the back of the clerk rummaging through a storage with possibly even worse lighting. A few minutes later, Ioha left for building one with a satchel slung over his shoulder. Apart from a small purse in his pocket, this one unsealed, it contained his entire worldly fortune for the coming four years. He could earn money here, of course, but there would be no more handing out of items needed.

  That, he thought as he lengthened his steps across the yard, includes my rapier and parrying sword, well and the spellsword uniform. The latter a mandatory expense for the fourth years. The former, however, had to be remedied within the week. He thrust his hand into his pocket, as if feeling the hard silver coins between his fingers made them more real. On his way to his new home, Ioha passed a small training field crammed into another corner between the stone buildings. The lingering scent of sweat, leather and metal told a tale of how school had already started for his seniors. With a bit of luck, he’d add to the smell himself within a few days. Maybe tomorrow. There’s the test.

  He climbed another set of stairs, less ostentatious than the ones at the administrative building, allowed himself to be swallowed by a wide doorway and entered another gloomy hallway. It fed two endless corridors that clearly didn’t include any doors to an open space large enough to be used as a dining hall. Well, that would be a later problem.

  In front of him, squeezed in between two flights of stairs climbing to the second floor, a heavy table in the ever-present dark hardwood made do as a reception desk, and behind it, a girl in a more worn version of his red and green waited in a chair. Curious eyes peeked at him from between stacks of paper and a basket filled with metallic disks.

  Senior student. Guess the Japanese arrived here in numbers first, Ioha thought. This world, at least the part close to the gate hub, as he learned during his year here, was very much a fantasy world in the worst sense of the word. A sudden influx of outworlder residents from Japan twenty years earlier would have made its mark anywhere.

  “Welcome. My name is Almadina Bergerauss, and I’m the secretary of the student council,” the girl behind the table said with a smile that never reached her eyes.

  Of course, they have a student council… A sudden influx of very young Japanese residents, with brains defunct enough to give up on three hundred years of development for a chance to die prematurely in a fantasy land devoid of decent medical science, tainted the world rather than marking it. Hence, a magical military academy with gaudy school uniforms.

  “I bid you welcome to the armed combat division,” she continued. “Spellsword, knightage, or soldier of fortune class?”

  Soldier of fortune? A group of misled idiots had even set up a system of adventurers guilds that no one ever asked for, and things didn’t get any better with his own generation of Swedish residents bringing brains filled with Hollywood ideals of fantasy land; he was one of them.

  “Spellsword,” Ioha said, and wished fervently that he’d join the most extreme of the maniacs.

  “You, a cat?”

  Haven’t I just heard that somewhere else? “Yes.”

  “Look, you’re the tree a cat climbs, not the cat.”

  Rude much? “Test tomorrow? Where?” he said and pretended he hadn’t heard her comment.

  She glared at him, reached for a paper and one of the disks in the basket. “Barn two. Bed number on the disk. Rules on the paper. If you pass, you’ll be assigned a shared room here.” Then she plastered a sugary smile to her face. “Any questions?”

  “None,” Ioha said. Mind if I beat some civility into that cute face of yours? he thought. This is why you don’t give kids service jobs suited for adults. But in the Japanese romanticised ideal of any kind of education, high school students were perfectly capable of handling tasks they were patently too young to be entrusted. Still better than back home, he added mentally. There, a full third of the average school class couldn’t be entrusted with anything at all. Maybe set up those adventurers guilds at home? D-rank quests applying LARTs to that third? He flashed the girl what he hoped was a predatory smile. “Thank you for your help,” he said, and headed out again.

  Barn two. Temporary dormitories, I guess. It made sense. Anyone failing the test wouldn’t live here anyway. Glancing at the paper on his way to what he assumed were the barns, he quickly took in the contents. ‘Don’t be an arse and at least ask for permission before you do anything epically stupid,’ it said in a lot more words tidily organised into half a dozen sections. At least he wouldn’t have to pay for destroyed equipment if it failed catastrophically while used as intended. A small mental sigh of relief left his shoulders a little less laden. Memories of broken foils from years of fencing training flashed through his mind.

  Another doorway swallowed him, and he stood in what was unmistakably a dojo because in this version of fantasy land, you needed a lot of barefoot martial arts training to gain proficiency in armoured combat. At least the polished wooden floor promised a perfectly decent night of sleep, even in a bunk bed. No damp and draughty hell here. There were dozens of them here, and he didn’t need much time to find his own. After dumping his satchel on the bed, Ioha went outdoors again. An afternoon spent staring at empty beds wasn’t his idea of a fun way to burn his first day at school.