The long table filled again at midday.

Anuar had cooked enough for the number of people present plus a reasonable margin, which Li had independently calculated and which turned out to be the same number Anuar had calculated, despite the two of them always fighting and having arrived at it by completely different routes.

"I can't believe everyone is eighteen already," said Liu again, in the same monotone.

"You said that this morning," said Taro.

"I'm saying it again because I find it relevant." Liu looked at the full group with the expression of someone who had something to say and was building it as he said it. "Eight years ago none of us imagined being where we are, thanks to Ren."

A brief silence.

"And in three days we'll be defending the wall," Liu continued. "Which is also relevant…"

"You said that this morning too," said Taro.

"Also relevant."

Ren looked at Liu.

Liu returned the look with the expression of someone who knew exactly what he was doing and didn't need anyone to explain it to him.

Ren raised his glass.

No speech nor elaboration... Just the gesture Liu was looking for.

The group followed, a variety of people who shared a moment without needing the moment to describe itself in order to exist.

Li raised his too, his had juice while most of the others had something else, and he raised it with the enthusiasm of someone who did not consider the difference in contents to change the nature of the gesture.

Anuar raised his with both hands and the reverence he applied to moments he considered historic, which were more moments than most people would have classified as historic, but Anuar's position was that this was exactly the point.

Tao raised his without saying anything, which was Tao's way of saying what Liu had said with more words.

Reed's garden was still Reed's garden outside.

The mansion was still small and still everyone's favorite.

And in three days the wall would be waiting for them with the indifference of things that didn't know they were waiting but that were there regardless when you arrived.

♢♢♢♢

Time passed without giving ground, and the quiet days ended. The mansion had many visitors, but the time came for the teachers to return to teaching and for the graduates to defend the city.

Selphira was the last to visit.

Not because she lacked time or didn't want to come, but because Selphira rarely did things in the order logic would have suggested she do them if they were no emergency, and because she had wanted to give them the space to enjoy what they had before it ended. The conversation that last afternoon with Ren had the significance that important conversations had when there were few chances left to have them and both people knew it, so every small detail was considered before being said.

She had told him everything in code like when she had something to say and barely enough time to say it correctly: that the wall was another school, and that the wall taught things no academy taught, and that the only way to become what Ren needed to become for what came after being a soldier, and being able to lead them, was to let it happen without trying to accelerate it. To be in it rather than above it.

Ren had listened with the attention he gave Selphira, which was different from the attention he gave anyone else because he had spent enough time with her to know that the things she said without extra elaboration were the ones that had received the most elaboration before arriving.

Then Selphira had left.

And the mansion held the silence of spaces that have had many people in them and have let most of them go.

♢♢♢♢

The cycle that gave life to Yano's defense was almost as old as Yano itself in its current form.

Those who completed their service left the wall. Those who graduated from the academy entered to cover it.

It wasn't an elegant system in terms of human resources, the rotation inevitably produced a transition period where the two most separated generations didn't overlap, where the accumulated experience of those leaving couldn't be transferred in time to those arriving. The new ones had to learn from those closest to them, the ones who knew only a little more than they did, which was the opposite of the academic model. But it was a system that worked, somehow, in those progressively layered levels of knowledge… perhaps because the closeness to people who had just slightly more experience produced a different kind of learning than the distance of formal instruction. In the last mana-free bastion of this hostile world, in the only functional final defense that remained, functioning to stop the mutants was the only criterion that truly mattered.

Those who this year had decided not to pursue a military career were the majority, as every year, most graduates took what they had learned and carried it toward commerce, administration, the academy, or live itself. The productive paths, the civilian paths, the paths that built the city from the inside rather than defending it from the outside.

But a few stayed.

Some of the best tamers in Yano's history had not taken that path and had produced things the wall alone would not have produced, discoveries, advancements, the kind of practical knowledge that came from applying preparation to different ways of life. Leaving the wall wasn't a lesser choice.

It was simply another choice.

But those who stayed were also necessary…

So even with those who stayed, the defense could always use more people when a generation departed. The structure had a constant appetite that graduation filled each year by a bit more of new blood replacing the lower number of experienced soldiers it emptied.

The ones arriving to replace them were the ones arriving now.

The protocol established that new soldiers filled the gaps at random.

Not according to their capabilities, not according to their preferences, not according to any optimized assignment system. According to where the structure needed someone at the moment they arrived. The oldest method of integrating a person into something larger: put them where the structure needed them and let the structure teach what it had to teach. Friction as curriculum.

For most graduates of any year, this meant living in sectors separated from their close friends, with commanders who didn't know them, in units that had been established long enough to have their own internal dynamics, systems that absorbed new arrivals with the slightly impersonal efficiency of processes that had handled many iterations of the same thing and knew where to put the next one.

But for Ren's group, the situation would be technically different.