Renn Vasik survived his first semester at Aurelius Academy. His second semester is going to be harder to hide.
Six months ago, Renn escaped a corporate laboratory with a synthetic Core in his chest and thirty-seven scars documenting twelve years of failed prototypes. He enrolled at the most prestigious cultivation Academy in the city, built a cover identity, and learned to be a person instead of a test subject. He found people worth protecting and people worth being protected by.
Now the people who built him want him back.
Selected for the Academy's elite combat specialization, Renn trains under Commander Ashara Rynn — a former Guild operative who recognizes that his capabilities exceed anything the grade system can explain and who chooses to shield him rather than report him. As his synthetic Core advances through its fourth Integration, Renn develops abilities that no biological cultivator can produce: a sensing field that reads opponents before they move, a frequency lock that pins their output to a single band, and an absorption technique that converts enemy attacks into fuel.
He's going to need all of it. Korvane BioSystems has sent an operative inside the Academy with fabricated credentials and a mission to catalogue everything Renn can do. When institutional countermeasures expel the spy, Korvane escalates — deploying military-grade retrieval operatives with suppression equipment and a warrant that authorizes extraction by force.
Renn's protection comes from the people around him. Suki — ranked first, harmonized with his Core, the combat partner whose analytical mind designs the protocols that might keep him alive. Petra — the healer whose Resonance techniques can bypass any suppression field and whose hands have mapped every scar on his body. Keris — the political heir whose family name is a weapon and whose legal apparatus builds the institutional walls between Renn and the corporation. And Jo Tannick — the engineer who designed Prototype 37, who has been watching from the shadows, and who carries evidence that could bring Korvane's twenty-year research program crashing down.
But when the walls fall and the fight produces consequences that the institutional machinery can't contain, Korvane activates a final contingency: destroy the evidence and disappear the remaining test subjects still inside the facility. The children who weren't Prototype 37. The ones whose doors still lock from the outside.
Renn has a choice. Stay hidden and stay safe. Or walk back into the building where they cut him open for twelve years — except this time, he's S-grade, and he's not on the table.
Genre: Science Fiction
Six months ago, Renn escaped a corporate laboratory with a synthetic Core in his chest and thirty-seven scars documenting twelve years of failed prototypes. He enrolled at the most prestigious cultivation Academy in the city, built a cover identity, and learned to be a person instead of a test subject. He found people worth protecting and people worth being protected by.
Now the people who built him want him back.
Selected for the Academy's elite combat specialization, Renn trains under Commander Ashara Rynn — a former Guild operative who recognizes that his capabilities exceed anything the grade system can explain and who chooses to shield him rather than report him. As his synthetic Core advances through its fourth Integration, Renn develops abilities that no biological cultivator can produce: a sensing field that reads opponents before they move, a frequency lock that pins their output to a single band, and an absorption technique that converts enemy attacks into fuel.
He's going to need all of it. Korvane BioSystems has sent an operative inside the Academy with fabricated credentials and a mission to catalogue everything Renn can do. When institutional countermeasures expel the spy, Korvane escalates — deploying military-grade retrieval operatives with suppression equipment and a warrant that authorizes extraction by force.
Renn's protection comes from the people around him. Suki — ranked first, harmonized with his Core, the combat partner whose analytical mind designs the protocols that might keep him alive. Petra — the healer whose Resonance techniques can bypass any suppression field and whose hands have mapped every scar on his body. Keris — the political heir whose family name is a weapon and whose legal apparatus builds the institutional walls between Renn and the corporation. And Jo Tannick — the engineer who designed Prototype 37, who has been watching from the shadows, and who carries evidence that could bring Korvane's twenty-year research program crashing down.
But when the walls fall and the fight produces consequences that the institutional machinery can't contain, Korvane activates a final contingency: destroy the evidence and disappear the remaining test subjects still inside the facility. The children who weren't Prototype 37. The ones whose doors still lock from the outside.
Renn has a choice. Stay hidden and stay safe. Or walk back into the building where they cut him open for twelve years — except this time, he's S-grade, and he's not on the table.
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Vance Ryder's Hollow Core 2