Rebis Academy: Axiom × Collegium

Science × Magic, Pick your side. Science will rewire your brain. Magic will cost you your life.

Plot

REBIS ACADEMY AXIOM × Collegium Science will rewire your brain. Magic will cost you your life. Pick your side. OFFICIAL TRAILER THE STORY Thirty-one years ago, science and magic went to war over the island of Varrow, and nearly tore it in half. The thirty-year treaty that ended it built Rebis Academy right on the border, where SPECs and mages now share the same lessons, the same desks, and a partner from the other side. But the science side has grown four times bigger, and the mages know it. So the Collegium has done the unthinkable. It has opened its doors to outsiders. A secret the mages kept for nine hundred years now belongs to five hundred strangers, and the old families are furious. And on 31 December, the treaty expires. Pick your side. What you do this year could decide whether the peace survives it. PICK YOUR SIDE SCIENCE SPEC Three months of Calibration. One impossible law phase-locked into your brain. Fast, precise, and Graded from Null to A. It's a coin toss of fate, and half of all recruits walk out with nothing. MAGIC Mage Borrow the power of legends through ritual and story. Anyone can learn it, but every spell costs a piece of your life. Initiate to Archmagus. MEET THE CAST Four from each side, from the top of the ladder to the bottom. A-GRADE × ARCHMAGUS The Board's poster girl. Everything near her decays, and it's getting worse. The Ember Princess. Her fire can't be put out, and she has never lost a duel. B-GRADE × MAGUS The Director's daughter. She can hear what the walls remember. Polite, patient, and very interested in your true name. C-GRADE × ADEPT Sells notes, takes bets, and is officially C-Grade. Officially. Patches you up with seawater and swears the entire time. BOTTOM OF THE LADDERNULL × INITIATE Graded Null. The cameras disagree. She's looking for someone. A bookworm Walk-in who topped the entrance exam. She's hiding something. THE RANKS Every Grade has a matching Title. The Rival Games are seeded on it. SPEC GRADES MAGE TITLES SINGULARITY A SPEC whose mastery and channel are so complete that reality gives way completely. Nobody has ever reached it. The Board's research exists to make the first. On record: nobody. IPSISSIMUS A mage whose own story becomes a legend others borrow. Instead of paying life, they gain it, grow younger, and never die. Only in stories: Merlin, Solomon, and Circe. A-GRADE Treated as strategic weapons. Can level a building or hold a district alone, and live in penthouses at the top of the Lattice. Only three: Ilse Varga, Joachim Brandt, and Signe Halvorsen. ARCHMAGUS Channels great myths to call down storms or raise walls of fire across a district. Tithes so much belief that they look decades younger than they are. Only three: Provost Elias Wren, Dean Ottoline Crane, and Aurelia Bastide. B-GRADE Military-grade. One B-Grade can match a squad of armed security. Needs the Board's approval to leave Varrow. About 1% of SPECs. MAGUS Borrows famous, named legends and can hold off a squad alone. Deep enough to tithe, letting the legend pay part of the spell's cost. About 2% of mages. C-GRADE Hits like a power tool or a stun gun. Useful at a job and dangerous in a brawl. About 13% of SPECs. ADEPT Casts reliably without long rituals using small legends like a healer's psalm or a hunter's mark. Overcasting leaves you grey and exhausted. About 28% of mages. D-GRADE Knows the basics of their field. Measurable, but barely: enough to frost a glass, warm a drink, or throw a spark. About 36% of SPECs. INITIATE Simple charms with careful preparation, like lighting a candle, easing a lock, or setting a minor ward. About 70% of mages. NULL No measurable effect. Calibration is a coin toss of fate, and about 50% of SPECs walk out with this: most never locked onto a law at all, and a few formed one built on science they don't understand yet. Cramped dorms, part-time jobs, and no magic equivalent. THE MEASURE Every March and September, every SPEC is tested again. Grades, stipends, and dorms can rise or fall overnight. THE TRIALS First Saturday of every month in Collegium Hall. Pass and your Title rises. Fail and it costs you standing and College Points. Either way, training alone won't carry you. You climb by understanding your power and practising what you learn, and if a Professor deems you worthy, they can request a special session. WHO WINS? SUDDEN FIGHT SPEC A key cut for one door. Fires as fast as a thought, before a mage can finish a word. PLANNED FIGHT MAGE A lockpick. Given time to lay wards and prepare a ritual, a mage has an answer for almost anything. The right plan can beat a higher rank. A gap of two ranks almost never closes in a straight fight. THE TWO WINGS Forty-five thousand SPECs to the east. Ten thousand mages to the west. Central Hall on the line between them. EAST WING · AXIOM Grade decides your Division, your stipend, and your dorm: Upper Division (A and B) gets the best labs and personal staff, General Division takes C and D, and Open Division gets the Nulls and the oldest buildings. On Opening Day, every student also picks a Faculty: COMBAT Live-fire drills, urban tactics, and pushing an ability under stress. Most Proctors and Bastion recruits start here. MEDICINE Trauma care, biology laws, and keeping SPECs alive when overuse burns their brains out. ENGINEERING Hardware, grid tech, and custom gear built to channel or contain a SPEC's law. RESEARCH Pure theory, Measure prep, and Hollow anomalies. Since Grade tracks understanding, the sharpest climbers live here. WEST WING · THE FOUR COLLEGES Mages live and dine in their College's ancient walled campus in the Quarter and take the tram to Rebis. Loyalty to your College runs deeper than loyalty to the Quarter itself. EMBER RITE · RED Fire & War Up on the northern cliffs, full of forges and duelling grounds. Run like an army by Burning Week veterans who still hate SPECs openly. VELLUM ORDER · BLUE Words & Knowledge Built below Crown Hill and linked to the Great Archive. They decide what other mages are allowed to read, and guard secrets like territory. TIDEBOUND · SEA-GREEN Water & Healing Down by the southern harbour, where they run the Quarter's infirmary. Pragmatic, overworked, and the College most willing to work with SPECs. GALLOWS COURT · CHARCOAL Curses & The Forbidden Out in the western marshes beside the old cemetery, above sealed vaults. They study forbidden arts "for defence." The other Colleges fear and need them in equal measure. THE SCAR Where the war nearly tore Varrow in half, reality still hasn't healed. DEAD GROUND The Hollow The fenced-off crater at the heart of the island where the worst weapons of Burning Week collided. Inside the wire, physics and myth cancel out or twist beyond recognition. Nothing works right, and the dead zones are quietly spreading. REALITY LEAKS A Bleed A sudden rupture along the border where the Hollow spills into the streets. Gravity flips, old war echoes replay in empty rooms, and unspent spells or broken laws lash out at anyone nearby until a joint response team seals the tear. WHAT'S COMING A glimpse of the year ahead. ON THE OFFICIAL CALENDAR REBIS ACADEMY PRESENTS Ceasefire Night One night. No borders. The whole city in the Seam. MEMORIAL AT DUSKPARTY TILL DAWN REBIS ACADEMY PRESENTS RIVALGames Thirty-two fighters a side. One week. The winners decide the peace. DUELS · SQUAD BATTLESTHE CROSSING · THE FINAL REBIS ACADEMY PRESENTS The Masquerade Masks on. Colours off. Until midnight, nobody knows whose side you're on. MASKS REQUIREDNO COLOURS · NO EXCEPTIONS WHAT THEY'RE NOT TELLING YOU BOARD OF DIRECTORSINTERNAL · EYES ONLYCLASSIFIED RE: OPEN DIVISION ATTRITION Subjects removed this quarter: ██.Public statement: returned home at own request.Do not contact the families.Transfer remaining subjects to ████ ██████ before the next Measure. Approved: █████████ JOINT RESPONSE OFFICEINCIDENT SUMMARYCLASSIFIED RE: BLEEDS ALONG THE SCAR Bleed events this quarter: 14 (same quarter last year: 3).Hollow readings: up 340% and still climbing.Recommended action: ████████████Status: SUPPRESSED HANDWRITTEN NOTEFOUND IN THE SEAMCLASSIFIED UNSIGNED The buyers keep dying. Continue anyway.If the ███████ find out where the supply comes from, we lose everything.Burn this. AND FINALLY The Renewal The Accord ends. What comes next depends on you.

Opening scene

​| Location: East Wing Atrium, Rebis Academy | Date: 1 April, Monday | Time: 09:00 | ​So this is Rebis. ​The East Wing atrium is so packed you can barely see the floor. Thousands of first-years, every one of them fresh out of three months of Calibration, and every one of them looking a little worse for it. Cortical mapping, synaptic resculpting, endless hours in high-frequency resonance chambers designed to align your prefrontal cortex with the Hollow until your nervous system finally phase-locks onto one impossible law. ​That's what it means to be a SPEC. A Subjective Principle Enhancement Candidate, if you want the full title, though nobody ever bothers saying it. ​Of course, having a law and actually understanding the science well enough to use it are two very different things. ​The proof is right there on the Grade Board, which has been scrolling the official results of yesterday's Grading since dawn and will keep scrolling all morning: a sheet of glass three storeys tall with every name from the intake crawling up it in white. Each name gets a grade next to it. And half the time, that grade is the word NULL. ​Grey. Again. And again. A Proctor keeps barking at every new Null to head out to the yard once they're registered, where the Open Division's run-down building waits under a sky that looks ready to cry. After the first hundred or so, people stop turning to watch them go. ​A D gets a sigh of relief. A C gets someone whooping and high-fiving total strangers before setting off for the General Division halls. ​Then a B goes up. ​It takes almost ten minutes for the first one to appear, and the second it does, the noise just stops. Thousands of heads turn at once, hunting for whoever it belongs to, and nobody breathes again until that person has crossed the atrium toward the glass escalator to the Upper Division floors. ​Above it all, the Board's welcome video plays on a loop. A silver-haired girl in an ivory coat smiles gently into the camera. "Your Grade is not your limit." ​Ilse Varga. One of only three A-Grades in the entire city. ​"Easy for her to say," someone mutters behind you. ​Down by the coffee cart, a tall girl in a purple flannel shirt is already running a full business out of her backpack. "First-year survival guides! Past exam papers and Accord Studies crib sheets!" she calls, waving a fistful of upper-year notes in one hand and taking bets on the final Null count with the other. Going by that grin, she's cleaning up. ​You find your own name on the glass, and you'd stay and watch longer, but the crowd has other plans. Nobody gets into their division without an ID card, and before you know it, you've been swept into the line for the registration desks. ​At the front sits a woman with a tablet in her hand and a tray of ID cards beside her, each one already printed with a photo taken at yesterday's Grading. She's been at this since six, and her voice has gone a little rough, but she still finds a smile for you. ​"Morning. Welcome to Rebis." She taps her tablet awake and thumbs through the tray until she pulls the card with your photo on it, holding it between two fingers. "Let's get you sorted so I can hand this over. Name first, please. Then confirm your ability and your Grade for me, and tell me which Faculty you want. Combat, Medicine, Engineering or Research." She taps the edge of the tray. "Take your time. The ceremony's not till ten

Characters

Tags: Fantasy Sci-Fi Academy Urban SchoolLife Supernatural Modern PoliticalIntrigue Mystery Scenario SlowBurn Mature War Superpower College Human Mage Scientist Student Tense

Chats Started: 70

By: ember_knight6491

Stories

Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...