Wil's not good at combat. He's been trained on it since he was old enough to walk--that's how it goes, with Phil as a dad and Terrence as an older brother--and he's still not good at it. He doesn't have the strength or the reaction time or--anything else, really--and he hasn't gotten seriously injured yet but it's embarrassing how instinctive it is, for Phil and Terrence and Tommy, to kill any mals that get close to Wil. He's even worse at getting mana--it's frustrating and he hates it, hates it in the way that makes him cry and scream and throw everything he owns against the wall as hard as he can because it should be easy and he can't do it. Phil doesn't really know what to do with that (because it was always easy for Phil and Terrence, who can somehow do these things for ten, twelve, fourteen hours, every day, every single day), just pats him awkwardly and switches to drilling Wil on something he is good at until Wil can breathe again.

(Malia is easier, but it fucks you up, he knows it fucks you up. Phil taught him how to get some safely, drawing from old broken doorways in London and mice that sneak into their home, but always with warnings. He's promised Phil to be careful with it, and he plans on keeping his promise.)

He's good at languages, though, they figure that out soon enough; alongside English he knows Spanish and German and Latin and Ancient Greek and Dutch and he's passable in Russian and Mandarin and Japanese and French, not good but good enough that it's not a liability, enough that he knows spells in all of them, and in English he writes songs, constantly and desperately, uploads videos of them onto YouTube even though he knows they're not very good because the alternative is that they'll disappear forever when he dies. He's not an enclave kid but Phil has friends in the London and Manchester enclaves, Wil won't be entirely without help and connections, and being born in the UK is its own advantage--they never had to worry about getting a seat for him. So even with how shit he is at some things, he has better chances than a lot of people, even some people who might be more talented than him. He's listened to Terrence's bitter rants about the enclave system enough to be fully aware of that.

When he's 13 he goes on a revolution kick, reads shitty dystopian YA under the covers when he's supposed to be sleeping and isn't, listens to Hamilton and Les Mis on repeat. He doesn't know what a better system even could be--as far as anyone knows, through all of human history the scholomance is the best thing anyone's come up with. It's a 25% survival rate, one in four, and there are four of them, Terrence and Wil and Tommy and Toby, and Wil's heard of the gambler's fallacy, he knows that isn't really how statistics work, but Terrence came out alive and so one in four isn't good enough, and if everyone gave up on progress because nobody's done it before then nothing would ever happen. And so he has to do better. It's unrealistic, sure, but him living is unrealistic. What does he have to lose? Nothing. He has nothing to lose. But if he can make things better, somehow, then he'll be remembered, and then it won't matter if he lives or dies because he'll be immortal, he'll have a legacy. And so Wil reads another shitty book about a teenager making a better world and he hopes.

On the day of the induction he's six foot two and still growing. He hasn't eaten in three days, he's shaking with it, he shaved head to toe, and he still doesn't have much space to carry supplies. Starvation is bad for your chances of survival, but not being able to go to the scholomance is worse, and Wil was never going to win on physical fitness. Phil's done his best with his precious five kilos of space, but being 99th percentile in height was never not going to be a problem.

It doesn't really matter, to Wil. His spells and languages and songs are in his head, he doesn't need any tools for them. If he can think of something good enough to change the world, to become somebody--that isn't reliant on anything outside of his head, either. But everyone else is nervous, and so he tries to be reassuring. Tommy makes a half-joke about whether Wil's gone to the bathroom recently, if he could try to get another few grams out of that, and it doesn't really land, but Wil laughs anyway. He hugs Tommy and he hugs Phil and he nods respectfully to Terrence and he goes through the goodbyes he had rehearsed in front of the mirror last night instead of sleeping and he keeps his face steady when the nausea hits.