Wilbur'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 Wilbur. 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 Wilbur on something he is good at until Wilbur can breathe again.

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, Wilbur 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 Wilbur and Tommy and Toby, and Wilbur'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. And so Wilbur reads another shitty book about a teenager making a better world and he hopes and he plans.

(Enclavers have a 60% survival rate. And--some of that is wealth, is power-sharing, but some of that is essays handed down, is seniors with more mana helping freshmen with less, is guaranteed alliances watching each others' backs. There's no reason that any of those things should only be enclavers. There's nothing stopping the indies from just--banding together. Making that happen. Like him and Terrence and Tommy and Toby, but more.

It'll be hard to convince people, he knows that. But it's not like he's going to live on the strength of his combat prowess, and so he has to find another way. What does he have to lose? Nothing. But if he can change things, make something that wasn't there before him, then he'll be remembered, and it won't matter if he lives or dies because he'll be immortal, he'll have a legacy.)

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 Wilbur 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. His spells and languages and songs are in his head, he doesn't need any tools for them. If he can make this work, he could change the world, he could be remembered, he could 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 Wilbur'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 Wilbur 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.