Chapter 50 – Midterms
A week before midterms, the library stopped being a quiet place for people like Lyra and turned into a battlefield.
Not the fun kind with swords.
The kind with ink, panic, and too many people pretending they hadn't ignored their notes for the last month.
Every table was full.
Divination robes huddled around stacks of theology and law. Staff students had built forts out of enchantment manuals and healer's guides. Sword campus uniforms were scattered between them, glaring at theory papers as if the enemy had changed all the rules again.
I'd picked a table near the back wall.
Good view of the room. Clear path to the exit. Enough space to lay out my notes without getting elbowed every time someone remembered something "important."
Melody's blade-self rested against my chair, the familiar weight balanced just so. Her projection sat on the edge of the table, legs swinging through the wood like it wasn't there, watching the chaos with wide, amused eyes.
"This is a library?" she murmured. "It sounds like a siege."
"It is," I said. "The enemy is time."
"And history," she added solemnly.
"Especially history," I agreed.
It didn't stay my table for long.
"Move over."
Tamara dropped a stack of books so hard the table shook, then dragged out the chair opposite me and collapsed into it. Her usually immaculate blue hair was tied back messier than usual. There was ink on her cheek.
"You're breathing in my study zone," I said.
"Shut up," she replied. "I'm dying."
Melody tilted her head, considering Tamara.
"She looks alive," she whispered. "Just… frayed."
"She says that every time she has to read more than three pages of theory," I said under my breath.
Lyra arrived next, a calm shadow behind the noise. She slid into the seat on my left with the quiet efficiency of someone who had planned this ambush in advance, then started unpacking her bag. Neatly stacked notebooks. A ruler. Quills. She'd colour-coded her tabs.
Of course she had.
Melody watched her for a moment, then leaned closer to me.
"She's the one who memorises everything," she said.
"More or less," I said.
Noel came last, carrying a pile of Staff texts that looked like they were trying to escape her arms. She set them down carefully, like they were patients, not books.
"I found us a quiet corner," I said.
She looked around at the groaning shelves, the frantic whispering, the students already half-asleep over their notes.
"This is the quiet corner?" she asked.
"It's quieter than the sword dorm common room," I said. "Someone was chanting 'right foot, left foot' like a spell when I walked past."
"Basic Combat revision," Melody said helpfully.
I spread my own notes out—mana resonance, field patterns, enchantment structures, Divination derivations. Lines and circles and scribbled diagrams that would have made more sense on a whiteboard with a projector.
Tamara thumped a mana derivation workbook down between us and stabbed a line with her finger.
"Explain this," she demanded.
On the page, someone had drawn a familiar-looking spiral of lines twisting around a straight central rod. There were a lot of words about "rotational mana drift" and "field torsion."
I recognised the shape.
It had a different name, here.
In the old world, we'd called it something else.
Electromagnetism, my brain supplied automatically. Right-hand rule. Current and field. Wire, not "mana conduit."
I didn't say that out loud.
"Alright," I said instead, tapping the rod. "Think of mana flowing through this like water through a pipe. What you call 'drift' is the field around it. Not air," I corrected myself. "The ambient mana. The 'field.'"
Tamara squinted.
"And the spin?" she said.
"Your instructors call it drift," I said. "They're not wrong, just… imprecise. The flow doesn't just go straight. It curls. Like this."
I took her quill and sketched a tighter, clearer spiral around the rod.
Melody leaned in, eyes bright.
"I like that one," she said. "It feels… tidy. Coiled. Like a song that wants to unwind."
"In a perfect world, the pattern would be this neat," I went on. "But in reality, materials have flaws, circles aren't perfectly even, people get lazy with their runes. So you get wobbles. That wobble is what your exam question is actually about."
Tamara stared between the messy textbook diagram and my quick one.
"Why didn't they just draw it like that in the first place?" she muttered.
"Because then they'd have to admit it works better as a pattern than as a prayer," I said.
Noel gave me a warning look.
"Careful," she murmured. "Divination students can hear blasphemy up to three shelves away."
I shrugged.
"I'm not insulting their god," I said. "Just their diagrams."
Lyra's quill scratched steadily across her page.
"If the wobble increases," she said, not looking up, "that means more strain on the conduit walls, right? So resonance threshold drops."
I nodded.
"Exactly," I said. "They'll probably ask you to calculate where it fails. Focus on the ratio, not the pretty words they wrap it in."
Tamara groaned.
"You sound like you enjoy this," she said.
"I enjoy things that make sense," I said. "The more mana behaves like something I recognise from the old world, the less my head hurts."
Melody glanced sideways at me.
"The old world," she repeated softly.
I didn't say it out loud often.
Here it stayed a private label in my head. A file name. A way to sort memories into "useful" and "dangerous" and "things that will get me killed if I assume they're still true."
Physics? Close enough, once you translated the language.
Mana flow liked patterns. Patterns liked stability. Stability liked math.
Magic circles were just badly drawn circuit diagrams with extra religious guilt on top.
Enchantments? Half of them were programming with worse syntax and no debugging tools.
Those converted cleanly.
History?
That was a black box.
Dates, wars, kings, saints—none of it matched the timelines written on the backs of my old students' notebooks. Empires had the wrong names. Continents had shifted. Gods had stepped into the places where industrial revolutions should have gone.
Every time someone mentioned the "Third Coastal Campaign," my brain tried to fill in a different war.
Every time they referenced an "Age of Ascension," my mind grabbed for smokestacks and railways and electricity lines that had never existed here.
I could see the shape of their history.
I just couldn't trust any detail without asking.
Which made it useless for exams.
"History," Tamara groaned, as if summoned by my thoughts. "I hate history."
"Ask Lyra," I said immediately.
Lyra blinked.
"I—" she began.
"You've memorised half the archive," I said. "You may as well admit it."
She flushed a little, but didn't deny it.
Noel flipped open a Staff theory text and slid it toward me.
"I'll take you on your strengths," she said. "Mana structures. Help me translate this. Please."
She pointed at a diagram labelled "Basic Stabilisation Array."
I glanced at it.
Four runes. Square layout. Mana flow indicated by arrows.
Old world eyes translated it: two nodes for input, two for output, and a looped path that screamed "bridge" and "feedback loop" at the same time.
"They tell you this stops the circle from collapsing if one rune gets damaged, right?" I said.
"Yes," Noel said. "They say the god's blessing flows more 'evenly' if—"
"Forget the blessing," I said. "Look at the paths."
I traced the arrows.
"Even if this corner fails," I said, "mana can still go around through here and here. You're not asking for a miracle. You're designing it so the hole is smaller in the first place."
Her eyes sharpened.
"Redundancy," she repeated softly. "Like… like multiple blood vessels feeding the same organ. So if one is blocked…"
"The others keep it alive," I said.
She nodded slowly, making notes in neat script.
I watched her expression change—fear and obligation pushed aside by curiosity for a moment.
That was better.
"See?" I said. "You don't need to copy the prayer. You just need to see the pattern."
"Then why do they make us memorise the prayer?" Tamara grumbled.
"So they feel useful," I said, a little too honestly.
Lyra coughed, badly hiding a smile.
Melody tilted her head.
"Are you always this disrespectful about their rituals?" she asked.
"Only when they get between my friends and a passing grade," I murmured.
The afternoon wore on.
We moved from mana theory to enchantments, from enchantments to combat tactics. I explained the difference between the "official" way to approach a problem and the way you actually solved it when you weren't being graded by someone whose derivation was "faith."
They listened.
Tamara complained loudly and still filled half a page.
Lyra asked quiet questions that revealed she'd thought three steps past what the textbook bothered to say.
Noel connected enchantment diagrams to anatomy with a healer's eye, occasionally offering analogies that made my translations easier—"like a nerve," "like a muscle."
It was… almost comfortable.
Like sitting in the middle of four different worlds—noble expectations, commoner fear, priestly dogma, Staff logic—and seeing the math underneath didn't care where the ink came from.
At some point, Rion flopped into a chair at the next table, hair a mess, eyes hollow.
"Tell me things," he groaned. "I have made poor life choices."
"History?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Ask Lyra," I said again.
She sighed, but scooted her chair a little, launching into an explanation that somehow turned battles and dates into a story instead of a list. Rion listened, nodding slowly, while Melody watched with interest.
"She's good at this," Melody murmured.
"Terrifying, isn't it?" I said.
I tuned out the details.
Every mention of a battle name made my old memory itch.
In one world, that title belonged to a failed campaign that had turned into a massacre.
In this one, it was a victory sermon etched into marble in the main square.
If I tried to lean on the wrong one in the exam, I'd end up writing about the wrong dead people.
So I didn't.
I resigned myself to whatever my notes and Lyra's cautious corrections could carry me through and focused on everything else.
***
Midterms arrived like a punch to the face.
Mana Theory was first.
Rows of desks. Ink bottles. A proctor with a voice like grinding stone explaining rules everyone was too anxious to really hear.
Melody stayed in the dorm, blade laid carefully on the rack beside my bed. The proctors had been very clear about "no unnecessary weapons" in written exams. She'd been offended.
"I am never unnecessary," she'd told me.
"You're also very pointy," I'd said. "They get nervous."
Now, in the exam hall, my back felt too light without her weight.
The exam paper was thick.
I flipped it open.
Field interactions. Resonance thresholds. Pattern stability.
Half the questions were variations on problems I'd already walked Tamara and Noel through in the library.
The other half were things the professors clearly thought were clever tricks.
They weren't.
I worked through them steadily, translating their pious phrasing back into math. Somewhere between the second and third page, I realised I was… enjoying myself.
I caught myself smiling once, then wiped it away before anyone could see.
By the time I put my quill down, my mana channels felt weirdly relaxed, like solving equations had scratched an itch swords couldn't reach.
Enchantments came next.
Staff kids looked murderous.
Sword campus students looked betrayed again.
I quietly enjoyed myself.
Divinity followed.
That one was harder.
Not because the logic was bad, but because the logic and the faith were tangled, and pretending not to see the knots was half the test.
I knew how to write what they wanted to read.
I just didn't enjoy doing it.
If Melody had been there, she would have made a face at some of the questions about "proper obedience to revealed patterns." I made it for both of us.
History was last.
Of course it was.
The gods of scheduling had a sense of humour.
The exam questions blurred together into a parade of dates, battles, treaties, and saintly interventions.
"Outline the causes of the Third Coastal Campaign…"
My brain offered, unhelpfully, three different wars from two different lives and one game event where that phrase had been the name of a side quest.
I stared at the parchment for a long moment.
Then I wrote down the version that matched Lyra's careful summaries—the one where the numbers lined up with the textbook, not with the ghosts in my head.
It felt wrong.
Not morally.
Just… tilted.
Like writing with my off-hand.
I did my best.
It would not be top-ten material.
That was fine.
I didn't want to be first anyway.
I just wanted to not embarrass myself.
When the last paper was collected, the whole Academy exhaled.
Students spilled out into the courtyard, voices rising, some already dissecting questions, others refusing to talk about it at all.
I went back to the training yard.
Swords made more sense than essays.
Melody hummed softly against my palms when I reclaimed her from the rack, vibration running up my arms like a greeting.
"Well?" she asked.
"I did not set anything on fire in Divinity," I said. "So that's a win."
"And history?" she said.
"We don't talk about history," I said.
She snorted.
We went to work.
***
Results came out two days later.
The Academy liked announcements.
It liked stone and spectacle and "motivation."
So they posted the midterm rankings on a big, rune-lit board in the main courtyard.
It drew a crowd fast.
"Move, move— I can't see—"
"Who's first?"
"Please not Tamara again, I can't take another week of her bragging—"
"I can hear you," Tamara snapped from somewhere near the front.
I arrived late enough that the outer ring of students had already formed. I could still see the board if I stood on a low step near one of the pillars.
Names glowed in careful script.
Top ten.
My eyes went to the top automatically.
1st: Lyra Feld.
Of course.
There was a heartbeat of stunned silence.
Then the whispers started.
"Who's that—"
"The quiet one—"
"She beat all the nobles?"
I glanced to the side.
Lyra stood near the front, half-hidden behind taller students, eyes wide, fingers curled in the fabric of her skirt. Her ears had gone bright red.
Noel stood beside her, smiling so hard it looked like her face might crack.
Her name was second.
2nd: Noel Verdan.
Perfectly neat script. No titles. Just a name that now sat, in glowing runes, above then below nobility and commoners alike.
3rd: Tamara von Hailbrecht.
She stared at it.
"…I'm third?" she demanded.
"You're still in the top three," Noel said. "That's very good, Tamara."
"That's not the point," Tamara muttered. "Lyra beat me. Lyra."
Lyra flinched.
"I'm sorry," she blurted.
Tamara scowled at her.
"Don't apologise," she said. "I'm mad at myself, not at you."
She hesitated.
"…and a little at you," she admitted. "For studying more."
Lyra made a strangled noise somewhere between laughter and panic.
The rankings went on.
Sword, Staff, Divination. Nobles. Commoners. Numbers.
My name was near the bottom of the list.
9th: Erynd Milton.
History dragged me down. Which was probably a blessing.
Rion whistled low.
"Top ten," he said. "Look at you."
"Tsk," he added. "Most people would be thrilled. You sound like someone told you your dessert was slightly too big."
"Too much attention is a problem," I said.
"As opposed to 'no one remembers my name,' which is my problem," he muttered.
I didn't point out that half the Academy remembered him as "the boy who nearly got a broom through his head in Basic Combat."
He leaned around me to squint at the board.
"Lyra's first," he said, tone impressed. "Noel second. Tamara third. Sword girls really just decided to monopolise the top, huh."
"Noel's Staff," I said automatically.
He waved a hand.
"You know what I mean," he said. "Your people."
"My people are the ones who don't try to set me on fire," I said.
He considered that.
"Then you're doomed," he decided.
He wasn't wrong.
Near the front, Noel turned, searching the crowd.
Her eyes found me.
For a moment, the noise of the courtyard faded.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't have to.
Her smile said enough:
*I made it. We made it. I'm still here.*
I gave her a small nod.
Lyra caught my eye a second later, startled, as if she still didn't quite believe her own name belonged where it was. I lifted a hand, just enough for her to see.
She flushed, ducked her head, but I saw the corner of her mouth twitch up.
Tamara, after a few more seconds of glaring at the board, marched over.
She stopped in front of me, hands on hips.
"You," she said.
"Me," I agreed.
"You're ninth," she said.
"Good observing," I said.
She glared.
"You're not allowed to be below me," she said eventually. "It feels wrong."
"That's not how rankings work," I said.
"It is now," she replied. "Study harder next time."
She spun and stalked off before I could answer, braid whipping behind her like a banner.
The runes hummed quietly, recording, tallying, feeding numbers into whatever invisible machinery decided scholarships and recommendations and who got first pick of certain classes.
[ System ]
[ Reputation (Academy – Students): Increased. ]
[ Perception: "Capable," "Dangerous," "Terrible at Staying Out of Trouble." ][ Note: Top ten status unlocked. Future events may scale accordingly. ]
Of course.
I stepped back from the crowd.
Exams done.
Duels survived.
Feelings… postponed, not resolved.
Somewhere, a dwarf was probably still arguing with a block of alloy underground.
Somewhere else, an empress-in-training was likely arguing with her father about "visiting rights."
Life kept moving.
Midterms were just another checkpoint.
I rolled my sore shoulder once, feeling the familiar weight of Melody's claymore form against my back, the subtle awareness of her presence pressed along my spine.
She shifted, just enough that the hilt nudged my shoulder.
"Top ten," she said quietly, only for me. "That seems… good."
"It seems like trouble," I replied.
"Everything you do seems like trouble," she said. "At least this version comes with less blood."
Rion clapped me on the back.
"Top ten," he said again, oblivious to the extra voice. "You know what this means?"
"That I have to work harder on history," I said.
"That you're officially one of the people everyone will compare themselves to," he said cheerfully. "Welcome to the pedestal."
"I'm bringing a hammer," I said.
He laughed.
The courtyard buzzed.
Life at the Academy flowed on—now with new numbers carved into stone, new expectations, new lines of light over names that glowed a little brighter than they had last week.
I slipped back into the river of students.
Midterms were over.
The real tests weren't on paper anyway.