One year later.
The Grand Transit Hall of the Stellar Ascendancy Academy was a symphony of controlled chaos. Light streamed through crystalline panels, gleaming off polished floors as three hundred new students milled about, their voices a roaring mix of excitement, anxiety, and aristocratic boredom.
Heirs in fine silks from the Azure Marches stood beside hardened cadets from the Iron Crag, all funneled toward the same destiny.
Among them, Prince Ken Vaelstron was a carefully engineered void.
He stood where he was meant to stand—not at the front with the other royals, nor at the back with the nervous commoners, but squarely in the middle of the pack. His posture was neither confident nor slouched, but neutrally upright. His expression, viewed through the **Eye of Truth** he kept at a passive scan, was a masterclass in benign anonymity.
He observed everything.
*Targets. Assets. Variables.*
His mind cataloged them.
The boisterous son of an Ashfall clan chief, boasting about magma-forged muscles. A pair of whispering girls from the Sylvan Weald, their fingers unconsciously tracing leaf patterns in the air. A hulking, silent youth from the Iron Crag who scanned the room like a fortress wall.
And there, at the front, holding court—his half-brother, Crown Prince Dorian, in immaculate white and gold, already surrounded by a flock of sycophants from House Aethel.
Ken's gaze slid over Dorian without pause.
*Variable: D. Vaelstron. Primary threat: indirect. Status: monitored.*
A sharp, rhythmic clicking of boots cut through the din.
A man with a spine of iron and a face like weathered stone strode onto the raised dais. Combat Master Rourke. The hall fell silent.
"Welcome to your proving ground," Rourke's voice carried without amplification, a gravelly baritone that promised pain. "You are the seeds of the Dominion's future. Some of you will thrive. Many of you will break. We are here to find out which is which."
He paused, his eyes sweeping the crowd like a predator assessing a herd.
"The entrance exams begin now."
---
**First Trial: Written Assessment.**
The examination hall was vast and silent. Holographic screens flickered to life at each station, displaying questions on history, Origin Code theory, and geopolitical strategy.
Ken picked up the tactile stylus. His mind was a vault.
He had memorized every approved textbook, every sanitized royal decree, every basic theorem. He also knew the *un*sanitized histories, the glitch-induced paradoxes, the true reasons behind the War of the Seven Spires.
He began to write.
His answers were grammatically perfect, factually accurate, and utterly devoid of insight. He cited the mainstream scholars, parroted the Dominion's official stance on the Aurelian Construct, and framed every analytical response with the cautious, derivative thinking expected of a middling student.
For a question on tactical response to a simulated border incursion, he wrote a competent, by-the-book answer.
He did not write the brutally efficient, three-step Phantom protocol that would have ended the incursion by poisoning the enemy commander's water supply and framing his second-in-command.
He finished with twenty minutes to spare. He placed the stylus down, folded his hands, and stared vacantly ahead, the picture of a student who had done his modest best.
**Result:** 76th percentile.
Respectably average.
---
**Second Trial: Physical Aptitude.**
The training cavern was a brutalist landscape of obstacle courses, weight stations, and combat rings. Ken moved through it with a precise, unspectacular economy of motion.
On the vertical climb, he used just enough strength to reach the top, his arms trembling convincingly at the end.
In the sprint, he finished squarely in the middle of the pack, his breathing deliberately labored.
Then came the sparring assessment.
He was paired with a burly youth from a minor military family, whose **Eye of Truth** revealed a pattern of over-committing on his right strikes.
The boy came at him, fist flying.
Ken calculated the trajectory. He could have slipped inside the guard, shattered the boy's elbow with a palm strike, and ended it.
Instead, he performed the "Weak Prince" script.
He brought his arms up in a clumsy guard, took the blow on his forearms with a sharp, genuine gasp of pain he allowed himself to feel, and stumbled back, yielding.
"Yield," Ken said, his voice tinged with believable strain.
The examiner, a bored-looking senior cadet, marked his slate.
"Vaelstron yields. Next."
As Ken walked to the sidelines, rubbing his arm, he felt a gaze.
Not from the examiner.
From across the cavern.
A girl with practical short hair and a scar across her chin was watching him.
**Seraphine Rae.**
Her eyes weren't mocking. They were analytical, narrowed. She'd seen him stumble, but her expression held a flicker of... reassessment.
Not of strength.
Of something else.
*Variable: S. Rae. Observation: High perceptivity. Threat level: potential. Utility: high.*
He looked away, feigning discomfort.
**Result:** 212th out of 300.
Weak, but not the weakest. Unremarkable.
---
**Third Trial: Origin Affinity.**
This was the dangerous one.
Held in a shielded chamber, each student approached the "Affinity Lens"—a relic of the Renounced that hummed with latent energy, measuring one's connection to the fundamental forces.
One by one, students placed their hands on the crystal plinth.
Lights flared.
A girl from a tech-house made the lens glow a steady blue. Strong Engineering Affinity.
Dorian, with a dramatic flourish, elicited a shower of silver sparks. Moderate Stellar-Touched Affinity. The hall murmured appreciatively.
Ken's turn approached.
His heart rate, monitored by his own will, did not increase. This was pure control. He had spent a year learning to suppress his aura, to mute the Umbral Scribe signature in his blood, to project a void.
He stepped up.
Placed his palm on the cold crystal.
He felt the Lens's probe, a searching tendril of energy. He didn't fight it.
He *erased*.
He imagined his internal power not as a fortress to defend, but as a featureless, empty plain. A still pond reflecting nothing. A blank page.
The Lens hummed, confused.
It flickered—a dim, pathetic gray—then settled into a faint, pulsing ochre, the color of weak embers. The lowest register of generic, unfocused potential.
The proctor, a gaunt Arcane Studies professor, peered at the readout.
"Minimal Affinity. Non-specialized."
He announced it without inflection, already looking to the next student.
A soft snicker came from Dorian's group.
Ken didn't react. He simply retrieved his hand, his face a mask of quiet resignation.
*Perfect.*
---
**Later that evening, in the assigned dormitory.**
The rooms were tiers of privacy. The top-ranked students had suites. Ken's rank granted him a small, single chamber in the middle levels—neither an insult nor a privilege.
Just another data point of his averageness.
He stood at the window, looking out at the sprawling, illuminated campus. The sounds of new friendships being forged, alliances tested, and boasts made floated up from the courtyards below.
He tuned it out.
In his mind, he opened a new file:
*Academy Phase: Initiated.*
He began populating it.
* **Primary Target Acquisition:** Empress Valeriana's influence network within the student body and faculty. Initial tags applied to 17 students exhibiting excessive deference to House Aethel members.
* **Asset Development:** Seraphine Rae. Combat proficiency, observational skills. Jax Meridian. Located in workshop sector, exhibited exceptional kinetic intuition during engineering sub-test.
* **Personal Alibi Consolidation:** "Weak Prince" persona is stable. Affinity test results provide perfect cover for any power-related anomalies deemed "glitches."
* **Next Objective:** Gain access to the Restricted Archives. Method: excel just enough in Arcane Studies theory to warrant a research pass, while maintaining overall average rank.
A soft chime echoed through the halls.
Curfew in one hour.
Ken turned from the window. The night was not for rest.
The Phantom had maps to memorize, patrol routes to log, and the first name on a very private list—a second-year student who was a confirmed SS9 messenger—to evaluate for termination.
He allowed himself one final, calculated thought as he changed into dark, soft-soled shoes.
The battlefield was set. The pieces were moving.
And no one, not the arrogant heirs, not the watchful professors, and certainly not the Empress in her distant spire, saw the silent weapon already in their midst.
The hunt within the academy began at midnight.
---
**[End of Chapter 2]**