The two days that followed were a gray haze of pain and forced recovery. The backlash from integrating **[Flicker Step]** was not just physical; it was a deep, spiritual sprain, as if my soul had been asked to perform a geometry it was never meant to comprehend. My body ached with a phantom bruising, and my mind recoiled from the memory of that gut-wrenching spatial twitch.
Machina enforced a strict regimen of rest, nutrient-dense gruel (acquired through Machiavellian manipulation of the kitchen's waste-disposal schedules), and mental exercises to stabilize the new skill's pattern in my neural pathways.
**[SYNCHRONIZATION OF [FLICKER STEP] NOW AT 41%. MARGINAL USAGE MAY BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT INDUCING NEURAL CASCADE FAILURE. DO NOT ATTEMPT CONSECUTIVE ACTIVATIONS.]**
In the public eye, nothing changed. I was still the Blank, shuffling through lectures, a convenient focus for the boredom and anxiety of my peers. The countdown to the semester evaluation, however, now ticked in my mind with the steady rhythm of a funeral drum. Six weeks had become four.
The opportunity to demonstrate my "potential" arrived not through some grand design, but through the mundane cruelty of academy life.
It was during a required Wilderness Familiarization class, held in a tame, warded section of the outer woods. The instructor, a harried-looking Elf named Lyra, was demonstrating basic herbal identification. I lingered at the back of the group, my **[Mana-Sense]** passively mapping the flora—the gentle vitality of sunsap leaves, the faint astringent magic of silverroot.
A group of students had clustered ahead: three human boys from minor noble houses, their Awakened skills unremarkable but sufficient to grant them a sense of superiority over the truly powerless. Their leader was Jax, a bulky youth with a D-rank skill that hardened his skin like rough bark.
Their target was a smaller, mousy-haired boy named Elian, whose only offense was being poor, shy, and possessing a useless F-rank skill that made small objects slightly damp. They had him backed against a thick hawthorn tree, their laughter sharp.
"—just trying to help, Elian," Jax was saying, his voice a mockery of concern. "If you can't control that leaky skill of yours, maybe you need to… dry out." One of his cronies, a boy with a minor telekinetic push, was using it to repeatedly shove a handful of forest loam into Elian's face. Elian sputtered, tears of humiliation mixing with the dirt.
Instructor Lyra was thirty meters away, engrossed in explaining the difference between edible and toxic berries to a group of attentive Elf girls. She either didn't see or chose not to.
A familiar, old instinct rose in me: look down, walk away. Survival through invisibility. The memory of my own decades of swallowed shame was a bitter taste. But another memory, sharper and more recent, overlaid it: the feeling of a stolen teleport, the principle of *adjacency*. Of bridging a gap.
This wasn't about heroism. It was a calculation. A test. Public demonstration required a stage.
"Machina," I sub-vocalized, my pulse quickening. "Scenario analysis. If I intervene using **[Flicker Step]** to reposition and create a distraction, probability of defusing the situation without exposing undue capability?"
**[SCANNING. TARGETS: THREE HUMAN MALES, LOW D-RANK THREATS. ENVIRONMENT: SEMI-SECLUDED. WITNESSES: MULTIPLE. PROBABILITY OF SUCCESSFUL DE-ESCALATION: 68%. PROBABILITY OF SKILL DISCOVERY: 100%. PROBABILITY OF SKILL BEING MISINTERPRETED AS A LATE-BLOOMING, LOW-UTILITY ABILITY: 92%. CONCLUSION: ACCEPTABLE RISK. DEMONSTRATION PARAMETERS MET.]**
It was all I needed.
I didn't stride forward. I didn't shout. I simply focused on a point one meter to the left of Jax, just inside his peripheral vision. I visualized the fold. The world gave its sickening, minute lurch.
One moment I was at the back of the group. The next, I was *there*, standing slightly too close to Jax, having seemingly appeared from behind a tree.
Jax flinched hard, stumbling back a step. "What the— Veridian?" His confusion was absolute. He'd seen no movement, heard no approach.
"You're in my light," I said, my voice flat. I pointed vaguely at a sunbeam dappling the ground where Elian had been standing. "I was identifying the moss."
It was a nonsensical statement, delivered with a blank, detached stare. The absurdity of it, combined with the uncanny nature of my appearance, created a perfect cognitive hiccup.
Jax's face flushed with anger, overriding his confusion. "You freak! You think your Blank ass can—?"
He swung a backhand, his arm already sheathed in his rough, bark-like skin. It was a slow, telegraphed blow from an untrained brawler. To my old eyes, it would have been unavoidable. To my new senses, steeped in the principles of spatial adjacency and guided by Machina's predictive algorithms, it was a glacier.
I didn't try to block. I didn't need to. I activated **[Flicker Step]** again.
The nausea surged, a wave of disorientation. But I pushed through.
*Twitch.*
I was six inches to the left. Jax's fist whistled through empty air, his own momentum spinning him slightly. The look on his face was priceless—pure, uncomprehending shock.
"He moved!" one of the other boys yelped. "I didn't see him move!"
"He's just fast, you idiot!" Jax snarled, regaining his footing. He lunged, a clumsy grab.
*Twitch.*
One meter backward. The grab closed on nothing.
I was breathing heavily now, the strain of two rapid activations making my vision pulse at the edges. But I held my ground, my expression unchanged. "The moss here is *Lichen Phasmatis*," I recited dully from a text I'd read. "It thrives in intermittent sunlight. You're disrupting the pattern."
My utter, bizarre refusal to engage in the expected script of threat and counter-threat was more disarming than any show of force. Jax hesitated, off-balance in every sense.
"What is going on here?"
Instructor Lyra's voice cut through the clearing. She stood there, her elegant features tight with irritation. Her eyes swept over the scene: Jax, red-faced and panting; his cronies, confused; Elian, wiping mud and tears; and me, standing calmly a few feet away as if I'd been there all along.
"He— he attacked me!" Jax spluttered, pointing a trembling finger at me.
Lyra's eyebrow arched. "Veridian? Attacked you?" The skepticism was palpable. She looked at me. "Explain."
"There was a dispute over foraging rights for a moss sample," I said, my tone that of a bored librarian. "I was attempting to mediate by explaining the moss's phototropic cycle. Jax appeared to… disagree with my botanical assessment." I gestured to the completely unremarkable patch of ground.
Lyra stared at me, then at Jax's still-partially hardened fists. Her **[Mana-Sense]**, far more refined than mine, would be reading the agitated energy of a fight, but the actual events were a mystery. My own mana signature was still pathetically faint, giving nothing away.
"Jax. Elian. My office, now," she said coldly. "The rest of you, back to the designated area. And Veridian?" She fixed me with a piercing look. "A word."
The others shuffled off, throwing bewildered glances over their shoulders. Jax shot me a look of pure, venomous hatred before being led away.
Lyra waited until we were alone. "What *actually* happened?" she asked, her voice lower.
"What I said happened," I replied. It wasn't a lie. It was just a severely edited truth.
She studied me for a long moment. "Your file says you are a Non-Standard Blank. No skill manifestation." It wasn't a question.
I said nothing.
"I didn't see how you got between them," she mused, almost to herself. "And Jax is an oaf, but he's not so clumsy he misses a stationary target twice." Her eyes narrowed. "Has there been… a change in your status?"
This was the moment. The demonstration.
I focused on a point half a meter to my right, by a fallen branch. I visualized. The world lurched.
*Twitch.*
I was standing by the branch. I made a show of bending down, picking up a non-existent leaf, and straightening. "The quality of light here is better for identification," I said, as if that explained the displacement.
Lyra's breath caught. She had been watching. She hadn't seen movement. She'd seen a discontinuity. A blink.
"A… displacement skill?" she whispered. "Late awakening? Flicker? A minor Phase variant?"
"I find it useful for horticultural study," I said, dusting off my hands. "Avoiding shadows."
She continued to stare, a storm of reevaluation in her eyes. A Blank was a write-off. But a student with a manifested skill, however odd and low-powered, was a different category. It was *potential*, however stunted. It was a reason to keep them enrolled.
"I see," she said finally, her voice carefully neutral. "Well. Please try to avoid… disputes over moss in the future, Veridian. Dismissed."
I nodded and walked away, feeling her gaze on my back long after I'd left the clearing.
The news, as such things do, spread in a distorted form. There were no details, just whispers. *Did you hear about Jax and the Blank?* *Something happened in the woods. Lyra took Jax's side.* *Veridian's not quite as helpless as he looks.* The rumors were vague, but they changed the atmosphere. The open mockery became more hesitant, tinged with a sliver of uncertainty.
That evening, as I forced down another bowl of nutrient-paste, Machina's interface glowed.
**[DEMONSTRATION OBJECTIVE: SUCCESSFUL. PUBLIC PERCEPTION SHIFT DETECTED. PROBABILITY OF IMMINENT EXPULSION REDUCED BY 47%.]**
"It's a stay of execution," I murmured. "Not a pardon."
**[CORRECT. YOU HAVE DEMONSTRATED THE EXISTENCE OF A SKILL. YOU MUST NOW DEMONSTRATE ITS WORTH. THE SEMESTER EVALUATION INCLUDES A PRACTICAL ASSESSMENT. YOU WILL BE EXPECTED TO PARTICIPATE.]**
The Practical. Where students showcased their combat or utility skills. Where my one-meter, nauseating teleport would be laughed off the stage unless applied with perfect, undeniable utility.
**[NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: ACQUIRE A SUPPLEMENTARY TRAIT OR SKILL TO SYNERGIZE WITH [FLICKER STEP] BEFORE EVALUATION. TARGET MUST BE DEFENSIVE OR PERCEPTUAL, TO COMPENSATE FOR YOUR EXTREME PHYSICAL FRAILTY. COMMENCING SCAN OF AVAILABLE RESOURCES.]**
The path forward was clear. One stolen trick had bought me time. But time was a currency that burned. To keep my place, to continue my heretical ascent, I needed to steal again. Not just a skill, but a strategy. The thief-god needed an arsenal, and the clock was ticking faster than ever.