The morning of the Practical Evaluation dawned with a metallic taste in the air and a tension that strummed the very stones of Astral Peak. The Grand Coliseum, a vast, open-air amphitheater usually reserved for graduation tournaments, hummed with the energy of hundreds of students and a smattering of visiting dignitaries. Tiered seating rose like a cliff face, filled with a murmuring sea of faces. At the center lay the proving ground: a circular sand pit a hundred meters across, dotted with obstacles—pillars of varying height, shallow trenches, and zones of enchanted terrain that shimmered with faint, elemental auras.
My assigned cohort was Group 9: a mix of middling talents and late-bloomers deemed unlikely to produce anything spectacular. We were the afternoon's warm-up act before the main events of the elite groups. Our examiner was Proctor Valus, the same man who had declared me a Blank. He stood on a raised dais, his expression one of profound boredom.
"The rules are simple," he announced, his voice magically amplified to fill the space. "Survival and demonstration. You will be entered into the arena in groups of five. A single Academy Golem—ranked at a middling E for this exercise—will be activated. Your objective is to last three minutes within the bounds without being incapacitated. You may work together, or not. You will be judged on the efficacy, control, and ingenuity of your skill application. Failure to last the duration does not guarantee a failing mark, but it makes one… likely."
He looked directly at our group, his gaze lingering on me for a fraction of a second longer than the others. "First quintet: step forward."
My name was called third. My stomach was a block of ice. My companions were a nervous girl who could summon a weak gust of wind, a boy whose fingers emitted a faint, tickling light, a Draf girl who could make small pebbles tremble, and Jax.
Jax. His bark-hardened skin looked even rougher today, a permanent scowl etched on his face. When his eyes met mine, they held a cold, focused hatred. The humiliation in the woods had festered. He saw this as his chance for redemption.
"Remember the moss, Veridian," he muttered as we filed down the stairs into the sandy pit. "I've been practicing."
The massive iron gate on the far side of the arena groaned open. The Academy Golem lurched out. It was a crude, humanoid construct of dark stone and etched runes, about eight feet tall. It moved with a ponderous, grinding gait, its single, glowing eye-sensor sweeping over us. It was slow, stupid, and designed to deliver painful, but non-lethal, concussive blasts of force from its fists. An E-rank threat for a group. A death sentence for me, alone.
The gong sounded.
The wind-girl shrieked and immediately tried to push the Golem back with a feeble breeze that only stirred the sand at its feet. The light-boy blinked his fingers uselessly. The Draf girl concentrated, causing a patch of sand near the Golem to ripple, making it stumble slightly—the first sign of actual cooperation.
Jax ignored them. He turned, not toward the Golem, but straight toward me. A blatant, shocking violation of the exercise's implied spirit. But the rules only said "survive the Golem." They said nothing about other students.
"No hiding in the woods now, Blank," he growled, and charged.
The arena, the watching thousands, the Golem—all of it narrowed to the hulking form of Jax closing the distance. My mind, trained by Machina's cold drills, snapped into a crystalline state of analysis.
**[THREAT ANALYSIS: JAX. D-RANK [STONESHARD SKIN]. ENHANCED DURABILITY, MINOR STRENGTH BOOST. LOW COMBAT INTELLIGENCE. PREDICTABLE LINEAR CHARGE. EXECUTE STING-FLICKER DRILL BETA.]**
Time seemed to dilate. My **[Mana-Sense]** painted him in layers: the dense, rough energy sheath around his body, the brighter, turbulent core in his center, the shifting points of balance as he ran.
I didn't run. I stood still, a pale, fragile target.
At the last second, as his hardened fist drew back for a wide, haymaker swing meant to shatter my jaw, I activated **[Flicker Step]**.
The world lurched. I was one meter to his right, now slightly behind his leading shoulder. The nausea was a familiar ghost, pushed aside by adrenaline. His fist whistled through empty air.
My own move was already in motion. Using the minimal momentum of the teleport, I drove the stiffened knuckles of my right hand, not at his rock-like back, but into the side of his ribcage, just below the armpit—a point where the "stone" was thinnest, a nexus of intercostal nerves.
***Thud.***
The impact was pathetic. My hand screamed in protest. But **[Kinetic Dispersal]** smeared the recoil through my arm, preventing a break. And for Jax, it wasn't about force. It was about *surprise* and *location*. A sharp, shocking pain in a vulnerable spot he hadn't even considered defending.
He grunted, more in outrage than agony, and whirled, backhanding wildly. Another **[Flicker Step]**. I appeared a meter away, by a low pillar. The disorientation was worse this time, my vision swimming.
The Golem, having shrugged off the other students' pitiful efforts, was now turning toward the more interesting conflict. Its runes glowed, and it fired a fist-sized blast of concussive force.
Not at me. At Jax.
He saw it coming and braced, his skin thickening. The blast hit him square in the chest with a sound like a hammer on an anvil. He was knocked back two steps, gritting his teeth, but unharmed. His attention was divided now—me and the Golem.
The audience, who had been murmuring at the unusual student-on-student violence, now buzzed with confusion. What was happening? Was the Blank… kiting the Golem toward his bully?
I was. It was a desperate, dangerous gambit. I began to move, not with speed, but with unsettling, precise teleports. A one-meter flicker behind a different pillar. Another to put the Golem directly between me and Jax. I was a ghost, a will-o'-the-wisp, using the environment and the construct as my shields.
Jax, enraged and embarrassed, tried to chase. But every time he got close, I'd vanish, and he'd be left facing the Golem's next methodical blast. He was forced to defend, to divert his focus. The Golem's programming identified him as the primary, active threat.
The other three students, seeing an opportunity, began to harry the Golem from the flanks, their weak skills now slightly more effective as it was preoccupied.
For two minutes, it was a bizarre, tense dance. Jax, a furious bull, was slowly worn down by the Golem's relentless, if slow, pounding and my infuriating, pinpoint reappearances. I was a catalyst, a flaw in his strategy, using the principle of *Rupture* I'd understood from Corin—not by breaking his core, but by breaking his focus, his tempo.
My mana was draining fast. Each **[Flicker Step]** was a small hemorrhage. My head throbbed. I was nearing my limit.
With forty seconds left, Jax made his mistake. Frustrated beyond reason, he roared and charged the Golem directly, aiming to smash it apart and then get to me. The Golem's runes blazed, gathering power for a larger blast.
It was the moment. The **Sting-Flicker** finale.
I didn't target Jax. I targeted the Golem. Not to damage it, but to *adjust* it.
As Jax closed, I used my second-to-last usable **[Flicker Step]** to appear not *away*, but *beside* the Golem's leg, in its blind spot. I slammed my palm, not against the stone, but against a specific, faintly glowing rune on its thigh—a stabilization glyph I'd identified with my **[Mana-Sense]** from the bestiaries on constructs.
I had no power to disrupt it. But I had the *conceptual understanding* of a fracture point. I pushed my minuscule, desperately compressed strand of mana into the glyph, not to overload it, but to *vibrate* it at a sympathetic frequency to the chaotic energy of Jax's own charging aura.
The Golem shuddered. Its gathered blast, aimed at Jax's center mass, fired a half-second early and three degrees off-axis.
Instead of hitting Jax's fortified chest, the concussive orb struck the ground at his feet just as he planted his lead foot.
***BOOM.***
Sand and magic exploded. Jax was thrown upward and backward, not by a direct hit, but by the blast's shockwave and the disrupted ground. He landed in a heap five meters away, dazed, his stone-skin flickering uncertainly. The Golem, its stabilization temporarily fouled, listed to one side, its eye-sensor fizzing.
The gong rang. Three minutes.
Silence.
Then, a wave of confused chatter swept the stands. It hadn't been a display of power. It had been a display of… something else. Precision. Timing. A kind of eerie, tactical malignancy. I had not thrown a single punch of consequence. I had not cast a single spell. I had been a ghost, a provocateur, a living flaw in the arena's expected narrative.
I stood panting in the sand, my body trembling with exhaustion and strain. Jax groaned, struggling to get up, humiliation complete. The other three students looked at me with a mixture of awe and fear.
Proctor Valus stared down from his dais, his boredom replaced by a sharp, evaluating intensity. He hadn't seen a skill's strength. He'd seen a skill's *use*. He'd seen the F-rank Blank not just survive, but orchestrate the downfall of a stronger peer using the environment and the test's parameters as weapons.
"Group 9… concluded," he announced, his voice cutting through the murmur. "Results will be posted with your semester evaluations. Next group, prepare."
As I stumbled out of the arena, the world felt brittle and too bright. I had passed. I knew it. Not with glory, but with a stark, unsettling competence that would be harder to dismiss than mere failure.
In the cool dimness of the exit tunnel, Machina's interface glowed.
**[PRACTICAL ASSESSMENT: COMPLETE. PRIMARY OBJECTIVE (DEMONSTRATE SURVIVABILITY/UTILITY): ACHIEVED. SECONDARY DATA: COMBAT STRESS TEST OF SYNERGIZED TRAITS SUCCESSFUL. EFFICIENCY RATING: 71%.]**
"It was ugly," I whispered, leaning against the cold stone.
**[EFFICIENCY IS NOT AESTHETIC. YOU UTILIZED THREE ARCHIVED TRAITS AND ONE CONCEPTUAL DATUM TO NEUTRALIZE A SUPERIOR PHYSICAL THREAT AND MANIPULATE A NEUTRAL CONSTRUCT. YOU DEMONSTRATED THE PRINCIPLE OF ASYMMETRICAL CONFLICT. THIS IS THE FOUNDATION OF YOUR ASCENSION.]**
Asymmetrical conflict. The war of the weak against the strong. The thief against the vault.
I had survived the Coliseum. I had secured my place at the academy for another term. But the victory tasted of sand and bile. I hadn't won a fight. I had exploited a system. It was a vital lesson, but a cold one.
The path forward was no longer about mere survival within these walls. I had proven I could play their game, however oddly. Now, the real theft could begin. The academy's deepest secrets, the forgotten relics, the dormant powers slumbering in its vaults and ancient groves—they were the next targets. The Crucible had forged not a hero, but a sharper, hungrier ghost. And a ghost could go places heroes never dreamed.