The Assessment
"I scored sixty percent because sixty percent is invisible. Invisible is useful. Perfect is a target."
The written examination was held in the Grand Hall — a cavernous space beneath a domed ceiling enchanted to display the real-time positions of every active Gate in Vaelthorne. The dots pulsed like heartbeats: blue for stable, amber for approaching Break threshold, red for active incursion. There were more amber dots than Kael remembered from the last published survey. He filed this observation alongside the thirty-seven others he'd made since entering the building and returned his attention to the exam.
Three hundred and twelve desks. Three hundred and twelve students. The scratch of pens on paper. The occasional nervous cough. The subtle hum of anti-cheating enchantments that monitored mana activity within a three-foot radius of each desk. The enchantments were well-designed — they'd catch any student trying to use a magical communication device or enhancement spell. They would not catch Kael, because Kael was not cheating. He did not need to cheat. He had read every book in Hector's modest library by age six, had bribed a travelling merchant to bring him Academy textbooks by age nine, and had memorised the entire current curriculum by age twelve.
He knew every answer on this exam. He would not give every answer on this exam.
• •
Question 14: Describe the three primary mechanisms by which a Gate achieves dimensional stability.
Kael's pen hovered above the page. The correct answer — the textbook answer, the answer that would earn full marks — involved mana-membrane equilibrium, spatial anchoring, and temporal synchronisation. He knew this. He also knew the answer that wasn't in the textbook: that Gates achieved stability through a fourth mechanism, one that no human researcher had identified because it required understanding dimensional physics from the other side. A mechanism involving the slow crystallisation of emotional resonance from the beings killed inside the Gate, forming a psychic sediment layer that the Gate used as ballast.
He knew this because, in another life, he had designed this mechanism.
The knowledge surfaced not as a Memory Shard — those were violent, involuntary, experiential — but as a passive fragment, a "gut feeling" that was actually a ten-thousand-year-old piece of technical expertise so deeply embedded in his cognitive architecture that it had survived the dimensional transit intact. He had hundreds of these. Instincts that weren't instincts. Reflexes that weren't reflexes. A body of knowledge so vast and so fragmented that accessing it was like trying to read a library by the light of a flickering candle — he could see individual pages, but never the whole shelf.
He wrote the textbook answer. Three mechanisms. Clear, competent, unremarkable. He deliberated for precisely twelve seconds before intentionally misspelling "synchronisation" in a way that would cost him one mark.
Sixty percent. That was the target. High enough to pass. Low enough to be invisible. In a class of three hundred, nobody remembered the student who scored sixty percent. They remembered the top ten and the bottom five. Everyone else was furniture.
Kael intended to be furniture. For as long as it served him.
• •
The physical assessment was held on Training Field Three — an open-air arena ringed with tiered seating and enclosed by a shimmering barrier that, according to the proctor, would "absorb impacts up to B-Rank intensity." The proctor said this with the confidence of a man who had never been hit by anything above C-Rank. Kael noted the barrier's resonance frequency, identified two structural weak points where the enchantment anchors were slightly misaligned, and filed the information under "useful if things go wrong."
The assessment was straightforward: a series of physical tests (sprint, endurance, strength, flexibility, reaction time) followed by a basic combat evaluation against a training construct — a mana-animated humanoid that adapted its difficulty to the student's level.
Kael ran the sprint in 11.2 seconds. His body was capable of 8.4, but 8.4 would have raised questions. 11.2 placed him in the 55th percentile — above average, but only slightly. Not worth a second look.
The endurance test was harder to fake. Not physically — physically it was trivial, a five-minute jog that his body could sustain for hours. The difficulty was in the details. A normal sixteen-year-old with no mana enhancement would show specific signs of exertion at specific intervals: elevated breathing at minute two, mild perspiration at minute three, a slight decline in form at minute four. Kael performed each of these on cue, like an actor hitting marks, because the alternative was a sixteen-year-old boy jogging for five minutes without a single biological sign of effort, and that would be noticed.
The body he inhabited was not normal. Thirteen years of Inverse Cultivation — the forbidden technique he had adapted from his past life's knowledge, the agonising process of using anti-mana to dissolve scar tissue on his shattered circuits and regrow them as hybrid pathways — had reshaped him at the cellular level. His muscles were denser than a human's should be. His reflexes were faster. His spatial awareness extended further. He moved with a fluidity that several students had already noticed and that he was working very hard to suppress, dampening the grace that came from ten thousand years of combat instinct into something that merely looked like "good coordination."
The combat evaluation was where the real performance began.
The training construct materialised in the centre of the arena — a featureless humanoid of blue light, roughly six feet tall, holding a blunted practice sword. It bowed. Kael bowed back. The proctor signalled the start.
The construct attacked with a textbook overhead strike. Kael sidestepped it with exactly the right amount of clumsiness — not graceful, not panicked, just a teenager with decent reflexes and no formal training. He let the construct drive him back for thirty seconds, blocking with the practice sword they'd issued him, allowing it to score two glancing hits on his left arm and one on his ribs. Each hit stung. He used the sting to remember what authentic pain responses looked like and performed them accurately.
Then he counter-attacked. A simple thrust, slightly off-centre, followed by a retreat. The construct adapted. He let it push him again. Another exchange. He scored a clean hit on the construct's torso — not elegant, not devastating, just a solid strike from a student who had "some natural talent but no training."
The construct's difficulty ratcheted up. Its movements became sharper, more varied. Kael matched the increase exactly, staying one half-step behind it, making it look like he was struggling to keep up rather than carefully calibrating his performance to a predetermined output level.
The proctor called the match after ninety seconds. "Not bad," he said, making a note on his clipboard. "Natural reflexes are above average. Swordsmanship is raw but instinctive. Recommend placement in Tier 3 combat training."
Tier 3. Middle of the pack. Invisible.
Kael handed back the practice sword and walked off the field. As he passed the seating area, he caught a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision — a girl in the front row, leaning forward, her copper-red hair catching the light like a signal fire. She was watching him with an expression he couldn't immediately categorise, which was unusual. He could categorise most expressions.
He filed her under "observation required" and kept walking. He did not yet know her name.
• •
The Mana Assessment was the test that mattered. Everything else — the written exam, the physical, the combat evaluation — was context. This was the verdict. In a world where power was biological destiny, the Mana Assessment determined your place in the hierarchy with the finality of a gavel.
The assessment chamber was a circular room lined with resonance crystals — six-foot pillars of translucent blue stone that amplified and measured mana output. At the centre of the room stood a single column of pure assessment crystal, waist-high and polished to a mirror sheen. The procedure was simple: place both hands on the crystal, push your mana into it, and the crystal displays your Mana Grade, Circuit Configuration, and Elemental Affinity. The results are instant, public, and permanent in the Academy's records.
Students went in one at a time. They came out in one of two states: elated or destroyed. There was no middle ground. This was by design.
Kael waited. The line moved. Through the chamber's open door, he heard the results being announced.
"Maren Voss. Grade E. Three active circuits. Wind affinity. Next."
"Talia Sung. Grade D. Five active circuits. Water affinity." A gasp from outside — D-Rank at sixteen was exceptional. "Next."
"Ren Kaito. Grade E. Four active circuits." A pause. "Dual affinity: Wind and Lightning." Another murmur. Dual affinities were rare. Kael noted this and adjusted Ren's entry in his mental catalogue upward. "Next."
His turn.
The chamber was cold. Not physically — the temperature was regulated by climate enchantments — but in the way that mana-dense environments sometimes felt cold to people whose circuits were configured differently. Kael's Void Circuits didn't channel mana the way normal circuits did. They inverted it. Absorbed it. The ambient mana in the room was being pulled toward him in microscopic currents, like water swirling toward a drain, and the resonance crystals along the walls were dimming almost imperceptibly as their stored energy was siphoned by his presence.
The proctor — a different one, older, with the tired eyes of someone who had assessed ten thousand students and been surprised by exactly none of them — gestured toward the crystal.
"Hands on. Push when ready."
Kael placed his hands on the crystal. It was smooth and faintly warm. He felt the assessment enchantment engage — a tendril of diagnostic mana extending from the crystal into his palms, tracing the pathways of his circuits, mapping their configuration.
He felt the tendril reach his Void Circuit and stop.
Not "stop" in the sense of hitting a wall. "Stop" in the sense of ceasing to exist. The diagnostic mana entered his Void Circuit and was unmade — converted from energy to absence, from something to nothing, with the quiet efficiency of a candle being snuffed. The assessment crystal, which had been glowing a steady blue, flickered. Dimmed. Went dark.
Silence.
The proctor leaned forward. Tapped the crystal. Checked the resonance pillars. Frowned.
"No reading," he said, more to himself than to Kael. He tapped the crystal again. Nothing. "Grade: Unclassifiable. Circuits: zero detected. Affinity: none." He looked up at Kael with an expression that was equal parts confusion and pity. "Son, this crystal hasn't failed to read someone in eleven years."
"I'm aware of my condition," Kael said. Polite. Neutral. Giving nothing.
The proctor hesitated, clearly debating whether to say something compassionate or clinical. He chose clinical: "I'll log you as F-Rank, minimum viable. You'll be eligible for non-combat electives and support-track courses. If your condition changes—"
"It won't," Kael said, because this was what a person with shattered circuits would say, and because the lie tasted no different from any other.
He removed his hands from the crystal. As his palms left the surface, he felt it — a hairline crack, running diagonally across the crystal's face. Tiny. Invisible unless you knew where to look. The assessment crystal, designed to withstand A-Rank mana outputs, had cracked under the strain of trying to read a circuit type that wasn't supposed to exist.
Kael turned and walked out. Behind him, the proctor ran his fingers across the crystal's surface and found nothing. The crack was on the inside.
• •
The dormitory assignments were posted on a crystal board in the central plaza — a ten-foot slab of enchanted glass that displayed every student's name, rank, and housing assignment in glowing text that updated in real time.
Kael found his name at the bottom.
ASHBORNE, KAEL — RANK: F — DORMITORY: COMMONER BLOCK, ROOM 107
The Commoner Block. Not Sovereign Hall, where every other Sovereign Family scion was housed in suites with private training rooms and personal attendants. The Commoner Block, where scholarship students and minor noble children shared cramped rooms with thin walls and heating enchantments that cut out at midnight.
This was his father's hand. The enrollment bylaw guaranteed Kael a seat at Zenith, but it did not guarantee him the privileges of his bloodline. Those were granted at the family's discretion. Duke Aldric had exercised that discretion with surgical precision: his son could attend the Academy, but he would do so as a commoner. Stripped of name. Stripped of standing. Stripped of everything except the right to exist in the building.
Kael studied the assignment and felt something he did not expect.
Amusement.
Not the Emperor's cold amusement — the vast, indifferent humour of a being so powerful that mortal slights were beneath notice. This was sharper. More personal. More human. The amusement of a sixteen-year-old boy who had spent thirteen years in a stone house with one elderly servant, sleeping on a narrow bed, eating whatever Hector could cook from whatever the supply cart brought, training in a basement by candlelight because there was no money for mana-lamps. The Commoner Block, with its thin walls and unreliable heating, was an upgrade.
His father had meant this as punishment. It had arrived as comedy.
Kael shouldered his single bag — containing three changes of clothes, a journal, a set of lockpicks Hector had given him "for emergencies," and nothing else — and walked toward the Commoner Block. The crystal board updated behind him, his name settling into its position at the very bottom of the rankings, below three hundred and eleven other students, a dead pixel at the edge of a bright screen.
Room 107 was small. A bed, a desk, a window that faced the outer edge of the floating island, giving him a view of open sky and the distant sprawl of Arcanum three thousand feet below. The heating enchantment hummed at a frequency that suggested it would indeed stop working at midnight. The walls were thin enough that he could hear the student in 108 unpacking.
Kael set his bag on the bed. He stood at the window. The sun was setting over Arcanum, painting the capital in shades of amber and rose, and the Gates scattered across the cityscape pulsed in counterpoint — blue, amber, blue, amber — a rhythm that, if you listened with the right kind of ears, sounded almost like breathing.
He placed his palm flat against his sternum. Beneath his hand, beneath the bone and muscle and skin of a sixteen-year-old boy, the Void Circuits hummed their impossible frequency. Thirty-seven fracture points. Thirteen years of repair. Twenty-two circuits partially restored, functioning at roughly forty percent capacity in a configuration that no test could measure and no textbook could explain.
Tomorrow, the Academy would begin the work of ranking him, sorting him, and deciding what he was worth. Tomorrow, he would begin the work of letting them believe they had succeeded.
Tonight, he closed his eyes and listened to the sound that was not quite silence beneath his ribs, and the blade that slept against his soul stirred once, softly, like a dreamer turning toward a familiar voice, and was still.