Chapter 7: Too Much - The Null Sovereign

The objective completed itself on a Thursday morning.

I was standing in the forest north of the estate, watching the last of my XP bar fill from a hunt I had barely needed to try on, when the notification arrived.

[Objective complete: Arrive at Avar Academy ready.][Reward: 1,000 Skill Points.][New objective issued.][Objective: Enroll at Avar Academy.][Reward: 500 Skill Points.][Failure penalty: Objective chain terminated.]

And then the level notification.

[Level up! Level 48.][Level up! Level 49.][Level up! Level 50.]

[Milestone reached: Level 50.][Bonus awarded: All stats plus 20. Skill Points plus 200.]

I stood in the quiet forest and let the notifications settle.

Then I checked my status properly for the first time in two weeks.

I read it once.

Then I sat down on a fallen log and read it again.

One hundred and twenty four strength. One hundred and thirty one agility. Stats that scaled so far past anything the guild assessment crystals could process that Della had stopped trying to record them accurately two months ago and just wrote exceptional in the notes field with the energy of someone who had given up caring.

Over a thousand skill points sitting unspent.

I thought about the S class students I was about to walk into a room with. The ones the kingdom considered its most gifted young fighters. The ones who had trained their entire lives, refined their mana cores carefully, built their strength deliberately across years of structured education.

S minus rank on the strength scale. The best of them. The ones the noble houses bragged about at court.

My Luck stat was two. It was by a significant margin the most accurate number on my entire status screen.

I sat on the log for a while longer.

Then I said, out loud, to nobody in particular, "I may have overdone it."

The forest didn't respond. I appreciated the discretion.

I spent the day before departure on skills.

Not everything. I had learned the hard way that spending everything left you exposed in ways you couldn't predict. But the reserve was large enough that strategic spending made sense and I had been thinking about the academy specifically.

The academy wouldn't just be combat. There would be assessments, theoretical components, mana control examinations, the kind of structured institutional testing that required precision over raw power. Raw power could break an assessment instrument. Precision could actually pass one.

[Skill purchased: Mana Suppression (Active)][Effect: Allows user to compress and conceal their mana signature to any desired level, down to complete invisibility. Suppressed mana does not affect combat capability. Scales with Mana and Intelligence.][Cost: 180 Skill Points.]

This one I considered the most important purchase I had made since Master Swordsman.

Walking into Avar Academy at full output would be like setting fire to a building to find out which room was the warmest. I needed control. I needed the ability to look like something other than whatever I actually was until I understood the environment well enough to decide what to reveal and when.

I tested it immediately. Compressed my mana signature down, layer by layer, watching my Mana Domain track its own output decreasing. All the way down to something that read roughly as C rank.

My stats didn't change. My skills still functioned. From the outside I would appear to be a moderately capable student with an unclear core reading and nothing particularly remarkable about him.

Good.

[Skill purchased: Arcane Mind (Passive)][Effect: Permanently enhances cognitive processing speed, memory retention, and analytical capability. Accelerates learning of new magic systems and academic disciplines. Scales with Intelligence.][Cost: 150 Skill Points.]

[Skill Points remaining: 910]

I kept the rest. The academy would show me what I needed next.

Packing up the Knox estate took about an hour.

There wasn't much. Caiden hadn't accumulated things. A few books I wanted to keep, the notebook full of beast observations, a change of clothes, the Ironclad Serpent core I still hadn't decided what to do with. The iron longsword.

I had purchased a better sword in Greyveil the week before. A proper one, well balanced, good steel, mana conductive enough to hold a Blade enhancement without degradation. It sat in a plain scabbard that I strapped across my back without ceremony.

The iron sword I left on the desk.

It had done what it needed to do. Carrying it to an elite academy felt like bringing a reminder of something I didn't need reminding of. I remembered the first Grim Rat well enough without props.

I locked the estate door, pocketed the key out of a habit that made no practical sense, and started walking.

Avar Academy was a full day's travel by the mana rail that connected Greyveil to the capital district. I bought a single ticket, found a window seat in an empty carriage, and watched Aethoria move past outside.

The kingdom was bigger than I had appreciated from the estate window. Cities that made Greyveil look like a rest stop, arcane infrastructure that got more complex and layered the closer we got to the capital, noble estates visible on hillsides with the particular architecture of places that had been built to be seen from a distance.

I had spent six months in a small corner of it killing things.

The world was considerably larger than a small corner.

I filed that observation away and watched the landscape change.

The academy appeared on the horizon an hour before we arrived.

I had seen it from the city below when I first woke up in Caiden's room, distant and silhouetted against the twin moons. Up close it was something else entirely. Built into the side of a mountain that the capital had grown around rather than over, the kind of deliberate architectural statement that said we were here before everything else and we intend to remain. Stone and steel and mana channels running through the walls in patterns visible from the rail, the whole structure carrying a low hum that my Mana Domain picked up from two kilometres out.

Dense with signatures. Students, faculty, staff, the ambient mana of a building that had been accumulating arcane residue for centuries. All of it layered on top of each other in a way that would have been overwhelming six months ago and now just felt like a lot of information arriving at once.

I got off the rail at the academy stop and joined the stream of students moving toward the main gates.

They were loud. Excited, nervous, performing confidence for each other with the energy of people who had been waiting for this for years. Noble crests on uniforms, groups clustering by house affiliation, the particular social choreography of people who had grown up in the same circles and were now establishing the hierarchy they had already rehearsed in their heads.

I walked through it quietly with my mana compressed to C rank and my hands in my pockets.

The gates were exactly as large as a building trying to make a statement would build them. Black iron, mana inscribed, flanked by stone pillars that had names carved into them, graduates presumably, the kind of institutional gesture that said this place produces people worth remembering.

I stopped in front of them.

Looked up.

Around me students streamed past, jostling, talking, too busy performing their own arrivals to notice one quiet minor noble standing at the threshold doing absolutely nothing remarkable.

I thought about the Grim Rat on day one. The knife. The shaking hands. The absolute absence of anything resembling competence.

Then I thought about the Stormcaller Drake on the mountain ridge, the forty seven minute fight in self generated rain, three levels in one afternoon.

Then I thought about sitting on that log this morning reading stats that shouldn't exist on a seventeen year old in this world and saying out loud to an empty forest that I had possibly overdone it.

The irony was not lost on me. It never was. I just never laughed at it.

I walked through the gates.

Chapter 7 - Chapter 7: Too Much