The training hall for S class was on the fifth floor of the north tower, directly above the orientation room.
If the orientation room said we are going to put you in a space and see what happens, the training hall said we are going to put you in a space and hit you with things. High ceilings, reinforced stone floors with mana absorption channels running through them to contain stray output, weapon racks along one wall, and a series of measuring instruments along the other that I recognised as more sophisticated versions of the assessment disc from yesterday.
I noted the instruments and made a mental note about the disc situation.
Cael was already there when we arrived. Standing in the centre of the floor with her hands behind her back and the expression of someone who had done this enough times to find it interesting rather than routine.
"Combat assessment," she said, without preamble. "Individual. Sequential. You will each demonstrate your current capability against a training construct at full output. No holding back. I need accurate baselines or the next four years are built on bad foundations."
She looked around the circle we had instinctively formed.
"Full output," she repeated. "I will know if you aren't."
Her eyes stopped on me for exactly one second.
I kept my face neutral.
"Varek," she said. "You're first."
Lucien Varek fighting was a different thing from Lucien Varek existing in a room.
The training construct was a mana animated figure, roughly humanoid, calibrated to match the strength level of whoever it was fighting, which meant it scaled up as the fighter's output increased. Cael activated it with a hand gesture and it came to life in the centre of the floor with the particular quality of movement that mana constructs have, precise and unhesitating and completely without self preservation instinct.
Varek didn't warm up. He didn't adjust his stance or shake out his hands or do any of the preparatory things that people do when they're performing capability for an audience. He just looked at the construct for one second, made a small precise gesture with his right hand, and the air around him changed.
His mana output was clean. Controlled in the way that years of structured training produced, no wasted output, every bit of it directed. The construct matched him and they went back and forth across the floor in exchanges that were fast enough to make some of the watching students shift their weight forward without realising they were doing it.
He finished it in four minutes with a technique that compressed mana into a single point and drove it through the construct's core. The construct collapsed and Cael noted something on the slate she was holding.
"S minus," she said. "Consistent with yesterday. Good."
Varek stepped back without visible satisfaction. Like S minus was the expected result and anything else would have been the surprise.
The next seven students went in the order Cael called them.
The red haired girl with the scar, whose name turned out to be Mira Ashfen, fought with a directness that was almost startling. No technique flourishes, no complex mana constructs, just forward pressure and an absolute refusal to move backward. She registered A rank and took a cut from the construct across her forearm that she didn't appear to notice until Cael pointed at it afterward.
The two boys with matching house crests, Aldric and Penn Soral, were brothers and fought with a complementary style that suggested they had trained together for years. Individually they both registered A minus. Cael noted something extra when she watched them that she didn't share aloud.
The girl with the notebook, whose name was Yenna Tal, turned out to be a mage in the specific academic sense, her combat style built entirely around constructed spells rather than physical engagement. Her mana control was the most precise I had seen from anyone in the room, each spell assembled with the care of someone who understood exactly what they were building and why. She registered A rank and the construct had visible difficulty tracking her spell sequencing.
Three more students after that, all registering between A minus and A rank, all competent, all clearly products of years of deliberate development.
Then Seris Elwyn.
Cael called her name and Seris stood up from the wall she had been leaning against and walked to the centre of the floor with the same quiet economy of movement I had noticed yesterday.
The construct activated.
And then something happened that made the room go still in a different way from how it had gone still at the assessment.
Seris didn't fight the construct.
She moved around it. Through it almost, in a way that was difficult to track visually, her body finding the spaces between its attacks with a precision that suggested she knew where they were going before they arrived. Her mana output was low, lower than anyone else who had gone before her, but it was doing something I couldn't immediately categorise. Not reinforcement. Not a weapon enhancement. Something more internal, more structural.
The construct swung and she was already not where it was swinging. It adjusted and she adjusted first. It escalated and she moved through the escalation like water finding the path of least resistance and doing it faster than water had any right to.
After three minutes she placed one hand flat against the construct's core and it stopped.
Not collapsed. Stopped. Like she had found the switch and pressed it.
The room was quiet.
Cael looked at her slate for a moment. Then at Seris. Then she wrote something down that she angled away from the rest of the room.
"Thank you Elwyn," she said, in a tone that gave nothing away.
Seris walked back to her wall and resumed leaning against it.
I watched her for a moment longer than I should have.
Whatever she had just done, it wasn't on the standard scale in any way I recognised. And her mana core was from a rival noble house with a history the old Caiden had known about and I didn't.
Something to think about.
"Brant," Cael said.
Theo, who had been sitting next to me with the posture of a man quietly hoping his name wouldn't be called, stood up.
"Right," he said, to no one.
He walked to the centre of the floor with the energy of someone approaching something they had made their peace with not enjoying. The construct activated. Theo looked at it. It looked at him.
What followed was genuinely surprising.
Not because Theo was exceptional. He wasn't, by S class standards, and he seemed to know it and have a functional relationship with that knowledge. But he was smarter in a fight than his posture suggested. He used the floor space well, created angles that made the construct work harder than it should have for its calibration level, and when he took hits he took them in ways that minimised damage with the practiced efficiency of someone who had spent a lot of time learning how to lose as safely as possible.
He registered B rank. The lowest in the room by a margin.
He walked back and sat down next to me.
"B rank," he said quietly, with the tone of a man confirming a thing he already knew.
"You used the floor better than half the people who went before you," I said.
He looked at me sideways. "Was that a compliment."
"It was an observation."
"From you I'll take it." He paused. "You're last by the way."
"I know."
"Any thoughts on how that's going to go."
"Some," I said.
He waited.
I didn't elaborate.
He nodded slowly. "Fantastic," he said.
"Knox."
The room had the particular quality of attention that a room gets when it has been waiting for something. Nine students and one advisor, all of them carrying the assessment from two days ago somewhere in the front of their minds, all of them now watching me stand up and walk to the centre of the floor with expressions ranging from careful neutrality to open curiosity to Varek's specific brand of focused assessment that hadn't changed since yesterday.
The construct activated.
I stood in front of it and made a decision.
Full output wasn't an option. Full output would end the construct in under ten seconds and do something to the instruments along the wall that would require another call to the Academic Standards Committee and I had decided that organisation had enough to think about already.
But Cael had said she would know if I held back. And she had looked at me when she said it in a way that suggested she was not making a general statement.
So. A middle position. Enough to show something real. Not enough to show everything.
I let Mana Suppression settle at a level that felt approximately honest without being complete. Somewhere around the lower edge of what I actually was. A controlled reveal rather than a performance.
The construct came at me.
I stepped into it rather than back from it, which was the first thing that made the room change quality slightly because it was the opposite of what every previous student had done. The construct's first strike I caught on a forearm guard and redirected rather than absorbed, Iron Fortress handling the impact without visible effort on my part. The second strike I let pass entirely using a movement that wasn't quite Void Step but borrowed from it, a compression of space that made the attack land on empty air.
I wasn't using a weapon. I hadn't taken one from the rack. Fighting the construct empty handed at this output level felt like the right calibration.
The construct escalated. I matched it. We went back and forth across the floor in exchanges that were faster than what Varek had shown but not dramatically so, controlled, measured, the kind of fight that communicated capable without communicating everything.
After five minutes I ended it with a Mana Blade technique applied through my palm rather than a weapon, a concentrated burst to the core that was significantly less than what I was capable of but more than enough for the purpose.
The construct went down.
I stepped back.
The instruments along the wall registered.
Cael looked at her slate.
The room waited.
"S rank," she said.
Not S minus. Not the edge of the scale where all the other exceptional students in the room lived. The top of the formal scale, the rank the kingdom kept a registry of, the rank that made you a strategic national asset in the eyes of the crown.
And I had been holding back.
Not dramatically. Not obviously. But I had been holding back and Cael knew it and from the expression on her face she had known it before I even stood up and the S rank reading was what a controlled, measured, deliberately restrained version of Kane Knox produced when asked to demonstrate baseline capability to a room of people he had known for less than twenty four hours.
Nobody spoke.
Varek was looking at me with an expression that had moved past careful assessment into something quieter and more internal. The look of someone revising a conclusion they had been confident about.
Seris was watching me from her wall with those pale green eyes and the same expression she'd had in the orientation room, the one that gave nothing away and gathered everything.
Theo was sitting very still next to where I was about to return to with the expression of a man who had just updated his threat assessment of his own living situation significantly upward.
I walked back and sat down.
"So," Theo said, very quietly.
"So," I agreed.
"You were holding back."
I didn't answer that.
He looked at the ceiling. "Room forty two is a very nice room," he said, mostly to himself. "I was really looking forward to room forty two."
Across the circle Varek's eyes found mine for the first time since yesterday's assessment and held there for three seconds with an expression that had resolved into something clear and uncomplicated.
This wasn't over. It was, in fact, just starting.
I held the look until he was the one who ended it.
Then I looked at Cael, who was writing on her slate with the focused attention of someone who had a great deal to note down and was going to take her time about it.
She looked up once, caught my eye, and gave me the small precise nod of someone filing a significant piece of information away for later.
I looked back at the window.
First day of S class.
Four years to go.