The woman made her intent glaringly obvious, her gaze darting toward my direction before she quickly dropped her eyes the moment our glances locked. With a practiced, dismissive flick of her wrist, she jotted something down on the sleek, glowing tablet resting in her palms.
After Headmaster Duncan had finished debriefing the assembly on what to expect from the rigors ahead, Wilbeck led the group through a cavernous, arching doorway that opened into a vast, sprawling corridor. They walked in tense silence for a long while before coming to a halt in front of an imposing double door.
Wilbeck struck the heavy wood with three sharp raps. A crisp, resonant voice answered from within. They were ushered through the threshold into a monumental hall packed with rows of polished wooden desks stretching as far as the eye could see.
The students were arranged strictly according to their assigned serial numbers. Kyle found himself slotted squarely in the middle of a restless beast folk whose amber eyes flickered with animalistic tension, and a stoic elf whose long, pointed ears twitched at every ambient sound.
The voice that had answered from within revealed herself as Solane. She stepped forward, laying down sharp, unyielding instructions while handing out thick, closely-printed packets of exam papers down the rows.
This was the written phase of the entrance trials. As Kyle scanned the pages, a wave of profound relief washed over him—the questions posed were drawn exclusively from the exact texts and foundational theories he had spent grueling hours studying. It made the entire examination feel like a complete piece of cake.
Around him, pens scratched frantically against parchment. Yet, thirty minutes into the allotted time, Kyle calmly laid down his pen, gathered his papers, and walked up to turn them in. Solane stared at him, her hand hovering above the collection tray, visibly reluctant to accept them. A flicker of judgment crossed her features; she clearly assumed he had hit a wall of ignorance and simply given up out of frustration.
The written phase ground on for about two agonizing hours. When the heavy doors finally swung open, the students stumbled out into the hallway looking thoroughly gloomy, their spirits crushed by the theoretical depth of the exam.
Wilbeck returned from wherever he had vanished, rounding the group up and guiding them through another labyrinth of twisting corridors until they reached a secondary, subterranean hall.
This room bore no resemblance to the last. Instead of desks, the floor was cleared of chairs, centered entirely around a massive, jagged crystal artifact resting upon a raised stone dais. Thick, pulsing conduits of arcane wire linked the glowing crystal to a complex, rune-etched calculation device nearby.
The man in charge of the station, an instructor named Gunner, stepped forward to explain the mechanics. The crystal was designed to measure the raw, unadulterated potency of a student's mana when they placed their bare hand upon its faceted surface and forced their core to release its reserve.
"Just put your hand squarely on the crystal and channel as much mana as you can into it," Gunner instructed, his tone brisk and clinical.
To demonstrate, he folded his crisp white coat above his elbow, pressed his right palm flat against the cold surface of the crystal, and released a steady stream of mana. The stone flared a faint, sickly yellow, and the connected device chimed softly, displaying a numerical value: 765.
A red-haired girl stepped up next. Clenching her jaw, she flooded the artifact with her energy. The crystal surged into a vibrant orange hue, registering a score of 734.
"That's impressive," Gunner commented, his fingers sliding up to adjust his glasses as he touched his pale green hair. He pulled the tablet closer and logged her score.
For the most part, the common scores hovered steadily between 500 and 600, with a select few exceptional candidates breaking into the 700s. Rumor had it that an anomaly years ago had even managed an 850, a feat Gunner still recalled with open-mouthed disbelief. But nothing in his decades of invigilation could have prepared him for what happened next when a silver-haired boy stepped up to take his assessment.
The moment Kyle touched the stone, the crystal didn't just glow—it erupted. A blinding, searing white light filled the hall, forcing everyone to shield their eyes. Sharp, spiderweb cracks fractured across the crystal's dense surface, accompanied by the distinct, brittle sound of shattering glass echoing violently off the stone walls. When the blinding glare finally subsided, every eye in the room locked onto Kyle in absolute, breathless suspense, waiting for the heavily strained device to calculate the catastrophic output.
Seconds stretched into an eternity as the runes on the monitor flickered erratically before finally locking onto a final value.
Gunner stared at the display, his breath hitching in his throat. He had dismissed the ancient legends of such numbers as impossible exaggerations, yet the stark reality burned right before his eyes. The hall plunged into a profound, suffocating silence; no one knew how to process it. It simply defied the laws of the academy's metrics. Here stood a boy who had casually achieved a score of 1045, and yet he didn't even bat an eye. Instead, he let out a low, disappointed sigh, as if he had been expecting a far higher number.
When Kyle stepped down from the platform, the crowd parted instantly, waves of students scrambling to clear a path. Not a single person—not even the supervising instructors—dared to approach him.
Who in the hells is this kid? Gunner thought, his mind racing as Kyle turned and walked out of the hall. The assessment crystal was completely ruined, necessitating a full replacement. Predictably, whispers exploded through the corridors, turning the rumor mills among staff and students alike into a frenzy about the mysterious silver-haired boy who had shattered the testing stone.
High above the commotion, Headmaster Duncan received the chaotic report of the incident when his secretary burst unceremoniously through his office doors.
"Sir, I don't think the rumors are even true," she blurted out, trying to steady her breathing.
Duncan let out a low, amused chuckle. "If the rumors weren't true, then why on earth are they hauling a replacement crystal down to the testing hall right now?" he asked, casually gesturing toward the window where porters could be seen struggling under the weight of a massive crated stone below.
When she bowed and excused herself, Duncan massaged his throbbing temples, leaning back in his leather chair. "You never cease to amaze me," he murmured quietly, directing the words toward the empty space right in front of his desk.
Meanwhile, Kyle had abandoned the hall the moment his assessment concluded, desperate to escape the suffocating weight of prying eyes and whispered rumors. Now, however, he faced a far more immediate problem: he was utterly lost.
I really've done it now, and on my very first day, Kyle muttered inwardly. In frustration, he crumpled the campus map he had been clutching in his hand and tossed it into a passing disposal urn.
He had attempted to deploy his mana sense to navigate the labyrinthine architecture, but the ambient signatures of the school were a chaotic blur, completely foreign to his senses.
Just as a mounting sense of frustration began to prick at his composure, he felt it—a sharp, dense wave of mana rolling through the corridor. It was the exact, formidable signature he had previously encountered with Olivia, and it was moving directly toward him.
Kyle raised his head, his golden eyes narrowing slightly as he watched a girl around his age detach herself from the shadows of the corridor, stepping forward to block his path.
"Do you need any help?"