The Meat Bun Was Perfect
King chewed slowly, standing at the edge of the street cart, watching steam curl off the paper wrapper in the cold morning air. The vendor—a stocky man with flour on his apron and a permanent squint—had handed it over without looking up. Thirty copper. A fair price.
Warm. Dense. The filling was slightly sweet.
King took another bite and made a mental note.
Around him, Rume was already loud. The tiered capital of the Devas Empire rose behind him like a mountain someone had decided to turn into a city—a hundred thousand windows glinting in the early light, stone streets stacked on top of stone streets, the highest tier hidden behind morning cloud. Flags everywhere. Vendor carts packed shoulder to shoulder along the examination boulevard. People streaming in from every direction, most of them young, most of them nervous, nearly all of them wearing the same anxious expression.
Today was the day.
Magic Aptitude Examination Day, the posted notices read, in bold black ink on every street corner and city gate from here to the eastern passes. All citizens aged eighteen must present themselves before a certified Evaluation Station by the ninth bell. Failure to appear is punishable by immediate Labor Class designation.
King looked at the nearest notice, then looked at the line stretching down the boulevard.
Ten thousand people, maybe more. All of them waiting for a crystal pillar to tell them who they were allowed to become.
He finished the meat bun. Folded the wrapper neatly and placed it in the cart's waste bin.
Strange custom, he thought. Deciding a person's worth in a single morning.
He got in line.
---
The queue moved slowly.
King stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the city wake up around him. A group of young men three rows ahead were practicing breathing exercises, mana cycling visible in the faint shimmer around their chests. A girl beside him kept flexing her fingers and unflexing them, over and over, staring straight ahead. Someone behind him was praying quietly under their breath.
He didn't bother to listen. The words were private.
The examination station was set up in Rume's central plaza—a massive open square ringed with official banners in Devas silver and blue. At its center stood the Evaluation Pillar. Twenty feet of pure enchanted crystal, perfectly clear, faceted so that it caught the morning light from every angle. Three centuries of service, the plaque beside it read. Three centuries without incident.
King looked at it.
The crystal looked back, in the way that purely decorative objects sometimes seem to.
It's a very nice crystal, he thought.
"You're not nervous," said the girl beside him.
He glanced at her. Black hair, sharp eyes, maybe seventeen. She was watching him with the focused look of someone who catalogued things.
"No," he said.
"Everyone's nervous."
"I know."
She studied him for a moment longer, like she was waiting for him to explain himself. He didn't. She turned back to face forward.
Her mana is interesting, he noticed, without meaning to. Stillwind type. Atmospheric affinity. Rare to see that clearly before classification. He stopped that thought before it went further. That kind of thinking was a habit he was trying to break. He was here to be ordinary. Observing everyone's fundamental mana signature before they'd even touched the evaluation crystal was the opposite of ordinary.
He looked at the vendor cart nearest the plaza instead. The second one from the left had flatbread. He'd try that after.
---
The line reached the plaza by the eighth bell.
An official in a grey examiner's coat directed them forward in groups of twenty. Each examinee stepped up to the Evaluation Pillar, placed both hands on the contact surface—marked by two worn patches in the crystal where ten thousand hands had rested before—and waited. The Pillar's reaction was usually immediate. A color bloom from within the crystal, moving through a spectrum that corresponded to talent type, and then a tone—a clear bell-note rating the power classification from E-rank upward.
The examiners logged each result on their clipboards without expression. They'd done this hundreds of times. They were efficient, professional, completely unmoved.
The girl with the sharp eyes was called forward six people ahead of King.
She placed her hands on the crystal.
For two seconds, nothing. Then the crystal bloomed a clean silver-blue—deep, clear, almost luminous. The bell tone rang at a pitch that made people turn their heads. One of the examiners' eyebrows went up slightly as he wrote in his log.
Unique Talent, King thought. She'll test B-rank or above. They'll want her for an elite program.
The girl stepped back from the pillar. Her expression was difficult to read—not pleased exactly, not relieved. Like she'd confirmed something she already suspected.
She caught him looking.
He looked away.
Stop doing that, he reminded himself.
"Next."
---
King stepped up to the Evaluation Pillar.
He placed both hands on the contact surface.
The crystal was cool under his palms. Perfectly smooth. He could feel the enchantment inside it—a complex layered thing, three centuries of accumulated calibration, precise as a watch.
Careful, he thought at himself. Don't—
Nothing happened for three seconds.
He felt the crystal trying. He could feel its mana reaching through the contact points, scanning, probing, searching for something to grab onto. Looking for a core to measure.
What it found was—
The crystal turned white.
Then it turned every color at once. Not a sequence—simultaneously, all of them, fighting for the same space inside the facets until the pillar looked less like crystal and more like contained lightning.
Someone in the crowd made a sound.
The examiner looked up from his clipboard.
The Evaluation Pillar released a sound then—not the clear bell-tone it was calibrated for. Something lower. Something that resonated in the chest and in the stone plaza and in the flags above and kept going after it should have stopped, like an echo that had lost track of what it was an echo of.
Then the crystal shattered.
Not violently. It did not explode. The pieces separated from each other in a precise, almost careful way—clean fractures from top to bottom—and then the fragments hovered. A dozen pieces of a twenty-foot crystal pillar, suspended two feet off the ground, caught in their own mana field.
The plaza went silent.
King watched the pieces hover.
Slowly, with a kind of inevitability that he found faintly embarrassing, the fragments drifted together into a shape.
A question mark.
They held the shape for almost four full seconds. Then they sank gently to the ground and settled in a neat pile at his feet.
The fragment closest to his left shoe vibrated once, softly, like a sigh.
King looked down at it.
I barely touched it, he thought.
He heard the examiner's pen hit the ground.
When he looked up, the man—middle-aged, A-rank veteran, the kind of face that had seen a hundred strange things and stayed professional through all of them—was staring at the pile of crystal with his mouth open. He had been writing results for three hours without a single break in his rhythm. Now he was just staring.
A second examiner came over. They conferred in whispers, pointing at King, pointing at the crystal, pointing at their clipboards. The presiding examiner opened the record book and stared at the blank field where King's classification was supposed to go.
King waited.
He checked his shoe—he'd felt something, at some point during the last thirty seconds, and wanted to confirm he hadn't stepped on a fragment.
He hadn't.
The examiner looked up from the record book. He looked at King with the expression of a man choosing his words very carefully.
"...Can you state your name for the record."
"King Von Deluxh," King said.
"And your—that is to say, do you have any prior documented—"
"No."
The examiner wrote something in the book. He wrote it very slowly, with the deliberateness of someone producing a document they expected to be looked at later.
King tilted his head to see.
F-Rank—Unknown Variable.
He straightened up. That seemed about right.
"Am I done?" he asked.
"You're—" The examiner closed the book. Opened it again. Looked at the pile of crystal. Looked at King. "...Yes. You're done."
"Thank you," King said.
---
He stepped away from the ruins of the Evaluation Pillar, back toward the edge of the plaza. Behind him, he could hear the examiners already calling for a replacement crystal and a containment team. Around him, the crowd had created a careful space—not from aggression, just the instinct to put some distance between themselves and something they couldn't explain.
The girl with the sharp eyes was still standing nearby. She hadn't moved. She was looking at the crystal pieces on the ground with an expression King had no name for yet—the expression of someone watching a pattern emerge and already writing the first line of a very long document.
"F-Rank," she said, not to him specifically. More to herself.
He glanced at her.
"That's what it says," he said.
She looked at him. "That's not what I saw."
King considered that for a moment.
"What did you see?" he asked.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked back at the crystal. The fragments on the ground had stopped vibrating, but the nearest one to his previous position had left a faint impression in the stone plaza floor—a shallow ring in the granite, as if something very heavy had rested there for a long time.
"I don't know yet," she finally said.
King nodded. That was an honest answer. He respected honest answers.
"I'm King," he said.
"Sora," she said. "Sora Aizawa."
He nodded again.
Down the boulevard, the vendor with the flatbread was still open.
"There's a cart with flatbread," he said. "Would you like some?"
She stared at him.
"The crystal just shattered," she said. "The one that has been running continuously for three hundred years. Without incident."
"Yes," he said.
"And you want flatbread."
"I want to try flatbread," he said. "I've had bread before. Not this specific kind. The region matters for the grain. I'm told Rume uses a fermented base."
Sora Aizawa looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at her notebook—a small, leather-bound thing she'd produced from her coat pocket, he hadn't seen her reach for it—and wrote something down. The first line of what would become, eventually, two hundred pages.
"...Fine," she said. "One piece."
King nodded and started walking.
Behind them, the presiding examiner was still standing at the ruins of the Evaluation Pillar, staring at his record book. F-Rank—Unknown Variable, it read.
He would think about that entry for the rest of his career.
It was, he would eventually decide, the most accurate thing ever written.
---
The Magic Knights Academy of Avalon accepted its new class twelve days later.
Among the enrollment records: one King Von Deluxh, aged 22, classification F-Rank, talent type listed as "Unknown Variable." The administrative system crashed twice processing his paperwork. The third attempt succeeded, but only after the system was manually overridden by a senior registrar who added a footnote:
"No further evaluation recommended at this time."
He had no idea how right he was.