The next pair stepped onto the center stone.
Arthur watched from the wall with his sleeve still pressed to his nose and tried to place any of them.
Nothing.
He went through every face in the room.
The red-haired woman, Kreasial, was already on her way to the medical wing.
The guy with the black hair covering his eyes had decent footwork but telegraphed every punch from his shoulder.
The blue-haired girl with glasses moved like someone who had thought carefully about fighting without ever actually doing it.
A broad kid in the back row hit hard but stood completely flat-footed and got swept twice in three minutes.
Nobody.
Not one name. Not one face. Not one detail that matched anything from two thousand chapters of reading.
This entire class was made up of people the story had never bothered to name.
Arthur leaned his head back against the wall.
That should have been a relief. If none of these people mattered to the plot then none of them were a threat. Clean and simple.
Except.
He pulled at the thought that had been sitting in the back of his head since the morning.
Vexis Lestilaut in the original story never got moved to Class F. He stayed in Class A the whole time. He was in Xavier's class. Same room, same seats, same proximity to the main plot right up until he turned up dead in a corridor.
Arthur got demoted to Class F because of a fight that Arthur started. A fight that happened because Arthur was in the body and couldn't control the mouth.
That was a change. A real one. He'd felt certain of it.
But the floating red text hadn't appeared. Not once since the Mageia biology recitation. No points. No notification. No confirmation that anything he'd done since then had nudged the story at all.
So either the story didn't care about Class F.
Or the story had already rerouted around it.
Or he hadn't actually changed anything. Just reshuffled the same pieces into a different order while the ending stayed exactly where it had always been.
Eleven days.
He pressed his sleeve harder against his nose.
I am so fucked man.
Across the room Havier was watching him.
Not obviously. Not the way someone stares when they want you to know. Every time Arthur looked away and looked back, Havier's eyes were already somewhere else. But they kept coming back.
Arthur kept his face still and filed it away.
Havier. Brown hair, busted nose, still healing. The kid Vexis had broken in the cafeteria on the first day. The kid Arthur had walked past in the Ampshire district, head down, trying to take up as little space as possible.
There was motive there. More than enough of it. Vexis had humiliated him publicly and from what little Arthur could piece together from the body memories it hadn't been the first time either. A person could take that quietly for a long time before they stopped being quiet.
He made a note of it. Not a conclusion. Just a note.
Havier. Possible.
The professor called the last pair. Arthur watched without really seeing it.
-----
The results were posted outside the changing area on a board. Arthur scanned down and found the next session.
Magic and Mageia. Same day. One hour gap.
He was still staring at it when Ivan appeared from around the corner.
"Vex."
Ivan looked genuinely thrown. Not his usual loud energy. Something quieter underneath it.
"What happened? When did you— how did you end up in Class F? I tried asking Cael but he just—"
"I'm busy."
"I know but I just wanted to—"
"Ivan." Arthur turned and looked at him directly. "I'll explain later. Right now I need to prepare for the next class."
Ivan opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Arthur for a moment with an expression that wasn't quite hurt and wasn't quite worried but sat somewhere between the two.
"Alright," he said. "Okay, Vex."
He walked off down the corridor. A girl appeared from somewhere and slipped her arm through his and just like that he was himself again, laughing at something she said, already half gone.
Arthur watched him disappear around the corner.
He stood there for a second.
Then he grabbed the relic stone from his pocket and thought of a place.
-----
The secluded courtyard on the east side of the campus appeared around him with the usual horrible stomach feeling and then settled into stone walls and an open sky and the sound of nothing in particular.
He'd remembered this place clearly from the novel. One of those details that stuck for no reason. It had come up in maybe three scenes, always in passing, always empty. A corner of the academy that the story acknowledged existed without ever making relevant.
He sat down on the ground, back against the wall, and looked at his hands.
Okay.
Physical combat was survivable. Painful and humiliating but survivable, especially now that he and Vexis had figured out a rough working arrangement that neither of them was happy about.
Magic was different.
Magic required something internal. Something that lived in the body at a level Arthur couldn't access just by getting out of the way and letting Vexis's muscle memory take over.
And Vexis, for all his screaming about prodigies and bloodlines and ten years of combat drilling, was a genuinely terrible mage.
Arthur had noted it while reading. Mentioned it in at least two comments. The author had written Vexis with shitty aetheric output, which at the time had read like lazy characterization, a bully with no real threat. Now it meant Arthur was sitting in a body with a Mageia Core that barely functioned trying to figure out how to pass a magic class in a world that ran on magic.
Vexis floated nearby. Conspicuously quiet.
Arthur glanced at him.
Vexis looked away.
Yeah. That's what I thought prick.
He exhaled and thought back through everything he'd absorbed from the novel. Two thousand chapters. Somewhere in there was something useful.
The Mageia Core worked like a second heart. He knew that.
Aetheric blood circulated the same way regular blood did. Which meant the flow followed the breath. Control the breathing and you controlled the circulation. Control the circulation and you could push aetheric blood into your hands and from your hands into the world.
In theory.
Arthur sat up straight, put both hands on his knees, and breathed in.
Then out.
He tried to feel something moving through his chest. Some kind of current. Some warmth or pressure or awareness that the body had a second system running underneath the first one.
Nothing.
He breathed in again. This time he tensed everything from his core outward like he was bracing for an impact, which felt stupid, which he was aware of.
He held it.
Then he breathed out slowly and turned one hand palm up and pushed.
A small sphere of water rose from nothing above his palm. Wobbly. About the size of a large marble. It spun once, slow and uneven, and then collapsed into a splash that soaked his sleeve.
Arthur stared at his wet hand.
Okay. That was something. That was technically something.
It was also the most basic application of magic that existed in this world. Civilians used it to water crops. Children learned it before they could write. And it had taken him every ounce of concentration he had just to produce a ball of water that immediately gave up on existing.
He tried again. Same breathing. Same tensing of everything. Same feeling of clenching muscles he wasn't sure were supposed to be clenched.
The ball came up smaller this time and lasted about two seconds before dispersing.
He dropped his hand.
Vexis said nothing. Which was somehow worse than the yelling.
"You're doing it wrong."
Arthur turned his head.
A girl was sitting on the low wall across the courtyard. He hadn't heard her arrive. Hadn't seen her when he came in. She was just there, one leg folded under her, a book closed in her lap, watching him with the calm expression of someone who had been there for a while.
Dark brown hair cut straight across her collarbone. Eyes that were a shade somewhere between grey and green depending on the light. She wasn't delicate and she wasn't striking in the way that made you look twice from a distance. She was the kind of face you noticed up close, specific and real.
Arthur looked at her.
Then the name landed.
He felt something in his chest go very still.
Of course. Of course this is where she'd be. He knew this courtyard. He'd remembered it specifically because the novel had mentioned it exactly three times and every single time it had been in a scene with her.
Alfia Everreth.
One of the heroines.