During the lunch time, Elara arrived at the dry fountain bench with the expression of someone who had been holding something since morning and had decided lunch was the right time to release it.
"Elara," Isaac nodded. Elara smiled lightly as she settled beside him.
"There's… a girl in my class," she said right away upon her arrival.
Although sudden, Isaac didn't mind. He listened as he picked up his fork.
"She's been there since the first day." Elara turned her fork over once. "I don't think she's doing anything. She's just—there. And the boys in the class keep losing track of what they were doing. One of them walked into a desk this morning. Just walked directly into it. While looking in her direction."
Isaac looked up from his plate.
"She doesn't seem to notice," Elara continued. "Or she notices and doesn't care. Either way, by the end of the session the whole left side of the room had quietly reorganized itself to have a better sight to wherever she was sitting." She sighed. "I mean, I get that she's pretty and all that, but really? I can't focus because all that going on."
"Low-ranked passive skill, perhaps." Isaac said.
"…Really?" Elara looked at him. "You think it's a skill—" She paused, humming. "You know what? You may be right."
"A perception-related, ambient influence type rather than targeted discharge. The reorganization pattern toward a single point source without conscious awareness..."
Isaac remembered reading through the books listing all the skills that made their names known throughout the history. Of course, his memory and precision weren't of the same level as now without [The Prism], so there were limits. Still, there was one skill that was stuck in his mind because of its uniqueness.
"Did she appear as if focusing on a matter? To 'allure' the guys?"
Elara was quiet for a moment. "She looked bored. I don't think she was using a skill either."
"A passive skill it is." Isaac returned to his food. "Perfectly matches the recorded cases of D-rank: [Glamour]."
"…How do you know that?"
"Read about it somewhere."
Elara looked at him with the expression she used when she had decided to stop expecting his reasoning to arrive in the standard order. Then, she moved on.
"There is a rumor. An assessment, they say," she said. Her voice shifted—the tone she used when delivering information that she'd been holding at arm's length because she wasn't fully certain of it. "I heard about it from some third-years this morning. Near the furnace rooms before first bell."
An assessment… Isaac recalled what he briefly overheard the day before. "What did they say?"
"Group assignment. Four students. Some kind of evaluation exercise." She paused. "They said the marking is entirely team-based. That your individual performance doesn't matter—only what the group produces does. Even if you're exceptional, a weak group pulls you down to their level." She looked at him with something careful in her expression. "One of them told me to pray I get lucky with the draw."
Isaac set his fork down.
"Class designation."
Elara froze upon his statement.
"You think that's what this assessment is about?"
"Time-wise, it makes sense. The classes that we're placed upon is temporary. Soon or later, we needed to be sorted into the system of higher class, elite class, combat class, and commoner class." Isaac took a moment to swallow his food. "What doesn't make sense is that the assessment will be 'team-based' entirely."
"You think they're wrong," Elara said.
"The Academy is a warring kingdom's national training institution. An assessment that makes individual capability irrelevant doesn't produce information useful to them." He picked up his fork. "The weighting sounds off—especially when this society functions via skill supremacy."
Elara was quiet for a moment. "They seemed certain."
"If is often the certain ones who get wrong more often than the reluctant ones." He looked at her. "Nevertheless, the information is still useful, better than nothing."
She looked at the table. "Ugh… too much thinking."
Isaac chuckled at that.
"Is it even real?" she said. "The assessment. I mean, the words came out of blue. No one's confirmed it officially. It's just what the seniors said."
Isaac looked at her. "Now that's the more important question."
"I've been assuming it was real because three different people said it."
"Only time will tell if it's true or not."
She nodded. Then, after a moment, she perked up as if having remembered something, "One more thing. There's a third-year—his name was… Al… Al-something? Apparently, he's been asking about that same girl I mentioned. I wonder if he's interested in her."
They ate, with Isaac as the listening one and the gossip-loving Elara as the talkative one. The garden continued its midday motion around them.
By the time the lunch was almost over, the notification crystals chimed at the end of the midday period.
"All second-year students to the grand hall, afternoon session suspended, attendance mandatory."
Surprised, Isaac and Elara looked at each other. The rumor mentioned by Elara—unverified, sourced from seniors whose motives ranged from genuine helpfulness to something less clear—suddenly had institutional weight behind it. Not confirmation of the details, but the confirmation that something was happening.
They watched the intrigue spread across the garden in the thirty seconds between the crystal chime and the corresponding movement of first students. The ones that had been anxious became more so. The unverified variable had become probable, which meant everything attached to it had become probable alongside it.
Wrapping up, Isaac and Elara followed other students, walking to the grand hall.
The garden was emptying around them, students flowing toward the main building in the specific pattern of a huge crowd that had received simultaneous instruction and hadn't yet decided how urgently to follow it.
"Yikes, this is getting chaotic," Elara commented as she looked around, "Too many people."
"That's the pros and cons of the mandatory National Academy," Isaac said as he casually walked. "As far as I know, there are around four-thousand students of our grade."
She walked beside him with the particular posture of someone carrying anxiety of her own. Her auburn hair had come slightly loose from its tie during lunch, which it always did by midday; she pushed it back with her free hand and didn't appear to notice she'd done it.
The main building's corridor was filling with students from every lecture cohort—all the second-years converging on a single space, the ambient noise rising to the specific level that large crowds produced when everyone was speaking at the same time.
Isaac walked through it with the efficiency he applied to any crowded space: reading the flow, finding the gaps, moving through them without friction.
Elara stayed beside him. She was shorter than Isaac by several centimeters, and the crowd required more active navigation on her part—she read it with her elbows rather than her eyes, the practiced technique of someone who had been moving through crowded furnace rooms and maintenance corridors since her first year. They arrived at the grand hall's entrance within seconds of each other.
The grand hall opened before them. Vaulted ceilings, the founding crests of the Five Houses inlaid in the floor's stone, a scale that converted the crowd from a number into something with physical weight.
Isaac took in the room in a single sweep.
The upper gallery ran along three walls above the main floor, already filling with upper-year students who had cleared their afternoon schedules without being asked. Third-years toward the south rail, fourth-years at the elevated north positions—the hierarchy reproducing itself even in observation.
Princess Lyra Aetherion was already near the dais. She had arrived before the crowd, which was't surprising to him. Her silver hair caught the hall's light in the way that Aetherion bloodline coloring always did—not striking exactly, just consistently visible, the way weather was visible. Her eyes moved across the room in the arc of someone confirming a picture they already had.
Cassiopeia was near the east wall with Marlene beside her. Even across the hall's distance, the contrast between them was visible: Cassiopeia with her notebook already open, sharp violet eyes moving across the room's geometry with the focused economy of someone building a model before the model became necessary, and Marlene beside her with the quieter, ground-level attentiveness of someone reading the crowd itself rather than the room's architecture.
Marlene was shorter than Cassiopeia, with round features and warm brown eyes that moved across faces rather than spaces—the specific observation of someone who had learned that people were more legible than positions.
Then, Elara's hand touched Isaac's shoulder. Briefly, just a tap—the gesture she used when she wanted to direct his attention without speaking.
He followed her gaze toward the western entrance.
Among the huge influx of students was a girl, and the effect Isaac had spent the lunch hour processing theoretically was now operating in real space before him.
She was not the tallest in the group, but she immediately stood out—because objectively speaking, her appearance was entrancing.
The crowd near the western entrance had already begun its reorientation—students nearby shifting their view without apparent cause, conversations slowing by a half-second, and hence on. The effect was subtle at close range. It was visible as a pattern from a distance.
[The Prism] resolved the mana signature immediately. Passive skill meant that the skill was consistently utilizing the inherent mana output at a level that didn't require an attention. The flow of mana in her replicated the exact patterns of a passive skill.
Every point of observation matched the known characteristics of D-rank: [Glamour].
Isaac looked at the person rather than the effect.
Again, she was genuinely beautiful. Dark hair fell straight to her collarbones, the ends clean and even. Her features had the specific symmetry that was easy to look at without being able to identify why: wide dark eyes with the slight downward slope at their outer corners, a face whose proportions were simply arranged correctly, the kind of appearance that had nothing performative about it because it required no performance.
She was listening to something one of her companions was saying with the mild patience of someone present in a conversation but not particularly invested in it.
She looked, as Elara had said, faintly bored. The boredom was evident and not concealed—the specific flatness of someone who had been producing this effect in every room since manifestation and had stopped expecting it to produce anything interesting in return.
"That's her," Elara said quietly. "The one I was telling you about."
Isaac observed the field's operation in real time. The male students in proximity were, without exception, finding reasons to orient slightly toward the western entrance. The female students had either noticed and adjusted or hadn't noticed and hadn't adjusted, the split roughly even.
"[Glamour] it is," Isaac said. "The effect amplifies the base. Without the mana output, the appearance alone would produce less than half this response."
"She's still beautiful without it," Elara said.
"Yes," Isaac agreed. "That's what makes it this effective. The synergy seems to have exceeded what a D-rank skill is usually capable of."
Elara then looked elsewhere, having found something other than the girl.
"I think I found my group." She had found a cluster of students she recognized, waving her over. She looked at Isaac with the specific expression she used when she had decided something was all right even though it wasn't exactly what she wanted. "I'll find you after."
"Go ahead. I'll be near the east wall," Isaac said.
She nodded and moved away through the crowd, her auburn hair catching the light as she went. Isaac watched her go for exactly the time it took to confirm she'd reached her group safely, then turned back toward the east wall.
In silence, he watched as the students continued to fill the hall. Given the number that crowded the space, it gave him an impression that they weren't in the Academy, but rather, a military.
Two distinct footsteps then entered his senses. Turning, he found Cassiopeia and Marlene approaching—seemingly toward him.
Cassiopeia stopped at a comfortable distance. Not close enough to be presumptuous, not far enough to make the conversation difficult. Her violet eyes were doing the specific thing they did when she had decided a variable was worth addressing directly—steady, specific, the composed attention of someone who had been watching him for two days and had decided two days was sufficient data for a first approach.
Marlene behind her looked aware on what exactly drove her interest, and was curious herself.
"You were in the training room this morning," Cassiopeia said. It wasn't a greeting, but it was a start nonetheless.
"We're in the same class, so yes."
"The B-rank discharge that deflected." She paused. The pause had the quality of someone choosing the next word with precision. "I've been running the mechanism since it happened. I have three possible explanations. None of them involve standard [Condensation] application."
"Standard [Condensation] is, in most of the cases, pointless." Isaac said, "But if looked beyond its standard operation, it is a skill that offers high versatility."
"I could tell." She nodded.
Marlene had been watching this exchange with the quiet attention. Her brown eyes moved between them with the specific observation of someone reading the subtext of a conversation rather than its surface. She glanced at Cassiopeia, then back at Isaac.
"She's been writing about it since this lunch," Marlene said, with the mild tone of someone providing context that seemed relevant. "Marlene Raven, by the way. It is nice to meet you, Isaac… Isaac."
Cassiopeia paused. Then blinked, having noticed that she skipped the introduction, "Cassiopeia Terra."
"Isaac Nameless," said Isaac. Marlene, in particular, flinched as he said the "Nameless" part, before looking at him in disbelief.
"You… you are fine with that?" Marlene asked. "'Nameless' indicates a mark branded on fallen nobles. It is generally treated as an omen. Yet, you…"
"It is something that I have no control over," he replied, "no point grieving over it."
"That's… a remarkable way of thinking."
"And now, back to the topic," Cassiopeia interrupted, with her flat tone underlying an anticipation filled with curiosity, "[Condensation]. By no means was your application within the level of an F-rank skill. The fact that it was able to deflect a B-rank skill demonstrates that your output was at least B-rank in potency. As I said I have three possible explanations, and if should you have the time in the future—"
"Deionization of water, insulating property, magnified via compression," Isaac simply replied in one go, finding no reason to keep the knowledge concealed. It wasn't like other users of [Condensation] would be able to mimic his applications anyway—doing so required an extreme degree of perception and precision that only [The Prism] was able to grant.
Something shifted fractionally in Cassiopeia's expression, and her face showed a surprise that she couldn't mask completely. She had apparently not expected the answer to come by right away, for she knew the value in the information.
"You…" In her face, the expression of someone knowing that she now owed him one, crossed by. "Noted. Solid application, if I were to comment."
She nodded. Filed it. The conversation closed with the specific efficiency of two people who had said what they needed to say and didn't require social elaboration around it.
Then the hall's ambient noise shifted again—differently from before, with the particular quality change that happened when a specific person entered a space with a specific kind of gravity.
Silas Fulgur came through the main entrance the way certain people entered rooms—not loudly, not with announcement, but with the specific weight of someone around whom space reorganized without being asked.
He was taller than most of the second-year students by a visible margin, broad across the shoulders in the way of someone whose body had been under physical discipline long before the Academy had a claim on it.
His dark hair sat in its characteristic state—not disheveled but not arranged either, with the faint static electricity that [Lightning Spear]'s contained energy produced even in its dormant state, as if the air around him had learned to hold a slight charge.
His sharp-featured face carried the composed authority of someone who had never seriously considered the possibility that a room wouldn't accommodate him.
Behind him came a cluster of minor noble students who had calibrated their proximity to someone they considered it useful to be nearby. Two of them were speaking toward Silas simultaneously, their voices overlapping in the particular register of people competing for the same conversational opening. Silas wasn't listening to either of them with any particular attention. He was scanning the hall.
"—absolutely the strongest in the second year, the assessment just confirmed—"
"—everyone knows the Trial has already been settled. The F-rank student had some kind of—"
Silas's gaze moved across the crowd like how someone with objective superiority would do—in a mix of boredom and underlying sharpness. It managed to find Isaac among thousands of students and paused briefly at him. Then moved on.
"I heard," Silas said to no one in particular, at the volume of someone not bothering to maintain privacy because what he was saying didn't require it, "that they're doing the group draw today." He looked at the dais, at the hall's scale, at the gathering crowd.
Vane moved at Silas's right hand—quieter, less visible, conducting analysis of his surroundings.
On the south-west balcony, the third-year cluster was found to be settled along the railing with the relaxed authority of people watching something they had already experienced.
"Silas Fulgur. Second year's leading figure, no question," one of them was saying. "S-rank, lightning element. Two destructive combinations that synergize so well that… they are comparable to [Tempest] and [Great Deluge]."
"Crazy how three among the five S-rank skill owners of the Kingdom are all in the Academy right now." Another one remarked, before his expression darkened. "Five s-rank skill owners in one era. It's supposed to be the sign of strength. Yet, out in the battlefield…"
The third-year with the pale straw hair had his forearm on the railing, his attention divided between the main floor below and the point where the beautiful girl—pointed by Elara—had entered. A student beside him followed his gaze.
"Where are you looking, Aldric?"
"Heh, nothing," said the third-year, with the flat tone of someone answering a question they didn't consider worth the full truth.
The student beside him looked toward the western entrance, then back at the third-year, and appeared to make a decision about whether to pursue the question. He decided against it.
The third-year—Aldric, though no one on the main floor below had learned this name yet—looked away from the western entrance. His gaze moved upward, past the south rail's cluster of third-years, toward the north balcony's more elevated position where the fourth-year students had gathered.
He found Caspian Valerius immediately. Caspian was easy to find because he occupied elevated positions the way he occupied everything, as the clear centre of the fourth-year. He stood at the north railing with Seraphina Everfrost beside him, both of them watching the main floor below with the quiet attention of people who had arrived for specific reasons they hadn't shared.
Aldric's expression shifted to something between amusement and provocation—the expression of someone who had thought of something clever and intended to deliver it.
He raised his voice just enough to carry across the balcony's ambient noise.
"Valerius," he called with a light smile. "I see you're here as well… is it because of your brother?" A beat. His mouth curved. "Strange, isn't it—that the F-rank Residue student everyone's been talking about shares the same blood as the fourth year's strongest."
The balconies went silent. Third- and fourth-year students identified the clash between the representatives of each grade.
Caspian did not move. His gaze remained on the main floor as if Aldric's words weren't worthy of his response.
"...Aldric Zephyr."
Seraphina turned her head toward Aldric. Her dark eyes were steady and completely without temperature.
"Do not be mistaken," she said. Her voice carried without being raised—the precision of someone who had learned that volume was a tool and economy was more effective. "His name is Isaac Nameless."
The correction landed with the specific weight of someone who had not defended a person but had refused to let them be defined by someone else's framing. She held Aldric's gaze for exactly as long as it took for the distinction to register.
Then she turned back to the main floor.
Aldric looked at her for a moment. "Oh, is that so?" At last, he said, shrugging it off. The tension dissipated, and some on the balconies let out the breath that they didn't know were holding.
Just then, the faculty entered from the side door.
The Proctor took the center of the dais. Thorne stood to his left with his hands clasped behind his back, among the group of second-year professors.
The hall settled.
"Second year," the Proctor said. "You have completed your Rite of Manifestation. You have spent two days in foundational skill management. Tomorrow begins the assessment that determines your class assignment for the remainder of your Academy tenure."
The unverified variable had been confirmed. Around Isaac, he registered the specific shift as every second-year heard the seniors' information.
"You will be assigned to groups of four by the Academy's allocation system, which constructs groups based on all available assessment data. The allocation is final. The exercise runs over three consecutive days beginning tomorrow morning."
They didn't disclose what this assessment was for.
He stepped back. Thorne stepped forward.
"More detailed information will be given tomorrow right before the start of the assessment," Thorne stated. "Now, pay attention to the allocation screen, which will display group assignments. Locate your group mates. Gather here at seventh bell tomorrow morning. Dismissed."
The screen activated on the rear wall, and the hall held its breath.