The steel ring was set into the floor like someone dropped it there and forgot about it.
Not impressive. Renn had expected more from the thing that was supposed to decide the rest of his life. But it was just a ring of dull metal in cracked stone, about two meters across, with a hum you could feel in your teeth if you stood close enough.
Forty-seven people in the hall. Three exits. Two at the back, one up front behind the proctor's desk. The front door was wider but that meant walking past everyone. The left rear door had a broken hinge. He noticed it coming in.
He was in the back row. Same as every assembly, every lineup, every classroom since he figured out how to stand still and not get noticed. Nobody assigned the back row. You just ended up there.
The Awakening Hall was a converted iron foundry on the east side of Greymarsh. Walls stained grey from decades of forge smoke that no paint could fix. The ceiling was too high for the room and the acoustics were bad. Every cough went up and came back sounding wrong.
Cold iron and ozone. That's what it smelled like. That smell the System leaves behind after someone steps on the ring. Seventeen years of it. Since the Rending.
A girl was crying in the front rows somewhere. Not loud. The nervous kind, where you've been waiting your whole life and now it's here and your body just picks whatever reaction it wants. Renn understood that. He didn't have the crying part though.
"Is this seat taken?"
He looked left. A boy standing there. Tall, skinny, reddish hair that he'd clearly combed with his fingers about four minutes ago. Holding his registration card in both hands like it might fly off.
"No."
The boy sat down. Fast. Like the bench was going to change its mind.
"I'm Coby." He stuck his hand out. Pulled it back. Stuck it out again. "Coby Staves. I think I'm gonna throw up."
"Renn."
"Renn what?"
"Aldis."
"Renn Aldis." Coby said it like he was checking the weight. "You don't look nervous."
"I'm not."
Lie. But Renn was good at lying by now. Three years of practice. Three years wearing a dead boy's name and living in his house with his grandmother and at some point the whole thing stopped feeling borrowed. He wasn't sure when exactly.
Maren told him to come back with something useful.
She kissed his forehead at the door this morning. Hands on both sides of his face. Her skin was papery and warm and she squeezed harder than someone who weighed ninety pounds should be able to. He pretended not to notice the kiss. She pretended not to notice him pretending.
Three years of that too.
"I trained for two years," Coby said. He was bending the corner of his registration card back and forth. "Combat manuals. Morning runs. I even did those breathing exercises from that book, you know the one? Mana Foundations by Terros? Everyone says it's garbage but I figured the breathing part might actually do something. You think it does anything?"
"I don't know."
"Yeah. Me neither. But I did it anyway." His knee was bouncing. "What about you? What'd you do to prepare?"
Renn looked at him. "Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"I was sick."
True enough. The original Renn had been sick. Gate-wisp exposure at seventeen. The body spent two years recovering and the soul inside it changed and nobody noticed because nobody was looking that hard. By the time the fever broke Renn was someone else entirely. Not Maren, not Sera, not the healer who checked on him every month. None of them knew.
The proctor started calling names. Alphabetical.
Simple process. Walk to the ring. Stand in the center. System reads your soul resonance and assigns a class. Four seconds. The ring pulses when the class comes through. Blue for Common. Green for Rare. Purple for Epic. Greymarsh had never seen higher.
"Arren, Della."
Girl from the third row. Walked to the ring. Stepped on. Metal hummed. Blue. Faint.
Common.
Polite clapping. The kind where nobody really means it.
"Baker, Tomas."
Blue.
The hall was warm. Renn could hear the Hum underneath everything, that low drone from the Bulwark sixty miles east. Everyone in Greymarsh grew up with it. After enough years it became part of the air, part of the walls. You stopped hearing it the way you stop noticing your own breathing.
Coby watched every awakening with his whole body. Leaning forward, hands locked between his knees. His shoulders dropped whenever someone got Common. When someone got Rare, green light, gasps from the crowd, he sat up like someone poked him.
"Three Commons and one Rare," he said. "Out of four. That's a seventy-five percent Common rate which is actually below the national average of eighty-two percent. So statistically this is a good batch."
Renn looked at him.
"I read a lot," Coby said.
More names. More blue. Another green. A Caster, Rare grade, and the boy who got it cried. Not the same kind as before. Looser. Something like relief. That thing where someone tells you you're actually worth something and you didn't think they would and you don't really know what to do with your face after.
Renn counted the remaining names. Twenty-three before his. He counted exits again. Still three. Two Authority observers near the front exit, grey coats, Oversight Division. Standard for ceremonies. They were watching the ring. Not the people.
"Aldis, Renn."
He stood up. Legs fine. His hands were in his pockets so he took them out because walking down the center aisle with your hands in your pockets while forty-six people watch you just looks like you're trying too hard.
The ring was cold through his boots.
He stood in the center. Metal hummed. He felt it in his ankles, his shins, the bones in his feet. System doing whatever it did.
Four seconds.
The light came.
Grey.
Not blue. Not green. Iron-grey. The color of old nails and forge slag. It pulsed once, hard, and the floor under the ring shook different from how it had for anyone else.
Quiet. The sudden kind where you can hear the ceiling.
Forty-seven people looking at something none of them had ever seen. The proctor's pen stopped. One Authority observer stepped forward. The other was writing already.
Renn felt it in his chest. Not pain. Something heavier. It settled into his ribs and just stayed there. He didn't have a word for it. It was just there now.
System window showed up. Only he could see it. Grey panel, slightly see-through, text that looked pressed into metal. Like someone stamped it there.
[CLASS ASSIGNED]
[LEGION MARSHAL]
[GRADE: HIDDEN UNIQUE]
He read it twice.
Hidden Unique. Not in any registry he knew. Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary. Unique existed in theory. Hidden Unique didn't exist at all.
The grey light faded. Ring went quiet.
Proctor looked at her tablet. At Renn. At the tablet again. Her mouth opened. Closed.
"Class registered," she said. Voice flat. "Summoner. Rare grade."
That's not what the System told him. Her tablet said Rare. His panel said Hidden Unique.
It lied for him. He didn't know why.
He put it away somewhere he didn't have to look at right now and walked back to his seat. Forty-six pairs of eyes. The grey light had been wrong enough to notice but short enough to doubt. By tomorrow most of them would remember it as a weird shade of blue.
The Authority observer was still writing though.
Coby was staring at him when he sat down.
"What the hell was that?"
"What was what?"
"That color. That wasn't blue."
"Metallic mana affinity," Renn said. Smooth. Automatic. The part of his brain that made up excuses on short notice had three years of practice. "Common in border provinces. Something in the soil."
Coby looked at him for a long moment. Then his name got called.
"Staves, Coby."
He stood up. Hands shaking. Walked to the ring and Renn watched him go and felt something in his chest he couldn't name. Didn't try to.
The ring hummed. Blue. Faint.
Common.
Striker. Common grade.
Nobody said anything. That was worse than anything they could've said. No gasps. No murmurs. Just nothing. People clapped the way you clap when someone finishes something that wasn't very good.
Coby came back. Sat down. Registration card crumpled in his fist.
"Striker," he said. Thin voice. "Common."
Renn didn't say anything for a while. He didn't know the right words so he used someone else's.
"My grandmother says the System doesn't know what people are worth. She says it measures something. Not everything."
"Your grandmother sounds nice."
"She is."
Rest of the ceremony went by. More names, more lights. Common, Common, Rare, Common. The Authority observers left when it was over. One of them had a notebook with something in it. Renn didn't need to see what it said.
Anomolous reading. Grey pulse. No registry match.
Outside the hall Greymarsh looked the same as always. Narrow streets, buildings that leaned on each other. Hum was louder out here. You could feel it in your back teeth.
Coby caught up at the corner.
"Hey. Renn. Wait."
Renn stopped.
"That thing you said. About the System not knowing." His eyes were red but he'd stopped crying. His jaw was tight and it looked like it hurt. "Did you mean it?"
"Yeah."
"Okay." One nod. "I'm holding you to that."
He put his hand out. Didn't pull it back this time.
Renn shook it.
They walked toward the guild hall. Behind them in the Awakening Hall the proctor was doing her quarterly report. Forty-seven awakenings. Forty-two Common. Four Rare. One anomalous reading. Grey pulse, duration 1.2 seconds, no registry match.
Report would travel to the provincial capital by courier. Then to Oversight Authority headquarters in the Dominion's seat. Land on a desk. One of hundreds.
Four hundred miles away, Director Gavrel Nuth was reading a different report about a different problem. He had never heard of Greymarsh. Had never heard the name Renn Aldis. The proctor's quarterly filing wouldn't reach his office for weeks.