The moment Landen stepped onto the stage, gasps swept through the crowd like a wave. Every head turned. The presentation's rhythm shattered.
Doe slipped away to speak with Headmaster Vanderbilt — a man with deep ties to the police force. Over the years, Vanderbilt had become their go-to consultant for the strange and unexplainable: anomalous cases, awakened individuals, Essence-related incidents. When the police had found Landen, they hadn't known what to do with him. So they'd brought him here, hoping the academy might be the answer. If anyone could assess the boy, it was Vanderbilt.
He adjusted his glasses, studying Landen from a distance.
"If he performs adequately on the stage tests," Vanderbilt murmured to Doe, "he may qualify for enrollment."
"He's… unusual," Doe said.
"That much is obvious."
On stage, Landen faced the crowd. His jaw was tight, his eyes hard. His anger fumed with rage, seeing their nonchalant faces as if his life was meaningless to them.
Landen stared out at the crowd with the most villainous glare. Narrow enough to cut glass.
Then he spotted a girl near the front row.
She was beautiful.
His glare flickered — just slightly. A twitch at the corner of his mouth.
He looked away. Scanned the crowd again. Tried to hold onto his fury.
Then he saw another girl. Even cuter.
Twitch.
Then, behind her — another one.
His eye twitched again. And again. His carefully constructed death-glare began to short-circuit as his gaze bounced helplessly from face to face. There were too many of them. He couldn't stop. The furious scowl that had felt so powerful thirty seconds ago was now trembling at the edges, collapsing inward, reshaping itself into something deeply, horribly cheesy.
He looked like a man who wanted to commit a crime and ask for someone's number at the same time.
The crowd stared at him in collective horror.
"What is wrong with his face?"
"He looks like a serial killer."
"His creepy smile is going to give me nightmares."
While the comments continued, Vanderbilt leaned toward Doe and murmured something. Celestine nodded, then stepped to the center of the stage.
"It looks like we have our volunteer," she announced, gesturing to the Essence Reader beside her.
Every eye in the arena swung back to Landen.
The moment Doe and Ray moved toward him, Landen was already gone — twisting sideways with a sharp pivot that caught both of them off guard. His palm drove into Ray's chest, and Ray stumbled directly into Doe. They went down together in a graceless heap.
Landen didn't wait to see the landing. He ran.
He bolted for the edge of the stage with the wild, wide-eyed energy of a man with absolutely nothing to lose. Shouts erupted in front of him. The crowd went from murmuring to screaming in seconds, scattering like he was a live grenade. He didn't care. The edge of the stage rushed up to meet him, and he launched himself off it without a second thought—
Something caught him.
Not the ground. Not a person.
Something grew out of the earth beneath him — fast, enormous, impossible — and plucked him clean out of the air like a piece of fruit. In the span of a single breath, he was dangling twenty feet off the ground, eye-level with a massive creature made entirely of bark and branch and something that pulsed with dim, greenish light.
Two glowing eyes blinked at him slowly.
A hollow, jagged mouth creaked open.
"Aww, shit—"
But even as the words left his mouth, Landen realized he wasn't actually afraid.
He was fascinated.
He craned his neck, drinking in every detail. The bark-skin texture. The deep rumble vibrating through its grip. The glow. He'd spent his whole life on one planet, in one world that played by one set of rules — and every single one of those rules was currently being broken.
The buildings had been wrong. The sky had been wrong. The language had been wrong. And now there was a tree monster holding him in the air like a rag doll.
A slow grin spread across his face despite everything.
"…Either I finally lost it," he muttered to himself, scanning the impossible scene one more time. "Or I just got isekai'd."
As Landen dangled helplessly, the large tree creature carried him back to Vanderbilt.
"Thank you, my friend," the chief said. "You may go." And with a quick wave of the hand, the tree disappeared.
Landen and Vanderbilt locked eyes.
So it was him, Landen thought. The old man summoned that thing. I knew there was something off about him.
Before either of them could move, Celestine stepped smoothly between them, scanned the tag on Landen's arm, and guided him in front of the Essence Reader.
"Now stand still while I turn on the device," she said.
Landen turned to face the crowd, his back now pressed toward the machine. His chest heaved. His eyes darted — left, right, front, back — looking at every face, every exit, every possible angle of escape.
There was none.
His mind ran through the options at full speed and kept arriving at the same destination.
Nothing.
"Okay," Celestine said. "Here we go."
She pressed the button.
The display flickered to life. Numbers and letters scrambled across the screen in rapid succession. The entire audience leaned forward as one, a collective held breath pressing down on the arena.
"He has to be at the Master's grade."
"Probably higher, his stare alone is at least a Grand Master."
Landen heard all of it. Every whisper. Every speculative murmur. And something about their easy confidence—their excitement—their complete indifference to the fact that he was about to be executed—snapped something loose inside him.
"YOU ARE ALL DISGUSTING!"
The shout tore out of him raw and enormous. The crowd flinched back as one.
"MY DEATH IS ON EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU! I PROMISE — EVEN IF I DIE TODAY — I WILL COME BACK AND HAUNT EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU!"
The crowd was stunned by his theatrical display. Even though they couldn't understand a word he was saying, they could tell it was some kind of threat. Unsure if they should be closing their eyes or running, all of them fell into complete silence, waiting for the results.
A sharp whine burst from the machine, low at first—barely noticeable.
Then it climbed.
Higher. Louder.
The pitch kept rising, drilling into the air like a needle. Landen's body stiffened as the sound pressed against him.
The anticipation of his death was already unbearable, and now this piercing sound drove him past his limit.
"Stop—" he tried to say, but the word barely formed.
Then he snapped.
"AWWWWWW—!!!"
The scream tore out of him, echoing across the arena.
The machine kept climbing—then slowed—then stopped.
BEEB BEEB BEEB
The results appeared on the display.
For one suspended moment, the arena held its breath.
Then every single person in it gasped.