The silence in the Great Hall of Zenith Academy was heavier than the fog that clung to the eastern sector. It was a pressurized suffocating silence broken only by the scratching of three hundred quills against parchment. It sounded like an army of termites devouring a wooden house from the inside out.

The usual arrogance of the student body had evaporated. The posturing. The duels. The sneering about bloodlines. It was all gone. In its place was a collective vibrating panic that smelled of stale coffee and alchemical stimulants and the cold sweat of teenagers realizing that their family names couldn't bribe a piece of paper.

Vane sat in the middle of the room at a desk that felt too small for him. He was tired. Not the bone-deep muscular exhaustion of training with Senna but a jagged brittle fatigue born of three nights spent staring at textbooks he barely understood.

His eyes burned. His hand cramped around the quill. He looked at the floating clock above the dais.

Four exams. Six hours. One massive headache.

"Eyes on your own papers," the proctor's voice boomed magically amplified to rattle the teeth of anyone thinking about glancing sideways. "Any student caught using optical enhancement spells or telepathic links will be expelled before they can blink."

Vane looked down at the first packet. Continental History.

He dipped his quill. The ink was black and permanent. There were no second chances here.

Question 4: Analyze the primary cause for the collapse of the Imperial Northern Front during the Winter of 402. Discuss the role of morale and the Betrayal of Oaths.

Vane stared at the words. He knew the textbook answer. He had read it at 3:00 AM two nights ago. The textbook said the Front collapsed because the Vanguard General lost faith in the Emperor's divine mandate causing a spiritual rot that infected the troops. It was a poetic noble tragedy about honor and faith.

It was also complete bullshit.

Vane tapped the quill against his chin leaving a smudge of ink. He didn't know much about the Northern Front but he knew about collapse. He had seen the Black-Tooth Gang fall apart in Oakhaven three years ago. It hadn't been because of a lack of faith.

It was because the price of grain went up by forty percent and the leader stopped paying his enforcers.

'Morale doesn't fill a stomach,' Vane thought the ghost of his street wisdom filtering the academic prompt. 'And oaths don't stop frostbite.'

He began to write. He ignored the prompt about "Betrayal." Instead he wrote about supply lines. He wrote about the difficulty of moving mana crystals through frozen mountain passes. He calculated the caloric needs of a legion versus the available forage in a scorched-earth campaign.

He treated the Imperial Army like a massive incompetent gang that had overextended its territory without securing its revenue stream.

The Front failed not because of a lack of honor, Vane scrawled his handwriting jagged and aggressive, but because you cannot eat loyalty. When the supply chain broke the army became a mob. A mob does not hold a line. It eats itself.

He finished the essay feeling a grim satisfaction. It probably wasn't what the professor wanted but it was the truth.

The bell rang. Papers were collected. There was a collective groan as the students shifted in their seats rubbing cramping hands.

Next up. Mana Ballistics.

This was Vane's nightmare. It was pure mathematics. Calculating arc and velocity and drag coefficients and mana decay over distance.

The packet landed on his desk with a thud.

Problem 12: Calculate the optimal trajectory for a Grade-C Fireball to strike a target at 400 meters, accounting for a crosswind of 15 knots and heavy rainfall, which increases mana decay by a factor of 1.5.

Vane stared at the formulas provided in the reference sheet. They looked like alien hieroglyphics. Cosine. Tangent. Decay Coefficient.

He felt a spike of panic. If he failed this his GPA tanked. If his GPA tanked he lost Villa 1. If he lost Villa 1 he was back in the barracks sleeping with one eye open.

'Think,' he told himself. 'Don't be a mathematician. Be a killer.'

He closed his eyes. He blocked out the scratching quills and the smell of fear.

He visualized the rooftop in the fog sector. He imagined Senna standing on the other side of the gap holding her broom. He imagined holding a throwing knife. Heavy. Balanced. Lethal.

'Four hundred meters is a long throw,' he thought. 'Wind coming from the left. Rain pushing it down.'

He didn't solve for X. He felt the weight of the spell in his hand. He visualized the arc. If he threw it straight the wind would take it wide and the rain would snuff it out before it hit.

He needed to aim high. He needed to overpower the throw to compensate for the decay.

He opened his eyes and looked at the numbers. He worked backward. He estimated where the hit needed to be then forced the numbers to justify the instinct.

Angle of release: 35 degrees. Overcharge mana input by 20% to counteract the rain.

He scribbled the solution ignoring the intermediate steps he didn't understand. It was messy math. A scholar would look at it and weep. But a sniper would look at it and know that the target was dead.

"Time," the proctor called.

Vane exhaled wiping sweat from his forehead. Two down.

The third exam was Abyssal Ecology. Professor Otho's domain.

Vane cracked his knuckles. This one he felt better about. He knew monsters. He knew where the soft spots were.

Question 7: Describe the internal regenerative catalyst of a Void-Hydra, and detail the physiological mechanism that allows it to survive decapitation.

Vane froze. The textbook had a clean sanitized diagram of a Hydra with neat little labels pointing to organs.

But Vane didn't see the diagram.

The [Usurper] stirred in his chest. A memory that wasn't his flooded his senses.

Suddenly he wasn't in the Great Hall. He was in the obsidian corridor. The smell hit him first. A thick cloying stench of ozone and rotting limes and old copper. He felt the slick oily texture of the blood beneath his boots. He saw the black pulsating gland inside the Hydra's severed neck bubbling with violet light.

He remembered the sound it made when Senna's spear pierced it. A wet shrieking hiss as the acid melted the star-metal.

Vane picked up his quill. He didn't write a biological description. He wrote an autopsy report.

The regenerative node is not an organ. It is a tumor of pressurized dead mana located beneath the third cervical vertebra, Vane wrote the memory guiding his hand. It smells like sulfur and tastes like battery acid. The casing is chitinous resistant to slashing damage but vulnerable to piercing. When ruptured the fluid is highly corrosive capable of dissolving Grade-B steel in seconds.

He described the texture of the scales. He described the way the muscles twitched after death. He poured the horror of the corridor onto the page.

When he finished he realized his hand was shaking. He put the quill down breathing hard pushing the memory back into the dark corner of his mind where he kept Senna's ghosts.

"Final Exam," the proctor announced. The lights in the hall dimmed slightly and the air grew colder.

Advanced Mana Theory.

Professor Vyla didn't trust proctors. She walked the rows herself her heels clicking on the stone floor like a countdown timer. She passed Vane's desk her cold blue eyes lingering on him for a second with an expression that clearly said Don't waste my ink.

The test was a single sheet of paper containing one complex arcanic diagram.

Prompt: The illustrated Third-Circle Kinetic Shield Matrix is suffering from structural instability due to high-impact resonance. Correct the lattice to prevent collapse.

Vane stared at the diagram. It was a mess of runes and flow lines and geometric shapes.

It looked like a blueprint for a glass house that was about to be hit by a boulder.

The "correct" academic answer was to reinforce the load-bearing runes. To add more mana. To thicken the walls. To make the shield harder.

But Vane knew better now.

He thought about the gym. He thought about the fifty-pound weight hovering an inch off the floor and how his own body had nearly shattered trying to hold it still.

'You can't stop the force,' Senna's voice whispered in his ear dry and rasping. 'If you try to stop the world with your back your spine snaps. You need a lever.'

'It isn't magic,' Vane realized staring at the glowing lines. 'It is plumbing.'

If the pressure is too high you don't plug the hole. You open a valve.

He picked up his quill. He didn't add reinforcement runes. He took his pen and aggressively crossed out the rigid outer boundary of the shield.

In its place he drew a series of jagged ugly glyphs that acted as vents.

Don't block the impact, he scribbled in the margin. Cycle it. Use the force of the strike to power the exhaust vent. Bleed the kinetic energy out the sides.

He redrew the entire matrix. It wasn't a static wall anymore. It was a spinning turbine of deflection. It was the magical equivalent of the Argent Horizon's Coiling Root. It accepted the hit spun it around and dumped it into the ground.

It was crude. It violated three different laws of standard mana conservation. It was ugly as sin.

But it wouldn't break.

Vane slammed his quill down just as the final bell rang.

"Pencils down! Step away from the desks!"

Vane slumped back his shirt sticking to his back with sweat. He felt lightheaded and drained and strangely hollow.

He looked around the room. The noble students were comparing answers confident and loud. The scholarship kids were crying in the corner.

Vane just sat there listening to the silence returning to the hall.

He had fought gangs and monsters and a Rank 6 corruption. But somehow fighting a piece of paper felt like the hardest thing he had done all month.

He stood up his legs stiff from sitting for six hours. He walked toward the exit ignoring the looks from the other students.

He didn't know if he had passed. He didn't know if the Rat had managed to fool the Academy one more time.

But as he walked out into the cool evening air of Zenith he knew one thing for sure.

He hadn't left anything in the tank. If they kicked him out now it wouldn't be because he didn't try.

He headed for Villa 1 the ghost of the Spear waiting for him in the dark. The paper war was over. Now he just had to wait for the casualty report.

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