Vane pressed his back against the cold metal of the turbine housing. His breath came in shallow, ragged gasps. The moisture in the air was already freezing on his eyelashes.

Isaac Glacium did not move. He stood in the center of the frost-covered room with his hands deep in his pockets. The ice spreading from his boots wasn't magic in the traditional sense. It was a thermal void. He was a sinkhole for heat.

"You are staring," Isaac said. His voice was quiet. It sounded like cracking glass. "It is rude to stare."

Ashe Razar was the first to break the paralysis.

The Warlord let out a low, guttural growl. Her pride was a physical thing, a volatile fuel that burned hotter than her mana. She was a Rank 3 Elite. She was a predator. She did not freeze just because a Rank 2 walked into the room.

"You think you can look down on us?" Ashe hissed. The black aura around her flared back to life, melting the frost on her armor. "You are just an ice cube, Isaac. I will shatter you."

She moved.

It was the same supersonic step she had used against Anastasia. The air cracked as she broke the sound barrier. She was a blur of violence, a kinetic missile aimed directly at Isaac's throat.

Vane flinched. He knew that speed. It was impossible to track.

Isaac did not blink. He did not take his hands out of his pockets.

A wall of ice erupted from the floor.

It wasn't a messy, organic wave. It was a perfect, geometric structure. Hexagonal pillars of translucent blue ice shot up with the speed of a piston. They didn't block the air around Ashe. They intercepted the exact trajectory of her blade.

Bang.

The sound was sickening. It was the sound of steel hitting something harder than steel.

Ashe stopped dead. Her sword was embedded three inches into the ice wall. The vibration traveled up her arms, shattering the armor plating on her gauntlets. She gasped, coughing up blood as the recoil hammered her internal organs.

She hadn't been stopped by magic. She had been stopped by physics. Isaac had placed an immovable object in the path of an unstoppable force.

"Sloppy," Isaac critiqued. "You waste so much momentum."

"Drop him!" Valerica roared.

The Titan didn't bother with projectiles. She clenched both fists and pulled down.

The gravity in the room shifted violently. The floor groaned. The pressure was enough to flatten a tank. Vane felt his bones creak even from the edge of the room. It felt as if the ceiling had liquefied and poured itself onto their shoulders.

Isaac's knees buckled.

For a second, just a split second, the monster looked human. The weight was real. Isaac wasn't immune to gravity. He frowned, a flicker of annoyance crossing his pale face.

"Heavy," Isaac muttered.

He stomped his foot.

Crunch.

Ice flash-froze around his legs, anchoring him to the sub-floor. At the same time, the air around him shimmered. He wasn't fighting the gravity. He was reinforcing his own density. He pumped mana into his bones, into his skin, into the very air in his lungs, matching the external pressure with internal solidity.

He stood up straight. The ice anchors cracked, but they held.

"Is that it?" Isaac asked. He looked bored again. "If you want to crush me, Valerica, you need to collapse the space itself. Simple weight is just exercise."

Anastasia didn't speak. She saw the opening. While Isaac was anchored, she thrust her rapier forward.

"Pierce," she commanded.

The ambient mana, which usually loved her, surged to obey. A beam of concentrated arcane light shot toward Isaac's chest. It was the attack that had defeated Ashe.

Isaac finally took a hand out of his pocket.

He didn't cast a spell. He just swiped his hand through the air, as if swatting a fly.

A cloud of white mist trailed his fingers.

The arcane beam hit the mist and dissolved. It didn't explode. It simply ceased to be. The structure of Anastasia's spell fell apart. The mana lost its cohesion, turning into harmless sparks of light that drifted to the floor like snow.

"Your weave is loose," Isaac said, putting his hand back in his pocket. "You rely on the mana liking you. But mana is energy. Energy obeys thermodynamics. And I control the temperature."

The three elites stood there, panting, bleeding, and mana-drained.

They had thrown their best concepts at him. Speed. Gravity. Mastery.

He had dismantled them with geometry, density, and basic science.

Vane slid down the wall, sitting in the shadows. He stared at the white-haired boy who looked more like an accountant than a warrior.

'I am supposed to be Rank 1?'

The thought was so absurd he almost laughed out loud.

He remembered the day Steward Pervis had handed him the student tablet in Argentum. The man had looked at him with that dry, professional indifference, handing over the rank like it was a clerical error.

'A word of advice, Mr. Vane,' Pervis had said, adjusting his glasses. 'Do not let the title go to your head. Isaac Glacium is not merely a generational talent. He is the greatest talent in the history of the world.'

Vane remembered how he had scoffed. He remembered looking at Isaac in the auditorium and thinking, 'And yet, he is Rank 2. If he is so great, why isn't he the King?'

He had thought Pervis was just a bureaucrat who didn't understand street smarts. He had thought the "Provisional" tag on his ID was just a formality.

He looked at Isaac now.

He looked at the way the ice didn't just freeze water, but froze the mana in the air. He looked at the perfect, mathematical efficiency of Isaac's defense. There wasn't a wasted joule of energy.

'Pervis was right,' Vane realized. The nausea in his stomach wasn't from the cold. It was from shame. 'I am not special. I am just a curiosity. I am holding the seat warm for the real King.'

Isaac wasn't a god. Vane could see that now. The boy was breathing hard. The veins in his neck were bulging slightly from the effort of resisting Valerica's gravity. He burned mana just like anyone else.

But that made it worse.

If Isaac was a god, Vane could excuse his own weakness. But Isaac was just a student. He was just a person who had worked harder, calculated faster, and optimized better than anyone else.

"I am bored," Isaac announced.

He turned his back on the three elites. He raised a finger and pointed to the far end of the turbine hall, past the wreckage of the battle.

A pillar of ice erupted from the floor. Atop it sat a small, glowing red beacon.

"The exam is simple," Isaac said. His voice carried through the freezing air. "I will give you five minutes. If you touch the beacon, I will let you leave. You pass."

He turned his head slightly, his pale blue eyes locking onto Vane in the shadows.

"Even the rat," Isaac added. "If it can crawl fast enough."

The temperature in the room dropped another ten degrees. The metal walls began to groan as they contracted.

"But if you bore me again," Isaac whispered, "I will freeze the fluid in your eyes."

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