March 14th, 2012 — 3:38 PM
Sunken Isle (Volcania) — Eastern River Ridge, Between Central Highland & Class C Basin
Perspective: Kaiser Everhart ('X')
A blade woven from compressed light-magic missed my ear by about 2 inches.
It didn't whistle. It hissed, flash-boiling the damp river fog hanging off the ridge into a sharp slap of steam. The basalt behind me didn't crack—it vitrified, turning into black, glassy slag where the heat touched stone.
I didn't counter. I took half a step backward, let my center of gravity drop into the mud, and slid down the embankment before his recovery arc could catch my collar.
"Still running, rat?"
Lucas came down the ridge like he weighed nothing.
Wind magic cushioned his boots just enough to ignore the loose gravel, but his follow-up wasn't elemental at all. Before his heels even settled, his off-hand flicked.
Three throwing daggers made of condensed hard-light materialized in the dead space between his fingers, snapping toward my throat, chest, and right knee. High, middle, low.
A textbook triangle to force an evasion pattern.
I didn't jump. Jumping against someone with wind control is just hoping for God to save you.
I leaned sideways, caught the edge of a jutting limestone outcrop with my left gauntlet, and leveraged my entire weight into a low pivot. The daggers hummed past, shearing through my armor and detonating against the slope in dull, concussive flashes.
Annoying.
Very annoying. Also terrible for my health.
I didn't want to fight him. I definitely didn't want to kill him. Winning an exchange against Lucas Reinhardt wasn't just unnecessary; it was top 5 best ways to waste time. I had watched what happened during his fight with Rigel earlier this term. Every time an opponent gave Lucas a difficult problem, Lucas didn't even get hurt. He absorbed the damage, restructured his stance, and returned 20% sharper on the next pass. Hurting him was basically strengthen bro, who was feeding him??
My objective was embarrassingly simple: waste his time.
There were roughly 3 hours left in the exam window. Rose was already safe. Class B's field combatants had wiped out in the north. If I dragged this out along the eastern river basin and kept Lucas occupied until the final horn, Class C held the Soul advantage by default. Elfie stayed safe. We took the draw or the points victory.
Then I could take off this suffocating grey armor, sit on the luxurious ship, and eat a decent sandwich. Maybe steal some for my lunch tomorrow
Simple. A foolproof, dignified plan. Happy plan :D
Except the boy trying to decapitate me didn't fight like a spoiled genius.
Lucas closed the gap before the dust settled. His greatsword was gone—dismissed or stowed—replaced by a twin pair of curved starlight daggers. His stance was impossibly low, fluid, shifting from an aggressive imperial thrust into an open-guard sweep with zero transition stutter.
Whoosh.
I raised my right forearm, catching the flat of his strike on the heavy iron pauldron.
Clang!
The vibration shot straight into my collarbone, numbing my fingers. My boots tore through four feet of wet turf before I managed to arrest the momentum.
He was already faster than he had been 30 seconds ago. How rude.
"Is this the best Class C could scrape together?" Lucas mocked, circling with a relaxed, predatory tilt of his chin. The golden sheen in his eyes was vivid, pulsing in sync with his breathing.
"A coward whose only talent is running away? Stand your ground and fight. Or did that pathetic excuse of rank-zero give all her courage to her pet?"
I adjusted my posture behind the dented grey visor, letting the helmet's voice changer flatten my voice into a raspy, mechanical buzz.
"You know, lions like hunting deer," I said, catching my breath beneath the metal shell.
"And right now, I'm feeling very much like a deer. So... bye-bye."
I kicked a spray of black grit directly toward his eyes and sprinted downstream.
"You piece of trash—!"
His roar echoed behind me, followed immediately by the crack of displaced air as he burst into pursuit.
Good. Keep chasing. Run your little ducal heart out.
While my boots pounded against the river stones, my mind did what it always did: it started stripping the noise away from the target.
Most people who looked at Lucas Reinhardt saw an arrogant prodigy. A noble brute with insane mana reserves and a severe personality defect who looked down on commoners because he was born with a silver spear in his cradle.
That was the convenient model. The cheap idealization.
In science, you start with idealizations because the real world is too messy. You draw a world map without every pebble, boulder, and alleyway, because if you mapped every single grain of sand, the map would be the size of the world itself. You simplify so you can navigate.
For 2 months, my map of Lucas had been: Arrogant lone wolf. Solitary Lion.
It worked. It explained 80% of his behavior.
But an idealization becomes dangerous the second you mistake the simplified model for the reality.
Because Lucas didn't behave like a pure narcissist. When Class A's frontline collapsed, he didn't exploit his own classmates for bait. When dungeon groups formed, he frequently detached himself entirely. Was he wandering off because others slowed him down? Or was he keeping his distance because anyone standing near him ended up caught in the blast radius of whatever monstrous threat he was hunting?
Same behavior. Completely contradictory motives.
Don't jump to conclusions, I reminded myself as I vaulted over a fallen birch trunk, ducking beneath a sweeping gust of wind-blade that lopped the branches off clean behind me.
Maybe he's secretly considerate. A deeply unsettling thought. What if he's actually a sweet boy who knits sweaters for orphans? Terrifying. Maybe he's just an asshole. Much simpler. Let's hope he's an asshole. I'm too lazy to overthink.
What mattered right now wasn't his morality. It was his architecture.
And his architecture was genuinely horrifying.
He's an abductive reasoner.
No. More annoying than that.
He wasn't merely guessing the best explanation. Every failed attack became the next active experiment.
A purely deductive fighter relies on known formulas: if the opponent shows X stance, counter with Y technique. That's how traditional academy sorcerers fought. They were predictable because their premises were rigid.
Lucas wasn't deductive. He was treating our fight like an empirical trial in real time.
He threw an attack. He observed the anomaly—in this case, an opponent who refused to trade blows and solely prioritized evasion. He generated an immediate hypothesis about my evasion path. He discriminated between variables by altering angles, testing whether I dodged based on sight, footwork, or sound.
Then he updated his confidence, refined his mechanical output, and questioned his own previous failure to immediately produce an answer.
To do that while sprinting at 30 miles an hour over broken volcanic rock required an absurd level of metacognition.
It reminded me of the senior instructors from the Decayed Foundation. Men and women who had survived 40 years of black-ops warfare by turning combat into an iterative diagnostic loop.
I had killed those people. It took them decades of blood and trauma to build that cognitive discipline.
Lucas was 10. 10-year-olds are supposed to be worrying about acne and clumsy love letters, not running real-time multivariate combat regressions while jumping off waterfalls.
Where did he get that experience?
Even if he spent 16 hours a day training under the greatest masters of the Reinhardt nobility, human biology imposed hard limits. Humans pay a measurable cognitive cost whenever they switch tasks. Preparation lowers the cost; expertise suppresses the friction; but neither ever makes it zero. The brain still has to disengage one set of motor rules and load the next.
Lucas changed entire combat grammars without paying a single microsecond I could measure.
One second he was an elemental mage manipulating light pressure. The next, an assassin utilizing inverted dagger grips. Then a celestial mage using ranged redirection.
He was compressing entire disciplines into modular, callable subroutines.
A thought flickered into my head, dragging up an old academic debate I had read back in the imperial archives.
The Elven biochemist Haelen Yvris had spent 30 years arguing the Black Box problem of cellular machinery. Yvris proposed that when you look at certain biological systems, you find structures of irreducible complexity—networks so tightly integrated that removing a single component causes total collapse rather than mild degradation. Yvris claimed such arrangements demanded the signature of an external architect: contingent, statistically improbable, and satisfying a functional specification.
Contingent? Yes. Lucas's hybrid arts weren't fixed by natural laws.
Complex? Unbelievably so. A 10-year-old soloing the monthly dungeon with zero navigation equipment, processing massive environmental streams without neural fatigue.
Specified? Every switch directly closed an opponent's survival probability.
All three markers matched.
So... an external scaffold? An intelligent system? A god whispering in his ear?
Stop.
I checked the thought before it ran away with me.
Classic "best of a bad lot" fallacy. Just because an external system explains the zero-switching cost better than natural genius doesn't make it true. It only means it's the best guess out of the garbage pile of answers I can personally imagine right now.
Could be inherited memory. A unique magical domain. A cognitive artifact from the First Age. An obscure soul-binding.
Fine. I didn't need its name. I needed the operational reality.
Whatever he had running behind those green eyes, Lucas was not fighting alone.
"Found you!"
The roar came from above.
The air pressure cratered. Lucas had launched himself off the sheer face of the eastern bluff, his starlight blades fused together into a single, blinding lance that came screaming straight down at my skull.
I didn't care whether it was an ancient god, a cursed relic, or some alien cognitive lattice. Knowing the name of his passenger wouldn't stop the lance from splitting my head in two.
Don't solve the passenger, I told myself, bracing my boots against the riverbed and pulling the iron cables inside my gauntlet taut. Just survive the ride.
Not that I really care, mostly all I care about is my free sandwiches once this exam ends!! 😃
---
Perspective: Lucas Reinhardt
「 He dodged you again. Honestly, Lucas, your aura is in the gutter right now. It's actually painful to watch. 」
Shut up.
I hit the basalt with a double-footed jump dispersion, kicking up two rooster-tails of shattered obsidian as my starlight lance drove straight into the mud.
Empty ground.
The rat in the grey plate wasn't under the tip. He wasn't even scrambling to the side. He was standing three yards away, his arms hanging limp by his sides, his dented helmet tilted at a curious, vacant angle.
「 Look at him, he's just standing there. Chop his head off already before you embarrass both of us... 」
My jaw clenched so hard a molar gave a sharp, grinding twinge. I pulled the lance back, letting the celestial mana reabsorb into my marrow while twin bursts of wind surged around my shins.
"Stand still and die like a real man!" I snarled, stepping forward to cleave him in half.
The voice changer inside his helmet hissed, flattening his reply into a metallic, monotonous drone.
"Anyone can piss on the floor, Lucas," the grey knight said calmly, not even raising a guard. "It takes a real man to shit on the ceiling."
I froze mid-stride.
...What?
My brain stuttered. The celestial mana circulating through my chest literally hitched.
「 ...What on earth did he just say? Why are you pausing? Don't listen to him, monkey, just hit him! 」
"What the hell did you just say to me?!" I yelled, the dignity of the Reinhardt bloodline evaporating into pure disbelief.
The rat didn't flinch. He raised one grey, scuffed finger, pointing sagely toward the sky.
"A foolish man complains about his torn pocket," he said with deadpan serenity. "A wise man uses it to scratch his balls."
Is this guy insane?
Did Class C pull a lunatic out of an asylum, bolt 50 pounds of scrap metal onto him, and send him into the exam?!
"I'm going to rip your head off and feed it to dogs!"
「 He's gonna jump right. Go cut him off! 」
I didn't hesitate. I trusted the call. My left hand whipped forward, unleashing a compressed crescent of pressurized wind aimed precisely at his right shoulder to sever the dodge.
Except X didn't dodge right.
He didn't dodge left.
He literally stood completely, motionlessly still. The wind blade screamed past his neck, missing by half an inch and lopping a boulder behind him cleanly in two.
He tilted his head again.
"Your enemy can't guess your strategy if you don't have one," he droned through the speaker.
I lunged forward with twin starlight daggers, aiming straight for his chest.
He didn't twitch a muscle.
"And your enemy can't predict your next move if you don't move."
The daggers struck empty air. In the microsecond before the blades connected, he simply leaned his torso back at a 90-degree angle like a broken wooden plank, let the twin starlight edges slice through his empty afterimage, and snapped back upright.
"Shut the hell up!" I roared, my vision tinting red. "All you do is run away! Fight me!"
The rat suddenly turned around and took off sprinting toward the lower riverbed.
「 And he's running again. Wow. Groundbreaking stuff. Who could have seen this coming? 」
"Not this time!"
I flooded my quads with fire-burst acceleration, the dirt beneath my boots exploding into soot as I closed the distance in 2 strides. I prepared an overhand execution strike, channeling maximum mana into my right fist.
The moment I entered arm's reach, the rat didn't parry.
He dropped his entire weight, threw a full handful of wet river mud directly into my face, used the momentum of his slide to execute an impossible, low-ground gymnastic spin, and as he whipped behind me—
SMACK!
An iron gauntlet slapped the absolute shit out of the back of my head.
My ears rang. My helmet shook.
"Life is a race, Lucas," the raspy voice called out as he sprinted downstream, his boots splashing merrily through the shallows. "And you must be racist!"
HE SLAPPED ME.
A NO-NAME COMMONER SLAPPED A HEIR OF REINHARDT ON THE BACK OF HIS SKULL AND CALLED HIM A RACIST.
Veins bulged across my forehead. My temples throbbed so violently I thought my skull was going to crack open.
"STOP RUNNING, YOU BASTARD!"
"To be a madman like me," he shouted back without even turning his head, "you need to consider everyone's red flags as just fun facts!"
I can't take this anymore.
I genuinely cannot take this anymore.
System! I screamed internally, chasing him down the rocky bank with every drop of mana I had left. Use an instant-kill skill! Erase him! Cheating, illegal, whatever—just delete this cockroach from the island right now!
「 Denied. You're supposed to be on a glorious solo leveling journey, peasant. Go suffer like a proper protagonist. 」
Imagine it's for a fictional story! I bellowed in my mind. Pretend it's a plot device! Just kill him!
「 ...Fine. Bypassing safety locks. Awakening Forbidden Divine Authority: Total Annihilation of the Annoying Monkey... 」
A surge of terrifying, primordial power gathered at the tips of my fingers. My heart leaped.
Finally!
「 ...Just kidding, bro. We don't have that. Lmao. 」
I AM GOING TO UNINSTALL YOU.
I SWEAR ON MY ANCESTORS I WILL RIP THIS SYSTEM OUT OF MY SOUL.
The rat ahead suddenly stopped on top of a jagged river boulder, turned around, and gestured with two fingers like a schoolmaster beckoning an unruly toddler.
"Come on, lion. What happened to the apex predator? You're a lion and I'm a deer. Come here, kitty kitty."
"Where is the 'no more Mr. Nice Guy?'" He uttered running away further.
"You are going to die right here. In the dirt. No extraction. I will turn you into pieces." I hissed through gritted teeth, my voice shaking with murder.
"A wise man speaks," X recited cheerfully. "A fool screams. A legend barks. And you, my friend, are barking like a magnificent legend."
I threw a hard-light dagger straight at his throat.
Clink!
He didn't draw a blade. Before the dagger fully stabilized into its rigid physical lattice, he flicked a flat river pebble at a sharp angle into its forming seam, destabilizing the light construct just enough to veer into the water.
"You know, Lucas, I actually know a lot about you," he continued, his tone dangerously conversational.
"What the hell could a loser like you know about me?!" I spat, gathering elemental flames across both palms.
"I know you like them big," the helmet buzzed with absolute, scientific conviction. "A big ass compensates for small boobs. However... big boobs do not compensate for a small ass. It's simple structural physics. The greater the force the greater the attraction"
I choked on my own spit.
Disgust, horror, and sheer, cosmic bewilderment hit me all at once.
What is wrong with him?! What is wrong with his head?!
「 Look at your face, you're fuming. He's literally ragebaiting you so you miss your swings. Take a deep breath and touch some grass. 」
I know.
The red haze in my vision didn't vanish, but my pulse chilled.
He thinks I'm chasing emotionally.
Good. Let him think that.
He thought his idiotic, unhinged quotes were buying him time while he ran circles around me. But while he was making jokes about ceiling toilets and women's bodies, I was logging every single micro-habit he had shown over the last ten minutes.
One: the rat never traded damage. Even when an exchange was overwhelmingly in his favor, he refused to take a single scratch.
Two: he refused to leap vertically whenever I had wind pressure loaded.
Three: when the System predicted he'd jump right earlier and he stood completely still, it wasn't an accident. He wasn't just dodging attacks—he was exploiting the fact that attackers expect rational evasion. He weaponized non-action.
And four: no matter where he ran, his escape vectors strictly pulled away from the Class C citadel.
"Get good in the mail!" X shouted, and bounded backward over the ridge like an oversized iron frog.
「 Teleportation anomaly detected 12 meters ahead in the rock seam. Dormant rune... Asier's signature. 」
My lips curled back over my teeth.
There.
The System gave me the sensor reading; the rest was mine.
If I tried to predict where he would dodge, he would just stand still again or choose something absurd. So I wouldn't predict his dodge. I would eliminate every single survival option until only one existed.
Standing still? Death.
Dodging left? Death.
Dodging right? Death.
Jumping up? Wind-shear decapitation.
The only route that wouldn't cost him an arm, and the only route that kept him between me and Elfina—was the fissure mouth.
I raised my bow—woven instantly from combined solar radiance and compressed fire mana.
Three incendiary arrows materialized across the string, burning with white-hot elemental heat.
No more games.
Thwip-thwip-thwip!
The arrows didn't aim directly at him.
The first arrow struck the cliff face to his left, collapsing tons of basalt into his path. The second pierced the riverbed to his right, erupting into a towering geyser of scalding steam that blocked lateral retreat. The third snapped directly through the low cloud ceiling, cutting off any vertical leap with a wall of fire.
Standing still meant incinerating in the crossfire.
He had exactly one surviving option.
The rat reacted with textbook reflexes. He executed two rapid backflips through the smoke, clearing the fiery debris, his iron boots seeking the only patch of stable ground that kept him out of the explosion and away from Elfina's boundary.
His heel touched the black stone inside the fissure mouth.
Fzzzzzt.
The iron vein beneath his boot flared with pale, dormant blue light.
Spatial runes, etched deep into the rock hours ago by Asier Yeshe, recognized the metallic charge and the total absence of readable mana.
The rat's visor snapped downward. For the first time all afternoon, he went dead silent.
「 Got him. Bye-bye, rat. 」
A flash of violet lightning folded the air around him. The space warped, compressed into a singular geometric point, and snapped like a broken bowstring.
Pop.
The grey knight was gone. Completely vanished from the eastern river basin, hurled miles away into the northern caldera.
The silence that returned to the riverbank was deafening.
I stood there, panting, dust and mud clinging to my uniform, my head still sore where he had slapped me.
「 Checkmate, monkey. Now go get your girl. 」
'Your girl' lil bro I ain't here to save a princess, I am here to kill her.
I exhaled slowly, wiping the grit from my face, and turned my eyes toward the Class C stronghold in the distance.
"Finally," I muttered, stepping forward into the clearing.
"Now let's see what Rank Zero has to say."