This is the precipice. Sixteen hours of daily physical hell for thirty straight days. All for this single threshold: The Academy Qualifying Exams.
They dock once a year. Fail now, and the gate locks forever.
Shielding his eyes against the mid-day glare, Arthur stared up at the needle-thin spires jutting from the Academy's primary bastion. Even here, nestled within the greatest metropolis of the Viera Kingdom, the institution looked alien. It was gargantuan, magnificent—simply greater.
A cluster of fortresses, each massive enough to swallow an entire barony, stretched beyond the natural field of vision. The sheer bulk of the stone dwarfed the noon sun.
Sweat cut tracks down his jaw as he marched. The heat hammered through the cloudless sky. He sought refuge near the stone pillars, but the avenues converged into a single chokepoint. He had no choice but to let the dense throng carry him forward.
At least the current flowed toward the same altar: the Academy gates.
This should be the final testing cohort.
Yet there are easily five thousand bodies packed onto this concourse alone!
"Pardon me," Arthur muttered, angling his shoulder between two towering applicants.
Out of this sea of thousands—and the tens of thousands processed over the preceding nine days—only five hundred would pass through the School of Magic's threshold. That was the immutable quota.
Among those five hundred, thirty elite entrants would secure seats in the Honor Class. The chosen few, lavished with imperial resources and groomed for the continental stage.
In my current state, an Honor Class seat is a pipe dream.
Survive the cut. That is all that matters.
And even that might slip through my fingers.
A sudden shudder ran through the queue. Arthur's momentum caught him off balance, his frame colliding with the applicant ahead, who crashed hard onto the flagstones.
The boy's linen tunic hitched up, exposing his lower back.
The skin was almost entirely black.
Arthur blinked, leaning in. The dark pigment was not a stain. It was a dizzying, suffocating lattice of overlapping geometric markings—concentric rings anchored to unique focal runes, forming a suffocating tapestry that seemed to swallow the ambient light.
"Ah, forgive me! Are you hurt?"
What in the world is that ink—
"Cedric? Is that you?"
The boy dusted his knees and sprang up, flashing a blinding grin. "Oh! Hey, Arthur!
The crush of the crowd surged behind them, forcing the twins to shoulder forward side by side.
"I haven't seen you in over a week—Mother and Father were losing their minds!"
"I have been doing fine," Arthur said, carefully averting his eyes from the radiant face beside him.
"How are your nerves holding up?" Cedric asked, falling effortlessly into stride. "Are you still anxious about the test?"
Blessings. The gods' currency. A month in the woods, sleeping on roots, praying for hours in complete silence to the Spirit God, the primordial spirits, anything that would listen.
And not a single whisper in return.
"I manage," Arthur replied, his features set in an impenetrable mask. "I'm nervous, obviously, but if we give everything we have, we'll make the cut."
Everything I have? My everything amounted to a dead-end quotient.
Even with a perfect mark on the Written evaluation, without a single blessing, I have to outperform half this field in physical combat just to graze the bottom margin.
He cast a viperous glance toward Cedric.
While you could sleep through every trial and be carried directly to the Honor Class on a gilded litter.
"What number did they pin to you?" Cedric asked, clutching his parchment ticket.
Arthur's reply was flat. "Three hundred twenty-one."
"No way! I'm three hundred twenty! We're taking the practicals side by side!"
Look at that posture. Unfiltered, careless confidence. He doesn't even care that fifty strangers are cataloguing every word.
You hold everything I bled for. You are sickeningly flawless. I want to smash your jaw.