Axen left.
Isaac watched him go until the shelter district's familiar grey brick absorbed him—the small figure moving with the arm held normally for the first time in three days. He watched until the figure was gone.
Then he turned.
The Order of Acacia's temple was behind him. The incense from the entrance hall had followed him out in a faint trail that the evening air was slowly resolving. He stood at the temple's outer steps and looked at the city.
Three days remained. The pouch was spent. Thankfully, his means of making profit didn't require a starting fund; the absence of money meant nothing to him.
He began to walk. The sun was starting to set, but there still was light.
Looking around, he saw how the people stared at him in recognition. Four days of time wasn't enough to diminish their interest in him. He could continue with the performance that he's been doing for the past four days.
He then saw.
The bounty board was on the Free Ground's northern wall—a standard institutional fixture, the Academy's typography replaced here by the capital's administrative format, notices posted and replaced at irregular intervals by whatever office managed such things. He had passed it three times during the week without stopping.
He stopped now.
Not for the board specifically, but for a specific paper that still carried the slight sheen of fresh ink rather than the weathered flatness of notices that had been up for weeks.
Two faces. Rendered in the flat, detailed style. A man and a woman, described in the administrative language of wanted notices—height, build, distinguishing features, last known location.
Suspected operatives of the Solari Empire. Confirmed active in the capital. Bounty: three silver total, split between confirmed capture and location disclosure, one silver for location, two for capture.
[The Prism] read it at full resolution. Filed it.
The spies of Solari Empire managed to sneak their way into the capital… how?
Isaac continued walking.
…
The fifth day's performance began at the fourth bell.
The central park crowd had its now-familiar composition—the core watchers who had consistently attended throughout the past five days, the new arrivals drawn by word of mouth, and the cluster of children at the front who had appointed themselves the performance's permanent front row. The fountain provided the humidity. The afternoon light provided the angles.
Isaac ran the mirage first. The crowd reacted with the established anticipation, waiting for the execution rather than being surprised.
He watched the crowd the way he watched every room.
[The Prism] ran at its standard baseline. Full resolution, without the extended output of the colosseum. The crowd's faces processed at the same depth as everything else—the specific reading of moisture content, mana signature, the micro-expressions that the standard visual register didn't catch.
Most faces were what they presented. The watchers, the merchants, the children, the occasional Academy student passing through who slowed to observe before continuing.
Isaac's eyes then narrowed. Because, two were not.
He identified them on the third cycle of the mirage, not because they had done anything overtly wrong, but because the gap between what he saw and what [The Prism] read underneath the surface was present in a way it wasn't for anyone else in the crowd.
The faces looking back at him were constructed. The skill operating beneath them was in the same category as [Glamour], illusion-adjacent, a surface applied over a different reality. [The Prism] noted it the way it had noted Irine's [Glamour] in the Golden Repose's corridor, set it aside, read what remained.
What mattered was that their faces matched the drawings that the notice on the bounty depicted.
A man and a woman. They stood at different positions in the crowd, far enough apart to appear unconnected, close enough that a single diagonal line would bisect both of them. They were watching the performance with the appropriate engagement of people who had come not to watch a performance, but to analyze it.
They were analyzing him.
Are they deeming me the threat to the Solari Empire?
Isaac took a peek at the mana-bird that was on his shoulder. Continued the mirage.
The question was how long they had been coming. Whether they had been in the earlier crowds. Whether the performance itself had drawn them or whether they had another reason to be in the central park.
The Order of Acacia's temple was visible from this position.
He filed that information. It was a speculation at best, but a possibility worth noting.
The mirage shifted. He moved the angle and the crowd tracked it. He watched the two targets track it with the same movement as everyone else, which told him they were performing their own version of audience behavior and doing it competently.
Competent disguise. Competent behavior. He discerned that they were trained, professionally.
He transitioned to the bubbles.
He needed them to stay.
Distraction. Misdirection. I need to perform multiple applications of [Condensation], simultaneously.
He formed the first bubble.
Released it.
The crowd tracked upward. In the gap of that collective tracking, he made two adjustments that appeared to be performance— the handkerchief repositioned, a slight shift in his standing position—that were actually the beginning of a wider water veil, seeded at the crowd's periphery from the elevated humidity the fountain was providing. Not yet a veil. The molecular architecture of one, distributed invisibly in the air.
He formed the second bubble. Smaller. The crowd's attention redistributed between the ascending first bubble and the forming second.
Two bubbles joined, merging into one larger bubble that wobbled as it floated in the air.
He reinforced the veil's periphery.
He formed the third bubble. The largest. He released it with the specific timing that made the crowd produce its involuntary exhale—the breath held and released, the specific collective reset of attention that gave him the gap he needed.
The veil's architecture was nearly complete. A distributed curtain at the crowd's outer edge, ready to consolidate into a coherent surface on one more iteration. The targets were inside it. They didn't know they were inside it.
The third bubble collided with the large bubble that was slowly descending. They initially merged, becoming an even larger bubble, before it popped in a mesmerizing manner.
The veil is—
"Hah."
A snort came from the crowd's right edge. It contained a mockery that had the intention of disrupting his focus.
Tomlin Greave pushed forward through the crowd with the same confidence he had carried into Group 13's assembly three weeks ago.
C-rank: [Reinforcement], lesser noble. Tomlin wasn't alone, but had a group of colleagues alongside him, and he appeared to be the leading figure of the group. Behind him, three students stood in the relaxed uniform of combat class—the same as what he wore—with that of nervousness.
Tomlin looked at the performance. At the crowd. At the basket of accumulated coins.
At Isaac.
"Isaac Nameless," he said. The surname delivered with the specific precision of someone using it as a tool, which told Isaac that Tomlin had noticed Camilla using it this way and considered it effective. "So this is what rank 2 does with his week. Putting on a show for coins."
The crowd registered the interruption—the specific social reconfiguration of a space that had been organized around one person and had found a competing center of attention.
Isaac held the fourth bubble.
The veil's architecture was nearly complete. The targets were inside it. However, the sun was setting. Once the light runs out, mirages won't be effective any longer.
He looked at Tomlin with the flat attention he brought to variables that required acknowledgement before being filed.
Tomlin Greave, C-rank: [Reinforcement], disqualified because of his complacency.
"Who are you again?" Asked Isaac, feigning obliviousness.
Tomlin snarled. "Don't play with me," he said. "You think you have the whole world after that one lucky victory?"
"…"
As he fumed, the crowd too a step back. The show of mirages and bubbles was over.
"What are you, the advocate of Silas Fulgur?" Isaac's voice had the register of someone reading a fact from a ledger. "Fulgur himself admitted the loss. If a F-rank skill can pull a win against a S-rank skill with sheer luck, the hierarchy of today's society won't be as skill-skewed as it is."
The crowd had gone to the specific quiet of people who were watching something they hadn't come to watch and had decided they were going to watch it anyway. Tomlin's companions looked between him and Isaac with a grimace.
"Fuck you," Tomlin cursed. The forced ease of someone whose composure was running at higher output than it should have needed to. "I still remember that in that Mechanism Room, I was disqualified because of being the primary target of enemies. Everyone knew that you were a deadweight. No one targeted you. That's why you were able to get into the higher class. Everything that you think you achieved so far is based on nothing but luck."
"If anything…" Isaac said. "Awakening a C-rank skill would be considered more lucky. You got disqualified because you let your guard down."
"Shut your mouth! Vane Abias, he—"
"And so," Isaac said. "What's the point of arguing with me? Clearly, you don't agree with me, and I don't agree with you. The talk will continue to be in parallel. The fact that you interrupted my business for a talk as useless as this…" A pause. "Are you here to request a duel against me?"
Tomlin froze. His mouth closed. He looked at Isaac, who looked back at him, impassively.
"You—" He then stepped forward, scowling. [Reinforcement] produced its characteristic iron-grey sheen at his forearms—the automatic activation of someone whose threat response ran directly through their skill. "Don't get comfortable with that rank, Nameless. The designation board doesn't have a section for luck."
"Tomlin Greave. You are dodging the point."
The voice came from the crowd's far left—not loud, carrying without needing volume, the specific register of a name delivered by someone who had decided the delivery was sufficient.
Lyra Aetherion stood at the crowd's edge with her hands folded and her silver gaze doing the quiet arc it always did when she arrived somewhere and wanted to know the shape of the space before committing to it. She was in the higher class's after-school uniform just like Isaac. Considering how she was one of sixteen tasked on making profits over the course of a week, it was understandable that she would be nearby—close enough to overhear the commotion.
"I heard it all."
She looked at Tomlin. The [Clairvoyance] didn't show in her eyes at this expenditure level—but the specific quality of someone who had already seen how the next thirty seconds would resolve and was simply waiting for the present to catch up was present in her expression.
"You clearly came here to pick a fight against Isaac," she said. "Yet, you are beating around the bush. Being loud doesn't make you right—it makes you look idiotic and uneducated." She looked at him with the direct attention she brought to inaccurate statements. "Answer Isaac's question, Tomlin Greave. A duel. Are you here for that?"
Tomlin looked at her.
This clearly wasn't in his calculation. Princess Lyra Aetherion, the owner of A-rank: [Clairvoyance], rank 3 of the second-year cohort, member of the royal line, was defending whom he considered "failure."
He looked at his forearms. The [Reinforcement] sheen faded.
"I was simply—" he started.
"Answer," Lyra said. The flat delivery of someone closing a parenthesis.
Tomlin held the position for two seconds. Then he turned, answering with silence. His companions reorganized themselves around his exit with their heads lowered, hoping that Lyra didn't catch their faces.
They left.
The crowd settled. Then, seeing that the sun was gone and the night has arrived, they began to disperse quietly—especially since being near a royal brought too much pressure unto them.
The veil—the set up that he made, was long gone.
Isaac watched them go—the two individuals whose characteristics matched the bounty posters. Noted the direction. North-northeast.
He then turned, facing Lyra who seemed to have waited for him. "Lyra." He nodded.
"I pity you, Isaac." she said. "I can't understand why there are so many nobles who want to pick on you." She then looked around the area, "Quite humid, I'd say. It looks like your choice of working here was a strategic disposition."
"It is."
"And those mirages and bubbles which you displayed… I've never heard of [Condensation] doing any of that. You never cease to make me impressed, Isaac."
Lyra then paused, looking surprised by her own honesty.
"My approach was different," she said, after a moment. The specific register of someone offering information they hadn't been asked for because the exchange warranted it. "Information. [Clairvoyance] at its lowest sustainable expenditure produces a read on ambient conditions—weather patterns, crowd movement, the specific probability distributions that merchants and traders pay well to have assessed in advance." She looked at the fountain. "I spent five days in the merchant quarter's morning sessions. The expenditure cost was manageable at that level. The return was better than labor would have produced."
Lyra looked at the direction the crowd had thinned toward. Then at Isaac, with the expression she carried when she was deciding how much of a conclusion to share. "But… that's not why I came to visit you. I heard about the ongoing rumor, of how you spent your earned money to pay for a child's treatment."
"What about it?"
"I just wanted to ask if you will be fine."
"I am and will be fine." Isaac replied blankly, "This is just an assignment, nothing more."
Lyra looked at Isaac intently. Then, she chuckled, "It looks like you don't care much about the prestige of being in the higher class."
It wasn't question, and Isaac knew that.
"I would argue, however, that even with your pace having been reset, you'll eventually end up with more money than Silas. He apparently made it huge initially before losing it all in following rounds." Lyra placed her hand under her chin. "Then, there is Vane who bought a worn-down store and has been renovating it… I find it hard to believe that they are close friends."
Isaac nodded mechanically, his mind still on two spies from the Solari Kingdom. Lyra noticed his aloofness, and immediately caught on,
"…You are onto something."
"Yes."
"Is it related to an assignment?"
Isaac looked at the mana-bird that still remained seated on his shoulder. He then looked at the other mana-bird that was flapping its wings nearby Lyra.
"It's debatable."