The assessment hall was the same room as the combat review.
Same table. Same raised platform with the carved-line sensors. Same observer benches along the left wall. But the arrangement was different. The board table had only two chairs behind it instead of three, and both chairs were occupied by the same administrative staff who logged the session rather than evaluated it. The actual assessment did not come from the board.
It came from the woman sitting alone at a small table to the right.
She was around sixty, with the compact, economical build of someone who had kept themselves useful through decades of work that required consistency rather than intensity. Her coat was the plain travelling cut of a hunter who had been in and out of zones for a long time. Her badge was on a chain—the same way Voss wore his, Kai noted—and the Gold-Rank mark had the deep patina of something that had been earned and then mostly ignored in favour of the work the rank enabled.
