---
Three thousand two hundred and forty eight students entered the examination grounds.
No instructor explained the rules. No bell signaled the start. The gates simply opened into an enormous enclosed field — part forest, part stone ruins, part open terrain — and a single voice from somewhere above said:
"To pass remain standing for 3hours or all orcs down."the instructor said
Then silence.
Then chaos.
---
The orcs came from the forest line.
Five hundred of them. Trained, armed, moving with the coordinated aggression of fighters who had done this before and found it straightforward. They hit the outer edges of the student mass like a wave hitting sand and the student mass immediately began to collapse inward.
Aren had moved before the first collision.
Not toward the forest. Straight — reading the terrain the way Markus had drilled into him across three months of early mornings. High ground to the east. Ruins to the northwest offering cover and chokepoints. The student crowd was the most dangerous thing on the field right now, panicking people in every direction, and staying inside it meant getting carried somewhere he hadn't chosen to go.
Irisa was at the northwest ruins her postition ready for fight.
She had already drawn her sword and was moving with the clean decisive footwork of someone who had been in real fights before, not just training halls. Their eyes met across eight feet of screaming students. No words. She angled left. He angled right. Between them they cut a path to the ruins that closed behind them like water.
They accidently worked well together.
He noticed it immediately — the way she read spacing, never crowding his range, covering the angles he left open without being told where they were. She was fast and she was precise and she did not panic, which in the first four minutes of the examination was rarer than any sword technique.
The orcs that came through the ruins gap came in groups of three and four. Aren and Irisa took them in turn, occasionally simultaneously, settling into a rhythm that had no reason to exist this early and existed anyway.
---
Aren heard Mizellia before he saw what was happening to her.
Not a scream — Mizellia Thon did not scream, he would learn this about her — but a sharp controlled sound that meant something had gone wrong in a specific way. He came around a broken wall and found her pinned, two orcs holding her position, a third coming in from the side she couldn't cover.
The orc raised hlits club to strike her down but....
The orc stopped. Aren's blade was between them and the orc was looking at the expression on Aren's face and making a rapid reassessment.
It backed up. Aren turned to the other two. They also made reassessments.
The three of them left quickly.
Mizellia straightened. Fixed her coat. Looked at him.
"I owe you one vex," she said. Exactly once. Crisply.
"Move to the east ruins," Aren said. "Higher ground."
She moved. No argument. He noted that too.
---
From somewhere in the western sector came an extremely loud crash followed by Roman's voice saying something that was probably an apology and Makhon's voice responding in a register that suggested the apology was insufficient.
Aren did not have full visibility but from what he could piece together later: Roman had used a wide-range wind technique to clear a group of orcs, had not fully accounted for Makhon's standing eight feet to his left, and Makhon had been launched approximately twelve feet into a stone wall accidentally (or purposely )by Roman's twin swords
Makhon was fine. Makhon was unhappy. These were separate facts that would take some time to reconcile.
Roman spent the remainder of the examination staying slightly further left than strictly necessary.
---
The ground shook.
Not an orc technique. Something different — a cold that came down from the upper atmosphere and hit the earth in a wave, frost spreading outward from a single point in the east sector where Colis Viken had apparently decided the examination had been going on long enough.
His aura was extraordinary. Not loud, not aggressive — cold the way the north is cold, patient and absolute and perfectly indifferent to what it covered. The frost moved outward from him in a ring, fifteen feet, twenty, thirty, the earth locking solid and white and the orcs in his sector sliding, stumbling, losing their footing entirely.
It was the most controlled display of aura Aren had seen outside of Markus.
He filed it away.
---
The frost reached further than Colis had intended.
Specifically, it reached the stretch of open ground between the eastern ruins and the northern tree line
Princess Lura was terrifying and beautiful both at same time her Silver luna blessed hair shinned faintly As her fury of flaming thunder crackled with celestial energy wiping out more then dozen of brutes at one time.
But at same time as she reached the north tree lines she stepped on ice formed by aura of colis.
The ground went white beneath her feet.
Her left boot found no traction.
---
*Lura — POV*
The ground disappeared.
She was falling — sideways, which was the worst direction to fall, her hands going out instinctively — and then she wasn't falling.
Something had caught her.
An arm. Around her waist. Solid and immediate, the kind of catch that happened before the person catching had visibly moved, and she was upright again, one hand braced against a chest, her face approximately four inches from—
*Oh.*
*Oh no.*
Blue eyes. Cold and completely unbothered. Silver hair. The examination still happening around them as if the world had not just briefly tilted on its axis.
Aren Vex looked at her with the expression of someone who had caught a falling object and was waiting to set it down at a convenient moment.
*Badump.*
Her face was doing something. She could feel it doing something. It was warm and she had absolutely no authority over it.
*He is—*
*That is—*
*This is not—*
*Badump.*
"...Thank you," she said. Extremely calmly. With great dignity.
He nodded once and set her upright and was already looking back at the field.
From somewhere to the left, Colis's voice, very quiet, genuinely regretful:
*"...Sorry, Princess."*
She straightened her coat.
She was fine.
She was completely fine.
She looked at Aren's profile for one second longer than she intended to.
*Badump.*
She was not fine.
---
*Back to main POV*
When the gates opened again, five hundred and eleven students walked out.
Some were helped. Some were carried. A number had not gotten up.
Aren walked out with five people he had not known this morning and noted, without particular emotion, that the six of them had not needed to help each other out. They had simply moved through the same space and the space had been better for it.
Roman was saying something cheerful. Makhon was not responding. Mizellia was walking with the crisp posture of someone pretending they had not nearly been in serious trouble. Colis had the expression of a man quietly managing some guilt about the ice.
Lura walked beside Aren and looked straight ahead and did not look at him and was extremely normal about everything.
"You all passed," an instructor said flatly as they crossed the threshold.
None of them said anything.
Roman said: "Was there any doubt?"
Instructor said: "Yes."he glanced at the students who had qualified" this year batch has the most high percentage of passed candidtes.
---
— End of Chapter 6 —
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What comes next?