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The observation room was dark except for the glow of the simulator feed. It painted the five members of Team Drex in pale blue light as they sat in silence, watching.
"We shouldn't be in here," Nyssa Vael said. Tall, skinny, their team mage. She'd said it twice already.
"We're not breaking any rules," River Ashlock said — second on the underground leaderboard and their captain. He didn't move. Didn't shift in his seat, didn't cross his arms. Just watched.
Torvin Hale sat beside him — strongest freshman tank, first place in the stamina trial. Whenever something impressed him, he'd exhale through his nose. He doesn't do it often, but he's been doing it a lot over the past few minutes. The only indication that what he was watching was anything other than ordinary.
Because on the feed, Landen was good. Too good. The female avatar he was piloting tore through bot waves with clean rotations, predicted positioning, and farm stacking up like he'd already memorized the pattern before it ran. The kind of thing you don't just figure out. The kind of thing you grind into your hands over years —
"He played on a team before," IIyra said. "Has to be. You don't read rotations like that without — "
"He's a civilian-grade essence," River said quietly.
The room went quiet with it.
Ilyra Sorum, their team's fighter, frowned at the screen. She was a larger woman. Large and round.
River was right. Civilian grade meant zero combat history, no essence power, no academy prep. Whatever Landen was doing out there, he was doing it without the foundation that the rest of them had spent years building.
Which left two possibilities: either the avatar was carrying him in ways that wouldn't survive a real match, or something else was happening that they didn't have a category for yet.
River needed more data. "Cedric."
From the back of the room came the sound of typing that hadn't stopped once since they'd snuck in. Cedric Lowen's glasses reflected his screen. He was a slight guy, easy to overlook, which was more or less the point of him. Their team's support player by day and hired computer hacker by night.
"Already pulling his assessment data," Cedric said, without looking up.
"Keep pulling. I want everything before the session ends."
The River glanced over at Torvin.
"We need to see the real Mifaso, not just some simulation." He rubbed his chin. "What's his name — Ryker? Yes, get Ryker on him."
Cedric kept working. Then a second notification opened alongside the data pull, separate and unexpected. He looked at it. Looked at it a beat longer than he usually looked at things.
A job request. Sender: Micah Rush.
Ember's in the simulation room. Get it done.
Cedric clicked his tongue. "That idiot didn't need to message me—I was already about to handle it." He sighed. "Now he's gone and left a digital trail."
He opened the task queue labeled:
Ember's Rejects
—and began to hack the system. Somewhere across the academy, a terminal was about to have a very bad day.
— — —
After the tutorial ended, Ember crossed to one of the terminals and pulled up her match data. The session metrics loaded clean — wave efficiency, positioning score, damage output, all of it logging exactly the way she'd expected. The numbers were fine. Better than fine.
The screen flickered.
Not badly. Just once, a single frame of static, the kind of thing you'd chalk up to pod interference or a loose connection.
But Ember's eyes narrowed. Terminals didn't flicker — not these ones, not ever. So what was this happening now?
Then the display changed.
Her metrics dissolved into a wall of red text, cascading down the screen faster than she could read it. Line after line of corrupted data or error codes or something that looked like error codes. She has seen this before, someone was clearly hacking into the system. But before she could process any of it, the text cleared.
And she was looking at herself.
A clip from inside the simulation. Two, maybe three seconds. The moment they'd been caught from behind, when the formation had collapsed before anyone had time to call it — and she had flinched. The fear, and then the confusion, and then the doubt, all of it moving across her face in the span of a single breath. She'd tried to recover, to look composed, to reset. But they'd all gotten killed. Her overconfidence, her assumed leadership, had gotten them all killed.
The clip looped.
The same fractional hesitation, blown up to fill the entire terminal screen, playing again and again — taunting her, showing her something she already knew deep down: that she wasn't the unshakable, all-powerful person she pretended to be.
Then, bleeding in from the corner — slow, unhurried — a watermark. A small icon she didn't recognize: a flame pressed flat under glass, burning without going anywhere. Below it, a single line of text faded into focus:
Simulation's over, but the rejects don't fade. What's coming won't reset — and there's no upgrade.
Ember stared at it. Her heart raced.
She looked over her shoulder. The corridor was the usual post-session traffic — people filing out, a technician walking the far end of the room, nobody looking at her.
She looked back at the terminal.
It was her metrics. Clean numbers, normal display, the third-wave performance logged as flawless. The watermark was gone. The clip was gone. The red text was gone.
She stood there for another moment, staring at numbers that no longer meant anything.
Then she closed the session log, pushed off the terminal, and walked out of the room — faster than she meant to.
She didn't call a technician over. She didn't mention it to anyone.
Post-simulation fatigue did things to your perception. Everyone knew that. She was just tired.
She kept telling herself that until she believed it.
Behind her, the terminal screen flickered once more. Just static. No one was there to see it.
— — —
Landen walked out of the simulation room rubbing the back of his neck, half-convinced he'd just spent twenty minutes getting yelled at by a computer. The tutorial and simulation against the bots were meant to give the students a taste of what was coming. Instead, most of them walked out more confused than when they walked in. That seemed to be the actual point — not to teach anything, just to show them how little they currently knew.
One good thing did come out of it, though. Every member of the team except Ember had walked away with a noticeably higher opinion of Landen. Maybe next time, they'd actually listen to him.
The academy had a strange way of running things. First came the hands-on tutorial — sink or swim, figure it out as you go. After that, students were split up by classification. Warriors trained with warriors, Mages with mages, Tanks with tanks, and so on down the line. Landen's classification was Support, which meant his entire schedule was now support classes.
His first one was Support 101.
He walked in late, and the second he stepped through the door, every head in the room turned toward him. Long hair, pretty eyes, and a wave of perfume thick enough to knock over a horse. Landen froze in the doorway. Of course. Nearly the entire class was female.
The room went dead silent for half a second.
Then: "Come sit next to me!"
"No, sit next to me!"
"There's a seat open right here, Landen!"
Within seconds, the whole classroom was a chorus of girls calling his name, waving him over, scooting chairs to make room. Landen just stood there, looking like a man who'd wandered into the wrong building and was too polite to leave.
"Causing trouble already, Mr. Knight?" Professor Celestine Varro's voice cut through the noise like a blade. "Sit down."
"Yes, ma'am." He dropped into the nearest open seat so fast he nearly missed it.
The girl next to him glanced over, the corner of her mouth twitching like she was fighting off a smile. "Rough start."
"You have no idea," Landen muttered.
"Liora," she said. "Liora Fenwick."
"Landen."
"I know," she said dryly. "Everyone knows."
That was Liora — soft-spoken, quiet, the observant type who noticed everything and said almost none of it. Her beauty wasn't the loud kind; it was the sort that crept up on you, natural and understated. And for whatever reason, when Landen looked at her, nothing happened. No curse, no chaos, no instant adoration. Just... normal. He could've kissed her for that. Sitting next to her felt safe in a way nothing else in this school did.
"Now then," Professor Varro said, sweeping her gaze across the room, "let's discuss the support role. The least glamorous position on any team — and arguably the most important."
She began walking them through it: map control, positioning, vision, peeling for carries, turning the tide of a fight before anyone else even realized it was turning.
Landen already knew all of this. He'd lived this. So instead of listening, he tuned out and pulled up his system interface.
Alright. Time to level up.
He checked his EXP bar and blinked. He'd gotten 20 EXP from the Aegis Tutorial and 10 EXP from his first MOBA Training Center session — that part made sense. But his bar read 50/100. That was an extra 20 EXP he couldn't account for.
System, where's this extra experience coming from?
The system answered immediately: 10 EXP for reviewing the Heroes tab and 10 EXP for reviewing the Inventory tab. Apparently, just looking through the system for the first time counted as progress. He hadn't expected that — passive EXP just for poking around his own interface.
The system added that he'd get the same bonus for every tab he reviewed. Fortunately, there were two unexplored tabs: Abilities and Rankings.
He opened Rankings first.
There wasn't much to see yet. A handful of familiar names — the top students announced at the Townhall assembly, a few of Halvek's students, including Maledic and his team — but every single one of them showed up as unranked. Made sense. Nobody had competed in an actual match yet, so the system had nothing to calculate.
What caught his attention was further up the list. The professors were on the leaderboard too.
At the top:
Gordon Vanderbilt, power ranking 2361.
Second: Kael Halvek, 2042.
Third: Celestine Varro, 1820.
Fourth: Maris Feld, 1293.
Every student sat at zero.
Landen stared at that second spot for a second too long. Kael, sitting that close to Vanderbilt? He could understand the Chief Marshal topping the chart — guy practically ran the whole school — but Kael being only a few hundred points behind him felt... significant. Maybe the gaps widened the higher you climbed. Or maybe Kael was a lot more than "just a professor."
He filed that thought away for later.
The moment he finished reading the tab, 10 EXP dropped into his bar. 60/100 now.
Progress, but slow. Painfully slow.
System, what do I actually need to do to level up faster?
The system pointed him toward the MOBA Training Center — specific modules, each one worth a chunk of EXP for completion. A display unfolded in his mind, listing them out:
Basic Movement & Attacking — 5 EXP
Skill Casting & Targeting — 5 EXP
Turrets and Objectives — 5 EXP
Laning and Jungle Basics — 5 EXP
Advanced Training Modules — Locked
Landen looked at the list, then glanced up at Professor Varro, still mid-lecture, still completely unaware that one of her students had checked out the moment she opened her mouth.
Then he realized. I don't need for class to end. I can start the training modules now.
He pulled up the menu, selected Basic Movement & Attacking, and the world dimmed around him — sound muffling, classroom fading to gray.
Somewhere very far away, Professor Varro's voice sharpened. "Mr. Knight. Are you sleeping in my class?"
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