The creature lunged straight at Alex with an explosive fury, throwing sparks off the floor plating. Alex didn't take a single step back. The moment the creature reached him he slipped the flat side of his sword under its momentum, gave his own Chi to the surface of the blade, absorbed the creature's weight and hurled it upward in a hard arc. The badger rose into the air uncontrolled.
At that exact fraction of a second Natasha went into action. She loosed two arrows made of special polar steel, nocked to her bow, toward the point where the badger would fall from the air, with millimetric timing. *THWACK! THWACK!*
The arrows drove deep into the floor plating and stood up like two metal columns. As the creature, having lost its balance in the air, fell exactly between those two arrows, Natasha loosed her third and fourth arrows from a crossing angle, forming a steel cage arrangement that locked down the range of motion of the creature's arms and back.
The moment the badger slammed into the ground, it was stuck in the narrow area bounded by the metal arrows. Before it could even understand what had happened, Alex and Dex dropped down on either side of it with lightning speed. Alex pinned it by pressing the broad face of his sword against the creature's neck; Dex, meanwhile, pressed the hilt sections of his blades into the Mana points along the badger's spinal line, reducing its mobility completely to zero.
It was flawless, seamless teamwork, magnificent and completed within seconds. Rodolf grinned and made a note on his board. "Good! Perfect teamwork. Nobody put on a show, everybody played their role flawlessly."
Then he lifted his head from his board and turned to the class, his voice dropping a notch. "And pay attention, brats: that girl didn't loose a single extra arrow. Four arrows, four jobs. In the field it isn't only an archer's aim that keeps her alive — it's her counting." Natasha said nothing; she only checked the tension of her bowstring once with her thumb as she hung the bow on her back — as if the praise had been directed not at her but at her arrows.
As Alex left the arena he looked at me, and in that look, in place of the usual arrogance, there was something else: not "did you see that," but something that said "what are you going to do."
"Next group!" Rodolf roared. "Elena, Peter, Kai. Get down here!"
Elena flexed her sword slightly. "How are we doing this?"
Peter, without looking at me at all, readied his shield and short sword with a professional expression. "I'll stay on the front line and absorb the first momentum with the shield," Peter said in a flat voice. "Elena, you cut its speed from the right diagonal. Kai, you close the left flank, don't let it get around to the back."
"Fine," I said with a yawn. Hand in my pocket, I took my place with a thoroughly sluggish air.
The red light came on. The collar loosened with a click.
The badger, with the fury of the pressure it had suffered from the previous group, threw itself forward this time with unbelievable aggression. Its target was directly the Peter in the middle. Peter planted his shield firmly on the ground and distributed his Chi evenly through his body. The creature slammed hard into his shield. *CLANG!* With the force of the impact Peter didn't retreat a single step; with his shield he reduced the creature's momentum to zero.
At that moment Elena came in from the right like lightning. She struck the badger's mutated leg lightly with the hilt of her sword and completely broke its balance. The creature went out of control and rolled toward the left side — that is, toward where I was standing.
Just as the badger was straightening up to make a move at me, I shifted my body only a few centimeters to the side. As the creature passed by me into empty space, I glanced out of the corner of my eye at the mutated tissue at its rear. Without putting on any extra show, I simply reached out my hand and lightly touched the unstable Mana accumulation in the creature's leg. Already coming in out of control, the creature lost its direction with that small contact and toppled onto the antimetal floor.
Peter immediately sprang forward and closed off the creature's range of motion with his shield. When the one-minute duration was up, we had completed the time without giving the creature a chance for a serious move.
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Rodolf blew his whistle. The electro-shock came into play and the badger was rendered completely harmless.
"That's it, that's enough!" Rodolf shouted. He turned to the class and raised his enormous hand. "Did you see, brats? Today, out of the whole class, only two groups managed their task properly! The rest of you just panicked and flung Chi around. Which means that in real life you're a class that has no chance at all even against a creature at this level — and they call you the elite class. That's it for today, class is over! Everyone to the locker room!"
Elena slid her sword into its sheath and gave Peter a slight nod. Peter answered with the same cold professionalism and walked toward the locker room — still without saying a single word to me, but at least he wasn't glaring anymore; I think our coordination just now had stirred up at least a slight respect in him.
Elena came over and tapped my shoulder lightly. "You weren't bad, Kai. You got off cheap again."
"We did what was needed, that's all," I said with a yawn, sticking my hands in my pockets. "Thank goodness it ended without an injury; I don't want to miss the meal hour in the cafeteria."
After class I came out of the heavily protected arena and went up to the cafeteria; the cafeteria was on the building's ground floor. The stress of the class and the adrenaline of having faced a monster were behind me — and so was Mr. Rodolf's head-splitting voice. All I wanted was to eat my meal calmly and rest my head. I filled my plate with food and moved to an empty table.
But there was something I hadn't noticed that day: the moment I touched that accumulated Chi on the badger's back, I had felt for an instant, in my fingertips, an indescribable coldness — as if the thing my fingers had touched wasn't merely a mutated animal. For the first time I had touched the feel of anti-Chi; the energy the System doesn't detect, or deliberately doesn't detect, older than the System and emerged at the same time as Chi.
While eating, I opened my panel and went over my performance in that class. The System had labeled our group's performance "Perfect Coordination," and had also added a note specifically for me:
[System Notification]
The usage efficiency of your Control stat has shown a 12% increase in the last 24 hours. This increase means a performance slightly above the expected limits of your current Control stat. Continued observation is recommended.
This was the first time I had seen this kind of notification. The System generally reported stat increases, class grades, ranking changes — but it had never used an expression like "performance above expected limits" toward me. I examined it for a while, then closed it, trying not to think about it too much. Maybe it was just a routine system message; different notifications went out to everyone at different times anyway.
As I was finishing my meal, Eleanor came over to me with a plate in her hand, in a somewhat timid manner. "Kai, may I sit?" she asked.
"Of course," I said, surprised. Eleanor and I hadn't talked much before; she generally sat in her own corner, buried in her books. "In today's class," she said, her voice low, "I saw how you determined the badger's Chi distribution. I'm studying Chi engineering, as you know, and that concept of 'non-homogeneous distribution' you described... it's a subject I'm interested in too. Could you give me detailed information about it, if you have a command of the subject?"
This question surprised me for a moment. "I don't know," I said honestly. "I just... saw it. I observed it." In truth this had happened thanks to Master Ren's exercise, but...
Eleanor looked at me for a long while, as though searching for something beyond what I had said, then smiled kindly. "All right then," she said only, and didn't press the subject any further, though she was a little disappointed too. But for the rest of the meal I noticed her glancing at me out of the corner of her eye now and then, as if she were trying to solve me like a puzzle.
Not long after Eleanor got up, someone appeared who set his tray down on my table without a sound: Alex.
"We haven't been able to talk properly for a week, Kai," said Alex, pulling the glass on his tray to the side. "We're in the same class but with this pace we've stopped seeing each other's faces."
"Thanks to the academy, it doesn't let you breathe," I said, sinking my fork into the piece of meat on my plate.
Alex smiled and leaned back in his chair. We ate quietly for a while, then he set his glass on the table and looked at me, an unexpected curiosity in his eyes.
"You know what came to mind?" he said. "It's been nearly two and a half months since we entered this school, but I could swear you've never once toured the school. You just go back and forth between the classrooms, the dormitory and the dining hall. I mean, all this time has passed and you still probably don't know what's where beyond the arenas on the -3rd floor."
I shrugged. "Because those are the places I need. Class, food, bed. The rest is extra tiredness."
"That won't do," said Alex, shaking his head from side to side, as if what I'd said were nonsense. "Finish your food and come, let me show you around the school. Because my family knows people who count for quite a lot at this school, I've been coming in and out of here since I was little; I know this place better than anyone. Besides, there are a few interesting details, it'd be useful for you to know them."