The Awakening Crystal stood on the platform at the front of the Great Hall, on a pillar of black stone.
It was taller than a man and as clear as still water.
Light from the high windows passed through it and broke into soft colors on the floor.
Every Awakened person in the kingdom had stood in front of a crystal like this one.
Kings had stood there.
So had beggars.
The crystal did not care who you were.
It only showed what you could become.
That was what the priests said, anyway.
Aren had noticed that the beggars usually became beggars with slightly better posture.
The first-years sat in the front rows of the hall, in the order of the list.
Behind them, the older students filled the benches.
Above, in the gallery, sat teachers, guests, and the parents of anyone important enough to be invited.
Aren was in the second seat of the first row, which put him closer to the crystal than any commoner had been in a hundred years.
He could feel people staring at the back of his head.
On his left, in the first seat, sat Vivienne Ashgrave.
She had not looked at him since he sat down.
She sat straight, with her hands folded in her lap and the silver pendant around her wrist.
Up close, he could see that her knuckles were white.
Professor Crane stood beside the crystal with a scroll.
Next to him stood an alchemist with a silver tray of tonic vials.
The Headmaster, an old woman named Ysolde Marr whom Aren had only ever seen from a distance, sat in a tall chair at the side of the platform with her eyes half closed.
“Vivienne Ashgrave,” Crane read.
She stood.
The hall went silent.
The alchemist held out the tray.
Vivienne took the vial with her name on it, the one with the slightly imperfect label that Aren had written by lamplight four nights ago.
She did not look at the label.
She uncorked it and drank it in one smooth motion.
Aren let himself glance toward the front row on the other side of the aisle.
Darius Holt was watching her drink with an expression that was very carefully calm.
In the third row of the older students, a nervous young man who smelled of burnt herbs had gone pale.
Vivienne walked up the steps and put her right hand on the crystal.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the crystal filled with light from the inside, silver and soft at first, then brighter and brighter, until it was hard to look at.
Wind moved through the hall, though every door was closed.
Someone in the gallery gasped.
The light rose to the top of the crystal and gathered there, and words appeared inside it, written in glowing silver.
Class: Silver Moon Empress
Rarity: S
The hall exploded.
People stood up.
People shouted.
The older students pounded on the benches with their fists.
In the gallery, a tall man with Vivienne’s grey eyes rose to his feet, which Aren guessed was the closest the Duke of Ashgrave ever came to cheering.
The Headmaster opened her eyes all the way for the first time.
An S-rank class.
There were maybe a dozen S-rank Awakened alive in the whole kingdom.
Vivienne Ashgrave had just become one of the most valuable people in Aldermere, at eighteen years old, in front of everyone.
Across the aisle, Darius was clapping with the rest of them.
His smile looked like it had been nailed to his face.
Behind him, Pell the assistant had his head in his hands.
Vivienne took her hand off the crystal.
The light faded.
She bowed to the Headmaster, bowed to the hall, and walked down the steps with the same calm face she wore every day.
Only when she reached her seat did Aren see her let out a long breath, as if she had been holding it for a week.
She sat down beside him.
She did not look at him.
“Aren,” Crane read.
He paused, then added, with no expression at all, “No family name.”
Laughter rolled through the hall.
Aren stood up.
The noise changed as he walked to the platform.
It was not quiet.
People did not stop talking.
But the cheering for Vivienne turned into something lower and uglier, a sound full of jokes and whistles.
Someone near the back called out thief.
Someone else called out check your pockets.
A few people laughed so hard they had to hold onto their neighbors.
The alchemist held out the tray.
There was only one vial left with his name on it.
It was a cheap one, brewed by a student apprentice, with a slightly cloudy color.
He drank it.
It tasted like cold water and nothing else.
He climbed the steps.
From the top of the platform, the hall looked enormous.
A thousand faces, all turned toward him, all waiting to see the thief fall again.
He put his hand on the crystal.
It was colder than he had expected.
For one long, horrible second, nothing happened at all, and he heard someone in the front row start to snicker.
Then the blue screen opened in front of his eyes.
[Primary Anchor progressed: Class Awakening (S).]
[Source: Investment recorded.
Risk taken on behalf of Anchor.]
[Return generated.
Stored returns: 3.]
[Host Awakening in progress.]
[First Return detected.]
[Stored returns merged.]
[Genesis Spin unlocked.]
The hall went silent.
Not quiet.
Silent.
The laughter stopped in the middle of a breath.
Aren turned his head and saw that nobody was moving.
A boy in the third row was frozen with his mouth open.
A girl in the gallery was frozen halfway out of her seat.
Dust hung in the light from the windows like it had forgotten how to fall.
Even Crane, beside him, was frozen with one eyebrow raised.
Only Aren could move.
And in front of him, filling half the hall, a wheel was appearing out of the air.
It was huge, taller than the crystal, taller than the windows.
It was made of golden light, and it was divided into dozens of narrow segments, each one glowing a different color.
Every segment had a name written across it.
[All outcomes are valued at: Silver Moon Empress (S) x10,000.]
Aren read the names as the wheel settled into place.
[Sword Saint of the Last Dawn] (SSS)
[Draconic Blood Emperor] (SSS)
[Grand Necromancer of the Silent Kingdom] (SSS)
[Storm Titan] (SSS)
[Phoenix Archon] (SSS)
[Void Walker] (SSS)
[Heavenly Demon Monarch] (EX)
[Star-Devouring Mage] (EX)
[Lord of a Thousand Weapons] (EX)
There were more, many more.
Some were names he did not understand.
Some were names that sounded like they belonged in legends.
Every one of them was better than anything in this hall, better than Vivienne’s S-rank, better than anything the Duke of Ashgrave could buy for his daughter.
And somewhere between a red segment and a black one, there was a tiny sliver of gold, so thin he almost missed it.
It had no name.
Only three marks.
[???]
[Spin.]
He did not touch anything.
The wheel began to turn on its own.
It started slowly, then faster, until the names became bright streaks of color.
The sound of it filled the frozen hall, a deep humming like a bell that never stopped ringing.
Aren realized he was holding his breath.
The wheel began to slow.
He could read the names again as they passed under the pointer at the top.
Phoenix Archon.
Void Walker.
Storm Titan.
Each one would have made him one of the most powerful people in the kingdom.
Each one slid past and kept going.
It slowed more.
Draconic Blood Emperor.
The pointer clicked over the edge of it.
Lord of a Thousand Weapons, an EX tier, a tier not even legend are made off, and the wheel was barely moving now, and the pointer crawled across the segment, closer and closer to the end of it.
Aren felt his heart hammering against his ribs.
Stop.
Stop there.
That’s enough.
It did not stop.
The pointer reached the edge of the EX segment, hung there for a long second, and slid one tiny step further.
Onto the gold.
[Result: ???
(EX, Unique).]
[Probability: 0.0001%.]
[The Genesis Spin cannot occur again.]
[Class awakened: Zero.]
The wheel broke apart into golden light and was gone.
[True Class: Zero (EX, Unique).]
[Passive Skill acquired: False Face.]
[No one may see what you truly are.]
The hall moved again.
The laughter came back in the middle of the same breath, as if nothing had happened.
The boy in the third row finished his snicker.
The dust fell.
Crane’s eyebrow came down.
Nobody had seen the wheel.
Nobody had felt the silence.
For everyone else in the Great Hall, Aren had touched the crystal and waited one awkward second.
Then the crystal lit up.
It did not fill with silver light, or with any light at all, really.
It glowed a weak, dull grey, like a candle seen through dirty glass.
It did not rise to the top.
It barely made it to the middle.
Words appeared there, small and faint.
Class: Servant
Rarity: F
Combat Aptitude: 0
There was a moment of total disbelief.
Then the hall lost its mind.
People laughed so hard that some of them fell off the benches.
The older students howled.
Someone in the gallery dropped a cup.
A boy near the front stood up on his seat and shouted, “Combat Aptitude zero!” and the people around him started chanting it.
Zero.
Zero.
Zero.
Even some of the teachers were smiling behind their hands.
Crane looked at the crystal for a long moment, then wrote something on his scroll with what Aren could have sworn was the first real enjoyment he had seen on the man’s face.
“Servant,” Crane announced.
“F-rank.”
Aren took his hand off the crystal.
His legs felt strange.
His heart was still racing from the wheel, from the gold segment, from the number that kept floating in front of his eyes.
0.0001%.
He had to work hard to keep his face blank as he walked down the steps.
When he reached the first row, he looked at Vivienne.
She was staring at the crystal.
Not at him, at the crystal and the faint grey word inside it.
Her face was pale.
For one second, he saw something in her expression that did not fit at all, something that looked almost like relief.
Her shoulders dropped, just a little, the way they had when she had come down from her own awakening.
Then she turned her head and looked at him, and the relief was gone.
What was left was pure, cold contempt.
“A servant,” she said quietly, so only he could hear.
“That suits you.”
He sat down beside her.
Around them, the hall was still chanting.
Zero.
Zero.
Zero.
[Vivienne Ashgrave.
Hostility: 96% → 97%.]
He let the chant wash over him and looked down at his hands.
They were the same hands as yesterday, thin and scarred from carrying crates.
Nothing about them had changed.
But when he looked at them now, a small window hung in the air above his palm, one that only he could see.
[Name: Aren.]
[True Class: Zero (EX, Unique).]
[Rank: F, Level 1.]
[Anchors: 1/1.
Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary).]
The hall kept calling him Zero.
They meant it as an insult, and he let them.
They had no idea they were saying the true name of his class out loud.