The ceremony went on for four more hours, and the hall never quite stopped laughing at him.
One by one, the first-years climbed the steps and touched the crystal.
Darius Holt awakened an A-rank class called Hawkblade Duelist, and the hall cheered for him almost as loudly as it had for Vivienne.
He looked at her as he walked back to his seat, clearly waiting for her to say something.
She did not.
Most of the noble children came out with B or C classes.
A few came out with D and tried very hard not to cry.
Near the very end of the day, Mira climbed the steps.
She drank her tonic like it had insulted her, put her hand on the crystal, and lit it up with a warm orange glow that rose well past the middle.
Class: Hearthwarden
Rarity: B
Commoners did not get cheers.
But a few people clapped, and some of the teachers wrote things down, and a B-rank class from the lower city was the kind of thing people would talk about later.
Aren clapped as loudly as he could.
Mira looked straight at him from the platform, and something in her face eased for the first time in a week.
She found him on the steps outside afterward, while the crowd was thinning out.
Students kept passing and calling out his new name.
Nice class, Zero.
Carry my bag, Zero.
Mira gave one of them a look that made him walk faster.
“Hearthwarden,” Aren said.
“That’s a good class.
A really good one.”
“It’s a defense class.
I get to stand in front of people and get hit.” She shrugged, but she was trying not to smile.
“Fits me, I guess.”
“It does.”
She was quiet for a moment, looking at him with her arms crossed.
“I don’t care what that crystal says,” she said finally.
“You hear me?
You’re the smartest person I know.
You’re not a servant.”
“I hear you.”
“Good.” She punched him in the shoulder, not gently.
“Now stop carrying that girl’s jewelry.”
She left before he could answer.
He watched her go down the hill.
Mira believed in him.
She always had.
And he was going to spend the next months lying to her face.
The next morning, the first-years were sorted into classes by rank.
There were five classes, named by letter.
Class S had exactly one student, and she sat alone in a beautiful room on the top floor of the east tower with a private instructor.
Class A held Darius and a handful of others.
The rest of the nobles filled B and C.
Class D was in the basement of the old building, next to the laundry.
It held the students with D and F classes, which meant mostly commoners and a few unlucky nobles who looked like they wanted to die.
Mira, with her B-rank class, should have been on the second floor.
She was not.
Twenty demerits from the trial meant she lost her right to choose, and somebody had made sure she landed in the basement too.
Their instructor for basic combat was Professor Crane.
“Some of you,” Crane said, on the first morning, walking slowly between the desks, “will become useful Awakened.
You will guard caravans.
You will clear small Rifts.
You will serve the kingdom in modest ways.” He stopped beside Aren’s desk.
“And some of you will carry things for the people who do.”
The class laughed.
Aren laughed with them, because it was easier.
That afternoon, during practice in the yard, Crane assigned him to carry the training gear for Class A.
It was a long walk up the hill with a crate of practice swords on his back.
When he reached the top yard, Darius was waiting.
He watched Aren set the crate down, then picked up a wooden sword and tapped him on the back of the knee with it, hard enough to drop him.
“Careful, Zero,” Darius said.
“Servants should kneel properly.”
Aren stayed on one knee and said nothing.
Behind Darius, the other students of Class A were smirking.
Vivienne was not among them.
Her class trained alone.
[Darius Holt.
Hostility: 82%.]
[Anchor slots full.
Darius Holt cannot be anchored.]
Not yet, Aren thought, and got up, and walked back down the hill.
He waited until midnight to test it.
The night before, after the ceremony, the System had given him one more message while he lay awake on his mattress.
[Class Skill unlocked: Reduce to Zero (Lv.
1).]
[Bring one property of a target to zero for one second.]
[Uses: 1 per day.]
[Cost: The same property of the Host is reduced to zero for the same duration.]
The old practice yard behind the scholarship dormitory was empty at night.
Nobody used it anymore.
It had a broken fence, weeds between the stones, and one training post in the middle, a thick pillar of black iron as tall as a man.
The post was enchanted so first-years could hit it as hard as they wanted without breaking it.
Aren had watched a C-rank student swing at it with all his strength last week and only make a small scratch.
He took a practice sword from the rack by the fence.
It was cheap steel, dull and chipped.
He stood in front of the iron post and tried to calm his breathing.
One property, he thought.
Hardness.
Bring its hardness to zero.
He did not know how to use a skill.
Nobody had taught him.
But when he lifted the sword and looked at the post, he felt something answer inside him, like a door opening in a room he had not known was there.
He swung.
“Reduce to Zero.”
For one second, the world was very quiet.
The cheap sword went through the iron post like it was soft bread.
There was no sound, no resistance at all.
The top half of the post slid sideways and fell onto the stones with a heavy crash that echoed off the dormitory walls.
At the same moment, Aren’s own body went strange.
He felt it before he understood it.
The stones under his bare feet were suddenly sharp.
The air was suddenly sharp.
His sword hand was still moving from the swing, and his wrist turned a little too far, and the dull edge of the practice blade brushed the inside of his left arm.
It opened the skin like paper.
Then the second was over, and his body was his own again, and blood was running down his arm and dripping onto the stones.
He dropped the sword and pressed his hand over the cut, breathing hard.
It was long and deep.
A dull training sword, barely touching him, had done that.
For one second, his own hardness had been zero.
A falling roof tile could have killed him.
He sat down on the cold stones next to the broken iron post and started to laugh, very quietly, so nobody in the dormitory would hear.
He had cut through enchanted iron with a chipped practice sword.
He had also nearly cut his own arm off by accident.
One use per day, one second at a time, and every time he used it, he would be standing in front of his enemy with nothing at all between them and his heart.
It was the most dangerous tool he had ever held.
He loved it.
He tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt, tied it tight around his arm, and dragged the top half of the iron post into the weeds behind the fence where nobody would look.
Tomorrow, the groundskeeper would find a training post with a perfectly smooth cut through the middle.
Aren decided he would be very surprised to hear about it.
It was almost one in the morning when he came back inside.
The next morning, the whole Academy was talking about two things.
The first was the iron training post behind the scholarship dormitory, which the groundskeeper had found cut cleanly in half.
Some people said it was a prank by older students.
Some people said it was a monster from the training Rift.
One girl in Class D swore it was the ghost of a dead swordsman who walked the grounds at night.
Aren listened to all the theories with great interest and agreed that the ghost sounded the most likely.
The second thing was that Pell, the alchemist’s assistant, had run away from the Academy in the night without a word to anyone.
Aren heard it at breakfast and kept eating.
When he looked up, Darius Holt was standing at the entrance of the dining hall with the man in the dark coat, the one with the silver hawk on his collar.
The man was speaking quietly into Darius’s ear.
Darius’s eyes moved slowly across the room until they found Aren.
They stayed on him for a long time.
[Darius Holt.
Hostility: 82% → 91%.]
He knows I was the night porter, Aren thought.
He doesn’t know what I did.
But he’s going to wonder.
That afternoon, Crane sent him to the library to carry a stack of old ledgers up to the third floor.
It was a long climb, and the books were heavy.
When he reached the reading room at the top, he stopped in the doorway.
Vivienne Ashgrave sat alone at a table by the window.
In front of her lay an open ledger from the alchemy wing, the kind where the alchemist signed for every tonic he brewed.
Beside it lay a small glass vial, empty, with a paper label still tied around its neck.
She was comparing the handwriting.
Slowly, one letter at a time.
She looked up when she heard him.
For a moment, her grey eyes rested on him: the servant from the basement, with a stack of dusty books in his arms and a bandage on his left arm.
There was nothing in her face at all, not even contempt.
She looked at him the way you look at a chair.
Then she looked back down at the label.
Aren set the ledgers on the shelf, very carefully, and walked out without hurrying.
His heart did not slow down until he reached the bottom of the stairs.
She did not know.
Not yet.
But she had found a thread, and Vivienne Ashgrave did not seem like the kind of person who let go of threads.