Marsh wrote something and moved on.
The girl two rows from the front summoned a mid-tier dragon. It filled the upper third of the room and had to fold its wings against the ceiling. She held it for sixty seconds like it cost her nothing and demonstrated a breath ability that left a scorch mark on the stone.
Marsh looked at the scorch mark briefly.
Wrote something.
Moved on.
Stellan’s Combat Sovereign manifestation made the air in the room feel pressurized. Clean. Controlled. Exactly sixty seconds and dismissed with the precision of someone who had been drilling this for years.
Marsh wrote something and moved on without comment.
One by one. Down through the ranks. S-ranks. A-ranks. The occasional B-rank whose owner tried to present it with more confidence than the result warranted.
Then Marsh called Corbyn’s name.
The room shifted. That specific quality of attention that happens when everyone wants to watch something and is trying to appear like they don’t.
Corbyn stood.
His mana channel notification had read 51% that morning. Cole had told him no summoning until 90%. Ishtar had said the same thing.
He stood at the center of the assessment circle anyway.
Corbyn, Ishtar said in his mind.
’I know,’ he thought back.
Your channels aren’t—
’I know,’ he thought.
A pause.
Don’t hold it longer than you have to, she said.
He reached for the bond.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then the air beside him changed. The familiar pressure shift, like something pulling at a seam. But different from the ceremony. Slower. Like whatever was on the other side was being careful.
Ishtar appeared.
Not fully.
Translucent. Like a drawing of herself rather than the complete version. The details were there — the bronze skin, the dark hair, the worn armor — but with the quality of something seen through water rather than open air.
Even like that the room went completely quiet.
Marsh stopped writing.
He didn’t step back. He was the kind of man who had made a decision at some point not to step back from things and had maintained that decision consistently.
But he stopped writing.
"Hold it," Marsh said.
Corbyn held it.
Thirty seconds. His mana was burning through faster than it should, dragging against the reserve he’d spent all morning trying to rebuild.
Forty seconds.
Ishtar looked at him with the expression of someone watching a person do something they were specifically told not to do.
He mouthed sorry.
Her expression didn’t change.
Fifty.
His vision blurred slightly at the edge.
Sixty.
"Sit down," Marsh said.
Corbyn sat. The manifestation dissolved. He pressed his palm flat on his thigh and breathed carefully until the blur cleared.
Marsh wrote something on his tablet.
Then he moved to the next student like the last sixty seconds had been a routine part of the assessment.
The results were posted outside the classroom after the session ended.
Students clustered around the board. Ranks in neat type beside each name. SS. S. S. A. A. B.
Corbyn looked at the entry beside his name.
Unclassified.
Not a failing grade. Not a passing one. A category that hadn’t existed on this board before today.
He stood there reading it for a moment.
Stellan stopped beside him.
Read the board.
Found Corbyn’s entry.
Looked at it for a moment without expression.
Then looked at Corbyn.
Said nothing.
Which was somehow more considered than anything he could have said.
Then he walked away.
Corbyn looked back at the board.
Unclassified because the assessment system graded summoners against known frameworks. It needed a mana rank, a class ceiling, a registered baseline output to produce a result. The Calamity Summoner class had no registered baseline. It hadn’t existed in two centuries. The system couldn’t grade what it had no framework for.
So Marsh had written what the system returned.
One word.
Corbyn turned from the board and walked away from it.
The path between the Summoning block and the Theory building cut across the east courtyard. Fifteen minutes between classes. Most students moved in groups, the social clusters from morning reassembling naturally.
Corbyn was walking it alone when footsteps fell into pace on his left.
Lyra. Notebook under her arm. Same direction. Same pace. Not looking at him.
"Theory of Mana Structures?" Corbyn said.
"Yes," Lyra said.
They walked.
From the covered walkway along the east side a group of girls passed going the other direction. Noble students. Two of them from the ceremony front row.
One of them looked at Lyra. Then at Corbyn walking beside her.
"Strange company, representative," the girl said as they passed. Loud enough to be heard. "Your family name is worth more than Ashfen associations."
She kept walking without waiting for a response.
Lyra didn’t break stride.
Corbyn watched her from the side.
Her jaw tightened for exactly one second.
Then it released. Her expression returned to neutral. Her pace didn’t change by a single beat.
He looked forward.
He didn’t offer anything. No commentary. No reassurance she hadn’t asked for. He just kept walking beside her at the same pace.
A few seconds passed.
"They’ve been like that since this morning," Lyra said. Flat. Informational.
"Since you sat at my table," Corbyn said.
"Since before that," Lyra said. "Since the speech last night." A pause. "Noble students don’t like being reminded that rank isn’t absolute. It implies their rank might not be absolute."
"Does it bother you?" Corbyn said.
She was quiet for a moment.
"No," Lyra said.
She said it the way people say things they’ve decided are true and decided that deciding is enough.
Corbyn nodded.
They reached the Theory building. Corbyn pulled the door open and held it.
Lyra walked through.
Then stopped just inside and looked back at him.
"Your assessment result," she said.
"Unclassified," Corbyn said.
"Marsh has run that assessment for eleven years," Lyra said. "He’s never written that before."
"I know," Corbyn said.
"It means he doesn’t have a framework for what he saw," she said. "Which means nobody does."
She looked at him for a moment with those grey eyes.
"That’s either a problem," she said, "or it’s the most useful thing that’s happened to you since yesterday."
Then she turned and walked into the building.
Corbyn stood in the doorway.
Then he followed her in.
==============
Theory of Mana Structures was taught by Professor Ashby in a long narrow room with tiered seating and a projection board covered in equations Corbyn hadn’t seen before.
He sat at the back.
Lyra sat three rows ahead without looking back.
Ashby moved through the material fast. Most of the noble students were nodding along. A girl near the front was writing fast enough that her pen was audible.
Corbyn wrote what he could and accepted that most of it would need revisiting later.
Halfway through the class his system chimed once.
He blinked.
A small window had opened in the corner of his vision.
[MANA CHANNEL STABILITY: 58%]
[ESTIMATED FULL RECOVERY: 26 HOURS]
[NOTE: AVOID SUMMONING ATTEMPTS UNTIL 90% OR ABOVE]
He stared at it for a moment.
58%. Up from 51% this morning. The session in Summoning Fundamentals had cost him something but not as much as he’d expected. His channels were recovering faster than the initial estimate had projected.
He closed the notification and looked back at the projection board.
The class ended at four.
Students filed out. Corbyn gathered his notes and stood.
By the time he reached the corridor Lyra was already gone.
He walked back toward the commoner dormitory alone, hands in his pockets, late afternoon light cutting long angles across the stone paths.
Twenty-six hours.
Three things sitting in his head that hadn’t been there this morning. The folder with seven names. The word Unclassified on a board outside a classroom. And Lyra’s last sentence in a doorway.
That’s either a problem, or it’s the most useful thing that’s happened to you since yesterday.
He was still deciding which.
He pushed open the dormitory room door.
Dex was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling with his hands folded behind his head. He looked over when Corbyn walked in.
"How’d the first day go?" Dex said.
"Fine," Corbyn said. He dropped his bag on his bed and sat down.
"You have the face of someone whose day was not fine," Dex said.
"Assessment result came back," Corbyn said. "Marsh wrote Unclassified next to my name."
Dex sat up.
"Unclassified," Dex said. "Not a rank. Just that word."
"Just that word," Corbyn said.
Dex thought about it for a moment.
"Is that bad?" Dex said.
"I don’t know yet," Corbyn said.
Dex looked at him for another second.
Then he swung his legs off the bed and grabbed his jacket from the chair.
"Dining hall opens in ten minutes," Dex said. "Tell me the rest over food."
"Yeah," Corbyn said.
They walked out together.