The central auditorium swallowed sound differently than any room Nagi had been in before — voices didn’t just fill it, they climbed, gathering under a domed ceiling high enough to make the hundreds of first-years below feel small on purpose.
Sunlight poured in through tall windows in solid gold columns, catching dust and robes and the nervous energy of an entire year’s worth of new students packed into rows that hadn’t yet learned where to sit.
Nagi slouched between Gota and Kakame in the commoner section, half-lidded eyes tracking the stage without much urgency.
“They’re gonna walk us through the whole school after this,” Gota whispered, practically vibrating in his seat.
“And I heard some of the top students here are actually insane. Like, not-supposed-to-be-possible insane.”
“Guess we’re about to find out how small our C-ranks really are.” Kakame said it lightly, but there was an edge under it, the kind of joke that wasn’t really a joke.
“Just watch,” Nagi murmured.
“No point stressing about it before it happens.”
A few rows ahead, in the noble section, Yuji sat with his arms crossed and his chin tilted at an angle that suggested he’d already decided how impressed he was going to be.
“Let’s see what ‘top’ actually looks like,” he told the boy next to him.
“Bet they’re all bloodline AA. Give it a year and that’ll be me.”
The head examiner stepped up to the front of the stage, a floating orb amplifying his voice out over the crowd without him needing to raise it.
“First-years, welcome. Today you’ll tour the grounds — classrooms, training arenas, the ley line chambers. But first, I want you to meet the students currently at the top of this school. Not because rank alone matters.” He let that land for a second.
“But because every one of them earned it through real flow, the same as you’re expected to.”
Three seniors walked out from the wings, and the auditorium’s noise dropped by half all at once.
The first was a girl who moved like the room had been built around her entrance — tall, silver-haired, a stillness to her that made people stop talking without meaning to.
She lifted one hand and a flower bloomed out of pure ice in her palm, each petal thin enough to catch light like glass.
“Kei,” she said, unhurried.
“Rank A. Precision. Control.” A faint, knowing curve touched her mouth.
“Beauty in stillness, if you want to call it that.”
Somewhere behind Nagi, someone actually sighed.
The second senior snapped his fingers before the applause had even finished dying down, and a ring of flame bloomed around him, controlled enough that it didn’t so much as singe his sleeves. This chapter was copied from novelping(.)com without permission.
Messy red hair, a grin that looked permanently installed on his face.
“Sani! Rank A, Flame Weaver.” He spread his arms like he was including the whole room in something.
“Let’s all burn bright, yeah?”
Then the third stepped forward, and the air in the room changed before he’d even spoken — not louder, just heavier, like the room itself had decided to pay closer attention.
“And our top student,” the examiner said.
“Rank AA.
Strongest first-year graduate the academy’s produced in years, and already back to mentor the new intake.
His flow runs through wind, fire—” a beat, deliberate “—and time.”
Mikey raised one hand, easy and unbothered, like he did this every week.
Maybe he did.
“Wind for speed and reach,” he said.
“Fire for destruction.” A faint smile.
“And time stop. Ten seconds. Watch.”
Wind came first — a controlled gust that swept the whole stage, lifting papers and rippling robes without so much as knocking anyone off balance.
Then fire, bright pillars rising and folding into the shape of a phoenix before dissolving into nothing, precise enough that it looked choreographed rather than cast.
Then he clapped his hands once.
Everything stopped.
Not slowed — stopped.
Mid-motion, mid-breath, a girl three rows down frozen with her hands still coming together in the beginning of applause, dust hanging motionless in a shaft of sunlight like it had been pinned there.
The only thing moving in the entire auditorium was Mikey, walking a slow, unhurried circle across the stage with the calm of someone taking a stroll through an empty garden.
Nagi sat in the middle of all of it — perfectly still, like everyone else, and yet for one fraction of a second that he wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone, not even himself, something in him *strained* against the stillness.
A pulse.
A door rattling somewhere he didn’t know he had a door.
It passed before he could hold onto it. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
By the time the sensation registered as strange, it was already gone, folded back into the same stillness as everyone around him.
Time resumed all at once, sound crashing back into the room like a held breath finally released.
The auditorium erupted — genuine gasps, scattered applause, someone a few seats over saying “ten seconds?!” like the number itself was the impossible part.
Gota’s mouth hung open.
Kakame let out a low whistle.
“AA rank, time stop,” Gota said, shaking his head slowly.
“We are so far behind.”
“Imagine pairing that with your speed, though,” Kakame said, glancing sideways at Nagi.
Nagi kept watching the stage, something faintly unplaceable sitting behind his usual calm.
“Interesting,” he said, after a moment.
“Ten seconds. My sixty’s a different thing entirely.” He said it easily enough, like it settled the matter.
“Still just flowing at my own pace.”
Up on stage, the three of them stood together under the light — Kei cool and untouched, Sani grinning like the applause was food, Mikey with his arms loosely crossed, eyes moving once, briefly, over the crowd, before he smiled and let it go.
In the audience, Yuji’s jaw was tight, his hands curled into fists on his knees, ambition burning somewhere behind his eyes like something he hadn’t decided what to do with yet.
Nagi just watched.
He didn’t feel the strange pull in his chest anymore.
He’d already stopped thinking about it, in the way people stop thinking about things they don’t yet have a reason to take seriously.
Ten seconds, frozen solid.
Everyone in that room agreed on what they’d seen.
Everyone, that is, except the one person who’d felt the floor of it move.
*End of Chapter 6*