The applause hadn’t fully died down when Mikey caught himself replaying the ten seconds in his head.
He stood center stage with the last traces of wind and dying fire still curling faintly around him, smiling the way he always smiled after a demonstration — easy, a little bored with his own excellence — while underneath it, something small and precise kept turning over and over, refusing to settle.
*Something was off.*
He could still see it if he let himself look — the auditorium frozen exactly the way he’d left it, every student pinned mid-motion, dust hanging in the light like it had been painted there.
Except for one point in the back rows.
One blur, there and gone before his eyes had even finished registering it, in a room where absolutely nothing should have been capable of moving at all.
*No one should be able to do that.
Not at this level.
Not at any level I’ve ever seen.*
“Mikey.” Kei’s voice, close and unhurried, cut through it.
She was watching him with that particular stillness of hers, calm on the surface but sharp underneath — the kind of attention that missed very little.
“You froze the room perfectly. So why do you look like you’re the one who missed something?”
The frown was gone before she’d even finished the sentence, folded away behind the easy grin he kept close at hand for exactly this purpose.
“Nothing, really.” He rolled one shoulder, loose.
“Just thinking the new intake looks sharper than usual this year. Good energy.”
“Flawless as always,” Sani said, clapping him on the shoulder hard enough to make sparks jump between his fingers.
“Ten seconds of pure dominance, man. You make it look boring, honestly.”
“Yeah.” Mikey’s eyes drifted once, briefly, back toward the rows where the blur had been.
“Flawless.”
The head examiner stepped back to the front of the stage before anyone could ask him what that pause was about.
“That concludes the showcase. First-years, you’re dismissed for lunch — the tour resumes after. Use the break to reflect on what you’ve just seen.”
A bell rang somewhere overhead, and the auditorium began emptying into noise and daylight.
The courtyard outside was scattered with stone tables under a loose canopy of trees, sunlight falling in patches over a mix of students who hadn’t yet decided which groups they belonged to.
Nobles clustered near the fountain, trading small showy spells over their trays.
Commoners kept closer to the walls, quieter, still feeling out the shape of a place that hadn’t earned their trust yet.
Nagi sat with Gota and Kakame at a plain table near the edge, working through the rice and grilled meat his mother had packed like it was any other lunch, anywhere else.
Gota had already demolished half his tray.
“Man,” Gota said, mouth still half full, “AA-rank, and he stops *time*? Ten whole seconds? I felt my own magic flinch just watching that. How do you even train for something like that?”
“And Kei.” Kakame poked idly at his food with a thin shadow tendril, not really eating so much as playing with it.
“Not just strong. Actually gorgeous. Whole room went dead silent for that ice flower.”
Nagi took a slow bite, chewed, swallowed.
“Yeah. Wind, fire, time, ice.” He said it evenly, like a list.
“Impressive flows, all of it.”
“You’re too chill about this.” Gota shook his head, half laughing.
“Didn’t that time stop mess with your head at all? Everybody just — frozen — and he’s strolling around like it’s nothing.”
Nagi’s chopsticks paused halfway to his mouth.
Half a second.
Long enough that if either of them had been watching closely, they might have caught it.
*For a second in there,* he thought, *it felt like I could still move.
Just a pull, right at the edge of things.
Probably nothing.* He resumed eating like the pause had never happened.
*Sixty seconds is still my limit.
No point chasing a feeling that isn’t there.*
“It was cool,” he said out loud, calm as ever.
“Ten seconds is a lot longer than my usual burst, though. Makes mine look small.”
“Look at him. Full glare mode.”
Across the courtyard, at a table with better shade and finer trays, Yuji was stabbing at his food with more force than the meat deserved, eyes fixed hard on Nagi’s table like he could burn a hole through it if he stared long enough.
“That speed villager,” he muttered, not quite quiet enough, “sitting there like nothing even happened.” His fork hit the plate harder.
“Just wait until practical classes start. I’ll show him what real power looks like.”
None of his friends bothered to argue with him.
They rarely did.
Back at the plain table, Gota was laughing, pushing more food toward Nagi’s tray whether he wanted it or not, while Kakame shaped a tiny, mocking shadow-clone of Mikey mid-time-stop — one that comically collapsed after barely two seconds, arms flailing.
All three of them laughed, low and easy, the kind of laugh that only exists between people who’ve known each other three days but already trust the shape of it.
“After lunch we get the full tour,” Gota said, wiping his mouth.
“Arenas, classrooms, even the restricted ley line zones, apparently. Place is bigger than my whole village.”
Nagi allowed something close to a small smile.
“Sounds good. One step at a time.”
High above the courtyard, on a balcony that overlooked the whole scattered crowd, Mikey stood with his arms loosely folded, smiling the same easy smile he’d worn on stage — except his eyes were moving, slow and deliberate, table to table, until they landed on one in particular and stayed there a beat too long.
Kei stood beside him, following his gaze without needing to ask what he was looking at.
“You saw something,” she said.
Not a question.
Mikey didn’t answer right away.
Down below, Nagi was laughing quietly at something Gota had said, chopsticks resting easy in his hand, looking like the least remarkable person in the entire courtyard.
“Maybe,” Mikey said finally.
“Or maybe I’ve just never frozen a room with someone like that sitting in it before.”
*End of Chapter 7*