Chapter 6: The Needle Barely Moved And So Did I

"Kohaku. Kohakuuu~ Wake up, we’ll be late for the Appraisal!"

Something small and warm was shaking my shoulder. I cracked one eye open and found Lily’s face about eight inches from mine, already in uniform, already brushed, already glowing, at an hour when no glowing should legally occur.

"Five more minutes," I said.

"You said that fifteen minutes ago!"

"Then I’m a liar and you should stop trusting me."

Lily giggled at that.

I sat up anyway, yawned hard enough to unhinge my jaw, stretched both arms over my head, and kicked the blanket off.

Lily made a noise like a kettle.

I looked at her. Her whole face had gone red, and she’d spun around to face the wall so fast her hair whipped, and she was now standing there rigid, hands pressed to her cheeks.

"...What?" I said.

"N-Nothing! Nothing. Good morning! I’ll just, um. The window. I’ll look at the window."

[What is she on about?]

I looked down.

Ah.

So here’s a fun fact about my new body that I’d learned the hard way at assembly and was now re-learning at seven in the morning: it came with a dick, and the dick had a work ethic. It was currently standing at full attention under my nightgown, like it was eager to start its day.

Morning wood. I’d heard about this. Men complained about it constantly online. I used to think they were exaggerating.

They were not exaggerating. This thing was harder than my old apartment’s walls. I could’ve hung the school flag off it.

I grabbed my towel and headed for the bathroom.

"I’m gonna shower. Don’t wait up, this could take a while."

"W-Why would it take a whi—"

I closed the door.

---

By the time we were walking to the Appraisal Hall, fed, dressed, and significantly less burdened, I’d pulled up my mental notes on today.

Classes hadn’t started yet. Today was the tail end of the opening ceremonies, what the academy called "orientation" and what I, the author, could confirm was hazing with extra steps.

Two events. First, the Appraisal, where every first-year gets their Rank measured and announced in front of everybody. I already knew mine from the Status screen, but that was private. The point of the Appraisal was for everyone else to learn your Rank, so the social food chain could be laminated by lunch.

Second, the combat practical. A series of exhibition duels between randomly paired first-years, officially "to assess practical skill," and unofficially to let the high-ranks beat the low-ranks in public until the low-ranks did the math and dropped out on their own.

No tuition refund, obviously.

[Good grief, the rich in this novel are PETTY.]

None of it involved me, so I could take it easy. Lily gets appraised, her reading does something dramatic, the staff take notice, first stone on the road to the princess reveal. The duels run on rails too. I just had to stand in the F-rank section, clap when appropriate, and draft my exit strategy.

The Appraisal Hall was another marble flex, round like a coliseum, with a raised platform in the center, and on the platform sat the mana crystal.

Picture a chandelier the size of a horse, unlit, floating a foot off a pedestal. Students touch it, and it assigns a Rank from F up to SSS, displayed as glowing letters above it.

Rank was everything. Rank was mana-weighted, mana fed every power source I ever duct-taped onto the magic system, and so Rank was the world’s one true scoreboard. Jobs, marriages, noble standing, whether the guards believed you or the guy accusing you, all of it keyed off that letter.

[A single public number that determines your entire social worth. I invented this at seventeen. I hadn’t even taken the SATs yet.]

Staff called us up by course blocks and the crystal did its thing over and over: touch, glow, letter. D-ranks, C-ranks, the occasional B that got polite applause.

Then it was my turn.

"Kohaku! Knight Course!"

I walked up to the platform, put my hand on the crystal, and gave the audience my best confident smirk, on the principle that if you’re going to bomb, you should bomb while hot.

The crystal lit up.

Barely. It did the light-equivalent of a cough. A faint shimmer crawled through maybe a tenth of it, flickered, and settled. The letter formed above me, small and apologetic.

F

The needle didn’t just barely move. I’m pretty sure I saw the crystal check whether I was actually touching it.

"F-rank," the proctor announced. "Next!"

I heard a snicker from the seats. Then a few more. Somewhere in the Knight Course block, a boy said "an F? In the KNIGHT course?" and his buddy said "she’ll be gone by the practical."

I strolled back to my seat, tail high, waving at my hecklers like I’d just won something.

[Laugh it up. I might fuck around and use my Manuscript to become the archmage or something. We are not the same, plebs.]

A few names later, they called Serena Frostfall.

The room went quiet on its own. She rose from the front row, walked to the platform without hurrying, and laid one elegant hand on the crystal like she was accepting its surrender.

The thing detonated. Light slammed through the whole crystal at once, so bright the front rows flinched, and the letters over her head came up gold.

SSS

The hall lost its mind.

Applause, gasps, one full scream. Serena didn’t react to any of it. She took her hand back, examined her nails like the crystal might have left a smudge, and returned to her seat.

[SSS at enrollment. Yeah. That tracks. God, she’s so hot. I hope my duel’s against her. No. NO. Bad. I hope it’s against literally anyone else... Mostly.]

Then came the boys.

Aldric got called up and the female half of the hall inhaled at the same time. He got SS-rank, gold letters, jawline angled for the cheap seats. The screaming section screamed. Cassian went a while later, S-rank, and did his whole routine of looking bored by his own excellence, and I watched three separate girls develop feelings in real time.

Me? I was fighting for my life against my own eyelids.

[How. HOW did I make these boys the main cast? Cassian is STILL wearing his trench coat. Sir, it’s a mana reading, not a noir film.]

Lily, next to me, clapped politely for both boys with the exact enthusiasm she’d shown the D-ranks. Identical claps. Not one extra clap for the male leads.

[Yeah, keep acting nonchalant, Lily. In a few months they’ll be the ones clapping... clapping your cheeks!]

And then they called her.

"Lily Everdawn! Knight Course!"

The hall’s interest dropped visibly. A scholarship commoner, the letter was going to be a C at best, time to stretch and chat. Lily gave me a nervous little smile, whispered "wish me luck," and headed down.

I, on the other hand, knowing what was coming, smiled.

[Enjoy, everyone.]

She touched the crystal.

It spiked.

All at once, no wind-up, the entire crystal went white-hot, brighter than Serena’s, bright enough that the whole hall flinched together, and the letters above started to form gold, and then

it stuttered.

The light strobed. The half-formed letter above broke apart, reformed, broke again, cycling through shapes like a slot machine having a seizure. The crystal’s glow surged and cut and surged, and somewhere in the staff seats three instructors stood up at the same time.

"Unstable reading," the proctor said, hand raised, voice carefully level. "It happens. Rarely. Step back please, miss."

Lily stepped back, hands to her chest, looking mortified in front of six hundred people. The crystal settled sullenly back to dark. No Rank ever formed. The staff section had gone from bored to a huddle, and I caught the words "resonance interference" and "have the archmage look at the logs."

Everyone was murmuring. Nobody knew what that meant.

Well. One person knew exactly what that meant. One person knew the crystal had just tried to put a normal letter on the daughter of the sealed, world-ending horror sleeping under the continent, and had the machine equivalent of a religious experience.

That person leaned back in her seat, arms crossed, and said:

"Damn. Yeah, that’s weird."

Lily dropped into the seat beside me, still pink.

"It’s never done that before! The village crystal always just said C!"

"Crazy stuff," I said. "Probably needs cleaning."

---

The combat practical was held on the training field, which was the size of a stadium.

First-years got herded into loose blocks along the edge while staff set up the dueling ring in the center. Around me, Knight Course students were rolling shoulders, doing warm-up swings, and sizing each other up. I was doing none of that, because I was busy chewing on a feeling.

[Something’s today. Something else. The Appraisal, the practical, and... there was a third thing. I remember there being a third thing about the practical specifically. Something I should be...]

It was right there. Shelved somewhere in two million words of landfill, close enough to smell.

But before I could figure it out...

"NEXT PAIRING!" the professor’s voice boomed across the field. "Kohaku, Knight Course, versus Cassian Holloway, Mage Course! Enter the ring!"

[...Oh, son of a bitch.]