Chapter 71| Six Good Days(Edited)

Chapter 71: Chapter 71| Six Good Days(Edited)

Maren materialized at the classroom door.

Saw Zane. Saw his expression. Glanced at her communicator.

Then looked back at him.

"Code Zero." Already smirking. The classroom noise emanating from various directions distorted the volume of her words slightly.

Zane leaned his ears forward before he managed to grasp what she said, calling her by her hero name. "Stellar Blitz,".

She held his gaze for exactly one second.

"That’s a cool name." The smirk settling into something warmer. "For a cool person."

Zane didn’t know what to do with that.

His heart did something entirely unprofessional in the middle of a classroom at 10:00 AM. He kept his expression neutral through what felt like considerable effort and reminded himself that he was a student at a hero academy and not a person whose chest had just done something at a compliment from a girl in fitted training gear.

"Likewise." He kept his voice even. "Hope your stomach upset is gone."

Maren looked at him.

Something shifted in her expression. The smirk softened slightly into something more genuine.

"Yes." A brief pause. "I think I’m better now." Another pause. "Thanks for asking."

She sat down beside him in the vacant seat on his right.

Said nothing else.

He looked at the front of the room.

’Cool person,’ he thought.

’She said I was a cool person,’ he thought.

’She’s never called me cool before,’ he thought. ’Six weeks of 6:20 AM and this is the first time she’s used that word in my direction.’

The system surfaced.

『 System Note: Heart rate elevation detected. The system notes this. 』

’Don’t,’ Zane said mentally.

『 The system is simply monitoring host vitals. 』

’Monitor them quietly,’

『 Noted. Quietly monitoring. 』

Instructor Vael came through the door thirty seconds later.

She checked the wall timer as she set her folder on the desk.

"Hmm," she said. "Seems I came in slightly late." She looked across the room without apology. "We’re going to do a short theory session. An interesting one, pay utmost attention."

The room settled.

"Today’s topic," Vael said. "Will be on Sigil improvement."

She looked across the class.

"What if I told you there are talented individuals who have the capacity to improve their Sigils. Not just develop their usage, but actually improve the Sigil itself, after training and mastering it to its maximum potential for a sustained period."

The room processed that.

A student near the front spoke up.

"I think that’s fairly standard knowledge ma," he said. "If someone with a Sigil masters it to the maximum it naturally performs better than when they were a novice. That’s just normal development."

Vael smiled.

"There’s a thin line," she said, "between what you just described and what I’m actually talking about." She set her tablet down. "There are a rare few, a very specific category of talent. Who can improve their Sigil’s rank entirely. A C-rank Sigil climbing to B-rank. A B-rank pushing through to A. Sometimes further." She paused. "It depends entirely on the individual’s ceiling and how hard they’re willing to push against it."

The room reacted.

"Is that even possible," someone muttered.

"I’ve never heard of that," another voice.

"That sounds like it shouldn’t be real," a third.

Vael let the murmuring run for five seconds.

Then.. "It happens. Rarely. But it happens." She looked across the room. "Let me give you an example. One you should recognise."

She paused for effect.

"Our late great hero — Sovereign. Who can guess what Sigil rank he carried when he first arrived at Aldren Academy as a first year student."

The room thought about it.

Someone near the back said — "S-rank."

Vael looked at them.

"Fail," she said simply.

The room went quiet.

"He arrived with an A-rank Sigil," Vael said. "Which was already exceptional. Already above most of what I see in any intake year." She let that sit for a moment. "But he was one of the true prodigies this academy has ever produced. He trained. He pushed. He hit every ceiling this institution had and pushed through each one." She looked across the room. "And by the time he graduated Aldren and entered active service the NSA had reclassified his Sigil as S-rank."

The room erupted.

Not chaotic, just the specific animated noise of forty students who had been given information that changed something about how they understood their own situation and were processing it simultaneously.

"A-rank to S-rank," someone said. "In one career."

"That’s not just improvement," another voice. "That’s something else entirely."

"How is that even classified as the same Sigil at that point."

Zane sat in the middle of it and looked at his palm.

’A-rank to S-rank,’ he thought. ’His father. The hero whose name opened rooms before he walked into them. Who placed second in first year trials at Aldren. Who the NSA eventually classified as the highest rank in active service.’

’Started at A-rank,’ Zane thought. ’And kept going.’

Vael let the noise run.

Then looked across the classroom.

Her eyes landed on Zane.

Two seconds. Steady. The look that had something in it that wasn’t standard teaching attention. The specific regard of someone who had filed everything they’d watched in the past six weeks and was choosing this moment to let him see that she’d filed it.

Then she looked at the room.

"I believe you all have it in you," she said. "The ceiling is not fixed. It only feels fixed until someone decides to test it." She picked up her folder. "Do well to impress me."

She walked toward the door.

"That’s all for today."

The room broke into noise again.

Zane sat in it and looked at his palm.

Beside him Maren was quiet. Looking at her own hands. The specific stillness of someone running calculations that had nothing to do with the immediate environment.

He glanced at her.

She glanced at him.

Neither of them said anything.

They didn’t need to.

The timer ticked in the corner of his vision.

『 BOUND TARGET QUEST — Time Remaining: 6 days 04 hours 22 minutes 』

’Six days,’ he thought. ’From A-rank to S-rank. So he was actually that talented.’