Chapter 1169: A Magister’s Dilemma

The examinations had ended, but the Academy had not yet finished with them. Scores became placements, placements became petitions, and every irregular result generated another document for someone with sufficient authority to sign.

For the faculty, the final bell had merely changed the shape of the work. Those with greater authority naturally received a greater share of what remained.

Magisters received considerably more than most.

Marisse sealed the final placement review and set it atop the outgoing correspondence.

The Examination Period had ended, yet its paperwork continued spreading across faculty desks. Examiner reports required authentication, disputed results needed responses, and registration offices had already begun asking which irregular admissions required special handling.

Lucavion’s wager occupied only one folder among them.

Marisse had opened that folder more than once during the examinations. Each time, she had closed it without adding the name of a representative.

The first Written examination had failed to expose him as decisively as expected and instead helped force the Oral examination back into place. Later reports reached her in fragments: Arcten had been pressed to test the boy seriously during Weaponship, Marcus had taken an unusual interest in his Combat performance, and both Marcus and Tamara had remained involved around Mana Control.

None of those accounts offered a complete measure. Together, they established that Lucavion had faced scrutiny far beyond what most freshmen encountered.

Choosing someone before the remaining results arrived would have repeated the original error—committing herself to an estimate before she understood what she was estimating.

Marisse did not regret the wager. Lucavion had granted her the right to select his opponent and prepare that student personally. Used properly, those terms still favored her.

There was no reason to spend that advantage merely to satisfy impatience.

A muted chime sounded from the document tray beside her desk. The Academy seal surfaced across a newly delivered packet, followed by the designation she had been expecting.

FINALIZED EXAMINATION RECORD — LUCAVION

Marisse released the authentication and unfolded the consolidated sheet.

Her eyes moved across Written I and Written II, then Oral, Mana Control, Combat, Weaponship, and Rotunda before reaching the weighted result.

The scattered reports, exceptions, and faculty interventions had finally been reduced to a single row.

Marisse drew the sheet closer and began to read.

She began with the written examinations.

Eighty-two in the first deserved little attention. She had already known that paper failed to expose him badly enough, and the inconvenience of that result had helped return the Oral examination to the process.

Written II held her gaze longer.

Eighty.

The second paper had not improved his standing, but it had done something more troublesome: it had repeated it.

One respectable result could have belonged to favorable questions, a fortunate guess, or some narrow region of knowledge the student happened to possess. Two examinations settling within two points of each other made chance a less useful explanation.

Her eyes moved back across the row.

Eighty-two. Eighty. Then forty.

Selenne’s Oral assessment remained clipped beneath Marisse’s notes. She did not need to reopen it. Lucavion lacked accepted terminology, confused classifications, and reached conclusions through practical sensation where educated students would have used established theory. Those deficiencies were not manufactured, nor had Selenne exaggerated them.

When the examination required Lucavion to expose how he reasoned, his score collapsed.

When paper allowed him to work around the missing language, he repeatedly recovered to eighty.

’So the first result was not fortunate.’

Whatever method he used to compensate for an incomplete education could survive repetition. The Oral score had revealed the fracture. The written scores showed how effectively he crossed it when nobody required him to explain the bridge.

Marisse continued toward Mana Control.

Eighty-four.

Her finger stopped beside the number.

Marcus and Tamara had both been involved around that examination, while Selenne had inserted herself into its oversight. The trial was not meant to flatter Lucavion. It had been shaped around a deficiency, one credible enough that several people expected the chamber to expose it.

The score confirmed that the weakness existed. Eighty-four was neither flawless nor dominant.

It was also far from failure.

Lucavion had entered an examination aimed toward something he genuinely could not do well and still recovered enough to produce one of his strongest academic results.

That distinction carried more value than any appearance of invulnerability. An opponent without weaknesses required discovery. Lucavion’s weaknesses had already been found.

They simply refused to become defeats.

Marisse’s attention crossed the next division and remained there.

Combat stood at one hundred.

The office continued around her. A document settled into the receiving tray near the door, and somewhere beyond the wall, another faculty member dismissed an assistant. Marisse did not move to the next score.

Marcus had taken particular interest in the Combat examination. Whatever version of events he later preferred, Marisse knew Lucavion had not received an ordinary freshman assessment. The conditions were supposed to press him beyond whatever his earlier displays had revealed.

The record allowed no room for qualification.

One hundred.

Marisse shifted her gaze to Weaponship.

The same number waited there.

Arcten had belonged to their side of the dispute. He had been encouraged to test Lucavion seriously, under circumstances chosen to strip away the value of easy preparation and favorable treatment. The intended correction had failed. Reports could soften that conclusion with technical language, but the Academy had already reduced the outcome to the mark that would follow Lucavion into placement.

Combat and Weaponship stood together at one hundred.

Their interventions had not exposed him. They had authenticated him.

Marisse rested her hand beside the sheet, careful not to obscure either score.

The pattern no longer permitted the comfortable assumption she had carried into the wager. Lucavion possessed obvious deficiencies. His education was fragmented, his theory unreliable, and Mana Control had found a limitation substantial enough to matter.

Yet each time an examination reached one of those deficiencies, he found a way to remain competitive. When the evaluation entered his field, pressure improved the evidence in his favor.

The Rotunda’s eighty-two offered one final irritation. Lucavion generally behaved as though etiquette had been invented to give disrespect a recognizable shape. A respectable result suggested that his conduct was chosen more often than imposed by incapacity. Even socially, the examination had failed to make him simple.

Marisse finally looked at the displayed weighted result.

Eighty-nine point two.

For placement, the number described an excellent but uneven freshman: weak in formal magical expression, competent elsewhere, and exceptional in practical disciplines. It also placed several students above him in the Block rankings.

That comparison had little use here.

Marisse was not selecting someone to outperform his composite record. She was preparing someone to defeat him in a duel. Written examinations would not enter the arena. Neither would his disastrous Oral score.

Combat would.

Weaponship would.

The weighted result softened the two numbers most relevant to the wager by averaging them beside weaknesses no opponent could rely upon once the duel began.

Marisse closed the supporting reports and left the consolidated sheet exposed.

She had treated the wager too lightly.

The admission brought no fear with it. It required correction, nothing more. Lucavion had granted her the right to choose his opponent and prepare that student herself. At the time, the freedom had appeared broader than she needed.

Now it looked precise.

A merely competent candidate would waste it.

Marisse’s attention moved away from Lucavion’s name and toward the empty space in the wager file where another student’s name would eventually be written.

This record had clarified what she was choosing against.

She now needed to decide what kind of opponent that required.

The strongest freshmen offered the simplest answer.

Marisse knew which students stood above Lucavion, which possessed the greatest raw output, and which could force an ordinary opponent backward before skill had time to matter. Several names would appear defensible in the wager file.

Yet Lucavion’s perfect practical scores made an ordinary martial choice uncomfortable.

The Weaponship report remained the clearest warning. Arcten had not fought with the unrestricted strength of a veteran instructor; the examination had compressed both participants into an equalized range. Lucavion had defeated the man who remained after that restriction, not the full power Arcten possessed outside it.

The difference mattered.

So did the result.

Once raw power narrowed enough for timing, distance, adjustment, and weapon control to decide the exchange, Lucavion had overcome decades of experience. Choosing someone merely stronger would work only while that advantage remained wide enough to deny him the kind of contest he handled best.

Marisse’s gaze settled upon the date recorded beside the wager.

END-OF-TERM EXHIBITION

Several months remained.

She had been considering the wrong comparison.

The selected student would not face the Lucavion described by the examination record. Written II had shown that his compensations were repeatable. Mana Control had found a genuine deficiency and still ended at eighty-four. Pressure did not reliably preserve his weaknesses; sometimes it taught him how to move around them.

By the Exhibition, those perfect practical scores might belong to a more capable cultivator with fewer exposed gaps.

The same interval belonged to his opponent.

Marisse leaned back and left the blank representative field before her. Current strength retained importance, but the better candidate would convert the remaining months into more than ordinary progress. Talent without discipline often wasted targeted instruction. Cultivation rank provided immediate force, yet some students already stood near the easiest limits of their present training.

She needed foundations that could bear additional weight.

A great inheritance did not merely provide expensive elixirs or a celebrated family name. Properly maintained, it carried generations of corrected mistakes. Its methods had survived repeated use, its techniques had been refined against known failures, and its teachers understood the system they were developing.

Lucavion had become dangerous by creating answers whenever established ones were absent.

Marisse could oppose that with someone who did not need to create alone.

Several obvious possibilities weakened under that standard. One powerful martial student still preferred the distance and rhythm Lucavion exploited. Another could grow stronger over one term without changing the nature of the problem. Others carried families that would resist Marisse’s direction, political positions that complicated preparation, or pride that treated correction as insult.

She did not need obedience without judgment. She needed someone capable of using what was offered.

Marisse opened the broader freshman profiles. Rankings supplied a starting point, nothing more. Natural ability narrowed the field, discipline narrowed it again, and she passed over foundations too immature to reshape within months. She also discarded students whose present training had already gathered most of its easier gains.

The remaining profiles belonged to students backed by specialized teachers, inherited techniques, and private resources already moving in the same direction. Marisse would not need to construct an entire system. She could identify the part best suited to the wager and sharpen it.

One profile passed beneath her hand.

Marisse continued.

Two pages later, her attention returned to it.

She drew the earlier sheet free and placed it beside Lucavion’s record.

The student already possessed strong standing, but that alone did not distinguish the choice. More relevant was how much of the present ability remained unfinished. The foundation could accept advanced work, while the student’s development had not exhausted what the inherited system could produce.

Resources would not become an obstacle. Neither would access to instruction. The family legacy and the existing teachers had spent years preparing the same ground Marisse would use.

Most importantly, the discipline was already present.

She would not need to spend months teaching the candidate to endure repetition, preserve a structure under pressure, or submit a successful method to refinement. Her preparation could begin where ordinary instruction usually hoped to end.

Marisse looked between the two records.

Lucavion would adapt. Any plan that depended upon him remaining identical to the student who entered the examinations deserved to fail.

This candidate could change as well.

Not through desperate correction or an improvised answer, but through an established structure deep enough to keep yielding results once Marisse applied pressure to the right places. The student’s existing methods also suggested ways to make Lucavion’s preferred engagements less comfortable, though that required closer study.

Marisse returned the other profiles to their folder.

She had not made her selection. The name remained unwritten, and one promising combination did not deserve commitment before she examined the matchup itself.

Still, the empty line no longer looked entirely empty.

Her fingertip rested beside it as quiet satisfaction settled over the calculation.

’Ah... that one might work.’