My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 174: C-Rank Walks Into a B-Rank Evaluation With No Cheats

The evaluation hall had a gallery, and the gallery was full, and Soren gave it the same attention he gave weather.

Five board members at the table. Three stages posted. Doctrine, control, and open assessment, which was the polite name for the stage where the board got to design a problem and watch the candidate drown in it.

A year ago he’d have walked in here with a script in the back of his skull, every examiner’s habit pre-read, every stage’s ending known before it started.

The script was long dead. What he had instead was the year.

He’d take the year.

◆◆◆◆

Doctrine went first and doctrine was paper.

They gave him a primordial containment scenario, because of course they did, the board wanted the famous thing, and he wrote them a response plan and then, in the margin, a second plan for when the first one failed.

Then a third, annotated, for the failure mode nobody on the board had thought to include, which was the containment site being exactly where somebody wanted your assets standing.

The doctrine examiner read the margin twice.

"This third scenario," she said. "Adversarial site placement. That’s not in any curriculum."

"No," Soren said. "It’s in my transcript."

◆◆◆◆

Control was the stage the gallery had come for.

Multi-channel load. The candidate ran his bonds through a graded series while the hall’s instruments read the wire, and the instruments had been calibrated for a C-rank’s ceiling, and the technicians recalibrated twice in the first ten minutes with the particular hurry of men whose equipment was embarrassing them.

He ran ice and fire in alternation, then together, then braided, holding both channels at combat draw while the hall’s needles climbed through bands the format sheet had listed as optional.

Selah, in the candidate’s support box, fed the channel with textbook precision, her output arriving shaped.

Soren took what she sent and held it against Maren’s heat, balanced, redirected, and vented in clean flourishes that cost him more than his face reported.

The cost was the exam. He knew it, the board knew it.

Anyone could carry load, the rank question was what it cost you, and a year of alignments and a winter of recalibrations had rebuilt the middle of him into something that paid these tolls in coin he actually had.

Grimm he ran last, alone.

The shadow channel opened and the hall’s lights did nothing, stayed on, unbent, and only the instruments knew that the dark under the candidate’s platform was ten times deeper than any C-rank’s shadow had a right to run.

The wolf at the platform’s edge stood motionless with her shut eyes forward, feeding him exactly the depth he called for and not one degree of what she actually held.

The control examiner signed his sheet without comment.

Comment would have required admitting what the instruments had read.

◆◆◆◆

The open assessment was an ambush, as designed.

The scenario team ran their suppression grid and cut his channels one by one.

Ice gone.

Fire gone.

Shadow gone.

The gallery leaned forward as one animal.

Soren stood alone in the middle of the yard with his wire dead and three graduates closing, and he thought, that there had been a severance field once, and a version of him that had walked into it to learn exactly what he was without the system’s hand.

He was about to save five people a lot of consulting fees.

He took the first graduate’s approach apart with footwork the tournament had beaten into him, no channel, just a body that had trained beside a fox all year and learned what her reflexes knew.

The second one he baited into the suppression grid’s own dead zone, where the man’s beast dropped out from under him mid-lunge, because a grid that cut the candidate’s channels cut everyone’s.

Soren had read the grid’s print in the doctrine stage, in the margin, in the plan the board thought was hypothetical.

The third graduate looked at his two colleagues, one disarmed, one beastless, and at the candidate walking toward him unhurried.

He yielded on points.

Smart man.

Points were the only thing left in the yard he could keep.

◆◆◆◆

The board deliberated for eleven minutes, which Joan said afterward was the length of time it took to draft language, not reach a decision, the decision having been reached in the control stage by three recalibrations.

The chair read it standing.

"Candidate Kane. Advanced to B-rank, continental registry, effective on record. The board notes, for the transcript, that the advancement is earned without asterisk."

Without asterisk.

His whole first year in this world he’d worn one, the Council’s little star, the mark that said watch this anomaly.

Then the system arrived.

[DING! — Tamer rank advanced: C → B. Bond capacity ceiling raised. All linked channels recalculating.]

The wire lit up end to end.

He felt the ceiling go through every bond at once, headroom opening above channels that had spent a season pressed to their old limits.

Selah’s cold flexed once, hard, a fist of frost closing and opening, her version of a shout.

Maren’s heat spiked and rolled and he heard her actual voice from the support box, no bond required.

Under it, deep, Yara’s shadow turned over slowly, vast and pleased, a leviathan adjusting in the dark, and somewhere small and stubborn.

Mona’s thread tugged toward him twice, homing, augh.

And Dani clapped.

That was ordinary. The support box was allowed its noise.

Except Soren had been facing the box when the DING fired, and the count caught what the gallery couldn’t have.

Dani’s hands had come together before the notice.

Before the wire lit. Half a second, maybe less, her applause already moving while the system was still drawing its breath.

Something had told her what the notice would say before the notice existed.

Her feeds didn’t run on the wire.

Nothing of Dani’s ran on the wire. Her bond was moth-carried, indirect, a whisper line, the slowest channel he had.

She was looking at him now, clapping with the rest, entirely normal.

He inclined his head to the box, entirely normal, and inside, in the ordered dark where the year lived, he opened the column with his own people’s names in it and gave the newest line its entry.

Dani heard it first.

He didn’t have a theory yet.

B-rank, he thought, walking off the yard into the noise.

The view was already better.