Chapter 249: 1st Monthly Exam - Class C
February 9, 2012 — 9:58 AM
Asura Academy — Dungeon Sector Staging Hall, Class C Entry
Perspective: Elfina Lunaris
The staging hall felt bigger without Class B in it.
They had filed out maybe 10 minutes ago. Two neat, quiet lines. Victor’s people first, then Sylvia’s circle behind them.
Class C filled it differently.
We were loud. Xander was doing his thing where he talked too fast because he was nervous. Mira had found the bench closest to the heating vent and curled into it. Roman was in the middle of explaining something to Daniel using his hands, and Daniel was nodding even though he clearly wasn’t listening.
Scarlet was pressed close to the wall, braids slightly lopsided, green eyes wide.
And Axel was gaming on his phone.
I stood on one of the observation benches, just tall enough that most of the class could see me, and I clapped my hands once.
"Okay! Hey. Eyes up, everyone."
Some heads turned.
"Milo! Xavier! Guys!"
Xavier’s glasses caught the light as he turned.
"Serena, I can see you whispering."
"I wasn’t—"
"Thank you." I smiled at her and she grinned back, unapologetic, but she stopped. I looked around the room, hands clasped in front of me.
"We’ve been preparing for this for a while. We’ve run these floors. We know how the credit system works. I know some of you are nervous—" I glanced at Scarlet. She squeezed the hem of her sleeve tighter. "—and that’s completely okay, because we planned for the version of this where we’re nervous. So we’re fine. We’re just going to do what we practiced. That’s all."
Milo had his arms crossed from the far corner, not looking at me. That was fine. He was here. That was enough.
"Rigel will go over the final strategy in a minute. But for now — Instructor Aisha is about to come in."
The door opened right on cue.
She swept in the way she always swept in — emerald robes, silver-blonde hair. She had her clipboard under one arm and her gold-flecked eyes did a quick scan of the room.
"Class C!"
"I’ll be brief. The dungeon has 10 floors. You know this. What you were not told are the parts of this exam that matter."
"1st: the credit baseline. Every group must cross 1,600 credits to pass. Falling below baseline means expulsion. Not warning — expulsion."
"2nd: the boss seal on Floor 10. You cannot exit the dungeon until a group from your class clears the floor boss. Each group’s individual timer stops when they exit, but the dungeon gate does not open for the next group until Floor 10 is cleared. The first group to enter must clear the boss."
"3rd: individual credit contributions are tracked. You will not be able to coast on a stronger teammate’s output. The system logs who engages, not just who stands near an engagement. Every person in a group must register at least 3 combat events or their baseline count is individually zeroed."
That one hit harder.
"You have 10 minutes to finalize preparations." Aisha’s eyes moved deliberately to me. Then to Rigel. "I would use them."
She stepped back to the wall and did not leave, which I assumed meant she was staying to observe.
Good. I want her to see this.
I nodded at Rigel.
He stood up from the bench where he’d been sitting with Leena, and pulled a folded sheet out of his jacket. He unfolded it on the central table without ceremony. It was a diagram — 10 floors rendered in clean, careful lines, with color-coded zones and numbered paths.
He had done every calculation himself. Every credit projection, every time estimate, every spawn density estimate by floor. When he’d first shown me the draft, my jaw had done something embarrassing, and I’d had to actively not look like I was panicking.
He had spent 4 days on it.
He is kinda brilliant.
"The strategy is straightforward," Rigel said. "Our strategic depth doesn’t come from magical output. It comes from information. Specifically—" he looked at me — "from the Lumina."
He pulled one out of his jacket pocket and set it on the table.
The Lumina was small. It fit in a palm easily, and it was thin enough to slip into a uniform pocket. Matte silver casing, rounded edges, a short antenna on the upper right side, and a speaker grate across the front face. There was a small display screen on one side. On the back, there was a single dial.
It looked, if you squinted, like a flat canteen that had ambitions.
Rigel picked it up.
"3 functions. First: map display." He turned the dial one click. The screen lit up — dim gold light, with a floor layout rendered in thin lines.
"The Lumina maps in real time as you walk. Every step you take is logged. Every dead end you hit is logged. Every route you cleared gets marked with a green line. Once you exit the dungeon and pass your Lumina to the next group, they have your entire map loaded. They walk into a floor we’ve already explored."
"2nd: positioning." Another click. The screen updated. 4 small dots appeared in two separate clusters. "Group members show as dots. You can see where everyone in your group is on the map. If someone gets separated, or a floor shifts, you know exactly where they went."
Serena leaned forward. Her horns tilted slightly, which they did when she was interested.
"3rd: monster detection." Rigel clicked the dial one more time. The screen updated again — and now there were small red marks on the map, 6 of them, clustered near a corridor. "The Lumina uses ambient mana detection to flag monster presence in a 15-meter radius. Red marks on the mini-map. They update every 4 seconds."
He set it back on the table.
"Each group runs with enough Lumina for each person. When you exit, you pass it to the next group. The map carries over. The red markers reset to current positions. You are not going in blind. You are going in with the combined knowledge of every group that went before you."
A very long silence.
"That’s—" Xavier started. He had his notebook clutched to his chest. "That’s not — that’s incredible. That’s actual dungeon architecture data in real time, that would take professional survey teams months to—"
"Who built that?" Xander asked, looking at me.
Rigel looked at me.
"Elfina did." he said simply. "It was her proposal."
The entire class looked at me at once.
Haha.
Ha.
Okay so technically, what actually happened was that Kai walked into my room a week ago, set a Lumina unit on my bed, and said "share how it works with Rigel." Then he went back to whatever he was doing — reading, probably — and didn’t explain anything else. And I had no idea how any of it worked. But Rigel is Rigel, and once I handed it to him and told him to look at it, he dismantled the whole concept in about 90 minutes, mapped all 3 features, and came back to me with a draft strategy that used it as the core.
And then he said "this is brilliant, Elfina! The architecture and engineering is really impressive, did you design the resonance detection frequency yourself" and I said "yes" because what else was I going to say?!
Kai, I owe you something. I haven’t decided what yet. Probably cake or more.
"Oh my GOD!" Serena said, very loudly. Her voice bounced off the stone walls. "You built that?! It has a minimap!"
"Elfina, that’s—" Mira’s cat ears were fully upright. Her tail had gone vertical. "That detects monsters? Like, it finds them before you walk into them!"
"Ranked 0 AND an engineer?!" Xavier gasped, looking between me and Rigel.
"I don’t understand mana resonance circuitry that well," Xavier said, "but to build a detection radius based on ambient mana density, and to also encode spatial mapping on the same device, at this size—"
"That is literally cheating," Serena declared with great satisfaction. "That is 100% cheating and I love it so much."
"It’s not cheating," Rigel said patiently. "We built it. From scratch. The rules prohibit purchased magical gear. They say nothing about constructed technology."
"That’s also cheating."
"It’s an exploit loophole."
"Same thing."
"Elfina," Del said — Delyra, sitting two benches over, perfectly straight-backed, her voice carrying the very specific weight of someone who has decided to be genuinely impressed and is slightly annoyed about it — "you’re telling me you solved our entire coordination problem with a device."
"The detection feature alone is worth more than anything Class A or B brought in." Rigel added. He was looking at his diagram again. He wasn’t trying to make it a bigger deal than it was, he was just stating things that were true.
Del made a sound that was not quite a word. Possibly an aristocratic "hmph" being forcefully converted into something more dignified.
"That’s incredible!" Leena said warmly. She was smiling at me. "Elfieeeee, really!!!!!"
"She carried us before she even carried us," Xavier said quietly. "I — that’s — I meant it as a compliment!"
"Okay!" My face was warm. Genuinely warm, in the specific way it got when people were being kind and I hadn’t fully braced for it.
"Okay, thank you, but — group focus, please. Groups first. Compliments after we win. In that order."
"She’s embarrassed," Mira said to Serena, just barely not under her breath.
"I am not—" I looked at Mira. She was smiling with her whole face. I looked at Serena. She was grinning. "I’m not embarrassed, I’m time-managing."
I sat down on the bench and turned to Rigel.
"Can you take the first few groups through the final briefing?"
He nodded. Already looking at his diagram.
Kai was two benches down, completely unhurried, leaning slightly forward with his forearms on his knees. He hadn’t said anything during the whole presentation. He had a way of existing in rooms that was almost perfectly invisible — not because he was hiding, just because he wasn’t trying to be seen. He just sat there while everyone around him was being very loud about the Lumina, and he watched, and his expression was the same as it always was.
Like he already knows how everything turns out.
I hated it a little bit. Very affectionately.
He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a small bottle of water and held it out toward me without turning his head.
I took it.
It was cold. Just the right amount of cold, the kind that goes straight to the inside of your wrist when you hold it.
He was looking at the diagram Rigel was pointing through with 3 members of Group 1.
I drank, and looked around the room.
25 students. That was Class C total.
The wildcard selection had taken Axel, Kaiser, and Scarlet — leaving them in their own mandatory 3-person group. Then Milo had done exactly what Milo always did, which was declare that he, Daniel, and Roman were going in as a unit and not accepting input on this. That was 6.
The remaining 19 broke into 4 groups of 4 or 5, which gave us 6 total groups including the mandatories.
I had told Rigel to go first — his group had the strongest combined tactical read, and the first group had to clear the boss. They would take the map in empty. They would draw everything from nothing and hand it down. That was the hardest run.
Kayla would go second. Her group had the best defensive formation and would build on Rigel’s foundation.
Then Milo’s group. Then Espen’s group. Then mine.
And then Kai’s group went last.
Because I had a specific plan, and it needed him to go last, and I hadn’t told him what it was yet.
I looked sideways at him. He was still watching Rigel.
"You know," he said quietly, "everyone is going to talk about you after this."
"Hmmm."
"Rigel called it my idea."
"It is your idea."
"Kai."
"You shared it with the class. You distributed it. You organized how it worked into a real exam strategy. That’s your idea."
I stared at the water bottle in my hands. "You’re just saying that."
"I’m going to go back to not saying anything now."
"That’s not—" I made a small sound of frustration. "You’re very annoying sometimes, do you know that?"
"People keep telling me."
"They’re right."
A pause. Then he said, with the exact same expression: "Becoming a favorite must be hard work."
Oh, he was absolutely teasing me.
"It’s your fault," I told him, keeping my voice low and extremely dignified. "You gave it to me. I just passed it along."
"And now 22 people just watched you get called a genius for it."
"I didn’t ask for—" I stopped. I was smiling. I pressed my lips together. "I hate you."
"That’s not true."
It was, extremely, not true.
Before I could respond to that, something moved in my peripheral vision.
I looked up.
Scarlet was standing there — twin braids slightly askew, green eyes wide and anxious, hands clasped in front of her in the way she held them when she was working up to asking something she wasn’t sure was okay to ask. Her long elf ears were angled forward, very attentive.
"Elfina," she started, then stopped. Then tried again: "I’m sorry to interrupt—"
"You’re not interrupting, Scarlet."
"I just — can I talk to—" she stopped again. Looked at me. Then at Kai beside me. Then back at me. "Can I talk to Kaiser?"
Kai raised an eyebrow.
"If you want to talk to me," he said, unhurried, "why are you asking her?"
Scarlet’s ears went slightly sideways. "Because — I thought — I wasn’t sure—"
"I’m just saying," he added, in the same completely level tone.
"Talk." I waved my hand. "Go ahead."
Scarlet pulled herself together visibly. "It’s Axel," she said. "He keeps saying he’s the secret weapon of the group and he won’t listen to my suggested formation, and now he’s sitting on the floor in the corner telling Daniel he’s suppressing his power level and Daniel is writing it down because he believes him, and I don’t — I don’t know how to—"
She trailed off.
I looked across the room. Axel was, in fact, sitting on the floor against the far wall with his oversized trench coat spread around him like a sad, dramatic cape. He was staring at the ceiling. He had his arms crossed. His chin was tilted up at what I could only describe as a Brooding Angle.
Daniel was sitting nearby with a notebook.
I sighed.
"I’ll handle it." I said.
Axel was still staring at the ceiling when I crouched down in front of him.
He let a very theatrical 3 seconds pass. Then his black eyes dropped to my face.
They went wide.
He scrambled to sit more upright in about 0.4 seconds, which made his coat do something chaotic.
"Elfie—" His voice cracked very slightly. He cleared his throat. "I mean....
"Hey, Axel."
"How are you feeling about the run?"
"Good." He crossed his arms again. "Good. Obviously. I’ve been holding back this whole time, so I’m—"
"Axel..." I folded my hands in my lap. "You know Scarlet is good. She has a better spatial sense than almost anyone in this group. And you’re—" I paused on purpose, "—not actually at your full power yet, right? You’ve been conserving."
He pointed at me. "Yes. Exactly. I knew you’d get it."
"So if you were at full power," I said, slowly, thoughtfully, "and you helped her formation work — your individual credit count would be really high."
He blinked.
"Individual credits," I repeated, gentle and matter-of-fact. "The Lumina tracks who engages what. It logs every person’s combat output. If you’re the strongest one in your group—"
"I am—"
"—then your personal credits would be the highest in the group." I let that settle. "Maybe the highest in the class."
Axel looked at me. Something was happening behind his eyes. The ’dramatic-wolf’ persona was doing math it had not expected to do today.
"And if that happened," I said, "and your score was exceptional... I’d have to add you to the top contributors list."
"...Add me."
"To the list."
"Your friends list?"
"The class’s list. Yes."
He pointed at me again, slower this time. More considered. "Your handwriting?"
"The class list is typed."
He nodded. Nodded again. Then stood up, coat swirling slightly, and offered me a hand to stand from my crouch.
I took it.
He was very solemn about it.
"I will," he said, with enormous gravity, "consider cooperating with the formation."
"Great."
"For the class."
"Obviously."
He pulled his coat straight and walked back toward where Scarlet was standing with the kind of stride that communicated destiny and purpose. Scarlet watched him approach with deeply cautious eyes.
I heard him say: "Formation changes. I’m leading point."
Scarlet opened her mouth.
"For the class," he added.
She closed her mouth. Then turned and looked at me with an expression that communicated a great deal of very complex emotion in a very small space. I gave her the smallest thumbs up I could manage.
---
9:58 AM — Dungeon Gate Entry — Group 1
(Omnipotent)
Rigel went in first.
His group was 5: himself, Leena, and 3 others from the class — Serena, Espen, and Xavier. He chose this group carefully. Leena for elvian combat. Serena for raw mana pressure. Espen for Beastkin senses. Xavier for the map.
The gate opened, and the darkness swallowed them whole.
Rigel clicked the dial on the Lumina the moment they crossed the threshold. The screen lit up immediately — gold on black, clean and precise. A 5-meter circle of revealed dungeon architecture around his current position.
"Floor 1 corridor runs north-south," he said into the small speaker grate on the side. "I need to confirm the trajectory at the 40-meter mark. Xavier."
"On it." Xavier was already three steps ahead, scribbling in his notebook, comparing what he was drawing to what the screen showed. "It’s matching. The map is — Rigel, it’s matching the actual layout perfectly."
"Good." He raised the Lumina slightly. 3 red markers appeared near the south end. "Monsters. 12 meters south. Serena, Espen — you have them."
"Finally," Serena said.
The first combat event was over in 40 seconds.
Credit registered. Serena, Espen, and Leena all logged. Rigel directed them north toward the junction.
Floor 2 opened the same way. He called directions. The map grew outward from the position dot in real time, filling in corridors and marking safe paths in green. Every junction they passed became solved ground. The red markers moved — updated — relocated to new positions as the group bypassed them or cleared them.
"Left branch at the Fork," Rigel said, checking the screen. "Right branch has 4 contacts and a dead end. Left has 1 contact and a through-route."
Leena took the 1 contact herself, dropping a Wind current through the corridor that folded the monster into the wall with a firm thud. Then she looked at her hands like she’d done something she’d been meaning to try.
"Floor 4." Rigel checked the time. 11 minutes.
They were moving fast.
The monster clusters on Floor 6 were tricky — densely packed in the central chamber. Rigel stood at the entry and studied the red markers. 8 of them. Overlapping.
"Spread formation. Everyone takes 1 credit event. Do not clear the cluster, just register contact and pull back. Credits logged, then we move."
Espen tilted his head. "That’s... efficient."
"That’s the point."
Each member touched a separate monster. Logged. Broke off. The cluster remained alive but they had their 3 combat events each, easily. They moved past.
Floor 10.
The Hydraveil had been cleared twice this morning. It looked no different for it — 5 heads, full regeneration, loot crystal sealed behind the ridge. It had the quality of something that had been doing this for a very long time and did not expect today to be different.
Leena stood at Rigel’s shoulder.
"You have it?" she asked.
"I have it."
He moved.
The thing about Rigel was that he was not elegant. He didn’t have Ivy’s spatial intuition or Victor’s celestial precision. He was methodical. He had spent 4 days with a borrowed diagram of the Hydraveil and he knew the distance from the entry point to the coordinator head, the angle of approach that avoided the fire and ice cones, and exactly how long he had between the stone-fragment arc and the lightning discharge.
He was not elegant. He was exact.
He hit the coordinator fiber with his broadsword at 150 seconds in. The barrier dropped.
Leena made a sound behind him — something between a cheer and a laugh.
"GO! RIGEL! THAT’S IT—"
He extracted the crystal with two hands and held it up. The dungeon’s confirmation tone rang through the stone corridor — deep, low, and authoritative.
DUNGEON BOSS: CLEARED.
Group 1 Time: 26 minutes, 12 seconds.
He exhaled.
Then Leena was beside him, bumping her shoulder hard against his arm, grinning wide enough that her green braids moved. "You planned that for 4 days and it took you 150 seconds."
"151."
"I’m going to tell Elfie you were this calm and cool!"
"Please don’t..."
---
10:28 AM — Group 2 — Kayla’s Formation
(Kayla Caroline — Inner Perspective)
Floor 3. Moving fast. The map was already green to Floor 5.
Kayla held the Lumina in her right hand and moved with her group at a measured pace, reading the red markers the way she read logic trees — find the pattern, trace the branches, eliminate the noise.
Ambient mana detection in a 15-meter radius.
She turned it over in her mind while they moved.
To build something like this, you would need to calibrate the baseline mana level of the dungeon environment first, otherwise every wall and stone and the students’ own ambient signatures would create static. Then you would need a second threshold — a delta — that fires when a living mana signature exceeds the background by a specific margin.
That’s your monster marker.
For a dungeon, specifically, where the interference field spikes and drops by floor based on monster density, you would need the threshold to self-adjust in real time.
She clicked the dial once. The screen refreshed. The markers shifted.
Dynamic threshold recalibration. Every 4 seconds.
She thought about how long it would take a professional engineer to build that. She thought about who had done it, and when, and under what constraints.
She came to a conclusion that she kept to herself.
"Left," she said. "There’s a spawn cluster on the right at 9 meters. We skip it — we already have our 3 events each."
Her group moved left.
The map was giving them a 7X time advantage over any unguided run. That was not an exaggeration. The dead ends alone — the class had memorized them from Rigel’s passed-down data. They walked through a dungeon that had already been solved for them, floor by floor, as if the stone had remembered something useful for once.
Constructed technology.
Academy-approved materials.
Built by a Rank 0 girl who, from all behavioral observation, spent the last 2 weeks eating cakes and clinging to her companion in various gardens.
Kayla flicked her gaze to the monster tracker.
He built it. The thought was precise and unsentimental. Obviously. The mana resonance work alone required theoretical knowledge far beyond what the academy has covered. Elfie has the magical intuition but not the engineering foundation. He does.
And he handed it to her.
She thought about this.
There was a version of that dynamic she had mapped before in her logic trees — asset allocation through trusted channels, preserving operational distance. Keep the technology removed from the source. Make the asset the face. Clean.
It was a very specific kind of loyalty.
What an enormously loyal little puppy, I would have been unstoppable. Through every verse, every layer, every exam this academy could construct.
Anyways.
The stairs to Floor 10 appeared ahead.
"We’re here," she said.
---
10:45 AM — Group 3
(Omnipotent)
Floor 4.
Milo Sterling stared at the Lumina in Roman’s hand. He hated it. He hated looking at it.
He hated that it worked perfectly.
"Left," Roman said, not even looking up from the screen. "Two dead ends on the right. Straight path ahead."
They turned left. It was a straight path. They had just avoided their fourth dead end in ten minutes.
"I’m just saying," Daniel said, jogging slightly to keep up with Milo’s furious pacing. "A girl who is Ranked 0 in magic and also an engineer? With that level of blasting cuteness?"
"Shut up," Milo snapped.
"I mean, Axel might be crazy, but he’s not entirely wrong," Roman added, tapping the screen.
"I might fall for her. This thing is literally cheating. We are moving 10 times faster than Rigel did just by following a glowing dot."
"Holy shit," Daniel whispered. "She didn’t just design the Lumina, she designed a dungeon map generator?!"
"Cute math girl!" Roman said dreamily.
"Stop simping!" Milo barked, his voice echoing off the stone walls. "We’re here to fight, not to kiss the boots of the Class Representative!"
"I wouldn’t mind kissing her feet!"
"Roman! I swear to God, I will break your kneecaps!" Milo roared.
Roman wisely shut his mouth.
They hit Floor 10 in record time. The map inheritance meant they had literally jogged through empty, solved corridors. The monster tracking meant they picked off exactly three stragglers each to hit their individual credit requirement and bypassed the rest.
The Hydraveil was waiting.
Milo didn’t bother with strategy. He didn’t calculate fibers or elemental cones.
"Finally!" Milo roared.
He launched himself forward, lightning crackling wildly around his heavy warhammer. Daniel and Roman flanked him, and within 40 seconds of pure, unadulterated brute force, the Hydraveil was pulverized into the stone floor.
---
11:14 AM — Evaluation Hall Lobby
(Omnipotent)
By the time the doors opened for the 5th time, most of the class was already assembled in the hallway outside the evaluation room.
The times were on the board.
Group 1 — Rigel: 26 min 12 sec.
Group 2 — Kayla: 16 min 38 sec.
Group 3 — Milo: 14 min 29 sec.
Group 4 - Delyara: 15 min 57 sec.
That last one had caused Xavier to look at his notebook for approximately 15 seconds without speaking.
Group 5— Vivienne: 16 min 51 sec.
Vivienne had done something unpredicted. She had noticed, on Floor 5, that the red markers were clustered tight near the east-side alcoves rather than spread across the corridor, which in dungeon architecture means a high-density spawn zone with above-average credit yield per engagement event.
She had turned to her group and said, with total calm: "There are some credit-worthy monster spawns in the east alcoves. We take the left edge at the next junction."
They had farmed efficiently on the way to the boss. Not Sylvia-style cycling, but clean, directed sweeps. They came out 500 credits above baseline.
Vivienne had looked at the Lumina the entire time with the expression of someone who had found something she was going to think about for a very long time.
two group left.
Elfie’s.
And then, after that — last — Kaiser’s group.
The dungeon gate stayed open.
Everyone looked at the hallway.
---
Perspecitive: Elfina Lunaris
Rigel appeared at my shoulder.
"It’s your turn." He had his diagram folded back into his pocket.
I nodded. I stood up, and took one last look around the hall.
All groups done. Every single one — aced the exam.
And then there was me. Class representative of Class C. Rank 0. Architect of the Lumina strategy.
Whose actual contribution was passing a box to the right person.
I would think about that later. For now I had a dungeon to enter.
I turned to Kai.
He was already looking at me.
"I will make it safe for you, Kai." I said. I said it quietly, so only he heard it.
He looked at me for a second without answering.
"I know." he said.
I winked at him, which I had been wanting to do for about 10 minutes, and then I went to find my group.
Dungeon Gate Entry — Group 6
(Elfina Lunaris)
My group was small. Just three of us. Mira, and a new boy named Sebastian Cyrill, who had the same Beastkin ears as Mira.
The gate closed behind us. The dungeon was dark, smelling of wet stone and old moss.
"Okay!" I clapped my hands together, the sound echoing down the corridor. "Mira, Sebastian. I need you two to work on Floors 1 through 3. Clear the side alcoves, get your individual credits, and hit the 600 baseline."
Sebastian blinked. His ears twitched nervously. "What about you?"
"I’m going to solo the rest of the floors," I said cheerfully. "I need to clear every single monster on the main path."
Sebastian’s eyes went wide. "Wait. Elfina, isn’t that... too risky? You’re going alone?"
I smiled at him. The kind of smile that didn’t leave room for argument. "I have a plan."
Mira looked at me for a second. Her tail swayed once, lazily. "Good luck, Elfina!"
"Thanks, Mira!"
I turned toward the main corridor.
Alright. Time to work.
I took a breath. Celestial magic wasn’t like elemental magic. You didn’t just pull it from the air; you aligned yourself with the universe’s order. But what if you told the universe that your order was simply... faster?
"Starlight-Skipper," I whispered.
It was a spell I made up last Tuesday. The logic was simple: if celestial magic manipulates the weight of the soul’s resonance, I could just decrease my physical gravity and replace the empty space with the light of a falling star.
My feet left the ground. Or rather, they stopped caring about the ground.
I dashed forward. The stone walls blurred into grey streaks. I was moving three times faster than a normal sprint, my footsteps completely silent, glowing with a faint silver dust.
I dodged through the corridors and reached Floor 4 in exactly 58 seconds.
I stopped in the middle of a massive, open cavern. The air here was thicker.
Kai goes next. Letting the Starlight-Skipper fade.
The thought made my chest tight. Kai was brilliant. He was the smartest person I had ever met, and he gave me the Lumina, and he understood the world in a way nobody else did.
But he couldn’t fight. He had zero mana. He was so, so fragile.
Axel and Scarlet are with him. But Axel is delusional and Scarlet is terrified.
I couldn’t trust them. I couldn’t trust anyone to keep him safe except myself. My goal wasn’t just to clear the dungeon.
It was to sanitize it. To leave secured, trapped monsters for his group to safely kill for their credit quota, and to completely annihilate anything that could even imagine to target him.
I closed my eyes.
The one thing I hadn’t been able to do since coming to this academy was use my actual talent.
Theory was boring. Rigid spells were boring. My real talent was just... wanting something to happen, and letting celestial mana figure out the shape.
I held out my hand.
"Honey-Sweet Lure," I chanted softly.
I condensed a sphere of pure, high-frequency celestial mana in my palm. It glowed like a tiny sun. Dungeon monsters fed on ambient, dirty mana. Dropping a sphere of pure celestial order right in the middle of them was like ringing a dinner bell made of sugar.
In the shadows, red eyes began to open. Dozens of them.
They came from the walls, the ceiling, the tunnels. Crawlers, stone-gargoyles, shadow-wolves. They flooded the cavern, surrounding me in a closing circle.
I didn’t move. I just smiled.
"Shooting-Star Twilight!"
The mana erupted from my back. I fused Earth magic for physical mass, Fire magic for propulsion, and Celestial magic to give it a mind of its own.
Eight massive, glowing blue-and-black tendrils ripped out of the air behind me, forming a protective shell. They didn’t just hang there; they moved independently, whipping and snapping with terrifying speed.
A shadow-wolf lunged at my throat.
One of the tails lashed out, impaling it mid-air and slamming it into the stone floor so hard the rock cracked. A gargoyle fired a spike of hardened earth at my back. Two tails intercepted it, caught the spike in a glowing grip, and violently hurled it back, shattering the gargoyle to dust.
It was a 5-meter radius of absolute destruction. Anything that stepped into my circle was crushed, pierced, or thrown. I walked forward, humming a small tune, while the tails behind me slaughtered everything in the cavern in a blur of blue and black strikes.
Smartyyy, I thought, feeling very proud of myself. I had spent all of Wednesday thinking about how to protect my blind spots.
I moved through Floors 5, 6, and 7 like a natural disaster.
Whenever a monster looked too weak to be a threat, I didn’t kill it. I used my next spell.
"Constellation Ribbons!"
I wove celestial light strings with freezing air currents, creating glowing, sticky ropes of ice. I pinned a crawler to the ceiling. I pinned a gargoyle to the cliff wall. They thrashed, completely immobilized, waiting like perfectly safe targets for Kai’s group to casually shoot down.
Floors 8 and 9 were wiped clean. Every single rogue monster was turned to ash by my tails. Every safe monster was tied to a wall with ribbons.
Then, Floor 10.
The Hydraveil.
It was massive, taking up the entire end of the cavern. Five heads, thick scales, dripping with acidic saliva.
Rigel had mapped this. He told everyone the strategy: take out one head, freeze the stump to stop the healing, then take out the next. Be exact. Be precise.
I walked into the chamber. My blue-black tails flared out behind me, tearing trenches into the stone floor.
If I want to be truly Rank Zero. Looking up at the monster, I can’t just beat it. I have to make sure it becomes absolutely nothing.
The Hydraveil roared. All five heads lunged at me.
I didn’t dodge. I leaped straight up, my tails launching me high into the air above the beast.
I raised both hands.
Celestial Order. Fire’s brilliance. Squeeze them together until they break!
"Supernova!" I yelled.
I slammed the compressed sphere of conflicting mana straight down onto the Hydraveil’s central back.
The cavern went completely white.
There was no sound at first. Just a blinding expansion of heat and light, a series of massive, overlapping fireballs that chained into each other like blooming flowers of pure destruction. Then the shockwave hit, shaking the entire dungeon from Floor 10 all the way up to the surface.
When the light faded, the Hydraveil wasn’t dead. It just wasn’t there anymore.
A crater of smoking, glowing red ash was all that was left. The dungeon completion tone rang out through the rubble.
I landed softly in the center of the crater. The air was filled with toxic smoke and burning ash, but I was surrounded by a perfectly round, glowing pink barrier.
I dusted off my skirt, grabbed the loot crystal, and smiled brightly at the empty room.
"Everything is done! :D"
---
11:14 AM — Evaluation Hall Lobby
I walked out of the dungeon gate. Mira and Sebastian were right behind me, both of them staring straight ahead with very wide, very blank eyes.
The moment the heavy stone doors sealed shut, the entire hallway went completely silent.
Every single person in Class C was staring at me.
Xavier’s notebook had fallen onto the floor. Milo was looking at me like he was trying to figure out if I was a hallucination.
Even Delyra had lost her perfect posture and was gripping the edge of a bench.
I think I overdid it. Offering a small, apologetic wave. But it was necessary.
"Elfina?" Rigel said slowly. "There was an earthquake. Up here."
"Was there?" I asked innocently.
"The floor cracked in the staging hall."
"Wow. Old architecture."
Before anyone could say anything else, Instructor Aisha stepped out from the main evaluation room. She was holding her clipboard, but she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking at me. Her gold-flecked eyes were shining with a kind of intense, manic reverence that she usually hid behind her warm instructor persona.
"Calm down, everyone!" Aisha said, her voice echoing sharply. "We have one more group left to enter. But before they do, let’s address the elephant in the room."
She tapped the clipboard.
"I heard about your... devices." A sharp smile played on her lips. "A brilliant loophole. And since your devices track individual credits as well as mapping, there is no need to keep your scores a secret."
She waved her hand, and the massive crystalline board above the hall flickered, projecting the final times and credit scores for the first six groups.
Group 1 (Rigel): 26 min 12 sec — Total: 2,450 Credits
Group 2 (Kayla): 16 min 38 sec — Total: 2,610 Credits
Group 3 (Milo): 14 min 29 sec — Total: 3,100 Credits
Group 4 (Delyra): 15 min 57 sec — Total: 2,580 Credits
Group 5 (Vivienne): 16 min 51 sec — Total: 2,740 Credits
Group 6 (Elfina): 9 min 04 sec — Total: 5,782 Credits
The hallway was so quiet I could hear Mira’s tail swishing.
"Furthermore," Aisha continued, her voice rising with unmistakable pride. "The top five individual creditors for this exam, as tracked by the dungeon’s internal mana-registry..."
The board shifted.
Top Individual Creditors:
1. Elfina Lunaris — 5,100 Credits
2. Milo Sterling — 1,450 Credits
3. Rigel Ravin — 1,120 Credits
4. Espen Caph — 980 Credits
5. Delyra Nysira — 920 Credits
Chaos erupted.
"NINE MINUTES?!" Roman screamed, gripping his hair.
"FIVE THOUSAND CREDITS?!" Daniel yelled, pointing at the board. "She got five thousand credits by herself! That’s more than our entire group combined!"
"She’s a monster!" Serena whispered in pure awe.
"A beautiful, brilliant monster!" Leena corrected, eyes sparkling.
I stood there, my cheeks burning as the entire class erupted into a chaotic chorus of praise and shock. I was officially a celebrity. I went from the Rank 0 pity-case to the unquestioned, terrifying genius of Class C in the span of a single morning.
Kai’s fault. I couldn’t help but smile.
"Quiet!" Aisha commanded, clapping her hands. The mana wave in her voice instantly silenced the room. "Celebrate later! We still have one mandatory group remaining. Group 7."
Axel stood up from the corner. His coat billowed dramatically, despite there being no wind in the hallway.
"It’ll be a piece of cake!" Axel said, shaking his head with a heavy, burdened sigh. "I can finally stop holding back! My true power will be unleashed!"
Scarlet looked like she wanted to cry. She gripped her staff with trembling hands and followed him toward the gate.
Kai stood up.
He was wearing his standard uniform, but I noticed the hilts of three separate melee weapons—daggers, reaper and a short-sword—strapped to his belt.
I walked over to him before he could reach the gate.
I didn’t care who was watching. I stepped close, invading his personal space, and reached up to adjust the collar of his jacket. I smoothed out a tiny wrinkle on his shoulder, my hands lingering against his chest.
"You took melee weapons." I said softly, looking up into his eyes.
"For precaution." he replied, his voice calm, completely unfazed by my proximity.
"There are pinned monsters on Floors 5 through 9." I whispered, my voice dropping into that specific, quiet tone I only ever used for him. "They’re tied up. They can’t move. All you have to do is hit them to get your credits. Nothing will touch you."
"Woah." He looked genuinely surprised.
"Take care of yourself." I said, my fingers brushing against his lapel. "Don’t do anything reckless. Just stay behind Scarlet and Axel and let them do the walking."
He looked down at me, those eyes softened slightly.
"I’ll be back before you notice." He said.
He turned and walked toward the gate, slipping into the darkness behind Scarlet and Axel. The heavy stone doors groaned shut, sealing them inside.
I stood there, staring at the closed gate.
The class was still buzzing behind me, whispering about my score, my magic, my device.
But the cheering felt distant.
My heart felt heavy. A cold, unsettling weight settled at the bottom of my stomach.
I really, really don’t like this feeling.
