Blair was the kind of person who didn’t turn off.
Misato Aya, the li-haired athletic one beside her, finished early and was now twirling her pen around her thumb with the bored ease of soone waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. She had the relaxed confidence of a person who either knew the material cold or didn’t care about the outco at all.
I was going to enjoy watching these people interact for the next three years.
Assuming I survived the next three days.
Right.
Test done. Now what.
I leaned back in the chair, which was a mistake because the chair was not built for that and made a sound that turned three heads in my direction. I straightened. Looked at my phone. Opened the academy app and checked the building map.
Physical Conditioning started at ten. That was in a little over an hour.
After the test wrapped, Cross stood up from her desk and walked to the center of the room again. Her heels announced her before she got there.
"Pencils down," she said. "Phones down. Look at ."
The room complied.
"I’ve already got your results," she said, tapping her tablet. "And I’m not going to share them individually, because again, this doesn’t count. What I will tell you is that the most commonly missed question was number twenty-two, the open response about second-entry risk factors."
She looked at the room.
"That’s not a morization problem," she said. "That’s a thinking problem. Most of you described what could go wrong without explaining why humans consistently make that mistake when they know better. That’s the actual lesson. Understanding failure isn’t enough. You need to understand why smart people fail anyway."
She let that sit.
"That’s what this class is actually about," she said. "Not the material. The material is just the vehicle."
I respected that answer.
She turned to the board behind her and pulled up a holographic display. Gate diagrams. Classification charts. The sester outline materialized across the screen in clean organized sections.
"We’re starting with E and D rank gate ecology," she said. "Not because it’s the most exciting topic. Because it’s where most first-year hunters die. Not in S-rank gates. Not in high-level content. In the easy ones. Because they stopped paying attention."
She walked slowly across the front of the room.
"E-rank gates are predictable environnts. Consistent monster patterns. Low mana density. Safe entry and exit corridors." She stopped. "And that predictability is exactly why they kill people. The mont you think you know what’s coming is the mont sothing changes and you’re not ready for it."
She tapped the display.
A monster appeared on screen. Sothing with too many legs and a jaw that opened the wrong direction.
Several students made sounds.
Cross smiled.
"This is a D-rank Hollow Crawler," she said pleasantly. "It lives in gate environnts classified D-rank or below. It’s about the size of a golden retriever. It is not particularly strong. It cannot use mana abilities. Its attack pattern is completely predictable."
She advanced the slide.
The sa monster, but now there were eleven of them.
"They travel in packs of eight to fifteen," she said. "They coordinate. They flank. They identify the weakest person in a group within approximately forty-five seconds of first contact and they prioritize that target above all else until it’s dead."
Naomi made a very small sound next to .
"The weakest person," Cross repeated. "Which ans the mont you enter a D-rank gate with soone who doesn’t belong there, you have given the monsters a roadmap to your team’s failure."
She looked at the room.
"I’m not telling you this to scare you," she said. "I’m telling you this because the first gate you set foot in, I need you to understand that it already knows more about your group’s dynamics than most of your teammates do."
She clicked to the next slide.
Diagrams. Data tables. Recomnded formation structures for D-rank encounters.
I found myself actually paying attention.
Not because I needed the information. But because Cross taught the way a person taught when they’d actually seen what happened when students didn’t learn. There was sothing specific in the way she described the Hollow Crawler’s targeting behavior.
She’d watched soone get prioritized before. Soone who didn’t make it.
The lecture ran thirty-five minutes. Cross covered gate environnt basics, mana density asurent, and the standard entry protocol that every licensed hunter was supposed to follow before crossing a gate threshold. She made it interesting by being casually honest about which parts of protocol people actually followed and which parts they skipped.
"Nobody does the full mana scan before entry," she said. "Everybody thinks they will. Nobody does. Keep that in mind when I test you on it next week."
Several students laughed.
When the lecture portion ended, Cross opened the floor for questions. A few Sapphire students asked predictable clarification questions. One Obsidian student asked sothing about gate rank reclassification that suggested his father had told him things that were mostly accurate but slightly wrong, and Cross corrected him without making it humiliating.
I did not ask anything.
I was watching.
When class ended at nine-forty, students filed out in house clusters. Naomi gathered her things beside and stood.
"That was actually okay," she said.
"Told you."
"The Hollow Crawler thing was terrifying."
"Terrifying and useful."
She considered this. "Both."
"Both," I agreed.
We walked toward the door. Belle fell in beside from two rows over, her blue hair swaying in the ponytail. She said nothing, which ant she was processing sothing. Belle went quiet when she was thinking. It was one of the more readable things about her.
At the door, I glanced back at Dr. Cross.
She was already looking at sothing on her tablet.
The glasses were still perched at the end of her nose.
I turned back around and followed my classmates into the hallway.
Physical Conditioning in fourteen minutes.
I rolled my neck, felt the body’s joints pop in four places, and followed the campus map toward Zone Two and the Arena.
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