"Come here."
Amelia said it the way someone might call another person over to look at something mildly interesting on a table, casual and unbothered, as if she had not just spent however long dismantling him in what was meant to be a simple exam.
Soren hesitated for the briefest moment, then went.
There was not much point resisting.
If Amelia wanted to do something, she would do it whether he stepped closer willingly or not, and after everything that had happened, arguing on principle felt too exhausting to bother with.
He kept a little of his guard up anyway, more from habit than logic, his body still too wound tight to fully trust that the fight was actually over.
The moment he got close enough, Amelia caught his wrist.
Not hard enough to hurt, just firm, direct, thoughtless in the way she seemed to do most things.
Her fingers closed around his arm like she had not considered for even a second whether grabbing people without warning was strange.
Soren flinched anyway.
"Wh—?"
A soft chime came from his bracelet.
He blinked.
Then a window opened on the bracelet.
[30 Points have been transferred from Amelia Indras Einhardt to Soren Arden]
He stared at it.
For a second, his mind simply refused to move.
The message remained there, clear and polite and entirely unhelpful in explaining why one of the strongest first-years in the academy had just casually handed him thirty points immediately after nearly beating him into the ground.
Slowly, very slowly, Soren lifted his head and looked at Amelia.
She was smiling.
Not in a mocking way, not like she had played some clever joke on him, but with bright, obvious satisfaction, as if this made perfect sense and she was pleased with herself for doing it.
"It's a reward," she said.
Soren continued staring.
"A… reward?"
Amelia nodded once.
"You hit me."
That was apparently meant to explain everything.
He opened his mouth, then shut it again.
There were probably responses available to a normal person here.
Maybe something composed, maybe something socially intelligent, maybe even a polite refusal followed by a graceful attempt to preserve some dignity.
Unfortunately, Soren was standing in the middle of a ruined exam field half-dead, sweat-soaked, and being matter-of-factly compensated by Amelia Indras Einhardt for drawing blood, so his mind offered him nothing useful at all.
'I don't know how to deal with her…'
He had prepared himself for humiliation.
For losing.
For getting injured.
For Amelia maybe laughing at him, or dismissing him, or simply walking away once she got what she wanted.
Being rewarded for managing one desperate hit had not even occurred to him as a possible outcome.
Then another thought cut through the haze.
"Oh!"
He turned so quickly that Amelia's brows drew together slightly.
Olivia.
He crossed the short distance to where she was resting against a tree, slumped exactly where she had collapsed after using [My Light].
For a jolt of a second panic flickered again, irrational and sharp, but the moment he crouched he could see she was breathing evenly.
Deep asleep, then.
Not unconscious in the dangerous sense, just completely spent.
That loosened something in his chest.
Before the thought could escape him, he carefully lifted her wrist, keeping his movements light enough not to wake her, and brought his bracelet close to hers.
A chime sounded.
[15 Points have been transferred]
Soren exhaled through his nose.
"That should do it…"
He let Olivia's arm settle gently back into place, then sat back on his heels for a moment, the tension in his shoulders finally starting to slip.
Between what she had already accumulated and the extra points, a top placement should be secure.
More than secure, probably.
After everything she had just done, after throwing away every drop of divine power she had to help him, the idea of her somehow not making the top ranks would have felt ridiculous.
'We should comfortably make top ten now.'
The thought arrived with an almost embarrassing amount of relief.
"Hahhh…"
A long breath left his lungs, heavy and unsteady.
It was over.
Only when the soft crunch of grass was heard did he remember something.
"Ah…"
She was still here.
He turned back and met Amelia's eyes.
She stood a little way off with her arms loosely crossed, her expression flat, unreadable, impossible to parse.
Then she said something that made no immediate sense to him at all.
"—"
Soren just looked at her.
'What?'
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
.
▶ Main Quest Complete! [First Steps (2)] ◀
[Difficulty: A-]
[Reward: Random Magic Skill, 150 Points.]
.
[Status Window]
Name: Soren Arden
◈ Stats
Stamina - 0.9 (F+) → 1.0 (E-)
Strength - 0.7 (F+) → 0.9 (F+)
Agility - 1.3 (E-)
Mana - 1.3 (E-) → 1.4 (E-)
Divine Power - 0.3 (F) → 0.5 (F+)
Charm - 8.7 (S-)
◈ Skills
- Life Magic
- Basic Magic
└ Ignition (D+) → Ignition (C-)
└ Shock (D-)
└ Gaia (E+)
└ Shield (E-) → Shield (E+)
└ Shockwave (E-) → Shockwave (E)
└ Breeze (F) → Breeze (E-)
└ Bloom (F+)
└ Aqua (F+)
└ Freeze (F) →Freeze (F+)
- Concentration (E-) → Concentration (E)
- Blood Magic
└ Hemokinesis (F)
.
The practical exam ended not long after that.
There was no dramatic finish, no ceremonial tension, no lingering build-up like the game might have dressed it up with.
The professors and staff simply moved in, the remaining students were ordered to stop fighting, and the whole bloodied, chaotic mess began folding itself back into order with clinical efficiency.
It almost felt anticlimactic.
Then again, after getting mauled by Amelia, maybe anything would have.
Olivia placed second.
Soren placed third.
First went to Raylin, the top-ranked Arcane Studies student, whose performance, from what little Soren could piece together from overheard staff remarks and the final standings, had been efficient, clean, and almost irritatingly uneventful.
No dramatic clash, no near-death experience, no early awakening thrown into the middle of it.
Just a strong student doing exactly what a strong student was expected to do.
Good for her, Soren supposed.
When Olivia heard the rankings, she froze.
Actually froze, as if the words had reached her but failed to fit anywhere sensible in her head.
Her eyes widened, her lips parted, and for one helpless second she just stood there holding the reality of it.
Then tears spilt over.
Not graceful tears either.
Not the pretty, restrained kind heroines in games sometimes cried when the scene wanted them to look touching.
Olivia cried properly, face crumpling all at once, shoulders shaking as relief and shock seemed to hit her together.
Before Soren could do more than blink, she grabbed both of his hands.
"Thank you— thank you so much— really, really—"
The words tumbled over each other, messy and wet with tears, gratitude pouring out faster than she could organise it.
She held on tightly, like she needed the physical proof that this had actually happened, that she had really done it, that she had really placed second and had not just imagined the number.
Soren, caught off guard, could only stand there and let her.
"You did most of it," he managed, though that felt both true and not enough.
Olivia shook her head rapidly, still crying.
"No, but if I hadn't met you, I would've— I would've—"
She didn't finish.
Instead she laughed through the tears in that awkward, breathless way people did when they were overwhelmed and did not know what to do with their feelings.
Then, just as suddenly, she let go.
She swiped at her face, tried and failed to compose herself, then brightened with a kind of open, earnest joy that made her seem even younger.
"I need to go find Alex."
Of course she did.
The words came with such immediate certainty that Soren almost smiled before he meant to.
There was something endearingly transparent about Olivia.
No hidden layers to this part, no need to posture or pretend.
She was happy; she wanted to tell the person she cared about, and that was the first thing in the world that mattered.
She gave him one more watery, radiant smile, then hurried off at a near-run, calling a quick goodbye over her shoulder.
Soren watched her go.
'She really is adorable.'
The thought settled quietly into him, warm and soft in a place that still felt bruised from everything else.
He had spent so much of the practical moving on tension, fear, calculation, and necessity that the simple sight of someone being sincerely, openly happy felt strangely gentle by comparison.
With second and third secured, the quest had not just been completed; it had been cleared comfortably.
The reward he had pushed himself so hard for was finally his.
Points, progress, proof that all of this had amounted to something concrete.
And yet when his gaze dropped back to the status window, his brow knit instead of easing.
"It's unexpected, though…"
Blood Magic.
Even after all the hours he had spent with the game, all the quests, all the guides, all the enemy breakdowns and half-forgotten forum speculation, that result still felt foreign in his hands.
He knew what blood magic was, obviously.
Anyone who had reached the middle and later parts of the game knew.
You had to.
Vampires used it often enough, and the smarter ones used it well enough, that ignoring it was a good way to get wiped.
But players did not get it.
That had always been one of those hard boundaries in the system.
Blood magic belonged to vampires, and vampires were almost always enemies or, at best, hostile neutrals whose cooperation cost more trouble than it was worth.
The idea of learning it as a normal human player was basically nonexistent.
And now he had it.
'From what I've seen fighting them… it's dangerous.'
That was putting it mildly.
Blood magic was flexible in a way that made it terrifying.
It could attack, bind, reinforce, manipulate, or support.
In the right hands, it was one of those disciplines that seemed to ignore neat category lines entirely.
The problem had never been usefulness.
The problem had always been cost.
Vampires had bodies built for it.
Humans did not.
A vampire's true heart could create and circulate the kind of mana-infused blood their spells consumed, and paired with their regeneration, that made expenditure frighteningly manageable.
A human trying to imitate that without the same biological advantages was just gambling with a much flimsier machine.
For Soren, reckless use of blood magic could very easily become self-harm with better aesthetics.
He stared at the skill name again.
Powerful, ridiculously so, and yet completely uncooperative.
'I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this.'
That was the problem.
A strong skill should have felt exciting, rewarding, like all the pain and panic had purchased something tangible.
Instead, he was sitting there with what might be one of the most dangerous tools he had ever gotten his hands on and no clear idea how to use it without potentially killing himself.
Which, honestly, felt annoyingly on brand for his life here.
"What's up?"
A voice cut through the thought so cleanly that he almost flinched.
Soren let out a breath through his nose.
'And there's this problem too.'
————「❤︎」————