The surge of demand following the exposure of Cassian's lie was overwhelming. The students, galvanized by the blend of superior craftsmanship, exotic styling, and the sheer audacity of the commoner's pricing, descended upon Daemon immediately. He was hounded in the dining hall, stopped in the corridors, and besieged outside the Forge. Any other commoner, desperate for financial security, would have immediately ramped up production, capitalizing on the windfall.
Daemon, however, was not driven by simple desperation; he was driven by efficiency. The immediate influx of 1,500 credits had already secured his metabolic needs (better nutrition for his augmented body) and initial resource acquisition (prepaid Forge time and basic materials). His priority was not profit maximization, but time allocation. He had a four-year window to master an entire planetary system, and constant manual labor would consume the precious hours he needed for research and advanced training.
He made a cold, calculated decision: he did not readily accept offers, despite the continuous, pleading requests. Instead, he immediately established strict boundaries for his new enterprise. He instituted a wait-list, a concept utterly foreign to the nobles who expected instantaneous gratification. He limited his output to accepting only two commissions per week.
This strategic scarcity served multiple, layered purposes. On the surface, it projected his work as something important and rarefied, not cheap trinkets. The weapons were now a status symbol requiring patience and privilege to acquire, further leveraging the demand ignited by the "Kyoto style" mystique. Subconsciously, the students now valued the weapon not just for its quality, but for the difficulty in obtaining it.
More crucially, the boundary gave him back his time: three days for focused Runic Library research, two days for advanced magical and physical training, and two days allocated for the actual forging and delivery. He had effectively created a sustainable, high-yield funding mechanism that respected his stringent training schedule. The system was now financially supporting his education, exactly as Matthew Strickland would have structured it.
Meanwhile, in the staff common room of the first-year instruction wing, several instructors gathered over steaming mugs of bitter Academy tea. The conversation, initially centered on the administrative burden of the upcoming ranking tournament, quickly devolved into a dissection of their most peculiar student: Daemon.
Master Veridian, the gruff Weapons Proficiency instructor, set his mug down with a clatter. "The boy's a contradiction. His aptitude scores are off the charts, but I watch him spar with the practice sword and he always manages to lose the critical engagements. He throws himself into the training—I see him pushing his cardio long after the others quit—but when the blades clash, he's just slow enough, just weak enough, to yield to a mediocre opponent. Yet he wields that foreign blade with a grace that suggests he's a master of a technique none of us recognize."
Master Harkan, the Principles of Magic instructor, stroked his chin thoughtfully. "It's the same in my class. The ability is there, Veridian. The Tria core is real; his energy cycling is flawless. He understands the Principles better than any student in the last decade. He excels in theories and academia—he codified the properties of Aether in a way that suggests profound, intuitive insight. But when I ask him to demonstrate powerful, sustained channeling, he hits a clear ceiling. He holds back. The magical aptitude is immense, but the magical execution remains… pedestrian."
The instructors agreed: Daemon was a paradox. He was a theoretical genius who could articulate complex magical physics, yet he was an underperformer in practical, visible application.
Master Kael, the Runic Enchantment instructor, pushed a detailed schematic of Daemon's bastard sword across the table. His interest was purely structural. "Forget the sparring. Look at the forging. His grasp of metallurgy and geometry is not academic; it is applied genius. I compared his Damascus fold patterns to those documented by the Royal Blacksmiths of the capital. Frankly, his are superior. He is operating at the level of a master artisan with thirty years of experience. He is a genius in the Forge, but he has no formal training. How does a boy who 'comes up short' during basic sword drills produce a blade that puts the Academy smiths to shame?"
The discussion circled back to the Tria anomaly. They concluded that Daemon's strength must lie purely in his mind—an academic marvel whose physical application was undermined by fear, inexperience, or perhaps the chaotic, stabilizing effect of managing three disparate affinities. His constant personal training, they theorized, was a desperate, futile effort to bridge the gap between his theoretical genius and his lackluster physical performance.
"The most likely truth," Harkan concluded with a sigh, "is that the Tria-anomaly gifted him incredible cognitive abilities, but the body—his physical core—cannot yet cope with the output. His theory is ahead of his practical ability. And that forging skill? An isolated, unique talent that demands manual dexterity, not raw magical power. It is the only place he can truly shine."
They dismissed the combat issue. Daemon was a genius confined by a mediocre body. They shifted their focus to the impending ranking tournament, the compulsory event that would force every student to compete publicly, assessing their practical skill across all disciplines. For the instructors, the tournament was simply a metric of their teaching success. For Daemon, who listened to all conversations with the attentiveness of a predator, the tournament was a problem.
He had perfectly established the perception he needed: an academic giant and artistic master, but a physical coward whose genius lay only in the abstract. His constant, intentional underperformance during sparring had successfully cemented this narrative. The ranking tournament, however, would force him into a sequence of high-stakes, unscripted combat scenarios where strategic yielding would be much harder to achieve. He would have to deploy his true, augmented power without exposing the source of its rapid growth. The system was about to demand a true measure of his worth, and he had only weeks to calculate the precise level of power he could safely reveal.