The Lecture Hall for Advanced Mana Theory was less a classroom and more an operating theater designed to dissect reality.
It was a cavernous amphitheater, the air perpetually chilled and smelling faintly of ozone and crushed dried lavender—scents used to stabilize volatile ether. The seats were carved from sound-dampening basalt, arranging the fifty best students in the first year into steep, rising tiers that looked down upon a central podium made of obsidian. The acoustics were merciless; a stifled yawn in the back row sounded like a shout.
Vane sat in the third row, near the edge. His Academy-issued notebook was open to a fresh page. His expensive ink pen hovered over the paper.
The page was blank.
Professor Vyla, the High Elf Rank 6 Expert who had terrorized them in homeroom, was currently pacing behind the obsidian podium. She didn't lecture; she relayed information with the cold, rapid-fire precision of a ticker-tape machine. Above her, complex arcanic diagrams floated in the air, glowing with shifting blue light, mapping out things that made Vane's eyes water just looking at them.
"The standard provincial mage operates within the First Circle," Vyla stated, her voice clipping through the silence. "Linear input, elemental conversion, linear output. That is sufficient for lighting a hearth or scaring off a goblin. You are not standard mages. You are Elites. Your cores are dense enough to sustain Second and Third-Circle resonant feedback loops."
She tapped the air, and the diagram twisted into a horrific knot of glowing lines.
"When calculating the coefficient of mana density in a Third-Circle spherical projection, one must account for ambient etheric drag. The drag coefficient is inversely proportional to the stability of the local environment, but must be adjusted logarithmically if the caster is operating within a high-saturation zone, such as a Dungeon or a ritual site. If you fail to account for the logarithmic shift, your Third-Circle barrier will collapse into unstable First-Circle noise, and you will die."
Vane stared at the floating formula.
In the slums of Oakhaven, magic was simple. It was brutal. You grabbed the mana in your gut, you shoved it through a pathway you stole or bought, and something happened. If it was fire, things burned. If it was force, people broke. Vane currently possessed forty-three different abilities inside his soul. Not a single one of their original owners had ever stopped mid-fight to talk about "Circles" or "logarithmic shifts."
He was drowning in jargon. He was a street brawler who had stumbled into a seminar on theoretical physics.
Twenty minutes passed. Vane's pen hadn't touched the paper. The drone of Vyla's voice and the soft hum of the mana projectors were hypnotic. Boredom, thick and heavy, began to settle over him.
He couldn't follow the lecture. His brain wasn't wired for this abstract architecture. He needed to see things, touch things, break things.
Deciding that staring at the board was useless, Vane shifted his focus. If he couldn't learn the theory, he would study the competition.
He narrowed his eyes, focusing not on the physical forms of the students around him, but on the energy humming beneath their skin. He didn't activate a named Skill; he simply opened the eye of his Authority, the passive perception of the [Usurper].
The lecture hall shifted. The stone walls grew dim, and the students blazed like signal fires.
This room was separate from the other first-year classes for a reason. Everyone here was a monster. Their mana cores weren't just bright; they were dense, tightly wound coils of power that distorted the air around them.
His gaze drifted first to Anastasia, seated front and center.
To the naked eye, she was perfectly poised, taking elegant notes. To Vane's true sight, she was a fusion reactor. Her mana was a blinding, regal gold. It flowed through her body with terrifying efficiency, a perfect circuit with zero waste. She was a hybrid—possessing the robust channels of a physical enhancer but the intricate mental architecture of a master caster. She wasn't just understanding Vyla's lecture on Third-Circle theory; she was probably bored by it.
Vane looked toward the back corner.
Valerica was hunched over her desk. Her aura was a dense, suffocating sphere of deep violet. It was massive, perhaps the largest in the room, but it was turbulent. It vibrated around her like a trapped ocean.
Snap.
The sound echoed sharply. Vane shifted back to normal sight just in time to see Valerica flinch, staring down at a quill that had shattered in her grip, splattering ink across her parchment.
She wasn't clumsy. She was just holding back an avalanche. Her challenge wasn't understanding the math; it was writing the answer down without pulverizing the desk.
Vane's gaze wandered further, scanning the other outliers that Vyla had lumped into this elite section.
Two rows back, sitting in rigid isolation, was a girl with stark white hair that framed a fierce face. Vane focused on her.
[Target Analysis]
Name: Ashe Razar
Rank: 3 (Elite)
Authority: Warlord (EX)
Her aura was aggressive, a swirling storm of deep crimson. Striking black horns tipped with red accents curled back from her temples, undisguised. She wore a sleeveless black uniform jacket with blood-red trim, her arms crossed, staring at Professor Vyla with deep red eyes that suggested she was calculating kill angles rather than mana coefficients.
Vane shifted his focus again, drawn to an anomaly on the far left side of the room. She had very dark green hair that cascaded over her shoulders, almost black in the dim light.
[Target Analysis]
Name: Isole Vesper
Rank: 3 (Elite)
Authority: Samsara (EX)
Her aura made Vane's stomach turn. It was a sickeningly perfect cycle of endless repetition. One half was a vibrant emerald green—raw, unchecked life centered around her right eye. The other half was a deep, violent scarlet—death and blood centered around her left eye. She wore a pristine white uniform trimmed with red, her hands covered by white gloves, sitting perfectly still as the energies twisted around her in a horrifying double helix.
Vane leaned back, letting the perception fade.
A golden reactor. A gravity well. A crimson warlord. An endless cycle of life and death.
And then there was him. A rat with a bag full of stolen tools he didn't know the names of. He was the only fraud in a room full of genuine nightmares.
"Mr. Vane."
The name cut through his thoughts like a whip.
Vane froze. The scratch of quills stopped instantly. The lecture hall went dead silent.
Professor Vyla was standing at the edge of the podium, looking directly at him. Her eyes, magnified slightly by her spectacles, were unreadable glaciers.
"You have seemed quite content to stare at your classmates rather than the board for the last ten minutes," Vyla said, her voice quiet and dangerous. "Perhaps you have already mastered the Second-Circle theorems through osmosis."
She tapped the air, clearing the previous complex diagram and replacing it with a combat scenario simulation.
"You are Special Admission Rank 1. Let us test that designation. You are casting a standard Second-Circle [Fire Lance]. Your opponent, a kinetic specialist, disrupts the ambient etheric field by 15% just as the spell schema forms."
Vyla leaned forward slightly. "How do you adjust the lattice formula in real-time to maintain structural integrity and prevent premature detonation?"
Vane slowly stood up. His chair scraped loudly against the basalt floor.
He looked at the glowing blue diagram. He looked at the variables Vyla was pointing to. He looked at the sea of faces turned toward him—some curious, some mocking, Anastasia looking politely bored.
His mind went blank. He knew what [Fire Lance] was—he had stolen it from a mercenary weeks ago. But he didn't know what a "Second-Circle lattice" was.
He knew what he would do in that situation. In the mud, if someone messed with your spell, you didn't do math. You dropped the spell, drew a knife, and closed the distance with [Flash Step]. Or, if you were desperate, you just pumped more mana into the spell and hoped it hit them before it blew up in your own face, relying on [Pain Nullification] to tank the backlash.
But he couldn't say that here. He couldn't tell the Head of Theory that his strategy was "stab them" or "hope I survive the explosion."
He had to give a mage's answer.
"If the ambient mana is disrupted..." Vane started, his voice rough. He grasped for the only concept he truly understood about magic: fuel. "You... you increase the mana input into the schema."
He tried to sound confident. "You overpower the disruption with raw density. Force the spell through."
For a second, there was silence.
Then, a stifled snicker rippled through the noble factions. It wasn't loud, but in the acoustically perfect hall, it sounded like a roar of derision. Even Anastasia's lip twitched upward in a faint, dismissive smirk.
Professor Vyla stared at him. Her expression didn't change, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop five degrees.
"Brute force," she said. The words dripped with intellectual disdain. "The answer of a barbarian. The answer of a hedge wizard casting parlor tricks in a swamp."
She tapped the diagram, and the simulated [Fire Lance] turned angry red, destabilized, and then exploded violently right where the caster's hand would be.
"If you increase input without adjusting the Second-Circle lattice structure to accommodate the pressure," Vyla lectured, her eyes never leaving Vane's, "the spell does not push through. It detonates at the point of origin. You would blow your own arm off."
Vane felt the humiliation burn his neck, but he kept his face neutral. He'd had worse things than words thrown at him.
"I have two arms," Vane said dryly.
The class erupted into laughter. It wasn't respectful. It was the laughter of the elite watching a peasant trip over his own feet at a royal ball.
Vyla waited for the noise to die down. She looked at Vane not with anger, but with profound disappointment.
"Sit down, Mr. Vane. And try not to get blood on my floor when your ignorance inevitably catches up with you."
Vane sat. He didn't pick up his pen. There was no point.
He looked at his hands—calloused, scarred, weapons in their own right. But in this room, they were useless. He was a creature of instinct trying to survive in a world built for intellect.
He was in the shark tank, and he had just bled in the water.