The hall was enormous.
About a hundred tables had been arranged in long, precise rows, each one occupied by a candidate sitting very still with a paper in front of them. The ceiling was high enough that the overhead lighting felt distant. The walls were plain stone. The whole space had the particular quality of a room designed to make you feel small and watched and aware of the sound your own breathing was making.
Rudra sat at the last table of the second row.
He was terrified.
His hands were shaking. Not in a way anyone nearby might notice — small, persistent tremors that he kept pressing flat against his thighs and that returned every time he lifted them. His eyes were wide open in the way eyes go wide when the brain behind them is doing a lot of rapid recalculation and arriving at bad answers.
In front of him was a paper.
The first phase of the Soul Fighters entrance exam was a written test. Three hours. One hundred questions covering constitutional law, the history of Dev Lok and its conflicts, Soul Fighter regulations, procedural knowledge, and a section described on the cover page as "personality and judgment assessment," which sounded pleasant and was likely the most dangerous part of all.
Edward had taught them all of this. That was the honest, uncomfortable truth that was currently sitting in Rudra's chest like a stone. Every subject on the paper — every single one — had been covered in the six months of training. Edward had spent entire evenings going through the history of Dev Lok, the laws of the Soul Fighters organisation, the procedural frameworks that governed how fighters operated in the field. He had been thorough. He had been patient. He had, on more than one occasion, repeated sections specifically because Rudra's eyes had glazed over partway through.
Which was the problem.
Rudra had a very clear memory of sitting across from Edward while these sessions were happening. He had a considerably less clear memory of the content of those sessions, because his internal reasoning at the time had been entirely consistent:
*Why do I need to know the constitutional amendment of forty years ago to fight a monster?*
He had never arrived at a satisfying answer to this question and so had never fully engaged with the material, operating on the assumption that the fighting portions of the exam would compensate for whatever gaps the written portions revealed.
He was regretting this.
He stared at the first question. Read it. Read it again. The words were all individually familiar but their arrangement produced no meaning he could access. He moved to the second question. Same result. The third. The fourth.
The format was clear at least — one point for every correct answer, minus two for every wrong one. Which meant he couldn't simply attempt everything and hope. A wrong answer cost more than a skipped one. He needed certainty, and certainty was in short supply.
His first plan had been Arjun.
The moment he had found out the exam included a written component, his immediate and only thought had been: Arjun will know all of this. Arjun reads everything. Arjun had genuinely enjoyed Edward's history sessions in a way that Rudra found slightly baffling. Arjun was going to sail through this paper and Rudra just needed to be close enough to see it.
Then he had found his seat. Last table, second row. And Arjun — he had looked — was at the very front. First table, first row. Separated by the full length of the hall, in the direct eyeline of every examiner in the room.
There was no plan anymore. Only the paper.
*Let me skip the questions I don't know.*
He glanced at the paper.
*Skip this one. I don't know this at all. Skip this. Skip this. This one looks familiar but I'm not certain enough. Skip this. This one is really hard — skip this...*
He reached the bottom of the last page.
He looked back at the top of the first page.
Now there were no questions left to skip because all the questions had been skipped.
*I know nothing.*
He was close to crying. Not dramatically — just that specific, quiet pressure behind the eyes that comes when something you hoped for feels genuinely out of reach. He caught it before it became visible and pressed it back down through sheer stubbornness.
*I'm never going to become a Soul Fighter.*
Then, from the corner of his eye, he noticed the person sitting at the table directly beside his.
Loose clothing, slightly too large, worn with no apparent attention to how it fit. Black hair long enough to cover his ears, messily arranged in the way of hair that had been slept on without being dealt with afterward. Dark circles under his eyes so pronounced they looked structural rather than temporary — the kind that didn't come from one bad night but from a long-term relationship with insufficient sleep. And his hand was moving. Fast. Very fast. The pen crossing the paper with the confident, unhesitating speed of someone who has read this question before, answered this type before, knows exactly where they're going and how long it will take to get there.
*A study nerd. An absolute, genuine, dedicated study nerd. He might actually save my life.*
The person glanced up. Noticed Rudra looking at him. Looked at the angle of Rudra's gaze relative to his answer sheet. Made the correct calculation. Shifted his arm immediately to cover the paper.
Rudra looked at him.
He deployed every available resource. He let his eyes go wide and slightly glassy. He let the corners of his mouth drop to the precise position that communicated genuine suffering without being dramatic about it. He let the expression settle across his whole face — the face of a man who had tried his absolute best and arrived at a situation that was simply beyond him, and who had now placed his remaining hope in the hands of the person sitting beside him. A face, as these things go, capable of melting considerably harder materials than a rock.
The person stared at him.
Then he closed his eyes. Exhaled through his nose. The long, resigned sigh of someone making a decision they know they will regret and are making anyway because they simply cannot bear the alternative.
He moved his arm off the paper.
*You are a God. An actual, living, breathing angel. You have no idea what you have just done for me.*
Rudra copied with the focused, careful speed of someone who understands that haste produces errors and errors here cost double. He kept one eye on the paper and one eye on the examiner at the front of the room, moving only when the examiner's attention was elsewhere, going still when it swung back. His neighbour had stopped writing and was staring at the wall with the expression of a man watching his own exam score quietly collapse.
Three hours later, Rudra walked out of the hall into the open air and sat down on a bench.
His face, by any objective measure, told the full story. He was relaxed in a way that didn't fit someone who had just spent three hours not knowing the answers to a hundred questions. His shoulders were loose. His expression was open and unbothered. He looked, in short, like someone who had solved a problem they hadn't been expecting to be able to solve.
Arjun came out a few minutes later, spotted him from the steps, and crossed to the bench with a slight frown.
"Why do you look so happy?" he said. "I thought you didn't know anything."
"I didn't," Rudra said, with the tone of someone recounting a pleasant memory. "But a really nice person ended up sitting next to me."
At that exact moment, someone sat down on the bench behind them.
Rudra and the person behind him spoke simultaneously.
"I'm definitely going to pass!!"
"I'm definitely going to fail."
Both of them stopped.
Both of them turned.
Rudra found himself looking at a familiar face — loose clothes, messy hair, enormous dark circles, and an expression that had moved well past resignation into something closer to acceptance of a fate that had been sealed approximately three hours ago by an act of generosity directed at a complete stranger.
Arjun looked at both of them. Then at the expression on Rudra's face. Then back at the other person.
"Ah," he said.