(Week 3. Combat Assessment Hall, Shinmyung Academy)
Master-Rank Hunter Song Jihyun ran the Monday combat drills with the focused displeasure of a man who had requested assignment to an active Gate front and been given a classroom instead. He was thirty-eight, compact, precise, and evaluated students with a bluntness that the Academy described in its materials as "direct feedback culture" and that the students described as something less polite.
He had formed an opinion of Ryu Seok in approximately six minutes during the intake week: scholarship student, F-Rank physical assessment, tactical thinking slightly above average, no notable qualities. He revisited this opinion at the beginning of every session and found no reason to change it.
Ryu Seok considered this ideal.
The Monday drills ran in pairs: one attacker, one defender, contact sparring under mana-dampening conditions designed to level the field between different rank potentials. The intent was to develop fundamental physical technique before students leaned on their awakening abilities. In practice it was a display of who had been training since childhood and who hadn't, which was another way of sorting the students whose families had resources from the students who didn't.
Ryu Seok was paired with a boy named Choi Wonjun: sixteen, broad, C-Rank potential, and clearly trained in a formal martial arts system that his family had spent money on. He entered the sparring circle with the calm confidence of someone who expected this to be easy.
Ryu Seok looked at him across the circle and thought: I need to lose convincingly and land maybe two exchanges that look like luck.
He lost in two minutes and forty seconds.
He was also, in those two minutes and forty seconds, clearly better than his rank suggested, twice catching angles that a true F-Rank would never have seen, twice placing his feet in positions that were, if you knew what you were looking at, not the positions of someone without combat instinct. Both exchanges he finished badly, by design. But they were there.
Song Jihyun watched from the edge with the slight narrowing of eyes that meant he had noticed something he hadn't expected.
Ryu Seok had calculated this. A complete non-entity provoked no interest and no investment. Someone who lost in a way that suggested buried potential provoked a specific kind of instructor attention, the kind that gave you access to extra resources without raising flags at the institutional level.
"Dravon," Song said, using the orphanage surname that Ryu Seok had registered under because the system did not require a family name he didn't have. "Your footwork in the third exchange."
"I got lucky," Ryu Seok said.
"Twice."
"It happens."
Song looked at him with the expression of a man choosing between two versions of a story and not yet certain which one was true. "Extra conditioning sessions. Tuesdays and Thursdays, sub-level gym, six a.m."
"Thank you, sir."
Access to the sub-level gym. Monitoring too light to be useful above the basic attendance sensors. Granted.
Ha Serin, sparring in the adjacent circle, had also been watching.
She didn't say anything. She won her own match in forty seconds, a clean, efficient takedown that suggested she found the whole exercise somewhat beneath her current abilities, and returned to the observation line without expression. But as she passed him she slowed by one step, and said, quietly, not quite looking at him: "You're doing something. I don't know what yet."
"I lost a sparring match," Ryu Seok said.
"You lost a sparring match the same way a very experienced boxer loses to someone for the purpose of not showing his hand." She walked on. "I've seen it before. My father does it."
He watched her go.
In his original life, he had not spoken to Ha Serin until she was twenty-two and he was twenty-eight, and the conversation had been a tactical briefing about Northern Gate defense lines. He had never known what she'd been like at seventeen. What she'd been able to see.
He revised several plans accordingly.
That evening he pulled up the System and ran a check on his progress.
[Iron Veil Unlock Rate: 1.9% → 2.4%]
[Skills Available: Combat Sensing (Passive, Tier 1)]
[New Skill Unlocked: Breath Control (Passive)]
Small increments. But he had six months before the world changed, and fifty-one years had taught him what small increments compounded into.
The sub-level gym was better equipped than the mechanical room, actual impact pads, resistance frames, a small cultivation mat designed for mana pathway exercises. Song ran the supplemental sessions without the ranking pressure of the main drills, which meant Ryu Seok could push his physical limits slightly more without it reading as suspicious.
He had always been a better fighter than he was a student. In his first life he had resented formal instruction, had walked out of three different guild training programs because the pace was too slow and the instructors too certain about things they were wrong about. He understood now what that had cost him: not in skill, he had found the skill eventually, but in the five years he had wasted finding it alone when someone else could have shortened the path.
He absorbed Song's corrections with the focus of a man who understood that even things he already knew could be refined by the perspective of someone teaching them. He was not the most talented student in the sub-level gym. He was the most attentive. There was a difference, and in his experience, attentiveness compounded over time in ways that raw talent did not.
By the end of the third week, Song had stopped explaining corrections and started simply demonstrating them, the particular shorthand that instructors developed with students they trusted to follow without narration. Ryu Seok treated this as the small, significant victory that it was.
He went to sleep at ten and trained in the mechanical room at two and was in Song's session at six with the face of someone simply trying to improve.
Nobody watched him.
That was exactly what he needed.