It was lunchtime for the entire group of freshmen. The cafeteria was packed, everyone scrambling for food after that long, devastating exam. Some dissected every question. Some spiraled into quiet dread. Others had already mentally transferred to a rival school.
Ember stood in the middle of the chaos like a statue.
The air felt heavy — recycled oxygen and the sharp sting of her own failure pressing down on her. She had never failed like this before. Not really. Her whole life, things simply fell into place. She got what she wanted, when she wanted it, and no one ever pushed back.
Especially boys.
They always found her. Same script, every time.
"Hi, I saw you from across the room. I just had to say something."
And she'd deliver her line without even looking up: "Sorry, not interested."
It was almost boring how predictable it was.
But Landen was different. They hadn't even had a real conversation, and somehow he had already dismissed her — twice. It felt exactly like that failing grade sitting on her desk. Cold. Clinical dismissal. Useless. Loser.
He couldn't do that to her.
She wasn't going to let him.
The door swung open, and Landen walked in, muttering quietly to himself.
"Why didn't you wake me up?"
"I tried," his system replied in his head. "You didn't respond."
"I completely failed that test. Is there any way to reverse time?"
"No, not even the Gods can do that."
Ember was moving before she'd made the conscious decision to. She cut across the room and planted herself directly in his path.
"What is your problem?" she said, voice low and sharp.
Landen looked up.
The moment his eyes landed on her face — that close, that vivid — something strange happened. His eyes crossed. His hand shot to his temple, and he swayed like a wave of vertigo had hit him.
"Arghh, System," he thought urgently, "is she doing something to me? Some kind of ability? Why does my head feel like this whenever I look at her?"
"She is not," it replied.
"Then what is it? It's driving me crazy."
"I'm not sure myself. I'm not detecting anything unusual."
What the system couldn't see was the seal buried deep within Landen's mind — placed there by Bob long before any of this began. Throughout Landen's life, his greatest weakness had always been a simple one: a pretty face. Any beautiful girl who so much as glanced his way could knock him completely off course. It would take him ages to recover, to find his footing again, to remember what he'd been doing before. Bob had watched it happen too many times to count. It was the first thing he corrected when Landen accepted the system. The seal didn't erase attraction. It just... rerouted it. Scrambled the signal into something that felt, to Landen, uncomfortably close to nausea.
Ember stepped closer. "You clearly have a problem with me. So say it. What is your problem?"
"No offense, but… your face makes me gag."
A sharp silence rippled through the nearby tables. Several girls slowly turned their heads.
Ember's mouth opened. Then closed. She pivoted fast, grasping for something — anything — that made sense.
"It — It was you!" she said, her voice trembling. "You're the reason I failed that test."
Landen looked genuinely pained, one hand still pressed against his head.
"You distracted me." The words were falling apart as she said them. "With your — with your face —"
The cafeteria was loud. The crowd nearby caught only pieces.
"Wait," one girl whispered to the friend beside her. "Is she… confessing to him?"
"Oh my God," the other breathed. "She totally is."
"Oh, it's so romantic," another sighed. "It's like watching a drama."
But Landen wasn't watching her face. He'd squeezed his eyes shut, turned away, and leaned back like he was escaping a bad smell.
"Look — you got it wrong. You've got it completely wrong. I'm not the one." He was already moving. "Excuse me."
He slipped past her and broke for the food line.
Ember's instincts fired, ready to hit him. Her hand shot out to grab his sleeve, but he was too quick. She was left standing there, arm still outstretched, fingers closing around nothing. Her mouth was open. The words she needed hadn't come yet.
To Ember, it was a moment of pure, suffocating humiliation. But to the spectators watching from the back of the room, the angle told a much more tragic story.
"Oh my… she just got rejected," a girl murmured, her voice full of pity.
"That boy actually rejected the most beautiful girl in our year."
"Look at her," another added, shaking her head. "She's still reaching out for him. God, that's heartbreaking."
— — —
Two tables back, a girl named Cassidy had watched the whole thing with her chin resting on her hand. She was pretty in a quiet, understated way that people tended to notice after the fact — green eyes, the kind of stillness that made her seem like she was always thinking two steps ahead. And right now, she was.
Interesting, she thought, tilting her head slightly.
She'd seen Ember's natural gravitation absorb any boy's attention, only to leave them rejected and destroyed. No one ever resisted her charm. So watching that boy walk away — watching him physically recoil — Cassidy felt something shift in the back of her mind like a key turning in a lock.
He didn't even flinch for her.
She let her gaze follow him as he loaded up a tray — three servings, she noted, which was oddly charming — and dropped into a seat next to a group of boys he clearly didn't know. No introduction. No performance. He just… sat down and started eating. Confidence.
Cassidy straightened up slowly.
So that's what that looks like. Someone who doesn't play the game.
She pressed her lips together and said nothing. But her eyes didn't leave him.
— — —
Across the room, Mira had been half-listening while picking at her food, not particularly interested in freshman cafeteria politics. Then she heard the murmur ripple through the tables and looked up just in time to see the tail end of it — Ember still standing there, arm out, reaching for someone who was already gone.
Wait.
Mira sat up straighter.
She'd known Ember since orientation. Not as a friend — more as a force of nature you simply learned to navigate around. Ember didn't get rejected. That wasn't something that happened. It was practically a rule of the universe, like gravity.
Except apparently it just did.
Mira followed the trajectory backward. Found him at a table across the cafeteria, already eating, completely unbothered. Like nothing had happened. Like he hadn't just walked away from Ember Strife in front of a hundred witnesses and felt nothing about it.
Who does that?
A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth before she could stop it. She disguised it by taking a sip of her drink, glancing sidelong at him over the rim of her cup.
He wasn't even especially trying to be noticed. That was almost the most interesting part.
Yeah, Mira thought, setting her cup down slowly. I want to know who that is.
— — —
Landen, for his part, was entirely focused on his food.
The boys sitting near him exchanged a series of baffled looks. They'd watched the girls at surrounding tables slowly reorient — conversations pausing, eyes drifting — all in the general direction of one guy who was currently on his second plate and showing no signs of noticing any of it.
"Uh," one of the boys said carefully, looking around at the quiet gathering of attention. "What exactly is going on right now?"
The break had done nothing for anyone's nerves.
Fifty freshmen filed back into their homeroom in near silence, changed back into their regulation uniforms, and found their original seats without being told. Landen dropped into his chair and 56 materialized into the one beside him like he'd never left.
Ember went straight to her seat. She didn't dare to look around.
Professor Halvek stood at the center of the room, holding two documents in his hand. Beside him, Maris waited next to a wheeled cart covered with a grey cloth. Nobody asked what was underneath it.
When the room had filled, Halvek held two documents high with each hand.
"Moment of truth," he said. "Who's excited?"
The room went absolutely still.
"There are fifteen names on this list. The results are sorted numerically."
"The fifteen makes three teams of five. Those of you who find your number will see your scores, your classification, and your team assignment." He paused. "Please sit back down after you've looked. There's more to explain."
Another pause. Shorter.
"If your number isn't on the list — leave immediately," Halvek said, disturbingly smiling.
Maris stepped forward, took the sheets from him, and pinned them to the front board.
"Please come up," Halvek said.
Nobody moved.
It lasted longer than it should have — that strange collective hesitation, fifty people staring at a piece of paper ten feet away. Landen understood it. Not knowing felt like a kind of shelter. Then once you walked up there, you couldn't un-walk it.
56 stood up.
No urgency, no hesitation. He crossed the room, scanned the sheet for a few seconds, and came back. Sat down. His expression hadn't changed by a single degree.
That was enough for everyone else.
Students began moving in ones and twos, then in small clusters, the room filling with quiet footsteps and the rustling of people trying to take up as little space as possible. Landen watched from his seat. He watched a girl read the list and press her hand over her face before she turned away. He watched a boy come back and sit down — and noticed the slight difference in how he held his shoulders. He watched more people leave than stay. Far more.
A jacket stayed draped over an empty chair. Nobody came back for it.
Ember stood. She went to the front, read the page with the focused efficiency of someone checking something they already half-suspected, and then turned — not toward her seat, not toward the door — and her eyes moved across the room until they found Landen.
She looked at him for a moment.
It wasn't a smile. It was something more specific than that, something with a shape to it he couldn't immediately name. Then she walked back to her seat and said nothing.
Landen looked away.
The room was mostly empty now. Chairs sat at odd angles where people had pushed them back and had not bothered straightening them. What had been fifty was down to maybe twenty. The space felt different — larger, quieter.
Landen stood.
His legs felt strange under him. He walked to the front, telling himself, on some level, that his number wouldn't be there — that the walk was just due diligence, just so he could say he'd looked.
He found the page.
No. 28
Agility: 5th
Strength: 50th
Endurance: No score
Precision: No score
Energy Density: No score
Intellect (Written): 1st
Classification: Support
Team: B
He read it twice. Then he noticed the second page pinned beside it.
Team B
Mage: Ember Strife
Fighter: Joren Hale
Assassin: Elara Vesperine
Marksman: Veya Rune
Support: Landen Knight (*Captain)
"What!?"