Chapter 2

  This Just Got Interesting

  The waiting room was packed with so many future students that Gareth couldn't be bothered to count them. All of them pretending they weren't terrified. So he simply took a seat in the back row and stared at the ceiling.

  Boring. Completely boring.

  "Are you okay?"

  Gareth looked down.

  The girl watching him had chestnut hair pulled back in a neat braid and eyes the exact color of someone expecting a specific answer.

  Isolde Varen. Category: acquaintance. Narrative relevance: low.

  "Yeah," said Gareth.

  "You're acting really weird today." She frowned. "Considering everything you went through to get here, I thought you'd be more... happy, or maybe excited."

  Gareth processed that.

  'Dorian worked to be here..? He's not just the heir doing what was expected of him? That's... hard to believe... but also interesting, so it goes in the archive.'

  "I guess I'm so excited I don't know how to show it," Gareth replied, flatly.

  "Eh...?" Isolde stared at him, puzzled, because his answer made no sense whatsoever — his face wasn't showing a single trace of emotion.

  From across the room, a guy laughed without bothering to lower his voice.

  "Look at the Thornfield heir. What's wrong, Dorian? Nervous about your results?"

  Gareth didn't even turn his head. He didn't give it a second thought.

  The door at the far end opened.

  A man walked in. Gareth recognized him instantly. The instructor. His name was Aldric Voss. Somewhere in his forties, a horizontal scar above his right eye, the posture of someone used to being listened to without ever needing to raise his voice.

  "Welcome to the First Synchronization. What happens today will determine your initial rank. No tricks. No favoritism. The rank you receive today will stay with you throughout your entire first year at the academy, so give it everything you have."

  No one spoke.

  "Ranks go from F to S. Most of you will receive an E or a D. That's not failure. That's a starting point." A pause. "We begin."

  Gareth stared at the ceiling again.

  'F to S... NPC rank system. Very restrictive and limited. Nothing like the player level system that allows so much more freedom. How dull.'

  In the game, the world's inhabitants had fixed ranks. Players had levels they could raise without limit. It was the fundamental design that allowed the protagonist to eventually surpass any NPC, no matter how powerful.

  Except this time he wasn't the protagonist.

  He was Dorian.

  'Let's see how low this can go,' he thought, without any particular concern.

  He watched.

  The first student came out with rank E and a look of relief. The second got a D. The third, an E. The fourth, an E. The fifth got an F, and the silence that followed did more damage than any word could.

  When they called Roxanne, Gareth paid attention for the first time.

  His sister walked into the arena with the specific calm of someone who doesn't need to prove anything because she already knows what she can do. The creature assigned to her was a rank above standard. Roxanne didn't blink.

  What followed lasted two minutes and seventeen seconds. No patterns to read. No calculated angles. Just hits that landed before the monster could process they were coming — one after another, violent and destructive.

  Until she killed it.

  [Roxanne Thornfield — RANK ASSIGNED: C]

  The murmur that swept through the room was genuine.

  Everyone was surprised.

  Roxanne walked out of the arena, passed Gareth without looking at him, and returned to her spot with the same calm she'd entered with.

  'What's so impressive about that?' thought Gareth. 'It's just brute force. No mechanics. No intelligence behind it. Anyone could do that.'

  "Dorian Thornfield, you're next."

  Gareth stood up.

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  Nobody said anything out loud, but he noticed the stares. The specific weight of expectation that came with a last name. They were history. The kind of family whose heir was expected to come out with a high rank.

  He walked toward the arena entrance.

  The instructor stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  "The ring, Thornfield."

  Gareth looked down at his right hand.

  The ring was still in his pocket. He hadn't seen the point in putting it on.

  The instructor looked at him with the expression of someone who had spent years watching nervous students do strange things before an exam — but this particular thing felt new.

  "I don't think I need to tell you to put it on. Or do I?"

  Gareth put it on reluctantly.

  The effect was immediate: a faint pulse of light around his fingers, and then, spreading outward, a cloak that wasn't exactly visible but felt like a soft pressure wrapping around his entire body. A shield. Thin. But there.

  'Let's see what comes of all this,' he thought, without much urgency.

  He stepped inside.

  The creature was a Fourth Order Shadowgrasp.

  Three meters tall. Disproportionate limbs. No visible eyes. Oriented by vibration.

  Gareth looked at it from the center of the arena.

  The Shadowgrasp moved. It charged. Fast.

  Gareth moved his head three centimeters to the left. The attack grazed his ear.

  "Please," he murmured. "Could you not be so predictable? I know every single one of your attack patterns perfectly."

  The Shadowgrasp charged again.

  Gareth closed his eyes.

  The punch landed directly on his jaw.

  He staggered. He stood still for a moment with his head tilted, processing the sensation with an expression that wasn't exactly pain but something closer to genuine confusion.

  "Hold on... was that pa—.?"

  The second hit slammed him into the wall.

  The impact was absolute.

  He dropped.

  He lay on the ground for a moment with his cheek against the cold stone, lungs working to pull in air.

  "Alright," he murmured. "I'm starting to think this might not be a dream. Those hits hurt way too much for that."

  He got up.

  The Shadowgrasp attacked again. He dodged it this time — barely — and felt a sharp pull in his ribs as he moved.

  "Damn."

  He put some distance between them. Looked at his hands.

  He opened the system out of reflex.

  There was no system.

  Of course there was no system. He was Dorian Thornfield, not Mourgare. No interface. No cooldowns. Nothing telling him how much damage he'd taken or what he could do about it.

  The Shadowgrasp repositioned.

  'But if all of this is real — how is it possible that I'm here? How did I end up in this place? It's supposed to be fictional. Someone created it. Someone sat in front of a screen and wrote the name of this creature and decided how tall it was and—'

  The Shadowgrasp charged.

  He dodged on instinct. Badly. The cloak absorbed the blow and he felt the pulse of energy draining away.

  No time for existentialism.

  'Thornfield family. Their attribute is plasma. I remember now. I just need to channel the spells through my voice.'

  Gareth looked at the sword in his hand. It wasn't his weapon. Mourgare used daggers. He had spent years with daggers, had mapped every possible combo with daggers, and a sword was an entirely different instrument with a different weight and a different rhythm that didn't belong to him.

  But the spells could imbue it.

  If he said the words out loud.

  There were three basic imbuing spells in the Thornfield compendium. He remembered them because his brain didn't know how to filter information by relevance. They were just sitting there — stored only because of his strange memory, since he had never planned to use them.

  But everything had changed now.

  Gareth closed his eyes for a moment.

  "Volt!"

  'How embarrassing to say that out loud...'

  His voice sounded strange. Too hesitant. Like someone reading aloud a word from a language they had never studied. The ring pulsed and the sword's edge lit up with electricity crackling along the blade.

  'I'm going to have to stoop to using brute force... I'll regret this later.'

  He moved to attack, but the Shadowgrasp caught him from the side. The cloak gave out. Gareth bounced off the floor, rolled two meters, and ended up on his knees with the sword still in his hand.

  "Volt!" he repeated, this time with more conviction than he actually felt.

  But the sword barely flickered.

  "You've got to be kidding me," he muttered.

  Then the Shadowgrasp hit him again, knocking him down one last time.

  [COMBAT ENDED]

  [RESULT: DEFEAT]

  [RANK ASSIGNED: F]

  "Thornfield." The instructor's voice. Neutral. "Out of the arena."

  The waiting room received him with the kind of silence that comes right before something worse.

  "F," someone said. Not quietly.

  A laugh. Then another.

  "The Thornfield heir. Rank F." A theatrical pause. "Can you believe it? It's almost like a bad joke, haha."

  "This is going in the history books."

  "You're right, no one's ever going to forget this."

  "His father's going to be devastated."

  Gareth kept walking without stopping. His attention was completely somewhere else.

  'This is real.'

  He left without looking back.

  ***

  Lord Victor Thornfield was waiting in the corridor.

  Rank S+. The strongest Sentinel alive. Leader of the Eternal Blades. The most influential NPC in the entire family. And right now he wore the expression of someone whose patience had reached its absolute limit.

  "Explain to me what just happened in there." The calm in his voice more threatening than any volume could be. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

  "Great."

  Gareth wasn't answering him. He was just assessing the situation.

  "Great?" Victor's voice dropped a register. "That's all you have to—"

  "Hm?"

  Victor grabbed him by the collar.

  Gareth blinked. Looked at the hand. Calculated the tension in the knuckles, the angle of the grip, the exact pressure that communicated 'What does he plan to do? Is he going to hit me or something?'

  "Victor."

  Lady Elizabeth appeared with the quiet speed of someone who always knows exactly when they need to show up. One hand on her husband's arm. Gentle.

  "It's the first synchronization. Ranks aren't final. He can improve in the second one."

  Victor let go of the collar. He kept his eyes on Gareth.

  "The least I expect right now is an apology."

  Gareth considered his options. He had exactly one that wouldn't complicate things.

  "I'm sorry," he said, with the enthusiasm of someone reading a phone number out loud.

  "You're a disgrace." The words weren't loud. They were worse than that: precise. "A blow to this family from someone who doesn't deserve the name he carries."

  A pause.

  "I hope you're proud of yourself."

  He left.

  His footsteps faded down the corridor and nothing remained but the stone silence and the smell of torches that burned without smoke.

  Then lighter footsteps. Two pairs.

  Lady Elizabeth stopped in front of him. She looked at him with those eyes the game described as capable of reading lies before they finished forming. She said nothing. Just studied him, with an expression that wasn't quite concern — it was something closer to 'I'm seeing something I don't know how to name yet.'

  Then she walked on.

  Roxanne passed him a second later. Without a word. Just that flat, unreadable calm of someone who has decided that other people's problems don't affect their ecosystem.

  And she was gone.

  Gareth stood alone in the corridor.

  He felt something that took him a moment to identify, because he hadn't felt it quite like this in a long time.

  It wasn't fear.

  It was the same exact pulse from when he had played the game for the very first time.

  The feeling of something completely new.

  That made him smile.

  "This just got very interesting..."