Chapter 836: The First Paper
Chapter 836: The First Paper
After Liam’s encounter with Chris in the cafeteria, the rest of the day passed with surprising smoothness.No one else approached him with unwanted conversation. Chris did not make a second attempt at provocation, at least not where Liam could see or hear it, and if the students who had witnessed the cafeteria exchange were spreading their own versions of it, they were doing so far enough away that Liam did not have to care.
He returned to his study, finished reviewing another section of the Eldervale guide, and let the day collapse into the kind of quiet routine he preferred when the academy was not actively creating problems for him.
The weekend ended the same way.
Not peacefully, exactly, because peace was apparently too generous a thing to expect inside Dark Knight Academy during examination season, but steadily. Students studied until their eyes reddened, trained until their bodies protested, reread notes they already knew, and asked questions they should have asked weeks earlier.
The second-years remained consumed by the Bastion Assessment, but Theory week had finally come close enough to seize everyone by the throat. No matter how important Eldervale was, they still had to survive the papers before they ever reached the realm.
By the time the new week began, the entire academy had settled into final preparation.
Breakfast that morning was louder than usual, but not with ordinary energy. It was the brittle noise of students trying to outrun nerves. First-years spoke too quickly about whatever their foundational exams would involve. Third-years looked more controlled, though some of them carried the hollow-eyed exhaustion of people who had studied through the night and were now surviving on pride, caffeine, and resentment.
The second-years sat between both extremes, old enough to understand the academy would not be merciful and young enough to still hope it might be slightly less cruel than expected.
It would not be.
After breakfast, each year was assigned to a separate grand hall for the first paper of Theory week: Core Myst. It was the one paper shared across all class tracks, and therefore the one the academy treated with the most weight. Combat styles, affinities, weapons, and specializations could differ, but Core Myst was the foundation beneath all of them.
If a student did not understand Myst flow, core stability, channel pressure, resonance, backlash, density, conversion, and depletion, then every advanced class built on top of that ignorance became more dangerous than useful.
Half an hour after breakfast, the second-years were seated in their assigned hall.
The room was wide, high-ceilinged, and severe in its arrangement. Long lines of individual desks stretched across the polished floor, each separated by enough space to make whispering impractical and copying nearly impossible. The academy crest hung behind the front platform, dark and imposing beneath the tall windows.