Chapter 26: New School, Same Story
The opening ceremony was scheduled for nine in the morning.
Hundreds of chairs had been arranged across the courtyard. Uriel found his seat in the first-year column and let his gaze move across the crowd without purpose.
Identical uniforms. Identical colour scheme. Young faces, still unfinished.
Ordinary. Completely ordinary. Perfect.
He registered this satisfying fact, and then a voice arrived from his right, suppressed but enthusiastic.
"The uniform really suits Uriel — though if the collar were just a little—"
A pair of black-gloved hands reached across from his right side, expertly adjusting his collar, smoothing it flat, and then moving to brush off an entirely imaginary speck of dust from his shoulder.
Uriel went rigid. He turned his head.
Galatina was sitting right next to him, apparently having moved over without him noticing. Short hair tucked entirely under the student cap, brim pulled low. Same male uniform, same cut. Posture correct, back straight. If you disregarded the instinctive, deeply practised quality of that collar adjustment, she could pass for a perfectly ordinary and rather sharp-looking male student.
"Stop." He removed her hand from his shoulder, kept his voice low, and spoke through his teeth. "You are my roommate. My mate. As in: the guy who covers my blind spot in combat drills and shares my notes. Guys don't look at each other with that suffocatingly maternal expression."
"Is that true?" Galatina blinked, with the look of someone receiving genuinely new information. "But roommates compliment each other all the time, don’t they?"
"Not like that. Guys don't compliment each other like that. Go back to your seat and stabilise your roommate mode. You keep slipping back into Mom mode without noticing."
He had briefly considered saying guys just say bro you look kind of good today but then remembered that he was, in fact, her son, and redirected his gaze firmly toward the stage.
Fine. Ordinary. The person next to me is just a slightly enthusiastic ordinary male classmate. That is the entire story. Moving on.
The ceremony proceeded in sequence.
The headmaster spoke. The academic director spoke. Uriel propped his elbow on his knee, exhaled without much energy, and tilted slightly toward his right.
"Next will be a guest speaker," he said, directing his prediction at the air in front of him. "At least five minutes on 'the future belongs to you.' Then the student representative address at the end, which is the main event."
"How does Uriel know?" Galatina asked, ears perking up.
"Experience." He watched the stage with flat eyes. "And there’s always a pattern with the student representative slot. It seems to attract a very specific kind of person. A princess, or a duke's daughter, or the designated heir of some ancient bloodline. Ideally blonde. Imperious bearing. Walks like the floor is doing her a favour."
The emcee's voice rang out across the amplification array:
"— the student representative address will now be given by Her Highness Princess Angelica—"
A girl walked onto the stage.
Blonde. A small crown-shaped hairpin. A skirt with no wrinkles in it whatsoever. Full aristocratic bearing.
Galatina turned to him, voice low, eyes wide: "Uriel got all of it right!"
"That's not something to be proud of. It means the script is lazy."
He dug a finger into his ear, extracted whatever it found, and flicked it forward without looking. The student directly in front twitched, reached for the back of his neck, and scratched.
The address from the stage was fluent and well-worded. Near the end, the princess lifted her head and let her gaze pass over the audience.
A few suppressed voices from the front rows: "She looked over here—"
Uriel applauded politely, ten claps exactly, like a background character with no lines. Ten claps. Stopped. A flawless impression of a background character with no narrative function.
---
When the ceremony broke up, he stood, dusted off his trousers, and started toward the classroom building. Someone nudged his elbow.
He turned.
Galatina was beside him, looking up from under the cap brim with an expression of mild and genuine puzzlement.
"That princess," she said, just audible between the two of them. "She's very pretty, isn't she."
Uriel's step stopped for one beat. He looked at her for a moment.
"Don't go around commenting on people like that."
"I'm just saying," she said, falling into step beside him, the rhythm of it entirely natural. "You saw too, didn't you?"
He didn't answer. He walked faster.
I didn't look.
I am telling myself clearly: I did not look. She is, to the eyes of this school, the untouchable standard. The impossible benchmark every boy in that courtyard was staring at. She is not a girl in the eyes of someone like you, whose mother could flatten her without a warmup. From this moment forward I am an ordinary first-year student.
Ordinary.
---
The first class covered the ranking system — specifically the Adventurers' Guild structure.
Uriel sat in the third row by the window, chin in one hand, watching the middle-aged instructor sketch a tier ladder across the blackboard.
"Pay attention, all of you. Doesn't matter if you're a count's son or a once-in-a-generation prodigy — if you walk into the Guild at fifteen, you start at Stone rank. No exceptions." The chalk hit the board with emphasis. "Stone is Ranks one through five. Your first week you'll be finding someone's missing cat or clearing slimes out of a storage room."
"From there, Iron rank — five to ten. You can escort merchant caravans on safe routes, clear out a goblin den if someone's paying for it. Bronze rank, ten to twenty — now you're a working adventurer. You can take on ogre nests, low-level dungeon runs."
The instructor had the rhythm of someone who'd been there. The textbook version of this lecture sounded different.
Uriel took notes in the margins. The shape of it: Stone, Iron, Bronze leading up to Gold, which was elite — royal escorts, high-commission contracts. Above that, Mithril, Orichalcum, Astral. The instructor said the word monsters with appropriate gravity, like he meant it. And at the top, the Radiant tier. Living legends. If you met one, he suggested, you probably wanted to bow first and ask questions later.
Radiant. The tier of heroes.
His pen stopped on the page.
Something had shifted in the Observer.
When the instructor mapped rank to combat potential and made the system concrete — put numbers to it, gave it a structure — the passive skill that until now had only read raw aetheric flow seemed to update itself. A new layer loaded in, quietly, without announcement.
...Rank detection. It just cross-referenced the new framework.
He extended the sense outward, gently, and swept the room.
Most of his classmates registered as silver-tinted light — some brighter, some dimmer, but clustered in the same range. A few glowed with a fuller gold. The dimmer ones were probably bronze. The spread was narrow, the variation subtle; it was like a row of bulbs with slightly different wattages, all within normal operating parameters. By concentrating, he could probably distinguish a combat potential of 24 from a 28, though the effort cost something.
This is what a name-brand academy looks like. First-years already at the silver threshold.
He noted it with satisfaction. Then, out of habit, he let the sense drift slightly to the right and back.
Galatina was sitting there.
The corner of his vision went white.
—
Not metaphorically white. White in the way that bypasses metaphor and becomes a physical event — a sun dropped directly into his field of perception, aetheric density so saturated it registered as pressure, as heat, as something that had no business being inside a classroom.
TOO BRIGHT. ABORT. I asked for a general read, not a near-death experience — you are supposed to be a student right now, could you please exist at a normal luminosity—
He narrowed his eyes and dialled the sensitivity down, carefully, bracing himself, and tried to get a number.
Nothing.
Not ninety-nine. Not some implausible six-digit figure. Nothing — a complete absence where the readout should have been, the way a screen looks when it's been given input it can't process. Behind the blinding light, a blank that had no edges.
Detection failure. Either the gap is too wide for the skill to bridge, or the Hero's constitution actively resists it.
He looked back at his notebook. Pressed his pen down. Drew a line. His knuckles were slightly pale.
He tried again a moment later. Still blank.
Third attempt, same result, and this time the effort left him faintly winded. Probing at that magnitude consumed more aether than it was worth.
He put his pen flat on the page, moved his gaze back to the blackboard, and let his expression do nothing at all.
Noted. Mom is immeasurable. Filing this under: already knew that, moving on.
---
When the bell rang, Uriel was the first one standing.
He walked to the bathroom at a pace that could only be described as casually purposeful, went to the sink, and looked at himself in the mirror.
Water dripped from the faucet. He breathed in.
He aimed the Observer at his own reflection and probed, lightly.
If he couldn't read her, fine. But he could at least get a baseline on his own reincarnated body. Understand what he was working with. Establish a starting point.
Blank.
No number. No silver glow, no bronze, not even the faint warmth of someone who had never trained a day in their life. Nothing. The mirror showed his face and the Observer showed an empty display, a screen with no signal.
...
Okay. I expected not being able to read her. I did not expect not being able to read myself.
Am I genuinely below detectable threshold? Does the system not bother generating a readout for someone at Stone rank? Or am I some kind of edge case — a bug with no UI? A character whose stats panel never loaded?
He turned the faucet on and held his hands under the water and watched it move through his fingers.
Sample size insufficient. Comparison unavailable. Possibly the skill is still calibrating. Possibly I'm just a slow starter. Possibly I should stop spiralling in a bathroom and go to lunch.
What matters is I do not compare myself to my catastrophically overpowered mother. That is a comparison with no constructive endpoint.
He was about to close the skill and leave when a group of classmates came through, talking, and passed behind him in front of the large mirror on the back wall.
Out of reflex, he scanned them.
Blank. Blank. Blank.
Uriel stood very still.
...The mirror blocks it. The skill doesn't read reflections. I just spent five minutes having an existential crisis about my own combat potential based on a mirror.
I would like those five minutes returned.
---
The library occupied a standalone building on the east side of the campus.
Uriel went in the afternoon, during a free period. His objective was specific: the public record on past heroes. If he couldn't probe Galatina directly, documented history was the next best reference.
She was a former Hero. Whatever that meant in terms of formal rank, it put her at Radiant tier, no question. But the question that had been sitting in the back of his mind since the graduation corridor hadn't moved.
A person who could, by any reasonable measure, tear a hole in the sky. Hunted. Reduced to raising a child in obscurity in a forgotten corner of the countryside.
What did she actually do. 'Didn't listen to the people at the top' is the summary. That is not the full story. That is not even close to the full story.
He pushed open the library's heavy door and went inside.