“So, what can you do?” Derek asked. It seemed like a safe question that should still help him figure things out. “Can you go invisible or something?”

  Ye-in shook her head. “No, you just need to work on your situational awareness. I’m a High Human, which I think you are too …?”

  Derek nodded, so she continued.

  “… Also, I can read people really well, apparently that was a part of my mother’s [Class] back when she was a prison warden. You know, figure out who’s likely going to have a problem with me, and what they’re going to do. Also, I can heal just like you can and do this!”

  With that final announcement, a translucent plane of grey light manifested in front of her hand, shot through with dark vertical lines … like bars.

  “It’s pretty fragile if I keep it mobile, but the less mobile I make it, the tougher it becomes. One time, I caught a falling anvil on it.”

  “What?”

  Hardly the most articulate of responses, but what did you say to that?

  “Mom decided to get creative. Anyway, what can you do?”

  “You saw most of it,” Derek said. “Regen, hellfire, and a bunch of utility [Skills]. I can also phase through solid objects, but haven’t tried it yet.”

  To be honest, while he did have the mana to use the ability, the thought of getting stuck inside something terrified him in a way hellfire didn’t. Even if [Skills] like that had safety systems, part of him was still scared.

  “So basically, you’ve got the standard utility stuff everyone except hardcore warriors picks up eventually, plus hellfire,” Ye-in summed up. “That’s gotta be great.”

  Another forcefield flickered in place over her hand.

  “I mean, I like this too, but it sucks up so many [Skill]points, and it’s not something I’d have normally picked up.”

  Right. That was the big “limit” to the power of bloodlines. Anything they provided, their holder would get from them, not regular leveling. In other words, their benefits were a sort of “advance,” which meant that any sufficiently empowering bloodline would also eat up enough [Skill]points to permanently shape one’s future.

  Which was why Derek was so grateful that his own was almost entirely comprised of abilities he’d have focused on picking up on his own if he didn’t already have them, merely providing him the tools needed to gain a good [Class] of his own, rather than locking him into a given path.

  “I mean, you might be able to redirect your progression if you spend enough time doing something else?” he tried to offer.

  “Yeah, I know,” she sighed, closing her hand and making the force field wink out. “But it feels like I shouldn’t have to. I should be just able to work on being me, not fight to not be like her.”

  And now what were you supposed to say to that?

  Something, anything, that would change the topic seemed like the correct choice.

  “So, what do you want to do with your life, then?” he asked. “Me, I’m going to figure out where my brother already explored, then go somewhere else.”

  Ye-in laughed, only a small hint of bitterness in her tone. “Oh, you too?”

  She shrugged. “I think I’m just going to go off-world, then figure out what to do then. Go all ‘you can’t take the sky from me.’”

  Something about that phrase seemed familiar … oh …

  “That’s from the opening for the TV show ‘Firefly,’ isn’t it?” Derek asked.

  Ye-in started to smile. “I think the song is older than the show. You watch Firefly?”

  “New obsession,” Derek admitted. “I saw it on TV last week and watched it from start to end in one sitting.”

  They started talking about the show, then. Independence, finding your place in the world, and, of course, space cowboys. What wasn’t to love?

  Also, firm plans were made to visit some planets whose inhabitants had built their world with a “Western” aesthetic at some point in the future, once they were able to.

  While they talked, the room filled up, but any thoughts of large-scale socializing had long since fled his mind.

  Though after fifty minutes, the floor suddenly shuddered softly as space twisted and warped, the entire inside of the dome turning into a blur of lights and stone, as though viewing his surroundings through a broken pair of binoculars and the reflection in a shattered mirror.

  The weirdness only lasted a moment, however, leaving the randomly scattered groups of chatting teens evenly distributed across the room, while stone chairs were rising from the floor in neat rows, the proffered seats being quickly taken, while the windows in the ceiling shut to darken everywhere except the far side of the room, where an entire line of adults was standing.

  As with the students, most were Korean, but not all.

  And in the front stood a middle-aged woman who had most likely been old-ish during the initialization, because someone so low level as to have reached this age despite having been born afterwards would almost certainly not have been working here.

  “Hello, everyone,” she began, her voice ringing out clearly, audible despite the distance without any visible form of amplification system, to the point where it felt as though she were talking to him while a mere meter was separating them.

  “I am Kim Yerin, the Dean of this academy. Some of you may know who I am already …”

  Several people laughed, her identity and achievements well known, especially in Korea, but she ignored it and continued anyway.

  “… but for those of you who don’t, I am one of Korea’s thirteen S-Rankers.”

  Also, she fought the Leviathan, invented the enchantment that could locally block monster summoning, and was generally a terrifyingly powerful individual who would have been able to turn the entire city into a crater at the drop of a hat, had it not been for the fact that the majority of the other S-Rankers were also in the city.

  Because while humanity used letter-grades to provide a way to describe the power of people who were significantly stronger or weaker than their raw Level would suggest, “S-Rank” wasn’t just a title slapped onto the people at the top.

  It was a statement, a declaration that those who fell under its umbrella were so strong that including them would completely break the scale.

  And while the grade had purely been named that because that was what the highest grade typically was, over the past few decades, it had pretty definitively been retroactively declared as being short for “Scalebreaker Rank.”

  He had, of course, known who the dean of the academy he was going to was, and his sisters held the same rank, but that only slightly diminished the impact of seeing Kim stand up there, after having twisted reality into a pretzel with casual ease.

  And it was relatively well known that that was just scratching the surface of the ability she was publicly known to have, which, in turn, was only a fraction of what she could actually do, as most people tended to hold their cards close to the vest.

  Simply put, Kim could manifest mana into a physical shape, then transform it into just about anything else, mostly elemental energy.

  In other words, she could create just about every kind of spell at the drop of a hat, having all of magic save the most exotic of functions at her fingertips, capable of unleashing the grandest of workings effectively instantly.

  “You are all here because you’ve decided you want more out of life than just living it, you want to go beyond and take everything the [System] can give you, and it will be my pleasure to help you on that path.

  “But make no mistake, you will get out of this program what you put into it.

  “If formal qualifications are what you want, we are qualified to act as proctors for just about every official test there is, and have a training class for it.

  “If there is an idea about something that ought to be a [Class] and needs support to test that hypothesis, then we will provide that support.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “And if all you need is a place to train your ass off, with your only reward coming in the form of an impressive [Class] that you will walk out of the door with the moment you have it, we will consider your time here well spent.

  “On the other hand, if you plan on doing the bare minimum, you will get the bare minimum. It’s not us, the teachers, or some regulatory body who assigns [Classes], it is the [System] itself, and as you well know, the [System] rewards effort as much as it does results.”

  She then gestured towards the wall on her left, which had actually moved closer to the center at some point during the spatial warp, likely having “gained” some new rooms in the meanwhile.

  “Now, before we get on with the actual classes, we will be conducting a short assessment to ensure your chosen lessons are suitable for both you and your current spread of abilities. You have been matched with the correct set of tests, so please proceed down the line of chairs to the door at the end.”

  Then, Kim gave them a warm grin. “And welcome to Seoul Academy, everyone. I’m sure you will make us proud.”

  And with that, the teachers vanished, teleportation having swept them away, while the windows up above once again started to let in light, banishing the shadow.

  “I think they separated us by our stats,” Ye-in suggested after a brief pause. “Everyone I recognize in this row is a high human too.”

  “Makes sense,” Derek agreed, starting to make his way down the row of chairs.

  No one needed to assess their actual physical and magical capabilities; those would be known as the baseline stats for their various races would be a known quantity. How they could use the power they held, on the other hand, that would come down to the individual.

  Quickly, they reached the door, as there weren’t very many high humans present, and entered another room, which was basically just a smaller version of the grand hall they’d just left, albeit with transparent walls that revealed … rooms.

  Weird rooms.

  The first was basically just an ankle-height forest of wooden poles, the padded floor seemingly indicating that there was an expectation for people falling onto it from above, so you were supposed to run from pole to pole, or something like that.

  The second was basically a large sheet of ice on the floor, the third was a large block of an unidentified material sitting on the floor, while the fourth was more something along the lines of a classical shooting gallery.

  And, on the far side of the first room, was a man, clearly waiting for them.

  A white guy, clearly an adult but not an old one.

  “Alright, everyone, I’m Mr. Zillman, and I’ll be conducting this assessment. I’m going to make this simple,” he began, his accent … maybe American?

  Derek knew what Americans sounded like when speaking German and English, but he had no earthly idea as to how to identify an American accent in the Korean language.

  “In the first room, you’ll have to run across the tops of the poles. In the second, you’re going to have to walk across the ice without stepping on any patch thin enough to fall through. Then you’re going to push the metal block up against the far wall, and I’ll be waiting for you in the last one, where you’ll be able to demonstrate any magic you may have.”

  This seemed way too easy.

  “What’s the catch?” Derek wondered out loud to Ye-in.

  Quietly.

  But not quietly enough. Zillman had heard, of course, but normally, anything spoken at a sufficiently low volume was regarded as “private” and therefore ignored.

  “The ‘catch,’ Mr. Thoma, is that this isn’t about whether or not you pass or fail, though if anyone does manage to fail, that would likely lead to their place at this academy being questioned. No, this is about assessing your ability to leverage the abilities we know you have.

  “Now, I’ll go into the last room. When the door to the first room opens, the next person goes in, work out the order you take the test in yourselves.”

  Likely, that was, in and of itself, another test. So, as Zillman walked straight through the wall into the last room, Derek made a suggestion.

  “How about we just go in order of who’s closest to the door?”

  After all, things had wound up playing out in a way that they’d been given a clear order that way.

  There was a murmured round of agreement, and with that, one after another, they went into the tests, though the windows had gone opaque to provide privacy.

  There were still murmured conversations, but most of them seemed to be instead mentally preparing for the test.

  Then, it was his turn, though Derek managed to “run” through them in barely five minutes … which may or may not be a good showing.

  The tests themselves wound up being relatively simple. More difficult than they’d seemed at first glance, but not by much.

  Jumping from pole to pole was easy, especially after a childhood of clambering all over the place and nearly giving his parents heart attacks on the regular, leaving it easy in a way that made him feel like there was some more spectacular method he should have been using.

  Obviously, it was meant to assess how well he could leverage his Agility Stat, but was there anything more spectacular than literally running across the poles that he could actually pull off?

  Nope.

  Navigating the frozen “lake” was likewise simple; all he had to do was keep his balance and make sure to only step on the thick parts of the sheet. It was almost entirely a test of his ability to draw upon his Perception Stat.

  The test that was all about strength was actually slightly tricky, as the floor everywhere but beneath the metal block was both incredibly smooth and greased.

  It wasn’t about moving the metal, but rather doing so without falling flat on one’s face. Or, perhaps, just managing it with a minimum of forehead-on-stone collisions. He managed it with zero, but that was only because he’d had a bad habit of running across frozen lakes when he’d been younger, and had learned to do so without going sprawling … eventually.

  Which just left him with the shooting gallery, where Zillman was sitting at a desk, an old-fashioned pen, marking something on a piece of paper, likely the assessment.

  “So, do you have any magical or elemental abilities?” he asked, in a tone that heavily implied that he’d read Derek’s application and already knew the answer, but had to ask for the sake of protocol, and wasn’t too happy with that.

  “I can use Hellfire,” Derek replied.

  “Source?”

  “My Bloodline.”

  “And how long have you been training with it?”

  “It only unlocked it when I gained System access, but I haven’t really had many places where I can safely practice it,” Derek explained.

  “Sounds like someone with sense designed your bloodline, and you’ve got common sense,” the trainer commented, then gestured to the target on the far wall. “Shoot that, please.”

  Derek closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it stream back out of him. He’d done this a handful of times so far, usually with one of his sisters making sure nothing was going to go wrong.

  And there’d been one more time … the first time. Ten years ago.

  Then, he drew on his mana, pushed it towards his right palm as he raised it to aim towards the target, converted it into hellfire, and threw it outwards, black flames racing through the air, ready to devour anything they touched.

  After not even a second, the stream ended without him having done anything to make it so, his mana having simply bottomed out. For all the practice he’d done to master his control of mana, it didn’t quite translate over to using elements when he was a complete novice with them.

  “Control’s a little lacking, but you wrecked the target,” Zillman commented while Derek just stared at the mess he’d left behind. The paper target had been utterly obliterated, reduced to less than dust, but the wall behind it was more than a little scorched. Yeah, control was definitely something he needed to work on.

  But the effect of the blast had made him wonder …

  “Uh, can I ask a question?” Derek cautiously asked.

  “If we let you practice in indestructible rooms, you’d break everything in sight the moment you graduated,” the teacher said, having already guessed the question. “In all seriousness, you’ll probably wreck a lot of things. If that’s the only thing you break while you’re here, you’ll be the finest student this academy has ever produced. If that’s the only thing you break this week, you’ll still be a shoo-in for valedictorian.”

  With that done, Zillman looked back down upon his notes and nodded happily.

  “You’ll be happy to know that you’ve got a good grasp on your abilities, though you’ve obviously got some areas you can improve in, but those are mostly going to be covered by the classes you requested. You’ll get your finalized lesson plan sent to your email tomorrow.”

  Then, the teacher looked up again to meet Derek’s eyes.

  “Normally, this’d be the part where you join your classmates, but I have a note here that the Dean would like to talk to you about something that happened earlier …”

  Zillman reached under his desk and pulled out a paper map, then quickly drew on it to provide directions.

  “I wouldn’t keep her waiting. Good luck.”

  Oh hell …

  ***

  Five minutes later, Derek found himself sitting in an office literally overflowing with intricate and expensive-looking contraptions, to the point where he felt like even breathing in this room risked putting him into debt for the rest of eternity, to say nothing of the fact that the two other people in there with him were Kim and that aristocratic jackass Grandison.

  The dean sighed. “I’ll make this simple: attacking other students is not something we like to see at this academy.

  “Therefore, first of all, Mr. Thoma. I believe we both know that using hellfire in that situation was a dangerous overreaction, but considering that none of the wore outcomes came about, and that you are already enrolled in classes to help you control it, I don’t think further actions need to be taken, unless this turns out to be a pattern.”

  She looked at him expectantly for several seconds.

  … wait … was this really it? Be careful with hellfire, learn to control it? But what was she waiting fo- … oh, right.

  “Understood,” he said, and she nodded, turning to face the elephant in the room.

  “Now, Mr. Grandison. Bluntly put, you were raised as the big fish in a very small town, and the behavior you learned won’t fly here.

  “Now, were you in your hometown, with known local powers, fully aware of on whose toes you can and cannot tread, you’d be free to act the barbarian, with the only thing stopping you being common decency, because no one would raise their hand to you.

  “But here? Or anywhere foreign to you, for that matter? You have no idea who anyone is, what they’re capable of, and whether or not they’re likely to snap you like a toothpick if you get on their nerves. You’re just lucky it went badly in a schoolyard scuffle than in a …”

  “Oh come on!” the jackass yelled, causing Derek to sigh and pinch the bridge of his nose.

  Even if Derek himself had grown up to be a brat, he liked to think that he’d only have been spoiled, rather than being both spoiled and stupid.

  “Something funny, asshole?” the brat snapped, this time in his direction.

  Derek decided that the “proper” response was to simply put on a flat expression and raise a singular eyebrow. Which, of course, only set the little twerp off again, only for the sound to cut out a moment later as some kind of ability swallowed the tirade.

  “Thank you for that, Mr. Thoma,” the dean said dryly, only the barest hint of rebuke in her tone. “You can go. Though I do hear the class on de-escalation and conflict mediation still has some spots open.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Derek agreed as he headed out of the office. It was a useful skill to pick up, but only for other kinds of situations, because he didn’t feel all that bad about deliberately setting off Grandison.

  The “noble” was an ingrate, who deserved some “teasing” and, more importantly, Derek wasn’t “punching down,” as it were. Not in the context of their little spat, at any rate.

  And with that done … time to put the mess out of his mind, and head to what was starting to sound increasingly like a party.