By early afternoon, the surviving candidates — noticeably fewer than that morning, several having withdrawn or been quietly disqualified for medical reasons — filed into a long, cool stone hall lined with writing desks. A different instructor stood at the front, thin and severe-looking, a stack of papers tucked under one arm.
"Trial of the Mind," she announced, in a voice considerably quieter than the proctor's but somehow no less commanding. "You will have one hour to answer the questions before you. Formation tactics, terrain assessment, creature weaknesses, supply logistics. A sword arm without a mind behind it is a liability to everyone standing near it."
Stephan stared down at the paper in front of him like it had personally wronged him.
The first question read: A patrol of five soldiers must cross open terrain known to house wyvern nests. Describe the optimal formation and reasoning.
Stephan wrote: Just run really fast and hit the wyvern really hard.
The second question asked him to identify the weak point of an armored troll from a diagram. Stephan drew an arrow pointing at the troll's face, then, after a moment of consideration, drew a second arrow pointing at the troll's other face, just in case there was some ambiguity about which face he meant.
The fifth question asked what a candidate should do if separated from their unit in hostile territory at night. Stephan's answer, in full, read: Find the loudest fight and go stand in the middle of it. Someone will notice. Eventually.
Question eleven asked him to list three supply considerations for a week-long march through mountainous terrain. Stephan listed: food, more food, snacks.
Question fourteen asked him to explain the strategic value of maintaining formation discipline under archer fire. He stared at it for nearly ten minutes, chewed on the end of his quill until it splintered, and eventually wrote: Formations are for people who get hit by the first arrow. I don't plan on being there when it lands. The severe instructor, reading it later, would underline this answer twice, though whether in horror or something resembling respect, nobody present could say for certain.
By the time the hour ended, he had answered twelve of the twenty questions, at least four of which simply said "hit it" in various phrasings, and one of which he'd apparently given up on halfway through and instead drawn a reasonably detailed picture of Ember.
The severe instructor collected his paper last, glanced over it, and did not change expression even slightly. That, somehow, felt worse than if she'd laughed.
"Candidate Gojo..." she said, not unkindly, "Has it occurred to you that thinking before a fight might occasionally help you survive it?"
"It's occurred to me plenty," Stephan admitted. "I just usually decide against it before I finish the thought."
She stared at him for a long moment, made a small mark on his paper, and moved on without another word. Stephan chose to interpret the silence as a win, mostly because the alternative was too depressing to consider.
***
Elsewhere, in a cluttered workshop smelling of hot metal and ozone, Bruce was beginning to suspect he'd made a mistake.
It had started reasonably enough. Elrick had found him wandering near the tinkerer's hall that morning, taken one look at the modifications on Stephan's sword — modifications Bruce had proudly explained in detail — and declared, with genuine enthusiasm, that they simply had to work together. Bruce, flattered and more than a little starstruck at the idea of collaborating with an actual rune-mage, had agreed immediately.
Three hours later, he was elbow-deep in a crate of scrap components, sorting rune-etched plates by size while Elrick sat nearby, feet up on a workbench, "supervising."
"How exactly is this teaching me anything?" Bruce asked, wiping sweat from his forehead.
"Foundational work," Elrick said serenely, not looking up from the apple he was eating. "You have to understand your materials before you can understand the runes that go on them. It's very important. Very foundational."
"You said that about the last three tasks."
"Because it's been true three times in a row. Remarkable, really."
Bruce narrowed his eyes, sorting through a very specific, dawning suspicion that he was being used for free labor under the thinnest possible educational pretense. He glanced over at Elrick. He was sitting comfortably, unbothered, and entirely too pleased with himself.
"...You're doing this to Xavier too, aren't you?"
"I have no idea what you mean."
"You absolutely do."
Elrick just smiled around a mouthful of apple and gestured vaguely toward the next crate. "Foundational work, young Roswelle. Keep sorting. Once you've finished this crate, there's a second one. Slightly bigger."
"...There's always a second one, isn't there?"
"There is very often a second one, yes."
Bruce sighed, the particular sigh of a man who had just fully understood the shape of his own week, and reached for the next rune plate anyway. Whatever this actually was, it wasn't nothing. The plates were genuinely fascinating up close, etched with lines of script finer than anything he'd worked with before, and some small, stubborn part of him refused to admit he was having a strange sort of fun regardless.
"While we're doing foundational work," Bruce said, holding up a plate to the light, "can you at least tell me what these are eventually going to be part of?"
"Nope."
"Not even a hint?"
"A hint would ruin the foundational nature of the work." Elrick took another bite of his apple, entirely unbothered by his own logic. "Also, I genuinely haven't decided yet. I have several crates of parts and no plan whatsoever. This is less a lesson and more a very slow, very expensive form of procrastination."
Bruce set the plate down very carefully, as if setting it down loudly might somehow make the situation worse. "...I've been sorting scrap for three hours for a project that doesn't exist."
"When you say it like that, it sounds much worse than it is."
"How is it better than that?"
Elrick considered this for a genuinely long moment. "It isn't. But you've met some very nice rune plates in the process, so I'd call that a fair trade."