Chapter 27 - The biggest event of the year

A heavy silence hangs over the small waiting room where the five of us—me, Viktoria, Selene, Jasmine, and Arielle—wait for our turn to begin the exam. Each of the nine teams representing Astralea at the Inter-Academy Team Exam is placed in a separate room, waiting for a professor to call them into the arena. For events like this, the rule is absolute confidentiality. No one knows when their turn will come, how many teams have already gone, or what results they achieved. Above all, no one knows what kind of trial awaits. Well, technically we know one thing: we'll be facing a randomly drawn Class-B creature chosen from a pool of nine announced last week—one assigned to each participating team. Everything is arranged to ensure perfect fairness and prevent anyone from being influenced by the performance of other teams.