The lecture hall for the Apex Tier was less of a classroom and more of a tactical command center. Instead of wooden desks, each student sat behind a console of etched quartz, capable of projecting complex three-dimensional mana-models into the air. The room was circular, placing the students on a steep incline looking down into a central pit where the laws of physics were often treated as mere suggestions.
Alaric arrived early, a habit born of his desire to observe the room before it was filled with the clutter of human presence. He sat in his designated center-seat, his hands resting lightly on the quartz surface. He didn't need to turn on the console; his telekinesis could feel the dormant mana-circuits beneath the stone, humming with the potential of the day's lesson.
As the other students filed in, the air grew heavy with the smell of old parchment and the sharp, ozone-scent of high-level mana. Ignis took her seat two rows up, her eyes lingering on the back of Alaric's head with a mixture of challenge and curiosity. Silas, the spectacled boy, was already frantically syncing his personal tablet to the room's main array.
Then came Squad One.
Caspian moved with the stiff, mechanical gait of a man walking into an ambush. He didn't look at Alaric as he took his seat to the right. Seraphina followed, her head bowed so low her silver-blonde hair obscured her face like a veil. Leo brought up the rear, clutching his bag as if it contained a live explosive.
"Good morning," Alaric said softly, not turning his head. "I've pre-loaded the spatial-frequency charts from the last three frontier reports onto our console. It might make the Professor's derivation of the 'Folding Point' easier to follow."
"I don't need your notes, Thorne," Caspian muttered, his voice low and jagged.
"They aren't notes, Caspian. They're data," Alaric replied, his tone conversational and entirely devoid of ego. "It's harder to hit a target when you're squinting at the math."
Professor Silas entered the room with a suddenness that made several students jump. He didn't speak. He simply slammed his prosthetic iron hand onto the central pedestal, and a massive, shimmering hologram of a Gate's Internal Architecture exploded into the center of the room.
"Most of the world thinks a Gate is a door," Silas rasped, his organic eye scanning the silent class. "They think you walk in, kill the monsters, and walk out. They are wrong. A Gate is a spatial stomach. It digests reality. If you don't understand the geography of the distortion, you aren't a hero. You're just a snack."
He pointed his metallic finger at the complex, swirling geometry of the hologram. "Someone tell me the 'Constant of Decay' for a Rank-C Gate during its maturation phase."
The room went silent. The Constant of Decay was a third-year theory, a mathematical nightmare involving the rate at which mana-crystals destabilize the surrounding atmospheric pressure.
Silas's eye landed on Ignis. She looked away. He turned to the boy with the spectacles. Silas—the student—began to sweat, his fingers hovering over his console as he tried to run a simulation.
"0.842 mana-units per cubic meter," Alaric said, his voice calm and steady. "But that's assuming a standard terrestrial atmosphere. If the Gate is underwater or in a high-altitude vacuum, the decay accelerates by a factor of the square root of the local gravity."
The Professor turned his gaze toward Alaric. A slow, predatory smile crept across his scarred face. "Correct. And how would you stabilize the exit-vent if the core is harvested prematurely?"
"I wouldn't," Alaric answered, leaning back slightly. "Stabilization is a waste of mana. If you pulse the local telekinetic field at a frequency of 440 hertz, you can essentially 'ride' the collapse-wave out of the rift. It's 30% faster and uses zero external crystals."
A collective intake of breath filled the room. The other Apex students looked at Alaric with a new kind of resentment. It wasn't just that he was stronger; he was making the very curriculum look like a child's workbook.
Seraphina gripped the edge of her console. Her mind flashed back to a different lecture, years in the future, where Alaric had used that exact same 'collapse-wave' theory to trap a legion of enemies inside a dying Gate. He had looked just as calm then as he did now.
"Thorne is right," Professor Silas said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "But he forgot one thing. If your timing is off by even a millisecond, the collapse-wave doesn't eject you. It shreds you. Squad One, since your leader is so fond of high-risk efficiency, you will demonstrate the 'Spatial Anchoring' drill in the lab this afternoon."
Caspian's head snapped up. "We haven't even reviewed the anchoring formulas yet."
"Then I suggest you listen to your Class President," Silas remarked, turning back to the hologram. "He clearly has all the answers."
The rest of the lecture was a blur of high-level calculus and spatial mapping. Alaric took meticulous notes, his telekinesis moving three different pens across his parchment simultaneously to capture different mana-spectra. He felt the radiating heat of Caspian's anger and the cold shiver of Seraphina's fear.
By the time the bell rang, the atmosphere in the room was toxic. The other squads hurried out, whispering about "The Prodigy" with sneers hidden behind their hands.
"You just had to do it, didn't you?" Caspian said, standing over Alaric as the room emptied. "You had to show off. Now we're going into a spatial anchor drill blind because you wanted to play the genius."
Alaric stood up, his silver hair perfectly in place. He looked at Caspian, not with the arrogance the boy expected, but with a look of sincere, quiet focus.
"I wasn't showing off, Caspian. I was answering the Professor's question to save the class forty minutes of redundant derivation. That time could be spent on practical drills." Alaric reached out, tapping a command on Caspian's console that sent the pre-calculated formulas directly to his personal interface. "I've already mapped the anchoring points for our squad. If you look at them now, you'll have four hours to memorize the rhythm before the drill starts."
Caspian looked at the screen. The math was flawless. It was more than flawless—it was beautiful, a streamlined version of the imperial standard that looked specifically designed for Caspian's aggressive combat style.
He felt a surge of vertigo. It was a trap. It had to be.
"I don't want your help," Caspian hissed, though his eyes lingered on the data.
"I'm not helping you, Caspian. I'm helping the squad," Alaric said, gathering his things. He looked at Seraphina, who was still sitting in her chair, looking paralyzed. "Seraphina, the anchoring requires a steady mana-flow from the rear. If you can focus on the heartbeats of the team, the math will follow the blood. You don't need to fear the numbers. Just focus on us."
He walked out of the room, leaving his squad in the wake of his terrifying competence.
Alaric walked down the obsidian hallway, his mind already moving to the next problem. He didn't understand why his excellence was being treated as a provocation. In his mind, providing the best information was the highest form of respect he could show his peers.
Hypothesis, Alaric mused, his violet eyes glowing with a faint light. The students of the Apex Tier define their self-worth through their relative standing to the mean. By shifting the mean so far to the right, I am inadvertently damaging their psychological stability. To rectify this, I must either lower my public performance or increase their capability until the gap is no longer perceived as a threat.
He stopped at a window, looking out over the Academy's sprawling training fields.
I will choose the latter, Alaric decided. I will make them so strong that they no longer have a reason to be afraid of me.
He didn't know that in the classroom he had just left, Seraphina was weeping silently into her hands, and Caspian was punching a hole into the quartz console. He only knew that the next drill was an opportunity to be the perfect leader—and Alaric Thorne never missed an opportunity.