— Two days after the Examination.
The Letter Arrived at the Sixth Bell
King heard the postal runner's boots on the staircase, heard the knock three doors down, then two doors down, then his door. He was already awake—sitting at the small desk with the fixed window latch open an inch, watching the lower city come to life through the gap, eating a rice roll he'd bought from the morning cart downstairs.
He opened the door.
The runner—a teenage boy with a satchel and ink-stained fingers—held out an envelope sealed with the National Registry's grey wax crest. "Von Deluxh? King Von Deluxh, Examination Cycle Four-Twelve, registration number—"
"Yes," King said.
The boy handed it over. "Sign here." He produced a delivery log.
King signed. The boy looked at the signature, compared it to the name on his list, looked at King, looked back at the list with the expression of someone deciding not to ask follow-up questions, and left.
King closed the door.
He looked at the envelope.
National Registry of Avalon—Devas Branch. Classification Assignment and Mandatory Reporting Notice.
He broke the seal. Unfolded the letter. Read it.
Then he read it again, more slowly, because he wanted to be certain he understood what he was reading.
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
F-Rank classification, the letter said, carries a mandatory Labor Class designation under Section 4, Article 2 of the Devas National Talent Utilization Act. As a classified F-Rank citizen, you are hereby directed to report to the Labor Class Assignment Office, Second Tier, Rume Civic Building 7, within five business days of this notice. Failure to report will result in escalating penalties beginning with a fifteen-day civic detainment hold.
Mandatory, it said.
Labor Class, it said.
Failure to report.
King put the letter down on the desk. He picked up his rice roll. He took a bite and chewed it slowly, looking at the letter.
They assign people's entire futures, he thought. Based on one morning.
He'd known that. He'd read it in the transit pamphlet, the same one that had told him about the fountains. The examination result determined the course of a citizen's life. Those who tested low were assigned Labor Class. They couldn't bear arms, couldn't attend academies, couldn't advance in station.
He'd read it and understood it the way you understand things written in pamphlets—as information, as context, as the way the world apparently worked.
He hadn't connected it, specifically, to himself.
I need to go to the Academy intake office today, he thought. Not in five days. Today.
He finished the rice roll. Put the letter in his coat pocket. Put on his boots.
He went out.
---
The National Registry's Labor Class Assignment Office was on the second tier, in a civic building that sat between a tax records hall and a water usage authority—the particular neighborhood of Rume that existed to make people feel like their lives were being efficiently managed in ways they hadn't consented to.
King found it by following the signs.
The office had a waiting area with twelve chairs, nine of which were occupied. The people sitting in them had the look of early morning bad news—the kind you absorbed in silence, staring at the middle distance, because there wasn't much to say about it.
King took the last empty chair beside the door.
The person next to him was a girl maybe a year younger than him—red-rimmed eyes, a letter in her hands identical to the one in his pocket. She was reading it for what looked like the fifth or sixth time, as if the words might say something different if she tried again.
They didn't. He could see the letter clearly. F-Rank. Mandatory. Report.
Don't, he told himself firmly. You're not here to fix other people's mornings. You're here to fix your own paperwork situation.
He looked at the wall instead.
A notice board covered one entire wall of the waiting room, pinned with official documents in neat rows. Assignment procedures. Labor district listings. Exemption criteria—a short list, heavily formatted, in the smallest font size that was technically still legible.
He read the exemption criteria.
Active enrollment in or pending acceptance review by a certified Magic Knights Academy or elite Adventurer Guild training program constitutes grounds for temporary exemption from Labor Class mandatory reporting, pending verification of enrollment status.
He read it twice.
Pending verification of enrollment status.
He had submitted his Academy application six days ago. Arakawa had confirmed this. The intake office had his file. The question was whether they had processed it, and whether they had processed it before the Labor Class system had processed the exam results and generated his reporting notice.
Probably not, he thought. Given how long it took the Registry system to handle my classification at all.
He stood up, went to the front counter, and waited for the clerk.
---
The clerk was a thin man in his forties with the particular energy of someone who had spent years telling people news they didn't want to hear and had developed, from this, a kind of professional distance that was not unkind but was also not anything close to warm.
He took King's letter. Took his identification. Looked at the classification field.
His expression shifted in a small but specific way—the flicker of someone who recognized a name from a report that had crossed their desk.
"Von Deluxh," he said.
"Yes," King said.
The clerk looked at his classification field one more time: F-Rank—Unknown Variable. "You're the Evaluation Pillar incident."
"The pillar shattered during my examination," King said. "Yes."
"The incident report is still being reviewed." The clerk set down the letter. "The mandatory reporting notice was generated automatically by the exam results system. F-rank classification triggers the notice without human review." He paused. "Normally, this is straightforward."
"I have an active Academy application," King said. "Filed six days ago."
"I know." The clerk pulled a secondary ledger from beneath the counter. He opened it to a flagged page. "Your file was referred to us by Senior Administrator Hane two days ago with a notation requesting we hold your mandatory reporting clock pending Academy intake review."
King waited.
"The problem," the clerk said, "is that when we attempted to cross-reference your file with the Academy's intake system—" He stopped. He looked at the ledger. He looked up at King with the expression of someone deciding how to say the next part professionally. "The system crashed."
"The intake system," King said.
"Yes."
"When you entered my file."
"When we entered the Unknown Variable notation into the cross-reference field. The intake system is designed to process confirmed classifications. Unknown Variable is—" He turned to a specific page in the ledger. "—not a field it was built to handle. The crash corrupted approximately forty minutes of intake entries, which the technical team has been restoring since yesterday morning."
"I see," King said.
"It crashed twice," the clerk added, with the slight hollowness of someone reporting this for the fifth time and still not fully believing it. "The second time was when the technical team attempted a manual override."
A pause.
"Is the file restored now?" King asked.
"Your specific file is—being processed. Separately. By hand. On paper." He closed the ledger. "The intake office will send their enrollment decision by post within ten days of—"
"I'd like to go in person," King said.
The clerk blinked.
"To the Academy intake office," King said. "Today. If my mandatory reporting clock is on hold pending their review, I'd prefer to move that review along so the situation is resolved rather than pending."
The clerk looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at the nine people still sitting in the waiting area chairs, all of whom had actual mandatory reporting problems with no pending exemptions, none of whom had suggested going directly to the Academy to sort it out personally.
"The intake office is on the Academy's third administrative floor," the clerk said, carefully. "It receives walk-in appointments between the second and fourth bells, weekdays only."
"It's a weekday," King said.
"Yes," the clerk said. "It is."
"And it's between the second and fourth bells."
"...Yes."
"Thank you," King said. "You've been very helpful."
The clerk watched him walk out.
He looked down at the notation in his ledger: Von Deluxh, King. F-Rank (Unknown Variable). Status: pending. System disruption: 2x. Manual processing: ongoing.
He turned to the next page, then turned back.
He added one more note in the margin, in his own handwriting: Showed up in person. Polite. Untroubled. I have no further information.
He moved on to the next file.
---
The Academy's administrative wing was a separate building from the main campus—a three-story block attached to the outer wall, accessible through a public entrance that didn't require enrollment credentials.
King found it. Found the third floor. Found the intake office.
He knocked.
"Come in."
The intake office was small and full of paper. Not disorganized paper—carefully organized paper, in stacks, in labeled trays, in folders lined on shelves from floor to ceiling. A woman sat behind the main desk with the kind of systematic tidiness that said she had made peace with the fact that her job produced an infinite amount of documentation and she was going to handle all of it correctly.
She looked up. Looked at him. Something registered in her expression.
"Von Deluxh," she said.
"Yes," King said. "I'm—"
"I know who you are." She was already standing, moving to one of the shelves. She pulled a folder—a thicker one than was probably normal for a new applicant. "Your file has been—notable."
"I heard the system crashed," King said.
"Twice." She set the folder on the desk and opened it. Inside: his application, the Registry's incident report, Hane's holding request, three printed system error logs, and a handwritten summary page on top that read, in neat script, Handle manually—do not re-enter into system until further notice.
"I want to make sure my application is still active," King said.
"It is." She sat back down. "The Academy charter allows me to process enrollment independently of the Registry classification system in cases where a classification dispute or anomaly is on record." She looked at the incident report—the one with Arakawa's careful language about the pillar and the question mark and the shoe check. "Unknown Variable qualifies as an anomaly."
"So I can be accepted."
"You can be evaluated by the Academy's own assessment process," she said. "Which is separate from the Registry exam. If you pass the Academy's intake requirements—" she turned a page— "you receive Academy enrollment status, which overrides the Labor Class mandatory assignment for the duration of your enrollment."
"What are the intake requirements?" King asked.
She looked at the folder. She looked at the incident report. She looked at King.
"Normally," she said, "there's a secondary mana evaluation. Conducted by one of our senior staff. On an Academy-grade assessment artifact." She paused. "Given the circumstances, Senior Administrator Roland Knight has requested to conduct this evaluation himself."
"The headmaster?" King said.
"He flagged your file personally." She closed the folder. "He left a note."
"What does the note say?"
She turned to the last page.
The note was short. Two sentences, in a clean, even hand: I will conduct this student's supplementary assessment myself. Schedule him at my convenience, which is to say: immediately.
King looked at the note.
"He's available now?" King asked.
"He marked it available now, yes." She was watching him with the careful attention of someone who had worked in this office for long enough to know that the headmaster scheduling himself personally for a supplementary intake assessment was not a normal thing that happened.
"All right," King said.
She stood. "This way."
---
Roland Knight's office was on the Academy's highest floor, in a corner room with windows that faced both the inner courtyard and the city below. The bookshelves were old and full. The desk was large and organized in the specific way of someone who dealt with enormous amounts of information and had built, over decades, an exact system for managing it.
Roland himself was standing at the window when King was shown in. He turned.
King's first impression: a man who had seen a very large number of things in his life, had formed considered opinions about most of them, and was not easily surprised. Silver hair, neat. The particular stillness of someone who had spent years in high-pressure rooms and learned to be the calmest person in every one of them.
He looked at King the way you looked at something you'd read about and were now seeing for the first time in person—taking it in, adjusting the mental image, filing the update.
"Sit down," Roland said.
King sat.
Roland sat across from him. He had a small crystal instrument on the desk between them—palm-sized, a secondary evaluation tool, the kind used in private assessments. He looked at it. Then he looked at King.
"I read Arakawa's report," Roland said.
"I see," King said.
"The question mark was a detail that stayed with me." A pause. "That was not embellishment. He is not a man who embellishes."
"It wasn't embellishment," King confirmed.
Roland looked at the small crystal instrument. He looked back at King. "I'm going to ask you to hold this," he said. "You don't need to do anything. Just hold it."
King took the instrument.
The crystal stayed completely clear.
No color. No tone. No reading.
It simply sat in his hand, perfectly transparent, perfectly calm, perfectly empty of any reaction—the way a thermometer stayed blank when you hadn't put it in anything yet, except that King's body temperature was normal and the instrument was not designed to check temperature.
Roland watched it for ten seconds.
Twenty.
He leaned forward slightly. The crystal was doing nothing. It was, in the most technically precise sense possible, doing absolutely nothing—not failing to measure, not overloading, not generating any output at all. It simply had no response to offer, the way a scale had no response when there was nothing on it, except that something was clearly on it.
"Interesting," Roland said quietly.
Not distressed. Not alarmed. Genuinely, simply interested—in the specific way of someone who had spent forty years seeing the most talented people in the world walk through their office and had never stopped being curious about new things.
He took the instrument back. He held it himself. It immediately produced a clear blue-grey reading—his own classification, precise and immediate.
He set it on the desk between them.
He looked at King.
"You're not a threat to this institution," Roland said. It wasn't a question.
"No," King said.
"You're not here with an agenda."
"I want to attend classes," King said. "And I'd like to stay in the dormitory. I read that the cafeteria has eighteen different types of bread."
A pause.
Roland looked at him for a long moment with no change in expression. Then he opened the folder his assistant had brought up, turned to the enrollment form, and picked up his pen.
"Eighteen," he said. "Yes. The baker on staff has been here longer than I have." He signed the form. "Welcome to the Academy, Mr. Von Deluxh."
King looked at the signed form.
That's it, he thought. That was the whole problem. Now it's resolved.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me," Roland said. "I'll be watching your progress with personal interest." He set the pen down. "That isn't a threat. It's a statement of fact."
"I understand," King said.
He stood. Roland stayed seated, picking up the small crystal instrument again, looking at it. Turning it over in his hand. It produced his own reading in steady calm blue-grey.
He set it back on the desk.
"Mr. Von Deluxh," he said.
King turned from the door.
"The evaluation crystal this morning," Roland said. "The one you're holding now. Neither of them read anything." He looked at his desk. "That's not a malfunction. Malfunctions produce wrong answers. These produced no answer at all." He looked up. "There's a difference."
King met his eyes.
"Yes," King said. "There is."
Roland nodded once, like that confirmed something he'd already decided.
"First day orientation is in nine days," he said. "Don't be late."
---
Outside the administrative building, the morning sun had climbed fully above the mountain's eastern face and the city below was in full swing. The examination boulevard was cleared and ordinary again. The replacement pillar was gone—temporary fixtures came and went. The plaza looked like it always had. Nothing left to show what had happened there two mornings ago except a very faint circular impression in the granite that the city maintenance team hadn't noticed yet.
King stood at the top of the main steps and looked at the city.
Nine days, he thought. Until orientation.
Nine days was enough time to learn the fountain district properly. Enough to try every cart on the examination boulevard. Enough to find the baker that Roland had mentioned, who had apparently been making eighteen types of bread for longer than the headmaster had been running the school.
He put his hands in his pockets.
No mandatory labor assignment, he thought. Classification on file. Enrollment confirmed.
He started down the steps.
Somewhere in the lower city, Sora Aizawa was probably in a café with her results letter from yesterday morning—Unique Talent, B-Rank, Stillwind classification—writing observations in her notebook about fountains and pressure differentials and a student named King who had told her it was a reasonable assumption.
He wondered if she'd measured the tonal difference between the northern and southern clusters.
She probably had, he thought.
He wondered what she'd concluded.
He was, he noticed, genuinely curious about that.
Interesting, he thought—about the curiosity itself, the small clean spark of it. New. Specific. Aimed at a particular person's particular notebook.
He filed the feeling carefully.
Nine days.
There was a lot to eat.
---
In his office on the highest floor of the administrative wing, Roland Knight sat at his desk for a long time after King left.
He picked up his pen. He pulled out a separate personal ledger—not the administrative one, not the official record, just the small leather-bound book he'd kept for forty years, in which he wrote notes about students who stayed with him.
He opened to a fresh page.
He wrote: Von Deluxh, King. F-Rank (Unknown Variable). Enrolled.
He paused.
He added: The crystal produced no answer. No output. No failure. Nothing.
He paused again.
He added: He said "there is a difference" when I noted that distinction. He was correct. He did not seem surprised that I noticed.
He closed the pen.
He looked out the window at the city below.
Worth watching, he wrote at the bottom of the page.
He underlined it.
Twice.