[Time]: Day 32 of Enrollment, 08:10 AM[Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Lecture Hall 7
The silence stretched. The air in the lecture hall grew heavy, filled with the malicious anticipation of three thousand geniuses waiting to see another failure.
Even Victoria, sitting behind, leaned forward slightly, sensing the abnormality in the atmosphere. Why hasn't she said 'Fail' yet?
Then, the corner of Nino's mouth twitched imperceptibly, a flicker of grim amusement, as if she had found a specific, oddly shaped tool in a pile of junk.
Nino withdrew her terrifying gaze and tapped her finger twice on Hathaway's desk.
Tap. Tap.
"You."
Nino skipped the flawed execution and the abysmal 7.8-second clear time, reached into her sleeve, and tossed a second [Full Allowance Application Form] directly onto the desk.
"Ludwig. You handle miscellaneous processing."
The paper slid across the wood, stopping right next to Hathaway's trembling hand.
For a heartbeat, the hall went dead silent. Then, the collective shock shattered the quiet.
This time, the crowd's expression had morphed from hungry anticipation into utter, logic-defying disbelief.
Hathaway heard a sharp, audible intake of breath from directly behind her. The sound was Victoria’s "Standard Answer" worldview cracking.
Wait. Hathaway blinked, staring at the form. She didn't care about the jitter? She recognized me.
A sudden realization hit her.
It was the Napkin.
Heidi Lucent had done more than "mention" her. She must have stamped a metaphorical VIP pass right on Hathaway's forehead.
The Balor Witch stood up abruptly, her tail flicking sparks, unable to process the blatant injustice: "Professor! I object! I accept the Wellington, but this Ludwig, her time was 7.8 seconds! Why choose her over me?!"
Nino slowly turned around.
She kept her gaze off the angry prodigy, tilting her head, grey eyes radiating arrogant indifference.
"Object?" Nino echoed, as if she had just heard a mildly amusing joke.
She offered no justification for Hathaway's merits, partly because there were none, and no excuses about "compatible wavelengths" to soothe the wounded egos of the elite.
She stated flatly:
"This is my lab. My funding. My project. Do I need to explain my choices to a bunch of Amoebas?"
The entire hall flatlined.
This was the privilege of a Nominee for [The Axiom of the Water Dragon].
Nino cast a sideways glance at the Balor Witch who wanted to speak again, her voice cold:
"If you feel it's unfair, you can complain to the Academic Affairs Office. Or... go reincarnate into a species I find aesthetically tolerable."
With that, she walked straight toward the door.
"Report to Lab 606 after class. Don't be late. Wellington. And... Ludwig."
Nino reached for the door handle, then paused. She glanced at the mechanical clock on the wall, her grey eyes narrowing slightly.
"By the way," she added, her voice flat, as if remembering to feed a goldfish. "Today's lecture content is 'The Fluid Dynamics of Mana'. The notes are on the board."
Snap.
She snapped her fingers. In an instant, the massive, three-story-high blackboard behind the podium was completely overlaid with densely packed, terrifyingly complex formulas.
Chalk dust had no time to fall; the sheer volume of knowledge was imprinted onto the slate by brute force. It was enough calculation to make a normal scholar vomit blood.
"Copy it down. Learn it. I'll test it next week. Class dismissed."
The classroom door closed.
Click.
The sound echoed in the silence, leaving behind a room full of genius SSRs whose foundational realities had just been fundamentally shaken.
Hathaway gripped the funding form in her hand, her heart racing.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
What is the ultimate Power Fantasy?
Knowing the system is rigged entirely in your favor.
You tried your hardest, burned your brain, and scored a Perfect 100 to get the reward. I barely passed, scored a 60, but because I know the developer, I got the exact same loot.
It was shameful. It was unfair. And it felt fantastic.
She subconsciously pressed a hand against the inner pocket of her coat, where Heidi's Napkin Booklist sat warm against her ribs.
Sorry, Victoria, Hathaway gloated silently in her heart, though her face showed no apology. Technically, you won the Duel of Skill... But in this slaughterhouse, the one holding the VIP Ticket takes all.
She fought back a savage, delighted grin, masking it behind a polite cough. She had won the lottery. She had cheated the system.
But as the momentary high faded, the atmospheric pressure in the room plummeted. The previous silence had been stunned; this one was heavy, sharp, and lethal.
It was the collective realization of three thousand geniuses that the game had been rigged before the server opened, and their accounts had never had login rights.
Nino Lucent had walked in, glanced at exactly four people in the front row, picked a Wellington, handed a VIP pass to a Ludwig, and walked out.
To the absolute elite of Yggdrasil Academy, the violent subtext was clear: If you aren't sitting in the first row, you don't even exist in my peripheral vision.
Hathaway could physically feel the weight of three thousand shattered egos transmuting into cold, analytical fury, thousands of glares boring into her spine. They recognized gross nepotism when they saw it.
They are wondering what I paid, Hathaway realized, keeping her posture stiff as the invisible weight pressed down on her. And they are simultaneously realizing the most horrifying truth of academic politics.
If you wanted a spot natively, you could usurp a genius like Victoria by practicing harder and executing with a tighter error margin.
But a VIP hire? Connections were bulletproof.
Every genius in the room knew the bitter reality. Victoria could theoretically be fired the second her hands shook, or if she accidentally contaminated a single lab sample.
But the girl who just bought her way in with an invisible VIP ticket? She was the absolute safest person in the room. Competing with the system was pointless when the system belonged to her sponsor.
Seeking a moment of confirmation, Hathaway turned her head halfway back to glance at the true winner of the skill check.
But the moment she made eye contact, she froze. Those unfocused blue eyes were locked dead onto the hand Hathaway had pressed against her chest.
Victoria looked up. She adjusted her gloves, her aura shifting from "Indignant Rival" to "Wary Respect."
The silent message was deafening:
"Ah.
"The Napkin.
"I see... You didn't play a game of Skill. You played the Political Card."
Busted, Hathaway thought, suppressing a nervous smirk.
Before Hathaway could process the victory, the atmosphere shifted again, logical analysis giving way to physical hostility.
A strange numbness seized her right hand. A layer of grey, decaying frost silently crept across the boundary of the desk, invading her territory. The wood turned ashen and brittle, aging fifty years in a single second.
Hathaway turned her head stiffly to the right.
The Ghost Witch had leaned in closer. Her deep green pupils had dilated entirely, swirling into the misty, bottomless spectrum of the Underworld.
By peeling back mundane physical reality, she was forcing open a perceptual window to stare directly at Hathaway's karmic weight.
It was the intense, unblinking glare of a high-roller who had secretly brought a Royal Flush to the table, now frantically trying to parse the invisible, terrifying hand that had just swept the pot with a blank card.
By bridging the material and Ethereal planes, the ambient heat and vitality of the desk were passively vacuumed into the low-energy void of her gaze.
The lethal micro-ice-age spreading from her elbows went unnoticed, her quill hovering forgotten in the air as she obsessively dissected Hathaway's anomaly.
Sizzle.
At the exact same second, the air on her left ignited.
The Balor Witch sat statue-still, but the magma-veins beneath her scales pulsed with a blinding, territorial crimson.
The air around her warped, rippling with a heavy, suffocating mirage. She spiked her core body temperature, turning her side of the desk into the open mouth of a blast furnace.
The heat was survivable. Any competent Witch would snap her fingers, cast a basic [Resist Energy] ward, and go about her day.
But that was exactly the insult. Forcing a classmate to burn mana and dedicate a cognitive thread to a thermal shield just to sit at a desk was an act of arrogant dominance.
On the right: the passive absolute zero of an Underworld Gaze.
On the left: the active high-pressure heat of Territorial Hazing.
The two opposing S-Class domains clashed right in the middle, exactly where Hathaway was sitting.
CRACK.
The air twisted visibly. The wood of her desk groaned under the thermal shock.
Hathaway felt the Ethereal draft rotting her right sleeve and the Balor heat singeing the left side of her hair.
It was painful. It was profoundly annoying.
So she pushed back.
She unsealed the Weight inside her own blood vessels.
HUMMMM—
Her entire mana pool, all 42,000 M-Units of it, slammed down like a physical hammer, heavy and dense and suffocatingly thick.
Compared to the sharp, highly refined elemental natures of her neighbors, her mana was unpolished Deep Sea Water. Or liquid Mercury.
Density was its own defense.
Hathaway took a deep breath, and exhaled.
A heavy, deep crimson aura erupted from her skin, flooding her personal space and claiming every inch of air around her.
Because her mana was just as dense, just as heavy, and just as abundant as theirs, the laws of physics dictated that the competing elements had no room to exist.
Stalemate.
The invasive grey entropy on her right hit the wall of crimson mana and shattered.
The aggressive heat wave on her left distorted and bent, washing harmlessly around the gravity well she had just established.
Anchored between two S-Class monsters, Hathaway sat perfectly still, her red eyes glowing with a cold, irritated light.
You want to scan me? You want to bake me?
Fine.
But I have mass too. Back off.
She looked back at Victoria. The blonde aristocrat was watching the exchange: the Entropy halting, the Heat bending, the crude, inefficient, undeniably effective barrier of raw mass.
Victoria adjusted her gloves, offering a faint nod.
"Good," her eyes seemed to say.
"You are a sledgehammer, Ludwig. At least you finally stopped trying to act like a scalpel.
"You have the mass. Use it. Don't die."
Left: Scorching Pride.
Right: Frozen Curiosity.
Center: The Anomaly.
Hathaway sat in the dead center of this localized "Three-Body Problem."
The smug, political smile on her face faded, replaced by a calm, dangerous composure.
The target on her back was the least of it; she had stepped into the fighting ring.
Luck got me in the door, Hathaway thought, her deep crimson mana humming around her like heavy armor, holding a demilitarized zone across her desk. But Power keeps me in the seat.
Ignoring the deadly elemental storm raging mere inches from her elbows, she calmly picked up her quill and began to copy the fluid dynamics formulas from the board.