“Remember, you have two hours. Finish as much as you can,” the cat-eyed proctor said with a smirk. The sheaf of exam papers was an inch thick. Yuriko thought that there was no way to finish all of it even if they were using a regular pen instead of trying to write with their Animus.

Yuriko opened to the first page, scanned the questions and heaved a sigh of relief. It was a multiple-choice question, all of the questions on the first page were, so her answers would only be single letters instead of words. That wasn’t so bad. Better still, the subject of the questions was the same as the ones she answered during the Agaza written test.

‘Well, let’s get things going.’

She buckled down and envisioned her Animus. The proctor warned against burning the paper, so it was a matter of applying heat and leaving the burn marks as answers.

The paper burned quickly though, so she only had to apply enough heat to brown it and nothing more. Or she could create a layer of cold around the heated part, much like how the Tracer board game was played. Well, it would require dividing her Animus into at least two strands but that was as easy as breathing for her.

She glanced at Ella-Mai who had her hand raised in front of her with her index and middle finger raised. There was a small gap between the two digits and her Animus’ red glow could be seen there faintly. A little bit of it stretched past her fingernails and she lowered it to the paper, careful only to let the tip touch. However, a moment later, a little smoke and the smell of burning paper wafted from her direction. Ella-Mai cursed under her breath and pulled her fingers away.

‘Huh.’ Yuriko focused and brought two strands of Animus out of her core. She imparted one strand with the Intent to burn. Fire, heat, powerful radiant light. The other, she gave the Intent to cold. Freeze, hold, ice!

She could feel one strand growing warmer. It felt much like the sun on her bare shoulders this morning, except magnified a thousand times more. She knew right then and there that if she touched her Animus to the paper, it would immediately go up in flames.

It was strange but her Animus has never held this much heat before. She remembered the last time she did was when she played Tracer with Braden back in the Watchtower. So what happened? The cold strand was normal and it was nowhere near enough to hold back that much fire. Well, she could lower the Intent…

It was unbelievably difficult. The slightest Intent of heat and the image of the Radiant Sun, particularly the pattern of her Inlay, popped in her mind. Her Animus blazed.

‘No, no, have to dampen it. If it wouldn’t lower the heat by itself, then apply cold. If one isn’t enough, use more!’

She wrapped the sun strand with cold strands. First one, then two. And when it didn’t do much, she kept adding to it, until six strands with cold Intent surrounded the single sun strand. It was just barely enough.

She allowed it to extend past her fingertip, brought it near the paper. Even without touching, a spot began to brown. She quickly traced her answer to the first question. She could feel her Animus slowly being drained. She could keep this up for a good while, but she knew that she would lose her mental strength first before she ran out of Animus. So she just kept answering the questions one by one.

After ten questions, the format changed. Now, instead of a multiple-choice question, she was meant to fill in the blanks.

“Ancestors,” she muttered.

The questions were still easy, so she only had to focus on writing her answers down. At first, her letters were thick and blocky but the next set forced her to thin the lines. She squeezed the sun strand tighter, narrowing the tip to a needlepoint. Still, the letters she wrote were blockier than what she could accomplish with the pen. Her slow movements also spread the heat too much.

‘I need to speed up!’

Still, there was only so much she could do. Too fast and she didn’t leave a mark, too slow and she’d burn a hole through it.

“Chaos and swarm fodder!” One of the examinees shouted.

Yuriko couldn’t help but look and found the student’s desk ablaze. The proctor waved a hand, her Animus, bronze coloured, swept out and snuffed the fire. There was nothing but ashes on the student's desk.

“You may go,” the proctor announced coldly.

The girl could help but sob. Yuriko shook her head and focused back on her papers, feeling her heart beating erratically.

Wait, why so nervous? Did you want to enter Sharom’s Elite Class?

With that thought, she felt herself relax. Why was she taken in by the anxieties anyway? The other girl who burned her papers trudged out of the classroom. From her expression, it looked like she’d lost all hope.

The proctor’s expression retained the same placidity after sending that girl out but Yuriko could see the corner of her lips twitch.

Soon enough, she finished the fill in the blanks section and moved on to the next portion of the exam. This one covered arithmetic and geometry. Now Yuriko felt a nervous sweat bead on her forehead. She wasn’t that great with numbers. Alright, she was absolutely dismal at them. Well, these were simple problems, at least.

So if the numbers were in the parenthesis she had to do that operation first, right? Which goes first, multiplication or division? Addition or subtraction? And why was this question looking for the length of the side of a triangle? It wasn’t even to scale! Why was it that the leg marked ‘three’ wasn’t three-fourths the length of the one marked ‘four’?

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“Argh!” She scrubbed her hand against her hair furiously. Whatever! She’d just write down whatever numbers came to mind!

A torturous half hour later and she was done with the numbers. Heaving a sigh of relief, she entered the history and geography section. Which city-state of the Federation of City States of Rumiga is the farthest from Rumiga City? It was a toss-up between Jugen, Garamus, and Uaran. Wait, if it's from Rumiga City then it should be Uaran City, which was closer to Faron’s Crossing.

Where is the Kadrac Desert located? Next to Kadrac City, south of Haveena, of course. How far do the Zarek Mountains stretch? From the Northern Planar Barrier to the Southern Planar Barrier, effectively bisecting the plane of Rumiga.

Simple questions with simple answers. Yuriko breezed through the section and finally came to the essay portion. By this time, she had refined her Animus writing to a fine point, nearly indistinguishable from her usual handwriting save for the fact that it used no ink.

The subject of the essay was strange: ‘If your brother and sister’s lives were in danger and you had the chance to save one, who would you save, and why?’

Yuriko frowned. Well, aside from the fact that she didn’t have a sister, this one was quite easy to answer. She would save both. If there was a chance to save one, there was a chance to save both and the question was a trick to limit her choices to one or the other.

“Hmmph!” She snorted in annoyance. Most of the following essay questions were in the same vein. Moral quandaries. She answered them casually, often writing down what came to mind. Would she spend her last silver penny on parfaits or cake? Neither, she’d rather hold on to it until she needed it.

She was in the middle of answering the third essay question when the time for the exam ran out. Yuriko sighed and gathered her exam papers, the thick stack of questions that she didn’t even get a quarter of the way through and the five answer sheets she’d filled up.

Ella-Mai looked satisfied when Yuriiko looked at her. Only one other student, one of the boys with short-cropped tawny brown hair, looked happy. The other girl and boy looked grim. Making sure that her papers were labelled properly, she brought them over to the cat-eyed proctor.

“Return here an hour after noon, for the second part of the exams.” She walked out the door with papers in hand. “You too.”

It turned out that the girl who had been sent out had lingered in the hallway. She had dried her tears and cleaned up the mascara that ran down her cheeks, though there were still smudges just under her right eyelid.

“Er, you’ve got a little something there,” Yuriko said.

“Oh, thank you.” The girl took a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. She was a petite little thing with her honey-coloured hair in twin tails.

Yuriko nodded and headed out. She was of a mind to visit Mama Blu’s eatery for lunch. She paused down the hallway, hearing her name being called. Orrin ran up to her.

“You left me behind!” he whined.

Yuriko couldn’t help it. Her hand darted to his cheek, pinched and pulled.

“Eeeh! Ow! Whyyyy?” His ineffectual hand flailing only made her want to pinch his cheeks more. But she controlled herself and let go after a moment.

“Sorry, couldn’t help it,” she giggled.

Orrin stared up at her with a wounded look.

She bit her lip and spun on her heels. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

“Fine. Where to?”

“I want Mama Blu’s pasta.”

“Eh? Uhm, really. Er…”

Yuriko glanced back and found him twiddling his thumbs. “What, you want to eat somewhere else?”

“It’s the only place I know here.” He gulped, his eyes dancing around. “Well, let’s go.”

Mama Blu’s wasn’t too crowded, though it took them ten minutes of brisk walking to get there. They were seated almost immediately with the waiter surreptitiously giving Orrin a thumbs up. Yuriko saw it anyway, though she wondered what that was about.

Orrin certainly looked smug. His cheeks puffed out just enough when he smirked that she wanted to pinch them again. The red mark from her earlier effort stood out against his pale complexion.

The waiter placed a small vase with fragrant flowers on the table along with their order. The pasta today consisted of cute little bow ties with a generous helping of tomato sauce and ground meat. The bread was toasted enough that it was quite crunchy and spiced butter had been spread over it. Yuriko refused the offered wine and asked for sweet tea instead.

She ate quickly, wishing that the portions were larger, though the taste was well worth the price of the meal.

“How did you do on the test?” Orrin asked nervously.

“Not bad, I guess,” Yuriko shrugged.

“Yeah, I had trouble when it came to the one word answers.” Orrin shuddered. “It took me too much time calibrating my Animus. I almost burnt my paper!”

“Oh, same here. I didn’t expect my Animus to take in heat so well,” Yuriko mused. “I had to cover it with cold Intent otherwise I would have never been able to write. One of the girls in the room got thrown out for setting her paper ablaze.”

“Yeah. A couple of people burned their papers in my room too.” Orrin chuckled, shamefaced, “Er, I got thrown out when I set my third paper ablaze, ahahaha.”

“Did the proctor accept the previous papers though?”

“Yes, of course he did.”

“Oh, why would you burn the later papers though? You should have gotten used to writing like that after the first few times.”

“Well,” Orrin drawled, “maybe because I had to write words? More contact with the paper means a greater chance of it igniting.” He chuckled. “I guess I got too anxious. It was close to the time limit.”

They paid for their meal and hurried back to Song Building with a couple of minutes to spare. The same proctor entered the room, this time with a wooden chest floating behind her, following her like a puppy. She gestured towards it and it moved over the desk and plopped itself down, the lid popping open. She pulled out six metal cylinders, each one the length of her forearm, and distributed them amongst the examinees.

Yuriko looked at hers curiously. There was nothing visible on the grey metal and when she took it, it was heavier than it looked.

“Here.”

Yuriko was given a single sheet of paper filled with tiny runescript.

“You will etch the runescript patterns from the paper onto the inside of the cylinder. No tools other than your Animus will be used. Don’t worry, the metal will take your imprints. Copy them as closely as possible. You have two hours. Good fortune!”

Yuriko stared at the little scribblings on the paper. They were almost as thin as a strand of hair! She brought the paper close to her eyes and, at the same time, channelled Animus to magnify her vision.

She read through the runescript but other than a few words, she didn’t understand most of it. But it was fine since she didn’t need to know what they meant to complete the task. She laboriously copied the runescript over to the cylinder using the same writing technique as earlier. After a few lines, her finger could no longer reach further inside the cylinder. Well, it was simple enough to just extend the tip of the Animus strand. From there she managed to write a few more lines until it became too awkward to do so.

Her solution this time was to bend the strand about sixty degrees and continued writing from there. She got a few dozen lines as such before the time ran out. She wrote her name on the outside of the cylinder and submitted it to the proctor. Her Animus reserves had dipped below a fifth though the mental strain of fine dexterous control took more of a toll than just the amount she used up.

Still, she felt she had done well in the exams and told so to Orrin when they were on their way back to the inn.

“But didn’t you take the elite exams so you won’t end up in Sharom?” Orrin asked, puzzled. “If you did so well here, you might end up in Sharom’s Elite Class instead.”

Yuriko froze. “Chaos and swarm fodder!”

Orrin reached up and patted her shoulder. “There, there. I’m sure things will turn out for the best.”

Yuriko rolled her eyes and stomped away.