Like this, a whole six months quickly passed, and the semester ended.
These six months, Emmet had never had a fuller existence. He had quickly realized that in reality, everything here was just puzzles, whether they were framed in that way or not. After realizing that, he suddenly found everything exhilarating. It was all about solving puzzles! That was just what he liked!
In the morning, he would attend classes teaching material he already knew, and then after, would read ahead through more of the textbook. After that, he would study some passages Maisy had assigned him and memorize more vocabulary. If he finished early and didn’t have anything to do, he would go back to his trusty puzzle picture book and work on the latest page. Currently, he was on page 70. Although he was stuck for a little while back in the 50s, after exposure to so many different formations through classes and his debugging job, he suddenly felt that his intuition was much better, and he sped through the book once again. Many of the concepts that appeared were reminiscent of those mentioned in the textbooks, so he felt that they were much easier to tackle through that lens. Although he had finally slowed down in the past month, he still solved a page a week.
Then, he would go to his debugging job, where the real fun happened. At this point, he had developed a bit of a reputation. Among the employees in Maisy’s Debugging Depot, he became known as “mad man Emmet” for his insane speed and crazy rate of improvement. Shortly after the first few months, when he was finally getting the hang of reading, his debugging speed sharply increased from a linear improvement to exponential! At this point, a basic formation in the left pile would barely take 10 minutes. After getting extremely experienced with the basic formations in the left pile, he quickly moved on to the intermediate pile, where the formations were significantly more advanced and harder to debug.
At first, when he had initially moved to that pile, Emmet had found himself frequently stuck, as everything seemed many times more complex, confusing, and unrecognizable. He barely managed to debug his first one within an entire week. However, he wasn’t “mad man Emmet” for nothing! Within a month, his intuition had connected and he realized that in essence, they weren’t so complicated after all. They were just constructed with a greater number of interleaving building blocks. Before long, he was chugging along and debugging one every two or three days. It was truly insane - nobody there had ever seen anything like it!
Because of this insane progress, Maisy already felt pressure to promote him, even though promotions were only meant for employees who had worked at least a year. But his improvement was just so crazy!
This practice of debugging was most helpful to Emmet in increasing his familiarity with all sorts of formations. While previously, he had no idea what any of the formations around the school campus did, what their mechanisms were, or how they were constructed, soon enough, he was able to identify with a glance a vague answer to all three of those questions, just from recognizing their structure due to his vast experience with debugging. Each new type of formation Emmet tackled in his debugging expanded his knowledge more, until he felt confident that he could build many of them from scratch if given the materials. Unknowingly, he was building up a large bank of incredibly valuable experience just from debugging so many varying structures.
Quickly, he became one of the fastest debuggers out of everyone in the company. In fact, at least for basic level formations, he was soon faster than virtually anyone else, other than Maisy herself. Considering there were numerous other upperclassman debuggers with in theory much more experience, this was quite the achievement! People could only look on with amazement.
His rabid speed came just in time, when the peak rush of clients came in. Toward the end of the semester was when the hardest assignments would come, and when grades would matter the most, so a lot of the students would panic. Splurging on a debugging service didn’t sound so bad if it would save their grade. Thus, Emmet never ran out of formations to debug, and the pile never shrunk much, actually growing larger in the last month until the final week of the semester.
Along with that came Emmet’s bulging pocket. Heavens! Everyone else at Maisy’s Debugging Depot could only stare on with jealous eyes. Debugging so efficiently granted him an enormous amount of commissions! It had been a while since he had last checked, but last time he had went to the admissions office, even with consistent spending, he had already amassed around 5000 points. Seeing such a stunning number, Emmet could only blankly stare. He had never planned for having such a surplus of points. What would he even do with it?
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Seeing Emmet’s drastic improvement, out of all of the employees, Maisy was the most shocked. None of the other employees had the same context as her, and weren’t aware that Emmet was actually a squire, not a legitimately enrolled student. But what Maisy was most shocked at was that he was not just a squire, he was a squire that, just a few months ago, didn’t even know how to read. For god’s sake! What godly talent! This was a true diamond in the rough!
Maisy made sure to tell Emmet that explicitly, pinching his cheeks teasingly and praising him excitedly. Emmet didn’t stop her, blushing a deep red every time. It felt weird to get praised so much, but for some reason, he felt a warm feeling in his heart every time. No one had ever full-heartedly supported him like this before. He had also never had a sister, and couldn’t help but feel that his relationship with Maisy resembled such a sibling relationship, so he felt happy as well.
One other thing about Maisy: now that they had gotten closer, she would often show Emmet various extravagant projects she would be working on. One week, it would be some sort of speeding helicopter, another week it would be an absurdly large rainbow warding formation, and some other week, it could be a random half mile long roller coaster ride that she had decided to build. There was truly no pattern - it could be literally anything that randomly caught her fancy. Emmet could only drop his jaw at this show of wealth. Clearly, she had a blatant disregard for the prices of materials. All of these materials costed an unfathomable amount of points, and they weren’t even for classes! This was all for fun! Emmet suspected that when purchasing materials, she probably wouldn’t even bother to look at the prices.
The rumor was, Maisy Harbinger was the wealthiest student on campus. Having run the biggest debugging service on campus for over five years, she had accumulated an unbelievable amount of points. Although she had to pay salaries and renting fees, and 10% of the debugging fee would go to the debugger, the rest all went directly to her! It had reached the point where she didn’t even have to consider her points when making any purchase. No one knew just how many points she had, but some speculated that it could even be in the millions!
Emmet could only bow down to that sort of power. Millions of points… what kind of an idea was that? With that sort of money, you could probably build your own campus!
In other words, because of all the great improvements, Emmet was having the time of his life. Presently, he was incredibly grateful that he really had come to this school.
However, the four boys of 427 were a different story.
At this point, they were all now worn out, and couldn’t help but have dwindling spirits. Late at night, Emmet would often see them tiredly wipe their eyes as they droopingly returned to the room. It had only been a semester, but they were already developing symptoms of burn out. Who could have expected the classes to be so fast paced and difficult? They could handle it for a month or two, but after six months, it had really started to get to them. They were constantly tired, constantly sleep-deprived, always with a mountain of work to do, always having to be out late attempting to finish constructions… it was draining.
Especially for Tauruk - since he was taking three classes, he had the most work of all. Every day he would struggle to keep up with his written work, while also trying to find the resources and time to build his weekly assignments. At one point during the end of the semester, he had been forced to spend some precious points submitting a stubborn construction that just wouldn’t work into a service called Maisy’s Debugging Depot - it had been recommended by some of the other boys in the dorm. Luckily, the service delivered, and the formation was promptly fixed and returned to him, better than ever. Even some of the already functional parts had been enhanced for better efficiency, allowing Tauruk the best grade he had received all semester - his first A. Apparently, there was some sort of new ‘mad man’ at the service that was clearing through the formations like crazy, yet still with great quality, allowing a quick return speed.
Tauruk was glad for that ‘madman,’ because it just barely allowed him to pass with passing grades - a B, C, and C. That A had come just in time, pulling his only D, in Fundamentals Algorithms in Formations, to a C. Two of the other three students in room 427 weren’t so lucky - although each had passed one of their courses, each had also failed the other.
The four could only sigh, recoup, and ready themselves for the next semester. If they tried to take it easy in the following semester, they would get left behind by the other students, and would inevitably get cut at the end of the second year. Thus, they had to grit their teeth and work through it.
Learning his lesson, Tauruk only picked two courses for the second semester, Introduction to Warding and Basic Locomotives. After hearing about his choices, Emmet promptly returned his three old textbooks and borrowed the two corresponding new ones. For the first time, he was genuinely excited to learn new material. He hadn’t really ever explored those two fields before, and couldn’t help but get excited.
The new semester began.