Skill Assessment (1)
"Laaaate, late, late, you're LATE!"
Chloe gnawed at her fingernails while staring at her phone, pacing in tight circles and drumming the soles of her shoes against the ground in an endless, anxious rhythm.
"The skill assessment starts soon—where on earth are you two and what could you POSSIBLY be doing?!"
It was 1:50 in the afternoon. Ten minutes remained until the exam.
Even the laziest slacker alive should have been at the hall by now. Yet neither Marin nor Solis showed the slightest sign of arriving. She'd texted every time the thought crossed her mind, called again and again, but the phones might as well have been boiled and eaten—no response whatsoever. Chloe gritted her teeth.
According to plan, she was supposed to gather the team over the lunch break, walk them through the assessment, and have them run a mock exam she'd prepared as a final check. Never in a million years had she expected contact to just... cut out. Thanks to that, Chloe—as the team captain—was on the verge of losing her mind.
"Ch-Chloe, calm down! Eve-everyone has their reasons for running late... right?"
Eva laid a hand on her shoulder, trying to soothe her. But her voice never reached Chloe's ears.
"Annoying, annoying, ANNOYING! Just TRY not showing up on time."
No matter how good your grades were, if you couldn't sit the exam, it was a flat zero. Every bone-grinding hour of effort she'd poured into this day would be rendered meaningless.
Ding-dong!
📣 Attention all students. The skill assessment will begin shortly. Prepared students, please assemble at the auditorium.
"Ughhh!"
Crack!
"Eep!"
It was the announcement that blared five minutes before the assessment began. As the speaker's voice rolled across the entire academy, her fury finally detonated. Mana she hadn't even meant to release leaked free of her control, and a jet-black aura—every bit as fierce as her personality—began smoldering up from her shoulders.
At the sight of her savagely kicking the ground and howling like something maddened, Eva found herself unconsciously backing away.
"...I'm sorry, Eva. I shouldn't be like this. I just lost it for a second."
"Th-then... l-let's head in first, shall we? There's s-so little time left."
"Okay."
Chloe flashed her a grin—that same warm, reassuring smile she always wore for Eva. But precisely because it was so familiar, Eva was able to spot the wrongness of it: the strained little creases pinching at the corners of Chloe's mouth.
'Sc-scary!'
She'd done nothing wrong, yet she felt like a condemned criminal. She had never once seen Chloe this angry. Hurry up and let time pass, hurry up and let the others arrive—Eva prayed to the heavens with both hands clasped together.
The desperate prayer of one girl. And did it reach the sky?
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
Footsteps like a stampede of wild beasts. A frantic, breathless sprint, soaked through with urgency. From far away you could practically see the dust kicking up behind them, they were running so hard.
"Arrived."
Out of the haze of dirt thick enough to blot out her own outstretched hands, Marin appeared. Arms thrust skyward like a sprinter who'd just taken gold, she presented her victory pose to the crowd.
"Hello, Eva. And Chloe. I'm not late."
"...Right. Thank you for coming."
"Phew, th-that's a relief!"
Cutting it impossibly close. Unlike Chloe, who scowled and let her displeasure show in the furrow between her brows, Eva let it slide without a word. Yes, skipping every single one of her messages was infuriating—but hey, at least she'd made it before the deadline. She stomped down the anger simmering in her gut.
Eva's tension finally broke, and her legs gave out beneath her. She sagged to the ground right where she stood, heart unclenching now that Marin had arrived on time. Her pulse, which had been hammering like a lunatic's, settled back into a steady rhythm and quieted.
One weight off her shoulders. But it was far too early to relax.
Two people were supposed to be here on time, not one.
"Marin, where's Solis?"
"There."
At Chloe's question, Marin turned around and pointed a finger behind her.
Shuffle. Shuffle.
A footstep so sluggish it drained the will to live from anyone who heard it echoed in their ears. Through the swirling dust, a towering black silhouette emerged, evoking the image of a giant.
Short golden hair, bronze skin, a frame so massive that even the academy's largest uniform strained at the seams, and a body packed with muscle to match—a man they all knew. Solis.
Except he looked nothing like his usual self.
"Sorry. I'm not late, am I?"
A face pale beyond pale—washed white. His once healthily sun-kissed skin had gone ashy, as though dusted with lime. Deep dark circles ringed his eyes, and the firm flesh of his cheeks had sunken in as if pressed down by a thumb.
Skin and bone. If a walking corpse existed, this was surely what it looked like.
"So-Solis! What on earth happened to..."
Eva's words trailed off. Worry overwhelmed everything else at the sight of the man who'd seemed furthest from ever catching a cold now standing there, barely upright, looking half-dead.
"Are you... okay? Should we tell the instructor and get you to a hospital?"
Even Chloe—who picked a fight with him every time they met and regarded him with open disdain—was worried enough to care about his well-being.
Solis forced a smile and flapped his limp hand dismissively, doing what he could to keep the others from worrying. But the group, watching a man who looked like a sheet of paper that might blow away on a single breath, couldn't find a single word to say.
Heck, a dead animal twitching through rigor mortis looked more spirited than he did. Enough said.
"I was hooked up to an IV resting in the infirmary bed before I came here. The crisis has passed, so don't worry."
Solis forced his mouth open, his voice so faint an ant could have crawled inside it.
Chloe powered on her phone screen and pressed the call button.
"I'm contacting Instructor Yupi. Don't take the exam—wait here and go to the hospital."
"The assessment is starting right now, though?"
"The written portion, maybe. But if you collapse during the practical or the duel in that state, that becomes MY failure for mismanaging my team."
Chloe wasn't heartless. She simply had no intention of squeezing results out of a sick man by running him into the ground.
"Listen to me. Don't push yourself for no reason and pass out halfway through the exam."
As much as it pained her, the wise move was to shelve her ambition here and send him off to the infirmary—or wherever—to get treated.
"I'm fine."
Except the man in question refused.
"I'm dizzy, sure, but I've got enough strength left to hold a pen. My condition's improving by the minute, so after the written test I can decide whether to move on. It won't be too late then."
He was stubborn to the very end. His eyes rolled like a madman's, his steps wobbled and failed to find their balance—yet, twisting his body forward like a snake in motion, he headed for the auditorium.
"Chloe. You're running for student council president, aren't you?"
"Huh...?"
"I'll make absolutely sure you can enter the election, so don't forget this debt—pay it back, and pay it back properly."
Chloe blinked at him, eyes closing and opening again and again. Setting aside how he could possibly know that, she couldn't understand why he would want to help her in the first place.
While she stood there dumbfounded, Solis delivered that final remark and kicked open the auditorium doors, walking straight in.
"U-um, let's hurry in too!"
"Agreed."
Eva and Marin hurried in after him. Chloe couldn't stand frozen at the entrance forever either, and she reluctantly made her way toward the hall.
The back of a man, dragging himself forward. Sagged like a drowned rat—and yet, in that exhaustion-crushed posture, she caught a glimpse of a quiet, unexpected dependability.
Like her father, the Sword Saint, who led their family.
Solis had no reason to be kind to her. She had treated him coldly and brushed him off every time they met, on the sole justification that she didn't like him. Resentment, unspoken and unvented, must surely have piled up somewhere inside him.
And still, he threw himself into his role as a team member with everything he had. As if drawing a hard line between duty and personal feeling, he'd vowed to give this assessment his all in front of her.
'When the exam's over, I'll apologize. For everything that happened before.'
Chloe looked back on the days she'd treated him so harshly. The petty, contemptible behavior—utterly unbefitting the child of the Sword Saint, the heir to House Opal. As she replayed her regrets and took stock of herself, she found herself seeing Solis anew. No—seeing him anew, as a person.
Hand pressed over her heart, she vowed to herself that she would bow her head and apologize for her past wrongs. She would stake the honor of her family on it.
Of course—
'There is absolutely NO way I'm letting you hang around Eva, got it?!'
'I'll get you into the student council president's seat, and then I'll pry you two apart for good.'
Her thoughts, as ever, never wavered.
'I'm dying.'
I slumped back against a bench set up in the auditorium. My exhaustion-soaked body was beckoning my consciousness toward the far side of darkness. I fended it off through sheer, stubborn willpower—but who knew how long that could hold.
'Still, I somehow finished the written portion.'
Using your brain was exhausting in its own right, but for someone who'd memorized the entire exam content, it wasn't a test so much as a matter of picking numbers. A guaranteed hundred. There was no possible way to get a single question wrong.
When the written test ended, we piled our papers together and graded them.
"Th-this is real?"
Chloe trembled violently, clutching a perfect-score exam sheet in her hands. And it wasn't mine, nor was it her own answer sheet. It was Marin's—the lowest score among us until that moment.
"Me, strongest. Confirmed."
"Ama-Amazing!"
'She memorized the answer key too, huh.'
Marin radiated confidence, squaring her shoulders with the pride of a scholar who'd just placed first in the national examinations. Eva applauded, celebrating the achievement she'd carved out for herself.
"So this really means..."
A light called hope dawned across Chloe's face. Mine and hers were, naturally, perfect hundreds. Eva had sailed past the average with a score bordering on eighty. All that remained were the practical and the duel.
"Don't let your guard down, everyone—let's keep pushing!"
"Yeah!"
"Ooo."
Chloe shouted her encouragement, trying to ride this momentum all the way to the end. The rest of us answered her fiery resolve and readied ourselves for what came next.
I believed, without a shred of doubt, that a lineup like ours could not possibly fail.
Believed, that is.
"Solis. Zero points."
"HAH?"
I had no idea, not until that very moment—that I was about to face-plant in the practical, and then again in the duel.