Nobody in Class 3 wanted to fight.
Nox spent Monday morning going door to door in the Class 3 dormitory wing, which felt uncomfortably like the time he'd tried to recruit volunteers for an on-call rotation at his old company. Same energy. Same averted eyes. Same sudden fascination with whatever was on the other side of the hallway.
"We lose every year," said a water-affinity student named Hu. He was sitting on his bed cleaning a practice sword and didn't look up when Nox entered. "Last year, Pang Wei's third fighter knocked out our entire team in seven minutes. The whole match took twelve."
"I have a plan."
"Everybody has a plan until Pang Wei hits them with Dual Frost."
"I have a plan for that too."
Hu finally looked at him. Seventeen years old. Dark circles under his eyes from what looked like habitual poor sleep. His sword was academy-issue, standard C-rank, chipped along the edge from use. He was ranked somewhere in the eighties. Not good enough for the top classes, not bad enough to be invisible.
"You're the guy with the weird fire skill," Hu said.
"Sea of Fire. Modified."
"Modified how?"
"You'll see in the match."
Hu shook his head and went back to cleaning his sword. Nox stood in the doorway for another ten seconds, then moved on.
By lunch, he'd talked to eleven students. Nine said no. One said maybe, which meant no. One said yes.
Her name was Tan Yi. Support affinity. She could project a healing aura in a four-meter radius that restored minor injuries and reduced fatigue. C-rank. Weak offensively, which was why she was in Class 3, but the healing aura could keep a frontliner fighting through damage that should have put them down.
"I'm not doing it because I think we'll win," Tan Yi said. She was tall, thin, and spoke with the careful precision of someone who'd learned the language formally rather than conversationally. Her family was from the southern provinces. "I'm doing it because my evaluation score depends on participation and I haven't participated in a class battle in two years."
"Good enough."
That made three. Nox, Lin Mei, Tan Yi. Two more needed.
The fourth came from an unexpected direction.
---
Nox was eating lunch alone, as usual, when a tray slammed down across from him. He looked up.
The kid was wiry. Shaved head. Restless hands that kept tapping the table. He wore a Class 3 uniform with no sleeve band, same as Nox, which meant D-class.
"I'm Guo Feng," the kid said. "I heard you're building a team."
"I am."
"I want in."
"What's your skill?"
"Flash Step. D-rank. Short-range teleportation. Three meters." He said it fast, like he was used to people losing interest after the word "D-rank." "I know it's not much. But I'm fast and I don't go down easy."
"Three-meter teleport. Cooldown?"
"Eight seconds."
"Cost?"
"Low. I can do maybe fifteen in a row before I'm tapped."
Nox's brain did the math automatically. Three-meter teleport with an eight-second cooldown. Fifteen uses. That was forty-five meters of total displacement, delivered in three-meter jumps. In a thirty-meter arena, that was enough to cross the space multiple times.
More importantly, it was repositioning. Instant repositioning. No vulnerability window.
"Can you carry someone?"
Guo Feng blinked. "What?"
"When you Flash Step. Can you take someone with you? If they're in physical contact."
"I've never tried."
"Try. Today. Training Yard B. Two o'clock."
Guo Feng grinned. He was missing a tooth on the left side. "You've got a plan."
"I've got the start of one."
"Better than the start of nothing." He picked up his tray and left. His walk was bouncy, heels barely touching the ground, like someone who was always half a second from being somewhere else.
Four. One more.
---
The fifth slot stayed empty through Monday afternoon. Lin Mei suggested pulling from the Class 3 roster at random. Nox vetoed it. A random fifth would be dead weight. Four fighters with a plan would beat five fighters without one.
They registered as a four-person team. The rules allowed it. Five was the maximum, not the minimum.
Training started at 2 PM. Nox laid out the strategy on the back of a notebook page.
"The arena is thirty meters across. Pang Wei's team has range advantage. Ice projection at twenty meters. Fire at fifteen. Their fighters have coordinated tactics and months of practice. We have none of those things."
"Inspiring," Lin Mei said. She was stretching. Her knuckles were freshly taped.
"What we have is this: Sea of Fire creates a three-meter kill zone. Anything inside it takes sustained damage and gets rooted for two seconds on first contact. If I can make the fight happen inside my zone, we win individual matchups. The problem is getting opponents into the zone when they can hit me from twenty meters away."
"That's where I come in," Guo Feng said. He was bouncing on his toes.
"That's where you come in. Three-meter Flash Step. If you can grab an opponent and jump them into my fire zone, they're rooted and burning before they can react. Lin Mei tanks the return fire while I set up. Tan Yi keeps us fighting through chip damage."
"And what happens when Pang Wei comes out?" Lin Mei asked. "He's not going to fall for the grab-and-dump. He's too fast and his ice affinity means he can project from distance."
"Pang Wei is the last fight. We need to beat his team first and hope he's tired by the time he faces whoever's left."
"He won't be tired. He's trained for endurance. His Spirit Core capacity is triple mine."
"Then we deal with him when we get there."
Lin Mei looked at him. The look said: we're going to lose the last fight. But it also said: winning three out of five would be the best Class 3 has done in years.
"Let's work on the grab," she said.
---
Guo Feng could carry someone. Barely.
The Flash Step with a passenger worked, but it cost three times the normal energy. Instead of fifteen jumps solo, he could manage five while carrying someone. And the landing was rough. The first time he grabbed Nox's arm and jumped, Nox's feet hit the ground at the wrong angle and he stumbled into his own fire zone.
The bind activated. On himself.
Two seconds of being rooted in his own flames. The fire didn't hurt him directly, the damage was coded as outward-facing, but the bind didn't distinguish between the caster and a target. He stood there, feet locked, while Lin Mei laughed and Guo Feng apologized.
"Self-targeting bug," Nox muttered, mentally noting the issue. *Sea of Fire bind does not exempt caster. Stepping into own zone triggers root. Need to be already inside the zone before activation, or accept the 2-sec root on re-entry.*
He wrote it down. Tested it again. If he activated Sea of Fire first, then stayed inside the zone, the first-contact bind had already triggered on him (zero effect, since he was the caster and the skill's initial activation didn't count as contact). But if he left the zone and came back, it would catch him.
"So the grab works like this," he told Guo Feng. "You teleport the target into my zone from outside. I'm already inside, fire running. They get bound on contact. I hit them while they're locked. You get out of range before you land in the fire yourself."
"What if I land in the fire?"
"You get bound for two seconds. Don't land in the fire."
They practiced. By 4 PM, Guo Feng could land a passenger inside Nox's fire zone from three meters out with about seventy percent accuracy. The other thirty percent of the time, one or both of them ended up bound. It wasn't clean. But it was something.
During a break, Nox sat on the bench and activated Sea of Fire slowly. Not in combat. Not under threat. Just sitting, channeling, focusing on the sensation in his Spirit Core as the skill initialized.
His vision shifted.
The code overlay appeared. Faint. Transparent. Like looking at a screen through fogged glass. But there. The parameters of Sea of Fire scrolled past, familiar now, his edits visible in the modified values. The code of the training yard's stone floor appeared as a material definition block. Lin Mei's Physical Enhancement skill glowed around her body in a thin aura, its parameters visible at the edge of his perception.
He held it for five seconds. Then seven. Then the focus slipped and the overlay faded.
But it had come without danger. Without adrenaline. Without a monster trying to eat him. Just concentration and intent.
The trigger was narrowing. The first time, panic. The second time, mortal danger. The third time, stress and skill activation. Now, focused channeling.
He was learning to see on demand. Not reliably. Not clearly. But the gap between "involuntary emergency response" and "voluntary perception" was closing.
He wrote in the notebook: *Compiler perception triggered through focused skill activation. Duration: ~7 seconds. Clarity: low. No danger required. Improving. If I can get this to 20-30 seconds on demand, I can read opponents' skill parameters before fights.*
---
At 4:30, a student from Class 2 appeared at the edge of the training yard. Stocky. Muscular. Square face. Callused knuckles. He watched the Class 3 team practice for ten minutes without saying anything.
Nox noticed him but didn't approach. The student was wearing a blue band for Class 2. He wasn't eligible for Class 3's team and had no reason to be watching their practice.
Lin Mei noticed Nox noticing.
"That's Shi Chen," she said quietly. "Melee fighter. C-rank. Physical enhancement and body reinforcement. He's good. Probably the best pure brawler in the freshman year."
"Why's he watching us?"
"Class 2's match isn't for another week. He's probably scouting Class 1 tactics through us. If we show anything useful, he'll use it against them later."
Shi Chen watched for another five minutes, then left. He walked with the heavy step of someone who carried muscle the way other people carried bags. Dense. Low center of gravity. His hands hung at his sides like weapons that happened to be attached to a body.
Nox filed it away. Shi Chen might be relevant later. Right now, he had four days, four fighters, and a thirty-meter problem.
---
That evening, Nox took a walk through the academy's western building. Not the dormitories or the training yards. The craft wing.
The academy forge occupied a basement room that smelled like hot metal and burned spirit material. It was a large space, maybe twenty meters across, dominated by a spirit-fueled furnace at the center and surrounded by workbenches, anvils, and racks of unfinished equipment. A few senior students were working at stations, shaping spirit materials into weapons and armor under the supervision of a forge master who looked like he'd been born in the heat and never left.
Nox wasn't here to forge. Not yet. He was here to look.
He'd been thinking about Mira's staff. A-rank quality. Dark wood. Single gem socket. It was good. Too good for a D-class student. And too specialized. The socket only held one spirit gem, which meant one amplification. For Sea of Fire's short range, what he really needed was a staff with multiple sockets. Different gems for different situations. Versatility.
The academy offered forging as an elective. Students could use the facilities to craft their own equipment if they could afford the materials and the forge time. The catch was the success rate.
He read the posted notice on the forge room wall:
**FORGE SUCCESS RATES (current semester average)**
Spirit Staff (Basic): 34%
Spirit Staff (Intermediate, 1 socket): 12%
Spirit Staff (Intermediate, 2 socket): 4%
Spirit Staff (Intermediate, 3 socket): 1%
Spirit Armor (Basic): 28%
Spirit Armor (Intermediate): 8%
One percent. A three-socket intermediate staff had a one percent success rate. Which meant, on average, a student would need a hundred attempts to produce one. At the material costs posted next to the rates, that was roughly sixty thousand credits. Nobody had sixty thousand credits. The entire freshman class's combined credit balance probably didn't hit sixty thousand.
A senior student at a nearby station was hammering a spirit ingot into a blade shape. The furnace blazed. The spirit material glowed orange-white. The student's hands were precise, their mana flowing through the ingot in patterns that the dead boy's memories recognized as standard forging technique.
Nox watched. And as he watched, he focused. The way he'd focused during training that afternoon. Not on danger. Not on adrenaline. On the system.
The code overlay flickered to life. Dim. Wavering. But present.
The forge had parameters.
He could see them. The furnace wasn't just a fire. It was a process. A function call with inputs and outputs. The spirit material on the anvil had properties defined in code. The forging technique the senior student was using was an algorithm, a series of operations applied to the material's parameters to reshape them.
And the success rate wasn't random. It was a calculation. A probability function built into the forge's operating code, taking inputs like material quality, technique precision, and spirit energy throughput, and producing a binary output: success or failure.
The RNG was in the code.
Nox stared at the forge. The overlay held for twelve seconds before fading. Twelve seconds. His longest yet, outside of combat.
He could see the forge's code. Which meant, theoretically, he could edit it. Remove the random number generator. Replace it with a deterministic calculation. Turn the one-percent success rate into something predictable.
Something like a hundred percent.
He left the forge room and walked back to the dormitory. His notebook was already open in his hand, pen moving.
*Forge has source code. Success rate is a probability function, not a physical limitation. RNG-dependent. If I can hold the perception for 30+ seconds and the edit is syntactically valid, I can remove the randomness. Deterministic forging. 100% success rate.*
*Materials for a 3-socket intermediate staff: approximately 600 credits.*
*Current balance: 2,140 credits.*
He closed the notebook. Four days to the class battle. He could train, or he could forge.
He needed both. But there were only so many hours in a day, and every hour spent at the anvil was an hour not spent practicing the grab-and-dump with Guo Feng.
The forge's one-percent success rate stared at him from memory. One percent, unless you could rewrite the equation.
He set his alarm for 4 AM and went to bed thinking about probability functions.
