A grunt from Jace's left.

  He turned. The occupant at the end of the table was difficult to miss and easy to overlook simultaneously, which was a trick of physics Jace hadn't known was possible. The young man was *wide* - not fat, but built with the dense, low-centered mass of someone whose skeleton had been designed for load-bearing. He sat with his shoulders hunched and his elbows tucked in, occupying as little lateral space as his frame would allow, which wasn't much. His skin was a weathered ruddy tan, and his jaw looked like it had been carved from the same stone as the Iron Holds he'd clearly come from. Short-cropped dark hair sat above a broad, flat forehead. His hands, wrapped around a cup of water, were enormous - thick-fingered, scarred across the knuckles, with the kind of calluses that came from years of hitting things that didn't want to be hit.

  "Torrin," he said. The word came out like a stone dropping into water. "Blackforge. [Brawler]."

  Mara leaned forward. "DPS role, right? [Brawler] is a Strength-primary-"

  "Yeah."

  Jace waited for more. More did not come. Torrin Blackforge lifted his cup, drank, set it down, and returned his attention to a spot on the table approximately six inches in front of his tray with the focused intensity of someone who had identified that spot as the least demanding thing in the room to look at.

  "Torrin's been here since before I sat down," Mara said, dropping her voice to a theatrical whisper that was still fully audible. "We've exchanged approximately eleven words. I counted."

  "Twelve," Torrin said.

  "Twelve! We're making progress."

  Jace took a bite of his stew. It tasted like it looked - brown, vaguely nutritious, aggressively inoffensive. "So what's a [Brawler] doing at the reject table? DPS is always in demand."

  Torrin's jaw tightened. For a moment Jace thought he'd overstepped, but then the big man exhaled through his nose and said, "Slow."

  "Slow?"

  "Agility's in the gutter. Can't dodge. Can't chase. Can't reposition." He said it the way someone else might list the weather - factual, unembellished, resigned. "Hit like a mine cart. Move like one too. Nobody wants a DPS that can't keep up with the fight."

  Jace looked at Torrin's hands again. The scars on his knuckles weren't training scars - they were too deep, too uneven. Work scars. Mining scars. "Iron Holds?"

  "Born there. Mother was human. Father was a dwarf. Got his build." Torrin opened and closed one massive fist. "Got her height. Worst of both, depending on who you ask."

  "And the best of both?"

  Torrin looked at him for the first time. His eyes were a dark, unremarkable brown, but there was something in them - a careful, patient intelligence that didn't match the blunt-instrument impression his body gave. "Hasn't come up yet."

  The fourth occupant of the table hadn't spoken. She sat at the opposite end from Torrin, separated from the group by a deliberate gap, and she was reading.

  The book was enormous - leather-bound, thick as Jace's fist, with the faint shimmer of preservation enchantments along its spine. It was propped against a water pitcher at an angle that allowed its reader to eat, read, and ignore the entire social landscape of the Mess Hall simultaneously. All Jace could see past the book was a pair of thin, pale hands holding the pages and a curtain of straight black hair that fell to the tabletop like ink poured from a bottle.

  "Hey," Jace said.

  A page turned.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "Excuse me."

  Another page.

  Mara reached across the table and tapped the book's cover. "Hi. We're doing introductions. It's awkward but apparently mandatory. I'm Mara, that's Jace, the mountain is Torrin."

  The book lowered by exactly two inches, revealing a narrow face with sharp features and skin so pale it bordered on translucent. Dark eyes - not brown, not black, but a deep grey that caught the overhead light and held it like still water - assessed Mara with the clinical precision of a specimen being catalogued. Thin eyebrows. Thin lips pressed into a line that wasn't quite a frown but wasn't anywhere near a smile. She wore her uniform buttoned to the collar, every line sharp, every crease deliberate.

  "Elara Voss," she said. Her voice was clear, unhurried, and exactly as warm as a surgical instrument. "Class: [Scribe]. Normal-tier. Utility role, though the academy classification system categorizes it as non-combat, which is reductive but technically accurate given the current combat taxonomy."

  "Scribe," Jace repeated. "Like... transcription?"

  The book lowered another inch. The grey eyes narrowed. "Like inscription. Enchantment analysis. Spell-formula transcription and modification. Runic identification and disassembly. Arcane cataloguing and indexing." Each word landed with the weight of a correction being administered. "It is a *knowledge* class with applications in magical theory, item identification, and ward construction. It is not *transcription*."

  "Right. Sorry."

  "The distinction matters." The book came down entirely, folded shut with a soft thump, and Elara Voss sat up straight - which made her look even thinner, a vertical line of precision in an academy uniform that fit her like it had been measured to the millimeter. "People hear 'Scribe' and they imagine someone copying documents in a back room. Which is part of it, yes, but reducing the class to its most mundane function is like calling a [Warden] a 'person who stands in front of things.' Technically true. Functionally useless as a description."

  Mara's eyebrows had climbed steadily throughout this speech. "You have feelings about this."

  "I have *opinions*. Feelings are imprecise."

  "They're... really not, though."

  "They are when they're being used as a substitute for reasoned assessment." Elara placed her hands flat on the table - a gesture that Jace would come to recognize as her version of resetting. "I apologize. That was more combative than the situation warranted. I have been told that I do that."

  "Do what?" Torrin asked.

  "Correct people with more force than the error requires."

  Torrin considered this. "Least you hit something."

  Something happened at the corner of Elara's mouth - not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the way a lake ripples when a stone is thrown nearby but not quite in. "That is a generous interpretation."

  Jace looked at the three of them. A Healer who fainted at blood. A DPS who couldn't move. A non-combat knowledge class. And him - the classless wanderer, the punchline, the appendix entry.

  "So," he said. "We're all here because nobody else wants to sit with us."

  The table went quiet. Mara stopped poking her stew. Torrin's jaw worked once. Elara's hands, still flat on the table, pressed down slightly harder.

  "I'm not trying to make it worse," Jace said. "I'm just - that's what this is, right? The reject table."

  "I prefer 'temporarily unaffiliated,'" Mara offered.

  "I sat here because it was empty," Torrin said.

  Elara said nothing for a moment. Then: "I sat here because the probability of unsolicited conversation seemed lowest. I was incorrect."

  "Sorry about that."

  "Don't be. It's a reasonable observation." She tilted her head, studying him the way she'd studied Mara - with that cataloguing precision that felt less like rudeness and more like the only way she knew how to engage with new data. "You're the [Nomad]."

  "Word travels."

  "Word has very little distance to travel in a closed environment with three hundred adolescents and a shared communication network." Elara paused. "For what it is worth, I read your class entry in the registry. The [Wayfaring] trait is... theoretically interesting."

  "Theoretically."

  "Yes. In practice, the resource penalties appear prohibitive. A two-hundred-percent increase in cost and a fifty-percent reduction in proficiency means you are functionally operating at one-sixth the efficiency of a specialized class user for any given skill."

  Jace stared at her. "Thanks. That's - yeah. That's the math."

  "I am not saying it to be cruel. I am saying it because you should understand the actual parameters of your situation if you intend to work within them."

  "If?" Mara cut in, her voice sharper than Jace expected. "What do you mean *if*? What's the alternative?"