The shed smelled like scorched earth and the sharp, mineral bite of cooling mana. Evening light leaked through the gaps in the walls - amber and grey, the sun drowning behind New Chicago's skyline.

  Jace sat on the overturned crate that had become his unofficial seat, his back against the wall, his body a catalog of complaints. The MP depletion from the Power Book absorption had faded from acute hollowness to a dull, persistent ache behind his sternum - like hunger, but deeper, located in a part of his anatomy that didn't have a name in pre-Unveiling biology. His SP was low from the dungeon's physical demands. His HP was fine, technically, but "fine" was relative when your baseline was twenty and every bruise felt like a percentage point.

  "Show us again," Elara said.

  She was cross-legged on the ground, notebook open, mana-lens around her neck, watching him with the focused intensity of someone observing a chemical reaction that shouldn't be possible.

  Jace closed his eyes. Reached inward. His MP pool had been trickling back since they'd left the Sunken Subway - the natural regeneration rate of someone with a Mystical of eight, which was roughly equivalent to filling a bathtub with an eyedropper. But he'd scraped together enough for a demonstration.

  He activated [Mana Sense].

  Fifteen MP per minute. At his current reserves, he had maybe forty seconds before the well ran dry again.

  The overlay bloomed behind his closed eyelids and he opened them into a world with two layers. The shed - wooden planks, scorched ground, his three companions in the dying light. And beneath it, through it, woven into the fabric of everything: mana. The ambient currents drifting through the air like smoke in still water. The brighter threads where the academy's ward network pulsed along underground conduits fifty meters away. Torrin's signature - that dense, slow-moving concentration of energy, heavy as magma, pooled in his core and limbs. Elara's - sharp, precise, clustered around her head and hands. Mara's - warm, diffuse, flickering with the quick nervous rhythm of her heartbeat.

  "I can see your channels," Jace said. His voice sounded strange to himself - distant, like speaking while listening to music. "Torrin, yours are narrow and deep. Like mine shafts. Everything's compressed. That's why your hits carry so much force - your mana doesn't spread, it compresses."

  Torrin grunted. "Feels like that."

  "Elara, yours branch in patterns. Like circuitry. Very organized. Very efficient."

  "Inscription training," she said, scribbling. "The Conclave's channeling methodology emphasizes structured pathways. It is foundational to precision work."

  "Mara-" He paused. Blinked. "Mara, your channels are wider than I expected. By a lot. Your throughput capacity is-"

  "I know." She said it quietly, looking at her hands. "My mother's the same way. Wide channels, high flow rate. It's what makes Restorers effective. You can push a lot of healing energy very fast." A pause. "If you can push it at all."

  The [Mana Sense] guttered. The overlay flickered, thinned, and died as his MP bottomed out. The world collapsed back to a single layer - just wood, just earth, just the fading light.

  Jace exhaled. The hollowness rushed back in, filling his chest with cold absence. He pressed his palms against the crate and breathed through it.

  "Forty-one seconds," Elara said, checking the timepiece clipped to her belt. "That is consistent with your estimated MP pool and the tripled cost. With regeneration factored in, you could sustain brief activations approximately every-"

  "Every fifteen minutes or so. I've been doing the math."

  "Have you been doing it correctly?"

  "Elara."

  "It was a genuine question."

  Despite himself, Jace smiled. Despite everything - the exhaustion, the emptiness, the bruises from yesterday's Combat Practicum and the bone-deep drain from today's dungeon - he smiled. Because they were here. In a burned-out shed behind an equipment storage building, analyzing stolen magic by the last light of day, and nobody had left the table.

  "We should eat," Torrin said.

  The statement carried the gravitational authority of a man who organized his priorities by fundamental need. Food was fundamental. Therefore, food came next. The logic was inarguable.

  * * *

  The Mess Hall was bright and loud and unkind.

  They entered through the east doors - the ones closest to the equipment sheds, farthest from the serving line, requiring a walk across the full length of the hall that put them on display for every occupied table. Jace had suggested they start using the west entrance. Torrin had said no. "You walk around a thing, you give it power," he'd said, in the tone of someone quoting a proverb they'd grown up hearing. So they walked the long way, every evening, through the center of the hall.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Tonight was worse than usual.

  Word had spread about the dungeon delve results. The rankings were posted on the board outside the Proving Grounds - every team's completion time, injury report, and tactical grade displayed for public consumption. Ironhold believed in transparency. Ironhold also believed that transparency built character, which was another way of saying that Ironhold believed in humiliation as a motivational tool.

  Team Miller: twenty-third place. Completion time: forty-seven minutes. Injuries: zero. Tactical grade: C+.

  Objectively decent. Zero injuries was notable - only four teams had managed that. But twenty-third place was twenty-third place, and the C+ meant the faculty had assessed their combat execution as "functional but unremarkable."

  The commentary started before they reached the serving line.

  "Hey, Jinx Squad - nice hustle out there. Almost broke into the top twenty." A [Stormcaller] at a center table, grinning, his party laughing around him. Normal-tier, but Normal-tier with a real combat class and real stats and the confidence that came from knowing the System had given him something worth building on.

  "Zero injuries because they ran from everything," someone else muttered - not to them, but near enough to be heard. The precision of that proximity was its own kind of cruelty.

  At Kael's table - front left, prime location, always - Sera leaned over and said something that made the surrounding students laugh. Kael himself didn't look up. He was eating with the focused disinterest of someone who considered his surroundings beneath his attention. But Durren glanced their way, and the expression on the [Frost Sentinel]'s face was complicated - not hostile, not sympathetic. Something in between that Jace filed away and didn't examine.

  They reached the serving line. Filled their trays. Walked to the back-right corner, to the wobbling bench and the window overlooking the service alley and its maintenance golems. Sat down.

  Mara's jaw was tight. She was doing the thing she did when the comments landed - pulling inward, making herself smaller, her appetite visibly evaporating.

  "The [Stormcaller]'s team came back with two injuries and ranked nineteenth," Elara said, opening her tray with mechanical precision. "His tactical grade was a C. He is objectively in no position to comment on our performance."

  "Doesn't matter," Mara said. "Being right doesn't make it stop."

  Torrin picked up his fork. Looked at Mara. Set it down again.

  "When I was eleven," he said, and the table went still because Torrin speaking at length was an event that commanded attention, "the boys in my hold said I was too slow to mine. Mining's agility work underground - ducking collapses, reading tremors, moving through narrow cuts. They said I'd die in the shafts. They were right. I was too slow." He picked his fork up again. "So I didn't mine. I broke rock on the surface until my fists could split granite. Now those boys mine for *my* family's contracts."

  He began eating.

  The silence held for a moment. Then Jace said: "Was that a motivational speech?"

  "No. I'm hungry and talking about something else was keeping me from eating."

  Mara's laugh was sudden, involuntary, bright enough that it turned heads at the nearest tables. She covered her mouth with her hand, but the damage was done - the sound hung in the air, warm and defiant, and Jace watched two students at the next table exchange a look that wasn't contempt. It was confusion. The Jinx Squad wasn't supposed to be laughing.

  Good.

  They ate. The comments continued - background noise now, the ambient cruelty of a social ecosystem that had identified its designated targets. But something had shifted in the chemistry of the table. The burn of the day - the dungeon's drain, the jeers, the rankings - was still there. But it was shared weight, distributed across four sets of shoulders, and shared weight was lighter by nature.

  Elara pulled out her notebook between bites and began sketching mana-flow diagrams. Torrin ate with the methodical efficiency of someone refueling a machine. Mara stole a bread roll off Jace's tray and dared him with her eyes to say something about it.

  He didn't. He'd already eaten two.

  * * *

  They parted at the dormitory junction - the corridor where the residential wings split by floor assignment. Torrin's room was ground floor, east wing. The girls' dormitory was in the west building, connected by a covered walkway. Jace was second floor, east wing, in a room the size of a closet that smelled permanently of mana-conduit ozone from the pipe running along his ceiling.

  "Tomorrow's the deep run," Jace said. "Thresh posted the briefing. Level Two, salvage operation. Teams keep what they find."

  "Keep what they find," Elara repeated. Her eyes sharpened. "That is unusual. The standard protocol for training dungeons is institutional collection - all drops go to the academy stores for redistribution."

  "Incentive structure," Mara said. "They want us to push deeper. Harder. The loot keeps us motivated."

  "Or it teaches us that risk has rewards," Jace said. "Either way - we go in, we clear what we can, and we come out with something useful. Our gear is Trash. Literally. Common-tier would be a meaningful upgrade for all of us."

  Torrin looked at his dented gauntlets. The knuckle-plate from the Tunnel Rat impact was still warped. "Could use new hands," he said.

  "That's the plan." Jace looked at each of them. "Get sleep. Real sleep. We go in rested or we don't go in at all."

  Mara gave him a mock salute. "Yes, Captain."

  "Don't call me that."

  "You literally just gave us marching orders."

  "Those were suggestions."

  "Those were orders delivered in a suggestive tone. There's a difference."

  They split. Jace climbed the stairs to his floor, the familiar sand-weight of spent SP dragging at his legs. His room was dark, small, and exactly what he needed - a space with no expectations, no audiences, no rankings posted on the wall. He lay on the narrow cot and stared at the mana-conduit pipe on his ceiling, watching its faint blue pulse in the darkness.

  He activated [Mana Sense] for three seconds. Just enough to see the pipe's energy flowing through the wall - a thread of structured mana connecting his room to the academy's greater network. A system. An architecture. Built from individual conduits that meant nothing alone but together formed something that powered an institution.

  The metaphor wasn't subtle. He didn't need it to be.

  He closed his eyes. The drain settled. Sleep took him with the efficiency of complete exhaustion.