Which was exactly what made it unsettling.
No one said that again after Marlow sent the formal flag. The words had already done their job.
They stayed in the room even after the conversation moved on, hanging in the background while the machinery of the midterm kept turning.
The next calibration cycle started three minutes later.
It was routine enough that almost nobody looked up when the notice rolled across the lower systems band.
Token synchronization refresh. Realm-node alignment check. Telemetry stability sweep. It happened in small intervals all through the exam so that the network linking the students, the monitoring halls, the extraction gates, and the realm's anchor points stayed clean.
Routine things were easy to stop seeing. That was why the university trusted routine. It turned complicated systems into habits people could carry without thinking, and when you were managing hundreds of students inside a shifting realm, habits mattered.
