The exam hall smelled of dried ink and cold stone, the way it always did, and under that the specific electric tension of eighty students trying not to let their pens shake.
Vane kept the Usurper running at its lowest passive setting, the way he always did in a room this size — not hunting, just listening, the ambient field a low hum at the very edge of his attention while his own pen moved across the Mana Systems Theory booklet. Around him, eighty students sat in the same rigid postures they'd all learned to hold during exams — spines straight, eyes down, the particular stillness of people who had been taught that fidgeting cost points nobody could see being deducted. Somewhere behind him, a proctor's boots clicked once against the stone and stopped. He was three questions deep when something in the field shifted.
