Instructor Seren Veylan distrusted clean victories.
Clean victories belonged in recruitment posters, noble memoirs, and funeral speeches written before anyone had smelled the battlefield. Real survival limped. Real survival cheated by inches. Real survival left blood in places poets forgot to mention.
Cedric Valdrake Arkhen's examination recording did not show a clean victory.
That was the first reason Veylan did not dismiss it.
The second reason was the boy's footwork.
Inside the private review chamber, three projection crystals hovered above a black table. Each crystal replayed one angle from Team Seven's final assessment scenario. A standard manual review used one recording and a bored instructor. This one had three crystals, two sealed logs, a restricted combat metric slate, and Professor Malcris waiting outside the authorization barrier with the patience of a spider pretending to be furniture.
Veylan dipped his pen in red ink.
Red for correction.
Red for injury.
