Landen opened his eyes.
For a moment, the world felt wrong—too still, too quiet after thirty hours of relentless movement. His body remembered the training even if time didn't. He glanced at the clock.
Five minutes had passed.
He exhaled slowly. Right. His mind processed faster than most people could comprehend, and the system had bent around that fact. What felt like a day and night compressed into the length of a coffee break. He flexed his fingers, then made a fist.
For the first time in this body, it felt like his.
He stood up. He was ready.
— — —
Catching a wisp, it turned out, was a completely different problem.
His first white wisp took five attempts. He lunged too early, reached too late, fumbled twice. When he finally closed his hand around that faint glow, the single point registered almost as an insult.
One point. More than half the time already gone.
He looked around the arena. White wisps drifted in lazy arcs everywhere—slow, abundant, nearly worthless. Blue wisps cut sharper paths through the air, their sapphire light flickering with something almost like intention. Red ones moved like prey that knew it was being hunted. And far above everything else, barely visible, a faint multicolored glow turned slow, patient circles.
Blue wisps: two points. Red: three. Rainbow: ten.
He wasn't going to win on white wisps. He'd known that the moment the first point registered.
Let's find out how difficult blue actually is.
— — —
He went for the nearest blue wisp and immediately lost it—or thought he did. It didn't flee. It simply ceased to exist, then reappeared a few seconds later, drifting on the same trajectory as before.
He tried again. Same result. Gone, then back.
Invisibility. His mind started mapping it automatically. Seven seconds invisible. Two-second cooldown. And when it's invisible, it can't change course.
Which meant it was predictable.
He grinned.
He tracked the wisp toward a steep slope, spotted a hanging rope near the edge, and grabbed it as he ran. The moment the blue wisp passed within range, he swung the rope toward it—and it vanished right on cue. He was already counting as he ran, tracing the invisible line in his head.
Five… six… seven—
He dove.
For one terrible instant his hand closed around nothing.
Then the wisp reappeared directly in his palm, its sapphire light spiking wildly as momentum carried them both into the dirt. Landen rolled, came to a stop, arm outstretched, and stared at the trapped flame flickering between his fingers.
A red wisp drifted lazily across his field of vision.
He didn't see a wisp. He saw three points.
— — —
The red was faster, more erratic—darting and doubling back like it had a mind working against him specifically. He studied it the way he'd studied the blue, and the first two attempts gave him exactly what he needed.
First attempt: it split in two. A decoy broke left while the real wisp bolted right—a nearly seamless illusion, except for a faint transparency in the copy that lasted half a second too long.
Second attempt: a blinding cloud of red dust detonated in his face and sent him stumbling backward.
Two abilities. He catalogued them instantly. Decoy—clone lasts two seconds, four-second cooldown. Smoke screen—propels itself in the opposite direction, seven-second cooldown.
He picked up two loose balls and gave chase.
The first ball triggered the split. His eyes caught the copy's faint transparency immediately. He pointed at the real one, already throwing the second ball at the wall ahead of it. While the ball was still in the air, he cut around behind the wisp's escape route.
The wisp panicked and fired its smoke screen.
The red dust exploded forward. The wisp shot backward.
Into his open hand.
"Gotcha."
— — —
The next several minutes settled into something almost rhythmic. Blue wisps blinked out of existence on schedule. Red wisps split and smoked. Landen read them all, adjusted, collected. What had felt impossible twenty minutes ago now felt like breathing.
He checked his basket. He was actually catching up.
He checked the clock. Five minutes left.
That was when he looked up.
Far above the obstacles floated a faint multicolored glow.
His eyes widened. The rainbow wisp.
Far above the course, the rainbow wisp turned its slow, unhurried circles. Ten points. The most difficult target in the arena, and barely enough time to learn it from scratch, let alone catch it.
Don't gamble. You have a solid score. Keep grinding what you know.
But a voice came from directly ahead. "Impressive…"
Landen turned sharply.
Standing a few meters away was number 56—the white-haired boy from before . His icy blue eyes briefly shifted toward Landen's basket before turning upward toward the rainbow wisp.
He smiled. "Let's see who can catch it first."
He was already moving before the words landed. He went up the nearest structure like it was flat ground, launched himself across the final gap, and reached—and the rainbow wisp detonated. Not force, not heat. Color—seven streaks exploding outward like a shattered prism, flooding the upper arena in an instant. 56 caught a ledge on the far side and hung there, staring at where the wisp had been.
It reappeared near the ground, already at full speed. 56 dropped without hesitation and gave chase.
Landen didn't follow. He took the mid-level platforms instead, climbing for height and angle, watching the wisp from above as 56 pursued it below. From up here its movements looked different—less like something fleeing, more like something searching. And there was something else. Every few seconds, the faintest shift in its coloring, so brief he almost dismissed it each time.
56 eventually cornered the wisp between two stone structures, cutting off its angles, approaching slowly with nowhere left for it to go. He closed the last few meters—and the wisp simply wasn't there anymore. Then seconds later, reappearing on the opposite side of 56, already pulling away.
Landen's eyes stayed on the wisp. Something was forming at the edge of his understanding, close but not yet solid. He grabbed a loose object and threw it to force a reaction. A red dust cloud erupted on contact, and 56, closing hard from the front, caught the full blast to the face and went down.
The cloud told him what he needed. But one piece was still missing.
He tracked the wisp as it resumed its circuit, and that was when he noticed—every other wisp in the arena was getting out of its way. Not drifting aside, but actively reacting. Blue wisps blinked invisible to clear its path. Red wisps fired their smoke screens to propel themselves away.
He was still working through it when something wrenched the back of his basket. A foot planted hard on his shoulder, and then 56 was airborne above him, having used him as a launching pad without a moment's consideration.
He glanced back mid-flight, grinning. "Your sacrifice will not be in vain."
Landen watched him arc upward.
Then, very quietly, his eyes went wide.
Everything arrived at once—not gradually, not piece by piece, but all of it simultaneously, snapping into place like a completed image. Every observation, every detail, every small thing he'd filed away without connecting.
He checked the clock. Two minutes.
He looked at his basket.
He started moving.
— — —
High above, 56 was losing, and losing badly. Every lunge, every cut, every outstretched reach—the rainbow wisp slipped away like it was barely paying attention, like this was something other than a contest. He landed on a platform breathing hard and made a fast decision. If he couldn't catch it, then neither could Landen. He began steering the wisp toward the far end of the arena, using its own evasiveness against it, buying distance and letting the clock do the rest.
He glanced back to check Landen's position—and stopped.
Landen stood still in the middle of the arena floor, holding a red wisp in his open palm.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the rainbow wisp stopped mid-flight—completely, impossibly still—before snapping toward Landen with a locked, predatory focus that 56 hadn't seen from it once in the last several minutes. It crossed the arena in seconds, faster and more direct than it had moved yet.
The understanding arrived quietly. He's using his own wisp as bait.
The collision was a single detonation of white light so total it erased everything—no shapes, no shadows, no color except the light itself, in every direction at once.
Then it faded slowly.
Landen stood in the center of the floor, arm raised, the rainbow wisp turning gentle cycles in his hand. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
The buzzer rang out across the arena.
The agility assessment was over.
"I am surprisingly impressed," the system said. "How did you know the rainbow wisp would react to the red wisp that way?"
Landen looked down at the wisp as he explained.
The explosion at the start—that was the rainbow wisp's own version of the red wisp's smoke screen. The invisibility it had used to escape 56's corner—borrowed from the blue wisp. The red dust cloud. Every trick it had pulled across the entire assessment had belonged to another wisp first. And every time it used one, its color had shifted slightly—faded in that specific hue—because the ability was gone. Spent. It couldn't repeat the same trick twice in a row because it no longer had it.
It wasn't just running. It was hunting. Chasing down specific wisps to reabsorb what it had lost.
When it had fired the red dust cloud, it had lost its red. Which meant it needed a red wisp.
And Landen had one.
"Elegant," the system said.
A notification chimed.
|| Quest: Explore the MOBA Training System — (Completed) ||
|| Receive: 10 EXP ||
|| QUEST: Outscore your opponent — (Failed) ||
|| No EXP received ||
|| Experience points: 10/100 ||
Landen stared at the second notification for a moment.
All that, and I still lost to him.
He'd caught the rainbow wisp. He just hadn't gotten it into the basket before the buzzer. The points had never registered.
He let the rainbow wisp go. It drifted upward and rejoined the others, colors cycling quietly.
"You sacrificed your own points to catch it." 56 had walked up beside him, studying Landen with a new expression—less competitive, more curious. "Nobody would even think of that. Deliberately losing points. But you didn't hesitate."
Silence.
Then a short exhale through 56's nose—not quite a laugh, but close. "No. I admit defeat." His voice carried no warmth, but it carried something. Respect. "But this will be the last time."
Kael's voice cut through the arena. "That concludes the first assessment. Please proceed towards the exit for the next assessment."
— — —
The students filtered out. The arena went quiet.
Maris stood over her tablet, scrolling through the data, and then stopped.
"Look at this." She tilted the screen toward Kael. "Number 28 recorded the lowest top speed and the lowest average speed in the entire group." She paused. "He placed fifth overall."
Kael's brow furrowed. "What?"
Kael took the tablet. He read the numbers twice, the way you read something that doesn't add up. In every assessment he'd run, speed and score correlated. Not perfectly, but reliably. The faster students collected more wisps. That was how it worked. That was how it had always worked.
He read the name attached to the number.
Landen Knight.
And then it hit him. The boy from the classroom. The one who had sat perfectly still in the middle of the chaos. The one with Civilian-level essence—the lowest recorded classification they had ever admitted.
That boy had placed fifth.
Kael handed the tablet back slowly. His eyes drifted to the doorway the students had passed through, now empty and still.
The silence stretched.
"…I'm going to have to keep an eye on you."