The last hour had passed, and all of the first years had already been brought back to the Academy hall.

The hall was the same as that morning, but it no longer felt the same. Earlier, it had been full of nerves and ambition. Now it felt heavier after the practical exam, with tired students, dirtied uniforms, and the marks of what they had just gone through. The raised balcony at the far end still overlooked the hall, though it remained empty for now.

The directors had not come out yet.

That alone kept the room from loosening fully.

Trafalgar stood with the same group as always, Zafira, Bartholomew, Xavier, and Cynthia. Being together again after the exam should have made the atmosphere lighter, and in some ways it did, but fatigue hung over all of them too clearly to ignore.

Even Xavier, who usually carried himself like someone the world could not tire properly, had lost part of his usual brightness. Cynthia looked steady from a distance, though the tightness in her shoulders gave her away. Zafira seemed the least affected on the surface, but Trafalgar could tell she had pushed herself seriously as well. As for Bartholomew, he looked half dead.

That was not strange.

Anyone who truly wanted to place high in the rankings could not take the practical final test lightly. Every first year in this hall understood that much. The Academy could talk about passing, survival, teamwork, and adaptation all it wanted, but students still wanted to stand above other students. They wanted names remembered, results acknowledged, and positions earned. That desire sat inside the hall as clearly as the smell of sweat and dust.

Even so, everyone also understood a simpler truth.

The top places almost never drifted far from the same kind of people.

The heirs of the Eight Great Families usually claimed the highest positions, and after them came the heirs of other powerful houses rich enough to invest in their children at a level most people could never match. That was how this world had always worked. Talent helped. Effort helped. But so did blood, tutors, rare resources, and a life built from the beginning around becoming stronger than everyone else.

This year, the top three had been an unspoken conclusion for a long time now.

Zafira.

Alfons.

Trafalgar.

There were three heirs from the Eight Great Families in this generation of first years, and nearly everyone had already accepted that those three would occupy the highest positions one way or another. The only real uncertainty lay in the order.

Cynthia was not thinking about any of that.

She had turned fully toward Bartholomew by then, and the moment she got a proper look at him, her expression tightened. Her brother had sweat on his face, his hair was a mess, and there was a deep kind of tiredness on him that went beyond ordinary exhaustion. It was not the face of someone who had simply hunted something and come back satisfied. It was the face of someone who had gone to the edge of what he could handle and only now had enough safety around him to feel the full cost.

"Are you alright, Barth?" Cynthia asked at once. "You look completely exhausted. You didn’t fail, did you? Don’t tell me that’s why you’re so down. That would be awful."

Bartholomew lifted his head as if the movement itself required effort. He wiped the sweat from his face with one sleeve, reached up, and put his glasses back into place before answering. Even that small action made him look more like himself.

"N-no..." he said, still trying to catch his breath properly. "I didn’t fail. But I am exhausted because of what I had to face. It was something above my level, I think. I was lucky I managed to kill it." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Trafalgar turned his head toward him immediately.

"What do you mean lucky?" he asked.

Bartholomew blinked, caught off guard by how quickly the reply came.

Trafalgar continued before he could say anything else. "I watched the whole thing live. You had everything you needed to kill it, and that’s exactly what you did. Give yourself more credit. You won because you worked for it."

The words were direct, but there was nothing forced in them. Trafalgar was not trying to comfort him out of kindness alone, nor was he throwing praise around loosely. He simply sounded certain. That made the difference.

Bartholomew stared at him for a moment, and the uncertainty in his face shifted into something quieter. He still looked tired, still overwhelmed by the memory of the fight, but the shame that had started to creep in lost some of its ground.

Xavier, who had been listening with growing interest, leaned in at once.

"What did you hunt?" he asked. "For him to say that, it must have been something serious."

Bartholomew looked a little embarrassed the moment all attention settled on him. "A rock serpent," he admitted.

Xavier froze.

For a brief moment, it looked like he had not processed the words correctly. Then his whole face changed.

"A rock serpent?" he repeated. "Barth, that’s insane."

Before Bartholomew could react, Xavier stepped forward and threw an arm around him in a sudden, enthusiastic hug that almost made the boy lose his balance on the spot.

"That’s incredible," Xavier said. "Seriously, I was expecting something decent, maybe something annoying to deal with, but a rock serpent? That’s actually incredible."

Bartholomew’s face went red almost immediately. "I-it wasn’t like that," he muttered, flustered by the reaction more than the praise itself. "It was really hard. I thought I was going to die more than once."

"That makes it better, not worse," Xavier said. "You still killed it."

Bartholomew did not know what to do with that. He stood there looking both pleased and mortified, which only made Xavier grin more.

Cynthia, meanwhile, had gone quiet.

Her attention had shifted away from her brother and landed on Trafalgar instead.

She knew Bartholomew well enough to understand what had happened without needing the rest explained out loud. Her brother did not just happen to walk into a fight like that on his own.

Not unless something had pushed him toward it, even if the push had come in the shape of trust rather than force.

Bartholomew and Xavier had already fallen into their own conversation by then, Xavier asking questions and Barth answering awkwardly, but Cynthia was no longer listening to them.

Trafalgar noticed it almost immediately.

"What?" he asked.

His tone was plain, almost dry, but it made Cynthia narrow her eyes at him.

She lowered her voice. "I’m sure you had something to do with him putting himself in danger."

Trafalgar did not look surprised. "Why do you think that?"

"Because you always push him," Cynthia replied. "You always make him overdo it and put himself in danger."

The answer came quickly, as if she had already been holding onto it before he asked. There was no real anger in it. Concern sat under everything. A sister’s concern, worn thin by habit.

Trafalgar looked at her for a second, and when he answered, his voice stayed even.

"I understand that you still want to protect Bartholomew," he said. "But I think you should trust your brother more. You underestimate him too much."

Cynthia did not answer right away.

That was enough for Trafalgar to continue.

"He’s changed," he said. "A lot more than you’re giving him credit for. That kind of fight would have crushed him before. Now it didn’t. That didn’t happen by accident."

Cynthia’s mouth parted slightly, but no words came out.

Because the worst part was that she knew he was right.

She did want to protect Bartholomew. That had become instinct so long ago that she hardly noticed it anymore. She was used to being the stronger one, the louder one, the one who stepped forward first while Barth stayed behind and tried to keep up. For a long time that had simply been reality. There had been nothing unfair about seeing him that way, because it had been true.

But that was the problem.

It had been true.

Not necessarily now.

Bartholomew had changed this year. He had grown stronger, steadier, more willing to step into things that once would have terrified him. He was still timid, still awkward, still very clearly himself, but that did not mean he was weak in the same way anymore. Cynthia knew that. She had seen it. Even so, some part of her still reacted as if he were the same boy from before.

That part of her did not know how to adjust.

What made it stranger was not only that Trafalgar had said it, but that he had said it about Bartholomew with that level of certainty. There had been no mockery in itl, no careless comment said just to move the conversation forward. Trafalgar had spoken like someone who had already measured Barth properly and reached a conclusion.

And, if she was honest with herself, her brother had changed because of him.

That realization carried more weight than she expected.

She stayed quiet, and Trafalgar did not press the point. He had already said what he meant to say. There was nothing else he needed to add.

Cynthia kept looking at him anyway.

The noise of the hall moved around them in broad, uneven waves. Students were still talking about what they had hunted, what they had almost hunted, who had come back injured, who had returned early, and who looked proud enough to burst. Somewhere farther away, someone was speaking loudly about a swamp beast. Another group was arguing over whether a kill completed with help from two teammates should count the same as one done mostly alone. None of it touched their circle directly.

Next to them, Xavier was still talking to Bartholomew with the same shameless energy as before.

"I’m telling you," Xavier said, "that’s one of the best things I’ve heard since we got back. If you rank lower than people who hunted something pathetic, the Academy is wrong."

Bartholomew looked helpless. "Please stop saying things like that."

"No."

"Xavier."

"No."

Even Zafira seemed faintly amused by that exchange, though it only showed in the smallest shift at the corner of her mouth.

Her attention drifted, not to Bartholomew, but to Cynthia.

She had noticed the conversation with Trafalgar. The silence on Cynthia’s side afterward said more than whatever had actually been spoken.

Zafira watched that for a brief moment, thoughtful.

After that, she turned toward Trafalgar.

"And what did you go for?" she asked.