Kael Draven never imagined his life would end over fried chicken.It had been a long and exhausting day. Work had drained him completely, his boss had pushed him past every reasonable limit, and all he wanted was one simple reward for surviving another miserable shift. That reward came in the form of his favorite fried chicken from a small shop across the street.A golden, crispy, and perfectly seasoned fried chicken, and the smell alone was enough to make the day feel survivable.He had already decided tonight that he would eat in peace.However, there was only one problem.Someone else grabbed the last box.Kael froze, and his hand was still on the shop door when he watched the stranger snatch the final box from the counter and walk away as if nothing had happened.Kael stared at the empty counter, then at the owner, who gave him an awkward, apologetic smile.Kael's jaw tightened, just slightly. "That… was mine," he said.The stranger did not turn around.Something inside Kael snapp

The explosion was not large.It was not the kind that destroyed walls or sent people flying across the room. It was sharp, sudden, and completely unexpected, a burst of white light and a crack of sound that made every person in the awakening hall flinch at the same moment.Then the smoke cleared, and the core stone was still there, but it had split cleanly down the middle.Professor Eldrin Hale, Kael, and the students stared at it.Nobody spoke for a full five seconds, and in that silence the only sound was the faint hiss of smoke curling up from the two halves of the stone. Then the professor walked forward, slow and deliberate, and crouched beside the broken stone. He studied both halves carefully, running one finger along the clean split as if checking whether it was real, and then he stood back up and looked at Kael with an expression that gave absolutely nothing away."In thirty years of running assessments," he said quietly, "I have never seen a student break the core stone."Ka

The notification on Kael's panel read three simple words.[ Luck Event Triggered ]Kael stared at it.Then he looked around the empty hall, as if someone might appear to explain what that meant.Nobody appeared, and he looked back at the panel.[ Luck Event Triggered ][ Details: Unclassified ]"Unclassified," he said quietly.The panel disappeared on its own.Kael sat there for a long moment, then stood, straightened his uniform, and walked out of the awakening hall into the corridor. He had no idea what a Luck Event was, what unclassified meant in this particular context, and absolutely no idea why his panel had chosen to tell him about it now, after everything had already happened, instead of earlier, when the information might have actually been useful.The hallway outside was mostly empty.Evening had settled fully over the academy. The wall-mounted lanterns cast a warm orange glow across the stone corridors, illuminating the floors and creating long shadows in the corners. A few

Kael spent the rest of the morning trying to look invisible, but it didn't work.Every corridor he walked through, every classroom he passed, every bench he sat on came with an audience he had not asked for. Students watched him from the corners; groups parted when he approached. Someone had drawn a rough sketch of him on the notice board near the main hall with the words "First Year First Place" written underneath in large, confident letters.Kael took it down, and someone put it back up before lunch, and he gave up after that.The afternoon brought his first formal class, an introduction to mana theory in a large tiered lecture room on the second floor. The seats filled quickly; Kael took a spot near the back and hoped that the distance from the front would translate into distance from attention, but it did not.Darius Vane sat three rows ahead of him, and he did not turn around, but the angle of his shoulders communicated everything.The lecturer, a small older woman named Professo

The circled room on the map was in the west wing basement, labeled with no explanation.Kael found it two hours after the evening bell, when the corridors were quiet, and most students had returned to their dormitories. He followed the hand-drawn map carefully, moving through the dimly lit west wing with his eyes on every turn. He took two wrong turns before finding a narrow staircase that led down into a lower hallway lit by a single row of wall lanterns. The air was cooler down here, and the silence had a different quality than the floors above. Heavier, like the kind that gathered in places people rarely visited.Someone left the door unlocked at the end.He pushed it open.Inside was a storage room converted into a space between a study and a small training area. Old furniture lined the walls, shelves stripped bare of their books, a cracked practice dummy stood in one corner, its painted face worn smooth by years of use, and a table near the center held a lantern, two chairs, and