Two heaping plates of flatbread, vegetables, and meat was an incomprehensible amount of food for Grant, but Roland had gently encouraged and prodded until there were only three bites left.

  He wasn’t particularly gentle with the rest, despite Grant’s pleas for mercy. But eventually he praised the former inn worker for getting the job done.

  [Strength has increased to 5!]

  Grant let out a reserved “woo” in mock celebration, then winced, clutching his ribs. He was going to be a Mage. Strength was irrelevant to him, but being half as strong as the average adult man was a milestone in itself.

  As if to remind himself of his goal, he subtly Resummoned his dagger, Identified it, and then Dismissed it. With his days of constant practice, he no longer needed to confirm his Mana beforehand. His maximum Mana was now high enough to cast Identify six times, but it didn’t feel necessary to break his current system of casting it the second he was ready.

  Grant wandered into the lecture hall to find only a few seats occupied. Confused, he stepped back out to confirm the room number. He assumed that every room would be packed full of recruits, but this was by far the smallest class he had seen. He took a seat against the wall.

  The atmosphere was different from his morning class. While there was nervous chatter that only quieted when Doctor Holt entered, the students in this class set cautious distances apart, taking furtive glances at each other when nobody was watching. He caught one girl cleverly watching him through a window’s reflection. Her eyes flicked away when he met her gaze in it.

  Eventually, a chubby, middle-aged woman with curly brown hair stomped in on short, hurried steps, bursting with energy and wearing a smile that matched it. She carried several rolls of parchment under her armpit.

  “I am Professor Caitlyn,” she said, dumping the papers onto her desk. Several rolled onto the floor, and she squatted down to pick them up, sending more over the other side. The class gawked as she hunched over to retrieve them. “You can just call me Caitlyn. This is Races and Monsters, which is a preparatory course for identifying creatures beyond the Portal. You may have noticed the abundance of open seats,” she continued, holding her hands out, “but rest assured that this is not due to any lack of competence on my part.”

  A few students chuckled politely.

  She reminded Grant of his third-year schoolteacher in Iori, who instead of threatening students with punishment for misbehaving, smothered them with affection until guilt kept them in check. He liked her already.

  Professor Caitlyn returned their laughs with a toothy smile. “You were selected for this course because you met the strict prerequisites. Your Intelligence is a minimum of 16, and your Perception a minimum of 18. You also demonstrated proficiency in reading comprehension and writing on your entrance examinations. Lastly, you all have the Identify spell.”

  The other recruits looked around, studying their classmates far more openly than before. There were six of them in total—four women and two men. While they all wore the same basic uniform, Grant took note that everyone but him appeared noble, or at least affluent.

  “In total, this course will be taught to 11 of the 9,641 recruits in Athemore and fewer than thirty across Evenon. I believe that you deserve to feel proud, as I hand-selected each of you among your peers. This happens to be the second most uncommon course for a future Campaigner to take,” she announced, her voice heavy with praise.

  Grant smiled to himself. Part of him was glad to be among the elite for once in his life, but a greater part of him was just happy that he had won an imaginary competition against the hundreds of nobles who did not qualify.

  “Without further ado,” she began, unrolling one of the sheets and sticking it to the blackboard.

  It was an intricate painting of a young man. Grant leaned forward, trying to find what it was about his face that unnerved him so much. The other recruits had also pushed themselves up against their desks, trying to get a better look.

  “Don’t just sit there. Come up!” She waved them forward, laughing. Chair legs groaned as they slid back from desks, and everyone crowded around the picture from the front. Professor Caitlyn laughed harder, sweeping her hand out towards her students. “One of the many benefits of a small class!”

  Some students scribbled notes frantically on paper, but Grant was more interested in taking in every detail of the face on the picture. He had never felt the need back in school to write everything his teachers said. As long as he understood the message, the details were easy enough to memorize.

  The pictured man’s eyes slanted at the wrong angle, as if they were being pulled up and back. His face looked emaciated, but not unhealthy. And somehow, his skin was wrong. It was too taut and too smooth. Almost too perfect, as though the artist was trying to flatter him.

  His classmates mumbled to themselves, scratching their pencils on paper.

  When Caitlyn could tell they were out of ideas, she hung another picture, which was of the same man. This time he was smiling. His canines were long and sharp, almost like the wolves that prowled the northern hills. Grant’s classmates gulped. Several stumbled back a step, and disbelief stood heavy in the air.

  He just wondered how the creature ate without biting its own tongue off.

  “This is an Elf,” their professor explained. “Scholars have debated their origins since the First Campaign. We know they, like all other races but Humans, are not native to Lyria. We also know there are multiple species of Elves, and this man is a Wood Elf. Even their weakest tribe members have the capabilities of a Scout or Ranger of the Rare rank.”

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  Every head in the room jerked toward her. Rare Classes were, for lack of a better word, exceptionally rare, even among Anomalies. If these Elves were as powerful as she had said, ten could carve through the entire military of a large city in a matter of hours. Beyond the Portal, he would have to do everything in his power to avoid them. They didn’t seem like the biting type, but their fangs must have been long for a reason.

  “It is said that the easiest way to kill an Elf is to call a meteor down on its forest—preferably from at least two fields away. They will occasionally parley with a Human, but if you wander into their territory uninvited, your brain will not even have enough time to process the pain of the arrow piercing it.”

  Grant smiled, deciding that this was by far his favorite class. Every description only led to more questions bursting out, and several of his classmates took every moment of silence as an invitation to request details.

  Professor Caitlyn answered every question in detail and managed to continue from exactly where she had left off, introducing all the major races they were likely to encounter. There were the Orcs, which were broad-shouldered, gray-skinned hulking beasts, whose disproportionately large hands looked like they could tear a horse’s hoof from its leg. They looked primitive and violent, she explained, but she emphasized with conviction that underestimating their intelligence was gambling with a bad hand.

  The Orcs’ natural rivals were the Dwarves, though there were records of them working together, depending on the circumstances. They were no taller than a ten-year-old Human child, and their bodies were covered in coarse hair. Their arms dangled past their muscular and squat torsos, almost to their knees, and their beards draped down to their bellies. For the Gnomes, she had multiple drawings, none of which looked all that similar, as they were rare beyond the Portal. She described their feats of engineering with the words “nothing our world would be seeing for centuries.”

  Professor Caitlyn introduced the Humans’ closest allies last: the Dryads. While the other races were, like Humans, generally composed of half men and half women, over ninety-nine percent of Dryads were born female. They had gangling, bony physiques, but Grant found their faces breathtakingly beautiful, with delicate features and piercing eyes. The Elves were closer in appearance and culture to Humans, but the Dryads and Humans had developed strong allegiances in previous Campaigns.

  Eventually, Professor Caitlyn clapped her hands and told them they were out of time, and the students gave a collective sigh. Grant loitered behind as the others shuffled out and the professor re-rolled her visual aids, dreading his next yard session.

  “Excuse me, Professor Caitlyn?”

  She glanced up and grinned. “Oh, Mr. Leeman. I hope you enjoyed the lecture. And just Caitlyn, please.”

  She knows my name?

  “Please call me Grant. It was fascinating, but a question has been burning near out my skull, and I didn’t want to interrupt class with it.”

  Having finished packing up her belongings, she laid her palms on the podium. “Well! I would hate to see a promising young mind melted with curiosity. Please.”

  Grant took the invitation eagerly. “We do not know the origins of the Orcs and the Dwarves, but we do know that some of their tribes will attack each other on sight, correct?”

  The professor gestured for him to continue.

  “Well, I noticed that in some of the images, their tooth structure is similar. They have long canines, but their premolars, molars, and incisors are flat and wide. To the best of our knowledge, the races all come from different worlds, but it seems to be too large of a coincidence for two races from two separate worlds to have developed identical dental anatomy.”

  She pointed at Grant and raised her eyebrows. “And what can be deduced from this?”

  Grant considered his next words carefully, trying to be as concise as he could, swaying his head to the side. “Perhaps nothing. However, Lyria has only one intelligent species. To the best of our knowledge, rats, dogs, cats, and horses are never selected. I believe the scholars may have erroneously assumed that all worlds were the same. If this is incorrect, Orcs and Dwarves could have evolved side by side on the same world, competing for the same resources. This would explain their hatred of each other and their identical teeth.”

  Without a word, Caitlyn reached under the desk and pulled out a drawer. From it, she retrieved a tome as thick as Grant’s wrist. He read its title. The Orc and Dwarf Convergent Evolution Hypothesis.

  “Ah,” Grant said. “I see I’m not the first to have thought of this.”

  She shook her head and lifted the tome. “This was written after the Fifth Campaign, just nine years ago. It took over a century of Campaign research history for Durant and Miller to develop the hypothesis that you just came up with in one lecture.”

  Grant couldn’t hide his joy at her praise.

  “Now, if you were a noble boy, I would assume that you read Durant and Miller’s work and tried to pass it off on me as your own work to curry favor. Perhaps it would be the precursor to requesting additional study sessions to get out of yard,” Caitlyn suggested.

  He opened his mouth to deny the allegations, but she rose a palm at him for silence.

  “But you are a former inn worker from Iori, are you not? You would not have the slightest inkling of any previous research. I’m fairly certain there are only five copies of this in the world right now, and one would most certainly not be sitting in Iori’s public library.” She paused and drummed her fingers on her desk. “No offense,” she added with a tight smile.

  “None taken,” said Grant, relief outweighing the shame of being from a remote town. “But do you actually have the ability to get me out of yard?” Grant would have loved nothing more than to spend another two hours a day in the classroom.

  Her laugh came out more like a squeal, and she patted Grant on the shoulder. “Oh, Grant, that’s even less likely than me being asked to be a yard instructor myself.”

  He sagged.

  “What was your Strength? 4?”

  “5, now,” Grant said hopefully.

  “And your Intelligence was 17, I believe.” She hummed. “You see, if your Wisdom did meet the minimum requirement, and if you could prove yourself capable in the field, there might be an argument for putting you in my Scouting and Information Gathering class. It teaches the cultures more deeply than this course, and it is meant to prepare teams to provide enemy locations and potential methods of attack to elite teams.”

  “And if my Wisdom were, say, a few points higher?” Grant asked.

  She sucked her teeth. “Unfortunately, for a two-letter word, ‘if’ is quite heavy.” An uncomfortable silence settled over the two as Grant stared at the floor.

  He almost spilled his secret about his true Wisdom value on the spot. It was officially what he reported it as in Iori, 3, but if it were higher, would they welcome the schedule change? Scouting and Information Gathering seemed to be a perfect fit for him.

  Captain Alaric’s face flashed in front of his eyes, and he clenched his jaw to smother a shudder. He held no skepticism about the effectiveness of the man’s instruction, but his methods were catered more for future Spearmen, not Mages.

  However, caution and sense eventually prevailed, and he pressed his lips together. He had only met Caitlyn a couple of hours ago, and although he was fond of the professor, he didn’t know how the officers would react to him undergoing 18 years of Wisdom training in a matter of days.

  “I feel like ‘no’ is a much heavier two-letter word,” Grant challenged.

  She scratched behind her ear thoughtfully. “That is true, young man,” she said after a few seconds. “I’ll… ask. Military types don’t like having their toes stepped on, and I may get an earful for it, but they need me more than I need them. At the very least, we’ll know for certain.”

  Grant almost cried with relief. “Thank you so much.”

  She chuckled, flashing another toothy smile. “Don’t thank me yet! I’ll see what I can do, though.”

  With that, Grant excused himself to his final yard session of the day.