The refeitory was in a state Golden had never seen before, not noisy, not quiet. It was that specific sound of hundreds of people pretending to eat while actually doing only one thing.

Gossiping.

"...they say the deadliest one now is the Fat Knight..."

"Was that really his name?"

"Yeah! Apparently he used to be one of Eldrath’s cooks."

"Holy shit. While the other test was mostly theory, this one looks like we’re actually going to have to fight. Just my luck after I already failed once..."

Golden wasn’t listening to anything else.

He sighed, picked up his tray, and started to get up.

"How many?"

Someone had walked up beside him without warning, placing another plate of food in front of him, a messy-haired boy wearing the expression of someone who had planned this moment far too carefully.

Golden didn’t look up and kept eating. "How many what?"

"Hahaha." The boy grinned. "You fell for my trick. Now that you’re eating it, you owe me one. You started eating before asking."

Golden looked at the plate.

Looked at the boy.

"I’m out."

"But you’re eating what I gave you. So at least hear me out."

"Do I have to?" Golden picked up his fork. "It’s like feeding a stray dog. It doesn’t care who gave it the food. Only what it’s eating. In my case, it’s this steak. And you must really like me to try something like this."

The boy opened his mouth. "Come on, man. I spent a ton of points. Just listen."

Golden stood up with his plate and left.

"After Living Map, everyone here at Eldrath thinks they’re a master manipulator..." he thought, leaving the cafeteria without hurrying. "The academy really is changing us... Idiots."

He had barely shut the door with his foot, tray still in hand, finishing the last piece of steak, when someone knocked.

Three knocks, dry, deliberate.

Golden stared at the door for a second.

He opened it.

It was a delegation.

Six people stood in the hallway, serious faces, postures that said they’d rehearsed this before coming. In front stood a long-eared elf wearing an expression meant to inspire confidence but much closer to calculated tension.

Golden looked at them.

"Yeah?"

"We have a proposal for you." The elf said, voice measured, the kind of tone a leader uses after learning that speaking deeply sounds authoritative.

"I’m out." Golden shut the door.

It didn’t close.

The elf had put his foot in the doorway.

"Clear sign of who’s in control here." The elf thought, feeling the situation under control. "He’s at a disadvantage. Look at him, stuck between closing the door and listening. Our intimidation plan is working."

Golden looked at the foot in the doorway.

He tried closing it again, slowly, testing.

The elf didn’t move his foot.

Golden opened the door all the way.

Then slammed it with everything he had.

BAM.

"AAAAAAAH..." The scream echoed through the entire hallway. "Fuck! You broke my foot..."

Golden locked the door. "Idiot. Doesn’t know where to put his feet. Now you’ll learn."

The knocking didn’t stop.

It went on for at least two minutes, alternating between "Open the door!" and curses Golden didn’t recognize in at least two different languages.

He opened it...

Moments later, the entire delegation was sitting on the bedroom rug in an awkward semicircle, the elf with his injured foot raised, twitching in pain while trying to keep a serious expression.

Golden sat on the bed.

Plate on his lap.

Still eating.

"What do you want."

"We want to join your team!" They all said almost in unison.

"What team?"

"For the next test." The elf explained, foot still elevated. "You and that guy... what was his name... the one with the Chinese-sounding name..."

"What was it?" One of the group asked the others.

"Was it Suzuki?"

"Suzuki!? No way!" another shouted.

"You’re crazy. He was Japanese... it was Jackie Chan!"

"It had an M and a Z in it, I remember."

"Mazukashuu! Yeah, that was it." They all agreed.

Golden stopped eating for a second.

Then resumed eating.

"You and Mazukashuu scored well on the last test." The elf continued, apparently deciding to ignore his foot. "We want good scores too. We want in."

"We weren’t a team." Golden said. "I paid him. He paid me. We know each other. That’s it."

"Why not go to Armand? Or Genials? They scored well too."

"Genius..." They hesitated. "We don’t know where he is. And Armand’s group is already full."

"Then ask the girls."

"We tried." One of them admitted, slightly embarrassed. "But we’re cowards."

Golden nodded, understanding without needing further explanation.

"No one feels comfortable around boobs." Golden said with the same natural tone someone would use to comment on the weather.

Silence for two seconds.

Then three of them laughed at the same time.

"Well." Golden put down his fork. "Mazukashuu and I aren’t a group. And I’m not interested in forming one. Besides, the test won’t be that hard."

"It won’t!?" The elf leaned forward. "Do you have information?"

"Of course he does!" Another added.

"Back during the Baptism there was a time he saved me!"

"True, but then the veterans’ dog screwed everything up. Those were the good old days."

Golden looked at them for a moment.

"I don’t have information." He said. "But it’s obvious. We’ll just go around beating up the weaker spirits. Simple. Everyone’s attention is on the Twelve, but who here actually wants to fight one of the Twelve?"

Complete silence.

"Exactly. So just avoid them and beat the weak ones. Easy."

"Whoa." Someone said. "Golden is so wise. Coming here wasn’t a waste."

"As for Mazukashuu..." The elf began.

"I don’t know where he is." Golden cut him off. "But I can take a guess. Since you want to hear from him too."

"Where?"

Golden looked at the whole group at once.

"How many points do you have for me?"

"MUZUKASHUU!" The group shouted toward the attendants’ wing. "Get out here, we wanna talk to you!"

An orange uniform appeared in the window.

"What the hell do you want?" The head cleaner said, elbows on the windowsill, wearing the expression of someone whose nap had just been interrupted by the most unnecessary noise of the day. "Didn’t clean much crap today. I’m resting."

"Shut up, old man." The most excited student in the group answered. "We wanna talk to Mazukashuu."

The head cleaner looked at him.

Slowly closed the window.

The door to the attendants’ wing opened.

The excited student didn’t even understand what happened. He only felt the impact twice, fast, the second hit arriving before the first one had even finished hurting.

Thud. Thud.

He stood there blinking.

"Whisky’s mother’s son." The chief shook his hand, not from pain, just out of habit. "No respect for old people. Wanna get bullied by an old man, huh? Want a kick in the balls too?"

The group didn’t know whether to laugh or back away.

"You little shits." The chief adjusted his uniform. "What do you want?"

"We just wanted to know if Mazukashuu is here."

"Who?... Mazukashuu!?"

"The Japanese guy."

"Mizuki, the kid!"

"Yeah, that’s what we said, Mazukashuu."

The chief stared at them for a second longer than necessary.

"He left a long time ago..."

Then he punched the excited student again, without any warning, simply because he was close enough.

"Get lost, you little shits."

...

The book read: "northeast wing, sublevels, ..., ..., corridor without official designation."

It had taken Haru forty minutes to find the door, not because the path was difficult, but because the map in the book was three hundred years old, and three internal renovations had changed enough to turn "third hallway on the left" into an exercise in archaeological interpretation.

But he found it.

The room was the kind of place that exists in every building old enough, that area no formal cleaning or renovation process ever managed to reach, not because it was forbidden but because it had gradually been forgotten.

Low ceiling. Dark stone damp with moisture that never completely dried.

Rotting wooden shelves holding objects that had lost their usefulness before any current student had been born.

Spiderwebs in every corner.

Haru coughed, the dust had that specific weight of air that hadn’t circulated in far too long.

He closed the Book of Eldrath.

Opened Vandris’s diary.

He stood there for a moment, looking around the room. The light entered through a crack in the ceiling, thin, diagonal, cutting through the suspended dust in an almost geometric line.

He exhaled.

No one was here.

And no one would be until the test truly began.

"Perfect."

He sat on the floor, not on a crate or a shelf, on the floor itself, his back against the sturdiest wall. He opened the diary to a specific page he had marked.

Vandris wrote in small, dense handwriting, wasting no space, like someone who had learned that paper was a resource, not a guarantee.

"The distinction between hosting and being possessed does not lie within the spirit. It lies within the host. A spirit enters where there is space. It remains where there is intention. And when the host’s intention aligns with what the spirit still carries, not will, but burden, the result is not possession."

"It is partnership."

"Temporary. Costly. But partnership."

Haru read the line three times.

Then stared at the ceiling for a while.

The Knights weren’t monsters to kill. They had once been people. They had died carrying burdens, promises, duty, love, fear, something they had failed to let go when they should have.

And now they were anchored to that burden.

Three hundred and forty-seven years of being anchored.

"The difference is that they chose to stay."

"I didn’t choose to carry."

"But maybe that’s an advantage now."

He closed the diary.

He looked at the objects on the shelves, things without names, without context, with no one left who remembered why they had been stored. A candelabra with strangely colored wax. A sword broken cleanly in half, blade separated from the hilt, both pieces resting together as though someone had expected the distance between them to shrink over time. A mirror that no longer reflected, its glass cloudy from within, not from dirt.

Haru stared at the mirror for a long time.

Inside the cloudy glass there was something, not an image, not a reflection. Just a sense of depth that shouldn’t exist in a flat mirror.

"Room of the Dead." He thought.

"What a funny name for a room full of things no one had the heart to throw away."

He returned to the diary.

"The problem with spirits is not what they want."

"It’s what they still believe they must do."

Haru kept looking at that line.

The broken sword on the shelf.

The cloudy mirror.

"And if I can understand what each of them still believes they must do..."

"...then I won’t have to defeat them."

"Either way, this is going to be my biggest scam."

Outside, far away, the afternoon bell rang, marking the official beginning of the information period about the Twelve.

Haru didn’t go.

He stayed in the Room of the Dead, reading Vandris, with dust floating through the air, diagonal light, and three hundred years of silence gathered within the walls.

Preparing.