The excitement Vance had felt for the rest of the first phase of the evaluation had become slightly muted. He cast his attention inwards at the first moment of relative quiet he was afforded and was gawking at his newfound willpower.

He spent a little while trying to quantify exactly what had changed. By his estimates, he was using over two-thirds of his total willpower to manage the feather construct.

Vance quickly became very excited about this evening's practice. He was curious to see exactly what sort of difference he'd notice in his various routines with all of this extra capacity.

Vance was brought back to reality when Brad announced, "Hey, Mariah. It's Naomi's turn."

Mariah responded with a long, exaggerated sigh.

"Woo, get 'em, sis." Her monotone cheer resounded through the chamber. Vance did his best to ignore Mariah's enthusiastic apathy for her sister whilst using his mana sense to observe Naomi's test.

Naomi performed very well. With the large quantities of mana third-years typically controlled, it was hard for Vance to figure out precisely how well she'd done. Even so, he guessed that she'd placed somewhere in the top handful.

Afterwards, Mariah seemed to be in a foul mood. Vance opted not to poke that particular hornet's nest and instead turned the conversation towards the next test. Considering none of the others brought up Naomi's results, he figured he'd made the right choice.

The masters took a short break before the identification test started, which gave the students plenty of time to start spreading information about the first test's results. Vance's performance was mentioned fairly frequently over the next few minutes.

By now, more or less everyone in the college had heard of the strange new kid on campus with a penchant for making bad decisions. Now that Vance had just outperformed nearly all of the second-year students in mana control, people had a lot of new questions. Vance was pleased when most of them failed to actually ask any of them.

The second examination was based on constructs and identification. Vance was less confident in this one than the first. After all, he hadn't spent as long actually studying magic as a lot of his peers. Based on her reactions so far, the only one less confident than him was Mariah.

As the exams started, Vance cast out his mana sense. He let it wash over the constructs that the masters had conjured and began studying them. He noticed that the masters never seemed to repeat themselves as they went from student to student. That gave Vance a good idea of exactly how broad of a subject the creation of constructs could be.

He did pick up a pattern, however. Typically, they'd start with some sort of variation on the gatherer construct. Then, they'd move on to constructs that expended mana in one way or another. Shifter constructs appeared less frequently and examples as complex as the enhancement constructs were appearing much later down the line.

So far, that all matched up with Vance's expectations. Then, the masters started stepping it up. It was around this stage that a lot of the first-year students had no idea what they were looking at. Second-year students evidently learned a lot more constructs on this level and made it a little further.

Vance did his best to identify each construct they created but he was struggling. This really was a weak spot for him. He managed to figure out a couple of the more advanced constructs and was very proud of this fact, but he found he was wrong more often than not.

The rest of the group performed to average levels. The only stand-out one amongst them was Thomas. His knowledge of constructs was even more impressive than his control. More than once, Vance had heard Thomas described as "diligent". He now believed this assessment to be correct.

"He'll be a master one day," James spoke to the group with a fawning sigh.

"So will we all. Except for Brad, he'll be a warlord." Mariah said.

"I don't like war." was all she got from Brad.

"What do you think, Vance?" She turned away from Brad. She didn't seem surprised that she didn't get a rise out of the big guy.

Vance didn't reply, so she prodded him. "Vance?"

Vance flinched and turned to face her. "Yeah? Sorry, I was...over there." Vance pointed in the rough direction of the tests.

"No kidding. Confident?"

"Absolutely not. You?"

"Nope. I'm going to fail this one hard."

"Well, at least we'll fail together." Vance put on his best dramatic voice.

"How romantic. I think you're up, by the way. Noelle is glaring at you."

Vance turned his focus back onto the room and heard, "Mr Vance Kalliea?" ring out from the old master's mouth.

Vance scurried his way out post-haste. He gave a little bow on his approach and muttered, "Sorry."

Without preamble, she instantly summoned a construct. Vance swept his sense out over it and took its components in. As expected, the first was a variation on a gatherer construct. In particular, this construct was not an automated gatherer but was more like a receiver. It could store mana similarly to a gatherer but it would only hold onto mana given to it directly by an Arcanist. The largest difference was that the core at the centre of the construct wasn't rotating.

"It's a gatherer construct, but it's inferior. It doesn't automatically gather mana, just holds it. Regardless, the standard process for creating a gatherer construct applies except you haven't set the core spinning, which creates the attraction force for pulling in new mana. Honestly, I can't think of many reasons you'd want to use this over the standardised gatherer, it's just worse."

Vance paused for a moment, then corrected himself.

"Actually, I suppose there is one use. If you specifically wanted to avoid gathering ambient mana into your construct, you could insert pre-shifted mana into the construct instead. It's not particularly efficient but if you had no room for a shifter construct it might have a use."

"A fine assessment. Next." Noelle was all business this time, it seemed.

Next, as expected, she conjured a construct that was used to expend gathered mana. Vance didn't exactly recognise the construct but its components were fairly basic. The basic shape was a cube constructed of dense water mana. In the centre lay a spherical shell of pure, ambient mana.

Between the two, there was a familiar lattice construct. It was just like a shifter construct but this time made entirely of water mana.

Vance was happy that he had his mana sense, it made it quite easy for him to distinguish the water lattice from the dense water mana comprising the exterior of the construct. He was fairly confident he could give this one an educated guess, so he got started.

"This one appears to be something you might use in a trap or maybe an attack. As far as I can tell, that centrepiece is a simple receiver point. I think its job is to accept mana from another source, then push it outwards. The water lattice is supposed to convert that ambient mana to water mana, then push it outwards again. I think that if you put ambient mana in this thing, the cube of water will grow. It's comprised of a core similar to a gatherer's core, a shifter construct and a basic membrane of water mana. If you left it long enough, the water mana on the outside would probably decay away back into ambient mana until you feed it more mana."

Vance gave his answer in a concise, confident way. In reality, he was only somewhere between sixty and seventy per cent confident in his answer.

"Accurate. Next."

Vance let out a deep breath. He really didn't want to fail that early. He was happy that he'd actually started learning his basics. On that note, he reminded himself to thank the McKinleys again for helping him out with all of that.

Noelle's third construct was a step up in difficulty. Vance felt his chances drop to near zero straight away.

The basic shape appeared to be one he'd come into contact with earlier today, an icosahedron. Vance could sense a smaller set of what appeared to be flat planes of metallic mana on the inside of the shape. There was one flat plane in line with each of the faces of the construct, like a small version of the icosahedron on the inside. Notably, one of the smaller faces was constructed of a different mana type, fire.

The miniature version was attached to the larger icosahedron via small strings of metallic mana, joining them at each vertex. Vance wasn't sure what their purpose was, structural integrity wasn't typically top of the list when designing a construct. Building things out of mana didn't really require physical support as mundane construction did. He supposed you could add it if you wanted, though.

At the very centre, there was a small core of pure mana. It wasn't solid like the cores at the centre of a gatherer construct and had pieces of the sphere missing. He couldn't identify the purpose of that particular change.

Giving it a minute, he made no significant progress. Vance decided to admit defeat. He had a time limit and he figured he was going to hit it anyway.

"Sorry, master. I have no idea what this one is for. I think it's supposed to move, maybe rotate based on the metallic support structure. Otherwise, I'm not sure what the purpose is. I've never seen a core like that."

"Very well. I'll explain. There's no point in wasting a teachable opportunity. First, observe."

Noelle inserted some ambient mana into the centre of the construct and it kicked into action. First, the core at the centre started to send out pulses of tiny amounts of ambient mana. Vance could sense them clearly but the concentration of mana was so small it'd probably be hard for other Arcanists to spot.

The wave of ambient mana moved outwards at a reasonable pace and collided with him. When it did, it harmlessly reflected off of his membrane and returned to the construct. As the mana returned to the core of the construct, the whole thing rotated to point one specific face at Vance.

From the outside, it would've appeared to have been just any random face. Vance could tell that it was the odd one out, the fire aspect face, that was facing him.

"It's an aiming construct. It sends out pulses of pure mana to harmlessly detect nearby membranes. The internal icosahedron is rotated by the core, pointing in the direction of the closest mana membrane it could detect. As you could imagine, if you attach some form of an offensive construct to this, you could create a semi-automated defensive system. The outer shell is brought along with the internal icosahedron as a defensive layer and a delaying strategy for anyone trying to break into the construct with mana."

"That sounds very handy. Why aren't these everywhere?" Vance asked, curious.

"Because the construct to have it differentiate between friend and foe is much more complex. Incorrectly using an automated defensive construct is a surefire way to find yourself responsible for a bloodbath."

That made Vance a little nervous.

"Why didn't it turn to you? You're closer than me."

"I prevented it from detecting me. If I hadn't, it would have. The demonstration is more effective if you're the target. Please return for now Vance."

Vance nodded at that, thanked Noelle, then bowed and made his way back to his friends. Overall, he was pretty pleased with his results.

"That wasn't so bad. You did pretty well," James patted Vance on the back as he got close.

"I'm surprised I got that far."

"I thought you said you weren't confident?!" Mariah appeared by his side in a panic.

"I wasn't. I think I was just a bit lucky, some of them were familiar enough for me to make a decent guess."

"This is going to suck..." Mariah complained.

"Maybe if you didn't keep trying to burn your books when you got frustrated, you'd do better." Thomas chastised.

"That was one time!"

"Twice." Brad corrected. "I had to rescue them last time."

Mariah made a wounded sound and fled back to Vance.

"Brad has betrayed me. Duel him." She demanded. By her voice, she was obviously joking. Vance was grateful for that fact.

"There's no way I'm fighting Brad. You realise he could crush me with his thumbs, right?"

"Good point. We'll work on a plan," Vance reasoned she was likely already halfway through concocting some elaborate prank-based revenge plan.

Not long afterwards, Mariah was called up for her examination. She successfully identified her gatherer construct and correctly identified the purpose of the second construct, though failed to properly identify all of its components.

When she returned, she was more pleased than anyone had been expecting. Evidently, she didn't think she'd make it past the first construct.

It was shortly thereafter that the masters took their second break. They began their preparations for the third exam. Just before it got underway, the doors to the room opened again. On impulse, Vance cast out his mana sense to see if he could identify what sort of crowd was joining them.

Instead of a crowd, he detected the membranes of four individuals. Ordinarily, that'd be the end of his interest, however, they captured his attention again a moment later.

At the same time as gasps and whispers of recognition began to ring out through the room, Vance felt the sudden appearance of four powerful mantles of mana. The powerful mana cloaks completely eclipsed the membranes he'd sensed a moment ago.

Each individual standing by the entrance of the room was emitting pulse after pulse of powerful mana. It caused something of a storm amongst the ambient mana of the chamber. The activation of their mantles was a clear message to everyone present letting them know that now was the time to show proper respect, for they were in the presence of masters.

The master's guests had finally arrived.