Silverleaf was carefully examining the Runes on the whiteboard.
By now, he had completely abandoned the idea of leaving. Instead, he was doing his best to make a good impression on his future boss.
But the Chief Student really was the Chief Student.
After looking over the Runes on the whiteboard, Silverleaf immediately figured out Angell's intentions.
There were five sections of Runes on the board:
The first section was unusually simple. Even without knowing anything about Runes, anyone with enough Mana could copy it down and get a rough effect;
The second section was simple, too. It basically just needed to be copied, but the Mana input had to be controlled. Any student who had taken Rune classes could manage it;
The third section was of average difficulty. A few Runes had to be filled in to produce the spell effect. This was standard material for a Rune Major test;
The fourth section was a little difficult. The student had to write the Runes themselves to produce the spell effect, which was slightly beyond what they had studied;
The fifth section was extremely difficult. At first glance, it looked like the simple Runes from the first section, but a few of the Runes were wrong. They had to be found and corrected before the spell effect could be produced.
The question was, which section did the boss expect his employees to be able to complete?
Silverleaf stopped guessing.
As long as he did his best, he'd be chosen, right?
Silverleaf had never minded places where hard work was rewarded.
He gripped the Rune Pen and began copying carefully.
*
Two hours passed in the blink of an eye.
Will, like an exam proctor, precisely checked his pocket watch.
"Time's up," he announced.
The boys put down their Rune Pens.
The Runes on the whiteboard weren't very long, and two hours was more than enough time. Most of them had finished.
But everyone there had only just graduated. They hadn't yet realized that job hunting required initiative, so almost all of them sat obediently in their seats, as if waiting for a teacher to collect their papers.
Silverleaf was eager to get moving, but when he saw Will open his briefcase and take out a list of students, he didn't rush forward.
"Shall we go in order?" Will asked Angell respectfully.
Angell nodded indifferently.
"Kurt Farag," Will called.
"Huh? Y-yes!" A boy with utterly unremarkable features stumbled forward, clutching the Runes he'd written, and handed the Rune Board to Angell.
"All right, let's see how it works."
Angell didn't read the Runes on the board. Instead, he walked over to the table in the middle of the room.
Everyone had seen similar tables when they entered the Workshop. They'd also seen the guests gathered excitedly around one, and Will had said it was a "game." But there had been too many people to tell what sort of game it was, and Will hadn't seemed to know much about it either. At the time, the boys had been worried about what came next and hadn't looked into it further.
Now they watched as Angell lifted the tabletop and slotted the Rune Board into the table's middle, where it was filled with Magic Cores.
Angell couldn't be bothered to close the tabletop. He activated the Runes directly.
At once, a huge, round creature appeared above the table—
A Magic Wolf?
That was a Magic Wolf, wasn't it?
In fact, anyone who understood the Runes had known, while copying them, that they were making an illusion of a Magic Wolf.
But in their minds, a Magic Wolf was a beast enlarged after being corrupted by Demonic Energy: fierce and frightening, and certainly not cute.
Yet the Magic Wolf before them was round all over. Even with all four legs stretched out, they were shorter than its belly was wide. It even had a pair of ridiculous beady eyes and tilted its head as it stared blankly at everyone.
"I-I didn't adjust the illusion part of the Runes!" the boy who had copied that section said in a panic.
"I know. It was designed to look like this from the start," Angell said. He beckoned to the boy named Kurt. "Come on, try operating it yourself."
"Operating it?"
Kurt hesitantly stepped up to the table. With Angell's guidance, he learned how to use the Status Panel.
Although the boy's Mana was definitely higher than Enlise's, and he'd received several years of formal magical education, he'd only had a general understanding of the Runes while copying them. But when it came to the Game Table, he was no more composed than Enlise had been:
"Forward."
The Magic Wolf waddled forward, belly sticking out.
"Back."
The Magic Wolf cautiously shuffled backward on its little legs, nearly stepping on its own tail.
"Defend."
The Magic Wolf curled itself into a ball.
"Attack."
The Magic Wolf viciously stretched out its claws, then lost its balance and tumbled awkwardly to the ground.
"Haha!" Kurt grinned as foolishly as the silly-looking Magic Wolf.
He wasn't the only one. Most of the boys watching wore the same silly grin.
It was the first time they'd found the Runes they'd copied so entertaining.
It wasn't that they'd never encountered Illusionary Runes before. But even in Rune studies, they rarely broke the Runes down into individual steps for students to control and learn the effects of.
Take this year's Rune Major final, for example. It included a question about Illusionary Runes: "Suppose someone trespasses in the Ancient Mansion you're guarding. Write a set of Illusionary Runes depicting a ghost to scare them away (limited to twenty Runes)."
What did that question sound like?
It sounded like asking an English-speaking student to describe a frightening ghost in a five-character poem!
And producing a Rune effect required a great deal of Mana from magic crystals and Magic Cores. Even the City of Academies in the Magic Era wouldn't waste so much. So the students' written Runes were simply treated like essays for the teachers to mark. Most students had no idea what kind of ghost they'd actually created in their final exam.
Let alone having the chance to control it step by step and play with it.
The boys watched the Magic Wolf's movements more intently than they ever watched a lesson.
Unfortunately, they were the creators, not the players. So even as they laughed at the Magic Wolf, they were responsible for every move it made.
Angell continued:
"Roll."
Kurt was still grinning as he tried to press a key, but his hand froze above the Keyboard.
"What's wrong? Keep going!" someone urged.
I don't know which key to press for 'roll.' No, did I even write a Rune for 'roll'... Right, right! The second blank in the third section. I got that Rune wrong!
Kurt thought in confusion.
His fingers trembled over the keys. He couldn't channel Mana into them.
This was the first time Kurt had clearly understood that he'd made a mistake in writing the Runes.
Before, like all the students with mediocre or poor grades, he'd looked over the exercises the teacher had marked and copied down the corrections, but he'd never truly understood what had caused his mistakes or what consequences they could have.
For the first time, Kurt desperately wanted to correct his mistake right away.
Large beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He looked anxiously at Angell. "Um, I think I left out a Rune. Can I fix it right now?"
But Angell wasn't a teacher. He shook his head coldly. "No need. That's enough!"
Kurt's eyes instantly reddened.
The boys who'd been laughing fell quiet, finally realizing how serious this was.
Assistant Will fell silent for a moment, then continued calling names. "Yodel Quinn."
A tall, thin boy walked forward nervously, holding his Rune Slate.
He hadn't filled in that blank either.
In fact, he'd done even worse than Kurt. He'd made an obvious mistake while entering the Mana in the second section, leaving the Magic Wolf's movements all tilted, as if it had a broken leg. It was certainly funny, but the Rune Apprentice himself couldn't laugh.
Then came the third...
Then the fourth...
After several people in a row failed to turn in perfect answers, the mood grew heavy. Many studied their Rune Boards carefully, trying to figure out what they'd done wrong.
Only Silverleaf frowned.
Something was wrong!
Very wrong!
The order on the list in Mr. Will's hands was all wrong!
Silverleaf had thought it strange from the start. Why hadn't the list begun with him, the Chief Student? Why had it started with Kurt? Kurt was one of the poor students. He worked very hard, but in the wrong places, so his grades were a little better than those of the other weak students. But no matter how the list was ranked, he shouldn't have been the first one called.
If this were just an exam, that wouldn't matter. But this was a job interview!
Silverleaf didn't know how interviews for mages at the Mage Tower worked. But he did know that if a group of children were looking for odd jobs at the docks or a factory, they should put the oldest and strongest among them at the front!
An employer wasn't a teacher. They had no interest in carefully assessing every worker's skills. When hiring a group of people from a particular place, they usually judged the group's general level based on the first applicants they saw.
More importantly, the students' abilities really weren't that different.
A single year group wouldn't usually have a banishment-level genius and a powerless failure mixed together. Most of them were Rune Apprentices who were either a little better or a little worse than average. If the employer decided at the start that everyone was a "weaker Rune Apprentice," then even the "better Rune Apprentices" would seem only so-so.
In the first place, why bring the students at the bottom of the class here first?
If they wanted to solve the employment problem, wouldn't it be better to mix the poor students in with the larger group of average students?
If they didn't want to work with a Magic Workshop, couldn't the Magic Association simply refuse?
Or was this something Mr. Will had decided to do on his own?!
Silverleaf looked at Will.
Once he realized his situation wasn't as bad as he'd imagined, Silverleaf's mind had completely calmed down. One by one, the strange things he'd noticed before but hadn't thought much about rose to the surface.
Why hadn't the usually "friendly" Mr. Will offered a single explanation for this arrangement?
Why, when Silverleaf had wanted to ask Mr. Will what was going on, had he been unable to find a single chance during the three days on the Train?
Why had Mr. Will dawdled throughout the journey, then suddenly seemed to have "no time" once they arrived at the Alchemy Workshop?
The more Silverleaf thought about it, the stranger it seemed.
At that moment, Will seemed to sense Silverleaf's gaze. He looked over, gave him the same encouraging smile as before, and called out:
"Silverleaf."
It was your turn.