For a while, Kyro was entranced in that swell of euphoria, drifting as though on cloud nine, up until he wasn't.
He didn't know the exact moment it happened, but at some point the fullness twisted. Turned. What had been comfortable became strained. What had been right became too much.
And then—
Pain.
Not sharp. Not immediate.
But inevitable.
Kyro's breath hitched. His arms trembled where they were outstretched. For the first time since the evaluation began, resistance surfaced, his body, or something within it, pushing back.
He tried his utmost to sustain the flow state, to absorb as much Cosmic Energy as he possibly could, but in the end it was all for naught. As Halvek had said, the amount of Cosmic Energy an organism could absorb was preset and finite, and Kyro, for all his singularity, was no different.
"Stabilisation threshold reached," Halvek said, voice cutting cleanly through the moment. "Terminating infusion."
At his command, the motes stilled instantly. The hum died. The glow faded.
And just like that, it was over.
Kyro staggered slightly as he stepped off the platform and onto solid ground once more. His legs held—just—as the pressure within him receded. Not gone. Never gone. But no longer increasing.
"Arms down," Halvek said, though it came out almost gentle.
Kyro realised he was still standing with his arms spread. He lowered them.
His body felt strange, for lack of a better word. Every inch of him felt... occupied. Alive in a way that was difficult to articulate. Lighter, yet heavier; exhausted yet energised. As though he had run himself to the point of collapse, and somehow emerged more invigorated for it.
He flexed his fingers and felt it, that faint, lingering presence. That strange, weightless fullness.
Still there. Still his.
The door released. Halvek stepped through, unhurried, datasheet in hand, eyes moving across whatever readings had accumulated during the process. He did not look up immediately, and Kyro could feel his heart hammering out of his chest.
When the Examiner finally raised his eyes, his expression was exactly what it had been the moment they'd met: measured, professional, and giving nothing away until he chose to.
"Final CES Grade," Halvek said, "for subject Kyro Malarc.
"Upper Bronze."
Upper Bronze. The verdict reverberated inside Kyro's head like a church bell.
Upper Bronze. Not Null. Not unpowered. Not any other euphemism for normie.
Not anymore.
Kyro simply stood there, struck wordless, but thinking everything. Against all odds, against the natural order itself, he was now one of them. An Ascendant. The cream of the crop. A de facto ruler of the world.
Gods. What did this mean for his life? His friends? How would they look at him now? How would he look at them?
He'd spent his entire life knowing his ceiling. Now, suddenly, there might not be one.
And that was a terrifying kind of freedom. One he had no idea what to do with.
As for the grade itself, Kyro had—at the cost of sounding ungrateful—sufficiently mixed feelings.
On the one hand, Bronze was above what Halvek had described as the minimum cutoff for meaningful potential. A whole tier above, in fact. And if the upper in "Upper Bronze" meant what Kyro thought it did, then he was closer to Silver than he was to regular Bronze.
On the other hand, it also meant there were still three whole tiers of Ascendants who would have, from the outset, better prospects, better foundations, better trajectories, and hence better futures, than he.
It took only a second for Kyro to recognise how absurd and entitled that sounded.
Better prospects? Pshh, what am I even saying? he scoffed, aloud, as it turned out, much to Halvek's bemusement. The Examiner had tactfully withdrawn to give him some space, no doubt to help him process the news.
I am an orphan from the Ashen District who, up until today, had no prospects to begin with, Kyro thought.
So what if his grade wasn't exceptional? So what if he was average, or even below average? He knew full well there was no shortage of people who would kill—and commit worse—for the same opportunity.
Bronze grade, Iron grade, Platinum grade, who cares? he concluded. One way or the other, his life was never going to be the same after today.
…
"If CES grade is the metric that determines how well an Ascendant harnesses Cosmic Energy," Halvek said, "then what do you think affinity represents?"
The two of them were back outside the chamber. Rather than let Kyro bask in the newfound energy coursing through his veins, the Examiner had moved straight to the next item on the agenda: Affinity profiling.
Kyro pondered the question briefly, then came up empty. "Something to do with how well your body handles Cosmic Energy, I reckon." He made a blind guess.
"A sensible assumption, but incorrect," Halvek replied. "To help answer my question, I'll pose another. Why do you think most Ascendants can either summon great fires, storms, and whatnot, or cause their bodies to transform and mutate, or achieve superhuman endurance, but almost never all three at once?"
It was a question Kyro was sure he'd considered at some point. Only then, he'd had the luxury of moving past it. Such matters hadn't concerned him.
Well. Not anymore.
"Affinity?" he guessed.
"Precisely," Halvek affirmed. "Affinities are innate dispositions that govern how an Ascendant naturally channels Cosmic Energy. Whether your affinity is Intra, Extra, Meta, Script, or otherwise will directly determine which Path of Ascension you'll eventually follow, and, if it wasn't already clear, that too is permanent."
Kyro gave a slow nod. "So if I have this right, the next test is basically seeing how my body tries to utilise the Cosmic Energy I absorbed?"
"A fair summary." Was Kyro imagining it, or was Halvek a shade warmer now that he'd passed the first phase? "Once your affinity and CES grade have been documented, you'll be issued your Ascendant ID, after which you'll be free to do as you please."
"Meaning by the end of this, I'll know exactly what kind of Ascendant I am," Kyro said.
"No," Halvek corrected. "You'll know what kind you could become. Those are very different things."