The Author's Extra: My SSS Skill Turns Souls into Anything!

The announcer stared at the crystal for a full second before her voice came back to her.

"What a match!"

She turned toward the crowd, microphone raised.

"Despite facing four opponents, Team One’s Alden kept all of them occupied under overwhelming pressure while secretly sending his companion to locate and charge the crystal! He never lost sight of the objective for a single moment! And in the end, he won through strategy rather than pure force!"

She extended her hand toward Alden.

"Please give a round of applause for Alden and his team!"

She started clapping herself.

The first few seconds were scattered, people still working through what they’d just watched.

"I completely forgot about the crystal. I was so focused on the fight."

"He was fighting four people and still thinking about the objective the whole time?!"

"This match was on whole another level."

The applause found its size.

Then Leon and Legion arrived.

Alden barely had time to turn before both of them hit him at the same time.

THUD.

He went backward, caught between two grown men who had apparently decided the correct response to winning was a collision.

"YOU ABSOLUTE MONSTER!" Leon grabbed him by the collar. "HOW DID YOU WIN THAT?!"

"That was completely unexpected!" Legion had him by the shoulder. "When did you plan using Pyrion like that?! From the start?!"

Alden’s face twitched. "Get off me!"

He shoved them back. Both of them stumbled, still grinning.

"Were you hoping I’d lose?! What is wrong with you two?! People are supposed to be happy when their teammate wins!"

Leon blinked. "...When you say it like that, it does sound bad."

"It IS bad!"

Legion scratched his head. "We were excited."

"Then be excited from a distance—"

"Senior Alden."

He stopped.

Emilia had approached while he was busy dealing with the other two. She stopped at a respectful distance, not grabbing anything, not crashing into anything.

Just standing there with an expression that was completely genuine.

"You were amazing," she said. "I mean it. I’ve never seen anyone fight like that." Her eyes were bright in a way that had nothing performed about it. "Four people, and you were still thinking clearly the whole time. You never lost the core reason of what actually mattered."

Alden looked at her.

His expression settled into something quieter.

"Thanks, Emilia."

He raised his fist.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she bumped it with hers.

"Yeah."

The four of them started walking back toward the sideline.

Behind them, Nicholas hadn’t moved.

He was looking at the mana crystal.

’I forgot about it entirely.’ His fingers curled slowly. ’I was so focused on Alden that I forgot the entire reason we were in that arena.’

Roselle noticed right away. She always caught these things.

"Nicholas..."

Sierra stepped up, reaching toward him. "Nicholas, are you okay?"

Roselle cut in front of her, gently catching Nicholas by the arm and guiding him away.

"It’s fine. Everyone fails sometimes. We’ll get them next round."

Nicholas looked at her.

Then nodded once. "Yeah."

Daniel fell into step beside them as they walked away.

Sierra didn’t follow immediately.

She stood at the edge of the arena and watched Alden’s back as he moved away with Leon, Legion, and Emilia. Laughing at something Leon said, Pyrion trotting alongside them with its tail in the air.

Her expression did something complicated.

’Before all of this, he was nobody.’

She wasn’t being cruel about it, it was just a fact. Alden had been average. A quiet one. Forgettable in the way that students who never quite stood out were forgettable. She’d chosen him specifically because he was easy to bury.

And now his name was being said in every corner of every corridor she walked through.

He defeated Nathan.

He held two of the academy’s strongest second-years in place by himself.

He won a four-on-one, while everyone watched him take hits.

Students who had believed everything she told them were looking at him differently. She could feel it shifting, the same way she could feel any crowd shifting when the story changed.

’What happened to him?’ She watched him disappear into the crowd.

’How did he change this much, this fast?’

The question sat in her chest without an answer.

More matches filled the rest of the afternoon.

One squad after another, two rounds condensed into a single long day, and by the time the last match finished and the announcer’s voice rang across a considerably more exhausted arena, the sun had moved considerably.

"That concludes the final match of the second round!"

The noise that had been running all day settled into something tired but still present.

"Tomorrow will be a rest day before the third and final round. Use it wisely." She paused. "And before everyone leaves, the current year’s top scores will be displayed now. Keep in mind these are not final. Final round can change everything."

The enormous screen above the arena flickered.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CURRENT TOP SCORES

━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Alden — [1,993 pts]

Augustus Solaris — [1,438 pts]

Nicholas Ashford — [1,385 pts]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━

One second of silence.

"...What."

"WAIT— ALDEN?!"

"HE’S FIRST?!"

The arena erupted again, and this time there was no confusion underneath the noise, just pure loud disbelief at the name sitting at the very top of a list that had never had that name anywhere near it before.

The announcer continued.

"According to today’s results, Alden has delivered one of the most remarkable performances we’ve seen! He has climbed all the way from 248th place to 9th place overall, accumulating a total of 2,485 points, without losing a single match!"

"He went from 248th to nineth in a single day?!"

"He scored almost two thousand points in one examination day!"

"Forget his ranking — he beat Nicholas for the top spot! Nicholas! Who scored 1,290 as a first-year!"

"I want to be friends with Alden. Starting now. Immediately."

The screen didn’t change. Alden’s name sat at the top while the crowd talked about it.

And somewhere in the stands, people who had believed everything they’d heard about him when his name first appeared in an accusation corridor were reading it at number one and not quite knowing where to put that.

The arena cleared in waves.

________

Alden left early. Before the crowd got moving, while the corridors were still empty enough to walk through without navigating around clusters of students who wanted to tell him something.

He moved at a normal pace, hands in his pockets, expression calm.

It lasted about a few minutes.

"That’s Alden—"

"Hey, Alden!"

"Should I go talk to him? I should go talk to him—"

Students he’d never spoken to were waving. Others were falling into step a short distance behind him and then losing their nerve. Two first-years he recognized from the earlier rounds tried approaching and then both stopped at the same time and nearly knocked each other over.

’This is going to be a problem.’

He returned the necessary nods. Kept moving. Pyrion trotted beside him and the people who weren’t sure whether to approach him were considerably less sure once they registered the A-Rank forged wolf at his heel.

’Helpful in this way as well.’

He turned down a quieter corridor, the noise falling behind him by degrees.

"Alden." He heard a familiar voice to his right.

He stopped and turned.

Sierra stood a few feet away from the wall she’d clearly just stepped away from. Her hands were at her sides. Her eyes met his directly but there was something underneath the eye contact that wasn’t the confidence she usually carried it with.

She held out her hand.

"I have something to say." Her voice was quieter than he’d heard it before. "Can we talk for a little?"

Alden looked at the hand.

Then at her face.

The corridor was empty in both directions. Pyrion sat down beside his leg and looked at Sierra with the patient, unblinking attention of something that had a very good memory.

Alden said nothing for a moment.

He looked at her the way he looked at problems without anger or heat, just with the straightforward assessment of someone who has been in enough situations to know that the shape of them matters.

"Okay."

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