The young girl started to cry upon hearing Rowland's assessment of her — his judgement didn't just mean that she had failed to advance onto the Official Knight academy, but it also meant that she was kicked out of the preparatory academy! Expelled!
For these Knight students, facing such a fate was akin to their entire future being ripped away from them. If they came back empty handed to their families, they would be ostracised, called failures and perhaps even disowned from their families entirely, depending on how strict they were!
This young girl clearly had a rough path ahead of her…
Lucian, and the majority of the other students in wait, couldn't care less what this girl thought though. In fact, most of the students there sneered and ridiculed the girl when her results were announced for them all to hear. That was just the way this world worked. If you had no strength, then you had no qualifications, and if you had no qualifications… well, good luck getting anywhere in life.
"Next!" Rowland shouted at the line of students, not bothered one bit that he had just ruined the young girl's entire future and ripped her dreams away from her.
The next student in line walked over to Rowland, much more nervous now after seeing what had happened to the first girl who was called up. He was worried that he might not make the cut as well, as he was in a similar situation as her — one of the weaker ones of the class, who somehow managed to keep themselves out of trouble.
Though, the reason these meagre children managed to keep themselves out of the limelight for the stronger students like Sofia and Roderick to bully them was because of Lucian.
Lucian was well known as the weakest kid in the entire academy, not even an Apprentice Knight! It was only natural that he would take all of the pain and suffering away from those who, while weak, were still at least classified as Knights.
In fact, Lucian himself felt a knock to his confidence thanks to this unforeseen situation.
'My strength is even lower than that girls… I can only hope that my vitality and agility will make up for it, or else my upcoming future will become very challenging for me.' He ruminated internally.
Although his thoughts were running through what to do, Lucian was also quite interested and fascinated by the assessment method. It seemed quite crude, with the students literally being asked to attack their teacher in a form of testing them, but it was clearly deeper than it seemed on the surface.
The fact that Teacher Rowland was able to discern such detailed stats, down to the hundredth even, showed that there must have been some sort of method he was using to judge them.
Or perhaps his experience was so wide that he could judge their stats off sheer instinct alone? He could have such control over his body that he could judge the incoming strength and pressure of children's fists, having an extremely high sensitivity to such things.
Whatever the case, Lucian only found it somewhat interesting — but not enough for him to dive deeper into it. If his judgement was correct, then this was probably just the case of someone who'd honed their craft enough that it exhibits near supernatural tendencies, in which case it would be a fruitless endeavour for Lucian to research, unless he wanted to spend decades following the same craft.
Time passed quickly, and soon the 20 students on stage were all assessed and had received their results.
In total, 14 of them passed, while the remaining 6 failed. Neither Teacher Rowland nor Professor Kaldor seemed surprised by these figures, which meant that it must be a common occurrence for this many students to fail each time they performed this surprise assessment.
However, one very annoying thing though—especially to Lucian—was that after the first girl, Rowland had stopped announcing the results out loud, instead taking a few moments to think to himself before announcing whether it was a simple pass or fail.
Naturally, this came to the dissatisfaction of Lucian and other students who wanted to compare themselves to the stats of the students who passed and failed, to guess at whether they themselves would receive either result.
'Such tricky methods. It's clear Rowland and Kaldor did this on purpose, perhaps to instil a sense of fear and trepidation in the students, to stop them from cheating. Or perhaps its all just thanks to Rowland's own twisted sense of humor.'
The next 20 students were called up, and Lucian heard his name among the bunch who were called. He wasn't too surprised at this, as it was clearly a random method of selection. Lucian was satisfied with this arrangement though, the sooner he could find out his result, the sooner he could determine whether he had to severely alter his future plans or not.
Very soon, he joined the line of students heading up onto the stage, and made his way to the front of the group. It was clear that Rowland just started from whichever student was closest to him, so none of the students were willing to be the first. Lucian used this opportunity to save himself more time, making his way all over to the front end, standing closest to Lucian.
"Looks like Lucian wants a quick exit, haha. At least he has the common sense to leave early."
"I'm surprised, Lucian actually took the initiative for once!"
"To see that Lucian showed less cowardice than the other 19 on stage. Tsk, just how far have this batch of students fallen."
A few murmurs could be heard around the hall when everyone witnessed Lucian's act, with both the students and teachers muttering among themselves. Lucian paid no heed to this though, as he felt there might be a decent chance that everyone would be in for quite a shock when his result was announced.
He was still unsure whether his stats qualified him as a pass or not, thanks to his strength being so low, but the only thing he could do no was wait for Teacher Rowland to call him over.