Chapter 50

“The three main factors are the quantity and quality of monster cores,” Sofia said, “which floors you’re delving, and finally, the number of weekly outings.”

The third surprised Natalie. “How often you’re delving?” It didn’t line up with Tenet’s modus operandi—always reward merit, not effort.

“Tenet wants to encourage hard work in some way, I suppose. Have rewards to those pushing the hardest, even if they’re not the most adept.” She shrugged. “If I had to guess, it’s not the biggest factor. But Instructor Lauer mentioned it, so.”

“And how do they track all that?”

“Without people cheating?”

“Seems like they could buy cores and lie about it.”

“Tenet’s able to detect how recently a core’s been gathered.”

“How?”

“Devices.” Another shrug.

“And why can’t someone pay a higher rank to collect them? Then pass it off, so it’s recent?”

“You slept through the whole class, didn’t you?”

“Jay doesn’t let me sleep,” Natalie said sourly. “She forces me to suffer.” But she did zone out, regardless of her friend’s efforts to keep her conscious. Even when she wasn’t zoned out, the information went in one ear and out the other.

“Well, like I said, in modern days, they use various tech to handle most of it,” Sofia said. “Before, to my knowledge, they kept profiles of students and compared expected results. Aberrant cases, those who deviated too far, were inspected, and most incidents of cheating were unearthed through ... whatever methods they used. And when cheaters were caught, they leveled sufficiently devastating consequences to persuade most opportunists to not even try. Tenet’s been playing this game for a long time. They know their way around keeping students in line.”

A long time. Yeah. Millennia. Sometimes it was hard to contextualize just how old this institution was. Sure, back in those days, Tenet didn’t look anything like this—that is, modern—but the academy had been formed shortly after Aradon’s first settlers. The world had always needed delvers dragging up valuables from the dungeon.

“Tech,” Natalie repeated. “What kind? How does it work?”

“We’ll be getting them next week, right before the dungeon opens. Devices that fix under your delver’s badge and track your movement, and the quantity of essence expelled near you. Along with Tenet’s original measures, cheating’s become, I assume, close to impossible.” She shrugged. “Though only close. I’m sure appropriately enterprising individuals can—and do—manage it. The question is why, really. High risk, high effort, low reward. Because even in the best case, you have to keep your results reasonable to your performance in class.”

So if you weren’t much of a delver, and that was clear in daily life, then you couldn’t cheat much, either. The only situation she imagined the effort being worth it was someone incompetent cheating to scrape by a ‘passing’ grade for the prestige that came with being a Tenet graduate.

“Huh,” Natalie said thoughtfully. She’d known there would by systems in place, but hearing the details was interesting.

“Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.”