Zero to Hero (Prequel/prototype)

Chapter 27. Year One

"Ken! Time to go!" Genesis shouted as she knocked on Ken's dorm door and waited alongside Lovetta and Indra.

In typical fashion, Ken opened the door while yawning. After a quick greeting, the four headed for the stadium to grab some breakfast from the multitude of stalls and enjoy the final day of the year end tournament as well as the last day before they get to head home.

Other than a few weeks of drama, the second semester of the first year went by rather quickly for Ken and the girls. Not much of anything happened for Ken other than spending his days studying, training and once in a while a secret make out session and the girls simply went on with their days enjoying each other's company and grew together closer as friends while also trying to sneak in secret make out sessions with Ken behind each other's back.

As for Indra, while she became very good friends with the girls over the semester and got much closer with Ken as well, her relationship with him remained platonic.

True to her words, Indra ended up crashing the finals and passed not only the beginner sections of every subject to ensure her enrollment for another year, but she also managed to pass every subject all the way up to advanced level like Clare and Alice already did and can now just focus on getting at least one subject to expert level in the next four years.

For Lovetta, by the skin of her teeth managed to get to expert level on her speed enhancement and as Ken predicted, with a subject at expert level, Lovetta was exempt from the beginner courses and now have six more years of guaranteed enrollment.

Emma ended taking the exams as well after Ken talked to the staff just so they could get a gauge on where she is at after Ken spent so much time tutoring her. While she didn't pass any beginner exams, she did rather well for someone who had never been to school and studied for less than half a year.

The slacker duo Alice and Genesis skipped the finals since they pretty much spent the whole year doing nothing to improve their grades. While Alice was doing actual work tutoring Ken and helping him with all of his studies. Genesis spent the whole time looking for opportunities to get closer to Ken just like right now with Alice and Clare spending the week with family, Genesis made sure to get as intimate as she could.

Not only did Clare retain her number one rank overall, but she also managed to get expert level on history and math on the written exams and water element on the practical side. Naturally, Clare with her ultra-competitive nature fumed over Lovetta's higher scores on all of the physical sections and even with Ken trying to logic with her that Lovetta is focusing all of her energy on just the physical training, Clare was agitated the entire day.

Ken got rewarded for all of his efforts and easily passed all of the beginners written classes. Since he was also tutoring Emma, his fundamentals were very strong and ended up almost getting full marks. Sadly, his goal of getting above the intermediate levels so he could start the advanced lessons at the beginning of year two did not pan out, but Alice was more than happy to keep on tutoring him.

On the practical portion, Ken really impressed all of the girls by passing intermediate level on all of the categories. According to Clare, almost everyone should have subcategories they are naturally better at just like how she is with water element and Lovetta is most proficient with speed enhancement even when they spent equal time training each.

However, when Ken got his scores, he ended up with the exact same score on all of his elemental spells and likewise, all of his physical enhancements ended up getting enhanced for the exact same amount. While Ken thought nothing of it, Clare was especially impressed and hypothesized that because he never knew anything and started from zero, with him been exceptionally smart as well, he was able to train up everything equally without any natural biases towards any specific area which meant that his max potential is just that much higher from the ability to utilizing everything at a higher level.