They had gone into the operation knowing that the Elendir Institute of Magic would not have a particularly high rate of success, for they were targeting zero-point-one percent of people, which was, of course, an excessively small population of people.
Still, it wasn't an easy pill to swallow that they had scoured an entire district over the span of three hours with a large number of teams going door to door and person to person to have them test their magic aptitude if they were within the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.
"Next district," Cæ calmly remarked.
The team swiftly packed up their belongings before heading to the very next district, several districts away, adjacent to the one they were in, following the same set of protocols again, setting up a base in a location scouted prior.
They couldn't simply expand their testing operations directly into the adjacent district simply because of the fact that spreading too far thinned out security beyond what was tenable, and thus, protocols limited range of the testing operations from the base to a maximum range that largely coincided with the size of each district, by design.
Shifting, resting, and preparing took another hour by the time operations commenced once more, and the testing teams were sent out to test for magic aptitude in the second district of the day.
The testing teams began thoroughly testing each eligible person once more, extensively documenting all the results they got automatically with an in-built system in the premium testing units that stored and transmitted data to the Elendir Institute of Magic.
The data was useful and a way to make money off the individuals of the slums by selling their data to lesser institutions that could go to the slums and make personal offers to them to join their magicademies.
This was a fact that Cæ had kept hidden even from the task force and was an arrangement that he had proposed to Headmistress Lenolia, who had promptly approved of the measure.
After all, even if their talent was too inferior for the Elendir Institute of Magic, that didn't mean that they were too inferior for other magicademies that had lower application thresholds than the Elendir Institute of Magic.
After all, one could theoretically be in the top two percent of the country and be rejected by the institute.
The data that they collected could serve as a form of income that could compensate for the great expenses and expenditure that had gone into the operations, as the Elendir Institute of Magic would soon become a broker for magical talent across the entire nation.
This was the plan that Cæ had cooked up to increase the funding that he got from the Headmistress Lenolia to be able to fund extravagant operations. She had been able to see clearly massive revenue that she would be able to charge all magicademies for the data that she was selling for them, after all.
This meant that the operations would pay for themselves, which meant she could actually increase the amount that she gave to Cæ, allowing her to double the original budget.
The more funds that Cæ got, the greater the likelihood of the project succeeding.
The more funds he got, the greater the protection that Trinity Housings would get when they eventually went deeper and deeper into the slums.
Cæ had set a target of tackling two districts per day and had compiled some of the districts with the highest youth populations, for they were the populations that the slum talent acquisition program was targeting.
Unfortunately, the districts with the greatest youth population were those of the outer districts of Colohen City.
The reason for it was as unfortunate as it was simple.
"Gangs." Cæ's eyes narrowed.
The influence of gangs in the inner district of the slums was very limited due to the fact that they were closer and closer to the influence of law enforcement of Colohen City, leaving them more liable than they would otherwise be.
Gang activity truly festered the deeper one went into the slums.
Young men banded up and gathered in groups that would claim territory and begin demanding 'protection fees', which was nothing short of thinly-veined extortion under the threat of violence.
They claimed the protection fees were to protect the citizens of the slums from other gangs in the same district or other districts. Gangs had hierarchy and leadership, and served as the one and only means of upward mobility of any kind.
After all, they didn't have any economic opportunity, and getting out of the slums was an extraordinarily difficult task, as Cæ knew from firsthand experience. It took many years of dedication, but hard work alone wasn't enough.
Unfortunately, one needed some modicum of fortune.
In the case of Cæ, it was finding the Selvigs who had given him the opportunity to work, eat, and earn an income to save. Without it, there was a good chance that Cæ would have failed to break out of the slums.
It was a stroke of fortune that not everybody had.
Most young men, hungry with a nasty combination of ambition, resentment, frustration, and aggression, entered gangs and became inseparably involved with them. The longer they spent, the deeper they got, eventually becoming a part of the Colohen Mafia and later the broader Underworld.
This meant that the talent acquisition operations would grow progressively more burdensome, and the testing teams would need to interact with boys and men, and even girls or women, to an extent, involved in crime and the underworld.
This had been one of the most difficult parts of Cæ's planning to tackle. Part of him was tempted to simply abandon them and focus on less tricky subjects, but the issue was that it drastically reduced their productivity per district.
Not to mention, he would not be able to get the protection of the Elendir Institute of Magic if he didn't go deeper and deeper into the slums. Thus, he simply resolved to handle the violence and the dangers that were bound to come to the operations the deeper they went.
BAM!
A sudden large noise some distance away from the base drew Cæ's attention, breaking him out of his reverie.
A man left his door open, glaring at a testing team that knocked on his door.
He had a gargantuan, burly body covered in intimidating scars.
A prominent tattoo of an eye with a star-shaped pupil within it was plastered on his neck, giving him an even more eerie appearance. He reeked of alcohol even as his unsteady gait made it clear that he was far from sober. His expression crumpled with aggression as he glared at the young man and woman of the Elendir Institute of Magic, standing at his doorway.
"S-Sir," the senior student flinched at his presence. "We are here to—!"
WHOOSH
She froze as he swung at her before she could even process it, let alone draw out her wand and cast magic. And yet, his haymaker never touched as a powerful gust of wind crashed into his chest, launching him several meters back into his shabby little hut, where he collapsed unconscious.
THUD
The young man of the assistant team and the young woman of the senior mage program collapsed to the ground as their legs gave out, breaking into a cold sweat.
"Are you ok?"
They turned around, only to find Cæ's raised wand slowly lowering as he calmly returned it to his holster.
The two of them breathed a relief.
"T-Thank you…" The male assistant thanked Cæ before quickly gathering their fallen supplies.
"Careful, Nambia," Cæ remarked with a composed tone. "You need to have greater alertness. You need to be able to profile risk with a single glance, rather than allowing it to reach violence in the first place."
Nambia heaved a deep breath, catching her breath, gazing at him with a grateful and impressed expression. "How… how did you react so fast?"
"Experience and reflex," Cæ replied. "The one thing that physical and magical combat share in common is that you can't allow yourself to be frozen by your fight-or-flight response. Without your magic, you're no different from a civilian, so you need to make sure that you use your magic."
She nodded thoughtfully before smiling at him appreciatively.
"I will keep that in mind. Thank you."
Cæ heaved a sigh as he watched the teams return to the operations without missing a beat. He kept an eye from a distance, surveying the testing teams getting their work done with the people of the slums, testing each youngster after explaining the deal to them.
The best part of the slums in this regard was the fact that they had the highest youth population percentage in the entire country. They bred much more than the people of the inner city in a well-known economic phenomenon dubbed the 'demo-economic paradox,' where income and education levels of a nation were generally inversely proportional to the birth rates.
Natality seemed to rise when people were poor and uneducated, for a variety of economic and sociological reasons.
The average household in the slums had four children, despite their tight financial situation.
This was good for Cæ.
It meant that they should have found greater success in districts of the same size in the slums than in the inner cities, and that was exactly what Cæ was counting on, among other things, to make up for the difficulty of the task to a certain extent and ensure that the program could be considered a success in the eyes of Headmistress Lenolia.
One of the heaviest burdens that Cæ faced was the fact that this first operation that he was commencing in the slums would be more difficult than all other operations that future student councils would do once they entered the slums.
The reason for this was simply that the documentation he was doing now would save them a lot of effort in the future, allowing them to simply focus on the new kids who turned sixteen in these districts next year.
This radically increased the success rate of all future operations, harming the mafia and the upper-class families of the nation even more. This was in addition to the fact that the selling of this data to other magicademies would cause even greater talent drains from the slums to the inner city, creating a strange brain drain not across nations, but across cities.
This would severely harm the interests of the Mafia and the elites of the country.
That was why Cæ knew that it was just a matter of time before they would get attacked. They couldn't tolerate allowing such operations to go through unchallenged and successfully. They didn't need to annihilate the group, either; that would be very catastrophic for them politically, for how enormous the political consequences from the other political blocs would be for such flagrant destruction of precious elite talent.
But an attack with wounded students and perhaps even a few casualties was enough.
Both Cæ and the Headmistress had long known about that and had made their various preparations for the inevitable.
"…we found one!"
One testing team gasped as their crystal began glowing.
The sixteen-year-old boy grew frightened by their reaction, leaping away as he felt self-conscious with all their various gazes converging. His orange eyes are fearful of the strange people who combed through his district as he hid behind his door.
He was the perfect age and was overflowing with magic aptitude: more than enough to make it into the Elendir Institute of Magic.
They had scouted their first talent.