Philips drew a passage from the middle of *On Friendship*.
He walked up to the lectern holding a cup of tea he had gotten from who-knows-where.
Only when he reached the lectern did he realize he was still holding something, so he calmly bent down and placed the teacup on the crossbar at its base.
This action drew a few soft chuckles from the audience.
His performance was perfectly adequate.
His pronunciation was precise, his rhythm was steady, and he handled the rhetoric competently.
It was like the tea in his hand: neither scalding nor cold, leaving no lasting impression once it was finished.
After he finished, he picked up the teacup again and even took a sip as he walked off the stage.
Meanwhile, Palmer, as expected, didn’t make it to the third paragraph.
He paused at the end of the second paragraph, his lips moving twice without a sound, and then he gave a very sincere bow toward the judges’ table.
"Doleo, sed memoriam non habeo."
(I’m sorry, but I can’t remember.)
Everyone in the audience couldn’t help but laugh, including Montague. His laugh was restrained, but his shoulders shook twice.
Palmer’s expression was completely unfazed as he walked off the stage, and he exchanged a look with Hutchinson.
Hutchinson did slightly better than him, stammering his way through the entire passage.
But he got nearly all the stresses wrong, which was like clapping on all the off-beats of a song.
After leaving the stage, he clapped Palmer on the shoulder. "Pies after the competition?"
"You’re on."
By the time it was Richard’s turn, more than an hour had passed.
"Number twenty-three, Richard Williams, Greenwood Middle School."
When the announcer read the school’s name, there was almost no reaction from the audience.
Greenwood’s reputation in academic circles was practically nonexistent, and the performances of the previous two contestants had only confirmed it.
Richard walked from the contestants’ section to the lectern.
His pace was neither fast nor slow. He carried nothing in his hands, having left his bookbag at his seat.
The lectern was made of stone, its surface polished smooth, with a low-relief laurel pattern carved along the edges.
Over five hundred pairs of eyes were on him from the audience, and on the judges’ table, six pens were poised and ready.
The Seven Sages on the dome also looked down silently upon everyone.
He stood still and took a deep breath.
The dome of Saint Augustine’s completely suppressed the Ether Field, and the micro-circulation within his body lay quietly dormant.
But his Breathing Skill was at work, providing firm and even support for the airflow as his vocal cords vibrated.
He began to speak. "What then could the Sicilians do, they who had already lost everything?"
As the first sentence left his lips, several people in the first three rows looked up.
Montague’s voice was a mellow brass instrument, Catherine’s a sharp, drawn string, but Richard’s voice was something else entirely.
It was deep, but not dark; steady, but not stiff.
The [Breathing] Skill had given him an incredibly precise vocal instrument.
Each vowel resonated naturally in the most suitable chamber—open vowels unfolded in the front of the mouth, while closed vowels converged at the top of the nasal cavity.
There was no need for conscious control; his optimized body structure reacted instinctively.
In *Impeachment of Velleius*, Cicero did something brilliant: he didn’t directly call Villas a thief.
He listed, one by one, the plundered statues and sacred vessels, describing in exhaustive detail how they had been worshipped, adorned, and maintained by generations within the Temples.
Immediately after finishing the description, he would pivot: and where are they now? In the private villa of a corrupt official.
The anger was buried beneath the details, and the name of each recited artifact was a piercing thorn.
"That statue of Diana at Herakleios, the most beautiful and most sacred one, revered by all for its antiquity and sublime majesty..."
*Pulcherrimum*—"the most beautiful." Richard slowed down as he pronounced this word.
[Scholarship] gave him an understanding of each Latin word’s etymology, context, and rhetorical intent that far surpassed the level of rote memorization.
When Cicero used the superlative to describe a statue, he was telling the Senate:
The thing you once cherished most has been stolen by one man.
And as Richard recited the names of these artifacts, certain images surfaced in his mind, helping him find the truest emotional anchor for his performance.
"...these things, gentlemen of the jury, were torn from the most sacred of places."
His voice deepened, sinking until the stone walls of the chapel began to resonate.
His chest became a resonance chamber. The sound of over five hundred people breathing vanished.
In the following passage, Cicero listed every stolen statue, every sacred vessel, every mural.
The rhythm slowed. The silence between each syllable stretched, becoming heavier than the words themselves.
"Nothing was left in anyone’s house, nothing even in the towns; nothing was left in public places, nothing even in the Divine Halls; nothing was left with our allies, nothing with our guests; in short, absolutely nothing was left anywhere."
This was the climax of the passage: a string of *nihil*s—"nothing."
Cicero was a master of parallelism, and here he used it to lay bare the tragic scene of utter desolation. Each repetition of *nihil* added another layer of despair.
Six *nihil*s, six escalating steps.
By the final *nihil*, he was forcing the words out through gritted teeth.
The more suppressed it was, the heavier the anger.
After he finished the passage, the only sound in the chapel was his breathing, echoing under the dome.
In the third row of the audience, Mr. Holland’s fingers were unconsciously tapping a beat on his knee, a beat perfectly in sync with Richard’s rhythm.
He had been teaching for twenty years, and for the first time, he felt that his time had been so well spent.
Beside him, Lady Gran took off her gold-rimmed glasses and wiped the lenses with a handkerchief... they had probably fogged over.
Mr. West sat with his arms crossed over his chest, his body utterly still in his chair.
But he didn’t even notice the beads of sweat that dripped down his forehead, a clear sign of his complete absorption.
At the judges’ table, the nibs of their pens moved quickly across their respective papers.
Professor Sirdon had filled half a page.
The white-haired professor next to him wrote even faster. When he finally stopped, he glanced back at the scoring criteria, likely to confirm whether a certain category deserved a perfect score.
But the pen of the woman on the far right, dressed in a dark blue suit, was still.
Isabella Ashford hadn’t written a single thing on her scoring sheet.
She glanced at the contestant’s information sheet and raised an eyebrow.
In the contestants’ section, Montague pulled back the hand that had been resting on the armrest and placed it on his knee.
His posture was no different than before—composed, relaxed, his spine straight.
But at one point during Richard’s speech, he had subtly shifted his center of gravity forward.
It was probably during the escalation of the six *nihil*s.
Catherine sat further away, her red hair falling to one side of her shoulder, her gaze never leaving the lectern.
The corner of her mouth held the slightest of curves—one of acknowledgment, but not submission.
As Richard’s final word landed, the echo in the dome was still slowly fading.
Then applause erupted, long and thunderous.
When he returned to his seat, Simon leaned over. "I’m feeling a lot of pressure sitting next to you now."
"You’ll do great, too."
"I haven’t even gone up yet."
"Just some advance encouragement."
"...Thanks, but now I’m even more nervous."

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