Evan spent the next morning walking through the elven city with Lyriel as his guide. She wanted him to observe daily magical practices so he could understand the scale of their problems. Everywhere he looked he saw beauty mixed with unstable performance. Mana vines flickered when they should hold steady. Light crystals dimmed while elves walked beneath them. Apprentices practiced spells in open courtyards and every few minutes one would explode into a burst of smoke or color that should not have happened.

Lyriel paused beside a training platform where young elves practiced spell casting. She watched a student chanting a fire spell under the eye of an instructor. The flame appeared but flickered weakly before vanishing. The student frowned.

“That should have worked,” the instructor muttered.

Evan stepped closer. “How do you track spell accuracy”

The instructor stared as if the question were incomprehensible. “We do not track accuracy. We simply practice until it feels consistent.”

“What is your success rate” Evan asked.

The instructor blinked. “Success rate”

“Yes. Out of one hundred attempts how many spells succeed”

The elves looked at each other as if Evan had asked them to count the stars in the sky.

Lyriel turned to him slowly. “We do not calculate such things. Magic either flows or it does not. It is guided by intuition and harmony with mana.”

Evan watched another student attempt a spell. The spell formed a sphere of light but wobbled before collapsing. Evan estimated the failure rate was above fifty percent. In his old world a product with a fifty percent success rate would be shut down immediately or redesigned from scratch. Here the elves acted as if it were acceptable.

“How long,” Evan asked, “have spell casters used this method”

“Thousands of years,” Lyriel answered.

Evan resisted the urge to rub his temples. “Do you have variables logged Spell components Intent Mana alignment Environmental conditions Anything”

“No,” Lyriel said calmly. “We trust the flow.”

Evan stared at the courtyard. “The flow is unreliable. You have no baseline. No recorded attempts. No historical comparison. No failure pattern analysis.”

The instructor frowned. “You speak as if magic is a system that can be controlled by numbers.”

“Everything is a system if you know how to measure it,” Evan said.

Lyriel placed a hand on the instructor’s shoulder. “Let him try.”

Evan turned to the group of apprentices. “I want you to attempt the same spell ten times. Do it in sequence no talking no breaks.”

The students looked confused but obeyed. They cast light spells repeatedly. Some flickered weakly some exploded in sparks some almost succeeded. Evan noted durations colors brightness fluctuations and stability. He counted failures and partial failures. He tracked the rhythm of mana pulses in the air.

He drew rough numbers on a piece of bark. “Out of ten attempts four succeeded completely three partially succeeded three failed.”

The apprentices stared as if he had cast a spell of his own.

“That is a sixty percent partial or full success rate,” Evan said. “And that means forty percent failure. What happens during the failures Why do they happen Do you change how you teach based on these trends”

The instructor looked shaken. “We never considered counting them.”

Lyriel watched Evan’s bark sheet. “What does this tell you”

“That your training has no feedback loop,” Evan said. “If you track attempts you can identify patterns. Maybe the third step in the chant is flawed. Maybe the mana pulse in the area fluctuates every few seconds. Maybe the environment affects output.”

Lyriel slowly nodded. “So you mean magic is affected by hidden variables that can be measured”

“Exactly.”

Evan began drawing another chart predicting the failure moments of the next several spell attempts. When the apprentices cast again the failures occurred exactly when he predicted.

The courtyard erupted in gasps.

The instructor whispered, “You see the invisible.”

“No,” Evan said. “I see what was always there. You just never recorded it.”

Lyriel stepped forward. “Can you create something that helps us see these fluctuations without you drawing by hand each time”

“Yes,” Evan said. “A spell dashboard. A panel that visualizes spell performance in real time. But I need materials crystals tools something that can store data.”

Lyriel gestured for him to follow. “Then we go to the Arcane Workshop. If anywhere can build the tools you need it is there.”

As they walked through the city apprentices whispered excitedly. Word was spreading. The human who measured magic. The human who predicted failure. The human who saw patterns elders could not.

Evan felt pressure growing. He had not just introduced analytics to a company or a project. He had introduced it to an entire civilization. If this worked he might reshape the way magic itself was understood.

If it failed he might become an enemy of tradition older than mountains.

But he was a data analyst. And analysts solved problems by making the invisible visible.
He would build the world’s first Spell Accuracy Dashboard.

And magic would never be the same.