People trickled in until the class had a total of nine participants. As Kairo sat with Nova, he noticed the type of people who walked in. He tried to play off the nervousness, but every person who walked in made him feel increasingly nervous. He expected the rookies to look more like him, but they didn't. Some were big, some were small. And the biggest was a guy who looked twenty with a full beard and messy brown hair.
Kairo continued to talk to Nova about the multiple rookies around, but behind him was a girl analysing the competition, her grey hair glossed over her shoulders, she only cared to seem about winning. There was a guy on the lower level that she didn't notice kept looking up at her every minute or so as if trying to muster up the courage to talk to her. Finally, he did, he made his way back to talk to her.
"Scouting the competition? Trying to find your next big rival?" She looked at him, scoffed before chirping out, "Yeah, and it's not you." The guy looked taken aback as she said this, "So you're just here to make enemies?" Suddenly, to her, the timid guy in the back corner of the room just became infinitely more interesting. She got up and walked over to him, leaving him grumbling, "You don't have to treat everyone like an enemy."
She sat next to him, "What's your name?" She asked the timid guy, with black hair and blue eyes and a nervous demeanour about him, like he didn't want to be here, "Jalen. What's yours?" She smiled for the first time, "Maris. So, why'd you come here? You don't seem like you belong." The Timid guy got a bit scared at this, but she backtracked, "Not as in you don't deserve to be here, but you don't seem to fit the moulds of dickhead, or righteous hero." In his mind, this meant Maris saw Jalen as different. And she liked different.