The Bus Was Late
King stood at the stop on the corner of Latium Road and Second Boulevard, hands in his coat pockets, and watched the city go about its morning.
Twelve days had passed since the Evaluation Pillar incident. His enrollment letter had arrived on day seven. His dormitory assignment on day ten. His class schedule on day eleven, printed on official Academy parchment and sealed with the silver crest of Rume's administrative office.
The schedule had included a travel note at the bottom.
Academy Transit Line 4 departs from Latium Road junction every forty minutes. New students are advised to board no later than the seventh bell.
The seventh bell had been nine minutes ago.
He looked down the boulevard.
No bus.
This is fine, King thought. This is what waiting feels like.
He'd never had to wait for anything before. He found the sensation interesting in a vague, detached way—like pressing on a bruise to understand what a bruise was. The mild inconvenience of standing on a corner while time moved at its normal pace without any particular regard for his plans.
Enjoyable, he decided. In small amounts.
"It's always late on enrollment days," said the woman behind him.
She was maybe fifty, carrying a canvas bag and wearing the pressed grey coat of an Academy administrative worker. "The new students fill up the first three runs. By the fourth you're lucky to get standing room."
King turned slightly. "That happens every year?"
"Every year for thirty years." She didn't seem bothered by it. "You're new."
"Yes."
She looked him over briefly—the plain coat, the worn boots, the complete absence of anything marking him as belonging to any noble house or guild affiliation. "First year?"
"First year."
She nodded like that explained something. "What rank did you place?"
King thought about the pile of shattered crystal on the plaza floor.
"F," he said.
The woman's eyebrows went up. "F-Rank." She said it carefully, like she was checking whether she'd heard correctly.
"Unknown Variable," he added helpfully.
She stared at him for a moment longer. Then she looked back down the boulevard at the space where the bus was supposed to be, with the expression of someone deciding not to ask follow-up questions about something they didn't entirely want to understand.
---
The bus arrived four minutes later.
It was packed.
Line 4 ran from the lower residential districts of Rume's third tier all the way up the mountain-face road to the Academy gates—a forty-minute journey through six switchback climbs, three tunnels cut directly through the rock, and a final open bridge stretch that gave an unobstructed view of the city spread out below.
King found a standing spot near the middle doors.
Around him: two dozen new students, five or six Academy workers, one extremely tired-looking upperclassman asleep against the window. Everyone smelled like new uniforms and varying degrees of anxiety. Someone to his left was muttering mana equations under his breath. Someone to his right had their jaw set so tight it looked painful.
King looked out the window.
Rume was enormous. He'd known that. He'd known it the way he knew everything—completely, precisely, without any particular feeling attached to the knowing. Standing in it was different. Watching it scroll past the bus window, tier by tier, the stone apartments and the market stalls and the narrow streets with the morning vendors and the children chasing each other around the public water troughs—knowing and seeing were completely different things.
I want to try that, he thought, watching a man at a corner stall press something into flat rounds and drop them on a griddle. A warm smell reached him even through the closed window. What is that? Some kind of grain paste?
He made a mental note.
"Hey."
A nudge at his elbow.
He looked. A boy about his age had wedged in beside him—broad-shouldered, dark-haired, wearing a training uniform that already had a scorch mark on the left sleeve. He had an open, uncomplicated face and the particular look of someone who operated primarily on impulse.
"You're tall," the boy said. This was apparently an opener.
"Somewhat," King said.
"I'm Haruto." He said it the way people said things when they'd already decided you were going to be important to them. "Haruto Takahashi. Thraxis border. Crimson Edge talent—heat-affinity blade enhancement." He said the last part like a combat report, quick and practiced. "You?"
"King. Von Deluxh." He paused. "F-Rank. Unknown Variable."
Haruto blinked. "F-Rank?"
"Yes."
Haruto looked at him—at the relaxed posture, the easy calm, the complete absence of the hunched defensiveness that F-rank students usually carried like a second skin. He tilted his head.
"How are you this calm?" he asked. "I tested C-rank and I'm still—" He made a gesture with his hands that communicated several different kinds of internal chaos. "You know."
"I'm not nervous," King said.
"About being F-rank?"
"About any of it."
Haruto stared at him. King returned the look without particular expression. The bus lurched through the first switchback climb and everyone grabbed for handrails. King didn't move.
"Huh," Haruto said. He seemed to be recalibrating something. "Most F-rank guys I've met are either really angry or really scared. You're just—"
"I'm looking at the city," King said.
Haruto turned to look out the window. Below them now, through the climbing road's outer edge, Rume spread in its entirety—the tiered mountain-city laid out like a diagram, every tier smaller than the one below, the highest tier just a smudge of pale towers above the morning cloud line.
"It's big," Haruto said.
"Yes," King said. And the geography is interesting. The mountain is volcanic basalt under the surface limestone, which means the aquifer feeding the city fountain district runs deeper than the engineers think. Probably why the flow fluctuates in summer. They should drill—
He stopped that line of thinking.
Not relevant, he reminded himself. You are a student on a bus. Look at the city. Don't solve the city.
"I've never been to Rume before," Haruto said.
"Neither have I."
That seemed to make Haruto happy in some uncomplicated way. "First time for both of us then." He grinned. "What do you want to see first? I heard the market district in the second tier has the best fighting equipment shops on the continent. And there's an arena in the—"
"I want to see the fountain district," King said.
Haruto paused. "The fountains?"
"They have seventeen fountains in the civic center. Each one feeds from a different section of the mountain aquifer." King had read this in a pamphlet at the transit stop. "The largest one is four hundred years old."
Haruto looked at him. "You want to see four-hundred-year-old fountains," he said slowly.
"Yes."
"Instead of the gear shops."
"I have no use for gear," King said.
Haruto opened his mouth. Closed it. Something in his expression went from puzzled to openly curious, the way a person looks when they've met something they haven't categorized yet and aren't sure which box to reach for.
"You're weird," he said finally. He said it pleasantly, like a compliment.
"Probably," King agreed.
---
The bus climbed through the second tunnel—a long dark passage carved straight through the rock, the overhead mana-lamps flickering slightly as the engine drew extra power for the incline. A few students shifted nervously. The boy who'd been muttering equations grabbed the overhead rail with both hands.
King watched the tunnel wall scroll past.
Basalt, he confirmed privately. Definitely volcanic. The crack pattern on the eastern section suggests stress from—
He stopped.
Fountains, he thought firmly. Bus. Haruto. Normal morning. Focus.
---
The Academy gates were exactly as large as the enrollment documents had implied and significantly more imposing in person.
Two stone towers flanked an iron gate thirty feet high, worked with the Academy crest—a sword and an open book crossed over a mana crystal, rendered in silver-grey iron that had gone slightly green at the edges with age. Beyond the gate, the Academy itself was visible in pieces through the stonework: towers, training grounds, the green roof of what the campus map called the Grand Library.
The bus unloaded in the forecourt.
King stepped off and stood still for a moment, letting the crowd of new students stream past him.
Big, he thought.
Not large in the way of genuinely large things—he'd seen stars, nebulae, the architecture of higher dimensions, which made any mortal building feel like a model made by children. This was different. Big in the way that mattered right now, in this body, at this scale. Big enough that it would take time to learn. Big enough to be interesting.
Good, he decided.
Haruto appeared at his shoulder. The scorch mark on his sleeve had been joined by what appeared to be a small hole. King had no idea when that had happened.
"There's a welcome ceremony," Haruto said, reading from a card he'd been handed at the gate. "Headmaster's address. Then dormitory assignment. Then—" He flipped the card. "Squad formation is next week?"
"Correct," said a voice from King's other side.
He looked. A boy—black hair, measured gaze, the particular stillness of someone who processed everything before speaking. He was holding an identical card, but he'd clearly already read it in full, twice.
"Riku Tanaka." He didn't say it with any warmth or any hostility. Just information. "Moravia district."
"King," King said.
Riku glanced at him. Something moved in his expression—something careful. "Your name is King."
"Yes."
"Rank?"
"F. Unknown Variable."
Riku's eyes went slightly flat in the way that meant a person was recalculating. "The Evaluation Pillar incident."
King looked at him. "You know about that?"
"Everyone in the transit line was talking about it on my bus." Riku folded his card precisely in half and put it in his coat pocket. "They're saying you broke a three-hundred-year-old measurement artifact."
"It shattered," King said. "I didn't break it intentionally."
"And your classification is F-Rank."
"Unknown Variable," King added.
Riku looked at him for a long moment with no change in expression. Then he said: "That's either the most suspicious thing I've heard today or the most honest."
"It could be both," King offered.
"...Fair," Riku said. He seemed to decide something. "The welcome ceremony is in the eastern courtyard. The dormitory block for first-year general enrollment is in the north wing—it's about an eight-minute walk from here if you use the side passage by the library." He paused. "I mapped the campus from the satellite imagery the enrollment packet included."
"You mapped it before you arrived," Haruto said.
"Yes."
"From a picture."
"It's called preparation."
Haruto opened his mouth to say something about preparation. King started walking toward the eastern courtyard. After a moment, both of them followed.
---
The welcome ceremony lasted forty minutes.
Headmaster Roland Knight spoke from a raised platform at the center of the courtyard—a tall man with silver hair and the kind of still, measured face that suggested he had heard a great many surprising things in his career and had elected to have feelings about none of them. His voice carried without effort across six hundred first-year students packed into the stone courtyard, the echo of the surrounding walls doing the work for him.
King listened. Mostly.
He was also watching the courtyard fountain.
It sat in the courtyard's northern corner—a smaller fountain than the ones in the civic district, fed by a lateral pipe from the Academy's interior water system. The basin was circular, the water clear, a slow constant flow from the central column.
He was standing approximately twelve feet from it.
Twelve feet should be fine, he thought.
Eight minutes into Headmaster Roland's address—something about excellence and discipline and the responsibility of talent—the fountain's flow increased slightly.
King didn't notice at first.
Fifteen minutes in, the flow had increased enough that the water was beginning to lap at the basin's upper rim.
Twenty minutes in, a thin sheet of water was running quietly over the stone edge and spreading across the courtyard's northern corner in a slow, spreading pool.
The students nearest the fountain began shuffling sideways.
King became aware of this when Haruto, standing beside him, grabbed his arm and pulled him two steps to the right.
"The fountain," Haruto muttered.
King looked.
Oh, he thought.
He took several deliberate steps away from the northern corner. Across the courtyard, without any drama, the fountain's flow returned to normal. The water stopped overflowing. The puddle on the stones began its slow retreat back toward the drain grate.
Several first-year students were looking at the fountain with puzzled expressions.
Riku was looking at King.
King looked back at him.
Riku said nothing. He turned forward again and resumed listening to Headmaster Roland's address with careful attention.
His expression had shifted in some small, specific way that King couldn't quite read yet.
Later, Riku thought—King couldn't hear his thoughts, had made a point of that particular discipline—but the shape of it was clear enough in the set of his jaw. I will think about that later.
"—and it is the belief of this Academy," Headmaster Roland was saying, "that talent is only ever the beginning. What you do with it—that is the measure of who you are."
The six hundred first-year students applauded.
King clapped three times, because that was the appropriate response.
The fountain, in the northern corner, was still and ordinary and quiet.
He made a note to stand further away from civic water fixtures in the future.
---
The dormitory keys were handed out in the main hall after the ceremony—a long stone room with high ceilings and the smell of old wood and mana-treated stone that King was already deciding was one of his favorite smells so far.
He waited in line. He received his key. Room 7-F, North Wing.
He found the staircase, found the corridor, found the room.
He opened the door.
Small. Two windows, one facing the inner courtyard, one facing the mountain wall. A bed, a desk, a wardrobe. A bookshelf, empty. A rug that had seen better decades.
A scratch in the wall beside the window latch read: this latch is broken.
King looked at the latch. He tried it. The mechanism was stiff—the internal spring had lost tension, the catch plate slightly misaligned. A simple fix, the kind of thing that took five minutes and had probably been annoying whoever lived in this room for the past two or three years.
He looked at the scratch on the wall.
Someone had written that note in frustration. Someone had hoped that whoever came next would fix it.
He set his bag on the desk.
He found a small flat tool in the bag's side pocket—he'd picked it up at a market stall in the lower city for thirty copper, on instinct. He hadn't known why at the time.
Apparently for this, he thought.
He opened the latch housing, realigned the catch plate, reset the spring. Tested it three times. The mechanism moved clean and smooth, clicking shut with the satisfying sound of something working the way it was supposed to.
He stood there for a moment, looking at the fixed latch and the scratch beside it.
The scratch would stay—it was in the wall, not something he could undo without proper plastering, which was not his area. But the latch was fixed. Whoever came after him would open the window without fighting it.
Good, he thought.
He sat on the edge of the bed. The springs creaked. He bounced once, evaluating.
Acceptable.
He lay back, stared at the ceiling, and listened to the sounds of the Academy settling in for its first evening with six hundred new students. Footsteps in corridors. Voices finding their volume in new spaces. Someone laughing three rooms down. Someone else dropping something heavy with a muffled curse.
This is what it sounds like, he thought. A place with people in it.
He stayed very still and listened to all of it.
He had, in ways he did not have words for yet, been alone for a very long time.
But not tonight, he thought. Tonight there are people three rooms down who are laughing about something I don't know about yet.
He looked at the ceiling.
I could knock, he thought. Introduce myself. Ask what was funny.
He stayed where he was. That was a tomorrow thing.
Tonight was for listening to a building full of strangers find their feet. For a fixed latch. For the memory of a fountain that had done something it shouldn't have, twelve feet away from him, because proximity worked that way sometimes.
For the scratch on the wall that said someone had been here and needed something and he had, without being asked, taken care of it.
He was going to like it here.
He was almost certain of it.
---
Three floors below, in the staff wing of the North dormitory building, Combat Instructor Edward Johnson was reviewing the first-year enrollment files.
He read the Evaluation Pillar incident report. He read the dormitory assignment sheet. He cross-referenced the combat history field—blank—and the prior training record—also blank—and the mana signature classification—Unknown Variable, officially, with a handwritten note from the examiner that read: "The shard closest to his left foot vibrated for the rest of the day. I do not know what to do with this information."
Johnson set the file down.
He picked it up again.
He looked at the name.
King Von Deluxh.
He put the file in a separate stack from the others—the stack he kept for students he wanted to watch personally, not because they were the most talented, but because talent wasn't the thing that kept him up at night.
He wasn't sure what he'd just filed.
But he was fairly sure he was going to find out.