— The morning after move-in. First day of classes.
The Academy Smelled Different in the Morning
King noticed it the moment he opened his door—the overnight air had settled into the stone corridors and picked up something from the old wood beams and the mana-treated walls, something that was neither food nor dust but the specific compound smell of a building that had held a great many people for a very long time and kept some trace of all of them.
Old place, he thought. Good bones.
He had slept well. Eight hours, undisturbed, which he'd understood in the abstract was how sleep was supposed to work and now had one data point confirming it was, in practice, exactly as described. He had also, at some point in the night, woken up briefly because someone in a room two floors up had knocked something off a shelf—the sound traveled clearly through the old stone—and for three full seconds he had simply listened to the Academy's nighttime quiet before deciding this was a normal building sound and not something that required his attention.
Normal building sound, he reminded himself now, pulling on his coat. Most sounds are normal building sounds. This is the policy.
He checked the window latch before leaving. It opened smoothly.
Good, he thought, and went to find breakfast.
---
The main hall was already full when he arrived.
Six hundred first-year students, roughly, distributed across long wooden tables with benches. Breakfast service was running from both ends of the hall—two service lines with Academy staff behind them, moving efficiently. The noise level was at the pitch of a large group of people who hadn't yet sorted themselves into their social groups and were therefore being approximately twenty percent louder than they would be in a week.
King stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at it.
Food on both sides, he observed. Long tables. Mixed seating—not assigned yet. This is good. Assigned seating would be harder to navigate.
He picked the left service line. Shorter by four people.
The food was porridge, bread, soft-boiled eggs, and a fruit preserve in small clay pots. He took one of each, found an empty stretch of bench near the middle of one of the long tables, and sat down.
He tried the porridge first.
Grain base. Slightly salted. Topped with something sweet—that's the preserve mixed in. He took another spoonful. Different grain from the buns. Heavier. This region's staple crop is different from the southern provinces.
He was making a note of this—mentally, not literally, he didn't have a notebook and was not planning to start one—when a tray landed on the table across from him with enough force to make the clay pot rattle.
He looked up.
Haruto dropped onto the bench, already talking. "The porridge is better than I expected," he said. "I thought Academy food would be—you know. Institutional. This is actually decent."
"Yes," King said.
"Morning." Haruto looked at his own bowl. He'd taken twice the amount King had. "Did you sleep?"
"Well."
"I heard the guy in the room beside me snoring through the wall at the second bell." He shook his head. "It was impressive, actually. Almost rhythmic."
King ate another spoonful.
He sat down across from me, he noted internally, not about Haruto specifically but about the fact itself—someone had found him in a full hall of six hundred people and chosen, without any calculation, to sit across from him. The directness of it was something he was still learning to locate properly.
"What is it today?" King asked.
Haruto had the orientation card already out—the folded card from the gate yesterday, the one he'd been consulting since they'd arrived. "Combat theory lecture. First bell. Then practical placement test in the training yard. Then—" He turned the card over. "Mana theory fundamentals. Then assigned study hall. Then dinner at the sixth bell."
"What's the practical placement test?" King asked.
"They watch you fight something. A training construct—a mana dummy, basically—and evaluate your technique, output, and instinct." Haruto said it with the energy of someone who had been looking forward to exactly this. "C-rank combat assessment. They'll put us in training groups based on the results."
King considered the phrase training construct.
They're going to watch me hit a mana dummy, he thought. And record the results.
"That's going to be interesting," he said carefully.
"Right? I've been waiting for this part." Haruto was already eating at speed. "I trained for three years for this exam. Three years of blade enhancement drills, heat-mana cycling, pressure strikes—" He paused to swallow. "The assessment's going to be the first real measure of where I stand against the other students."
"Crimson Edge," King said, remembering from the bus. "Heat-affinity blade enhancement."
Haruto looked up, pleased that King had remembered. "Yeah. My uncle taught me. He was a D-rank Adventurer Guild veteran. He said—"
The sleeve caught fire.
Not dramatically. Not from any external source. Haruto had been gesturing with his right hand—the animated talking gestures of someone fully engaged in what they were saying—and the motion had cycled a small, unconscious push of heat mana through his right forearm, which had, apparently, found the worn patch on his sleeve that was already slightly singed from some previous incident, and decided that was enough structural weakness to work with.
A flame the size of a playing card bloomed on Haruto's right sleeve, bright orange, burning cheerfully.
Haruto did not notice for two full seconds because he was in the middle of a sentence about his uncle's grip technique.
Then he noticed.
"Oh," he said. He said it very calmly, which suggested this had happened before. He began pulling the sleeve away from his skin with his left hand while simultaneously looking for something to pat it with.
King, who was sitting directly across the table, looked at the flame.
He leaned forward slightly.
He blew on it. Once. Gently. From approximately three feet away.
The flame went out.
Not smothered—out. Cleanly, the way a candle went out when you blew on it from close range, except this was from three feet and the flame had been on a sleeve, not a wick.
Haruto stared at the dark patch on his sleeve where the fire had been.
He looked at King.
King was already back to his porridge.
"How did you—" Haruto started.
"Air current," King said. Which was technically true.
"From three feet away."
"Yes."
"That's not—" Haruto stopped. He looked at the sleeve. He looked at King. He set his spoon down. "That's the second sleeve this month," he said. "My uncle says I need better mana control."
"Your uncle is probably right," King said.
"I know." Haruto picked his spoon back up. He ate two spoonfuls in silence, with the focused energy of someone metabolizing something. Then: "You're going to be strange to be friends with."
King looked at him. "Is that what we are?"
"Yeah," Haruto said, simply. "I decided on the bus."
He decided on the bus, King thought.
There was something in that—the uncomplicated certainty of it, the lack of condition or qualification—that he did not have an immediate response to. He sat with it for a moment, the way you sat with something warm before you knew what to call it.
"All right," King said finally.
"All right," Haruto agreed, and went back to eating.
---
The girl found them twelve minutes later.
She arrived at their table section with a tray stacked higher than was structurally advisable—porridge, two types of bread, three eggs, the fruit preserve, and what appeared to be an extra roll she'd added as an afterthought—and set it down beside King with the deliberate intention of someone who had surveyed the hall and picked a destination.
"You're the F-rank Pillar incident," she said. She said it not as an accusation but as a confirmed identification. "Room 7-F, North Wing. I'm in 7-D."
She had bright eyes and a practical, cut-short style to her hair that suggested she had made a decision at some point that hair management was time she could use for other things. She sat down without waiting for an invitation.
"I'm Aki," she said. "Aki Shimizu." She looked at King's bowl. "You're almost done. Do you want more?" She was already half-risen to go back to the service line.
"I'm fine," King said.
She sat back down. "Rare Talent—Radiant Bloom. Healing and light affinity." She said it with the matter-of-fact ease of someone who had no complicated feelings about her classification. Then she looked at the dark scorch mark on Haruto's sleeve. "Did that just happen?"
"A few minutes ago," Haruto said.
She reached into her jacket pocket and produced a small tin of salve without any particular surprise, unscrewed the lid, and pushed it across the table. "That's for the skin underneath if it got hot. The fabric can conduct heat for a few seconds even after the fire's gone."
Haruto looked at the tin, then at her. "I'm not burned."
"I know. The salve's still useful—it reduces residual heat in the skin layer. You won't feel the effect now, but in two hours you'll notice your arm feels normal rather than slightly tender." She was already eating, the medical advice delivered with the efficiency of someone who dispensed it as a reflex. "You've done this before, right? The sleeve thing?"
"...A few times," Haruto admitted.
"You should keep a tin." She pushed the salve closer to him. "Take it. I have more."
Haruto took the tin with the expression of someone who had just been managed by a person half his intimidating size and had no particular objection to it.
King watched this exchange.
She assessed the injury before he said he wasn't hurt, he noticed. She had the salve ready. She keeps a medical kit on her person on the first morning of classes.
He looked at his porridge.
She's going to be good at this, he thought. Whatever she decides to do with Radiant Bloom.
"I'm Haruto," Haruto said. "C-rank. Crimson Edge."
"I know, you told everyone on the elevator from the gate yesterday." Aki smiled without any sting in it. "You were listing your training history to the boy next to you."
"He asked," Haruto said.
"He asked what floor he was on. You told him your rank, your talent classification, your training regimen, and your uncle's grip philosophy."
A pause.
"He seemed interested," Haruto said.
"He was trying to figure out which button to press," King said.
Haruto opened his mouth. Closed it. Pointed at King. "That's not—" He stopped. "Was it?"
"Third floor," King said. "He pressed it immediately after."
Haruto looked at the ceiling. "I talk a lot when I'm nervous," he said, to the ceiling.
"It's not a problem," Aki said cheerfully. She looked at King. "What's your classification?"
"F-rank," King said. "Unknown Variable."
She looked at him for exactly one second—the single-second look of someone rapid-processing new information—and then nodded and continued eating. "That's fine," she said. "Rank doesn't tell you much about a person before you've seen them work."
Haruto pointed at her with his spoon. "Exactly. That's exactly what I said on the bus."
"You said 'there's something wrong with that ranking' and then immediately challenged someone to a sparring match," King said.
"The spirit of what I said," Haruto clarified.
---
Riku arrived at the seventh bell, exactly on time, with a bowl of porridge and no expression that indicated he had opinions about where he sat. He sat two people down from Aki, which meant he was technically at the same table grouping but with plausible deniability about whether he was joining them or simply near them.
King noted this.
"Tanaka," Haruto said, having apparently catalogued him from the forecourt yesterday.
"Takahashi," Riku returned, in the tone of someone confirming a data entry.
Aki introduced herself. Riku received this with a nod that indicated he had heard and filed it.
He looked at King. "How did the Administrative wing visit go yesterday?"
Everyone at that end of the table looked at King.
King considered how much to say. "The classification was confirmed. The enrollment is finalized."
"They accepted an F-rank," Riku said. Not skeptical—precise.
"The headmaster processed it personally."
A short silence.
"Hm," Riku said. He ate his porridge. He looked at the entrance to the hall, at the orientation schedule posted on the board beside the doors, at the clock above it. "Practical placement test is in ninety minutes," he said. "In the main training yard. Anyone who hasn't reviewed the assessment parameters should do so before then."
"I reviewed them last night," Aki said.
"I've been ready since I applied," Haruto said.
"King," Riku said.
"I'll manage," King said.
Riku looked at him. The flat, careful look—the one that said a person was weighing something specific and had not yet reached a conclusion. "The assessment logs combat output. Mana output. Strike force, speed, precision." A pause. "F-rank classification assumes zero viable combat output."
"I know," King said.
"The assessors are going to have a record field for you that says Unknown Variable."
"I know," King said.
"And you're still not concerned."
King thought about the training construct—the mana dummy in the training yard that a hundred C-rank students were about to hit very hard, in sequence, while assessors measured the results and made notes.
I need to hit it softly enough that the results are manageable, he thought. Not too much. Not nothing—nothing would be suspicious in a different way. Something that reads as someone who has basic physical training and unknown mana capacity. Consistent with F-rank Unknown Variable.
This is going to require some thought.
"I'll manage," he said again.
Riku ate his last spoonful of porridge. He set down the bowl. He looked at King one more time with the expression of someone who had decided to table a question until they had more data.
"All right," he said. "Ninety minutes."
---
The combat theory lecture came first.
It was held in a stone hall with tiered seating and a demonstration floor at the center—the kind of room built for showing people things they were about to attempt themselves. The instructor was a thin, dry-voiced woman named Lena Okai who managed to make the mechanics of mana-to-force conversion sound like the most fundamentally important thing anyone had ever said, in the specific way of people who genuinely believed it was.
King sat in the third row.
He listened carefully.
She's correct about the force-to-area calculation, he thought, halfway through a diagram she was drawing on the board. The pressure differential model she's using assumes a uniform output, but combat mana in practice concentrates at the point of impact—the model undersells the peak pressure by about twelve percent.
He did not say this.
He wrote down what she said, in the notebook he'd bought that morning from the supply room for eight copper. He wrote it accurately, because it was what was being taught, and he was here to learn what was being taught, not to note discrepancies in the models.
Haruto was taking notes with the aggressive concentration of someone who had decided to be good at this and was building toward it one page at a time.
Riku's notes were already better than the instructor's own diagram. He had redrawn it in a cleaner format in the margin.
Aki was writing so fast her pen squeaked.
Sora Aizawa was in the row directly behind King.
He hadn't noticed until the lecture started and he heard the specific rhythm of her pen—he'd heard it enough times over the last twelve days, in the fountain district and twice in the market, to recognize it. He turned his head slightly.
She met his eyes immediately. She had clearly already known he was there.
She was, of course, writing in her notebook.
Of course, he thought.
He turned back to the front.
Behind him, without pausing, she wrote: Sat in the third row. Chose the exact center. Arrived precisely on time. Has a new notebook. Is taking notes.
She underlined the last observation twice.
She had seventeen more pages of observations like this and the semester had not technically started yet.
---
The practical placement test was at the second bell.
Six hundred students, rotating through the training yard in groups of thirty. Each student approached the training construct—a mana dummy suspended in the center of the yard, designed to measure and absorb force impact without damage—and performed a three-strike sequence. The assessors recorded everything.
King watched the first group go.
The training construct absorbed B-rank strikes with a slight shudder and a bright output number on the measurement board. C-rank strikes were the average—solid, consistent, producing numbers in the expected range. A few outliers in both directions. One student produced a strike that the board flagged yellow—unusually high output. Several produced results the board logged in red—dangerously low.
The board distinguishes, King observed. Yellow for unusual high. Red for unusual low. Green for within expected range.
He looked at his own hands.
Very, very, gentle, he thought. The most gentle strike imaginable. The goal is green. Solidly green. Unremarkably green.
His group was called.
He took his position.
Twenty-nine other students struck in sequence before him—Haruto's three strikes came out yellow on the first hit (the assessors made a note), Riku's were precise and measured and landed clean green, Aki's were borderline and she looked privately frustrated by the second strike.
King stepped up.
He looked at the training construct.
He struck it three times.
The board produced three green numbers.
They were, specifically, the most average green numbers the assessment board had produced all morning—sitting in the dead center of the expected C-rank baseline range, perfectly ordinary, unremarkable in every measurable way.
The assessors looked at their clipboards.
One of them looked at King's file notation: F-Rank—Unknown Variable.
He looked at the green numbers.
He looked at King.
King looked back.
"Next," the assessor said, and wrote something in a column that King couldn't read from this distance but suspected said see attached notes in whatever shorthand the Academy used for things that didn't fit the expected form.
King stepped aside.
Haruto was waiting at the yard's edge, arms crossed, staring at him with an expression that was starting to become familiar—the one that said: I saw that and I have no idea what to do with it.
"You hit it three times," Haruto said.
"Yes," King said.
"And it came out exactly average."
"I appear to be exactly average," King said.
"You appear to be," Haruto said. He said it in a tone that communicated very clearly that he did not believe the word appear was carrying the weight King was asking it to carry.
"Green is good," King said.
"Green is fine," Haruto said. He looked at the training construct. He looked at King. He looked at the construct again. "You're going to be very strange to know," he said.
"You said that at breakfast," King reminded him.
"It keeps being true," Haruto said—which was, King noted privately, almost exactly the thing King had said to Sora about being a student, three days ago, in front of the pile of shattered crystal.
He looked at the sky above the training yard. Blue, clear. The mountain's shadow fell across the far wall in the late morning light.
First day, he thought. Going well.
---
Behind the assessors' table, across the yard, Combat Instructor Edward Johnson was leaning against the wall with his arms folded, watching. He'd been watching since the first group. He'd seen every strike from every student.
He was looking at the assessment board's record of King's three green numbers.
He had his own clipboard. He was writing something on a page that wasn't the official assessment form—his personal notes, the ones he kept separate from the records.
He underlined it.
The numbers are correct.