— That same evening. North Wing dormitory. Seventh bell.
Nobody Warned Them About the Welcome Purge
It wasn't in the orientation card. It wasn't in the enrollment packet. It wasn't posted on the notice board beside the main hall doors alongside the schedule and the cafeteria hours and the library access policy.
It was, as Riku explained flatly while eating dinner, a tradition—which meant it was an unofficial practice that the Academy staff were technically aware of, did not officially endorse, and had not meaningfully stopped for at least a decade.
"Every first-year dormitory block," Riku said. "Second-years come through on the first evening. They establish hierarchy. Most of it is posturing. Some of it is physical." He ate a piece of bread without any particular change in expression. "It's been worse in previous years. The staff tightened the rules after an incident in the Latium dormitory block six years ago."
"What incident?" Aki asked.
"A second-year broke a first-year's collarbone with a gravity suppression demonstration." A pause. "The second-year was a minor noble from Rume's upper tier. He received a formal reprimand."
"Just a reprimand," Aki said.
"He was from the upper tier," Riku said. "Yes."
Haruto had put his fork down.
King watched him.
Haruto was not the type to go quiet at the dinner table unless something had replaced all his usual noise with a specific, focused kind of attention. His jaw was set. He was looking at the wall in the direction of the North Wing dormitory block the way a person looked at something they had already decided to walk toward.
"The North Wing is our block," Haruto said.
"Yes," Riku said.
"So they're coming to our corridor tonight."
"Statistically probable."
Haruto picked his fork back up. He ate with the aggressive efficiency of a person accelerating through a meal to get to what came after.
King finished his soup. It was good soup—root vegetables, thick broth, a grain he hadn't tried before that sat at the bottom of the bowl like small pearls. He was taking his time with it.
"You're not worried," Aki said—to King, not to Haruto, who was clearly worried in the specific way that looked like anger.
"I'm eating," King said.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at Haruto, who was three bites from the bottom of his bowl and visibly ready to be done. Then she looked back at King.
She picked up her own spoon and continued eating, but with a noticeably reduced enthusiasm, because she was also a person who did not love the idea of returning to a dormitory corridor that was about to have a problem in it.
Riku, across the table, turned to a clean page in his pocket journal and wrote something down.
King watched him.
"You're noting the situation," King said.
"I'm noting variables," Riku said. "If the second-years follow the traditional targeting pattern—F-rank and low-classification students first, working up—then our corridor is likely to be an early stop." He didn't look up. "Our corridor has one B-rank candidate, two C-ranks, one F-rank Unknown Variable, and a healer. That's either a very appealing target or a very confusing one."
"Which do you think?" Aki asked.
Riku finally looked up. "I don't know yet. Depends on whether the second-years have heard about the Pillar incident." He looked at King. "Which, given that everyone on my bus knew about it on enrollment day, I assume they have."
King considered this. He went back to the soup. The grain at the bottom was better cold—it had absorbed the broth fully and the texture was richer.
"It'll be fine," King said.
Haruto looked at him. "You keep saying things will be fine."
"They keep being fine," King said.
Haruto pointed at him with his spoon, in the way that Haruto pointed at things when he had a feeling he couldn't fully articulate yet. He didn't say anything. He went back to his bowl.
---
The seventh bell rang while they were walking back to the North Wing.
The evening was cool—the mountain held its temperature well into dark, but the corridor air from the open walkway between the main building and the dormitory wing had the particular chill of stone that had been warm all day and was releasing it all at once. Lanterns on the wall brackets. The sound of other students heading back from dinner in groups, the particular noise of sixty people getting used to being in the same building together.
King walked with his hands in his coat pockets and listened to the corridor.
Quiet, he thought. Mostly.
Not entirely. Two floors up, by the acoustic shape of it bouncing down through the stairwell. Voices with a specific register—not conversation. Command. The kind of voice people used when they wanted other people to understand there was a hierarchy operating.
Haruto heard it too. King saw the shift in his posture—shoulders back, weight forward, the unconscious physical grammar of someone preparing for something.
"Seventh floor," Haruto said. Not a question.
"Sixth," King said, correcting the acoustic.
Haruto looked at him. King kept walking.
They took the stairwell up.
---
Sixth floor, North Wing. Their corridor.
Three of them.
Second-years—the Academy uniform cut slightly differently, the insignia on the left shoulder marking classification, the particular ease of people who had already spent a year here and knew the building's rhythms. They were standing at the mid-corridor junction, which put them between the stairwell entrance and the cluster of first-year rooms that included King's, Haruto's, Riku's, and Aki's.
The one in front was broad, dark-haired, with the specific physical confidence of someone whose talent gave them reason to be confident and who had, at some point, decided physical confidence and arrogance were the same thing.
B-rank mana signature, King noted, quiet under the surface like a held breath. Combat-type. Probably pressure or force affinity.
He noted this and then deliberately stopped noting it.
Stop cataloguing, he reminded himself. You're a student coming back from dinner.
There were four first-year students already backed against the wall on the left side of the corridor—two King recognized from the assessment yard, one he didn't know, and a girl from 7-B who had been in the dining hall earlier and had probably just had very bad timing coming back up the stairs.
The girl against the wall was trying very hard to look small.
Ah, King thought.
Haruto made a sound that wasn't quite a word. He moved forward.
"Hey." He said it at full volume, covering the distance in three steps, putting himself between the three second-years and the students against the wall. It was a fast, completely unstrategic positioning that prioritized being between the threat and the people faster than it prioritized anything else.
King observed, privately, that this was exactly what the plot bible said Haruto would do and also exactly what a reasonable person might predict he'd do after about forty minutes of knowing him.
The broad second-year looked Haruto over. He took his time about it—the deliberate pace of someone demonstrating that they weren't worried about the interruption.
"C-rank," the second-year said, reading Haruto's insignia. "First year. You want to get involved in this?"
"Yeah," Haruto said. "I do."
"That's stupid."
"Probably," Haruto said.
He's going to fight three of them, King thought. He knows he's outclassed. He knows the positioning is bad. He's going to do it anyway because the girl against the wall is scared and he can't watch that happen.
King sighed.
He stepped forward.
He didn't step quickly. He didn't step dramatically. He simply moved from his position at Haruto's shoulder to a position two feet in front of Haruto, between Haruto and the three second-years, and stopped.
He stood there.
The broad second-year looked at King.
King looked back.
The corridor was quiet for a moment—not the quiet of something building, just quiet. The lanterns on the wall brackets. The sound of the mountain wind somewhere outside. The girl against the wall had stopped trying to look small and was just staring.
"F-rank," the second-year said, reading King's insignia. "Unknown Variable." He said it the specific way that people said classifications they considered insults. "You're in the wrong place."
"I live here," King said. "Room 7-F."
"Then go to your room."
"I will," King said. "After you leave."
A pause.
The second-year's mana shifted—not activated, just moved to the surface, the way people did when they were preparing to use it. A warning. A demonstration. This is what I have. Do you understand the scale of what you're talking to?
King looked at him with the same expression he'd been wearing since he stepped forward. Unhurried. Slightly attentive, the way you looked at something that had caught your interest without alarming you.
The mana pressure hit.
It wasn't an attack—not technically. Just a push of raw B-rank presence into the corridor, the kind that made lower-rank students take an involuntary step back. A dominance display. Standard practice, probably. Efficient.
King didn't move.
Not back. Not forward. He stood exactly where he was, with his hands in his coat pockets, and the mana pressure—which should have pushed him the way a strong wind pushed anyone standing in it—did nothing whatsoever to him.
The second-year's expression changed.
Very slightly. The way an expression changed when something returned the wrong result—not frightened, just recalibrating.
He pushed harder.
The two students against the wall flinched. Haruto's boots scraped the stone floor slightly—involuntary, absorbed and countered immediately, but real. Riku, who had come up behind King at some point, braced his left foot.
King stood still.
It's not that I'm resisting it, he thought. It's that there's nothing to resist. Pressure requires a reference point. It pushes relative to something. I'm not a relative.
He didn't say this.
"Are you going to leave," King said, "or would you like to stay and see what happens next?"
He said it the same way he'd asked the examiner if he was done—mild, genuine, no particular weight behind it. The kind of tone you used when you were asking a real question and would accept either answer without drama.
The second-year stared at him.
Something in the corridor had changed. Not loudly. The mana pressure was still out—the second-year hadn't pulled it back yet—but it had stopped doing anything, which meant it was running at full output against nothing, which looked, to the two second-years standing slightly behind the first one, like their friend was standing in front of someone who was not reacting to a B-rank pressure push.
The one on the left said, quietly: "Joren."
The broad second-year—Joren—looked at King for three more seconds.
Then something shifted in his face. A decision.
He stepped back.
One step. Then two.
He looked at the other first-year students against the wall, looked at Haruto, looked at King one last time, and turned away.
"Let's go," he said to the other two.
They walked down the corridor. Past the junction. Around the far corner. Their footsteps on the staircase going down, then quieter, then gone.
The corridor was still.
The four first-year students against the wall exhaled in a collective, uneven way. The girl from 7-B looked at King with an expression somewhere between relief and confusion.
Haruto turned around.
He looked at King.
"You stood there," Haruto said.
"Yes," King said.
"He pushed B-rank pressure at you."
"Yes."
"And you just—stood there."
"Yes."
Haruto ran a hand through his hair. He made a sound that was not quite words. He looked at the empty corridor where the three second-years had been, then back at King.
"How," he said.
"I wasn't pushed," King said.
"Why weren't you pushed."
King thought about how to answer that honestly.
"I don't know," he said.
Which was, again, technically true in the specific and narrow way he meant it—he didn't know how to explain it in terms that would make sense to anyone standing in this corridor, and he wasn't going to try.
Haruto stared at him for a long moment. Then he looked at the junction where the second-years had disappeared. Then he looked at the students who'd been against the wall. The girl from 7-B was already gone—she'd slipped off during the moment of quiet, moving fast, probably wanting to be inside her room with the door shut before any of the adrenaline fully landed.
"They'll come back," Riku said from behind King. He was looking at the stairwell. "Not tonight. Joren is a second-year from the Rume upper tier—if he reports back to his peer group that an F-rank Unknown Variable ignored his B-rank pressure push, there will be escalation."
"Escalation to what?" Aki asked. She was standing in the corridor entrance, having arrived during the mana-pressure moment, and her expression said she had done the medical math on what B-rank pressure could do to unbraced C-rank students and had not liked the result.
"Unclear," Riku said. "More of them. Higher rank. Or they leave it alone because the story is embarrassing and they don't want to repeat it." He looked at King. "Depends on how it gets told."
"It'll be fine," King said.
Everyone in the corridor looked at him.
He walked to his room. He opened the door—the latch moved cleanly, one smooth motion, the way a properly maintained mechanism moved.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
"Good night," he said.
He went inside and closed the door.
---
The corridor was quiet for a moment after that.
Haruto stood where he was, looking at the closed door of room 7-F.
Riku was already writing in his pocket journal. He wrote: Corridor incident. Three second-years, B-rank lead. Full B-rank pressure push made no contact. Von Deluxh did not brace, did not step back, did not activate mana. Pressure did not register on him physically. Result: second-years withdrew.
He paused.
He added: I do not currently have a model for this.
He underlined it once and closed the journal.
Aki was standing beside him, looking at the closed door of 7-F with an expression that had moved past surprise and into something more careful. She had her notebook—the one she'd been keeping about King since his assessment board results, the small green one—and she opened it to a fresh page.
She wrote one sentence.
She looked at it.
She drew a box around it.
He didn't brace because he didn't need to.
She closed the notebook.
"He's going to be trouble," Haruto said, to no one in particular. He didn't mean it as a complaint. He said it the way you said things about people you'd already decided to walk toward anyway.
He went to his own room.
Down the corridor, from behind the door of 7-F, came the small, quiet sound of a window being opened—the new latch moving smoothly, the night air coming in—and then nothing. Just the mountain quiet, and the sound of someone settling in for an evening with no particular urgency about anything at all.
---
Three floors down, in the ground-floor janitor's access corridor, three second-year students were sitting against the wall.
They had been sitting against the wall for approximately four minutes.
Joren—B-rank, Rume upper tier, fourteen months at the Academy and a solid record in every confrontation he'd initiated on Welcome Purge night in the previous two years—was staring at the middle distance with the specific expression of someone running a replay of the last thirty seconds and not finding anything that explained the current situation.
He was on the ground floor.
He had been on the sixth floor.
There were three floors of staircase between those two locations, and he had no memory of walking down any of them.
"What," said the second-year on his left.
"I don't know," Joren said.
"One minute we were in the corridor," the second-year on his right said slowly. "And then we were—"
"I know," Joren said.
They sat there.
"The F-rank," the one on the left said, after a while.
"I know," Joren said.
"He just stood there."
"I know."
The corridor was quiet.
"I don't think we should go back up there," the one on the right said.
Joren looked at the staircase leading back up to the sixth floor.
He thought about it.
"No," he said. "I don't think we should either."
He got up. The other two got up.
None of them mentioned it again.
Not to each other. Not to the other second-years.
Not to anyone.
Some things, Joren decided, were better left as things that had simply happened and did not need to be examined more closely than that.
He did not sleep well that night.