— Day eight. East corridor. Between the library and the main lecture building.
King Heard Him Before He Saw Him
Not because Daiki Fujimoto was loud—though he was, in the specific way of people who had grown up in rooms where their opinions were the most important thing in them. But because the corridor changed before he turned the corner.
People moved differently. The natural flow of students between buildings—loose clusters, uneven pace, the comfortable noise of fifty people not paying close attention to each other—compressed. Tightened. The way a crowd moved when something was happening that most of them wanted to be near but not involved in.
King turned the corner.
Daiki Fujimoto was standing in the middle of the east corridor with three friends arranged slightly behind him—the triangular spacing of people who expected to be watching something, not doing something. Daiki himself was easy to read: tall, broad-shouldered, wearing the Academy uniform with the kind of precise fit that said someone had altered it specifically for him, the Fujimoto house crest on the collar clasp in silver. Not the standard issue Academy clasp. Custom.
A-rank, King noted, from the insignia. Ultimate Skill classification. That's an unusual notation at first-year—most Ultimate Skills don't manifest cleanly until eighteen to twenty.
He stopped doing that.
What Daiki was currently doing was talking to a student King recognized from the F-block's adjacent corridor—not one of the seventh floor residents King knew, but a first-year from the sixth floor who'd been assigned a labor-track provisional enrollment. The student was backed against the wall, not because Daiki was physically blocking him but because the body language of the conversation had arranged itself into a shape where the wall was the most logical place to be.
"—because F-rank doesn't belong in an academic building," Daiki was saying. He said it with the particular confidence of someone who considered what he was saying a neutral statement of fact rather than an attack. "The Labor designation exists for a reason. The track exists because certain classifications need a different kind of structure—"
The student against the wall wasn't saying anything. He was looking at his shoes.
King stopped walking.
He had been heading to the library. The library was in the direction Daiki was currently occupying. He stood there for a moment, doing the calculation that a reasonable person did when encountering this kind of situation—the one that weighed whether this was his business against whether walking past it was a thing he was capable of doing with any degree of comfort.
It is not my business, he thought.
He kept standing there.
I have no personal conflict with Daiki Fujimoto. I don't know the student against the wall. This is a corridor interaction with social stakes I don't fully understand. I should walk past.
He stood there.
The student is looking at his shoes, he thought. He has been looking at his shoes for approximately forty seconds, which means this has been going on for at least that long, probably longer.
He started walking again.
Toward Daiki, not around him.
---
Daiki noticed him when he was about twelve feet away.
He looked at King the way people looked at things that had entered their peripheral vision and might require acknowledgment—a quick scan, a classification. His eyes found the F-rank insignia immediately. Then the Unknown Variable notation. Then King's face.
"Another one," Daiki said.
He didn't say it to King specifically. He said it to the general vicinity, the way you made an observation to an audience.
One of the three friends behind him made a short noise that wasn't quite a laugh.
"F-rank," Daiki said, this time to King directly. "Unknown Variable. You're the Pillar incident."
"Yes," King said.
He had stopped walking again. He was standing in the corridor, hands in his coat pockets, at approximately the natural conversational distance two people maintained when they were standing in a corridor together. Not close. Not backed away.
"I've been meaning to find you," Daiki said. He said it like a person who had a schedule and had been waiting for something on it. "I have a question."
"All right," King said.
"How does an F-rank get Academy enrollment?" Daiki asked. "Standard procedure is Labor assignment. Everyone knows this. But there's an F-rank Unknown Variable from the Pillar incident walking around the east corridor, so clearly something has gone wrong with standard procedure."
"The Headmaster processed my enrollment personally," King said.
"Roland Knight," Daiki said. He absorbed this. "My family has contributed significant funding to this institution for three generations. My grandfather endowed the eastern training annex. My father funded the library expansion in year three-ninety-eight." He paused to make sure that context had landed. "And the Headmaster is enrolling F-rank Unknown Variables."
"Apparently," King said.
Daiki looked at him for a moment.
He's waiting for me to be uncomfortable, King noticed. He's used to this working. The weight of the name, the history, the positioning—he's used to it changing the way people stand.
King stood the same way he'd been standing.
Daiki's expression didn't change exactly, but something behind it shifted slightly—the micro-adjustment of a person who had expected a different response and was recalculating on the fly.
"I think," Daiki said, "you need to understand what your classification means. Not for my benefit. For yours." He turned slightly, addressing the corridor at large, because he preferred an audience when making clear points. "F-rank isn't a number. It's a statement. It means the examination—which has been accurately measuring talent for three hundred years—determined you have no meaningful combat application. None." He turned back to King. "That's not an insult. It's a fact. The system exists because talent determines outcome. You could spend ten years in this Academy and—"
"Is there supposed to be something happening right now?" King asked.
Daiki stopped.
King tilted his head fifteen degrees to the right, looking at the air around him with the mild, attentive expression of someone who had noticed a phenomenon and was trying to identify it.
"I'm sorry?" Daiki said.
"There's a—something." King looked at the floor, then the walls, then back at Daiki. "A pressure? Is that coming from you?"
A silence.
Daiki hadn't been conscious of it—or rather, he had been, but in the background way that people were conscious of breathing. Sovereign Pressure was an Ultimate Skill. It operated passively in social situations with lower-rank individuals, a constant low-level field that established hierarchy without requiring deliberate activation. He'd never had to think about it. It simply worked.
It was working now. He was running it at approximately fifteen percent output—the ambient level he maintained by default in formal corridor situations. Every F-rank student in the vicinity should have felt it as a mild, persistent heaviness. Like the air had gotten denser. Like gravity had slightly increased.
The student against the wall had been noticeably uncomfortable for the last three minutes.
King was tilting his head and asking if there was supposed to be wind.
"That's my talent," Daiki said. Slowly. "Sovereign Pressure. It—"
"Oh," King said. He looked at the air again with the expression of someone who had been informed of something and was now trying to retroactively locate it. "I can't feel it particularly." He thought about this. "Is it working?"
A very complete silence fell over the corridor.
One of Daiki's three friends made a sound. It was unclear what kind of sound. It was the sound of a person whose face was doing something they were not fully in control of.
Daiki looked at King.
King looked back, with patient, genuine attention, waiting for an answer to his question.
"It's working," Daiki said. His voice had found a slightly different register—still controlled, still the voice of someone who was not going to show that anything had surprised him, but with the quality of a person speaking with more care than they'd been using a moment ago.
"How would I know if it was working?" King asked.
"You'd feel heavy," Daiki said. "Pressure on the chest. Lower-rank individuals experience it as a suppressive weight—it scales with rank differential. Against F-rank, at my output—" He stopped himself. He had been about to say you should be on your knees. He did not say this, because saying it out loud in the context of the current situation would produce a sentence that he could hear in advance would be awkward.
"I don't feel heavy," King said. He sounded like he was being honest about this. "I feel approximately normal."
Daiki looked at him.
He's not suppressing it, Daiki thought. Sovereign Pressure can be suppressed by high-rank mana resistance—an S-rank or above can push through it, an SS-rank might not feel it. But this is an F-rank Unknown Variable. There's no mana resistance on his file. There's no mana reading at all. He should—
He pushed the output up.
Not dramatically. He brought it from fifteen percent to forty. This was the level that made C-rank students instinctively step back. The level that made combat-track B-rank students brace and hold.
The student against the wall made a small, involuntary sound. He put one hand against the stone to stabilize.
King's head tilted slightly further to the right.
"There's still nothing," King said, not complainingly. Curiously. "Is it a localized thing? Maybe I'm outside the range."
He looked at the floor between them, as if checking whether he had accidentally stepped outside the area the ability covered.
"You're in the range," Daiki said.
"Hm," King said.
Daiki pushed to sixty percent.
Sixty percent Sovereign Pressure had, on one memorable occasion in second year, caused a B-rank student to sit down involuntarily. The pressure at this output physically interfered with the mana circulation of lower-rank individuals—not damaging, but present enough that the body prioritized responding to it over maintaining normal posture. It was the kind of output that ended conversations quickly, because people's bodies made the decision to conclude the conversation before their brains finished the thought.
King put his hands deeper in his coat pockets.
"Is there supposed to be wind?" he asked.
The question landed in the corridor like a stone dropped into still water.
One of Daiki's three friends turned slightly away. Not dramatically—just enough to indicate that whatever expression was on his face was one he was choosing not to display to the general corridor population.
Daiki stared at King.
King looked back, waiting.
"Wind," Daiki said.
"The pressure you're describing," King said. "I thought—pressure sometimes has a directional quality. I was wondering if it was supposed to be like wind. Is that not—" He looked around again, genuinely trying to locate the phenomenon he'd been told was happening. "Is it more like weight? Top-down rather than directional?"
"It's—" Daiki stopped. He looked at his output, which was currently sitting at sixty percent and had produced, as far as he could observe, a slight clockwise drift in King's head position and a question about meteorological phenomena. "Yes," he said, through significant effort of composure. "Top-down."
"Hmm," King said. He rolled his shoulders slightly, the way people did when checking if something was different. "Still approximately normal, I think. Sorry. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be feeling."
A pause of significant duration.
Daiki had been using Sovereign Pressure since he was fifteen. He had used it on students, on instructors who'd surprised him, on a minor noble from the Thraxis border who had once said something he'd disagreed with at a social function. It had never, in three years of casual deployment, failed to produce a visible physical effect on any human being it had contacted.
He was currently running it at sixty percent of maximum output.
Against an F-rank.
Who was asking about wind.
"I see," Daiki said.
He pulled the output back to zero.
He looked at King with the expression of a person who had not been surprised—he was going to maintain this position internally until further notice—but who had encountered a data point that did not fit any existing chart he possessed.
"Unknown Variable," Daiki said.
"Yes," King said.
"The Registry's classification for individuals whose talent cannot be measured by standard instruments."
"That's what the file says," King said.
Daiki looked at him for a long moment. His three friends had gone very quiet in the way of people who were waiting to take their social cue from someone else and that someone else was not currently providing clear cues.
"I'm going to the library," King said. He said it in the tone of someone who had completed a pleasant and mildly confusing conversation and was returning to his original plan. "If the pressure thing is supposed to do something, I apologize for not—being more responsive to it. I genuinely wasn't feeling it."
He started walking.
He walked past Daiki with the unhurried certainty of someone who had no reason to move around an obstacle, because an obstacle was a thing that stopped you, and nothing about the current configuration of the corridor was stopping him.
Daiki did not move.
King walked past him.
He walked past the three friends.
He continued down the corridor.
He did not look back.
---
The corridor was quiet for a moment after King disappeared around the far end.
The student who'd been against the wall was still against the wall. He was no longer looking at his shoes. He was looking at the place where King had been standing, with the expression of a person who had watched something happen and was going to be thinking about it for some time.
Daiki's three friends were looking at Daiki.
Daiki was looking at the corridor.
"Sixty percent," said the one on the left. He said it quietly. Not asking for confirmation. Just saying it out loud because saying it out loud made it real.
"I know," Daiki said.
"And he asked about wind."
"I know."
A pause.
"Is he—" the one on the right started.
"I don't know," Daiki said.
He was going to find out.
He wasn't sure what he was going to find, but the not-knowing had settled somewhere behind his ribs in a way that felt, uncomfortably, like the beginning of a very long question.
He looked at the corridor.
He looked at his own hands.
He put his hands in his pockets—a gesture he had never made before because it was the posture of people who didn't have anything to demonstrate—and walked away.
---
King was in the library for two hours.
He read three papers and started a fourth. He fixed a mistake in his week-one combat theory notes from memory, having realized while walking past the corridor incident that he'd transposed two numbers in a formula during the lecture. He returned two books to the incorrect shelves and moved them to the correct ones, which was something he'd been meaning to do since day five when he'd noticed the library's east wing had a shelving error in the third classification row.
He was on page eleven of the fourth paper when someone sat down across from him.
He looked up.
Sora. Her notebook already open, pen already moving, which meant she had been writing before she sat down and had simply transferred the motion seamlessly from standing to seated without interrupting it.
"The east corridor," she said, not looking up.
"Yes," he said.
"Daiki Fujimoto."
"Yes."
"Sovereign Pressure."
"He mentioned that, yes."
She looked up. "He was running it at sixty percent when you walked away. I was at the far end of the corridor. I could feel it from thirty feet away." She held his gaze. "You walked through it like it wasn't there."
"I couldn't feel it," King said.
She looked at him.
He looked back.
"You couldn't feel sixty percent Sovereign Pressure from an A-rank Ultimate Skill," she said.
"Not particularly, no."
"And your question about the wind."
"It seemed like a reasonable question given what he'd described," King said.
She looked at him for a long moment. Her pen was still. Which meant she was thinking and not writing, which—based on eight days of observation—meant she had encountered something that hadn't resolved into words yet.
"No. 49," she said finally.
"What?"
"The expression you had when you asked about the wind." She opened the notebook to the right page. She wrote something. "I was thirty feet away but I could still see it clearly. You weren't performing. You genuinely weren't feeling it." She looked up. "That's 49."
"What's the expression?" he asked.
She turned the notebook briefly. It read: No. 49—East corridor, Day 8. Polite confusion. Genuine. He was trying to help Fujimoto explain it better.
King looked at this.
"I was," he said.
"I know," she said. She turned the notebook back and kept writing. "That's the part that keeps being the problem."
"What part."
"That you're always doing exactly what you look like you're doing." Her pen moved steadily. "There's no gap. No performance layer. You were confused about Sovereign Pressure because you genuinely couldn't feel it, and you wanted to understand what you were supposed to be feeling so you could help him explain it more clearly." She paused. "That's a very specific kind of strange."
"Strange," King said.
"Strange," she confirmed. "In the way that things are strange when they're too straightforward to fit in a complicated framework."
King thought about this.
"Is that good or bad," he asked.
She wrote something else. She held it up briefly. It read: Good. Probably. Filing.
"Filing," he said.
"For return," she said, already turning the page.
---
At the same hour, in the upper-tier residential area of Rume's second tier, Daiki Fujimoto was sitting at the desk in his family's Academy-adjacent apartment—the one maintained by the Fujimoto noble house for use during the school year—and staring at his own hands.
He had used Sovereign Pressure at sixty percent.
Against an F-rank.
Who had asked about wind.
He opened his personal record book—the one he kept for tracking his own combat development—and turned to a fresh page. He wrote the date. He wrote: East corridor. Unknown Variable. Output: 60%. Result: —
He held the pen.
He didn't know what to write in the result column.
He had never, in three years of keeping this record, left the result column blank.
He wrote: Inconclusive.
He looked at it.
He underlined it.
He did not sleep particularly well.