— End of first week. Seventh floor rooftop access. Dusk.
He Found the Roof by Following the Stairs to Where They Stopped
Most people got off at the seventh floor—that was the top residential level of the North Wing. The stairwell continued past it, though. One more flight, narrower, the stone more worn on the center of each step than the sides, which meant people had used it but not often. At the top was a small landing and a door with a simple bar latch, the kind that opened from both sides.
He had noticed the stairs on the second day.
He had not opened the door until now.
Day ten, he thought. End of first week.
He lifted the bar and pushed.
---
The roof was flat and stone, bordered on three sides by a low parapet wall. The fourth side—the mountain face—had no parapet because there was no edge there, just the rock rising directly from the building's rear wall. The space was not large, maybe twenty paces by fifteen, but it was empty.
No equipment. No furniture. A few places where the stone showed the particular smooth wear of things having been set down and picked up repeatedly over years—someone had used this space, in the past, for some regular purpose that had eventually stopped.
A drainage channel ran along the base of the parapet on two sides, carrying whatever rain collected up here down through the building's pipe system. The channel was clear, recently cleaned, which meant the groundskeeping staff came up occasionally even if students didn't.
King stood in the center of the roof.
He looked west.
The sun was already low—two hands above the mountain peaks on the far side of the Rume valley. The peaks caught it at their edges, the rock going from grey to orange to a pale yellow at the very top that wasn't the color of anything he had a name for yet.
Below the peaks, the city.
Rume from above—he had seen it from the bus, from the administrative wing windows, from the second-floor corridor stairwell viewing position. He had seen it from several angles. This was different. The bus had been moving. The windows had been at a distance. Here he was standing on a surface seven floors up with no glass between him and the open air, and the city was simply—there.
All of it.
Every tier. The lowest residential levels dark already in their own shadow. The second tier still in direct light, the windows catching the late sun and throwing it back. The market district's colors visible even from this height—the striped awnings of the vendor stalls, the orange of the clay-tiled roofs, the particular pale grey of Rume's civic stone that turned warm at this hour.
And the sky behind all of it.
Oh, he thought.
Not dramatically. Just—oh. The specific sound of a realization that he had not anticipated the shape of.
He had known about sunsets. He knew the mechanism—the atmosphere scattering the shorter wavelengths at low angles, leaving the longer reds and oranges, the specific physics of why a sunset looked the way a sunset looked. He had known this completely, precisely, the way he knew everything that could be known.
He had never stood on a rooftop at dusk in a body that existed at this scale and watched it happen from the inside.
This is different, he thought.
He walked to the parapet wall and sat on it—carefully, the stone was worn but solid—and put his feet on the inner side and faced west.
The sun was moving.
It always moved. He knew it moved. Knowing something moved and watching it move from a position where you could mark its progress against the fixed line of the mountain peaks and feel the air change temperature on your face as it went—these were not the same experience.
Five minutes, he thought. Since I sat down. It's moved.
He watched it move.
The color of the city below him was changing in real time—the warm wash deepening, the shadows on the eastern sides of the buildings going purple-blue, the lit western faces going the specific deep gold of the last twenty minutes before full sunset.
The mountain peaks on the far side lost their yellow and went red.
The sky above them went from pale blue to something that wasn't quite one color—blue still in the high part, orange-red low, a band between them that shifted as he watched it.
I have no name for that color, he thought.
He looked at it.
I should have a name for that color, he thought. It's a real thing. It exists. It happens every evening. Someone must have named it.
He made a note to ask.
He stayed very still and watched the sun finish its descent.
---
He'd been there for almost forty minutes when he heard the stairwell door.
He didn't turn. He heard it open, heard boots on the roof stones, heard the specific way the person moved—loose, unhurried, someone who walked the way they talked, at full volume and with their weight forward.
Haruto.
King didn't say anything.
Haruto crossed the roof. He came to the parapet wall and looked out at the view—the city, the mountain peaks, the sky going deep now, the last sliver of direct sun just touching the highest peak on the western ridge.
He didn't ask what King was doing here.
He didn't ask how long he'd been here.
He didn't say anything at all.
He sat on the parapet wall, facing west, about three feet from King. He put his hands in his lap. He looked at the sky.
He just sat down, King thought.
No commentary. No context request. He had arrived, assessed the situation—person I know sitting on a roof watching a sunset, has probably been here a while—and sat down, because apparently sitting down was the appropriate response to that situation and Haruto had no particular interest in complicating it.
---
The sun went below the peaks.
The last direct light left the city.
For a few minutes afterward the sky kept doing its thing—the colors not disappearing but redistributing, the orange moving higher and going pinker, the blue deepening in stages, the horizon line on the far side of the valley going a specific shade of purple-brown that was different from the purple-blue of the building shadows and also different from the blue above.
"Hm," Haruto said.
King looked at him.
Haruto was still looking at the sky. His expression was the open, uncalculated expression of someone who had not been prepared for how good this was going to look and was in the process of updating their estimation of rooftop sitting as a general activity.
"I've never been up here," Haruto said.
"Neither had I," King said. "Before today."
"How did you find the stairs?"
"I followed them to where they stopped."
Haruto looked at the door they'd both come through. "I saw the door two days ago," he said. "I didn't open it."
"Why not?" King asked.
"I don't know. I kept meaning to." He shrugged, the easy shrug of someone who had no particular feelings about the gap between intentions and actions. "Too busy, I guess."
"What made you come today?"
Haruto was quiet for a moment. "I saw you weren't at dinner," he said. "Aki said you'd taken food from the service line and she thought you went up. Riku said there was a rooftop access stairwell on the seventh floor." He paused. "So."
So. He had followed. That was the complete reason. He'd noted the absence, traced the likely location, and come up.
He checked, King thought. He noticed I wasn't at dinner and he came to find me.
This was, he realized, a thing that had never happened to him before.
Not because no one had ever noticed his absence—he had been noticed, always, completely, by every system and structure that operated in the spaces he occupied. But that was noticing the way instruments noticed—measuring, logging, registering.
Haruto had not consulted an instrument. He had looked at an empty chair at a dinner table and thought: King's not here. I should find out where he is.
That was different.
King looked at the sky.
"I wanted to see a sunset," he said.
"From up here?"
"From anywhere. I haven't—I've been here ten days and I hadn't watched one properly yet."
Haruto looked at him sideways. "You hadn't watched a sunset."
"Not like this," King said.
"How else would you watch one."
"I don't know," King said. "From inside? From a lower level? Not paying attention?" He looked at the sky. "This is the first one I've actually sat with."
Haruto was quiet for a moment.
"Did it work?" he asked.
"Yes," King said. "It worked very well."
"Good." Haruto leaned back slightly against the parapet, settling in. "What are you looking at specifically? Like—is it the colors? The city thing? The mountain thing?"
"All of it," King said. "The way it changes while you're looking at it. You can see it moving if you pick one point and watch it."
Haruto tried this—picked the left edge of the western peak and watched the light shift against it. "Oh," he said, after a moment. "Yeah."
"Yes," King said.
---
They watched the sky go through its last stages. The pink faded. The deep blue spread downward from the top of the sky. The first stars appeared—not many, still more dusk than dark, but a few of the brighter ones pushing through in the southwest.
King looked at them.
He had seen these stars from outside them. From distances that made the distances between them look like the space between grains of sand. From positions and scales that made the idea of sitting on a rooftop and looking up at them the way a person looked up at the ceiling of a very large room feel—not small, exactly. Just specific. A specific kind of looking that was available from exactly here and nowhere else.
I know those, he thought. I know exactly what they are.
And then, quieter:
But I've never seen them from down here before.
He stayed with that.
Down here. In this body, on this roof, with the night air coming in off the mountain and the city below settling into its lit, comfortable evening self, and a person sitting three feet away who had noticed an empty chair at dinner and climbed seven floors to find out where he'd gone.
Down here is different, he thought. Down here, they're just—bright. Small and bright and there.
He exhaled.
"You okay?" Haruto said.
King looked at him.
Haruto was watching him with the easy, direct attention of someone who asked questions because they wanted answers, not because they were performing concern. No particular alarm in it. Just: you did a thing with your face, I noticed, asking.
"Yes," King said.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure." He looked back at the sky. "I'm—" He stopped. He found he wanted to say something accurate and was having trouble locating the exact words for it. "This is good," he said finally. "This is exactly the kind of thing I came here for."
Haruto looked at the sky, then at the city, then at King. "To watch sunsets?"
"To watch sunsets," King said. "And other things. Things I haven't done before." He paused. "There are a lot of things I haven't done before."
"Like what?"
King thought about the list he'd been building in his head since arriving. The grain varieties. The pressure differential between the fountain clusters. The spicy condiments. The sound of the corridor at night. The feeling of the assessment instrument doing nothing in his hands. The scratch on the wall. The second list in the cabinet. Dano's music through the wall. The way Haruto had said yeah, I decided on the bus with no conditions attached.
"Most things," he said.
Haruto looked at him. He had the expression of someone who was hearing something and deciding how much to ask about it versus how much to just let sit.
He let it sit.
---
"I'm from the Thraxis border," Haruto said, after a while. "Small settlement. Mining families, mostly. My uncle trained me because he said C-rank talent in the border settlements means you either join the Adventurer Guild or you spend your life underground. So I trained." He pulled one knee up, resting his arm on it. "I never saw a city until I took the transit to Rume for the exam."
King looked at him.
"What did you think?" King asked.
"I thought it was too loud," Haruto said. "And too expensive. And also—" He stopped. He looked at the city below. "Also incredible. Both at the same time. Like something that had no right to be as big as it was." He was quiet for a beat. "I ate five different things from five different street carts the first day because I couldn't decide which one to try and I kept seeing something new. My uncle would've said I wasted money. I don't think I did."
"You didn't," King said.
"No," Haruto agreed.
The city was fully lit now. The lamp posts coming on in sequences, district by district, the warm amber of the mana-lamps spreading outward from the civic center toward the residential edges. From up here you could see the pattern—the way the city lit up was the same shape as the city's design, the streets revealing themselves as lines of light.
"Can I ask you something?" Haruto said.
"Yes," King said.
"The corridor. With Joren and the other two."
King waited.
"You didn't fight them," Haruto said. "You didn't use mana. You just—stood there. And then they were on the ground floor." He looked at King. "What did you do?"
King thought about how to answer this honestly.
"I asked them to leave," he said.
Haruto looked at him. "That's not what—"
"I asked them to leave," King said again. "And they decided to."
Haruto was quiet for a moment. "Joren ran a B-rank pressure push," he said. "I felt it from the stairwell. It was strong. I was bracing and I was ten meters away." He held King's gaze. "You didn't brace."
"No," King said.
"Why not."
King thought about the answer he'd given before: I don't know. He thought about whether that was still the right answer for this conversation.
It was. It was still the honest answer, in the sense that he didn't know how to explain it in terms Haruto could use, and giving an explanation that wasn't fully true was worse than not explaining.
"I genuinely don't know," he said. "It didn't reach me."
Haruto looked at him for a long time.
Then he did the thing he had apparently decided was the right response to things about King he couldn't explain: he nodded, once, and let it go.
"Okay," he said.
King looked at him.
"Okay?" King said.
"Yeah." Haruto shrugged. "I don't understand it. I can see it happened. The not-understanding doesn't change what I saw." He looked at the city. "My uncle used to say that some people are built different and you can either spend all your time trying to figure out why or you can just accept that they are and train twice as hard to keep up." He paused. "He was talking about himself, usually. He never explained his technique to me either."
"Did you figure it out eventually?" King asked.
"Sort of," Haruto said. "Took me two years. But I got there."
"You'll figure this out eventually too," King said.
Haruto looked at him with the specific expression that said he had understood that King was technically telling the truth and also technically not answering the question.
"Yeah," Haruto said. "Probably." He didn't sound bothered. He sounded like someone who had filed the question in the long-term folder and was at peace with that location.
---
The night had fully settled in now. The stars were out properly—the full field of them, the pale streak across the middle of the sky that was the density of the galaxy's center, the individual bright ones that were close enough to see without the rest.
King looked at them.
Hello, he thought, which was not a thing he had ever thought before and was not a thing that made sense given what the stars were—burning things, enormous and distant, entirely indifferent to the presence of a person on a rooftop.
He thought it anyway.
They were his old neighborhood, in a way. Just visible from a very different window.
"We should get food," Haruto said. "Cafeteria second service runs until the ninth bell."
"Yes," King said.
He didn't move immediately.
Haruto didn't either.
They sat there for another few minutes in the particular comfortable silence of people who had somewhere to be and had mutually agreed that it could wait a little longer.
"This is a good spot," Haruto said.
"Yes," King said.
"I'm coming back tomorrow."
"All right," King said.
He looked at the city. He looked at the stars. He looked at the space between them—the dark that wasn't empty, just unlit.
I came here for this, he thought. Exactly this. A rooftop. A city. A person who noticed an empty chair and came to find me.
I didn't know what I was coming for when I chose this place.
I know now.
He got up.
He and Haruto went back down the stairs together, talking about what was left in the second cafeteria service, whether the sweet potato stew ran past the eighth bell, and whether Dano had fixed the heating pipe the way he'd said he would.
The roof door closed behind them.
The stars kept doing what they did.
The city kept its lights on.
---
That night, in her room in the East Wing, Sora Aizawa sat at her desk with the notebook open and the pen still.
She had been at the desk for twenty minutes.
She had written one line.
It read: No. 50—I don't know what this one is yet.
She looked at it.
She had seen King on the roof from the East Wing corridor window—just briefly, just the profile of him sitting on the parapet wall facing west, and the city below, and the sky doing what the sky did at that hour.
She had not gone up.
She had wanted to.
She had not written that down either.
She closed the notebook.
She opened it again.
She wrote, at the bottom of the page, in the smallest handwriting she ever used: He looked comfortable there too.
She closed the notebook.
She did not open it again that night.