— Day nine. Morning. Various locations.
King Found the Kazuki Sakurai Problem by Accident
He had not been looking for Kazuki Sakurai. He had been looking for the second-floor eastward staircase that connected to the advanced track lecture wing, because Haruto had mentioned the previous evening that the advanced combat theory class ran out of that wing at the ninth bell and he wanted to watch the tail end of the practical demonstration period that followed.
Why Haruto wanted to watch was a straightforward answer: Kazuki Sakurai was in the advanced class, and Haruto had a complicated relationship with the concept of people who were better at something than him, which expressed itself as wanting to watch them closely and understand exactly how they were better so he could close the gap.
"He's EX-rank candidate," Haruto had said, at dinner. "Supreme Talent. Sovereign Domain. The only first-year in the advanced track. He was moved up in the first week."
"I know about him," Riku had said.
"Everyone knows about him," Aki had said.
"I know about him too," King had said.
Haruto had looked at him. "How do you know about him? You don't talk to anyone outside our group."
"I read the placement board," King said. "His classification is listed."
"That's—" Haruto pointed his fork. "That's not knowing about him. That's knowing his rank. There's a difference."
"What's the difference," King said.
"Knowing about someone means you understand what they can do. What they're actually like." Haruto put his fork down with the energy of someone making a point through cutlery placement. "Kazuki Sakurai is seventeen, Rume upper tier, Sakurai Ducal House. He doesn't talk to people below A-rank unless he has to. He's trained since he was six years old. He beat a B-rank combat instructor in a supervised spar in the third week of the term and apparently the instructor needed to sit down after." He looked at King. "That's knowing about him."
"That's thorough," King said.
"I pay attention," Haruto said, with the dignity of someone whose primary information-gathering method was listening very carefully to every conversation within earshot. "Anyway. I want to watch the demonstration period tomorrow. You're coming."
"All right," King had said.
---
So now he was looking for the second-floor eastward staircase, which he had failed to locate because Riku's campus map—the one drawn from satellite imagery before enrollment—had the second-floor east wing labeled correctly but had not noted that one of the connecting corridors was currently blocked for maintenance and you had to go around.
He went around.
He turned a corner.
He found the staircase.
He also found Kazuki Sakurai, who was walking down it.
Kazuki Sakurai in person was—contained, was the word that came to King's mind. Not cold exactly. Precise. The way a very well-calibrated instrument was precise—nothing wasted, nothing imprecise, every element of how he moved and held himself was at exactly the right setting for the situation.
He was taller than King had expected from the placement board description, with dark hair and the particular stillness of someone who had spent years training himself not to react to things until he'd decided what reaction was appropriate.
He was looking at something in his hand—a small folded note, the kind that Academy administrative notices came on—and he came down the staircase reading it, his gaze tracking up at exactly the moment he reached the bottom step and the corridor opened in front of him.
He looked at King.
King looked at him.
For approximately two seconds, neither of them said anything. It was not a hostile silence. It was the silence of two people who had each just entered a space and were reading it before deciding what to do with it.
Kazuki's eyes moved—fast, almost clinical—to King's insignia. F-rank. Unknown Variable. His expression didn't change exactly, but King noticed the small precise thing that happened in the set of his jaw—the micro-motion of someone who had encountered a data point that didn't immediately resolve.
He knows who I am, King thought. The Pillar incident is well-documented. The placement board lists me. He's heard about the Daiki corridor.
Kazuki looked at King's face.
King looked back.
"Von Deluxh," Kazuki said. He said the name the way you said a term you'd read in a document and were now using for the first time in speech—correct, precise, like checking that the pronunciation matched the written form.
"Yes," King said.
Kazuki looked at him for one more beat. Then he folded the note he'd been reading and put it in his inner pocket, and walked past King down the corridor without another word.
Not rudely. Not with deliberate dismissal. He simply walked past, because he had somewhere to be and the conversation, such as it was, had concluded.
King watched him go.
Interesting, he thought—about the quality of Kazuki's attention more than anything else. It hadn't been the dismissive scan of someone who saw an F-rank and filed it as irrelevant. It had been something more careful than that. The look of someone who had heard a report and was now comparing the report against the reality and finding, in some small specific way, that the report was insufficient.
He's going to keep thinking about this, King thought.
So is he, he thought, meaning Kazuki.
---
He found the staircase viewing position.
Haruto was already there. He had brought Aki, who had brought her green notebook for reasons that apparently extended to watching other people's combat demonstrations. Riku had positioned himself at the railing with the focused attention of someone conducting a structural analysis.
"You're late," Haruto said.
"I had to go around the maintenance section," King said.
"Did you see Kazuki?"
"Briefly," King said. "In the stairwell."
Haruto turned to look at him fully. "Did he say anything?"
"My name," King said.
"That's it?"
"Yes."
Haruto absorbed this. "He said your name and walked away."
"Yes."
"And?"
"And nothing," King said. "He walked away."
Haruto looked at the demonstration floor below—Kazuki was down there now, three positions from the front of the advanced group, standing with the contained ease of someone waiting for something they'd already decided they were going to do well. "He never says anyone's name," Haruto said. "He doesn't introduce himself. He doesn't acknowledge first-years." He looked at King. "He said your name."
King looked at the demonstration floor.
"He was checking pronunciation," King said.
"That's not—" Haruto made a sound. "That's not a normal thing to check someone's name for."
"Maybe not," King said.
Below, the demonstration period began.
---
The reports arrived on Roland Knight's desk in three separate deliveries.
The first came at the seventh bell—from the administrative office, the standard morning compilation. He read through the week's incident summaries while his tea cooled on the corner of the desk. He read them every morning in the same order: safety incidents first, academic irregularities second, disciplinary flags third, and everything else last.
He reached the disciplinary flags.
There was one from yesterday: East corridor, between library and lecture building. Report filed by corridor monitor Adjunct Bennet. A-rank student Daiki Fujimoto, Fujimoto noble house, engaged in passive Sovereign Pressure deployment against two F-rank students in the east corridor. No physical contact. Incident concluded without escalation. No injuries. One of the two F-rank students, identified as King Von Deluxh, enrollment file #4-12-0091-UV, reportedly walked through the active field and continued to the library. Fujimoto left the corridor via the west passage approximately three minutes after Von Deluxh's departure. Attached: corridor monitor's personal observation note.
Roland put down his tea.
He picked up the attached observation note. Corridor monitor Bennet—a second-year on hall duty, not prone to dramatization—had written it in the spare format the job trained you into: Sovereign Pressure was active and at significant output. The F-rank Unknown Variable showed no visible response. He asked Fujimoto if there was supposed to be wind. I am including this because I believe it is relevant to the record.
Roland read he asked Fujimoto if there was supposed to be wind twice.
He set both documents in the separate file he'd started for King—the physical one, separate from the digital administrative record. The one he kept on his own desk rather than in the central filing system.
He picked up his tea. It had gone cold. He put it down.
He got up and poured a second cup from the pot on the side table.
He came back to the desk.
He opened the file.
---
The file was nine days old and already substantial.
The Evaluation Pillar incident report—Arakawa's careful, sequential account, including the note about the shoe check and the fragment that had vibrated for the rest of the day. Roland had read this four times. He read it again now.
The pillar attempted to render a classification. It was not able to. The resulting event cannot be attributed to any mechanism in the current assessment framework.
He turned the page.
Administrator Hane's holding request—the Labor Class assignment suspension pending Academy review, with the note about the Registry system crashing twice during manual override processing. The intake office's own records: the small crystal instrument that had produced nothing in King's hands and his own rank classification the moment Roland had held it himself. His own intake interview notes, written that afternoon: Said he wanted to attend classes and try the bread. Meant it. The crystal produced no output. No output. Not zero—no output.
He had underlined no output that day. He left the underlining.
The Welcome Purge report: three second-year students found on the ground floor of the North Wing with no memory of how they'd gotten there, approximately four minutes after a corridor confrontation on the sixth floor. The second-year lead—Joren—had filed no formal report. This was in Roland's file because the dormitory monitor had noticed the three of them sitting in the ground-floor corridor at the seventh bell looking disoriented and had logged it as a welfare check. When asked how they'd gotten there, all three had said they didn't remember.
They don't remember walking down three flights of stairs, Roland thought, reading it again.
Three flights.
He turned the page.
The placement test assessor's note—the unofficial one, written in the margin of the formal assessment record and flagged to his desk by Johnson, who had apparently flagged it within the hour of the assessment being completed: Numbers correct. Technique unrecognizable. No mana output signature detected on any of the three strikes. Output consistent with C-rank baseline. Method unknown. See personal notes, attached.
Johnson's personal notes were methodical and deeply unhappy. He had written, in the clean professional script of someone who had been keeping combat training records for thirty years: I have assessed the technique of approximately four thousand students in this role. I have never encountered this specific combination. Strike force in the expected range. Strike precision above average. Zero mana involvement. The force has to come from somewhere. I cannot locate the source. Filing for continued observation.
Roland had read this one twice. He read it again now.
The force has to come from somewhere.
Yes, Roland thought. It did.
The east corridor incident. The Sovereign Pressure field. Wind.
He sat back in his chair.
He looked out the window.
The Academy's inner courtyard was visible from here—the training groups running their morning rotations, the sound of impact drills carrying faintly up through the glass. Normal. Organized. The institution running the way it was supposed to run.
Nine days, Roland thought. The student had been here nine days.
In nine days, the following had happened, all documented, all filed, all pointing at the same specific object from different angles:
· The three-hundred-year evaluation pillar had shattered into a question mark.
· The Registry system had crashed twice.
· An F-rank student had walked through B-rank Sovereign Pressure at sixty percent output and asked if there was supposed to be wind.
· Three second-year students had ended up on the ground floor with no memory of transit.
· A placement assessment had produced average numbers via an unidentifiable method.
· A forty-year veteran combat instructor had written the force has to come from somewhere in his personal file.
· A first-year student with Unique Talent and Stillwind affinity had started keeping what appeared to be a detailed observational record that she had brought to the library daily for a week.
· And somewhere in the F-rank dormitory block—this one Roland had learned from the groundskeeping office's weekly check, which had noted with visible confusion that eleven outstanding maintenance items had been completed by unknown persons—the corridor was quietly being repaired by its own residents.
He looked at all of it.
He picked up his pen.
He turned to the last page of the file—the personal notes page, the one he kept separate from the official record. He'd written on it once, on the day of the intake interview. He looked at what he'd written.
Von Deluxh, King. F-Rank (Unknown Variable). Enrolled.
The crystal produced no answer. No output. No failure. Nothing.
He said "there is a difference" when I noted that distinction. He was correct. He did not seem surprised that I noticed.
He looked at this for a moment.
He added below it, in the careful hand of someone writing something they intended to mean:
Nine days. Documented incidents: seven. Pattern: each incident involves a standard measurement or force-application system making contact with Von Deluxh and producing either no result, an impossible result, or a result that the observing professional cannot account for within their existing framework.
The systems are not malfunctioning. Arakawa is correct. Johnson is correct. Malfunctions produce wrong answers. These produce no answer, or they produce correct answers by unknown method.
The student is cooperative, polite, and apparently sincere. He fixed the dormitory window latch on his first evening. He is helping other F-block residents repair the corridor.
He stopped.
He looked at that last line.
He looked out the window again.
Then he looked back at the page and wrote, at the bottom, in slightly larger letters than the rest:
Worth watching.
He underlined it.
He looked at it.
He underlined it again.
He closed the file.
He picked up his tea.
It was still warm this time.
He drank it and looked out the window at the inner courtyard—the training groups, the morning rotation, the normal working institution—and thought about a first-year student who had fixed a broken latch on his first evening and asked a bully if there was supposed to be wind, and who had, in nine days, produced more paperwork for his personal files than the previous decade of enrollment combined.
Worth watching, he thought.
He was already watching.
---
At that same hour, in the advanced track lecture wing on the second floor east, Kazuki Sakurai was standing at the practice board after the demonstration period, reviewing his own notes.
He had a system for his notes. Everything organized, everything ranked, everything prioritized by relevance.
He turned to the page he'd started the previous evening, after the Daiki corridor report had circulated through the noble house communication network.
At the top of the page: Von Deluxh, King. F-Rank (Unknown Variable).
Below that, in his neat compact script, three bullet points from what he'd been able to verify independently:
— Evaluation Pillar incident. Crystal destroyed. Classification unreadable.
— Welcome Purge. Three second-years found disoriented on ground floor.
— East corridor. Sovereign Pressure, 60% output. No visible response.
He looked at the three points.
He added a fourth, from this morning's stairwell:
— Stairwell encounter. He looked at me the same way he looked at the corridor. No adjustment. No classification response.
He looked at that last line.
He wasn't sure what it meant.
He didn't know what it was about a thirty-second stairwell non-conversation that had produced enough of an impression to put it in the notes.
He wrote beneath the fourth point, after a long pause:
What are you?
He looked at it.
He crossed it out.
He wrote it again.
He left it this time.