Mio steps out of a quaint little shophouse in the eastern quarter’s outer city, early in the morning. A bookstore, by the looks of things. A rather dull “Ittekimasu…” drops flat out of her mouth as she closes the door behind her.

Soon she’s at the nearest station to the levitating train, swiping her Link to get in. The White Line, as usual, heading further into the city. Among those waiting are several other students with her uniform, chattering on about this-and-that. Nothing particularly important. What had Mio been expecting to hear? Furthermore, what is this sinking in her stomach? But there’s no time to dwell on that. “Excuse me?”

Mio comes out of her head as one of the girls taps her shoulder. “Eh?” Oh. The train’s here. And there Mio stands, at the front of the line to get on. “Um… Sorry…” And on she walks, taking up a seat in a corner, away from anyone else.

The line leads directly to the campus. East Lumos Academy - the premier senior high school of Beacon’s East District, complete with sleek, polished architecture and state-of-the-art amenities. Custodian drones see to it that the grounds remain spotless. That much is evident from the completely pristine halls that, just yesterday, were torn asunder by such a brutal exchange.

Mio stops by her shoe cupboard in the entryway to the school’s First Year building and all of that flies from her mind. Sitting there, atop her school shoes, is a familiar orange scarf, joined with an envelope. One addressed to Mio from… well… one guess. “Jun-kun?” the girl says, taking the envelope with a look of dull surprise across her face. All she does is stare at it. She stares at it for so long that the early morning rush begins to trickle, and eventually flood through the doors. Hurried, Mio takes the scarf and envelope, shoving them both into her bag and leaving after changing her shoes.

All the way to homeroom, Mio’s eyes bounce from one cluster of students to another. All of them talking amongst themselves, some in hushed tones. It all passes by too quickly to make out entirely. But she can make out a few words from one conversation to the next. Royale. Esper. Battle. And as she reaches her classroom’s rear door, she hits upon a discovery. This feeling’s gotten worse. Like her stomach is trying to hold up a two-ton weight. She makes it inside eventually, quietly getting to her seat in the back. Like clockwork, the sketchpad comes out.

It’s not long before class begins… and the whispers with them. The vacant seat in the room, the absent voice among the crowd, the name skipped during attendance - a name soon on the lips and under the breath of several students throughout the room. Mio keeps her head down, staring at the scarf in her bag and feeling herself shrinking under the weight of all this quiet noise. That is until things abruptly become that much louder. And somehow that much lighter.

“Seeen-sei.” A chair screeches back across the floor and up pops Kou, that boyish, flamboyant voice of his carrying over the entire class. “I have something I’d like to say.”

At the front of the room, Ms. Kelly sighs, tipping down her head. Every instinct tells her not to acknowledge him. But through a grimace and twitching eyebrow, she addresses him all the same. “What is it this time, Matsuda?”

Kou grins, bearing those pearly whites and large canines of his, holding up a paper marked up with red. Bringing a fist over his mouth, he clears his throat. Ooh. This one’s going to be important. “Dear classmates. Fellow students of this fine establishment and citizens of Beacon. I ask you this. Is our great city not one of higher learning? A place for us, as individuals, to seek further knowledge and explore our limits as individuals? I say to you, it is! But it’s also a place of brotherly love, yes?”

All around are a myriad of reactions to Kou’s… monologue. Though the majority of them seem to feature the rolling of eyes as he carries on… and on… and further on. Indeed, at the front of the room, Ms. Kelly buries her face in her hand, seeming like she very well may snap her tablet in half with the other. But then there’s Mio, who just… stares. Unsure of what to think. From the center of the room it’s not like he wouldn’t have heard those whispers, himself. Yet he’s still in his usual form? He is. And he continues. “What a tragedy it would be for us to let any of our brothers and sisters get left behind. So I submit to you, the class, a proposition! That we delay the forthcoming quiz in honor of those of us who’ve not been able to study! It is our civic responsibility, after all, to ensure that none of our neighbors are left trampled underfoot by a disparity in opportuni-TY!”

Kou nearly does a flip over the back of his seat. Instead, he lands perfectly in it and slumped back, his forehead practically letting off steam from some sort of impact. Then a stick of chalk lands on the floor in the back of the room. And there it becomes clear what’d just happened. Kelly stands at the front with an arm outstretched. That stick of chalk had flown through the air with the force of a bullet and the accuracy to match, leaving a perfect white dot dead center on Kou’s noggin. She glowers at her outspoken student, brow still twitching, a contemptuous “Sit. Down,” hissing through her teeth.

Kou pulls himself into an upright position, sitting cross-legged in his chair and rubbing the back of his head. “H-hai…” Though he then gives Reggie the side-eye. “Oi. Why didn’t you back me up?” he whispers.

Reggie sits tall and folds his arms. “Fool! I don’t need your handicap! Passing a mere test is nothing to me! My evil eye can see all of the answers perfectly!”

“Heeeh?”

A blunt “Matsuda. Reggie,” from the front of the room pulls all attention forward. Kelly flicks her wrist, revealing more sticks of chalk positioned between her fingers. The two idiots straighten up real quick and the teacher stows her projectiles of choice away. “Hmph. If you’d put as much work into your studies as you do into figuring out how to get out of studying, you’d be a top student… All right.” Then it’s back to business, Kelly snaps her fingers and every student’s desktop surface converts into a touchscreen, on which are a number of questions and a digital keyboard. “Heads forward, Links silent. This will be a review of your summer work.” Mio looks over her desktop for the quiz, but… can’t stop herself glancing up at the back of Kou’s head, then down at the scarf in her bag. But now isn’t the time for that. The Quiz. Now the quiz. Everything else could wait.

---

Finally. Lunch. The afternoon bell chimes throughout the campus. The day now half over, Mio stares at her sketchpad. Blank. Not so much as a single line has made its way onto the paper. Perhaps some food would get her thinking straight. But first, she’d best wash her hands. Up she gets. In the restroom, she winds up staring into the mirror. The quiz, earlier… it’d gone by almost without her noticing. What even were the questions? What answers had she marked down? Where had her mind even been?

Mio steps out, making her way back to homeroom for lunch period. She gets all of five steps away from the restroom door, throwing her bag over her shoulder when “Morioka-chan!” That voice. That upbeat, sing-song, effeminate voice halts Mio like she’d just stepped in quick cement. Kou leans against the wall, one hand up to wave with a big grin across his face. “Yo!”

Reggie stands to Kou’s left flank, his arms crossed and his school blazer hung on his shoulders. “I told you we’d find her,” he declares with a smug chuckle. “Never doubt my awesome power.”

Kou dismissively pats his buddy on the shoulder. “Sure, sure…”

Meekly, Mio raises her own hand. “Matsuda-san.”

Kou kicks himself off of the wall, strolling over to her. “Kou-chan, Kou-chan,” he says giving the girl a light high-five that she was, in no way, expecting. “I wanted to say sorry about yesterday.” That one word - yesterday - reaches out, wringing Mio’s stomach like a cloth. But… why is Kou apologizing? He scratches his cheek with one of those mint-green polished nails of his, still not putting away that wide grin. “I didn’t mean to hit’cha with that airplane, ya know? Hope I didn’t hurt’cha or anything.”

Mio stares. That had happened, hadn’t it? But she shakes her head, still looking to the floor, as is habit for the girl, by now. “It didn’t hurt. Don’t worry about it.”

But even then, Kou bends down, putting himself directly into Mio’s field of view. “Well, that’s good! Just wanted to check on ya!”

Mio turns her eyes away. “Is your forehead okay?” No answer. When she looks back, he’s still there, looking her dead in the eyes with a catlike grin. Such a persistent boy. “K-Kou-chan?” That did it. An adjustment that widens his toothy smile as he stands back upright.

“Yep! Totally fine! A little something like that isn’t gonna keep me down! Ahahaha!”

Reggie stands proud, his hands on his hips and flaring his jacket behind him like a cape with his head held high. “Right! We’re used to that kind of thing by now! Such meager attacks have no effect on us!”

“Hey, when you say it like that, it makes us sound pretty cool.”

That’s… certainly one way to put it. Regardless, not wanting this to go on any longer, Mio steps around Kou and proceeds on her way back to homeroom. “I’m glad. Excuse me. I’m pretty hungry.”

But just when she’s a few steps away, something roots her to the floor. “Did you have a fun date with Jun-kun, Morioka-chan?”

Why that question? Worse yet, why from these people, in particular? How does she answer? “We didn’t…” The words die in her lungs. And those lungs tighten, strangling any chance of her ever finishing the thought.

Reggie’s mighty stance crumbles, that statement like a jackhammer taken to his knees, and he balks. “Hah?! Impossible! I already foresaw the two of you hitting it off! My Evil Eye was… wrong?! No. No no no no no. That can’t be it. Perhaps the timing was merely off.” He rushes to Mio and takes hold of her by the shoulders. Unsurprisingly, such proximity takes the girl aback and all she can do is blink at him. “Quickly! You must tell us where he is so we can set right the course of- OUWCH!”

He’d moved so quietly. But there Kou appears at Reggie’s side, gripping and twisting the boy’s ear with a look not unlike a child experimenting with a new toy. “Hey, now I see why Jun-kun kept using this method with us! It’s fun!” Indeed, these certainly are the infamous Two Idiots… two. Kou rubs his neck, turning his head away with a faint pout. “Sorry, about all this. Ya don’t have to tell us how it went if ya don’t wanna. We really didn’t mean to stress ya out or anythin’. We were just worried about Jun-kun since he’s never even late, let alone skips a day.” Mio stands in silence. That same truth-telling quiet as before lingers around her. These people are Jun’s friends. What else could she tell them? Right then, her body loosens. She feels her lungs opening back up. Kou throws his arm over Reggie’s shoulder and waves again with his free hand. “Nevermind. We’ll let’cha get back for lunch.”

“I never got to give him my answer…”

Everything falls still. The outside world seems to fade away. Even through the large hall windows, it’s as if the only thing beyond the glass is a blinding, ethereal light, snaring the teens and leaving them alone, just the three of them, in an endless white void. Kou and Reggie both stop with their backs to the girl, their last steps echoing loud and clear in that vacant hall. Reggie fights his way out from under Kou’s arm and rushes back to Mio with an eager look about him that says it all. Kou, on the other hand, remains front-facing. “This is perfect!” The hopeless chuunibyou declares. Yeah. That eager glint in his eye makes it apparent. He doesn’t get it. Not at all. “Then there’s still a chance! We just have to find him and get you two talking!”

A sharp “Reggie,” whips through the air from, of all people, Kou. That boyish tone, that flamboyant cadence, both completely absent.

There Reggie’s entire demeanor drops. The bravado drains from his person, and it isn’t content to leave on its own, taking his strength with it. He stumbles forward, one hand weakly reaching to Mio’s shoulder. But this look on his face is entirely removed from that confidence for which he’s so infamous. It’s the same as back then, with Jun. Too many emotions to read at once. Sadness, confusion, desperation. Though only one word appropriately fits that murky haze that clouds his eyes. Lost. “Morioka. There’s… still a chance. Right?”