Kenji Maburo lay on the floor, chest heaving. Blood flecked the corner of his mouth; sweat matted his hair to his temple. The cold of the arena floor seared the sweat on his cheek into salt. He could feel the throb from his ribs where Renji’s boot had landed, but his mind buzzed louder — in static, in equations, in the small, stubborn smile that had planted itself despite the pain.

Renji Okabe stood a few feet away, breathing hard, hood fallen back. The expression that had been an implacable program a minute ago was something else now: a flicker of disbelief, then something softer — respect, the faint shape of curiosity. He had seen his calculations collapse; he had felt the unexpected force of something messy and human. It had unsettled him in a way numbers never did.

Around them, the arena came to life. Voices rose, overlapping: cheers, incredulous laughter, stunned whispers. Clips from the fight replayed on the giant screen; slow motion took Renji’s strike and Kenji’s roll and stretched them into impossible, intimate detail. Comments ricocheted through the stands like pebbles across still water.

“Did you see that counter? He actually—” someone began, then stopped, mouth open.

Class D, who had just watched one of their own nearly get crushed, were noisy in an entirely different register now. A tremulous, newly-ignited hope threaded through fear.

“That was…not what I expected,” Reiko breathed, elbowing her seatmate until she cackled.

Across the tiers, Class C students traded looks. The smug certainty that had attended the first match wavered; a fissure of doubt appeared along their polished composure.

Mikado Jun watched all of it like a man who had just uncovered a faint pattern in static. He folded his arms, eyes narrowed. He had expected a quick, textbook victory. Instead, the room had been given an irregularity, an input that didn’t read cleanly on any of his charts. That unsettled him — not because it endangered the order, but because anomalies were interesting.

Reika lips pressed into a thin line. She had come to expect the cruelty of the system; she did not necessarily like surprises. Yet her anger from earlier softened into something complicated as she observed Kenji trying to rise. There was pity, but also calculation: if this boy could disrupt a trained opponent’s cadence, what else could he do?

Medical staff slid onto the floor with practiced speed. Their movements were efficient and businesslike; they did not rush with melodrama. One of them checked Kenji’s jaw, another moved to the scoreboard terminals and began tapping out the official update. Class rankings blinked — a tiny wobble, a line on a page that would ripple through dorms and parent meetings and scholarship committees.

High above, in the instructor box, Gota Shindou — the friendly, hungry blonde who’d flirted earlier with the spectacle — sat very still, the grin gone from his face. Whatever fun he had been expecting had turned into focus. He liked spectacle when it confirmed a hierarchy. He liked it less when it hinted at upheaval.

Kaito’s jaw loosened; for the first time that morning amusement gave way to interest that was not purely aesthetic. Rem beside him folded her arms, eyes cold and investigative. If this season of Seiryuu was going to have a crack in the façade, she wanted to catalogue exactly how it formed.

On the arena floor, Kenji’s vision blurred; the roar of the stands became a distant tide. He felt the weight of all those eyes — the expectation, the pity, the hungry curiosity. But beneath that, closer and smaller, was another pressure he’d learned to live under: the memory of a man in a dim living room, eyes gleaming at the word “prize.” He had fought in this ring partly to answer that memory. He had no illusions about the cost.

Then-

He came down from the shadowed rows with the quiet of a man who didn’t need noise to be noticed. Not an instructor, not a provocateur — but a student: Hoshida Akio, the top-ranked scholar, the one who had given the opening address at the ceremony. The school had applauded his words then; now he walked as though the applause were a thing folded away. His uniform was immaculate; his shoes made no sound on the steps.

Hoshida’s face was even — rimless glasses, eyes like dark glass. He paused at the lip of the arena. For a breath he didn’t speak; he didn’t need to. He watched Kenji, watched Renji, watched the drained lines of the two boys and the way the crowd drew breath around them.

Then Hoshida tilted his head almost imperceptibly and, with the mildness of someone making an observation in a laboratory notebook, he said, loud enough for Reika and Mikado to hear : “Interesting.”

It wasn’t praise. It wasn’t dismissal. It was something unimaginable.

Reika’s breath caught in her throat. For a moment, she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her.

But no… it was him.

Mikado seemed just as frozen, his gaze locked on the figure standing a short distance away.

The sunlight caught the edges of his uniform, the immaculate crest of Seiryuu Academy’s highest rank gleaming faintly. His posture was casual, hands buried deep in his pockets, yet there was something unshakable about the way he stood—like even the air around him knew its place.

Hoshida.

The top scholar of Seiryuu Academy.

The one whose name was spoken with a mix of awe and wariness.

And he was here… watching.

Reika’s mind raced.

Why would someone like him attend a junior match?

This wasn’t the kind of fight that would normally interest someone of his caliber. Unless…

Her stomach tightened. The only reason someone of his status would bother showing up was if the higher-ups were paying attention. If that was true, then this match was no longer just a match—it was a test. A quiet evaluation from eyes that decided fates.

Beside her, Mikado’s fists curled slightly. He didn’t say a word, but his jaw tightened, the way it always did when he was trying to mask tension.

Hoshida’s eyes swept lazily across the arena before settling on them—cold, sharp, and unblinking. For an instant, it felt like the weight of the entire academy’s judgment was pressing down on their shoulders.

Mikado’s mouth twitched. “Hoshida,” he said. There was an undercurrent of meaning in his single-name address.

“You filmed that with precision,” Hoshida replied, eyes drifting to the replay on the screen. “Kenji Maburo — unpredictable. Renji Okabe — optimized but wounded by distortion. This year’s batch may be messier than the board expected.”

Reika’s expression hardened. “Messy can breed chaos.”

Hoshida’s smile was small and unreadable.

“Chaos is not the same as uselessness, Yukishiro. In the right hands, chaos becomes a scalpel. It cuts through order… until all that’s left is the truth hidden beneath the flesh of this world.”

The words didn’t feel like they were meant only for Mikado. They slid across the space like cold steel, grazing everyone’s thoughts. His voice carried the stillness of a man who had already weighed every possible outcome and found them all wanting.

His eyes lingered on Reika and Jun, not with open disdain, but with the distant acknowledgement of a predator marking prey — irrelevant today, perhaps necessary tomorrow.

Then, without hurry, Hoshida adjusted his collar and took a single step backward. The shadows seemed to reach for him, curling around his figure as if claiming something that had always belonged to them.

Just before the dark swallowed him entirely, his gaze flicked once more to Mikado. His lips barely moved, the words quiet enough to be mistaken for the rustle of cloth:

“Ask yourself… why the gates were never meant to open.”

Mikado’s breath caught. Whatever the phrase meant, it drained the color from his face, his pupils tightening to pinpricks.

By the time Reika turned to question him, Hoshida was gone — as though he had never truly been there at all, leaving only the slow echo of his voice and the weight of something unspoken pressing down on them.

The scoreboard updated then with an official chirp: Class C: +3 points. Class D: +1 point for Kenji’s resilience. Small numbers. Tiny increments. But in a place measured by percentiles, those increments were leverage.

----

As Kenji was helped to the sideline and Renji retreated to his corner, the arena kept breathing. The fight was over, but the ripples were just beginning.

Somewhere in the stands, someone made a note in a leather-bound planner. Somewhere in an office, someone’s screen pinged with a flagged clip. Somewhere in a dorm, a whisper turned into a vow.

The season had shifted, just a hair. And in Seiryuu Academy, a shift was enough