The Corporate Son

They announced him like the rest of Seiryoku announced important things: in murmurs that behaved like weather fronts. Where the Senzai crest appeared on a pamphlet, students leaned in. Where a Senzai civic grant put a new lab wing on the map, prefects walked with a certain straighter air. You could see the influence in small gestures—a new charging kiosk that brightened faster than normal, a set of practice swords with cleaner edges in the advanced classroom, a scholarship plaque by the east gate with a name that smelled like money.

Riku Senzai arrived as a weather pattern with sharp shoulders. He didn’t push through the crowd. He stepped into it and the crowd rearranged itself politely, like furniture obeying a new rule. He was not loud. He was not showy. He had an economy of movement that said: I am used to people operating at my level and please, if possible, keep the choreography tidy.

He wore the Academy uniform like someone who’d been given it in a custom size. The fabric had small, tasteful embroideries—Senzai crest worked into the cuff the way some families work their names into silverware. Renji described it later as “tastefully predatory.” That was delightfully accurate. Riku’s hair was neat enough to be geometrically flattering; his eyes were dark, sharp, and almost amused at everything not his.

The first time I saw him properly, it was in Advanced Studies: Mana Theory and Application, the kind of lecture that smelled like chalk and entitlement. The room hummed in that particular way the wards did when a new idea wanted to be processed: a low, reverent buzz.

Riku sat three rows up, alone, notebook closed. He wasn’t walking in to be noticed. He was walking in to be controlled. The professor, a soft-spoken woman rumored to have written a sad number of treatises on focused mana conduits, began the lesson on transient discharges. He listened like a man taking measurements of a routine he intended to edit.

After the basic recitation of principles—what arc wanted, how a conductor misbehaved, how wards tolerated and did not forgive—the floor opened to students’ demonstrations. First-years were not usually invited to demo in that class, but Riku raised his hand with the polite audacity of someone who expects exceptions. The professor, with academic politeness that doubles as a bribe to arrogance, allowed it.

He stood, walked to the demonstration tile, and extended his hand.

It was casual. The way he shaped the coil of light around his palm was like watching someone wind a watch; small gestures, precise muscle memory—no flares, no vagaries. A fine filament of lightning answered. It arced, fragile and cruel. It ran across the demo tile in a controlled skate, left a thin glitter of scorched rune, and blinked out like a lesson concluded.

A small silence followed. Not awe exactly—something tighter, a recalibration. Riku smiled, and it was the smile of someone congratulating you for doing the math you should already know.

“You see?” he said, without elevating a voice. “Mana isn’t about spectacle. It’s infrastructure. Discipline. Control.”

He looked at the class with the watery amusement of a man who’d spent his first ten years surrounded by private tutors and second ten years surrounded by people he liked to grade. Some people clapped—curiosity, nervous admiration, the kind of applause you give someone when their family owns half the stadium.

Then he turned in my direction like a compass finding an iron seam.

“You did well,” he added, and the tone shifted in a way I had learned to detect: not praise but evaluation. “For someone who wasn’t born with it.”

His words were a scalpel disguised as a compliment.

I had been careful with my face. Careful was not the same as invisible. People had noticed me because of the duel; now Riku chose to notice me. That was different. Noticing from someone who had leverage feels like being weighed, and the scale always read slightly lower when you weren’t in their ledger.

A boy beside me snorted; a group in the back made a series of low bets about what would happen next. I kept my jaw even and my shoulders steady. Kaien’s voice hovered in the back of my head: Feet, not fear. Feel. Choose.

Riku’s smile turned razor-thin. “You surprised us, Kuroganezu. Quite resourceful to make a gun behave like a spell.” He said the last part like an afterthought—dismissive, a slight nod at the novelty. “But remember: fire is loud. Lightning is quiet and it keeps the receipts.”

He flicked his wrist and the filament returned to his palm like a pet. Students giggled in a complicated way—part nervousness, part the nervous laughter of people who watch a storm from behind glass. That was the moment he became less of a rumor and more of a standard: a yardstick measured against me.

After class, word braided itself through the corridors with an efficiency that would have impressed any logistics firm. Riku had demonstrated a contact-grade lightning pattern. He had, apparently, done it with the kind of control that made the professor smile thinly and undo ten years of complacency in her personal ledger.

Rumors about his family’s reach flowed like background data. “Senzai Industries,” someone said in the cafeteria like reading an incantation. “They sponsor the lab wing.” “They fund the wards near the east gate.” “People say they do private research with mana synthesis.” The darker whispers—that maybe the corporation did things in laboratories beneath permitted visibility, that they had called mana into arrangements the ethical books had not yet outlined—settled in the air like smoke that might mean a building had burned elsewhere.

You notice these things as a kind of static if you listen hard in Seiryoku. It’s hard to separate genuine danger from the kind of rumor that grows teeth simply because someone powerful likes the cut of their own shadow. In my head I filed each whisper: interesting, possibly harmful, requires context. Riku’s demonstration made the whispers louder. People put bets on him the way they put bets on fireworks.

After the bell, Renji barreled into me, cheeks flushed with equal parts caffeine and mischief. “He’s good,” Renji said, like he’d been reassigned to be the official evaluator of arrogant boys. “Sleek, trimmed edges. He’s the kind of villain whose hair is aligned.”

“He is not a villain,” I said. “He’s a very well-funded, slightly dangerous man-child.”

“Food taxonomy,” Renji said, satisfied with the metaphor. “He smells expensive.” He kept talking—because Renji talks like a river in flood—about engineering angles for the Mark One to avoid becoming a target for people who liked sparking things in rooms full of other people.

Kenji, always more comfortable as margin than center, added practical calculus. “If Senzai funds a wing, they may have influence on equipment procurement. If they authorize research, they may have access to certain materials excluded from general student stock. That means two things: a) they can do things other students can’t, and b) they’re under more scrutiny. Both bad and good.”

Hana’s hand found mine in the cafeteria; she gripped my sleeve just a little and then let go, as if testing if familiar territory still fit. “Don’t let them write the story for you,” she said softly. “We’ll help.”

The phrase landed like a buoy. That was my team.

There was a particular kind of humiliation Riku preferred: it wasn’t loud cruelty. It was the effortless kind that made you aware of the social ledger. I found myself walking home under the crush of small, measured looks. Rumor pressure was a new kind of weather—one that seeped into tests, into the way instructors chose examples, into the whispers before a duel pairing was announced.

I let it sit and then I trained.

Kaien saw me after supper, not with the lecture-of-old but with a program that measured my feet like a script. We worked the small things he’d been drilling in me—balance, micro-steps, knee-weighting, turning on the ball of the foot. If I’d needed a translation, he gave me the word: speed was a decision economy. You don’t move fast because of legs alone; you move fast because you have fewer things to reconsider.

“Riku’s lightning,” he said bluntly one dusk when the training yard’s runes had cooled just enough for the air to stop sweating. “Doesn’t change the drill. You want to stay unseen by his rhythm. Walk into a different song.”

“How do I write a song if I never get to the chorus?” I asked, breath stuttering from a set of pivots.

“You make the chorus yourself,” he said, which could have been a line in a self-help pamphlet if Kaien had sold those. Instead he added something practical. “Train choices until they are a muscle.”

He made me do drills where I had to pick the wrong step on purpose, then the right one. He made me unlearn rhythm so I could invent style. Sometimes it felt like erasing parts of the map so a new route could appear. Sometimes my legs wanted to obey yesterday’s muscle memory; sometimes they refused, and Kaien used the refusal to make me step into a different pattern.

Between sets, Renji would appear with diagrams and improvised contraptions. He made a small ankle-buzzer that would vibrate if my foot hit the wrong line—humiliation repurposed as feedback. Kenji annotated my movement with numbers I didn’t always understand but trusted because he delivered them like prayers that could be obeyed.

Hana hovered at our edge with bandages and snacks. After a particularly sharp set where my calves screamed at me in language I hadn’t agreed to, I slipped and tasted dust. The sting reddened my knuckles. She came immediately, not with performance critiques, but with quiet. She sat beside me on the bench and hummed with that shy, secret chord that had started to be useful in the workshop.

Her humming was gentler up close like a hand smoothing cloth. It did something small and concrete: the pulse of pain in my skin receded by a fractional degree and my breathing found a place to be steady. I watched the way it made the tiny capillaries relax as if a calm could be taught. No one else in our group seemed to notice the mechanics; to everyone else it was her being thoughtful. To me, it was a hand in the dark I was slowly learning to trust.

“You’re getting faster,” Kaien said later as we did cool-down laps. “Not enough, not yet. But you are on the border of it. Speed without habit breaks. Habit without meaning is a trap.”

“Feet,” I said, because the phrase felt like a clean tool now. “Not fear.”

He smiled with his mouth and not with his eyes—approval that was not a surrender. “Good. Keep it.”

The next week the Academy hummed louder with small politics. Rumors about Senzai’s philanthropic reach thickened into a kind of static that made students nervous around some of the labs. Some professors stiffened when Senzai donations were discussed at faculty dinners. Other professors accepted it as part of the trade-off in a world where good funding buys better books and the occasional moral discomfort.

We kept our heads down and our notebooks open. Mark One lived in the workshop with a new respect as the cylinder’s rawness had matured into a story we could tell without embarrassment. We refined detents, filed the bayonet’s dovetail, and practiced dry cycling until moving the cylinder felt like stroking a calm animal.

But sometimes, when the night got thin and I found myself alone in the dorm, I thought about Riku. He was more than an opponent. He was a representative of a world where the rules bent easier for the wealthy, where laboratories could slip into ethical shadows with a grant stamp as cover. There was a small, sour stone in my chest that named it: it wasn’t enough to be good at something if the world’s loudest players could buy the map that told you where to play.

Maybe that was inevitable. Maybe not. That was a kind of math I could learn.

“What do they want?” I asked Hana one night. We sat on the rooftop where the city grid looked less like a list of rules and more like a playground with lights.

“Power?” she guessed, softly. “Control?” She shrugged, which for Hana is an elegant admission that some things are more complex than her small brave heart wanted to admit.

“Everything,” I said.

She hummed then, a shape that sounded like a promise and a worry. “We’ll help,” she said again. “We all will.”

Her words were steady as solder. They stuck.

I went to bed with the phrase “feet, not fear” in my head and the shape of Riku’s smile at the edge of my thoughts. The Academy had more eyes now. Some looked with curiosity. Some with admiration. Some with a predatory patience that made me keep my tools close and my choices closer.

Tomorrow, Kaien would make me run drills until my feet memorized the decision I needed before I felt it. Renji and Kenji would keep filing edges from Mark One. Hana would hum. Ayaka would look for reasons to annoy me and maybe, if she liked my answer well enough, offer corrections that burned polite and true.

Riku would keep watching from his clean angle. That was a fact, a new weather, not a prophecy.

And I would step. Every time, I would take the step where the story told me not to—and see if the world adjusted.