Rivalries in Motion

The Outcasts Club was supposed to be a workshop. That was the official story — the sign we stuck on the door when prefects came sniffing. In practice it was a messy, warm, stubborn thing: blueprints spilled over snack wrappers, benches freckled with filings and rune dust, and a half-melted resin heart someone had tried to pass off as art. We worked like people who had nothing to lose and everything to invent.

Renji was the loudest organism in that ecosystem. He paced by the bench with a pencil behind his ear and a head full of improbable timelines. “Mark Two will be a revolver proper,” he announced to anyone who would listen, waving a sketch that looked like a spine with dreams. “It’ll be lighter frame, quick-change chamber, triple indexing. We’ll call it—oh, something dramatic. Mark Two, Marker of Destiny—”

“—or a terrible name,” Kenji supplied from across the table, balancing a stack of printouts that read like incantations to anyone who thought math could be a friend. His voice carried the dry precision of someone who loved numbers more than melodrama. “We don’t have crystals for three cycles. None of this is practical yet.”

“We’ll get crystals,” Renji said, eyes glittering. “We’ll charm them out of the vending machines if we have to.”

I set the Mark One frame gently on the bench and traced the edge where Renji had filed away mass. The cylinder’s detent clicked satisfyingly under my thumb; the bayonet mate fit snug where he’d refitted the dovetail. It wasn’t pretty—pretty had never been our priority—but it worked. Function had to come first: the blunt, honest business of making a tool obey simple physics.

“I’m focused on training,” I said. “Footwork, speed. The rest is a future problem.”

Hana was already at my elbow with gauze and a thermos. She shook a finger at me. “You can add future problems when your hands don’t seize up mid-duel,” she scolded, fumbling the bandage with the kind of care only she could give—quick, efficient, and surprisingly exact. Her hum threaded low beneath her breath, a steady vibration that seemed to smooth the edges of the room. To anyone else it was a nervous habit; to me it had become something else — a tiny, practical remedy I carried in my chest.

“Noted,” I said, flexing my bandaged fingers. The burn on my palm ached in that particular way that keeps you honest: raw enough to remind me, dull enough to let me plan. I’d learned to think around the sting.

Ayaka arrived without fanfare, like a sharpened announcement. The door clicked and the room’s energy rearranged. She scanned us with a single, measuring glance: Mark One on the bench, the bayonet’s shadow across the table, Renji’s scatter of parts.

“You’re treating it wrong,” she said, crossing the floor. “That bandage is too tight. It will constrict.” She glanced at Hana’s hands and then back at me as if she’d been tasked with correcting an imperfection the world had allowed to exist.

Hana bristled. “It’s fine. I did it this morning.”

“Not fine for a duel,” Ayaka countered. “Rivals deserve better.”

Her words landed like a hot pebble. I felt two pulls at once — Hana’s quiet competence and Ayaka’s hard-edged attention — both wanting to be the force that steadied me. Renji, never one to miss a chance for theater, seized the opening.

“Command performance,” he declared, leaning forward like a stage actor. “Which of our two caretakers performs better under pressure? Live demonstration. Ten points for charm.”

Both of them glared at him. For one ridiculous second their expressions matched exactly: flustered, indignant, unnecessarily competitive. Renji grinned like a man who’d just lit a firecracker with his bare hands.

Don’t make me regret recommending you, he said, and then promptly backpedaled as the room readied for a showdown nobody had really intended.

Kenji munched the moment like a statistic and scribbled a reductive annotation: Probability of both breaking the law of decorum: high. He was probably right. Their spat folded into the fabric of the room like a new pattern.

Hana finished the bandage with careful fingers and a softer-than-usual hum. For everyone else it was a medical task; for me it was an acknowledgment. Ayaka inspected the wrap like a duel-in-miniature, gave a curt nod, then turned to the Mark One.

“You put the baffle too far forward,” she said. Her tone wasn’t mocking — it was the clipped accuracy of someone who thought in margins and arcs. “You’ll get torque. If you pivot like that in the ring, the muzzle will bite.”

Renji blinked. Kenji made a note. My heartbeat steadied. Ayaka’s criticism had the shape of concern wrapped in bluntness. I’d grown used to it, and more and more it sounded like instruction.

For once, Ayaka and Hana’s interventions became chords rather than competing notes: one told me how to avoid mechanical failure; the other made sure my hands could use the mechanism. It was an odd duet, and I realized with a small, clumsy gratitude that I had two people willing to remap my edge.

If the workshop was where we made things, the dorm parody night was where we broke them again on purpose.

Renji had an excess of energy and a paucity of judgment. He announced—publicly and with too much gesture—that we needed a team-building night. The stated purpose was “strategic misdirection through recreational therapy.” The real purpose was snacks and pratfalls. It drew more people than we’d expected.

We took over the common lounge: Kenji with neat stacks of annotated manuals, Renji with a tray of festive engineering snacks, Hana with thermoses, and me reluctantly lugging a futon because Renji insisted it would lend the whole thing an air of seriousness. Ayaka arrived under the pretense of checking for noise complaints; she stayed because she disliked the idea of letting a ridiculous concept go unchallenged.

One ill-advised game involved mock-rescue drills: Renji insisted it would simulate the “possibility of falling in public,” an exercise he treated as tactically relevant. He tripped me with theatrical carelessness. The resulting heap of limbs, bandages, and startled laughter was exactly as humiliating as you’d expect. Hana turned rosy and sulky and utterly adorable; Ayaka’s face wavered between annoyed and vaguely pleased; Renji preened; Kenji documented the incident with stoic journalistic duty.

It was small and ridiculous and, in the precise way those things can be, healing. I left the pile of embarrassment feeling less like the sum of rumors and more like a person who could be knocked over and helped up again. Humiliating and oddly restorative — the kind of night that rewires people.

Later, when the dorm lamps dimmed and the pigeons outside stopped arguing about streetlights, Hana lingered with a thermos in her hands. She traced the rim with a fingertip, then looked up.

“You’re getting attention,” she said as if naming the weather. “Are you okay with it?”

I thought about how Riku had moved from rumor to measurement; people were lining up in small talk and quiet bets. “I don’t like that people pick a story for me,” I said. “I want to write it.”

She nodded like she understood enough to be dangerous. “Then write. We’ll help.”

She hummed, soft and half-ashamed and utterly earnest, and the vibration around her smoothed the edges of the room. For me, the hum was immediate comfort. I couldn’t explain it aloud, not yet, but it felt like a string anchoring me to the present.

Morning classrooms had a different tone. The spectacle Riku cultivated hadn’t been one-off; it was a pattern. He walked campus like he owned a map. Rumors about Senzai Industries’ donations had taken on a darker gloss over the weeks: private labs, mana synthesis, off-books experiments. People talked about Senzai with mixed admiration and unease, like a law you didn’t want to cross.

In theory class, Riku put on a neat demonstration designed to provoke: a controlled arc of lightning that scarred a spare rune tile and retreated obediently. It was tidy, efficient — the sort of performance that makes a room feel cheaply smaller.

“What you’re doing is show, not philosophy,” he said, eyes finding me the way someone picks a seam in a garment. “You could spend your life building clever toys. Or you could learn to command real energy.”

It was both invitation and insult. The class laughed; some clapped; others leaned forward with the hungry hush of people who like watching power happen.

I stood still and felt humiliation settle on me like an extra layer of clothes: heavy, itchy, and hard to peel off. But humiliation, like heat, is also a vector. It pushes. It guides. I could let it fracture me, or I could use it to sharpen.

After class, he lingered. Riku crossed the walkway with the same tidy stride and stopped near my bench.

“You’re effective in an…adorable way,” he said. “But charm dies fast in a ring with real consequence. Come year-end, don’t be surprised when the real current makes your little engine sputter.”

It was an accusation and a threat. I wanted to answer with a fist or a joke. I said neither.

“You’re not better,” I said quietly. “You’re loud.”

He smiled the sort of smile predators wear when the path is clear. “Noise is a tool,” he said. “And some tools are sharper.”

He left the rumor between us like a promise: Senzai had influence and reach. If I wanted to matter, I’d be contending with a system that could tilt a match with a check and a polite note.

Anger and smallness mixed into a kind of purpose. I turned to find Hana and Kenji waiting. Kenji’s face was a mask of thin patience; Hana’s eyes were wide and steady.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I am,” I said, which was true in degrees. Truth felt like a line of choices; I was cataloguing them fast.

Kaien treated Riku as a map that needed refining. He pushed me with structured cruelty and precise praise until footwork felt like a library of answers. “Riku’s lightning is direct,” he told me in the yard. “It moves along a line, fast and unforgiving. You can’t meet it in its lane. You have to be a lane that appears where it is not.”

He had me train with delayed starts and sudden angle changes, with micro-feints that made attackers commit to rhythm and then rendered that rhythm useless. He pushed the same phrase until it folded into instinct: Feet, not fear.

When drills ended my lungs burned in a way that felt like progress. Renji burst onto the yard, breathless with diagrams and a new baffle prototype, eager to test recoil solutions in motion — because a better Mark isn’t worth much if the hand holding it can’t stand the stress.

“You’re going to be a nuisance,” Renji said, grinning.

“You mean a problematic thing people don’t expect,” Kenji offered.

“Which is the best kind,” Renji answered.

Hana sat beside me on the bench and hummed while checking the bandage. The hum eased the stiffness in my calves; I let myself rest, head bowed and breath even. For a while, I felt less like someone being watched and more like someone practicing.

That evening the Academy posted pairings for the year-end exams. Message boards filled; people clustered, scanning the lists with the concentration of shoppers. The air smelled faintly of ink and adrenaline.

We squeezed forward until I could see the paper. Names printed in thin, official type. The duels were arranged, who would be called to test and who would be examined by crowd and judge.

Temo Kuroganezu — vs. Riku Senzai.

For one dizzy heartbeat, the world narrowed to a bright clarity. The crowd made space for the two names like the city deciding it wanted theater. Riku looked at me over the throng; his smile was calm and predatory.

Whispers rose: Nullborn vs. corporate heir. This will be quick. He doesn’t stand a chance. Maybe he’ll surprise us.

Renji whooped in a way that would have embarrassed anyone who liked dignity. Kenji shut his notebook and, for once, his face softened into something like cautious pride. Hana’s fingers tightened around the thermos until the metal creaked.

Ayaka stepped forward into the clearing the rumor had made and said, not unkindly, “Don’t make me regret calling you my rival.”

My jaw set. There was a heat that had nothing to do with flame or father’s money — the heat of being noticed and deciding what to do with that notice.

I’ll prove this story is mine to write, I told myself, not as bravado but as a map.

People dispersed and the campus hummed with its usual, useful indifference. Attention could notice, but attention couldn’t move feet for me. I would train. I would file metal and muscle and nerve into something that could stand up.

That night, on the rooftop where the city’s lights blinked like patient stars, the Outcasts drew plans in our small democracy of friends. Renji sketched wild diagrams for Mark Two. Kenji annotated odds. Hana hummed. Ayaka sat with us in a way that suggested she was staying for reasons besides duty. There was an uneasy, electric truce.

Riku’s shadow had lengthened into a real problem. The year-end duel was no longer abstract: it was scheduled. It was a place and a time.

I picked up my notebook and, with the careful brushing that turns a line into a plan, wrote three words in the corner of the page I kept for things only I read:

Feet. Not fear.

I closed the book and tucked it under my arm. The city below hummed, indifferent and patient. A week was both a long time to train and a short space for surprising yourself. I intended to use every second.

Tomorrow: more drills, more experiments, more humming, more filing, and the slow work of turning rumor into a story I controlled. Riku might be loud and favored, but weather moves and changes. I had learned one useful truth: you can practice steps that keep you upright when storms come.