Devouring the Demon King's Mana

Chapter 5

Ren was two days late to his own first day.

He stood outside the door of Class 1-A with the enrollment slip crumpled in his fist, listening to the murmur of voices on the other side, and tried to decide whether it would be worse to knock or to walk in. His uniform still smelled of the cloth it had been packed in. The collar was stiff against his neck, the sleeves were slightly too long, and somewhere behind his ribs a voice that had said nothing since the elders' hall was keeping very quiet.

He pushed the door open.

The classroom was bright and tall, with windows running the whole length of one wall and five desks set in a shallow curve facing the board. Each desk had a number carved into its corner. Four of them were already occupied, and the conversation died as every head turned toward him. Daichi Kurogane sat at the second desk with one boot propped on the rung of his chair, and his smile arrived before Ren had finished stepping through the door.

"Well, look at that," Daichi drawled. "Our fourth finally decided to join us. Two days, Hoshino. Did the orphanage lose your bus fare, or did you get lost between the bread line and the gate?"

Mio Tachibana, at the third desk, glanced away. Nobody laughed, but nobody stopped him either. None of them knew where Ren had been. As far as the rest of the class was concerned, the boy who had barely scraped into the top five had simply decided to skip the opening ceremony, and Ren couldn't tell them otherwise.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I had something I had to take care of."

"Something to take care of." Daichi turned to the rest of the room as though inviting them to enjoy the joke. "He's been here for ten seconds, and he's already making excuses. I told you, didn't I? Luck runs out. And now that it's..."

"Kurogane."

The voice came from the first desk, by the window, and it was so calm that it cut through the room without any effort at all. The boy sitting there had not even turned around. He was slouched in his chair with his chin on one hand, watching a cloud drift past the glass, and when he spoke again it was in the same tone he might have used to ask what time it was.

"Keep your mouth shut. Give the guy some room to breathe."

For a moment nobody moved. Ren recognized him now. Itsuki Sakaguchi, number one on the board, the quiet boy nobody had noticed all week.

Daichi's smile vanished. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

"Who exactly do you think you are, giving me orders?" Daichi's boot hit the floor and he stood up, his chair scraping back. "You think because the board put your name above mine you get to sit there and tell me when I can talk?"

"I think it's early, and you're loud."

"I was the fastest clear of the whole day! I finished in under a minute with a single strike. I got an A*. You, I'd never even seen you before the results went up. Nobody had. You didn't turn one head in that arena all week, and now you want to act like first place is yours by right?"

"It's on the board," Itsuki said, and finally turned his head. His eyes were grey and sleepy and completely unbothered. "I didn't write it. Take it up with the examiners."

Daichi's hands curled into fists. The air around him began to prickle, a faint heat that made the hairs on Ren's arms stand up, and the two girls at the third and fifth desks sat up a little straighter. Ren found himself holding his breath. It was obvious that Daichi could not make himself accept it. Every word out of his mouth had the sound of a boy who had never once been told he was second.

"That's enough."

The door at the front of the room slid open, and every head turned again.

The woman who walked in was tall, with long black hair tied low at the back of her neck and a plain grey coat that fell to her knees. She carried a slate under one arm and moved with the unhurried ease of someone who had never needed to raise her voice. She looked once at Daichi, once at Itsuki, and once at Ren standing frozen in the doorway, and Daichi sat down so quickly that his chair banged against the floor.

"Take your seat, Hoshino," she said. "Fourth desk. I'm Yamabuki, and I'll be your homeroom teacher for the year. I was told you would be late. I don't need the reason."

Ren crossed the room with his face burning and slid into the fourth desk. It was scratched along one edge, and someone had left a dried flower pressed into the groove where the inkwell sat. He didn't dare look up until Yamabuki had set her slate on the teacher's desk and turned to face them.

"Now that we're all here, let me explain how things work, since you've missed the opening and I don't intend to repeat myself." She lifted a small grey stone from her pocket, about the size of a plum, polished smooth, with a faint ring of light around its edge. "Every one of you will carry a Ledger Stone. It records your mana output whenever you use it, and it keeps your standing in the class. The five of you are ranked from one to five, and the numbers on your desks are your places. They are not decorations."

She walked down the row and set a stone on each desk, and Ren's landed with a soft click beside his elbow. It was warm to the touch.

"Rank matters here for one reason. Scouts from the top squads come through this academy every term, and they look at the Ledger before they look at anything else. Class A gets the first look. Class B gets the second. By the time they reach Class D, most of the best squads have already filled their rosters." Her gaze passed over each of them. "That's why there is a rule. Once a month, any student may challenge the student ranked directly above them to a supervised duel. If the challenger wins, you swap places. If the challenger loses, they cannot challenge again for a month."

Ren saw Daichi's head come up, and saw the grin that spread across his face. It was an ugly, hungry thing.

"Once a month," Daichi repeated.

"Starting next month," said Yamabuki, without looking at him. "Not before. If I see a challenge outside of the ring, I'll expel the one who started it. Is that clear, Kurogane?"

Daichi's grin did not fade, but he nodded. At the first desk, Itsuki yawned.

The rest of the morning went by in a blur. Yamabuki handed out the timetable and walked them through the grounds, pointing out the training halls and the infirmary and the long low building where the dormitories stood. She showed them where meals were served and which doors stayed shut after dark. She told them that every first-year would be assigned a month of supervised exercises before any of them were allowed to touch a real mission, and that a mission, when it came, would be small. Ren followed along at the back with his Ledger Stone in his pocket, memorizing every turn of the corridors, and tried not to look at the boy walking ahead of him.

He kept looking anyway. He could not help it. Itsuki Sakaguchi walked with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders loose, as unconcerned as if the whole academy belonged to him, and Ren could picture the man in the dark with a patch over one eye and a spear of light in his palm. Sakaguchi. The same name. The man who had wanted him dead only yesterday had a son in this class, sitting twenty feet away and yawning at the sky.

Did he know? Did the boy know what his own father had tried to do?

When the class broke for the midday meal, Ren followed the others into the dining hall and sat down at a table near the end, across from Mio Tachibana. She had short brown hair and a small scar through one eyebrow, and she had been quietly eating since he arrived.

"Can I ask you something?" Ren said.

She looked up. "Depends on what it is."

"Itsuki. Do you know anything about his family? I think I met his father, once."

Mio set down her spoon. Something in her face changed, and for a moment she looked older than sixteen. "Itsuki doesn't have a father."

"But I..."

"He died in the last war against the Tainted. Itsuki was very young." She glanced toward the far end of the hall, where Itsuki sat with a bowl of rice and his chin propped on one hand, surrounded by a crowd of girls from the lower classes, mostly Class C, all of them leaning in and talking at once, and lowered her voice. "You're probably thinking of one of his older brothers. There are a few of them, and some work for the board. If you met a Sakaguchi, that's who it would be."

Ren's stomach dropped. A brother. Not a father at all. He had spent the entire morning looking at Itsuki and imagining a boy whose father had tried to kill the person sitting two desks away, and the truth was both smaller and stranger than that.

"There's one more thing," Mio said. "Don't say that name around him. Shuten. Everyone in this academy knows better, and so should you. He goes cold whenever someone does, and a student who joked about it has been in the infirmary since the first day."

"Who was it?" Ren asked.

"Haruto Ikeda, from Class D." Mio picked up her spoon again. "So don't be the next one."

"I won't," Ren said. His voice sounded faint to his own ears.

Inside his head, nothing stirred. But Ren felt it anyway, the weight of a name that belonged to the one thing he could never say aloud in this place. After Mio left, he sat pushing his rice around his bowl, and the longer he looked toward the far end of the hall, the more one thought kept returning. Itsuki was number one, and he was the brother of a man who had tried to kill Ren, and Ren wanted to know what kind of person he was. Before he could talk himself out of it, he stood up, picked up his tray, and walked over.

He got within three steps before the girls noticed him. Three of them stood at the front of the crowd, and all three turned to look at him at once, with expressions so sour that he nearly stopped in the middle of the floor. The tall one in the center, Hana Matsuda, had a high ponytail and the posture of someone who was used to being listened to, and it was plain from the way the others stood behind her that she did the talking. Rika Ono and Sayaka Mori flanked her with their arms folded.

"Can we help you?" Hana asked.

"I only wanted to say hi to Itsuki," Ren said.

"Everyone wants to say hi. We were here first." Hana looked him up and down. "And honestly, you're the third boy in Class A, and I'd say you came third in every way that counts. Nobody was exactly lining up for that."

"Third out of three," Rika added, and Sayaka snorted into her sleeve.

Ren's ears went hot. Behind them Itsuki had finally lifted his head from his hand, and his sleepy grey eyes were turning toward the commotion, when the bell rang for the afternoon lesson. The girls scattered, Hana last of all, throwing a final glare over her shoulder. Itsuki rose, passed Ren without a word, and was gone, leaving him standing there with his tray.

Later that afternoon, when the others had gone to collect their uniforms from the stores, Yamabuki called him back to the front of the classroom. She stood by the window with the slate in her hands, and she waited until the room had emptied before she spoke.

"Since you missed the first lesson, I'll explain my ability to you separately," she said. "The others saw it on the first morning. Hold out your hand."

Ren hesitated, then held it out. She flicked two fingers, and a thread appeared in the air between them, so fine that he would have missed it if the light had not caught it. It drifted across the room, lifted a stick of chalk off the board, and carried it back to her palm.

"Tsumugi," she said. "I spin mana into threads no thicker than a hair. Each one carries my senses, so I feel whatever it touches, and each one can bind, lift, or pull. I can run hundreds at once. It makes me a good teacher, because at any moment I know where every one of you is standing."

A thread brushed Ren's wrist, cool and light. His heart stopped. For a long moment he did not breathe, and inside him Shuten stayed perfectly still. Then the thread slid away and curled back into her fingers, and Yamabuki gave him a small nod.

"That's all. Go and find your uniform."

Ren bowed and walked out. In the corridor he leaned against the wall, shaking, and stared at the sunlight lying across the floor.

Shuten. Everyone in the academy knew the name and no one would speak it. He had only been here for a single day, and he already understood how heavy it was. He wondered, for the first time, exactly what it cost people to hear it.