Devouring the Demon King's Mana

Chapter 7

Ren woke before the bell with his hand already closed around the Ledger Stone. He had no memory of reaching for it. When he fell asleep it had been sitting on the desk across the room, and now it lay in his palm, warm as a loaf fresh from the oven, with the ring of light at its edge swelling and fading in time with his pulse.

He opened his fingers one at a time and set the stone on the blanket and watched it. Stones got warm, he told himself. People held things in their sleep.

*Are you awake?* he thought, as clearly as he could manage, and waited.

Nothing answered. There was no voice and no amusement, only the quiet he had learned to recognize over the past few days, a presence at the back of his mind that felt like being ignored by someone who had stopped noticing he was in the room. It was almost worse than the talking. When Shuten spoke, at least Ren knew where he stood.

He washed in the cold water the dormitory provided and ate his rice standing at the window, and he put the stone in his pocket without looking at it.

The corridors of the academy were wide and bright, and every student in them seemed to know exactly where they were going. Ren kept his head down and his hands in his pockets and walked fast. Someone whispered behind him as he turned the last corner, and he caught the word *zero*, and he walked a little faster.

Class 1-A was half full when he slid through the door. Daichi sat at the second desk with his arms folded and a boot hooked on the rung of his chair, and the look he sent across the room was a promise to finish yesterday's conversation whenever it suited him. Itsuki lay with his head on his folded arms by the window, as if the morning were a personal insult. Ren took the fourth desk, set his bag on the floor, and felt it at once on the left side of his face.

It was not a sound or a touch. It was a pressure with a direction, the way you know someone is standing behind you in a queue. He turned his head and found Mio Tachibana's eyes already on him, brown and level under the scarred eyebrow. She did not look embarrassed. After a moment she went back to her book, turning a page she had not read.

Ren faced the board. The pressure stayed where it was.

"Hi! You're Ren, right?"

The girl at the fifth desk was leaning so far across the gap that she was nearly out of her chair. Black hair hung in a loose braid over her shoulder, and her uniform sleeves swallowed her hands to the knuckles. She was smiling the way people do when they are frightened and have decided to be friendly about it.

"I'm Emi. Nakagawa. Number five, which you probably worked out, since I'm the one who got in by a single point." She laughed at herself, a quick breathless sound. "Sorry. That was a terrible way to say hello. I was worried when you didn't come on the first day, and then I thought, oh no, if he's gone I'm number four, and that's an awful thing to think about a person, I swear I didn't mean it."

"It's fine," Ren said, and found to his surprise that he meant it.

She looked at his empty desk, then at his hands. "Do you have a pen?"

He did not. He had left in such a hurry that he had brought nothing at all except the stone.

"I brought three." She dug into her bag and pushed one into his palm, the way someone hands over a coin to a stranger who has lost theirs. "I always bring too many. If I run out of ink I get this feeling like the lesson is going to end and I'll have missed all of it."

Before Ren could answer, the door opened and the room went quiet in a single motion.

Yamabuki stood at the front with her slate against her hip and her black hair tied low at the nape. She looked at each of them in turn, and her eyes rested on Ren for exactly as long as on the others. "Eyes front," she said. "Yesterday I told you how this class works. Today I'm going to tell you how mana works, because most of you believe you already know, and most of you are wrong."

She pinched a little chalk dust from the tray under the board and let it fall. The powder hung in the sunlight in front of her, pale and weightless. Then she lifted one hand, and two threads of mana unwound from her fingertips, one white and one a dull, smoky grey.

"Every kind of mana carries a charge. Positive energy pushes outward. Negative energy pulls inward."

The white thread drifted near the dust and the powder scattered away from it in all directions. The grey thread followed, and the powder curled toward it and clung. Yamabuki brought the two threads together in the middle of the cloud, and the chalk between them did not fall or burn. It was there, and then it was not.

"Where the two meet, you get zero," she said. "Remember that. Someday you will meet a person who can make it, and you will want to be very polite to them."

At the fifth desk, Emi's pen stopped for half a second and then moved on.

"Now. Where does negative energy come from?" Yamabuki walked down the row with her hands behind her back. "Kegare, naturally. Poisoned mana is negative by nature, and so is any magic that has been twisted or contaminated. But the second source is closer to home. Strong feeling. Fear and anger most of all. A cadet who loses his temper bleeds negative energy into a room, and everyone nearby can feel it, friend and enemy alike. Kurogane. Define a clean strike."

Daichi did not stand. "One that spends nothing it doesn't have to," he said. "No leakage, no wasted motion. Whatever the target feels, it feels once."

"Adequate."

Ren was looking at Daichi when it happened. He was not meaning to look. His eyes had simply gone there, the way a hand goes to a pocket, and when he tried to bring them back, something behind them leaned. He felt it as a weight settling on the inside of his skull, patient and mild, with no hunger in it at all. It rested on the boy at the second desk the way a man's gaze rests on a horse he has not yet decided to buy. It took in the set of the shoulders, the stillness of the hands, the economy of the way Daichi shifted his weight when he answered. Then, with no more interest than it had come with, it drifted away.

Ren stared at his desk. His heart was beating much too fast.

*Shuten,* he thought.

No answer came. The quiet had closed over the spot where the weight had been, and Ren sat with the pen Emi had lent him and understood that he had just been shown something he was not supposed to ask about.

"Sakaguchi," Yamabuki said. "What is the first rule of negative energy?"

Itsuki did not lift his head. "Don't give it away," he said, in the voice of a man talking in his sleep.

"Correct." Her mouth moved by a fraction. "Now take out your stones."

They laid five grey ovals on five desks, each with its ring of light, and Yamabuki told them to channel a little mana. Only enough for the ring to read. Daichi went first, and his ring lit a thin, even white, no brighter than a candle and no weaker. Ren half expected the room to laugh at how ordinary it looked. Then he wondered whether it was so ordinary on purpose.

"Efficient," Yamabuki said, and Daichi's smile widened.

Mio's ring turned a smoky grey that curled inward on itself. Emi's flickered white, then black, then both went out together for a heartbeat before it returned as a pale gold, and she turned scarlet and bent over her notebook. Itsuki barely touched his, and the stone burned a clean white that did not waver, and he went back to sleep.

Then it was Ren's turn.

He pushed a thread of mana toward the stone as gently as he could. The ring woke at once and began to flicker between white and a deep, dark red, back and forth, faster than he could follow, and somewhere under his ribs something shifted its weight and settled again. It was a very small movement. It had the casual feel of a sleeping animal turning over. Then the ring settled at a glow so plain that Daichi snorted aloud.

"Hoshino." Yamabuki's eyes stayed on the stone a moment longer than they needed to. "Again, please. Lighter."

He tried again, and the ring held a clean ordinary white, and she nodded and moved on. But Ren could feel the pressure on the left side of his face grow, and when he glanced over, Mio had not written a single word. She was looking at his stone, and then at his hand, and then at his face.

By the end of the morning he had stopped trying to look away from it. She did not hide it. She did not seem to care that he knew.

Class ended at noon, and Ren filed into the corridor with Emi trotting at his elbow, still talking about her notes, about how the lesson had been so interesting she had filled four pages. They had nearly reached the stairs when someone stepped out of the doorway ahead and blocked it with one shoulder.

The boy was tall and lean, with blond hair swept up off his forehead and a grin that took up half his face. His collar badge was stamped with a B. He leaned against the wall with the loose ease of someone who had never once worried that he might be in the way, and he looked at the two of them as if sizing up a pair of shoes.

"Number four and number five," he said. "The famous Class A."

"Excuse me," Emi said quietly. "We're going to be late."

"Takumi Sera. Class B." He said it as though she had asked. "Rank six, which is the worst place in the world to finish, because you can see the door and you aren't allowed through it. One place, Nakagawa. Whoever drew that line had a grudge against me, because I'm better than every one of you, and I'm the only one in this corridor who knows it."

"Takumi..." Emi began.

"Don't strain yourself carrying that seat, number five. It looks heavy." He turned the grin on Ren. "And you. The zero. First blank record in the history of the district, and now you're fourth. Somebody paid somebody. I'm going to find out who."

"Move," Ren said.

It came out calmer than he felt. Takumi's eyebrows rose, and then he laughed, a loud, delighted laugh that bounced down the stairwell.

"He talks! Come on, Hoshino. Tell me your secret. Did you swallow something?"

Ren's blood went cold. Inside his head, the quiet did not just hold. It went perfectly still, the way a room goes still when a stranger walks into it, and Ren could not tell whether that stillness was for him or for the boy in front of him. But Takumi had only been making a joke, and he did not wait for an answer. He shoved off the wall, struck Ren's shoulder on the way past, and called back that the list was wrong and he would prove it.

When he was gone, Emi let out a long breath and began to apologize. She apologized to Ren, and to the corridor, and to the stairs. "He does that to everyone," she said. "He did it to me yesterday, and I don't even know why. I didn't do anything to him. I'm so sorry."

"You don't need to apologize. He's the one who's rude."

She gave him a wobbly smile and hurried down ahead of him, murmuring. Ren stayed at the top of the stairs rubbing his shoulder, and that was when the heat came through his pocket against his hip.

He put his hand over it. Through his fingers a dull red light pulsed once, and again, and went out.

He did not see her follow. He only knew, when he took the covered walkway toward the dormitory and passed the old wing, where the doors had not been opened in years, that the pressure on the side of his face had never left. A door stood ajar halfway down the corridor. A voice came out of it, calm and quiet.

"Hoshino. In here."

Every sensible instinct told him to keep walking, and still his feet carried him through the door and into a bare, dusty practice room with the shutters drawn and a long shaft of light cutting through the middle of it. Mio Tachibana stood at the far end with her book pressed to her chest. Behind him the door swung shut without a sound.

"Don't turn around," she said.

The air changed. It grew heavier, and colder, and something stirred at the back of the room where the shadows were thickest. Ren's own shadow on the floor stretched out toward the wall and then rose, and a shape came out of it: tall, narrow, made of smoke the color of wet slate, with no eyes at all and a mouth that opened down the whole length of its face to show rows of pale teeth. It stood at his shoulder, so close that he felt its breath on his ear.

"That is a kagemori," Mio said. "I made it this morning, in about a minute, from the fear in the classroom. It is not very good. It is hungry anyway."

Ren did not move.

"I have sat next to you for two days," she said. "I thought I was imagining it, so I waited, and I watched, and it is worse than I thought. You are carrying more negative energy than the kegare pens in the east yard. It does not leak out of you. It pours. And Yamabuki's stone flickered red in front of the entire class, and you looked like you were about to be sick."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"That was a lie." Her voice did not rise. "I can feel it when you do that. Your fear goes up, and I feel it from here, and so does he." She tilted her head very slightly toward the thing at his shoulder, and its mouth opened another inch. "So here is how this works. You are going to tell me what you are. If you lie to me again, it will eat you where you stand, and I will tell Yamabuki that you attacked me, and she will believe me."

The shaft of dust-filled light hung between them. Ren could hear the kagemori breathing through its teeth. In his chest, where the quiet should have been, there was nothing at all, and for the first time since the shore he understood exactly how alone he was.

"Start talking, Hoshino," Mio said.