The battlefield had no name. He didn't know how he got there — only that he was standing, and that everyone around him wasn't. Monsters and demons churned through the smoke on his left. Angels and hulking mechas of iron and light collapsed on his right. The sky was the colour of a wound that wouldn't close. He was the last one. Every comrade, every face he'd memorized — gone. The blood soaking through his shirt was his own, and there was too much of it. His legs were deciding, quietly, to stop working. Then something fell from the sky. Not fire. Not judgment. Something warm — almost gentle — like a light that had learned how to apologize.
He reached for it —
The alarm clock hit him like a personal insult. Haruto Yuki slammed his palm down on it, missed, knocked it off the nightstand entirely, and let it scream at the floor for four more seconds before he finally dragged himself over the edge of the bed and killed it. He lay there, half-on and half-off the mattress, staring at the ceiling of his D-Rank dormitory room. The dream was already dissolving — it always did. Just impressions left behind: smoke, warmth, the sound of something ending. He pushed himself upright and caught his reflection in the dark screen of his desk tablet. He looked terrible. Not in an interesting, tragic-hero sort of way. In a very boring, I-haven't-slept-in-three-days sort of way. The eyebags were architectural at this point. Load-bearing, even. He splashed water on his face, pulled on his uniform, and headed for class.
The First High School of Magic was the kind of institution that made you feel inadequate just by existing inside it. The hallways were long and vaulted and luminous — enchanted stone that hummed faintly underfoot, windows that caught light in ways physics had not approved. Students moved through it like they belonged to it. Haruto moved through it like he was worried it might notice him.
He was halfway to class when something hit him between the shoulder blades hard enough to stagger him forward two full steps. "Morning!" Haruto turned around slowly, the way a man turns to confirm what he already knows will be annoying. Shinei Haruka stood there grinning — tall, effortlessly handsome in that specific way that was probably illegal in three kingdoms, uniform pressed to perfection. First in line for the throne of Orion. Chosen of three noble bloodlines. Mage of considerable power. Currently staring at Haruto with the slight squint of someone trying to solve a puzzle. "...Haruto?" Shinei said. "Yes." "What happened to your face?" "You happened to my back," Haruto said. "Answer the face question yourself." Shinei's squint deepened. "Are those new eyebags or have they always been that deep? I feel like I could lose my keys in there." "I will end you," Haruto said pleasantly. Shinei fell into step beside him, still studying him with that concerned-but-amused expression that was somehow more infuriating than if he'd just picked one. "You're pulling all-nighters again. I can always tell because you start being honest about how you feel about me." "I always feel this way about you," Haruto said. "The sleep deprivation just removes the filter." "You don't have a filter." "Then I have no idea what you're talking about."
The truth — which Haruto had no particular interest in announcing — was that it had been a bad week, and a bad week at The First High had a specific texture to it when you couldn't use magic. Every student here had aptitude. They'd been tested, ranked, sorted. The school ran on magic the way a river ran on water — it was the medium, the point, the reason the building existed. Haruto had sailed through the entrance process on the name of his father, an archduke of considerable standing whose identity Haruto was strictly forbidden from revealing. The school had taken him as a courtesy. The school was beginning to regret it. Not openly. No one said it to his face. Instead they did the thing that was somehow worse: they looked at him. That specific look, deployed by faculty and students alike, that said we know and isn't it a shame and shouldn't he be somewhere else. The solution, as far as Haruto could determine, was academics. He couldn't cast a single spell. He couldn't feel mana. He couldn't do the thing that this entire school was designed to teach. But he could memorize. He could study chants he'd never be able to speak, theory he'd never be able to practice, history and formula and arcane law until his eyes stopped tracking properly. It was a stupid plan. It was the only plan he had.
They reached class 1-D to find it empty. Haruto looked at the rows of unoccupied chairs. Shinei looked at the rows of unoccupied chairs. They stood in the doorway for a moment, absorbing this. "It's after summer break," Shinei offered. "So?" Haruto said. "So nobody comes back from summer break on time." "You came back on time." Shinei shrugged. "I had reasons." Haruto chose not to pursue that sentence, because Shinei's reasons for things were usually either embarrassingly sentimental or politically complicated, and either way they'd be standing in this doorway for twenty minutes. They agreed, wordlessly, to take a walk.
The door opened before they reached it. Yui Haruka stepped in. She was Shinei's younger sister, and she looked like him the way a good translation looks like the original — the same, and also somehow clearer. She wore the standard uniform with the composed ease of someone who had never once had to think about whether she belonged somewhere. In her hands was a small stack of folders she probably didn't need but carried anyway, because Yui Haruka was the kind of person who prepared. "The practical session moved to the training grounds," she said, by way of greeting. "You're both late."
Shinei looked at Haruto. Then at Yui. Then back at Haruto — and something shifted in his expression, quick and deliberate, the specific look of a man who has just decided to be very helpful in a very obvious way. "Oh," he said. "Right. Ms. Rose. Faculty room. I completely forgot." He was already moving toward the door. "Very important. Can't be helped. You two — carry on." The door swung shut behind him. Yui stared at the empty space where her brother had been. "Was that real?" "Ten percent chance," Haruto said. "He's avoiding me." "He's not avoiding you," Haruto said. "He's avoiding being near you. Specifically when I'm also near you. It's a different thing." Yui turned to look at him. "That makes no sense." "Shinei has a plan." Haruto watched the closed door for a moment. "It just doesn't involve being subtle. It's almost touching, honestly."
Yui laughed — small and quick — and then she turned to face him properly, and that was when he saw it. She was smiling. But Haruto had known Yui Haruka since they were eight years old, and he knew the difference between her smiles the way you know the difference between types of weather. Some of them were real and some of them were load-bearing — the kind you put up to hold something heavier in place so nobody notices it's there. This one was load-bearing. "How are you?" she asked. "Tired," Haruto said. "You?" "Fine." "You don't look fine." Her smile didn't waver. "I said I'm fine, Haruto." "I know what you said." He kept his voice easy — no pressure in it, nothing that could be called pushing. "I'm just saying you don't have to be. If you're not." "Haruto —" "That's all I'm saying." He held up both hands, a small surrender. "I'm not asking. You don't owe me anything." Yui looked at him for a moment — that particular look of hers, the one that had always made him feel like she was reading something written in a language he didn't know he was speaking. Then she glanced toward the hallway. "Come to the practical session," she said. A question dressed as a statement. Something shifted in his chest. Not painfully. Just — shifted. "I'll pass," Haruto said. "Haruto —" "There's nothing for me to do there, Yui." He kept his voice easy. Unbothered. He'd had a lot of practice with unbothered. "I can't use magic. Standing around watching other people is a waste of everyone's time, including mine." He offered a small shrug. "I'll be in the library." Yui looked at him for a beat too long. "Okay," she said. Quiet. Like the word cost something. He left before she could say anything else.
The school library was old in the way that only magical buildings could be old — ageless and slightly smug about it. The shelves stretched up past where natural light should have reached, stocked with texts in seventeen languages and at least three dead scripts. It smelled like dust and certainty. Haruto liked it here. Nobody looked at him in the library. He was three steps inside when he saw the light. It came from between the stacks — a deep violet that had no business existing in a library in the middle of the afternoon. Not lamplight. Not sunlight filtered through coloured glass. Something else. Something that pulsed, slowly, like it was breathing. The sensible response was to find a faculty member. Haruto walked toward it instead.
The source was a book. Unremarkable in every way — worn cover, no visible title, tucked between two texts on intermediate barrier theory as though it had always been there. Except that it was radiating a spectrum of violet light that was getting into his eyes and settling somewhere behind them, warm and insistent. He reached out. The light touched his fingers first.
Then the floor was gone, the shelves were gone, the library and the school and the afternoon were gone —
He came back to awareness on a cold flat surface. No ceiling. No walls. Just darkness in every direction — the absolute kind, the kind that feels intentional — and a single point of light directly above him. He sat up slowly. His hands were fine. His head was fine. He was, inexplicably, entirely fine. "Hello?" His voice disappeared into the dark immediately, like it had never existed. Silence. Then, from somewhere that was not quite anywhere, a voice came back at him — deep and unhurried, the vocal equivalent of something very large deciding to be patient: "Huh. How'd a kid like you end up here?" Haruto went very still. "Who's there?" he said. A pause. The darkness seemed to breathe. "Leon Fury," the voice said. "Demon King."
Haruto said nothing.
"...was that too much?" Leon said. "I always forget if I should lead with the title."
Somewhere in the school library, a book lay open on the floor. Haruto Yuki was not there to see it.
— End of Chapter One —