Chapter Text
The voices started before the alarm.
Valt was halfway through breakfast with Rantaro when he heard them - two students drifting past the dorm corridor, completely unbothered by the concept of walls.
"That's the multi-guild kid, right?"
"Yeah. Still no proper assignment."
"How is he even here?"
He sat there for a second.
Then another.
Then he told himself it didn't matter. People talked. That was fine. Totally fine, completely normal, not a big deal, he was absolutely fine.
A small storm cloud materialized above his head and rained on him.
“Yo Valt. Everything good there buddy.” Honcho asked. “You're soaking up my toast.”
"Sorry, Honcho," he said, shooing it toward the window.
“Hey, you’re in evocation-101, heard they finally finished the safety information and are letting you guys duel."
“Wait really.” Valt said, face lighting up.
“Well I would assume you'd know since you're, you know, in the class.” Rantaro deadpanned.
Valt didn't even acknowledge honcho; he just grabbed his bag.
This is gonna be awesome.
The morning was normal.
Evocation theory ran until the bell. Valt took notes, lost his notes, found his notes, and spent the last ten minutes drawing a small horse in the margin. Shu sat two rows ahead and didn't turn around once. Lui sat in the back corner like a weather system that hadn't decided what it wanted to do yet.
Class ended.
“Meet me outside. In your training uniforms for practical application.” Professor Sparks said.
A pause.
Then, more pointed:
“In other words don’t embarrass yourselves.”
Valt leaned forward, eyes shining. “We’re actually doing this…”
“No one said we,” came a voice beside him.
Lui.
Flat. Immediate.
Valt blinked. “Oh. I just thought ”
“You thought wrong.”
Before Valt could respond, Lui was gone.
When they made it outside.
The first pairing was announced.
Shu Kurenai
Lui Shirosagi
The energy shifted instantly.
Even Valt felt it.
Not excitement. Expectation.
Valt watched from the outer ring with the rest of the cohort.
Shu moved like someone doing math. Every barrier he raised was layered, each piece dependent on the last. He didn't rush. He didn't have to.
Lui moved like a question that was expected to be answered immediately. No preamble. The first strike came before Valt had fully registered the match. A direct conjuration burst that hit Shu's first barrier at exactly the point where two layers met.
They traded like that for a few minutes. Shu building, Lui testing the logic of the structure until he found its argument's weak point. Shu revises calmly, without showing anything on his face. It wasn't a fight so much as a sustained disagreement expressed through controlled force.
In the arena, Shu's next barrier went up fractionally slower.
Lui turned his head not toward Shu.
Toward Valt.
Just briefly. Just enough.
Then back to Shu, who had already stabilized. The match wound down to its inconclusive end a few exchanges later: no clean win, no clean loss, just two people agreeing, without words, that this particular conversation was finished.
Shu stepped out. Expression unchanged.
Lui stepped out, looking at Valt.
Between rotations, the noise came back.
Louder this time.
“They stalled out.”
“Shu couldn’t finish it?”
“No, Lui didn’t push hard enough.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
Valt tried not to listen.
He really did.
But
“He drags output down.”
“He’s unstable.”
“Why is he even in multiple guild tracks?”
“He’s gonna fail out.”
Valt laughed.
Light.
Easy.
“People say stuff, right?”
No one answered him.
Because someone else did.
“Say it properly if you’re going to talk.”
The voices stopped.
Lui stood a few steps away, arms crossed, gaze sharp enough to cut.
“He’s inconsistent,” he said flatly.
A pause.
Then, colder:
“Not useless.”
The class went on eerily quiet after that.
—
After class, Valt was packing his bag.
“Hey.”
Valt turned.
Lui was already walking toward him.
Direct.
No hesitation.
“You’re not stabilizing anything you touch,” Lui said.
Valt blinked. “I’m trying–”
“That’s not the problem.”
Valt stopped.
“The problem,” Lui continued, “is you think trying makes you safe to be around.”
That hit.
Harder than anything in the arena.
Valt opened his mouth, then closed it.
Shu was watching from a distance now.
Free too, leaning lazily against the wall, eyes half-lidded.
Lui lifted his hand slightly.
A faint marker formed between them.
Challenge protocol.
“Show me,” Lui said.
Valt stared at it. “What?”
“If people are wrong,” Lui said, “prove it.”
—-
The after-class practice lanes were a different world from the morning arena. Looser. Less supervised. Students running their own drills, working through things that hadn't clicked in class, occasionally breaking something and hoping no one important saw.
There was no referee. No instructor with a clipboard. No calibrated lighting or clean white containment lines.
Just the lane, the late afternoon, and Lui already in position before Valt had fully processed what he'd agreed to.
The rules at Requiem were simple: knock them out or force them out of the ring. Everyone went for the knockout. It wasn't a rule; it was just how things were done. Clean, decisive, no ambiguity about who'd won.
Lui clearly intended to be decisive.
He didn't ease in. Didn't read Valt's stance or test his range or do anything that could be generously described as giving him a chance. The first strike came immediately, and surgically, a conjuration burst aimed directly at Valt's center, the kind of hit that ends things quickly if it lands.
Valt threw up a barrier on pure instinct.
It held. Barely.
The edges faded unevenly, and he was already three steps backward, already scrambling his next response before he'd finished surviving the first one.
Okay, he thought. Okay. This is fine.
A small rain cloud appeared over his head, assessed the situation, and vanished. It didn't even have time for this.
Lui pressed forward methodically, strikes targeted not at Valt's magic but at its inconsistencies. Every gap, every half-second of hesitation, every moment where Valt's output flickered sideways instead of landing where he'd meant it. He wasn't trying to overpower him. He was trying to show him exactly how many holes he had.
It was working.
"You hesitate before every output."
The words came between strikes, delivered in the same flat tone as everything else Lui said. Not trash talk. Not cruelty for the sake of it.
Just accurate.
"You're trying to be acceptable instead of effective."
Valt's next barrier shattered at the edge. He stumbled, redirected, felt his output spike sideways into something floral and unintended. Petals drifted through the practice lane. The air smelled briefly like something in bloom.
Not now, he thought at himself, desperate.
"That's why no one trusts you."
And there it was.
The thing he'd been swallowing since this morning. Since the corridor outside the dorms. Since the voices that I hadn't known were standing on the other side of the door.
It hit him somewhere deep and already bruised.
He almost broke from entirely magic spiking, footing going wrong, the beginning of a collapse that would've sent him out of the lane and ended the whole thing messily and fast.
He took a breath instead.
And then he stopped.
Not strategically. Not because he'd worked something out. He just stopped trying to answer correctly. Stopped translating what he actually felt into something more controlled, more acceptable, more appropriate. He let go of the version of himself he'd been performing all day and just let the magic go where it wanted to go.
It went somewhere real.
The next barrier wasn't pretty. It wasn't layered or logical. Wasn't anything anyone would screenshot for technique reference. But it was shaped around the actual feeling instead of the managed version of it, and it held the way he'd meant it to, solid and steady, and for the first time in the whole fight, Valt felt like he was actually there.
His output stopped spiking sideways.
The petals settled.
The air stopped smelling like an apology.
Lui noticed. Valt saw something shift in his rhythm, the methodical testing giving way to something more direct. He'd clocked the change and had exactly zero interest in leaving it untested. He wound up for the finish: one decisive knockout strike, center mass, the kind that ended things.
Valt didn't block it.
He redirected it.
By barely anything. Two degrees of arc, less than a second of timing, a margin that probably didn't even have a technical name. The strike slid just outside critical range. Valt's counter graceless, unplanned, more feeling than form landed.
Lui stepped back.
One step. Involuntary.
His heel hit the edge of the lane boundary.
The match was over.
The practice lane went very quiet.
Valt stood in the middle of it, breathing hard, covered in magical residue and what was definitely pollen, and looked at Lui.
Lui looked back.
—
He was still for long enough that Valt started counting seconds.
Then.
"You got lucky."
Valt, still catching his breath: "I didn't mean "
"That's not what I said."
A pause. Something colder and more precise is settling in:
"You didn't beat me."
Beat.
"You barely survived your own output."
Valt wanted to argue, but he was just too drained.
He'd been there, he'd seen it all go down, and technically, he'd come out on top.
Yet, beneath the adrenaline rush, he knew Lui had a point.
Valt had barely made it through his own ordeal. It was just luck that things had gone in his favor.
Two things could be true at the same time, and that was really frustrating.
Lui just walked away without saying another word. Shu had already turned his back; Valt wasn't sure when.
Free climbed down from the fence, slow and quiet, like a storm passing. Other students were staring, and some were already talking, which meant the story was going to get distorted.
Valt looked down at his hands.
They were still glowing, still smelling like flowers. A cloud formed above him, and it started raining, soft and gentle, like it was trying to calm him down.
He just let it happen.
—
The disciplinary slate was posted before dinner.
Valt and Lui were on it for an unsanctioned post-class duel and disrupting practice lanes with unauthorized emotional output spikes.
They had to report to the Administrative Wing at the third bell.
They sat in adjacent chairs outside the office door, not speaking. Valt counted the stones in the wall, getting to forty-seven. Then
"This is your fault," Lui said.
Valt turned to stare at him. "You challenged me."
"And you accepted."
"You said prove it "
"I said prove it." A pause, infuriatingly patient. "I didn't say start an unsanctioned duel in the practice lane after class."
"That is literally what proving it "
"Those are two different things."
Valt opened his mouth.
Closed it. Opened it.
The logic was wrong in a way he couldn't locate the exact wrongness of, which was the worst kind of wrong.
The office door opened.
The instructor looked at both of them with the expression of a person who had filed too many of these forms to feel anything about them anymore.
"Evocation field containment seals. Three days."
"Unacceptable," Lui said immediately.
"That's actually kind of " Valt considered his words carefully. "That's like bonding "
"Don't."
"Team building. I was going to say team build "
"I know what you were going to say."
The instructor closed the door.
Silence.
Valt looked at the ceiling. Lui looked at the wall. Outside the office window, the last of the afternoon light was going orange.
After a while, Valt said, "Hey. Thanks for earlier. When you told those people to "
"I corrected an inaccurate statement."
"Right." Valt nodded. "Thanks for correcting the inaccurate statement. About me. That you did. Out loud."
Lui said nothing.
Valt decided that was probably the best version of your welcome he was going to get and quietly accepted it.
—
The trip back was noisy in a way different from before.
“He beat Lui.”
“That's impossible.”
“Didn't you see?”
“Lui appeared really angry.”
“It must have been luck.”
Lui walked alongside him without any prior notice or invitation.
Not intimate, not friendly, just the way facts are there, without explanations.
"Now they'll talk about you more,"
He heard Lui say.
Valt looked at him.
Lui continued walking, looking straight ahead. "See whether you like it better."
And he went on, leaving this sentence hanging right where it landed.
At the junction, Valt stood still.
All these voices swirling around him, speculating, theorizing,
and twisting his name into any form that fitted the occasion.
He stood there, thinking about this morning, the corridor,
these voices that knew nothing about him being there.
Thinking about those words Lui had uttered before the battle.
Thinking about those other words, uttered by Lui after the battle.
Thinking about waking up at dawn for three days and cleaning containment seals with a guy who is definitely not going to say a single word to him the whole time.
The dark cloud formed above him.
He looked at it.
"Yeah," he said.I know."
And he chased the cloud away and went to his dorm.