Soren stared down at the two pieces of paper resting in his hand.
They were light enough that the slightest movement of his fingers made them shift, plain academy parchment stamped with the crest in dark ink, hardly the sort of thing that should have felt heavy, and yet he kept turning them over anyway, as though the answer might be hidden on the back if he looked enough times.
The teaching assistant's explanation still echoed in his head with irritating clarity.
— These are your duelling tickets. Each of you will receive two, and they are to be used when formally applying for a mock duel against another student. Naturally, you may only challenge someone of equal or higher rank. You are not permitted to issue a challenge to a lower-ranked student.
— Under normal circumstances, using one ticket is enough to submit a challenge, though the other student is free to decline. If, however, you choose to use both tickets at once, the challenged student will be required to accept, assuming their allotted duel slots have not already been filled.
Simple.
Annoyingly simple.
Simple enough that there was nothing to argue with, nowhere to hide inside technicalities or exceptions, just a choice placed neatly in his hands and left there to rot.
'Who should I fight?'
The thought had been circling for the better part of ten minutes without getting anywhere useful.
Rank ninety-six was an awkward place to exist.
It was not high enough to be impressive, not low enough to be completely ignored, just stranded in a place where he couldn't really afford to lose and couldn't gain much by winning either.
Most of the students below him would fold without teaching him anything worth learning, and beating them would only confirm something everyone already assumed.
'If I win, it proves nothing, and if I lose, I look stupid.'
Neither outcome felt especially attractive.
The easier option kept presenting itself anyway.
'Pick someone weak, get it over with, and keep your head down.'
It slid into place so naturally that he almost laughed.
That was still how his mind worked when he had space to think, not with dramatic panic, not with constant collapse, but with that quiet instinct to make himself smaller, to choose the route that disturbed the least, the route that asked the fewest questions and left the smallest trace behind.
Since arriving at the academy, that instinct had only sharpened.
Every time he touched something important, something shifted.
Sometimes subtly, sometimes not.
A little here, a little there, and then suddenly what should have happened did not happen at all.
Ripples.
He hated ripples.
One small choice was all it took, and then consequences kept travelling outward long after the moment itself was gone.
For a second, an old memory tried to resurface, the shape of a bedroom, the sound of his phone buzzing, guilt that had no clean place to go, but Soren cut it off before it could properly form.
His fingers tightened around the tickets, then loosened again.
Breathe.
It was just mock duels, not some life-or-death scenario.
He could still keep this small.
"Why not use this as an opportunity to fight someone strong?"
Soren looked up so quickly he almost dropped the tickets.
Lilliana sat across from him at the small round table by the window, posture loose and easy, one leg crossed neatly over the other.
A white mug rested in one hand, a tiny spoon in the other, and the soft morning light caught in her pink hair as she lifted the spoon to her mouth with all the seriousness of someone handling state affairs.
Soren blinked.
"Someone strong?"
"Mhm."
She sounded as though the answer were obvious.
She took a sip of coffee, then another small spoonful of honey, because apparently black coffee by itself was not enough.
"It's a mock duel. It'll have a controlled environment, professors watching, healing magic nearby, and very low actual risk. This is the sort of situation where getting beaten up is useful."
He frowned at her.
"Useful feels like a generous way of putting it."
Lilliana glanced at him over the rim of her mug, calm and entirely unrepentant.
"Would 'educational' make you feel better?"
"Not really."
She hummed.
"That's a shame."
Soren let out a breath through his nose and leaned back a little in his chair.
Lilliana's dorm was quiet, the sort of quiet he liked, not oppressive, just soft, with the faint clink of spoon against glass and the distant murmur of academy life outside the windows.
It should have been enough to settle him.
It almost was.
"But seriously," Lilliana went on, setting the mug down, "why waste a mock duel on someone you can already handle? If you fight someone stronger, even if you lose, you still get something out of it. You feel the difference properly. Timing, pressure, decision-making, how quickly they read you, how much room they leave you, if any. That kind of thing is hard to understand from the outside."
Soren lowered his gaze to the tickets again.
She was not wrong.
That was the annoying part.
"You've improved a lot. More than you give yourself credit for, actually, but the higher-ranked students are still far ahead of you. Seeing that clearly might help."
"Help me feel bad, maybe."
Lilliana's lips curved faintly.
"Maybe."
He gave her a flat look, but she simply ignored it and continued.
"You'll end up facing these people eventually anyway. They're your classmates, Ren, not distant monsters from some future battlefield. Better to get a look at your future rivals now than keep guessing."
Future rivals.
The phrase sat strangely in his head.
It implied continuity, a future long enough to matter, a version of himself still moving forward instead of merely avoiding the next collision.
He rubbed the back of his neck and looked away.
'Will I ever actually catch up?'
That thought came more quietly than the others, almost tired.
Not bitter or self-pitying, just honest in a way he usually tried not to be.
He had grown stronger, yes, but that had not magically erased the gap between him and people who had been shaped for this world from birth.
Talent, upbringing, resources, bodies that fit the rules better than his did, years of instinct he still lacked, all of it remained whether he acknowledged it or not.
Lilliana watched him for a moment, then spoke.
"There's no real downside here. The rankings won't shift much over a mock duel unless you do something absurd, and I don't think you're planning to."
"I wasn't, no."
"There you are, then."
Soren exhaled slowly.
When she put it like that, the decision felt less like stepping onto a stage and more like using a training tool properly.
A mock duel was a contained thing, a measured thing, not the sort of choice that had to become larger than itself unless he let it.
"…I guess there's no harm in trying," he said at last.
Lilliana's expression said, "Yes, that's what I just told you."
He chose to ignore that.
"Fine," he muttered, rolling the tickets once between his fingers. "Someone stronger, then."
The problem, of course, remained.
Who?
Someone competent, but not impossible.
Strong enough to teach him something, not so overwhelming that the duel ended before he had the chance to think.
Someone straightforward enough that he would not spend the entire match being dismantled by a style he could barely even read.
His thoughts began their usual unhelpful circuit of names, ranks, vague impressions, academy gossip, memories from the game, until his eyes drifted back to Lilliana.
She had resumed the battle between coffee and honey with complete concentration.
Soren paused, then blinked.
'Right.'
There was an obvious answer here.
Lilliana was not just Lilliana.
She was a professor.
"Who do you think I should challenge, then?" he asked.
The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.
"Cough. Cough."
She turned her head sharply, one hand flying up as she choked, then grabbed her mug and took a quick drink to recover.
For a moment she just sat there, eyes narrowed at him as if blaming him personally.
Soren stared.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes," she said at once, voice a little rough. "Give me a second."
He waited while she took another careful sip, set the mug down, then leaned back in her chair with her gaze slightly unfocused, clearly sorting through possibilities.
That alone made his chest loosen a little.
This was manageable.
This was still small.
No dramatic choices, no story-breaking interference, no feeling of being shoved somewhere he had not meant to go, just him asking someone more qualified for sensible advice.
He could do this much without his thoughts tangling themselves into knots.
When he had a hand on the wheel, when the situation stayed narrow, he could still think around the edges of things instead of straight through them.
Eventually, Lilliana gave him a name.
Just one.
A student he had not seriously considered even once.
Soren stared at her for a beat, surprised less by the choice itself than by how immediately it clicked once she said it.
Skilled, high enough to matter, but not such an absurd mismatch that the duel would be worthless.
A clean recommendation.
Sensible.
And just like that, his second mock duel was decided.
…Or at least, that was what he thought.
Because later that day, before he had even finished adjusting to the plan, someone appeared and tore it apart so cleanly that for a few seconds Soren forgot how to breathe.
————「❤︎」————