The crystal glowed.
Not red. Not blue. Not any single color.
All of them.
Fire red bled into water blue bled into earth gold bled into wind white bled into electric yellow bled into shadow black bled into light white-gold – and none of them fought for dominance. They swirled together in perfect, impossible balance, each one exactly as present as the last.
Shin'ya stared at it.
"...Is this normal?"
Silence.
He looked up.
Yuki was standing completely still, staring at the crystal in his hand with an expression he hadn't seen on her face before. Not her usual flat look. Not mild irritation. Something closer to genuine disbelief.
"Yuki?"
"...I've never seen that before," she said quietly.
"Is that bad?"
She didn't answer immediately. Just kept staring. Then she crossed her arms, looked away, looked back, and seemed to make a decision.
"Give it here."
Shin'ya handed it back. She turned it over in her fingers, examining it like it might tell her something different from a different angle. It didn't. She set it down on the bench beside them.
"You have no Primary," she said finally.
"...Is that bad?" Shin'ya repeated.
"It's not bad or good. It's just–" She paused. "It's never happened before. As far as I know."
"Great. I'm special.
"Don't say it like that."
"I'm uniquely unusual?"
"Closer."
Shin'ya looked down at his hand – the one that had been holding the crystal. It felt completely normal. No warmth, no residual glow, nothing to indicate that something apparently unprecedented had just happened.
"So what does it mean?" he asked. "Practically. For magic."
Yuki was quiet for a moment, clearly working through it herself.
"In theory," she said slowly, "you can use every element. All seven."
"That sounds good."
"At basic level only. Across all of them. Because you have no Primary, you have no element where your power runs deep. You're spread across everything equally."
"So I'm–"
"You're a Hollow," Yuki said. The name seemed to arrive fully formed, like she'd just decided it. "No dominant element. No Primary core. Just... everything, at the surface."
Shin'ya repeated it quietly. "Hollow."
"It's not an insult," she added. "It's just what you are."
"It sounds like an insult."
"Most accurate descriptions do."
He couldn't really argue with that.
"So the advantages," Shin'ya said, after a moment. "There are advantages, right? You said both."
Yuki gave him a look. "I didn't say both."
"Your face said both."
"My face doesn't say things."
"It said both."
She exhaled slowly through her nose. The specific exhale of someone exercising patience.
"In theory," she said, "a Hollow has flexibility no Primary user has. Someone with Fire as their Primary will always be weakest against Water – their opposing element. You don't have that weakness. Every element is equally yours, which means no obvious counter."
"So I'm hard to counter."
"At basic level. Yes."
"And the disadvantage."
"At basic level. Always." She looked at him directly. "Someone with Fire as their Primary can eventually produce flames hot enough to melt steel. A Hollow using Fire will never reach that. You'll always have access to everything and mastery of nothing."
Shin'ya absorbed this.
"Jack of all trades," he said.
"Exactly."
"Master of none."
"Exactly."
He was quiet for a second. Then – "In stories, that's usually where the protagonist finds a loophole."
"This isn't a story."
"Everything is kind of a story if you think about it–"
"Pick up your sword," Yuki said flatly. "We're not done training."
The weapon training resumed.
And something was different this time.
Not dramatically – Yuki wasn't suddenly struggling, wasn't breaking a sweat, wasn't showing any sign that Shin'ya had become a real threat. But the gap had narrowed. Slightly. Noticeably.
His blocks were half a beat faster. His footwork had started to feel natural instead of calculated. He wasn't thinking about where to put his feet anymore – they were just going there.
Yuki noticed. She didn't say anything, but she noticed – Shin'ya could tell by the way her adjustments became slightly less lazy. She was still reading him easily, still redirecting his swings without much effort, but she'd stopped leaving obvious openings as practice bait. She was making him work for the angles now.
That felt like progress.
"You're improving," she said, after blocking a sequence of three strikes.
"I know."
"Don't get confident."
"I'm just acknowledging the facts."
"Confidence and acknowledgment look the same from where I'm standing and both will get you hit."
As if to demonstrate, she tapped his practice sword out of his grip with a clean flick of her wrist. It clattered to the floor.
Shin'ya stared at his empty hand.
"...Okay."
"Pick it up."
Somewhere in the middle of a sparring round, Shin'ya tripped.
Not because Yuki did anything. Not because of a technique or a feint or a deliberate move on her part. He just caught his own foot on absolutely nothing and went down sideways, catching himself on one knee.
There was a long silence.
"Did you just," Yuki started.
"I slipped."
"On what."
"The floor."
"The floor is flat."
"Floors can be slippery."
"It's stone."
"Stone can be–"
"Shin'ya."
"I slipped," he said with great dignity, standing back up and retrieving his practice sword. "It happens to everyone."
Yuki stared at him for exactly three seconds. Then she turned away, and Shin'ya was almost completely certain she was hiding a smile.
Almost completely.
Later, during another break, Shin'ya made the mistake of trying to demonstrate a sword technique he'd seen in a manga.
"Okay so in this one series," he started, adopting what he clearly believed was a dramatic stance, "the character holds the sword like this – grip reversed, blade angled down – and then the strike comes from–"
"That would break your wrist."
"It looks really cool though–"
"Your wrist would snap on impact."
"What if I did it really fast–"
"Speed doesn't change anatomy."
Shin'ya lowered the sword slowly.
"The manga lied to me," he said quietly.
"Most stories lies to you about swords."
"This is devastating news."
"Welcome to reality."
He stood there for a moment, genuinely mourning. Yuki watched him with the expression of someone who had expected exactly this.
"Are you done grieving?" she asked.
"Give me a second."
"..."
"Okay I'm done."
By the time the light coming through the high windows had shifted a reminder that a day here lasted significantly longer than he was used to – Shin'ya's arms were properly tired. Good tired, the kind that meant something had actually happened, not just the kind that came from doing nothing wrong.
He sat against the wall. Yuki sat across from him, setting her practice sword aside.
"You're not terrible," she said.
"High praise."
"It's accurate."
"Can I quote you on that? 'Shin'ya – not terrible. Yuki, professional sword person.'"
"Don't."
"Too late, it's already in my head."
Yuki picked up the Resonance Crystal from where it had been sitting and turned it over in her fingers again briefly, then set it down.
"In 3 hours" she said, "we start magic."
Shin'ya sat up slightly.
"What kind?"
"Basic. All seven elements, since apparently that's what you have access to." She paused. "We'll figure out which ones respond to you most naturally first. Even without a Primary, there may be elements that feel more intuitive than others."
"And if none of them do?
"Then you're a true Hollow and we work with what we have."
Shin'ya looked at the crystal.
All seven colors. Perfect balance. Something that had never happened before, apparently.
He wasn't sure if that made him special or just strange.
Probably both, he decided.
"Hey Yuki," he said.
"What."
"Thanks. For not making a big deal out of the crystal thing."
She was quiet for a moment.
"It is a big deal," she said. "I'm just waiting until I understand it better before I make it one."
Shin'ya nodded slowly.
That was, he thought, probably the most Yuki thing she'd ever said.
— To Be Continued —