The ceremonial robes were hideous.
This was not a matter of opinion. It was, by the time Class 2-B had been standing in them for twenty minutes in the castle's preparation hall, an established fact that approximately thirty-four people had independently arrived at and were now expressing in varying degrees of volume.
The robes were white - which was fine - with gold trim - which was acceptable - in a cut that appeared to have been designed by someone who had never met a human body and was working from a rough description. Long in the front, shorter in the back, with sleeves that were simultaneously too wide at the shoulder and too tight at the elbow, and a collar that stood up on its own in a way that suggested strong opinions.
"I look like a paper crane," said the girl beside Ren, tugging at her collar.
"You look fine," said Ren, who was saying this to everyone on principle because someone had to, and also because he had decided that if he didn't look at himself in the mirror he could maintain the useful fiction that he looked acceptable.
He had made this decision after looking in the mirror.
"Takahashi, your collar is folded in," Hana said, passing behind him without stopping.
He fixed it without comment. She was already three people down the line, making small adjustments to people's robes with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that if they were all going to look ridiculous they were going to look presentably ridiculous.
Her own robe fit better than everyone else's. Ren suspected she had done something to it in the night. He also suspected that if he asked her about it she would say she hadn't done anything and the evidence would be somehow insufficient to argue with.
"The broaches are nice at least," someone offered from down the line.
"The broach is the only thing that's nice," someone else replied.
The broaches were, Ren admitted internally, genuinely well-made. Gold, engraved with the Dominion crest, warm in the hand in the way of things that had been enchanted. They'd been distributed that morning with instructions to wear them at all times - for your protection and identification within the kingdom's borders, so that all citizens may recognize you as the Dominion's honored heroes.
He had put his on without comment. Added it to the list.
"Ren."
He turned. Yui Asano had appeared beside him, adjusting her own collar with an expression of resignation. She was one of the quieter members of the class - perceptive in a way that made her good at noticing things people didn't intend to show.
She was noticing something now, apparently about him.
"What," he said.
"You've been thinking since last night," she said, simply.
"I'm always thinking."
"You're thinking differently since last night."
He looked at her for a moment.
"The wagon," she said, more quietly. Not a question.
"Drop it," he said. Not unkindly. Just - not here, not now, not in a room full of people and attendants and the pre-ceremony noise of thirty-four people in terrible robes trying to look like heroes.
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she dropped it, the way Yui dropped things - not gone, just set aside somewhere she could find it later.
"Your collar is still uneven," she said, and fixed it herself before he could respond, and walked away.
Ren stood with a straight collar and an unresolved thought and did what he was good at: he set his face and squared his shoulders and looked at the large doors at the end of the hall that were about to open.
Whatever came after the doors, he could handle.
He was good at what came after doors.
The roar of the crowd hit them before the light did.
The doors opened onto a balcony - wide, stone-railed, overlooking a plaza that was, by any reasonable measure, full. Thousands of people, packed from the base of the castle steps to the far end of the plaza where the buildings began, filling every visible space. Flags. Color. Sound that had physical weight.
For a moment, nobody in Class 2-B moved.
Then Ren walked out first, because someone had to, and the crowd's roar went up a register and everything else followed.
Seraphiel stood at the center of the balcony, radiant in white and gold, her wings spread to their full extension in a way that was clearly practiced and clearly effective because the crowd responded to it like a wave. She raised her hands. The crowd somehow got louder.
She began to speak, her voice carrying across the plaza with the effortless projection of someone who had been doing this for decades.
Ren stood in his paper-crane robe and listened to himself being called a beacon of hope and felt the crowd's energy moving through the balcony like a current and found, despite everything - despite the locked doors and the unexplained rune and the list he was keeping - that some part of him responded to it anyway.
He was seventeen. He had a Tier 6 combat system and a crowd of thousands saying his name. Some reactions were just chemical.
He let himself have it for the length of the ceremony and tucked the list away and cheered when everyone else cheered.
Behind him, standing at the back of the group with her notebook closed for once, Hana Mizuki watched the crowd with the expression of someone reading a text in a language they understood very well and did not entirely trust.
The after-party occupied the castle's great hall.
It was, even by the standards of people who had spent two weeks being shown impressive things, genuinely impressive. Long tables with food Haruki would never get to eat. Musicians in the gallery. Candles in quantities that suggested the Dominion had strong opinions about ambiance. The nobility of the capital moved through the space with the practiced ease of people who attended events like this regularly and knew exactly how to talk to heroes without saying anything of substance.
Class 2-B adapted at different speeds.
Some of them took to it immediately — the food, the attention, the novelty of being treated as important by people in expensive clothes. Some hung back in clusters, performing enjoyment without quite feeling it. A few had found each other in a corner and were speaking quietly in Japanese, which felt like breathing after a long time underwater.
Ren ate well and talked to anyone who approached him and was genuinely good at both of these things. He had the instincts of someone who had always been in the room - comfortable with attention, generous with energy, easy to be around. The nobility liked him because he was uncomplicated to talk to and looked the part.
He was also, continuously and without showing it, watching the room. Looking at the guards' positions. Noting which attendants moved where. Filing things.
The list was very organized by now.
Hana spoke to three separate senior nobles in the space of an hour, each conversation brief and precise, extracting information in the way that a person extracts a splinter - delicately and completely. She circled back to the food table and stood beside Yui and they exchanged four words in Japanese that were so quiet that nobody nearby could hear them.
Yui nodded once.
Hana moved on.
The hallway was quieter than the great hall but not empty - staff moved through it with trays and purposeful expressions, and the distant sound of the party carried through the stone walls like something underwater.
Ren had stepped out for air, which was only partially true. He had stepped out because he had seen which direction Seraphiel moved when she left the hall briefly, and he had made a decision that had the shape of impulsiveness and the structure of something he'd been building toward since last night.
He found the hallway. Found it not empty.
Seraphiel was at the far end, speaking to an attendant in a low voice. She registered Ren's approach with the peripheral awareness of someone who always knew where everyone was and dismissed the attendant with a small gesture as he got closer.
She turned to him with a warm, composed expression. The expression she wore the way other people wore jewelry - chosen, fitted, always appropriate to the occasion.
"Takahashi," she said. "Are you enjoying the celebration?"
"Yes, thank you," he said. "It's incredible."
"You were wonderful today. The crowd responded to you very naturally."
"Thank you." He paused, doing the thing he was good at - making a pause feel comfortable rather than loaded. "I had a question. If that's alright."
"Of course."
He'd thought about how to ask this. He was direct by nature but he wasn't careless, and he had understood since the wagon that whatever was in front of him required more care than his usual approach.
"Yesterday, during the return from the training ground," he said. "We passed through the courtyard. There was a transport going through."
Nothing moved in Seraphiel's expression. Nothing at all.
"There were children in it," Ren continued. "In the wagon. Demon children."
"Mm."
"I was wondering - one of them, a girl, she looked - I just wanted to know if she was alright. If there was somewhere they were going that was-"
"Oh." Seraphiel's expression shifted into something warm and slightly amused, in the specific way of an adult reassuring a child who has worried about something they don't need to worry about. "You don't need to concern yourself with her."
"I'd just like to know-"
"She's dead," Seraphiel said.
The word landed in the hallway and stayed there.
Ren didn't move. Kept his face still the way he'd learned to keep his face still on the arena floor - don't show what you're reading, don't show where you're going.
"Dead," he said.
"They were in poor condition when they were brought in," Seraphiel said, with the tone of someone reporting weather. "The journey through the Grey is harsh. Some of them don't survive processing."
"Processing," Ren said.
"It's unavoidable, I'm afraid."
"Why were they in shackles?"
Seraphiel looked at him with an expression that recalibrated slightly - not concern, exactly, but the look of someone who was deciding how much to explain and to whom.
"They were found living in the Grey," she said, settling on an answer. "In a structure built without authorization in a controlled no-man's territory. Demon settlements in the Grey are in direct violation of the Border Mandate."
"A controlled territory," Ren said. "The Grey is controlled?"
"All land between the Dominion border and the Demon Territories falls under Dominion jurisdiction," she said, pleasantly. "It has for three hundred years."
"And the children-"
"Were part of an illegal settlement," Seraphiel said. The warmth in her voice remained, which was somehow worse than if it hadn't. "You have to understand, Takahashi, that this world operates differently than yours. The demons are not - they don't think the way humans do. They don't organize themselves the way you're familiar with. The children you saw were not children in the sense you understand the word."
Ren looked at her.
He thought about the girl in the wagon. The way she had looked up at him. The expression on her face that he hadn't had a word for and still didn't.
"She looked like a child," he said.
"Appearances can be-"
"She was small," he said. "And she was shackled. And now she's dead." He kept his voice level. Even. The arena floor voice. "And you're telling me she wasn't a child in the sense I understand it."
Seraphiel looked at him for a long moment.
The warmth in her expression didn't disappear. It just became something different underneath — like a painting over something that wasn't a wall.
"I know this is difficult," she said. "You come from a world with different frameworks. It takes time to adjust to the realities here. That's completely natural." A pause. "The important thing is that you and your classmates are safe, and that you are learning what you need to learn to carry out your sacred purpose." Another pause, smaller. "You are exceptional, Takahashi. Truly. I would hate for unnecessary concerns to distract you from that."
Ren heard what that sentence was doing.
He smiled at her — easy, uncomplicated, the smile he gave everyone.
"Of course," he said. "Thank you for explaining."
"Of course." She touched his shoulder briefly, the way adults touched shoulders when they were finished with a conversation and wanted it to end warmly. "Go enjoy the celebration. You've earned it."
He went back to the great hall.
He ate more food. He talked to more nobles. He laughed at the right moments and performed the right amount of charm and nobody looking at him would have seen anything different from the Ren Takahashi they'd observed all evening.
He found Hana at the food table at the end of the night, in the brief moment when they were both reaching for the same plate of something and the space around them happened to be empty.
He didn't look at her. Picked up the plate, put something on it, put it back.
"The girl from the wagon," he said, very quietly, in Japanese. "She's dead."
Hana's hand didn't stop moving. She poured herself a drink. Set the cup down.
"I know," she said, just as quietly.
He looked at her then. "You already-"
"I asked two hours ago." She picked up her cup. Looked at it. "I asked differently and got a longer answer, but the same answer."
Ren stood with that.
"Hana."
"Yes."
"The broach," he said. "The rune on the back."
She looked at him for the first time in the conversation. Something in her expression shifted — not surprise, exactly. More like recognition.
"Yes," she said.
"You know what it does."
"I have a theory," she said. "I've been working on confirming it."
"And?"
She looked at her drink. Looked at the room.
"Not here," she said. "Not tonight."
She walked back into the party and smiled at a noble who approached her and began a conversation that looked, from the outside, entirely ordinary.
Ren stood at the food table alone for a moment.
The list in the back of his head had several new items on it.
He was no longer sure what he was going to do with them.
He was beginning to suspect that was the point - that the list was supposed to stay a list, filed in the back of a head, never assembled into anything that required action.
He picked up a drink he didn't intend to finish and went back into the party.
He did not look uncomplicated when he thought no one was watching.
TO BE CONTINUED ...