It was Ansel's second day at The Unified Training Academy. Though he was oblivious to it, rumors about his forthcoming spar with Dominic were already floating about the school.
Ansel was held up in the cafeteria for his morning break. He was seated beside Rotteger at a secluded table tucked away in the building's corner. The morning's influx of students caused a deluge of bodies that swarmed around the kitchen like moths to a flame. Luckily for Ansel and Rotteger, their mathematics class had ended early, allowing them ample time to pick out their meals.
"So," Rotteger swallowed a mouthful of ham sandwich, "...are the rumors true?"
"Huh?" Ansel asked, his eyes not looking away from his mathematics notebook spread out on the table in front of him. "...what rumors?" His voice trailed off. "...hey, do I bring x over to the—"
"Yes, and then complete the square and you'll put it in turning-point form. B-but that's beside the point!" Rotteger almost squished his breakfast in a fit of irritation. "Are you actually planning to spar with Dominic?"
"Wait... what?" Ansel finally looked over at his friend. "...how did you hear about that?"
"I just overheard some students talking..." Rotteger shook his head. "Seriously, I don't know who would spread such a stupid rumor. You might as well make it clear that you aren't sparring with Dominic, huh? Like, seriously... who would voluntarily spar with that—"
"But I am sparring with Dominic."
"Yes, exactly—" Rotteger took a bite out of his sandwich, yet to register Ansel's words. As he was about to swallow, the veins around his eyes began to bulge as he choked on a stray piece of lettuce. "Hggh!" He coughed, dislodging the lettuce from his throat. "You... WHAT?!"
"Uh... Rot, are you okay? Do you need some water, because..." Ansel shifted his shoulders, slinging his school bag in front of him to pick out the water bottle carried in its side pocket.
"Ansel, I'm fine." Rotteger regained his composure. "...so you've actually decided to spar with Dominic?"
"Yeah, I have." Ansel nodded.
"Are you... sure? You know what happened to the last person who challenged him—that being Samson. He hasn't even regained consciousness yet!"
"I won't let Dominic do that to me. If I want to help him, then I have to win." Ansel's gaze narrowed, a determined flame sending embers across his eyes.
"...what do you mean? If I were at Dominic's level of combat ability and got defeated, then I doubt 'happy' would describe what I'd feel at that moment."
"I'm not quite sure I understand myself... but I have a feeling Dominic's hiding something."
"Interesting..." Rotteger pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Perhaps—haahh..." His breath caught in his throat as his eyes fixed on a point further past Ansel's shoulders. He reached up with a trembling finger, his voice coming out hoarse. "A-Ansel."
Ansel slowly turned around, swallowing a bite of his sandwich. Behind him stood the looming figure of Cerua, her face hidden in the darkness, the black pools of her eyes locked onto him with undisguised judgment. "Oh. Morning, Cerua! We have history next, right?"
"Are you insane?" Her voice seemed to send tremors through the very earth itself. Her hands held a tray containing a sandwich, an apple, and a plastic bottle of water. Her posture was straight and curt, yet the terrifying aura that shrouded her face in shadow shattered that tranquil picture into a million pieces.
"Oh... I—" Ansel felt a bead of sweat run down his temple. "I'm... sorry?"
Cerua slammed her food tray down onto the table, making Rotteger flinch in fear. She sat down opposite the two boys, letting out a short breath to calm her temper. "Ansel," she spoke with her eyes gently closed, "...you're sparring Dominic?"
"Yes, I am." Ansel gulped.
"How do you plan on doing that when you can't even activate your ability?" Cerua opened her eyes, staring at Ansel head-on, her gaze unwavering.
Rotteger's lips parted in shock as he turned to look at Ansel. "You can't activate your ability... at all?" he asked, eyes widening. "...that doesn't make sense."
"Look," Cerua sighed, picking up her apple, "...do you even have any physical combat experience? Have you at least trained in physical combat before?"
"Well," Ansel sheepishly rubbed the nape of his neck, his cheeks tinged pink with slight embarrassment, "I stabbed someone when I was seven, but that's it."
"You're going to die," Cerua spat out, watching as Ansel shrank into his seat like a child being scolded. "...that is, if you don't activate your ability sometime within the next two weeks."
Rotteger recovered from the shock of discovering Ansel's inability. "Perhaps it's not that you can't activate your ability. Maybe you just don't know the required conditions."
Cerua turned her attention to Rotteger, watching as the boy readily avoided her gaze. Cerua was well known across the academy for her combat prowess and leadership skills. It made sense that her presence would prove intimidating for anyone in the school's lower social echelons. "What do you mean?"
"T-take my ability, for example." Rotteger piped up, quickly explaining the nature of his ability to Cerua. "...so I can see vague images of someone's future—a half-formed foresight—but in order to activate my ability, I must be looking at someone's palm."
"...I see." Ansel pondered. "So there must be some unknown requirement for me to access my ability."
Cerua rested her chin on her hands, her brow furrowing in contemplation. "...Do you have any ideas? You said that the last time you ever activated your ability was seven years ago, so think back to then. Was there anything special or unique about you at that moment?"
"Well, I do suppose I was under a lot of pressure." Ansel remembered the sight of his mother trying desperately to suppress her tears, and the predatory smile etched onto Yoran's face.
"That's too broad," Rotteger interrupted. "...a requirement for an ability has to be kind of specific."
"We shouldn't be bringing up any unwritten rules," Cerua spoke to Rotteger. "The nature of chords and abilities is still heavily debated. It's impossible to have a clear picture, so that means that—"
"Anything's possible..." Ansel finished Cerua's sentence, his hand coming up to stroke his chin.
"It isn't just some unwritten rule," Rotteger worked up the courage to debate Cerua. "...It's based on statistics and data collected over the span of hundreds of years. And that data clearly shows that there's a minimum nuance to ability activation requirements!"
"...Oh, there is?" Cerua scoffed. "How 'nuanced' something is is entirely subjective, so all that data can go straight in the bin. It's pointless."
Rotteger adjusted his glasses, grumbling something incomprehensible under his breath as his shoulders slumped with defeat. 'She's terrifying.'
"I don't think I'll be able to rely on my ability during the spar." Ansel made up his mind, looking down at his palms and clenching them. "...I have to rely on my physical strength."
Cerua bit her lip, staring blankly at Ansel with confusion in her eyes. "But you're all skin and bones."
"Harsh!" Rotteger hissed, patting Ansel's shoulder.
"Not like you're any beefier, Glasses."
"I have two weeks to prepare... that's more than enough time to learn something, heh." Ansel stood up, turning his head to slowly look at Cerua, who raised an eyebrow at him. "...if you don't mind—"
"You want me to train you?" Cerua spoke, letting out a short huff of air. "Pffft!" She started to laugh, making Rotteger uncomfortably twiddle his thumbs. "...why would I help you train? And besides, what are you even hoping to get done in two weeks?"
"Um..." Ansel looked off to the side, hesitating for a moment before opening his mouth to speak. "You... do kind of owe me. I stopped Dominic from sitting next to you yesterday..."
"..." Cerua went silent, a flush of color springing to her cheeks as she bit the insides of them. Her foot tapped against the ground with a staccato rhythm as her face scrunched up. "Mm, fine!" She snapped her head to the side. "But I won't be the one teaching you, all right?"
"Thank you!" Ansel beamed. "...I hope it's not too much trouble."
"Whatever... just a heads-up—the person who's going to be teaching you, she's kind of an oddball. Her family are the Garden's best martial artists, but they're all kind of... quirky."
"Quirky?" Rotteger tilted his head to the side.
"Ansel, you'll see when you meet her. Just make sure to book Training Ground Delta for a session after school tomorrow." Cerua stood up next, taking a sip of her water in the meantime. "Break's almost over, so we should get going." She spared one last quick glance at Ansel. "...good luck with practical combat this evening. Do your best."
"Thanks, I will." Ansel smiled, picking up his backpack and walking off toward the cafeteria exit.
Rotteger gently waved his hand, calling out, "Y-yeah, good luck!" As he watched Ansel's figure grow fainter among the crowd of students, now left alone with Cerua—just the two of them in a secluded corner of the room—Rotteger wracked his mind for something to say.
"I'm Rotteger," he spoke with his gaze downcast. "...t-that's my name, I mean. Since you didn't know. My friends just call me Rot, though."
Cerua looked down at Rotteger with a perplexed expression. "...okay."
* * *
Ansel walked out of his changing stall—fitted in The Unified Academy's training clothes: a large navy-blue shirt that covered his frame, accompanied by a pair of black shorts that fit snugly around his waist. As he exited onto Training Ground Beta, memories of orientation day began to stir within his head.
He was standing on the very same sand where Dominic had beaten Samson. The crater in the wall had been covered up, but cracks still spiderwebbed across the perimeter. Holding up his arm to shield his eyes from the sun, Ansel approached the rest of his peers, crowded around the class's instructor.
A familiar-looking man stood in the middle of the sandpit. His hair was slicked-back platinum blond, and the fine hairs of his goatee glinted in the sunlight. "All right! Hurry up, hurry up! I don't have all day!" Instructor Edward Hargrove called out, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
Edward watched his students bundle up around him, taking note of one face in particular: Ansel, who had unintentionally rained all over his one-on-one private parade with Franka in the medical wing. 'Gotcha...'
Ansel stopped next to Eyra, who was already bouncing up and down on her heels. "Hey, Ansel!" She waved erratically with a mischievous grin. "...you pumped, or what?"
"Yeah... I guess I'm excited." Ansel tried to offer a smile, his fingers clutching desperately onto the fabric of his shorts.
"What's with the disappointed tone?" Eyra stretched her spine in one direction, then the other. "The instructor's apparently a real sourpuss..." she whispered. "...that means he's going to push us extra hard. So be warned, Ansel... I'm not going to go easy, not even if I'm paired up with you."
"I thought we were doing team exercises," Ansel spoke with a confused tone, his eyes following the movements of Eyra's stretches.
"We rotate between individual sparring and team exercises with every lesson." Eyra planted her hands on her hips. "...Professor Wright told me that we'd be doing sparring today, since we haven't covered enough of the syllabus to start with team exercises."
"Oh, I see." Ansel's fingers released their grip on his shorts as he crossed his arms over his chest in a meager attempt to quell the frantic beating of his heart. 'There's no avoiding it...'
"You feeling nervous?" Eyra asked, sensing Ansel's strange behavior. "Don't worry, it's only our first lesson. Even if you lose today, you'll have a bunch of other opportunities left to win throughout the rest of the year. So stop being a wimp and hold your head up high."
"Yeah," Ansel nodded, swallowing down his anxiety. "...I'll give it my best shot." He closed his eyes, thinking back to Cerua and Rotteger. 'I'll do my best. Even if I know I'll end up losing.'
Edward finished explaining the structure of his lesson to the students, eventually pulling out a small roster from inside his shirt and reading out the fixtures. "...Bayal will be with Hannah, Kessler with Lasi..." he carried on until he reached the final two pairs. "...Ansel with Sven, and Eyra with Sal. Does that sound good?"
All the students nodded in unison—except Ansel. His eyes swept over his peers, searching for his sparring partner. Amid the sea of turning heads, he locked eyes with a boy standing at the opposite end. He stood at a similar height, yet had a sturdier build. His hair was a messy golden blond that carried a subtle neatness, and his eyes were a prismatic blue that seemed to pierce through Ansel's soul. 'Sven...'