Thursday.
A lot had changed since Friday.
The low tiers of Silvic High had started looking at me differently. Not with the usual mix of pity and second-hand embarrassment that came from watching someone absorb punishment and keep coming back for more. It was something else.
Recognition, maybe. A handful of them had started talking back to their bullies this week. A few had even gone further than that. The confidence was new, and it wasn't entirely mine to claim.
Aria's return had done most of the heavy lifting. With her back in the building, the hallways felt different. Louder, in a better way. The low tiers moved through them like people who'd remembered they were allowed to take up space.
Aria had been coming down to the lower floor cafeteria too, just to eat and talk, sitting with low tiers the same way she always had before her suspension. Like the hierarchy was a rule that applied to other people.
Tyler was suspended. Two weeks, starting Monday — the result of an anonymous recording sent to Mr Ross's office that contained a confession in Tyler's own voice, acquired through methods I was choosing not to think too hard about.
Two weeks was enough. It got him out of the building, out of my immediate radius, and gave the rest of the school a chance to breathe without his specific kind of gravitational pull distorting everything around it.
And somewhere in all of that, I'd started to notice something sitting quietly at the edge of my thinking.
This was it, wasn't it? What I'd been working toward. To beat Tyler. Clear my name. Stop being the school's designated punching bag. The original mission was completed.
So why did it feel like a comma instead of a period?
"Hey, grey eyes."
I looked up.
Aria was standing at the end of my table, food tray in hand, looking at me with that expression she had — the one that occupied some territory between amusement and challenge, like she was waiting to see whether you'd say something worth responding to.
She set the tray down on the table with more force than strictly necessary, apparently under the impression that this counted as being careful. Then she sat, no question, no pause— drove her fork into a pile of cabbage, and took a bite loud enough to register.
"I prefer eating alone," I said.
"Yeah." She chewed. Wiggled the fork. "That's your problem."
"If you're expecting a thank-you for the other day—"
"The low tiers have been telling me about you," she said, completely ignoring the sentence I was in the middle of. "Apparently you beat Tyler. Big hero moment." The snicker was small but deliberate. "They must think you're some hotshot knight now."
I kept eating. Gave her nothing.
"I'm curious though." She tilted her head slightly, studying me with the particular attentiveness of someone running a calculation. "How did you actually pull that off? He's a middle-tier. You're—" a pause that carried its own commentary, "—a guy who appears to have a personal objection to the gym."
Her eyes did a quick assessment as she said it. Not mean, exactly. Just thorough. The kind of look someone gives when they've spent enough time training to develop opinions about people who haven't.
She had a point. I wasn't going to say that out loud.
Cocky idiot.
I went back to my food. In silence. And just when it seemed like she'd exhausted the topic and might consider leaving me alone, her phone notification sounded. She pulled it out, glanced at the screen — and something shifted in her face. Not a big reaction, but a real one. Eyes slightly wider. Scrolling slowing down.
"My application got approved already?" She wasn't talking to me exactly. More just processing out loud. "I only submitted it an hour ago."
"You applied for the BHA?" The words came out before I'd decided to say them. "Why?"
It was a fair question. Everything I knew about Aria — which was assembled mostly from observation and school rumours, pointed to someone who found the hierarchy distasteful at a fundamental level.
Hunters were government-sponsored, yes, but they were also a power structure. A ranked system with allocation and hierarchy built into its design. It didn't immediately fit the person who spent her lunch breaks in the lower floor cafeteria and got suspended for making the Order uncomfortable.
"Why not?" She'd put the phone away and returned to the cabbage. Loud and unapologetic. "Does someone need a specific reason to apply?"
I didn't answer that directly. But it opened something in my own thinking.
My reason for not applying was powerlessness. The absence of an ability would make me anything other than a visible underperformer in an examination where everyone else would be demonstrating something functional and visible. That had been the comfortable reason to hold.
Except that thousands of people were probably applying right now. And only ten would be selected across the entire country. Even with an ability, the odds were the odds. The powerlessness was almost beside the point.
Chronic justification. Amelia had used that specific phrase in her last pep talk. The pattern of finding reasons why the hard thing wasn't worth attempting, because the alternative —attempting it and failing — was worse than not trying at all. She'd been fairly direct about where that pattern led.
The BHA had extended participation terms to cripples. That was a one-time condition. A window with a specific close date.
"I actually do have a reason," Aria said, after a stretch of silence that had almost convinced me the conversation was over. "College is three more years and a graduation hat. I've done the math. The BHA is eighteen months, and when you come out the other side, you have a placement. A job. Something real." She speared another forkful. "I'm not planning to work in a restaurant indefinitely. So BHA is the move — if I'm lucky."
Lucky.
I turned the word over and almost said something about it, then didn't. Because Aria Sinclair calling herself lucky in the context of a competitive examination was the kind of understatement that borders on misdirection.
Whatever rank she was carrying — and the Order's visible discomfort around her was the most reliable data point I had — it was not a rank that needed luck.
She was A-rank, at minimum. Possibly higher. If it was higher than that — if she was operating in the range that put her outside the normal scaling structure entirely — then the word for that was transcendent.
A rank higher than S-rank. The kind of person who lived quietly under the radar of what the system could accurately measure, because announcing what you actually were tended to complicate things significantly.
I was probably speculating. But the arithmetic kept coming out the same.
"Are you planning to register?" Her eyes came up, direct, waiting.
"Not your business." I cleared my throat and looked at the wall. "Are you going to leave?"
"Are you going to eat that?" She reached across, scooped my mashed potatoes without waiting for an answer.
"Hey—"
***
The staff room door had a handle.
I was aware of this because my hand had been resting on it for approximately two minutes without doing anything.
Why am I still standing here.
It wasn't a difficult question. The answer was embarrassment, the specific kind that came not from what people would say in the moment, but from the anticipation of it. The teachers at Silvic High had their own relationship with students in my position.
And it wasn't subtle. The stare that communicated you were a resource drain. The judgment that arrived pre-formed before you'd said anything. The institutional habit of putting a cripple in the category of not applicable before the relevant question had even been asked.
They'd probably try to redirect me. Find some procedural reason why registration wasn't straightforward for someone like me. Something that wasn't technically a refusal but functioned as one.
So what.
I'd walked into Tyler's territory and gotten a system through it anyway. I'd gotten punched into the floor enough times to track it, gotten back up the same number of times, and somewhere in the accumulation of that, things had started to shift. The embarrassment had been constant. The outcomes had changed.
BHA registration was a door. I was standing in front of it. The worst outcome was that someone on the other side said no.
I could handle no.
I'd built a tolerance for worse.
"Good news and bad news," Amelia said, her hologram appearing before me without announcement. "Good news first, a challenger in the tournament has flagged your progress and sent you a duel invitation."
I processed that. The street fight tournament was structured around the system's own seeded opponents, the idea that a real challenger had noticed movement in my stats was a different kind of signal entirely. Like something in the tournament had started paying attention.
"And the bad news?"
A panel opened to my left. Cropped profile image: a girl, purple hair, purple eyes, a grin that communicated something about her relationship with consequences, specifically, that she didn't have much of one. The kind of expression that belonged to someone who found other people's discomfort genuinely entertaining.
Below the image:
[Opponent]
[Name: EMBER]
[Difficulty: Impossible]
[Duel / Decline]
Impossible.
Not insane. A full tier above that. Which meant this wasn't a challenger who'd come looking for a fair fight, this was something else entirely. The kind of person who picked targets specifically because the gap was interesting to them, not because the outcome was in question.
And yet.
How much would this move the stats?
"Amelia." I could feel the shape of the smile on my face before I'd decided to put it there. "What kind of stat boost would an impossible-difficulty duel actually produce?"
The look she gave me had several layers. The top one was exasperation. Underneath that, something closer to disbelief. And under that, I thought, something that might have been the beginning of resignation.
"You're thinking about accepting." She said it flat. "You want to die."
"Maybe a little." I kept the smile where it was. "Duel."
"Ren—!"