Haruki sat down.
The cushion accepted him like it had been waiting for exactly this moment—which, given the Academy's apparent obsession with orchestration, it possibly had been. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else. His hands were shaking slightly. He pressed them flat against his thighs and hoped nobody noticed.
You done? Rax asked. Because that was either the worst or best thing you've ever done and I genuinely can't tell which.
Neither can I.
Good. Consistency.
The auditorium buzzed around him with the particular energy of people who'd just witnessed something unexpected and were now trying to figure out how to file it away in their existing worldview. The Golden Trajectory students shot glances at him—some curious, some dismissive, one or two actively hostile. The blond in seat two had resumed his silent reciting, though his eyes kept drifting toward Haruki between phrases.
But Haruki wasn't paying attention to them anymore.
He was watching the room.
Old habit. Porter training. When you're the weakest person in any given space, you learn to read the currents before they become waves. You learn where the threats are gathering. You learn which conversations are harmless and which ones are sharpening themselves into something dangerous.
And right now, something was sharpening itself in the center block.
It started with laughter.
Not loud—not the kind that drew attention from across the room. Just the low, clustered chuckling of people who'd found common ground in mocking something they didn't understand. A group of four boys near the middle aisle, their uniforms slightly rumpled in ways that suggested deliberate carelessness rather than actual dishevelment.
Scholarship section. Lesser nobility. The kind of kids who'd worked hard enough to get here but not hard enough to feel secure about it.
In other words: insecure boys who needed someone else to look small so they could feel big.
Classic, Rax observed. I give it ten minutes before one of them approaches.
I'm not—
Look at the one in front. The broad shoulders. The jaw that looks like it was carved specifically for punching things. He hasn't taken his eyes off you since you sat down.
Haruki glanced. Once. Briefly. Enough to confirm.
The boy Rax was describing was built like someone who'd decided physical intimidation was easier than academic achievement. Dark hair swept back with product that probably cost more than Haruki's first month of meals. A face that would've been handsome if it wasn't arranged into a permanent expression of smug anticipation.
He was talking to a girl beside him—pretty, in the polished way of someone who'd learned early that appearance was currency. Her hand rested on his arm. Possessive. Territorial. The kind of touch that said this one's mine, back off without needing words.
Great, Haruki thought. Power couple. Exactly what I needed today.
The boy leaned over to whisper something to his friends. They laughed again—louder this time, confident enough to let the sound carry. One of them made a gesture that might have been a wave or might have been mockery directed at the Golden Trajectory section generally and Haruki specifically.
Definitely you, Sol confirmed. Their body language indicates focused attention. I'd estimate approach within five minutes.
Can I leave?
The ceremony isn't over. Principal Veshen is still speaking. Leaving now would draw more attention than staying.
So my options are 'get bullied' or 'get noticed leaving.'
Essentially, yes.
Fantastic.
Veshen droned on about academic integrity and the honor code and the sacred trust placed in Soldemn's students to represent the Kingdom's finest traditions. The words washed over Haruki without sticking—he'd heard versions of this speech a dozen times already, in different contexts, from different authority figures who all shared the same fundamental belief that rules applied to everyone except the people who made them.
He was calculating exit strategies when the boy arrived.
Not alone—that would've been too simple. He brought an entourage. Three others flanked him in a formation that screamed we've done this before, plus the girlfriend trailing slightly behind with an expression that suggested she wasn't entirely comfortable with whatever was about to happen but wasn't going to stop it either.
They stopped at the edge of the Golden Trajectory platform. Looking up at Haruki like he was an exhibit in a museum they'd paid to criticize.
"Well." The boy's voice carried the practiced casualness of someone who'd perfected the art of sounding threatening while appearing friendly. "Looks like we have a dead boy sitting with us here."
Dead boy.
The words landed exactly where they were meant to land.
Rax—
I know. The Chaos entity's voice had sharpened. Something protective lived in there now, buried under layers of snark and impulse. I know what he called you. Want me to—
No.
The girlfriend shifted. Her grip on the boy's arm tightened.
"Ricky," she said, her voice pitched lower. Conspiratorial. The kind of tone that was meant to sound like concern but actually performed concern for an audience. "You shouldn't say that. It's mean."
Ricky. Of course his name was Ricky.
Ricky scoffed—the sound sharp enough to cut, casual enough to deny intent if anyone objected. "What? It's true, isn't it? The guy literally said it himself. 'I was supposed to be dead.' I'm just repeating his words." He smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "Besides, seems like our dead boy here is going to be entertaining. Got the whole academy's attention with that little speech. Very dramatic. Very..." He tilted his head, examining Haruki like a specimen. "...interesting."
The word dripped with implication.
Behind Haruki, movement.
Subtle. Quiet. The kind of repositioning that happened when people wanted to surround something without announcing their intentions. Two of Ricky's posse had drifted backward during the exchange—one to Haruki's left, one to his right. Creating angles. Cutting off sightlines.
Standard ambush formation.
Haruki. Sol's voice carried urgency now. There are two—
I know.
They're positioning to—
I know.
How do you—
Haruki had spent three weeks in the Grey, where everything wanted to kill him and nothing announced its intentions politely. He'd survived the Ashfen Rift by noticing things before they became threats. He'd kept Maren alive by reading danger in body language before words formed.
Two people moving into his blind spots wasn't subtle. Not to him.
It was amateur hour. Rich-kid bullying tactics performed by children who'd never faced anything that couldn't be solved by daddy's money or daddy's connections.
Ricky was still talking—something about how dead boys should stay dead, how recommendations didn't change what someone actually was, how some people didn't belong no matter who vouched for them—but Haruki wasn't really listening anymore.
He was counting heartbeats.
Waiting for the moment when the one behind him committed.
It came exactly when he expected it to.
A shift in weight. The creak of shoe against platform flooring. A hand drawing back, preparing to grab his shoulder—or shove him, or strike him, or whatever these idiots had planned as their big intimidating move.
Haruki moved.
Not forward. Not to fight. Just—aside. A single step to his left, smooth and natural, like he was adjusting his seating position. The motion took him out of the reaching hand's trajectory while simultaneously placing his foot in the path of the attacker's forward momentum.
Physics did the rest.
The posse member—whoever he was, Haruki hadn't bothered learning names—tripped. Stumbled forward with the graceless flailing of someone whose balance had suddenly and unexpectedly betrayed them. Their arms windmilled. Their momentum, denied its original target, carried them onward and downward in an arc that happened to terminate approximately three meters in front of the principal's podium.
Where Principal Veshen was standing.
Where the tripping body collided with her knees in a tangle of limbs and embarrassment and sudden absolute silence.
The auditorium froze.
Ricky froze.
The girlfriend's hand dropped from his arm.
And Haruki—still seated, still apparently calm, still pressing his trembling hands against his thighs—looked at the scene unfolding before him with an expression of complete and utter innocence that he'd practiced specifically for moments like this.
...Did you just—
Yes.
Without looking?
He was loud. I heard him coming from three meters away.
That's—
That's Porter training. That's survival instinct. That's three months of learning that if you don't pay attention to your surroundings, you die.
Ricky's face had gone through several stages of emotion in rapid succession. Confusion. Shock. Rage. And now something colder—calculation. The look of someone realizing that their target wasn't what they'd assumed and recalibrating accordingly.
"You—" His voice came out strangled. "You'll pay for that."
"Will I?" Haruki kept his tone neutral. Curious, even. Like he genuinely wanted to understand the threat being made against him. "Pay for what, exactly? Sitting here? Existing? Being tripped toward by your friend?"
"Don't play dumb with me, you freak. You—you did something. You made him fall. Nobody just—"
"Mr. Valence." Veshen's voice cut through the confrontation like a blade. Cold. Precise. The voice of someone who'd dealt with exactly this kind of situation many times before and had long since lost patience for it. "And Mr....?" She looked down at the student still tangled at her feet.
"T-Tobias, ma'am. Tobias Miller. I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to—I just slipped—"
"I'm certain you did." Veshen's gaze swept from the fallen boy to Ricky to Haruki to the girlfriend and back again. Reading the scene. Reaching conclusions that Haruki suspected were significantly more accurate than anything Ricky could have predicted. "All four of you. My office. Immediately. The ceremony will continue without you."
"Suspended," someone whispered nearby. "On the first day. That's going on their permanent record."
"Both families are going to hear about this."
"Do you think they'll actually get expelled?"
The whispers multiplied. Fed on each other. Grew into a hum of gossip that would likely consume the Academy's social landscape for at least a week.
Haruki absorbed none of it.
He was watching Ricky being escorted out—watching the way the boy's shoulders hunched with humiliation and rage, the way his jaw clenched around words he couldn't safely say, the way he shot one final look back at Haruki that promised retribution in terms that didn't need verbal articulation.
That one's going to be trouble later, Rax observed.
They're all going to be trouble later. At least this one's predictable.
Predictable enemies are still enemies.
Enemies I can see coming. I'll take that over the alternative.
The auditorium doors closed behind Ricky and his posse. The ceremony resumed. Veshen continued her speech as if nothing had happened—though her eyes kept drifting toward Haruki's seat with something that might have been amusement or might have been interest or might have been both.
He ignored them all.
Counted the minutes until this was over.
Waited for the moment when he could disappear into the crowd and find somewhere quiet to process the fact that he'd just gotten two people suspended on his first day by doing almost nothing at all.
Club registration opened at noon.
The process was exactly as bureaucratic as Haruki had feared—a hall filled with tables representing every organized activity the Academy offered, each staffed by enthusiastic upperclassmen trying to convince first-years that their particular club was essential to a well-rounded education.
Combat Arts Club. Magical Theory Society. Dueling Association. Alchemical Research Group. Gourmet Exploration Society (which appeared to involve eating expensive food and writing pretentious descriptions of it). Noble Etiquette Circle (which appeared to involve exactly what the name suggested).
Haruki wandered through the chaos with no particular destination in mind.
He wasn't joining a club. Clubs meant commitment. Commitment meant visibility. Visibility meant attention. Attention meant—
You're spiraling, Sol interrupted.
I'm assessing risks.
You're finding excuses to isolate yourself. Again. Like you did in the bathroom this morning.
That turned out fine.
It turned into a public speech in front of the entire Academy. That is not most people's definition of 'fine.'
Fair point.
He was about to turn around and leave—find his dorm room, lock the door, exist in peace until tomorrow's disasters arrived—when something caught his eye.
A table at the very end of the hall. Past the popular clubs. Past the academic societies. Past even the strange niche groups that had clearly been created to satisfy specific administrative requirements about student organization participation.
This table was different.
For one thing, it was barely a table at all—more of a board propped up on crates, covered in a cloth that might once have been white but had faded into something closer to grey. For another, the banner hanging above it was handwritten in what appeared to be multiple different colors of ink, none of which matched each other:
OVERLY OPPRESSED OPPRESSIVE SUPERNATURAL CLUB
[O³S](Pronounced: Oh-Cube-Ess)
WE ACCEPT EVERYONE.(Mostly.)(Okay, some restrictions apply.)(Don't ask.)
...What am I looking at? Rax asked, and for once, he sounded genuinely baffled.
I have absolutely no idea.
Is this a joke?
Maybe? Or maybe it's exactly what it looks like.
Which is what, exactly?
Haruki didn't have an answer for that. So he did the only thing that made sense in this situation.
He walked closer.
The table was unoccupied when he arrived.
No, wait—that wasn't quite true. There was someone behind the table, but they were currently underneath it, making sounds that suggested either mechanical repair or ritual summoning. Possibly both.
"Hello?" Haruki tried.
A muffled response came from beneath the tablecloth. "Sec! Almost got the stabilization rune—just need to—there!"
Something clicked. Hissed. Emitting a small puff of smoke that curled upward in an elegant spiral before dissipating into nothing.
Then the person emerged.
She was...
Messy.
That was the word that presented itself first. Messy in a way that went beyond simple disorganization—this was the messiness of someone who'd been working on something complicated for far too long and had long since stopped caring about external presentation. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun that was attempting to escape in six different directions. Her glasses sat slightly crooked on her nose, smudged at the edges with something that might have been ink or soot or residual magical residue. Her uniform was wrinkled, stained at the cuffs, and bore evidence of at least three different activities that probably weren't part of standard Academy curriculum.
She pushed her glasses up with one finger.
Looked at Haruki.
Looked at him longer than a simple greeting required.
Then blinked—twice, rapidly, like she was resetting something behind her eyes—and extended a hand that bore calluses and small burns and the general wear of someone who touched things she shouldn't.
"Hey." Her voice came out rough. Unused. Like she'd been focusing on work for so long that conversation required a warmup period. "I'm Dorothy. Dorothy Vane. I run this—well, 'run' is generous. I facilitate. The O³S. We do... stuff."
"Stuff."
"Supernatural stuff. Oppressive stuff. Overly oppressed oppressive supernatural stuff. The name is very specific for legal reasons." She adjusted her glasses again. They immediately slid back to crooked. "You're the dead boy. From the speech. Sora, right? Haruki?"
People are going to keep calling me that, aren't they?
Probably. Own it. Make it yours.
"Yeah. That's me."
"Huh." Dorothy examined him with an intensity that felt less like evaluation and more like... recognition? Like she was seeing something familiar in his posture, his presence, the particular way he held himself like someone expecting attack from any direction. "Interesting. You've got... hmm."
She trailed off. Didn't finish the thought. Instead, she stepped aside and gestured vaguely toward the space behind the table—toward a curtain that hung across what might have been a doorway or might have been a hole in the wall that someone had decided to cover decoratively.
"We should talk more. Inside. If you want. No pressure. Well, some pressure. Minimal pressure. The kind of pressure that's more like firm encouragement."
Before Haruki could respond—before he could ask what she meant by 'inside' or whether 'interesting' was good or bad or something else entirely—the curtain parted.
And someone walked out.
Someone wearing a tuxedo.
An actual, genuine, formal black-tie tuxedo. Complete with bow tie. Cummerbund. The whole ensemble. In the middle of a club registration hall at a magical academy in a fantasy world where tuxedos shouldn't logically exist unless someone had specifically invented them for exactly this purpose.
What, Rax said flatly. What am I looking at.
I don't know.
Why is he wearing—
I don't know.
Is this normal? Is this a thing here? Do people just—
I DON'T KNOW.
The tuxedo-clad figure stopped. Looked at Haruki. Looked him up and down with the slow, deliberate assessment of someone encountering a problem they hadn't expected and were already deciding how to address it.
His expression—visible beneath perfectly styled hair and a jawline that could've been carved from marble—remained utterly neutral throughout the examination.
Then:
"No."
One word. Complete sentence. Final judgment delivered without elaboration or appeal process.
He turned around. Walked back through the curtain. Let it fall closed behind him as if the conversation—and Haruki's potential membership in the Overly Oppressed Oppressive Supernatural Club—had never happened.
D Dorothy stared at the empty curtain space for a moment.
Then she looked back at Haruki.
Her expression was caught somewhere between apology and resignation—the look of someone whose colleague (friend? coworker? fellow chaotic entity?) had just done something inconvenient and who was now responsible for managing the aftermath.
"So," she said. "That's Marcus. He does that. The tuxedo thing. The rejection thing. Most things, really. Don't take it personally."
"He rejected me in under three seconds based solely on looking at me."
"Yeah. That's actually pretty good for him. Last week he rejected someone in one-point-five. New record." She pushed her glasses up again. They slid back down. "Do you want to come inside anyway? See what we actually do? Make your own decision instead of letting Marcus make it for you?"
Haruki considered.
On one hand: he'd come to this academy intending to keep his head down, avoid attention, survive until graduation without revealing anything important about himself. Joining a club called the Overly Oppressed Oppressive Supernatural Club—run by a girl who looked at him like she recognized something and included someone who wore a tuxedo and rejected people for sport—was the opposite of that plan.
On the other hand:
Everything about this place felt wrong in a way that aligned with everything else that felt wrong about this academy. The missing students. The mana harvesting. The secrets that Principal Veshen was keeping behind frozen eyes and careful smiles.
If there were answers to find, they wouldn't be found in the Combat Arts Club or the Gourmet Exploration Society.
They'd be found in places like this. Places that didn't make sense. Places that existed despite institutional pressure to eliminate them. Places full of people who looked at Haruki like they saw something familiar in the way he held himself.
This is a terrible idea, Sol observed.
Agreed.
We're going to do it anyway, aren't we?
Haruki looked at the curtain. At Dorothy's tired, hopeful expression. At the handwritten banner declaring acceptance for everyone (mostly).
"Yeah," he said. "Show me inside."
Dorothy's smile—when it finally arrived—transformed her face entirely. What had been plain became warm. What had been guarded became genuine. Whatever she'd seen in him that sparked recognition, she'd clearly been hoping he'd say yes.
"Follow me," she said. "And try not to touch anything. Some of it bites."
She pulled aside the curtain.
Beyond it: stairs. Descending. Into darkness that seemed to go deeper than the building's foundations should allow.
Of course it does, Haruki thought. Of course it does.
He followed her down.
Into whatever waited below.
[END OF CHAPTER 3]