— Day three. Morning lecture hall.
She Was Already in the Room When He Arrived
Third row, left side, two seats from the window. The same position she'd taken in every lecture since orientation. King had noticed this on day two—she picked the seat that gave her the widest sightline across the room without being at the back, where she'd have to crane forward to see detail. It was a good seat. He'd considered the same one before taking the center row.
He took his usual spot. Third row, center.
Sora's pen was already moving.
The lecture hadn't started yet. The instructor—Mana Theory Fundamentals, a compact man named Professor Hideo who spoke quickly and wrote on the board in a script so small that the students in the back row had collectively petitioned for larger chalk—was arranging his notes at the podium. Students were settling in. Haruto was dropping things. Aki was passing Haruto a pen because he'd dropped his. Riku was already reading ahead in the assigned text with the focused efficiency of a person who had decided to be three pages further along than everyone else by the time the lecture began.
King looked at Sora.
She wasn't writing lecture notes. The lecture hadn't started.
She was writing something else. The angle of the notebook put it mostly out of view, but the pace was wrong for note-taking—too deliberate, too spaced. Not information capture. Composition.
She's writing about something she already knows, he thought.
He looked away.
He opened his own notebook to a fresh page and dated the top corner.
From two seats to his left, without pausing, Sora wrote:
Day 3, Morning. Lecture Hall B.
Subject arrived exactly on time. Chose same position as previous sessions—third row center, slight angle toward the board's left side where the complex diagrams are typically drawn. This is consistent with someone who prioritizes information quality over social proximity. He did not choose the seat beside mine despite it being empty. He did not choose the seat away from mine. He chose the mathematically central position in the row.
He noticed I was writing before the lecture started. He looked for approximately two seconds, made no comment, and opened his own notebook.
He is aware of being observed. He has been aware since the fountain district on Day 1. He has not asked me to stop.
Anomaly confirmed. Further study required.
She underlined this last line. Then she underlined it again. Then a third time, pressing slightly harder on the final pass.
She turned to a fresh page.
---
"—the fundamental principle of mana-to-force conversion," Professor Hideo was saying, "is that the energy expenditure is never fully efficient. All mana expression loses between twelve and eighteen percent of its theoretical output to what we call conversion drift—"
King wrote this down.
He also, privately, noted that the twelve-to-eighteen percent range was an average across talent types. Unique Talent conversion drift was typically lower—some Unique holders operated at four to six percent loss. The number the professor was using was accurate for the student population in this room, most of whom had Common or Rare classifications, but would not hold for outlier classifications above B-rank.
He wrote down what the professor said.
The professor said twelve to eighteen percent.
King wrote twelve to eighteen percent.
I am a student, he thought. This is what students write.
"Question." It was the student two rows up, on the right side—a girl King recognized from the assessment yard. A-rank candidate by the look of the insignia, which put her above most of the class. "Does the drift vary by talent type?"
"An excellent question," Professor Hideo said. "Yes. The twelve-to-eighteen percent figure is a population average—"
King stopped writing for a moment.
He looked at the board.
He looked at the girl who had asked the question.
Then he looked at Sora, who had also stopped writing, and was also looking at the girl who had asked the question, with an expression that said she had been thinking the same thing and was mildly annoyed that someone else had asked it first.
Their eyes met briefly.
Sora turned back to the board.
King turned back to the board.
He wrote down the professor's answer.
From two seats over, without looking up, Sora wrote: He paused. He already knew the answer. He wrote it down anyway. She drew a small star in the margin beside this observation, which was her notation for significant, return to this.
---
Haruto found King after the lecture.
He always found King after lectures, with the reliable accuracy of someone who had designated himself King's point of contact and operated on the assumption that King would be wherever King was supposed to be and could be retrieved from there. He appeared at King's shoulder in the corridor outside Lecture Hall B with the slightly rumpled appearance of someone who had been paying attention for an hour and found it more effortful than combat training.
"Lunch," Haruto said.
"Yes," King said.
"Aki wants to go to the south cafeteria today. She says the east kitchen runs a different menu on odd days."
"All right."
They walked. Riku fell into step beside them from the doorway—he always appeared from slightly unexpected angles, which King suspected was less deliberate than it looked and more a function of how Riku moved through spaces, always along the wall, always at the efficient edge of foot traffic.
"The twelve-to-eighteen percent figure," Riku said, to King. Not to Haruto. To King specifically.
"Yes," King said.
"You stopped writing before the professor finished the sentence."
"I was listening."
"You had already written the answer in the margin of your notebook," Riku said. "I could see it from the seat beside you. You wrote it before he said it."
A pause.
"I made an inference," King said.
"From what information."
"The logical structure of the lecture topic," King said. "If conversion drift is a fixed percentage, it's more useful as a variable than a constant. The question was implied."
Riku looked at him with the particular flat expression that meant he was cataloguing something. "You inferred a specific numerical range from the logical structure of a lecture topic you were encountering for the first time."
"I read ahead," King said.
"The text doesn't include the talent-type variation data," Riku said. "That section is in the supplementary reading for week six."
King thought about this.
"I read further ahead," he said.
Riku looked at him for three more steps. Then he opened his pocket journal—he kept it in his left inside pocket, a reflex so fast it barely registered as a motion—and wrote something without stopping walking.
"All right," Riku said.
He put the journal away.
That was the end of it, apparently. This was one of the things King was developing genuine appreciation for in Riku—he asked precise questions, accepted the answers he was given without further pressure, and filed the results privately. He didn't push. He simply kept the file.
He knows the answer I gave him doesn't fully explain it, King thought. He's keeping it for later. When he has more data.
Smart, he thought. And then: I should be more careful around smart people.
He thought about this for half a step.
I should be more careful around most people, he amended. The smart ones just notice faster.
---
The south cafeteria ran sweet potato stew on odd days.
King had three bowls.
Aki watched him finish the third bowl with the focused scientific attention she gave all his food reactions. She had, at some point in the last three days, taken on the personal project of introducing King to things he hadn't eaten before, and the sweet potato stew qualified because he'd mentioned at breakfast that he hadn't tried sweet potato in this preparation style.
"Well?" she said.
"Very good," he said. "The base is richer than the root vegetable soup from the main hall. The sweet potato absorbs the seasoning differently."
She wrote something in the small green notebook she'd started keeping. He'd seen her write in it three times since orientation. He hadn't asked what it contained.
Everyone is keeping a notebook, he thought. Sora. Aki. Riku uses a journal. Haruto doesn't write things down, which is probably more accurate than the rest of them combined, because at least he's not pretending the notes explain anything.
"You think about food a lot," Haruto observed. He was watching King watch the empty third bowl.
"I think about everything I haven't experienced before," King said.
"That's a lot of things?"
"Yes." He considered how to be accurate about this without being specific. "I didn't travel much before this. Most of what I know about places was secondhand. The food here is—the food is something I'm learning in a way I couldn't learn it from description."
Haruto absorbed this.
"Where are you from?" he asked. "Originally."
King looked at the empty soup bowl.
This was a question he'd been expecting and had prepared an answer for, which was unusual for him—he didn't normally prepare answers, he simply answered accurately. But where are you from was the kind of question where accuracy was not useful and simplicity was.
"Nowhere specific," he said. "I moved around."
It was true.
"Family?" Haruto asked.
"None I'm in contact with," King said.
Also true.
Haruto nodded. He said nothing else about it—just nodded and went back to his stew with the easy acceptance of someone who understood that some answers were the shape of the answer and didn't need to be the full content of it.
King looked at him for a moment.
He let it go, King thought. Just like that.
He filed this.
---
After lunch, King went to the library.
He went because he wanted to, and also because he had been thinking since breakfast about the supplementary reading for week six—the talent-type conversion drift data—and wanted to look at the primary source rather than a lecture summary.
He found the section. Found the data.
He sat at a table in the library's east reading room—high ceilings, old wood, the smell he'd decided was his current favorite smell in the building—and read for forty minutes.
He was on the fourth paper when a notebook appeared at the edge of his peripheral vision.
Not opened. Just placed, flat, on the table two feet from his elbow. Then a chair scraped. Then Sora Aizawa sat down, opened the notebook to a specific tabbed page, and began writing something.
He looked at her.
She looked back. "I'm working," she said.
"In the library," he said.
"Where else would I work."
"You could work at your desk in your room."
"My desk has a draft from the window. The east reading room is twenty-two degrees and has better light." She looked back at her notebook. "You've been here for forty minutes. I've been looking for a good reading room."
"You timed how long I've been here," King said.
"I noticed you come in forty minutes ago," she said. "I was in the main stacks. Noting the time was incidental."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at the notebook she'd placed on the table—closed, but with a small tab sticking out of the pages that had today's date written on it in small, precise handwriting.
"What's in that," he said.
"Notes."
"About what."
She looked at him. "About various subjects."
"Am I one of them."
A pause. She held his gaze with the particular steadiness of someone who had decided the honest answer was better than the evasive one. "Yes."
"How many pages."
She opened the notebook to the tab, turned two pages, held it up briefly so he could see the density of writing. Then closed it again.
At least ten pages, he thought. In three days.
"That's a lot of notes," he said.
"You're a lot to note," she said.
He thought about asking what she'd written. He thought about asking her to stop. He looked at her handwriting on the outside cover of the notebook—the date, the subject header—and thought about the fact that she'd told him directly and honestly that yes, she was keeping a file on him, without apology and without particularly asking his permission.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yes."
"Why are you telling me? You could have kept it private."
She looked at him with the expression that meant she was deciding between two or three different framings of the same answer. "Because you already knew," she said. "And pretending you didn't would have been dishonest. And I don't like being dishonest about the things I'm doing."
He considered this.
"That's a good reason," he said.
"I know." She opened to a fresh page and wrote something.
"What did you just write?" he asked.
"'He accepted the explanation. No visible discomfort. Usual expression.'" She turned the notebook so he could briefly see the line, then turned it back. "I told you I was noting things."
"You did," King said.
He looked at the paper in front of him—the conversion drift data, third column, talent-type breakdown.
She's watching me read, he thought. She's writing about the way I hold a page.
He turned to the next page of the paper.
---
Behind her notes on King's page-turning, Sora Aizawa wrote a separate header at the bottom of the page, underlined it, and began a new section:
Key observations, Day 3:
1. He reads research papers rather than summaries. He went directly to the primary source. The supplementary reading is for Week 6. Today is Day 3.
2. He answered Tanaka's question about the lecture content with "I read further ahead." This is either true, in which case the reading pace is exceptional. Or it is not fully true, in which case the knowledge base exists independently of the reading material.
3. He did not ask me to stop keeping notes. He asked why I was telling him. These are very different questions.
4. His response to "you're a lot to note": no visible discomfort, mild interest, turned back to his paper.
5. The paper he is reading is published. It exists in the Academy library. An ordinary student could access it.
Something about the way he reads it does not look like a student encountering information for the first time.
It looks like a person confirming something they already know is being stated correctly.
She wrote this last line twice.
She drew a box around both.
She wrote at the bottom of the page, in smaller script: This is the part I cannot explain yet. File for return.
---
They worked in the east reading room for two hours without further conversation.
It was, King noted privately, one of the more comfortable silences he had sat in since arriving at the Academy. Not empty—both of them were working, and the room had the particular quality of shared concentration that felt different from being alone. Different in a way that was, for reasons he couldn't yet fully name, better.
He finished the conversion drift paper. Started the next one.
At some point, without planning to, he said: "The data in the third column is off."
Sora looked up immediately. "Which figure."
"The B-rank average. The sample size is forty-three students. That's not enough for a population average to hold at the precision they're claiming." He pointed at the column. "The standard deviation is too tight for a forty-three sample at this variance level. They've over-fitted the model."
Sora looked at the column. She read the figure. She looked at the methodology section. She read it.
"You're right," she said.
"The paper is from year four-hundred-and-six," King said. "It's cited in the lecture notes as a primary source."
"It's in the recommended reading list," she said. She pulled her own copy of the paper from the stack beside her—she'd already been reading it. Of course she had. "The number's been repeated in at least four subsequent papers I've found. They all cite this one."
"Which means the error propagated," King said.
"Yes." She had her pen out. She was writing in the margin of her copy with the intensity of someone who had found something offensive and was documenting it properly. "I'll need to trace all the citing papers."
"There might be three or four more," King said.
"I'll find them." She looked up. "How did you catch it?"
"The number looked small," he said. "For what it's claiming."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she wrote something in the notebook—the one she was keeping about him, not the paper notes.
"What did you write?" he asked.
"'He caught a methodological error in a published paper from a six-hundred-year-old Academy curriculum by looking at one number.'" She held it up briefly. "Accurate?"
He looked at it. "Yes."
She turned the notebook back. She wrote one more line below it, which she didn't hold up.
He didn't ask.
He turned back to the next paper.
From the corner of his eye he could see the pen still moving. He could not read the words from this angle.
That was fine. He was learning, gradually, that there were things it was better not to read at close range.
Some of those things were published research with questionable methodology.
Some of them were small leather notebooks with today's date on the tab and a cover that was already slightly worn from three days of being opened and closed more often than notebooks usually were.
He turned the page.
---
Day 3, Library—East Reading Room. Final entry.
He stayed for two hours. He did not leave when I arrived. He did not alter his reading behavior. He caught a methodological error in Keiso's year-406 paper that has been cited uncorrected for eighty-two years.
He told me about it.
He didn't have to. He could have written it in his own notes and said nothing. He chose to tell me.
I don't know why yet. I am noting that he did.
Anomaly confirmed.
Further study required.
She underlined it three times.
Closed the notebook.
Looked at King, who was reading the next paper with the calm attention of someone who had nowhere else to be and was precisely where they wanted to be.
She opened the notebook again.
She wrote one more line, in smaller script at the very bottom of the page:
He looks comfortable here.
She looked at it for a moment.
So do I, she thought.
She did not write this down.