Chapter 17: Colleagues

I tried.

I tried very hard. Keeping Lily away was not easy, especially given that we shared a dorm, but I gave it the best shot I could.

And, regardless, when the board went up outside the Appraisal Hall, I stopped and stared at it with my mouth on the floor.

[No...]

I found my name at the very top of the list.

EVERDAWN / SAKANA — 94%

Sakana. That’s me, by the way. Kohaku Sakana. Right next to Lily’s name, despite everything I’d done.

[... What, did my efforts get the percentage from 100 to 94?] I hung my head.

Second place on the chart was a pair of twins at 71%.

TWINS.

Two people who had shared a womb, and Lily and I had out-resonated them by twenty-three points in like, two weeks of cohabitation.

"Kohaku, look!" Lily had found me. She was pointing at the board, and it was the first time in days she’d sounded like herself, as if the chart had completely erased all my efforts. To be fair, she wasn’t wrong. "We’re partners! We’re first! Isn’t that amazing?"

"Yeah... Amazing."

---

[The exam beat needs Lily plus Perrin. Near-death, spirit contract, knight acquired. Instead the universe just handcuffed her to me. Fine. FINE. We have a week until the exam. I’ve fixed worse in a week.]

Attempt one: the petition.

"Professor. About the pairings."

Sabine didn’t look up from her marking.

"No."

"You haven’t heard the—"

"You want a different partner. The answer is no. The forest doesn’t care about your preferences, Sakana, it cares about your frequencies." She stamped a paper. "Besides, your margin is the highest this academy has recorded in eleven years. Most students would kill for it."

"What if I—"

"If the next words are ’paid you,’ remember I outrank you in every currency." Stamp. "Dismissed. See you tomorrow morning."

---

Attempt two: sabotage.

The registrar offered re-scans for students who believed their reading was in error. So I marched in, sat in the scanning circle, and tried to tank it. The reading had to do with your thoughts, so I thought about stuff. I thought about tax paperwork. I thought about Serena’s boobs. I thought about the word "moist." I emptied my heart of Lily entirely and held the reading down through sheer spite.

The needle dipped. It was working! The clerk frowned at the crystal, and then the door opened behind me.

"There you are! You skipped lunch, so I brought you-oh, is this a bad time?"

Suddenly, Lily showed up, holding a wrapped-up sandwich that she made for me.

At that moment, the needle had an anime power-up moment and launched itself in the opposite direction. The clerk made a small noise of acknowledgement and wrote down a new number.

"Re-scan complete," he said. "Congratulations, it went up."

[I want to speak to this universe’s manager.]

---

{Odette}

I believed in all my heart that the universe is just a series of things to catalogue.

That’s how I grew up. Ever since I’d seen magic for the first time, ever since I travelled outside my home, I began writing things down and categorizing them.

Here is a thing I witnessed three weeks ago and filed under unremarkable: at the entrance appraisal, the fox girl had been appraised, and had been found... lacking. Rank F. Presumably, she had the mana reserves of a damp candle. I remember everything, and F-ranks are rare enough to note.

And yet, this morning, that same girl, the one who’d approached me and asked me to bless her with the knowledge I’d accumulated, had somehow posted a 94% resonance. With the anomaly, no less, that unreadable Everdawn girl.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I spent my morning classes trying to figure it out, running the numbers. Okay, so, resonance scales with the interacting mana of both parties. Well, a signature as faint as the fox’s should cap out at fifty against any partner then.

Statistically, the fox girl is not a weak mage who made a friend. She’s more like a rounding error the size of a person!

Sighing, I closed my ninth graph. I amde several graphs trying to figure this out.

[This is crazy.]

But, at the same time, I have to confess that the problem caused a certain... excitement to bubble up within me. That girl had just become interesting in a way no one else was.

So when I found her at a prep-yard table that afternoon, buried in resonance charts, hair chaotic, muttering, I did not wait to be asked.

---

She came back to me later, for more lessons. And, this time, she had quite the problem.

"So, what do I do?" Kohaku asked me.

She had explained that in her own opinion, the resonance reading had to be incorrect. And, judging by everything else she went over...

"You’re trying to break your own pairing," I declared.

"What!?"

"Don’t insult my intelligence by denying it. Look, there’s a loophole."

Why was I even bothering to help her? Honestly, if I thought about it, I wouldn’t be able to say. But, I felt compelled to. Like I’d just been invited onto an exclusive scientific investigation.

"There is exactly one documented override. It’s called a cut-in. If a third party posts a higher resonance with one member of a locked pair before exam day, the board re-sorts. It’s happened four times in academy history, so your odds aren’t great, but that’s the way forward."

She stared at me.

"Why are you helping me?"

"Curiosity," I said, which was the truth.

[Run, little absurdity. I’ll be taking notes.]

---

{Kohaku}

A cut-in.

There it was. That was the win condition.

I had my third party within the hour.

"Perrin. Buddy. Champ." I found him at the weights, mid-flex. "Remember how I set you and Lily up at the treeline? Time for phase two. One week, intensive prep sessions, you and her. Shared drills. Synchronized casting. Trust exercises. Accidental touches and forced proximity. The whole shoujo package."

"What’s shoujo?"

"Never mind that." I waved his question away. "So, what do you think?"

He grinned and clapped my shoulder hard.

"You’re a good little matchmaker, fox. When I’m knighted proper, remind me you exist."

Oh, I ran the day like a director.

Paired sword drills, his stance beside hers. Casting synchronization, palms together, mana cycling between them, which, per page six of my notes, built resonance faster than anything short of sharing a bed. And for the finale, the oldest trick in the romance-writer’s cabinet: on the last drill of the session, I greased one very specific patch of the yard, Lily’s boot went out from under her, and Perrin, positioned by me with the precision of a chess piece, caught her a foot off the ground, dipped and everything.

The audience of first-years applauded. Lily laughed, embarrassed. Perrin held the pose several seconds longer than physics required.

Then I marched to the registrar’s office and filed the cut-in before the ink on their new reading was even dry.

---

{Marisol}

You do not ask to join a superior operation.

No, asking is what supplicants do, and being a supplicant is how you end up being used and thrown away. No. When you identify an operator of a higher grade, you demonstrate value first, silently, and let the work introduce you. Papa built a title out of that principle in three generations.

I had watched the fox maneuver around the pairing chart for two days, and by the second morning the picture had resolved.

The petitions to Sabine. The re-scan, deliberately tanked, I’d have bet the summer estate on it, until the Everdawn girl blundered in and ruined the read. And now, suddenly, intensive training between Everdawn and the Alderltoft boy, choreographed down to a catch so staged I nearly applauded.

Objective, deduced: the fox needed Everdawn and Alderltoft to be together. Why? Unknown. Irrelevant. The outer ring doesn’t need the why. The outer ring needs to be USEFUL.

And I, unlike the fox, knew what actually happens to a cut-in filing.

It goes into the appeals pile. The appeals pile is two weeks deep this close to an exam, and her filing would surface three days after the forest, stamped VOID, and all her beautiful work would rot in a tray.

So, it was time. I didn’t know what the fox was cooking, but a schemer on the same level as me? I was no fool. Teaming up would be infinitely better than being at odds.

That meant it was time for me to submit my application to her operation.

So I started by greasing the machine a little.

My registrar clerk was already bought, four silver and flattery, an investment maturing nicely. A word from House Vantecca moved the cut-in filing from the bottom of the pile to the top of it.

Next, I carefully implied that accuracy here would be more of a hindrance than a virtue.

And that was that. You’re welcome, Sakana.

---

{Kohaku}

The board updated the same afternoon.

EVERDAWN / ALDERLTOFT — 99%

[YES. Yes! Same-day turnaround! The plot’s back on the rails, the beat is saved, and all it cost was one week of prep, my sleep, my dignity, and a small patch of yard grease. And they say bureaucracy is slow! Kohaku Sakana, script doctor, ADMINISTRATIVE GENIUS. I filed one form and the entire academy machine rolled over for me. Somebody give me an award. Somebody give me a NAP.]

I was still basking when a girl materialized at my shoulder.

Oh, Marisol. Right, the antagonist whose job it was in the original novel to say bitchy quotes to Lily every three paragraphs.

Dark curls, sharp brows, cinnamon-colored skin, a Noble Course uniform tailored within an inch of the dress code, and a folding fan in her hand she wasn’t using.

But uh...

I was fairly sure I hadn’t yet spoken to this person.

She was standing close, though. Very close. I could smell her shampoo. It was good.

"Smoothly done," she murmured, eyes on the board, voice pleasantly deep for a girl as cute as her. In a gap moe kinda way. "You’ll find the registrar was... amenable." She winked at me. "Consider it a gesture of good faith. Between colleagues."

And she swept off down the hall, and was gone before my brain had even finished loading up the first question that came to it:

[... What?]

In any case, the job was done.

Now, all that was left was to see who my new partner would be, introduce myself, maybe flirt a little if she’s hot, and uh, yeah, the plot would officially be considered saved and back on its rails.

I could already feel the hammock on my back. Oh yeah, I hadn’t forgotten the goal. I’d kept my eyes on the prize this entire time.

So, I was halfway through planning a celebratory dinner in my head when the board behind me chimed. It was re-sorting, which meant now the system would auto-fill my new partner from the remaining pool, and I turned around with mild interest to see which stranger I’d be babysitting through the-

SAKANA / FROSTFALL — 88%

I read it twice.

Serena.

It paired me up with Serena.

[... Excuse me?]