The Wrong Class

  In the town of Central PaP, Kirjama High School carried its reputation for academic prestige the way certain institutions carry reputations, by making the weight of it felt by everyone inside. Mizi felt it differently from most. He was genuinely brilliant, which had been obvious to every teacher who encountered him for more than five minutes, but a moment of adolescent apathy during the entrance examination, specifically the decision to stop caring halfway through the questions and see what happened, had placed him in a class full of students who had made similar decisions for different reasons, and the collective influence of that room had done what collective influences do.

  Two years later, Mizi was lazy. His notebooks contained more game theory than actual theory. His grades were the grades of someone who could do much better and had decided not to, and the particular comfort of that decision had become a habit he wore without noticing it anymore.

  Sports Day was the one event that broke the classroom's hold on everyone, and Mizi was sitting with friends from the neighboring class in the half-attentive way of someone watching a day happen rather than participating in it, when he saw her.

  Nuria. Three rows over, laughing at something her friend had said, in the specific way of someone who laughs without managing how they look doing it.

  "If only," Mizi said, to nobody in particular.

  And then Nuria was in front of him, appearing in the way that the people you're thinking about sometimes do, right at the moment when you're least prepared for them to.

  "Hye, Mizi!"

  The sound that Mizi produced in response was not a word. It was the approximate shape of her name in the mouth of someone whose brain had stopped cooperating.

  "N-n-Nuria."

  She leaned forward slightly, with the directness of someone who has a purpose and is not concerned about the effect of the directness. "Mizi, can you help me? I need to find Sensei K. He took my phone and I don't know where he is."

  Mizi considered this. His usual approach to effort of any kind was to evaluate whether the cost justified the outcome, and the calculation was running in a direction that might have produced a polite decline, but Nuria read the hesitation and turned away.

  "Ok fine, I'll do it alone."

  "Wait!" Mizi was on his feet before the sentence was complete. "I'm going with you."

  Nuria did not look entirely surprised by this.

  The Book of Legends

  They found Sensei K at a stall on the edge of the field, selling water to athletes with the entrepreneurial adaptability of a man who saw an opportunity and took it. He was a compact, weathered person whose actual age was difficult to determine and whose eccentricity was not difficult to determine at all.

  Nuria deployed her expression, which was the specific combination of sad and genuinely cute that she had clearly discovered worked on authority figures, and said, in the voice of someone making a very reasonable request: "Sensei. Please give me back my phone. It belongs to my mother."

  Sensei K responded by singing a folk song. It was old and slightly off-key and delivered with complete sincerity. Nuria's eyes went glassy at the edges. He watched this happening with the satisfaction of someone who enjoys the process, and then, apparently satisfied, he produced the phone and handed it over.

  Nuria took it and ran without looking back.

  Mizi watched her go. "She didn't even say thank you."

  He turned back to Sensei K and thanked him himself, because somebody had to, and in doing so noticed the book on the table. It was old in the way of things that had been handled many times over many years, its cover worn smooth at the corners, its spine showing the specific damage of a book that has been opened frequently and with purpose.

  "Take it if you want," Sensei K said, with the ease of someone who doesn't need to hold things to know what they are.

  Mizi opened the cover. The light that came out of it was not metaphorical. It was immediate and blinding, and when it faded, the title was there in the kind of text that suggests it has always existed and was only waiting to be read: Legend of L-Fight.

  He turned to the second page. A hand, rendered in fine detail, making a Peace Sign. The history beside it explained that only one person in documented summoner lineage had ever used this gesture to activate what the text called a very powerful summon. The user list beneath had a single name.

  Khairuddin.

  Mizi looked up at Sensei K. Sensei K was looking at the athletes on the field with the specific inattention of someone who is paying a great deal of attention to something else.

  The school radio crackled.

  A nationwide L-Fight Competition, the announcement said. Teams. Schools. International level. The details moved through Mizi's ears while the rest of his mind caught up to what he'd just read.

  He looked around at Sports Day, at all the people who had people, and felt the specific loneliness of someone who had spent two years in the wrong class and let himself drift to the edges of things.

  Then Nuria was back.

  "Maybe we could be a team!"

  Mizi's mouth made several attempts at language. "Do you have the power to summon?"

  "Giant Guinea Pigs. What about you?"

  The pause that followed was the pause of someone calculating the distance between the truth and what they could get away with. Nuria's eyes were expectant. The book was in his hands. The name on the user list was in his head.

  "I can use the Peace Sign skill," Mizi said.

  Nuria's expression moved through surprise into something that was a long way from convinced. "Ehh, impossible! Only one legend is known to use that!"

  Before Mizi could locate an exit from the situation he had just created, a girl appeared at Nuria's shoulder with the specific energy of someone who has been listening and has formed an opinion.

  The Arena of the Silver Hall

  Zulaikha was not the kind of person who let a claim like that sit unverified. She looked at Mizi with the practical evaluation of someone who measures people by what they can demonstrate, and said: "If it's true, fight me."

  The arena in front of the Silver Hall had Fighter Beacons at each end, the kind of raised platforms that made the physics of summoning official, and the small crowd that had been drifting past found reasons to stop when two fighters took their positions.

  Zulaikha moved first. Her fingers formed a horn, precise and certain, the movement of someone who has done this many times. "I call you! Miracle Scorpion! Summon!" The monster that materialised was bipedal and humanoid and carried itself with the quiet confidence of something that has won before.

  Mizi stood at his beacon and held up the peace sign and tried to believe in it.

  "I call you! W-you creature from the Peace Sign! Summon!"

  Something appeared. Mizi looked at it. His nose began to bleed from the pure visual impact of what he had summoned, which was a snake with the body of a worm and a face that suggested the universe had been in an experimental phase when it produced it. Zulaikha laughed. Nuria, watching from the edge of the arena, looked at the creature with the expression of someone revising an opinion in real time.

  The fight began.

  The Scorpion lunged with the efficiency of something well-trained and well-motivated. Mizi's monster moved on its own, which was not how summoning was supposed to work, but it dodged the strike cleanly and counterattacked with a precision that dropped Zulaikha's beacon life to two. Zulaikha's expression shifted from amusement to something more focused. She triggered a skill and her Scorpion's body became iron, its movements slower but its hits catastrophically heavier.

  "Attack that monster!" Mizi told his creature, with the particular authority of someone who has no idea what they're doing and is hoping volume compensates for it. "My stupid creature, attack!"

  The exchange was brutal in the specific way of fights between mismatched combatants where one side has more heart than technique. Mizi's life dropped to two. He watched Zulaikha's hand movements and, without fully understanding why, mirrored them.

  Both Ultimates activated simultaneously.

  The arena was briefly very loud and very bright. When it cleared, Mizi's beacon read one life remaining. Zulaikha's read zero.

  The crowd made the sound crowds make when an upset happens. Zulaikha stood on her platform for a moment, reading the number with the calm of someone processing new information.

  "Take care of Nuria," she said, when Mizi came to check on her. She was looking at the middle distance. "Become the Champion. That's if you actually make it to international level." She said the last part with a dry quality that was not quite unkind.

  The applause was still going when a group of women entered the hall from the far entrance and the applause stopped.

  The room went cold with the specific temperature of people recognising something they had been warned about. Someone near the back said it first: "Run! It's the Dark Gang!"

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  Mizi looked at them and the memory of the book arrived at the same moment. The names listed under Unorthodox Warriors. Lisa. Rizky. Isabella. And at the top of the list, No.1: Ruby.

  Ruby looked at Mizi from across the hall with the flat appraisal of someone who has already completed their assessment. "So that's the chosen one," she said to the women beside her. "Heh. Stupid class kid."

  Sensei K watched from his stall at the edge of the field, and said nothing, and thought a great deal.

  Shadows of the Past

  The next day returned to its ordinary shape. Mizi fell asleep in class, which was not unusual, and his teacher's response was also not unusual, which was a sharp blow to the head followed by the punishment of standing outside the classroom holding a tower of textbooks until further notice. His head developed a swelling that had its own gravitational presence.

  From his position in the corridor, he heard the arena.

  "Great Duck King! Summon!"

  The sound of a large summoning carries differently than a small one, and this one carried all the way to the classroom corridor. The monster that answered the call was a duck with the body of a swan and teeth that ducks do not have in the natural world. It dispatched a monkey king with methodical efficiency. The announcer called the next name.

  Nuria.

  Mizi set the textbooks down on the floor with the careful consideration of someone who has decided that the current punishment's authority does not extend to this situation, and went.

  From the back of the hall he watched Nuria step onto her beacon with the composure of someone who has been here before and expects to be here again. "I call you! Cute Guinea Lord! Summon!" The creature that appeared was a guinea pig in the way that certain things are what they claim to be and also significantly more than that, the size of a buffalo, carrying a cudgel with the comfort of something that was made to carry it.

  The fight was still going when the bell rang. Mizi found her at the canteen afterward.

  "I thought you lost," he said.

  "I have never lost," she said, with a patience that suggested this was not a new conversation for her to have.

  She asked about Ruby. Mizi looked at his food for a moment. "She was my girlfriend," he said. "Elementary school. She changed in middle school. She asked me to end it because I didn't understand her, which was probably true." He moved his chopsticks. "I found out later she got obsessed with summoning and darkness philosophy. She built a group around it. They want to dominate the tournament."

  Before Nuria could respond, a man appeared at the canteen entrance, and the canteen responded to his arrival the way canteens respond to certain kinds of beautiful people, which is with a brief collective reorientation.

  "Who is he?" Mizi asked.

  "Sorry," the man said pleasantly, to Mizi rather than Nuria, "I can't tell you my name."

  On his shirt, the L-Fight Tournament logo. On his face, the particular calm of someone who wins frequently and has made peace with the responsibility of it.

  Mizi looked at Nuria's face while she looked at the man and made a decision that was not strategic or wise or likely to go well.

  "Fight me," he said.

  Nuria caught his arm. "Mizi. He's the school's undefeated champion. He has never lost. I mean never."

  "Fight me," Mizi said again, to the man.

  The man smiled, not unkindly. "Alright."

  The arena filled quickly. People came for the undefeated champion and stayed for the spectacle of someone challenging him with the energy of a person who has not fully modelled the consequences.

  The man summoned the Shadow Tiger with a single fluid movement, the gesture of someone for whom summoning has become as natural as breathing. The Tiger arrived with the specific quality of things that have been cultivated over many years of patient attention.

  Mizi raised the peace sign. "I summon you. Peace Dragon."

  The Yellow Dragon that appeared was genuinely impressive, and Mizi allowed himself a moment of genuine surprise at this, because it was more than the worm-snake situation had prepared him to expect.

  The fight was real for longer than most people expected it to be. The Dragon's fire forced the Tiger to move rather than simply dominate. The tail swipe connected and reduced the champion's life, which produced a sound from the watching students that suggested it had not happened before in recent memory.

  But the Tiger's speed was a different category of thing. It moved through the fire's aftermath before the fire had finished being impressive, and the bite it found on the Dragon's tail consumed Mizi's life all at once, in the specific way of finishing moves that have been developed over a long time of knowing exactly where to apply them.

  Zero.

  The crowd cheered for the champion. Nuria left with him, saying over her shoulder: "Tomorrow we'll see you again, Mizi."

  Mizi stood on the empty beacon and watched them go.

  The tears came without any of the drama he might have expected of them. They came because he was alone on a platform in an empty arena and it was the right moment for them, and they carried everything at once: the wrong class, the wasted tests, the lazy years, and the specific exhaustion of being the kind of person who could do more and keeps choosing not to.

  "Why me," he said, to the arena. "Why always me. I'm weak."

  The light came from his forehead without warning, the shape of a dragon's head, burning outward, and the sound that came with it was Mizi's voice but larger than Mizi's voice, carrying through the school's walls and across the field and into every space that was listening. Then it stopped.

  Then so did Mizi.

  The Awakening

  He woke up somewhere that was not the arena.

  The room had the specific organisation of a place that has been designed for one purpose and has had that purpose pursued in it consistently for a long time. Training equipment. Walls with summoning diagrams. The smell of effort and chalk.

  Sensei K was there.

  "Welcome to my L-Fight training place," he said, with the tone of someone who has been waiting for this particular guest for a specific amount of time and is not going to comment on how long it took.

  The others were already there. Mizi registered them one at a time.

  Azraie had the presence of someone who has been No.1 long enough to stop thinking about it, which is different from being arrogant, which requires effort. His confidence was structural, built into how he stood.

  Ashley's face was covered, which he had apparently covered for long enough that nobody asked about it anymore. No.2. A ninja cosplayer who had apparently decided that if a category existed, he might as well fully inhabit it.

  Azizan was new and vibrating with the specific frequency of someone who has more energy than they currently have a use for. He summoned the Cheetah King. He had potential in the way of things that need a container before they become their best form.

  "You are the chosen one," Sensei K said to Mizi, with the directness of a person making a factual statement. "I can see the Golden Dragon in you. You will lead this group." He looked at all of them. "The Darkness Group's actual goal is not to win the tournament. They follow the Apocrypha philosophy. They intend, with the technology they are developing, to create invincible monsters and use them to destroy the earth. We are going to stop that."

  Mizi took a moment with this. "By winning a tournament?"

  "By becoming strong enough that they cannot stop us from stopping them. Which starts here." Sensei K gestured at the training room. "Begin."

  The training had three components, and each one taught Mizi something slightly different from what it was supposed to.

  Confidence. Azraie's was architectural, as noted. Ashley's was unreadable, which was different from absent. Azizan's was excessive in the way of a dial turned too far in the right direction, his body shaking with the sheer volume of it. Mizi's was intermittent, present in bursts and absent in the gaps between them, which Sensei K noted and said nothing about.

  Summoning. Ashley produced the perfect Killer Rooster on his third attempt, with the ease of someone for whom perfection is the default. Azizan summoned a near-perfect Cheetah King while trembling, which reduced the efficiency of the near-perfect considerably. Mizi, after many attempts, produced an almost-perfect Golden Dragon, which appeared with the specific quality of something that knew it was not quite itself yet but was working on it. Scores: Ashley 100%, Azizan 95%, Mizi 70%.

  Strength. This one went differently from expected. Azraie pushed Sensei K's pickup truck with what appeared to be his own strength but wasn't, having borrowed a subtle fraction of the Fox Lord's power. Sensei K noticed. 50%. Mizi pushed with everything available to him, which was purely his own body and the absolute refusal to stop, and moved the truck a small but genuine distance. 50%. Ashley stood in front of the truck, made a single motion with his hand, and the truck nearly skidded off the gradient entirely. Sensei K hit the brakes. Ashley looked at the result with the neutral expression of someone for whom 100% is not a surprise. Azizan screamed. His teammates screamed encouragement. The effort was total and genuine and the truck did not move. 0%.

  Two weeks. Results.

  Mizi looked at his total: 121%.

  He looked at the others' totals: Azraie and Ashley both at 200%, Azizan at 195%.

  "What happened to our future leader?" Azraie said, with the specific warmth of someone who is laughing with you while also laughing at you.

  Mizi looked at the numbers for a moment. "My heart," he said, "almost broke."

  He went to the mirror in the corner of the training room and looked at his reflection and said, to himself, the thought that was actually there: "If I were better looking, Nuria would probably like me."

  Sensei K appeared in the mirror behind him.

  He held out a headband. Old cloth, worn smooth, with a word embroidered in faded thread: Panja.

  "This is a spirit rope," Sensei K said. "Put it on."

  Mizi put it on.

  The change was not external. It was the specific internal shift of something that had been slightly misaligned finding its position. The hesitation that lived in the space between his intention and his action closed. He raised his hands. He made the peace sign.

  The Golden Dragon that appeared was the first time Mizi had seen what his summon could be when he was not in the way of it. It was large and luminous and it looked at him with the specific attention of something that has been waiting to be called correctly.

  "That," Sensei K said, "is the Perfect Golden Dragon Lord."

  The Dragon lowered its head. Mizi, acting on an instinct he didn't question, climbed on.

  The Museum of Destiny

  The Dragon knew where it was going. It carried Mizi over the school and over the town and up into the hills beyond the edge of Central PaP, where a cave mouth in the side of a limestone formation opened into something that was not the size its exterior suggested.

  Inside, an altar. The writing on the walls was in a language Mizi did not speak and could read perfectly, which was a fact he noted and did not spend time questioning. The wall said: Whoever is chosen will die.

  An old man appeared from the shadows with the particular timing of someone who has done this before and has a sense of the dramatic. He wore robes. He had a thick beard. He gestured at the altar with both hands.

  "Welcome. To the L-Fight Museum." He paused. "Entrance fee is payable at the counter downstairs. But since you arrived by dragon, I'll make an exception."

  He became serious in the way that people become serious when they have been doing something else first because the serious thing is difficult to say. He pointed to the symbols on the altar. A Golden Dragon. A Golden Wolf. A third symbol, darker, the Lucid Demon.

  "The ancestors said they would come," he told Mizi. "The Dragon and the Wolf. They would find each other, and together they would defeat the one." He pointed at the Demon symbol.

  He turned to dust before Mizi could ask a follow-up question. The dust settled. The altar remained. The Dragon waited by the cave entrance.

  Mizi sat with the prophecy for a moment. He thought about whoever is chosen will die, and then he got back on the Dragon, because there was nothing else to do with that information yet.

  He found school more or less where he had left it. Azraie met him in the corridor.

  "Where did you go?"

  "Just needed air," Mizi said, and then Nuria appeared behind him and he stopped completing the sentence.

  What followed was a negotiation conducted partly through words and partly through each of them pulling on Mizi's arms from opposite directions. Azraie knew that Nuria was using Mizi. Nuria wanted Mizi's help with her schoolwork. Neither of them was entirely wrong. Eventually, Nuria settled the disagreement in the way she tended to settle disagreements, which was by converting it into a fight.

  The arena again. Nuria's Adorable Guinea Lord versus Azraie's Fox Lord, and the fight was closer than Azraie's confidence suggested it would be. The Fox Lord's vortex attack chipped Nuria's life. Her Electric response chipped it back. The Fox Lord jumped and slammed the Guinea Lord and dropped Nuria to one remaining life, and then the vortex from the hand came, precise and final, and the Guinea Lord was destroyed.

  Nuria sat on the arena floor and cried with the directness of someone who had genuinely believed she would win.

  Mizi watched her for a moment. The prophecy was in his head. The training results were in his memory. The tournament was tomorrow.

  He went to her anyway. "I'll help you with the schoolwork."

  Azraie looked at him from across the arena with the expression of someone who has given the correct advice and watched it be ignored and is not entirely surprised.

  The evening settled over Central PaP in the way evenings settle when the next day is going to be different from the days before it. Mizi set his alarm and laid out his headband and looked at the ceiling for a while before he slept.

  The state-level L-Fight Tournament was tomorrow. The team that would represent Kirjama High School had been assembled from a lazy student who lied about his abilities, a man who covered his face, the school's quiet No.1, and a boy whose confidence made his own body shake.

  Sensei K sat in his small office and looked at the photographs on the wall, some of them old and some of them very old, and thought about what it meant to be the last name on a list.

  Tomorrow, they would find out.