"I won't allow myself to be that kind of person, Rei. I'm going to keep pushing. Soon, this school will be one where the words 'I surrender' stop any fight in its tracks, and I don't care how many more people I have to torture to get there."

  .

  .

  .

  Half a minute after making my grand, dramatic declaration, I descended from my emotional high. With some faculty of reason restored in my mind, the fact that I had broken down into an erratic mess didn't escape me.

  My cheeks flared with hot mortification. Counting both lives, I'd lived far too long for such a lack of control to be acceptable. In a poor attempt to hide my teary mess of a face, I slumped over and stared at the tan rubber flooring, using my tiredness to avoid Rei's gaze. Really, the issue was that I wasn't used to talking to anybody with my customary mask so harshly damaged.

  Rei ruined my efforts by kneeling and staring at me from the floor, holding uncomfortably direct eye contact. It felt like he was trying to get inside my head and understand my thoughts. A tear dribbled down my chin and splashed on the floor. My pride (the pride of an adult mind that hates to admit a loss of control) didn't let me look away twice in a row.

  He exhaled lightly, almost certainly realizing that I wasn't ready to talk or listen, that I was only being stubborn. He stood up and diverted his eyes. We stayed like that for a while - silent and looking in different directions, with no noise other than the soft groans of sleeping, unconscious students echoing through the room.

  "Okay. Uh. Look, Meili." Rei broke the silence. "You're not the type of person to act on impulses alone. You always try to think through things. And a few minutes from now, after you've thought through it like you normally do, you'll take it back."

  "I think you're supposed to ask that as a question instead of saying it as a statement," I mumbled, frowning.

  Rei shook his head. "No. Because I know you." He gave a subdued grin. "And also because being king has made me more self-assured than I should be."

  I appreciated the gesture, nodding.

  "Sure. I- I can admit I was exaggerating," I spoke softly. "I wouldn't abuse every student at this school, and my body couldn't take much more than my current combat frequency, anyway. But I want to improve things, and I don't want to be the type of person who just gives up and bails on their principles once things get tough. I was just trying to express that. To you and myself."

  "See, you're already doing it," Rei pointed out. "Putting things in context and thinking logically. Isn't it better than jumping to extremes right away?"

  Extremes? A little irritated, I paused momentarily and tried to recall what I'd said in my feverish rant. "You know that telling someone upset to calm down or be 'less extreme' is - it's the worst thing you can do, right? And I don't think that I'm - that I said..."

  "'I can't let myself win that easily,'" he parroted slowly, enunciating every syllable. "Look, I understand what you're getting at emotionally, but if you don't want to 'win,' what do you want to do? Lose?" He shook his head and looked away for a bit. "It's not an insult. I didn't do enough to help you, to stop you from getting into a bad state of mind. You're a 14-year-old freshman. But remember, you're also the ultra-mature prodigy who spoke at a research conference! You should know that deciding things on pure feeling isn't good!"

  Rei couldn't have possibly known that age was a sore spot for me, yet the comment still stung. I flared up a bit, ready to point out similar failings on his end as a deflection – but by some miracle, I stopped myself. Like anybody, I had moments where I would dig my heels into the sand, stubbornly arguing on and on so that I could call myself the 'winner.' This time, the conditions were perfect for me to dig both of us into a deep hole. And yet, perhaps due to the sincere way Rei spoke, or simply because he was the one speaking, I took the time to really consider the rest of his words.

  Reluctantly, I admitted to myself that I had gone too far.

  "Yeah. You're right," I said with an embarrassed frown. "That wasn't the right thing to say. It's just that this whole situation is so- so damn personal! My character, everything I think about myself – it's all wrapped up in succeeding here! Maybe, if I were looking at this from an outside perspective, I wouldn't have gotten like this."

  I tried to smile, but it didn't come out quite right. I wiped away the wetness on my face with a tissue. "Just trying to reclaim some dignity, you know."

  He grimaced. "Meili, you don't need to justify yourself to me. What you've been doing isn't easy, and I never helped you out much, either. You haven't lost any dignity that you would need to reclaim."

  I gestured at myself in defeat.

  "I'm serious!" Rei said. "If you want to talk about having no dignity – even in my Junior year, I was still way behind Kuyo in level! He would beat me down in nearly every fair fight we had. By the end of an argument with him, I would be left on the ground looking like this!"

  Rei put his hands around his throat and slumped his neck to the side, making a surprisingly funny impression of a dead person. He winked.

  Shockingly, it cheered me up, and I surprised myself with a weak laugh. "That's kind of insensitive, you know, given our current location." I looked around at the injured students in the room, trying to remember if they'd all been completely sedated. "You were that much weaker just last year?"

  "Yeah. Kuyo was a couple of points ahead of me for years," Rei replied, "and I was always playing catch-up. It wasn't just painful, either. The difference in our viewpoints was even larger than it is now, and every time Kuyo left me flat on the ground, he would use the opportunity to preach about how 'stupid' my ideas were." He looked to the side for a bit, recalling. "Out of everything he said, the worst was that a high-ranker couldn't possibly have a real, equal friendship with a low-ranker. That it was strictly impossible."

  I didn't know where Rei was going, though I was thankful for the subject change. I jumped on the chance to get the conversation away from me. "I'm sure Kuyo gave some reasons to back himself up. I'm pretty familiar with the mainstream arguments – did he just use those?"

  "Basically. Kuyo would always say something like this:" Rei replied, slightly deepening his voice to imitate him. "'There are three options. Option one is that the low-ranker subconsciously gives up ground to the high-ranker whenever they talk, making the relationship inherently unequal. Option two is that the low-ranker gets jealous and resentful of the high-ranker's success. Option three is that the high-ranker starts to pity or look down on the low-ranker, making equal friendship impossible.'"

  I nodded, recognizing all three as common points, though there were other recurrent lines of reasoning that were nearly as standard. "I hear all of those a lot, maybe too much. But none are all that strong, I mean-"

  "Right?" Rei agreed. "I'd already thought up my own answers to all of them. Most of my friends were lower-tiered, and they didn't resent me at all. They weren't suck-ups; they weren't afraid to disagree when we argued, and I didn't look down on them just for being born weaker, either. But then I told him all this, and I swear his response hit me harder than his ability ever did."

  I had a guess but asked anyway. "What did Kuyo say?"

  "It was so bad that I still remember his exact words," Rei answered with a sigh. " 'People lie. The reality is you're two and a half levels higher than them. If they're jealous or resent you, would you expect them to admit it? And if they don't admit it, how would you ever know for sure? How would you ever know?' "

  He ran a hand through his hair, seemingly stressed by recalling the memory. "And he had such an honest look on his face, too, like he really believed what he was implying. I tried to argue at first – that my friends weren't dishonest assholes, that I was a good judge of character. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn't ever know. Not really. You can probably figure out how things unfolded after."

  "Paranoia," I uttered, realizing what had happened. "You got paranoid about whether they were truly your friends – or if they just wanted the benefits of having a high-ranker in their corner. You didn't want to constantly wonder if someone you considered a close friend was hiding extreme resentment and jealousy from you for social gain."

  There was some shame on his face, almost like he'd been purposefully trying to get me to say it in his stead. "That's right." He nodded weakly. "I ended up starting a huge, emotional argument, and we've never quite been able to make up. I managed to disguise our fallout as something else, but Kuyo connected the dots. He treated it as his victory, which I took badly... And, well, I trained hard enough to give him some payback. We've been about equal from then on."

  "But it didn't help, did it?" I asked. "Not on this specific point. Kuyo's always been able to hold what happened over you, and you're still bothered by it."

  Rei grimaced. "Yeah. It didn't help at all."

  If nostalgia was the fondness of a memory enhanced by time, what I saw on his face was the opposite of nostalgia: pain from a wound that had festered over time instead of healing. I laughed sadly, feeling a little touched and a little desolate.

  "I mean, there's the saying that misery likes company, and I like that we're connecting here, but if it's only over something like this..."

  "No, no." Rei shook his head. "I brought this story up for a good reason."

  "Yeah?" I wondered what he was trying to accomplish, ultimately deciding to figure things out by listening and waiting. "By all means, continue."

  He nodded and sat on the stool across from mine, slapping his palms on his knees and taking a deep breath. "Right. I know it sounds a little dumb, but for a long time afterward, I fantasized about an alternate timeline where I didn't completely obliterate my social group."

  "An alternate timeline," I repeated incredulously.

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  "I know it's a crazy idea, but it wasn't exactly a good time in my life," he explained. "I even spent some time researching time-manipulating abilities... Like, imagine that there's another universe where I managed to get over my fear in three weeks. Imagine I decided to apologize to my friends for doubting them and asked for forgiveness. And let's just say that we all mended our friendships perfectly and ended up as best friends for life. Everything turns out perfect, and we live happily ever after."

  He snorted derisively, trying to look dismissive, though it seemed a bit forced. "I used to think of this as the ultimate dream. But you know what I say now? I say, 'So what?' What's so good about it? This is the lamest alternate universe I've ever heard of!"

  I frowned, even more confused than before. "I'm not sure I understand."

  "I'm saying that nothing's changed," he said gravely. "There are still the same serious social problems that come with ability levels, the same unfairness. The only thing that's different would be me. In this hypothetical world, I'm mentally strong enough to recover and brave enough to apologize. I'm a good enough judge to be sure about my friends' honesty and convincing enough to get them to forgive me."

  "Okay?" I said, my eyebrows furrowing. "That sounds pretty amazing to me."

  "I don't think so," Rei replied. "I think it'd be unfair to expect even a single person to have all of these qualities. A high-tier who's extremely mentally strong, brave, perceptive, convincing – and who also doesn't look down on low-tiers? That's a threshold that nobody is going to reach. And do you know how I'd feel if I just happened to be that one special person to reach it? You know what I'd start thinking about how friendships work?"

  I breathed in sharply as I finally realized what he was getting at. "You're not saying-"

  "I'd think, 'I guess our hierarchy system's not so bad, after all,'" Rei stated with a rare sureness in his voice. "I'd come away thinking that we're doing just fine, that to have good, happy friendships with anybody, all we need to do is be better people. Like, 'If equal friendship is so impossible, why was I able to accomplish it?' Or, 'there's nothing wrong with good people having more opportunity to make friends than bad people.'" He rolled his eyes and shook his head as if to express scorn toward a hypothetical version of himself. "I would probably live the rest of my life like this, thinking that our social structures are just about fine as they are."

  An uncharacteristically mean smile sprouted on his face. "But it didn't happen that way. In reality, I failed. I can't even make eye contact with my old friends as we pass each other in the hallway. I didn't have the guts to apologize, and I'm still paranoid and afraid."

  His voice crescendoed in volume, vibrating with an undercurrent of righteous outrage. "But because I failed, I realized that a high-tier shouldn't have to be brave, understanding, and mature to have a low-tier as a friend! I realized that cowardly, paranoid, and immature high-tiers should have a real shot at making friends with any tier of person – that a jealous, secretive, and downright shallow low-tier should have the chance to be best friends with a 6.3! Just look at the state of high-tiers! Despite being richer and more respected than anyone else, we suffer from chronic loneliness! Because we can't connect with ninety percent of the population, and we end up venting our frustrations and pains on the very same 'weaklings' we need to befriend! "

  He gestured in the air erratically, becoming wilder and more energetic the more he spoke. "And after really thinking about it, I realized that I've never heard a single good reason explaining why Ability Levels should matter for relationships! You don't befriend someone just because they're weak or strong or somewhere in-between – you befriend them because you like them as a person and because interacting makes you happy! If someone is nice to hang out with, why does it matter if they can lift one ton or five?

  Rei stood up, now speaking with his whole chest. "Because of pointless restrictions, a massive number of people will never connect with the person who would've been their closest friend! Billions of husbands and wives are separated by something as irrelevant as deeper-cutting laser blasts or faster super-speed! Why do we let ability levels make things so difficult, restricting the realistic range of relationships to 'a little above us' and 'a little below?' Aren't we just making life worse for all of us together?"

  He ran out of breath. After stopping, It seemed like he'd lost his flow, wanting to say everything but coming up with air. Or perhaps, I thought, he was stunned by himself for saying such radical things one after another. Given the role ability level tended to play in forming social groups, he was essentially doing the equivalent of declaring that race and economic class should play no role in relationships. At least, that was the best past-life analogy I could come up with. There were likely better comparisons, I admitted to myself, but it was the best I could do in my state of mental exhaustion.

  Still, despite my growing fatigue, I decided to keep him talking, curiosity and a bit of an impassioned spirit taking over.

  "I've thought of some similar ideas," I said, purposefully making the understatement of the century. "I definitely agree with you. But when did you realize all of this? Recently or a long time ago? Also, judging by your tone, it feels like you must have a plan to fix things... Is that right?"

  "Ye- Yeah. Basically," Rei replied, now a bit calmer. "Everything I've said, I figured out by the beginning of this school year. But I didn't have a plan. I had too high of a goal without the knowledge or experience to go with it, and I was in a hurry, thinking that my nine-month period as king would be my only chance. I ended up trying a lot of bad, ineffective things, and I would've tried a lot more... Well, if we had never met."

  There was only one thing he could have meant. "I remember," I replied. "It was that day on the roof, right? When I told you that you should try becoming the headmaster of Wellston. Is that what you're going to do?"

  Rei nodded. "I want to control Wellston for a hundred years." He smiled incomprehensively, seeming perfectly genuine – and I pursed my lips, trying to make sense of what was a nonsensical statement.

  "You're not serious."

  "I'm serious, " he said. "I'm going to make god-tier, get the most prestigious education I can, get a position at Wellston, and become headmaster by thirty years old. I'll have fifty years of power over the kids who will go on to run this district, which will slowly change our system from the top down. And if that isn't enough, I'd get another fifty if I can train the right successor later. That's a hundred years. I don't think we'll fail if we put in a century of effort."

  I frowned. As with most things that sounded too good to be true, I felt the instinctive urge to poke mental holes in his plan. I found them. I could see multiple ways for Rei's master scheme to go horribly wrong – but then I thought a little more and realized I couldn't think of an alternative that avoided those same flaws.

  "Would you say that you're already fully committed?" I asked. "Not to imply that it's a bad idea, but this is the rest of your life we're talking about here..."

  "I've already been accepted into a lot of accelerated Master's programs at top schools," he replied, conviction clear on his face. "Being a former king of Wellston will give me a level of legitimacy from the beginning and help me beat out any similar-leveled competition for the job. I've thought this through."

  He stared out the window, the sunlight from outside framing his slight smile with an odd brilliance. "And I think that this way, eventually, I'll accomplish enough to stop dreaming about an alternate timeline, and maybe I'll be okay with how things ended up playing out."

  Oh, I realized. So this is all...

  "So you were exaggerating," I said, "when you called it the 'lamest alternate universe you've ever heard of.'"

  Rei laughed. "Are you kidding me? Of course! I was just saying that so I could make my point come across stronger!" He paused, scratching his cheek as he searched for words. "My point being, I guess, that there are situations where we think we've failed – when really, the success just isn't out in the open for us to see! I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, Meili, but I can tell you don't like to be violent. You went against your instincts these past months, and the results don't seem good enough to make it worth it. You feel like you failed yourself."

  I blinked a few times in surprise. His description of my mental state was shockingly good. Maybe Rei had truly seen a glimpse of my mind when he'd been staring into my pupils.

  "Yeah," I agreed, a little embarrassed now that it was my turn to share with the class. "I willingly chose not to meet my own standards, and it just feels like the results we've been seeing aren't enough to justify what I've done, you know? But that just made me feel tempted to stop, which would've made everything pointless, and..."

  "But see, this is what I'm talking about," Rei pointed out. "After what happened in my Junior year, I could have easily reacted by giving up on the idea of friendships across tiers. Instead, I thought a lot about why things went down the way they did, which led me to realize a bunch of important facts about our system and how I want it to change." He grinned, the regular, optimistic Rei I knew taking back over. "If I had never 'failed,' there were things I would have never learned, and I definitely wouldn't have chosen the path I'm on now. I just had to dig a little deeper to find the success, that's all! I don't see why you can't do something similar – instead of overreacting and doing something you'll regret."

  I noticed myself nodding along as he explained. Usually, tired old truisms like 'there's success to be found in failure' had me rolling my eyes dismissively, but I found Rei very convincing. Not only convincing, but I wanted to agree with him. I wanted a way to redeem myself, wanted a way to drag myself out of the mess I'd gotten stuck in. At the same time...

  "What, you think I can use something from my 'torture experience' to stop students from brutalizing their victims?" I gave him a questioning look. "I've been doing this for more than four months. If there were anything useful to be gained, don't you think I would've figured it out by now?"

  "I mean, that is one way to think about it," Rei replied. He grabbed the forgotten notebook I'd dropped and started flipping through it. "But just take a look at your notes! 'Fight scenario number three: Romantic Conflict. Perpetrator seriously attempted to permanently cripple the victim's reproductive capability. Fight scenario number two: Raw Jealousy. Fight scenario number five: Academic extortion...'" He stopped, putting down the notebook.

  "Each week," he said, tapping his finger on a page, "you watch like a hundred fight recordings and write notes about every single one. Over multiple months, you developed a system for classifying every fight. Now, you're telling me that if you spent some time analyzing your notes and the footage that goes with it, really thinking about the fights here at Wellston, you wouldn't figure out a pattern or weak point to take advantage of?"

  Reflexively, I opened and closed my mouth as I searched for a reply – but after running through a handful of lines of reasoning, I couldn't figure out a way to dispute him.

  Eventually, I weakly explained, "I didn't have much time to spare back when I was preparing for the research conference, and I wouldn't spend it on something as uncomfortable as reviewing my assault catalog..." Rei returned the questioning look I'd given him, and I relented. "...But the conference was a success, and I would take the temporary unpleasantness of analyzing my notes if it means I can figure out a better solution."

  I grabbed the notebook from his hands, an odd eagerness pulsing beneath my skin. "I'd be happy to accept that the source of my issues is that I haven't been studying hard enough."

  Rei seemed pleased with my agreement but also a bit guilty, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. "I didn't exactly mean it in that way. Now it seems like I'm making more uncomfortable work for you when you're already exhausted." He palmed his forehead. "And I just realized I should've told you to take a short vacation and rest up before I started blabbering my life story to you. I'm sorry, Meili."

  Instead of answering, I quickly flipped to the start of my notes, balking a little at the nauseating descriptions of violence on the page – but compared to actual violence, the feeling of hot blood saturating every crevice of my skin, it was like a fresh spring breeze. I remembered that, just a few months earlier, reading a description of someone's ribcage shattering would've made me lose my rationality to visceral emotion and disgust. Those same feelings were still there, but somewhere along the way, I'd gained the ability to think about violence, to analyze its horrors instead of only being horrified.

  Suddenly, I felt an inexplicably strong intuition appear in my mind - as though some hidden gate of secrets had cracked open a hair and let me peek inside.

  "Don't be sorry," I replied, a grin naturally sprouting on my face. "You just did me a huge favor."

  "Really?" Rei seemed a bit confused by my sudden mood swing. "I'm glad you feel that way, but my only real suggestion is that you should take a look at your notes for good ideas. We haven't actually done anything yet."

  "No." I shook my head. "I think I just figured something out."