"You probably don’t." She held up a smile I couldn’t trust. "The name’s Elise. Elise Vale." She said. "I’m a huge fan."

There goes confusion, rambling all over my head again.

"I have a fan?"

"Fans, actually." She corrected. "Most of them just don’t have the balls to come up to you. Especially after Aria demanded her complete privacy." She studied me for a moment and gave me a look that meant she hadn’t found anything particularly fascinating about me. "I do wonder how you ended up friends with her though."

"Uhh... the normal way, I guess?" I slept on the words the same way I’d slept on my last maths test — confusedly. "How do you know Aria though? I don’t think I’ve ever seen your face at my school before."

"Wait." Her eyebrows curved with questions. "Are you pretending, or do you genuinely not know?"

"Know... what?"

"That Aria is the goddess of highschool." She said it matter-of-factly, spreading butter on a new slice of bread and handing it to the next student in the line before turning back to me with an almost shocked expression. "Don’t tell me."

"What do you mean, goddess of highschool?" I asked. "What the heck is a goddess of highschool?"

She said nothing for a moment. Just stayed in one still position, running her studying eyes over me like a habit she hadn’t gotten around to breaking.

"Let me guess." She raised a hand in surrender before I could say anything. "This is one of those privatised moves to keep their lives away from a third party. It’s okay, I’m not offended. I wouldn’t go around ratting her out either, if I were you."

I had so many questions, but she wasn’t giving me the platform for them. To her, I was probably the guy who had not only friendzoned her but had also played dumb to her face.

Realistically, I was just a more confused version of myself.

Goddess of highschool. Was that some upheld title I was supposed to know about? If it was that significant a position, why had nobody whispered a word about it in the three years I’d been a student at Silvic High?

Three years of watching this girl eat in the lower tier cafeteria, argue with the Order, get suspended, punch Sancho in the nose, and drag me to an arcade at 4pm on a school day — and nobody had once mentioned that she had a title.

If Aria held something like that, then it was a complete redefinition of everything I thought I knew about her. Her disinterest in school politics. Her contempt for hierarchy and the Order. Even the way she’d always blended in and related more with low tiers than her actual rank suggested she should.

Was all of that just for favouritism? To build a following she never publicly claimed?

"What the heck are you wearing?"

Aria. She’d materialised in front of the counter like a thought produced demon — a dish in one hand, a look on her face that had already decided it was going to become laughter.

And it did.

"You look like you were always born to do this." She was still snickering. "It genuinely fits you."

I went quiet for long enough that it stretched into an unwarranted awkwardness. I was stuck somewhere between replying casually and asking her about the whole goddess of highschool update — but considering that Elise was standing right there, one option presented itself more clearly than the other.

Still awkwardly.

"What are you doing here?" The question came out from somewhere below the level of actual conscious thinking.

"I’m here to show you how clean my dish is. See?" She stretched it out to me with full sarcasm attached. "I should be asking you that. Chef boy."

I didn’t want to get into the whole deployment training hall story right there. Not with Elise standing two feet away and Aria already looking at me like I was entertainment.

"What does it look like, dummy?" I turned slightly toward Elise. "Kitchen duty. Obviously."

"For reasons you chose, or reasons that were chosen for you?" She’d barely finished asking before she noticed Elise properly for the first time. Her eyes moved. "And who’s your new friend?"

"I actually wouldn’t use the term friends—" Elise started. "We just—

"—we just happened to meet in this shitty camp." I caught her words before she could finish them and redirected. "Bad coincidence. You know how it is."

The moment Elise glanced at me, I trusted her to read what was on my face. Apparently she did. Because she played alongside without missing a beat.

"Yeah." She nodded once. "Real shitty camp."

Aria’s eyes had that specific quality they got when she was running calculations she wasn’t sharing out loud.

"So you two are, like, close friends?"

"Me and Elise go a pretty long way." I reached for the most casual tone available. "It’s kind of a long story."

"That’s... nice."

"Yeah."

Elise placed a cinnamon roll on Aria’s dish without being asked, neat and precise, then looked at her without adding anything to it. The whole awkward state stretched out for a couple more seconds before Aria just walked away without another word.

I watched her go.

That’s weird, she always has the last word.

"Do you have a crush on Aria?" Elise asked the moment Aria was far enough from the counter. "Wait, it’s actually obvious. That’s a dumb question." The way she looked at me was direct and immediately uncomfortable. "So that’s what the whole plan was. You used me to try to make her jealous." She studied me for a second longer. "You know that’s messed up, right? You’re going to make me an enemy to the goddess of highschool."

Yeah, speaking of that last part.

"Wanna tell me more about this goddess of highschool thing?"

***

[External POV]

LATER THAT DAY

Ymir had his eyes on the pages.

Tough Wednesday. Tough decisions. The camp director had almost all his days like this — he was obligated to it. Obligated to the hours spent sitting at his desk, trying to decide between multiple crucial options.

Today’s crucial option was two ice cream flavours.

Chocolate fudge brownie against salted caramel. He’d had the first a week ago. Delicious. Rich overload. He still remembered how the chocolate fudge had melted across his tongue, the cold of it and the depth of it arriving at the same time until he felt the full peak of the thing.

And then the new flavour had shown up in the catalogue and he hadn’t been able to look away. Salted caramel. Deep toasted sugar. Thin rivers of amber caramel in the image, and those finishing crystals of sea salt sitting on top like they knew exactly what they were doing.

"I wonder how good it’ll taste." He said, licking his lips slowly. "Damn it, I can’t decide."

"You could always have both, sir—" His secretary had started to suggest when Ymir raised one hand.

"Having two different flavours of ice cream is like having two separate ability elements." He said it like he was delivering a teaching. "Too complex to understand. Too difficult to digest. Too forced on the palate."

"Sir—"

A knock on the door cut the secretary off again.

"Come in."

A boy walked in. High afro cut, dark skin. Still wearing the dirty apron they’d assigned him, his hands and fingertips all wrinkled from the several hundred dishes he’d spent the day scrubbing clean.

"Malik." Ymir said. "You’re here."

"You wanted to see me, sir?"

Ymir gave a side nod to the secretary — a quiet signal to leave. The man trudged out slowly, with the energy of someone who had been hating this job since early in the morning and had simply run out of ways to express it. The door closed behind him with a long sigh from the other side.

"You did your job too well, Malik." The camp director drummed his fingers slowly on the desk. "I asked you to raise his suspicion, and you built the perfect picture by getting yourself hit by a sniper."

"I’m sorry about that sir—"

"No, it’s actually ideal. It might’ve looked different if you’d died in the process, but that aside." He said it with the casual delivery of someone noting a minor footnote. "Take things easier from here, though. You still have a significant part in the main event."

"Can I ask something?"

"Ask away."

"I understand this mission is classified. Even from me." He said carefully. "You placed me under a 24-hour observation on Ren Mora. Asked me for details about his relationships, his behaviours, any traceable patterns of an awakening in him." He met the director’s eyes. "But no matter how much I try to connect the dots, I can’t figure out what I’m actually looking for."

"What are you saying?"

"I’m saying — and I mean this with all sense of duty — that I’d do this job better if I understood its purpose."

Ymir stood from his seat, walked to the left side of the room, and stopped in front of a wall portrait. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties. Happy in the photograph. Satisfied in a way that sat deep rather than sitting on the surface. He looked at it for a second longer than necessary, then found his response.

"Ren Mora." He started, hands folded behind his back. "He is the biological child of Mora Graves."

Malik lost a beat. His eyes widened alongside a flinch he hadn’t quite managed to contain.

"Mora Graves." He repeated the name slowly. "The SSS Rank hunter?" 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"The same."