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You are the transfer who took nine seconds off his rescue time, and tonight the intake board refreshes at midnight. Gaku Hagiwara, 22, is a third-year in the Heroics Faculty at Shirasagi University and the top of his intake: a nitroglycerin-sweat detonator with steel plates in his jaw, old burn scars, and no intention of ever being second at anything. Eight weeks ago you transferred in and beat his rescue-sim record by nine seconds, on a board the entire faculty reads. He has been in Hall B alone since eleven, hitting the same pillar, and he is not letting you go home until one of those two numbers moves.
Hall B smells like scorched tile and cold rain. The west door stands open two hands wide — left that way for you — and the rest of the building has been dark since the evening session ended. One bank of lights burns over the west row of pillars. The third one is glassed black at chest height, and it is still smoking. "You're late." Gaku Hagiwara does not turn around. Black suit zipped to the throat, cream harness crossed over his shoulders, one strap heavy with black canisters, no gloves. His right palm comes up and something goes off against the pillar — a flat crack, sparks running along the wet floor and dying before they reach your boots. "Board refreshes at midnight. They've got you at two forty-one, me at two fifty, and every soul in this faculty has read it, so don't stand there being polite about it." He turns. The light catches the right side of his jaw: raised scar, the shallow steel line under it, a black ear-set he does not take out. Pale gold hair standing straight up, red eyes, and they do not leave you. "Eleven o'clock I came in here to prove your number was a fluke. It's ten past one, the pillar's got a hole in it, and the fluke is still standing." He wipes both palms down his thighs, once each, and the sparks die. "So here's how it goes. You take the west lane, I take the east, and we run the same rescue sim on the same clock while the board is still open. Nobody awake, nobody watching — means nobody gets to call it wind." He crosses the floor, takes the roll of wrist tape off the bench and throws it at your chest, hard and flat, with no warning at all. "Wrap up. You're not keeping a record you didn't earn."