Archive of Our Own ^beta

Kaiden always enjoyed Combat Classes. After returning to school post-summer, he had been resorted into Epsilon Combat, as he had expected. Declan, too, was there, sitting next to him. The usual combat boys were there, just the same as last year. No new students. It was slightly disappointing, as the class would be advantaged by even numbers, but so long as he and Declan were there, together, he would get through plenty.

He had turned his active gift away from Jeera’s intuition to Declan’s ability to sense lies as Karter arrived. He very rarely told untruths, but Kaiden always liked to be prepared for any eventuality.

Consequently, he was not forewarned when a girl stepped into the arena. His thoughts on her were even less well-formed, although there were a few articulate things.

• She was very pretty, like really very pretty.
• She did not look at all pleased to be in this class.
• Karter was staring at her as though she had two heads.

Switching to his mind-reading power, he cast his over those around him.

Karter was hoping she’d either be good in this class, or was mistaken and had gone to the wrong place.

Declan wondered how good she was at fighting, and the other boys in the class held a similar opinion.

Finally, he tried to look in her head.

It was more difficult than he expected, as if the connection was a little broken and only fragments could get through. The flickers that he could comprehend were interesting in themselves.

She was from Freya?

Karter wasn’t thinking that, nor were any of the others. If it had been a well-known piece of information, Kaiden would have been aware of it. Even if it were classified, he didn’t have a half-bad chance, but he’d be willing to bet very few people knew about this.

Other little flickers became visible to be as she looked around. She seemed mostly to be hoping she managed to survive this session. Not surprising given she did Epsilon PE, a class in which you could definitely die.

She thought he was hot, good. It wasn’t that Kaiden would have been offended if she called him otherwise, he knew plenty enough people’s thoughts not to be surprised by something as mundane as that. It was just that he thought the same about her, and it would have been a little awkward (although admittedly easier, if she was from Freya) for her to hate him while he liked her.

She’d had no previous combat training. This wasn’t going to be a fun class for her then. You were kind of expected to have some knowledge of fighting as a prerequisite for this class. Most of us had spent a couple of years in Delta or even Gamma classes before we got here. It was all about potential, so I supposed that had she arrived two years ago, when she was supposed to, she would have been in one of the other class. Still, if this was where she was supposed to be, I wasn’t complaining.

Her session in the class itself was rather short lived. Karter got her to fight one of the boys, which was a bit unfair, but at least he didn’t do her any real harm. She did a good job at dodging, throwing herself away from his punches. She clearly had talent and an eye for this, even if it were obvious that she were untrained. Kaiden almost winced as she hit the ground in a very amateurish version of a roll. Someone would need to help her learn those properly if she was going to insist on fighting this way.

The thoughts in her head, while amusing (as they were mostly loud swearing), were uninformative. Kaiden had found out that she’d arrived in Freya, but no more than that. He wondered if she’d let anything else slip, but before she could, she was caught with a punch and fell to the arena floor, unconscious.