Himeko
The time, 2:17 AM.
It glowed in the corner of Himeko's terminal. Her office was a cavern of deep shadows, the only light originating from the monitor's sterile blue glow and the faint pinpricks of starlight from the window. The air was thick with the ghosts of reports she had yet to file and the scent of coffe.
She had been trying to read, to force her mind to focus on the dry tactical analysis of a recent Honkai incident in Brazil, but her brain refused to cooperate. Sleep was a fleeting, unreliable luxury, and tonight it had abandoned her completely.
A soft, electronic chime broke the silence. She looked over to the new message, scanning it with her droopy eyes.
[ ENERGY LOG: SIM ROOM 7 (CUSTOM) USER: AOYAMA, KENJI, RUNTIME: 03:14:27 ]
Himeko's fingers stopped tapping. She leaned back, the old springs of her chair groaning in protest. Three hours and fourteen minutes. The academy cutoff for non-supervised sim usage was midnight.
'This kid…'
A wry smile touched her lips, but it was devoid of all humor. He was a force of nature, a biological anomaly wrapped in the stubborn, reckless stupidity of a teenage boy.
She had half a mind to let him run himself into the ground, but a glance at the energy log's graph made her reconsider. The readouts weren't just high; they were erratic, spiking and dipping with a violent, frustrated rhythm. He wasn't just training. He was using the fighting simulator.
"God dammit," she muttered to the empty room, pushing herself up from the chair. Her joints popped, protesting against the late hour and the damp chill in the air.
The walk from the faculty building to the training sector was silent. St. Freya, so full of life and chaotic energy during the day, became a tomb after midnight. Her footsteps echoed with a flat, lonely finality on the polished stone floors.
She was a Major, one of the most powerful Valkyries in the Far East, reduced to the role of a disgruntled dorm mother about to scold a child for staying up past his bedtime. The irony was not lost on her.
She arrived at Simulation Room 7. The heavy blast door was sealed, a single, glowing red panel indicating SIMULATION ACTIVE. She could feel the faintest vibration through the floor, a deep, percussive thrum that was out of sync with the room's usual hum. He was still at it.
Himeko swiped her high-clearance ID across the panel, opening the lock. The panel flashed green, and with a heavy hiss, the door slid open.
The room was vast and dark. The "sky" was a deep, bruised purple, a holographic nebula swirling slowly overhead, casting the entire arena in a sickly, alien light. In the center, he was a blur of motion.
Himeko leaned against the doorframe, her arms crossed, and decided to watch for a few minutes.
The simulation was running a high-intensity combat scenario. Three... no, four simulated Templar-class Honkai beasts. She had to give him credit; he wasn't slacking.
His movements were quick and efficient, a far cry from what she saw him do before. He ducked under a scything blade, his fist crackling with power as he drove it straight through the beast's core. The construct shattered into a billion glittering particles.
But as he moved to engage the next, Himeko's gaze narrowed. Something was odd with his movements.
He leaped, a twenty-foot vertical bound to evade a pincer attack. But mid-air, at the apex of his jump, something went wrong. His body seemed to… stutter in the air? It was not a controlled, secondary burst of energy, but an awkward, unrefined attempt to… what? Hang there?
His momentum died instantly. For a critical fraction of a second, he was a stationary target.
The remaining Templars reacted. One's lance lanced out, scything through the air where he had been a millisecond before. He was fast enough to recover, twisting in mid-air to avoid being impaled, but the move had cost him.
It had a messed-up flow, his primary advantage. He landed hard, rolling to his feet, and Himeko could feel the wave of unadulterated frustration that came off him.
He dispatched the remaining enemies with a savage, almost petulant display of power. Then, he stood alone in the center of the dark arena, panting.
"What are you doing?" Himeko murmured under her breath.
As if to answer, he crouched and leaped again. Not at an enemy—there were none left—but just a straight, vertical jump. He tried the move again. The awkward hitch, the momentary, anti-gravitational pause. And just as before, it failed. He plummeted, hitting the holographic grid floor with a flat, angry thud that echoed in the vast, empty room.
That was enough.
"That's enough, kid."
Himeko's voice, calm and amplified by the room's acoustics, cut through the simulation's ambient noise like a blade.
Kenji froze.
"You're not going to solve a problem by drilling your mistakes," Himeko continued, stepping into the room.
He turned his head slightly, surprised to see her but still visibly frustrated. "I can still go... I'm not... done..." His voice was a low, strained growl. "It's not working.
"That was an order, Aoyama." Himeko's tone hardened. She was all for hard work, but this was pushing it too far. "End simulation. You're a mess. Go take a shower."
For a long, tense moment, Kenji just stood there. Himeko could see the power racing across his skin. Finally, he spun his palm against the air, accessing the sim's command interface.
"END SIMULATION."
The holographic nebula vanished. The bruised purple light was replaced by the white of the room's overhead fluorescent lights. The vast arena was revealed for what it was: a simple, black, grid-lined room, empty save for the two of them.
Kenji grabbed his discarded shirt from the floor, not bothering to wipe the sweat and grime from his torso. He stalked past her, his boots silent on the floor. He didn't make eye contact. He didn't say a word. He was radiating a cold, inward fury, a frustration aimed not at her, but at himself. At his own power.
The door to the adjoining shower and changing room hissed open and slid shut behind him, leaving Himeko alone in the sudden, sterile silence.
The air, no longer agitated by his movement, began to settle, the sharp, electric scent of his power slowly fading, replaced by the mundane hum of the room's cooling systems.
Himeko stood motionless for a long moment, her arms still crossed. Then, with a sigh, she walked to the room's primary control console. As a scientist, she was defined by her need to understand, and Kenji's display had been one of the most illogical, frustrating variables she had encountered in years.
The screen lit up at her touch, displaying the full telemetry of the last three hours of the simulation. "Access combat log," she commanded, "Isolate... all instances of anomalous vertical maneuvering."
The data sorted itself. A dozen video clips and corresponding data streams appeared. Himeko replayed the first one, watching his stuttering maneuver in slow motion. The data confirmed what her eyes had told her. He would leap, and at the apex, his energy output would spike massively—a chaotic, uncontrolled burst that simply dissipated, briefly sustaining his momentum before gravity took over.
"What are you... trying to do?" she murmured, scrubbing through the other instances. All identical.
His words from moments before echoed in her head, "It's not... working."
A small smile, as faint as a scar, touched Himeko's lips. "What a familiar, stupid feeling."
She leaned against the console, the cold metal a familiar anchor. She inhaled, and the lingering scent of charged particles was suddenly not just Kenji's. It was the smell of her old particle accelerator at Caltech —the scent of 4 AM breakthroughs and 40-hour workweeks. The smell of a problem she couldn't solve.
The data logs on her screen blurred, the red "FAILED" text superimposed over a memory... a vast whiteboard in her old office, covered in equations, calculations, and a dozen theoretical models, all crossed out.
She remembered that younger version of herself, the one before the stigmata, before the diagnosis had put a timer on her entire existence. She had been just as arrogant and just as stubborn.
A brilliant, ambitious scientist who was utterly convinced that any problem, no matter how complex, could be solved by the sheer, brute-force application of her own intellect. Sleep was a suggestion. Food was fuel. Her colleagues were obstacles.
She remembered her old mentor, finding her asleep at her desk, surrounded by a mountain of research. "Himeko, go home. Sleep on it. The problem will still be there tomorrow.""I'm fine," she'd mumbled, already reaching for the coffee. "I'm close... I just need... more time...""You look like a ghost," he'd warned her. "You're trying to brute-force a solution. You'll burn yourself out."
She had ignored him, of course.
Himeko shook her head, a physical motion to pull herself from the memory. "God," she whispered, "I was an idiot."
She looked back at the screen, at Kenji's failed attempts. The stubbornness was the same, a perfect mirror of her own past. But what was his problem? That maneuver... it wasn't just a random impulse.
He was clearly aiming for something. He had a destination in mind, a specific "what" he wanted to achieve. He just had no idea "how" to get there.
And that was the real anomaly.
"But if he's this stuck... if he knows what he wants but has no idea how... why hasn't he asked for help?"
She was a Major, yes, but she was also one of the leading Honkai energy scientists on the continent. Theresa, for all her administrative burdens, was a tactical genius. They were resources. They were right there.
A child, even a stubborn one, would eventually ask for help when they were this lost. Unless... unless the problem itself was a secret.
'Of course,' She chuckled to herself. 'Another one of your secrets, then.'
/ — /
She closed the simulation log and walked out of the white-lit room. The corridor beyond was a stark contrast, bathed in the deep, heavy shadows of the late night. She leaned her back against the wall opposite the changing room and waited.
The implication of his secrecy was something that she had expected. She, Theresa, and Fu Hua all suspected that he was hiding something.
A kid with this much power, hiding his motives... that was how tragedies began. She, better than anyone, knew what happened when power and secrets were left to fester in the dark.
Minutes stretched. The only sound was the academy's central ventilation system. Finally, the changing room door hissed open.
Kenji emerged, his hair dark and damp from the shower, steam coiling off his shoulders into the cold hallway. He was dressed in a simple grey t-shirt and black sweatpants, his hands jammed into his pockets.
He stopped dead when he saw her, visibly surprised. He had clearly expected her to be long gone.
"Himeko,"
"Kenji," she replied, just as flatly. She pushed off the wall and fell into step beside him as he began the long walk toward the building's exit.
The silence between them was different now. It was no longer the empty silence of the sim room, but more of an awkward sensation.
They walked side-by-side, their footsteps echoing in tandem down the empty hall. Kenji kept his gaze fixed firmly on the floor ahead, as if he was expecting to be lectured. She found it funny that someone like him could still act like such a child.
Himeko let the silence draw out, letting him stew in it. Only when they reached the final set of doors did she finally speak.
"So, what were you trying to do there? Looked like you were practicing something."
Kenji's face didn't show it, but his body language shifted just a little. He shrugged, "Just... trying to add a new move… Nothing special"
'Wow, I thought I taught you better than this.'
It was a blatant, almost insulting lie. Himeko had the urge to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and demand the truth. But she suppressed it. She recognized the look in his eyes. It was the same one she used to give her own father. A guarded, stubborn refusal to be understood. Pushing him would only make him lock down harder.
"Look, kid," He stopped a few feet ahead, turning to look back at her, his expression wary. "You're trying to brute-force a problem you don't understand."
She saw his eyes narrow, a flicker of annoyance? Recognition?
"I used to be just like you," she continued, her voice tinged with a self-deprecating tone. She let out a small huff of a laugh, watching her breath plume in the cold air. "I spent my entire youth thinking I could solve any problem by just... pushing harder. By being smarter, or more stubborn, than the universe."
She met his gaze. "It's a good way to burn yourself out. Or get yourself killed. " Whatever it is you're trying to do in there," she nodded back toward the training building, "smashing your head against it like that isn't the answer." There's probably a smarter way."
"My door's always open," she finished, offering a tired smile. "If you decide you want to try and find it. Now, get some sleep. If I catch you out here this late again, I'm going to beat your ass."
Kenji stared at her for a moment before a small smile crept up his face. "Thanks, Himeko…" He stopped, seeming to consider something. "Could you maybe… not tell anyone else what I'm working on?"
She raised a brow at him. "Oh? You want me to lie to the Principal now?" she finished, with an accusatory grin.
The nervous look returned to his face. "U-uhh… Well…"
"Hahaha—!" She burst out laughing. She couldn't help it, he was just too easy to mess with.
"Fine, fine." Kenji was about to thank her, but she cut him off, "But, you owe me for this," And all his hopes were crushed once again.
"Fineee." He reluctantly said.
"That's the spirit!"