The Great

Geon Leventen: Leventen was a pretty shitty name—for a lot of different reasons. House Leventen was always full of trouble. They were one of the only families to support Sugul back in the ancient days and never really supported the Taegan empire. Nowadays they turned more to crime since the recent string of emperors really cracked down on the family’s old habit of uh…..trying to stage multiple coups. A lot of my uncles and brothers and sisters were hired assassins, paid mercenaries, and paid workers who gave other kinds of favors. So naturally, none of that made for great family conversation. It made a lot of things like, "take your kid to work day,” or questions like, “what does your dad do for a living,” really awkward too….

Everyone in the Leventen family was too strong for their own good, but I wanted to change that.

My father was one of the most effective butchers—or hired hitmen—in the world, and powerful people paid him a lot of money to go kill other powerful opponents. He apparently wanted to carry on his legacy or whatever and bought my mom from her family for a hefty sum. He wanted to create a super-baby which could do his killing for him when he got older and he didn’t succeed on his first try–which was why I had so many neglected siblings. On his eighth try though, he had me. He told me to fend for myself and left me to fester with my mom. I don’t remember his face, or his voice, or anything about him really. All I remember was that one day, he died on the job. I’ve heard rumors about how it happened but I’m pretty sure he was killed by another butcher–one way stronger than him.

But yeah, I grew up in a bit of a mess. I never really had a home—unless you counted a building full of hookers and drunk gang-lords twenty four-seven as a home. I couldn’t stand the screaming of momI couldn’t stand the lifeless corpses of my baby siblings, and I couldn’t stand the smell of our separate filthy shack—while he lived in his mansion….

It was all water under the bridge. He was dead, my mom’s been long gone, and I can’t even remember the faces of my various brothers and sisters.

I found these new people though and I was happy with that. They all seemed fine with me and they were all so nice—they even treated me like a human being—which was a bonus.

Sure Evay was a little strange, but he was the nicest person that I had met at this school. He also seemed extremely unaware of who I was and I didn’t really mind that. Lila was pretty hot and she was always looking out for us. Hopefully she was looking out for me a lot in specific…..

Aurora was like a panther, she wasn’t very approachable but she was a very talented warrior. She wasn’t very warm but she could talk to people as a leader.

They all weren’t perfectly honest about who they were or where they came from, but I valued the fact that they didn’t resent me. And that’s enough for me right now.

The warm evening sun rose high in the sky as everything seemed to be covered in a blanket of orange light. We each had our ice cream cones in our hands as we all basked in the evening sunshine. Evay seemed to enjoy his ice cream the most. In fact it looked like he’d never had an ice cream before in his life. I chuckled at the sight of Aurora devouring her ice cream as well. She’s such a composed and formal person until, ice cream.

I always saw Aurora as a little intimidating—since she was so serious and formal. She was intelligent and certainly perceptive. Her auburn hair looked like it was on fire in the evening glow, and her tan skin matched the summer season well. Lila also seemed to be enjoying her ice cream but a lot less than her dear friend. Lila was well…..beautiful. I overheard a lot of guys talk about her at the festival which made me cringe.

They think they have a chance with her…

She had dark skin and night black hair which had crescent-moon shaped gold markings in them. Her auburn eyes looked almost golden and she always had a happy look on her face...Maybe I got a shot, who knows?

I mused to myself until Lila said something that was on my mind. “So did you guys hear about the Youth Championships? Apparently it’s extremely big news this year,” I saw Aurora light up.

“Yeah I heard! Apparently this year 5 people are going to be chosen from our school instead of 6. Usually half of the team is in their third year, but this year the projected power rankings put the first years as the best class in our school!” Aurora was strangely passionate compared to her usual calm self.

“I think we all have a good chance at getting on the team this year! Imagine if we all get in, we can travel together, eat together, win together….” she suddenly looked up and blushed a little, “Sorry, just—I really like matches.”

“Wait, a tournament?” Evay looked a little puzzled.

Aurora continued speaking, “Yeah, the International Youth Championships. It’s the yearly tournament that schools have at the end of the year. The best school in all of the empire goes to the tournament, and we’ve always been chosen by the empire as the representative academy. If our academy ranking drops from number one to two, we won’t get to go. But so far we’ve been number one for the past 14 years.”

Aurora wasn’t the only one who wanted to win this thing. If we win this, nobles would probably have their eyes on us the moment we graduated from Eden. We would get to dive into our work right away and winning also get us an absurd amount of cash—which was always nice.

All four of us honestly had a good shot at being selected but that meant that if we were—one other person would need to round things out.

Well there’s no guarantee we get picked either. Being selected was a combination of your grades, your performance in class sparring, and your overall attitude and chemistry with other students. I was really worried about the grades part so my plan was to excel so much in combat training that they would ignore my grades. That would technically be harder than just getting good grades, but screw that.

If you were a terrible teammate you wouldn’t get picked but at the same time—kind people don’t always mesh well with each other either. If all four of us got picked our chemistry would probably fine, but we still hadn’t ever fought with each other. In fact we didn’t even know what Evay could really do.

Aurora stood up and we all followed her back to our dorm. It was weird—I had known these people for less than a week and yet everything seemed to just kind of get along. It was hard cooperating with other warriors but it all felt very natural with these three. It also helped that we all had something to work towards now. We needed to make the school team, go to the national championships, and win.

For some reason though, the winning wasn't what excited me. I wanted to be with these people, not just for a little while, but for a long time.

I looked over at Evay who was shoving an entire cream cone in his mouth.

I guess we just kind of…mesh.