Darius Virvit — POV
Another person stepped through the door and into the room.
I yawned. I'd forgotten how tedious this could become after the first dozen or so.
Elias, on the other hand, hadn't slowed at all. He was still writing nonstop, pen moving across the clipboard without pause. I felt a small twinge of guilt about that — I was mostly just watching him or asking the occasional question while he did the actual work.
What can I do to actually help him with this? I asked myself.
"You sent them off too quickly. I didn't get to ask them about their essence experience."
His words from earlier past in my head.
I looked at the figure standing in front of the table and, for a moment, I was genuinely reassessed what I was looking at.
He was tall. The tallest one we'd seen so far, by a clear margin. Gray eyes, the color of low fog. Long hair pulled back into a ponytail that fell down his back. For someone still going through puberty, his physique was remarkably developed — every muscle in apparent working order, nothing soft or undeveloped about him.
His essence flowed cleanly through his body as well. His heart, though, was beating faster than it should have been.
"Name?" Elias asked.
"Toren Gravald, sir."
His voice carried a weight to it — deeper than expected, deliberate, full of something that sounded like responsibility before he'd said anything that warranted it.
"Aha, where are you from?"
"Tihis Village, sir. That's where I live."
"What brings you here? Do you have plans for the future?"
"I came here for the sake of them. All of them."
"Who is 'them'?"
"My family. The people of my village. My friends. My comrades. And everyone else." He straightened slightly. "My plan for the future is to stand ahead of the people of Nivalis. As their living shield."
"Mhmm. Interesting." Elias tapped his pen against the table a few times. "What exactly do you mean by 'living shield'?"
"It means that whatever problems they have, they can come to me for help — the way they would go to a Snow Guard. And even without being asked, I'll be there. For all of them."
"What if you can't protect all of them?" I cut in.
His fist tightened at his side. "That's exactly why I want to become a living shield. So that I can protect them all." His voice rose with the last few words.
"But you won't be able to save everyone, Toren," Elias said. Flat. Cold.
"What?"
"That's the truth. No one can. No matter how strong you become, there will always be a moment, somewhere, where you can't be in two places at once."
Elias…
"Then what about Akira?" Toren argued. "How was he able to do it?"
Elias paused.
"He is Akira," he said finally. "One and only. Of course he could've."
"Then what's stopping me from doing the same thing as him?"
"You are not him. Are you?"
Toren went quiet, looking at him.
"If you were Akira, I would believe every word you say. But you're not. Just as I'm not Akira. Darius isn't Akira. No matter how much I want to believe you, I can't take that claim at face value."
"Then I'll prove it!" Toren said. "I'll show it to you both — and to everyone else — that there is someone who will always be there for them. A man who protects."
Elias let out a long breath. "Okay. So from everything you've said, I guess you're aiming for the Snow Guards. Correct?"
"Yes."
"Noted. Next question — have you ever had any contact with essence?"
"Yes, I have." Quick. Confident.
"You have?" I said.
"I can control the earth element."
Elias wrote it down.
"What can you do with it specifically?" he asked, eyes on the clipboard.
"I can raise walls of earth and move it at my will — although that is a lot harder for me than just raise them from the earth."
"All right." Elias said, as he finished writing. „Thank you for the informations, Toren. It's very useful to us."
"Always, sir."
"You can go back now. And send someone else. here"
He nodded and left.
"What a giant," I said.
"Yeah, he is massive indeed."
"What do you think of him?" Elias asked me.
"Great build. I also felt no problems with essence flowing within his body. I have high hopes for him, the same as with Luiz. Though his ambition is a little — concerning."
"He wants to protect everyone. Why concerning?" Elias asked, a small smile forming on his face.
"That is just not possible. Not even the S's can manage to do that."
"Well, he told you he was going to do it anyway, didn't he?"
I rubbed my forehead. "He'll figure that out eventually at some point, one way or another." I paused.
"Is there any wine left?" Elias said out of nowhere.
"Since when do you drink?"
"I do, just rarely.
I stood from the chair, grabbed the bottle, poured a glass, and handed it to him. He swirled it briefly in his hands before taking a sip.
"This is actually good," he said, a small flicker of genuine, almost childish pleasure in his voice.
"Of course that it's good. When has wine ever tasted bad, Elias?"
Twenty minutes later
We kept going through the candidates after Toren. My back was starting to fuse permanently to this chair, almost to the point that I started to thought it was glued to it. I couldn't wait for the actual training to start — at least that would involve standing up occasionally.
We'd just sent off another pair of two people to the room and told them to bring someone new.
Why are they all so boring? I thought, taking another sip of wine.
Elias was still writing. I genuinely had no idea how many pages he'd gone through since we'd started.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
"Come in," I said.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Nothing. The door stayed closed.
"Come in!" I said again, louder.
Oh no. Not another one of these. Another hedgehog.
The door opened slowly. A young man stepped through with jet-black hair — wild, spiky, sticking out in every direction as if it had personally decided not to cooperate with gravity. Thick, uneven locks framed his face, a few longer strands hanging over his forehead. His build was below average — probably one of the least physically developed of everyone we'd seen so far.
Look at this hairy one. Was the second thought that came to me from seeing him.
He took a step. Then another. Stopped in front of the table.
"Oh, there's a chair here!" he said bringing the chair closer to the table and sitting on it.
"You finished looking around?" I asked.
He glanced at me. "Yo. Yeah I did finished what I had to." He said it with an cheerful voice, almost sounding childish. "I didn't noticed you two here."
"There is literally nothing else in this room besides Elias and me. And you're telling me you didn't notice us."
He scratched the back of his head. "Well — I noticed that book over there. By the window."
He pointed.
"It got all of my attention as soon as I got here."
I stood and walked to the window. A small stack of books sat below it, a thin layer of dust over the top one. I picked up the one he'd pointed to, wiped the dust off with my left hand, and read the cover.
Listen to a Woman's Body Language — 3rd Edition. Was the books name, by some author named Kito Amagi.
I opened the first page of the book and...
A woman in a yellow colored bikini lay across a bed, sweat tracking down her body, while she licked her fingers with her tongue.
I stood there for a moment, staring at the page, heat moving up my neck for reasons I couldn't immediately explain.
WHAT IS THIS!? SINCE WHEN HAS THIS BEEN HERE!?
Why am I reacting like this? It's the wine. It has to be the wine. But no! Two glasses isn't enough to do this to Darius Virvit — not the one I knew!
This is what caught his attention instead of either of us? I thought thinking of the room. How did he even see this from that distance?
"Lemme see a bit too," someone said, right beside my shoulder.
I turned my head to where the sound came from. He was already there, mouth slightly open, eyes locked directly onto the girl on the page.
"Uhuhuuuu—" He made a very stupid noise, the sound he made was genuinely difficult to categorize. It sounded as bad as I could describe it. It sounded like he was some cavemen that just saw a sea pickle for the first time in his entire life.
The boy stood in that position for a few seconds, not breathing at all. Just staring at that page.
Ummm… Did it fried his brain? I thought.
"NO WAIT! — WHEN DID YOU GET OVER HERE?!" the word slipped out of my mouth fast.
Footsteps approached from behind us.
"What are you two doing?" Elias asked.
"What's in that b—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
I turned around to look at Elias, just in time to see the book floating in the air above his outstretched palm. A second later, fire erupted underneath it, and the entire thing was reduced to ash before it hit the floor.
"NOOOOOOO! MY TREASURE!" The boy clutched both hands to his head, dropping to his knees.
Why does he look like he is actually in a pain?
"You little—" Elias raised his right arm, and the room filled with a sudden, dense rush of mana.
The pressure that followed gripped everything in the room at once. Papers shook on the table. The boy hit the floor so fast I didn't even register the moment he fell.
"Not this again!" the boy shouted glued to the ground.
His technique slowly began to affect me as well, forcing me to coat myself in my own mana to resist it's force.
"Calm down, Elias! You're going to bring the whole room down if you keep it!" I shouted.
He cut the technique. The aftermath was immediate — dust hanging in the air, papers scattered across every surface, several still drifting down from where they'd been thrown.
Elias adjusted his glasses, sat back down in his chair, picked up his pen and clipboard, and started writing again with noticeably more force than usual. The boy and I both quietly returned to our own chairs.
We sat in silence. Elias writing being the only sound in the room.
This is the first time I've seen Elias behaving like this…
I glanced at the boy. His attention had drifted somewhere else entirely yet again — fixed, intent, focused on a single page still drifting through the air before settling face-down on Elias's clipboard.
Elias's eyes locked onto it immediately. He set his pen down, picked it up, and flipped it over.
"HUH?!"
It's her again! The same page! When did he managed to tear it apart?
Elias's jaw tightened audibly. He crumpled the paper in his right hand, eyes fixed onto the boy with an expression that contained nothing remotely friendly.
His arm rose. Mana surged from his core all way down to his palm and stayed there, gathering.
"Don't do it, Elias!" I shouted reaching for his arm.
Too late. He'd already thrown it.
BOOM.
The crumpled paper hit the boy square in the head and bounced off, ricocheting toward the door like something fired from a cannon rather than thrown by hand. Elias had wrapped it in mana before the throw — the impact sounded like stone, not paper.
"AAAAUGH!" The boy screamed reaching his head with both hands. "My head! It hurts!"
"And it should hurt you! You absolute disaster."
"Let's finish with this already," He said, trying to redirect things back toward something resembling an interview. "Your name?"
"Tavon Nenets," he said, rubbing his head.
"Do you have any goals you want to achieve?"
"Girls."
He said it simply. Completely seriously. No hesitation. No embarrassment.
Elias and I exchanged a look. Neither of us had anything to say to that immediately.
I studied his face for any sign of a joke. But there wasn't one. He looked genuinely, fully convinced of his own answer, a small proud smile forming there, his essence reacting and quickening with every passing second of his own enthusiasm.
Tup. Tup. Tup.
Elias's fingers drummed against the table.
"What exactly do you mean by that?"
Tavon put his elbows on his knees, closing his eyes and rocked slightly side to side, left-right "Girls. That's exactly what I mean."
Tup. Tup. Tup.
"I understand the word. But it doesn't tell us anything useful. What's your actual goal here?" Elias asked yet again, his voice slowly shifting down to anger.
"I want to have as many girls as possible." He said at least, spreading both of his hands in the air. He said it with a kind of pure, uncomplicated happiness I genuinely couldn't describe.
Tup. Tup. Tup. Tup. Tup.
"Last question. Have you had any contact with essence?"
"Essence?" He blinked. "What the hell is that?"
"You'll learn." Elias closed his eyes briefly. "You're free to go. Send someone else."
Tavon stood, walked to the door, opened it, and left.
"What is wrong with that man," Elias said, not quietly.
"What does h—"
The door opened again. Tavon's head reappeared around the frame, one arm reaching in toward the floor near the door, grabbing the scrap of crumpled paper still lying there, before vanishing again with the door clicking shut behind him.
I stared at Elias as he resumed writing.
"Umm." I scratched my cheek. "Did you find anything interesti—"
"I genuinely don't know if that man is a candidate or some kind of walking disaster sent here to test my patience specifically. He's here purely here for his own desires. How can someone like that even become a soldier? Let alone an essencer?"
"Who even put him on the list? Was it you, Darius?"
"I don't remember such name anywhere on the list that I made."
"It certainly wasn't me," he said, scandalized, almost devastated. "It cannot be me. There's no possible version of events where I invited that idiot to this program."
"Just relax Elias, it's not as bad as you think it is..."
"What do you mean it's not as bad as I think Darius? He is here for what? Girls? Do we really have to teach him about essence? Who exactly is he supposed to protect?"
"You're missing my point. What I meant was — not everyone here has the same motivations. Some people have genuinely ridiculous reasons for showing up. That doesn't mean those reasons can't eventually turn into something real."
"Ummm… Elias? You listening?"
"If others hear about this, I will be joked for the rest of my entire life. What if he becomes exactly like that one psychopath from Droswen? I can already see it in the newspaper, the student taught by Elias Sikigiti molested woman on the middle of the road."
"Elias!" I shouted at him.
He looked at me
"What?"
"Where did you wander off to?"
"Well, th—"
Knock. Knock. Knock.
"Come in!" I called.
The door opened slowly. A young man stepped through, and the first thing I noticed — immediately, unmistakably — was his green hair.
It's that boy. From the room earlier.
He closed the door gently behind him and approached the table, his eyes moving briefly left and right as he took in the lingering mess from Elias's technique — scattered papers, a faint haze of dust still settling. He sat down without a word.
He looked at me for a few seconds. Then at Elias. Then back to me. The cycle repeated once, unhurried.
Something about him kept pulling me at the edge of my memory. His face held a familiarity I couldn't place — features that matched someone I'd met before, somewhere, though I couldn't connect the dots.
His build was solid for his age, clearly visible beneath the standard-issue compression shirt we'd given all of them. But something was off in how his essence moved.
I couldn't feel any of it. No mana. No energy. Nothing at all.
Has he never had contact with essence either?
"Name?" Elias asked.
"Renias," he said, his voice calm and even. "But please — call me Ren."
I glanced at Elias, who was already writing.
"All right, Ren. Can we get your surname as well?"
Something shifted in his green eyes the moment the question landed — calm dropping away, replaced by something more guarded, more serious, in the space of a single breath.
That look. Who are you, Ren? Why do you remind me of someone so much?
"Sure," he said, looking down at Elias's clipboard rather than at either of us.
"I…I" He stopped. Started again. "I'm an Aoki."
A pause.
"Renias Aoki."
"WAIT — WHAT?"
Elias was out of his chair before he'd finished the sentence.
AOKI?! Since when do they have another child!?