The silence in Class 2-F was a physical entity. It was heavy, suffocating, and charged with the electric promise of violence. The moment Riku Sato spoke, the room's chaotic energy had snapped into perfect, terrified alignment, every eye fixed on the two opposing poles of power: the established King and the silent anomaly in the back.
Riku's walk was a performance. He moved with a predator's rolling gait, his shoulders swaying, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. Each heavy step of his boots on the floor was a drumbeat counting down to an execution. He wasn't just walking; he was claiming territory, his aggressive aura pressing down on the other students, forcing them to lower their heads and shrink in their seats. They knew this ritual. They had seen it many times before. It was the culling of the weak, the reinforcement of the food chain.
His shadow fell over the empty desks before it finally engulfed the boy by the window. Riku loomed over the seated figure, a mountain of muscle and menace casting the transfer student in complete darkness. The contrast was stark, almost comical. Riku, a portrait of explosive, kinetic rage. And Ravi Sharma, a study in absolute stillness. He hadn't moved a muscle. He was still gazing out the window, his profile calm, as if the most dangerous student in the school wasn't standing a foot away, radiating enough killing intent to make a normal person's heart stop.
This utter lack of reaction was more insulting than any curse. It was a silent, profound rejection of Riku's authority.
"Hey," Riku's voice was a low, dangerous growl. "I'm talking to you, pretty boy."
Ravi's eyes remained on the clouds.
A vein throbbed in Riku's temple. He was used to fear. He was used to defiance born of stupidity, which was always fun to break. He was not used to being ignored. It was like shouting at a rock.
"In this class," Riku continued, leaning down, his face now inches from Ravi's, "when I walk into a room, you look at me. When I speak, you listen. And when I stand over you, you fucking grovel."
From the corner of the room, the whispers were frantic, laced with a morbid excitement.
"It's over for him."
"He's dead. Riku looks pissed."
"Why isn't he saying anything? Is he deaf? Just apologize and maybe you'll only get a broken arm."
The tattooed brute from earlier, who now looked like a chastised puppy, watched with a cruel smirk. He was eager to see the new kid get the brutal welcome he deserved, a punishment that would re-establish the natural order and, by extension, his own place within it.
Riku reached out and slammed his hand down on Ravi's desk. The sound was a thunderclap, BAM!, making the entire class jump. The wood, already weakened from years of abuse, splintered under the force.
"Look. At. Me," Riku snarled, his voice dropping to a deadly hiss.
Slowly, deliberately, Ravi turned his head. His silver-gray eyes, empty and cold as a winter fog, finally lifted to meet Riku's. There was no fear in them. No anger. There was nothing. It was the gaze of a man looking at a mildly interesting insect.
For the first time in a long time, a flicker of unease, a primal instinct of wrongness, pricked at the back of Riku's mind. He crushed it immediately. Fear was for the weak. He was the King.
Ravi's lips parted, and he spoke for the first time since entering the classroom. His voice was quiet, smooth, and utterly devoid of emotion.
"I didn't see your name on it."
The words hung in the air, a quiet statement of fact that landed with the force of a physical blow. The class collectively held its breath. It wasn't a challenge. It wasn't a taunt. It was a dismissal. It was a quiet, factual statement that Riku Sato, the fearsome King of Black Fang High, was, to this boy, completely and utterly irrelevant.
Riku's face, which had been contorted in a sneer, went blank for a fraction of a second. Then, it flooded with a dark, furious red. The air around him seemed to thicken, to grow heavy with his rage.
"You…" he whispered, his voice trembling with fury. "You're dead."
He didn't waste any more words. His right hand, a fist the size of a small ham and adorned with heavy brass knuckles, shot forward. It was his signature opening move, a punch thrown with enough force to shatter concrete and end any fight before it began. It moved like a blur, aimed directly at Ravi's face, intended to rearrange his features into a bloody pulp.
The students gasped, some turning away, not wanting to witness the carnage.
The punch never landed.
At the very last microsecond, as the brass knuckles were a mere centimeter from his nose, Ravi moved. It wasn't a dodge. A dodge is a reaction, a panicked movement to escape danger. This was different. With a motion so subtle it was almost imperceptible, he simply leaned his head back. Just a centimeter. Maybe two. His body remained perfectly still in the chair, his hands resting on his lap.
WHOOSH.
Riku's fist sliced through the air where Ravi's face had been, the force of the blow creating a miniature sonic boom that ruffled Ravi's black hair.
Silence.
Riku froze, his arm extended, his fist clenched. His mind struggled to process what had just happened. It was impossible. No one was that fast. No one was that calm. He had miscalculated. He must have.
"He… he dodged it?" someone whispered from the back, their voice trembling with disbelief.
In the hallway, Reina Kurozawa, who had been observing the entire exchange through the narrow window of the door, felt her blood run cold. She hadn't seen a dodge. She had seen something else. It was yosoku, the art of prediction, but on a level that defied human capability. To move that little, that late, required not just seeing the punch coming, but knowing its exact trajectory, speed, and endpoint before it was even thrown. It was the movement of a grandmaster, yet it came from a boy who looked like he'd never been in a fight in his life. Her mind, usually a fortress of cold logic, was now a swirling vortex of confusion and alarm.
Riku, shaking off his shock with a furious growl, refused to accept it. "Lucky shot, you bastard!" he roared.
He followed up with a furious combination. A left hook aimed at the temple, an uppercut meant to shatter the jaw. It was a torrent of violence, each punch fast, brutal, and precise.
And Ravi simply… avoided it.
As the left hook came, he swayed gently to the right, his torso moving with the fluid grace of a willow branch in the wind. The punch missed by a hair's breadth. As the uppercut followed, he leaned back slightly, the fist grazing past his chin so closely it should have torn skin, yet it touched nothing. He hadn't stood up. He hadn't raised his hands. He looked less like he was in a fight and more like he was politely declining Riku's offerings.
Riku's controlled rage devolved into a wild, frantic flurry. He threw punch after punch, his movements becoming sloppy, his breath coming in ragged gasps of fury and exertion. Fists, elbows, backhands—he threw everything he had at the silent figure in the chair.
And nothing connected. Ravi was a ghost, a mirage. He moved with an impossible, almost lazy efficiency, making the smallest possible adjustments to evade a storm of attacks. A slight turn of the shoulder. A subtle dip of the head. A fractional shift in his seat. It was a sublime, terrifying dance of non-resistance.
The rest of the class watched, their jaws hanging open in stunned silence. The scene was surreal. Their invincible King, Riku "Fangbreaker" Sato, was flailing like a child throwing a tantrum, while his target looked like he was about to fall asleep from boredom.
The whispers started again, but this time their tone was different. The morbid excitement was gone, replaced by pure, unadulterated awe.
"What… what is happening?"
"He's not even looking at the punches!"
"It's like Riku's fighting the air…"
"He's a monster…"
Finally, Riku, his lungs burning and his arms aching, skidded to a halt. He stood panting, sweat beading on his forehead, his chest heaving. He had thrown over twenty punches at point-blank range, and not a single one had landed. He stared at Ravi, his mind screaming in disbelief.
The transfer student was in the exact same position as before the "fight" had started, still seated, his expression unchanged. A few strands of his black hair, disturbed by the wind of the missed punches, settled back into place. That was the only sign that anything had happened at all.
Ravi's silver eyes, which had followed Riku's movements with a placid, detached interest, now seemed to grow even colder. He blinked once, slowly. Then, he spoke again, his voice just as quiet, just as devastatingly calm as before.
"Are you done?"
The question was a bucket of ice water thrown on Riku's bonfire of rage.
Ravi followed it with a soft, weary sigh, as if he was dealing with a particularly persistent toddler.
"Sit down," he said, his tone flat, final, and utterly dismissive.
"You're boring."
The words echoed in the dead silent room. You're boring. It wasn't just an insult; it was a judgment. It was a god looking at a mortal's greatest effort and finding it profoundly, disappointingly dull.
Riku Sato, the King, the Fangbreaker, the symbol of power and violence in Black Fang High, just stood there. Frozen. His fists were still clenched, his body still coiled for a fight, but his will, his spirit, had been shattered by three simple words. Humiliation, hot and sharp, pierced through his rage, leaving him feeling hollowed out, exposed, and for the first time since he was a child, small.
The bell rang, its shrill, metallic shriek tearing through the spell, signaling the end of the period and the beginning of lunch.
But no one moved. No one spoke. Every eye was locked on the boy in the back of the room, their understanding of the world irrevocably broken and reformed in the last two minutes.
Ravi, for his part, simply turned his head and resumed his vigil, gazing out the window at the gray, uncaring sky, as if nothing at all had happened.