I found him on a Tuesday.
I knocked twice before opening the door.
Mr. Zeke's office was small and unremarkable — a desk buried under marked papers, a shelf of history textbooks nobody had touched in years, one window that looked out onto the school's rear courtyard. He was leaning back in his chair when I walked in, reading something. He didn't look up immediately.
"Kael," he said, turning a page. "Shouldn't you be in third period?"
"Probably."
He glanced up then.
There was nothing alarming about his face. That was always the thing with Mr. Zeke — he had the kind of face that made you feel like you were worrying over nothing. Patient eyes. A mild, unhurried expression. He looked like someone who had never been in a hurry in his entire life.
He set the papers down.
"Sit down then. What's going on?"
I didn't sit.
"I know who you are."
A pause.
Not a long one. Just a breath's worth — the kind of pause that tells you more than any answer would.
He looked at me for a moment.
Then he leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk.
"Close the door," he said quietly.
I did.
He didn't deny it.
That was the part that threw me. No confusion, no "what are you talking about," none of the stuff someone says when they genuinely don't know what you mean.
He just watched me stand there and waited.
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"A while," he said.
I folded my arms.
"You don't seem surprised."
"No," he agreed. "I'm not."
He studied me the way you study something you've been thinking about for a long time — not with suspicion, but with a kind of careful attention.
"I have to say," he said, "I didn't expect it to be you."
Something in the way he said it was strange. Not threatening. Almost familiar, like he was picking up a conversation from somewhere I hadn't been.
"Don't worry about what you mean by that," I said.
He almost smiled.
"I wasn't going to explain it."
He stood up slowly from behind the desk.
The room felt smaller when he stood.
"You should go back to class, Kael," he said. "Forget this. Whatever you think you're involved in — it's larger than you."
"I know how large it is."
"Do you?"
He said it without mockery. Genuinely curious.
"Then you know," he added, "that you are very far out of your depth."
I met his eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "I've been hearing that a lot lately."
Something shifted.
Not in the room. Not in his expression.
Just — in the air. A subtle settling, like pressure adjusting before a storm. I'd felt something like it on the island, when fighters were about to move.
I'd learned not to ignore that feeling.
I threw the first punch.
He slipped it. No panic, no dramatic dodge — just a small, economic movement, his head tilting an inch to the right, and my fist went past his ear.
I didn't stop there.
I followed with a left, shifted my weight low, went for the body. I wasn't working off copies — not Aria's stance, not Leilani's footwork, nothing borrowed. Just what I actually knew. Basics sharpened by years before the island ever existed, muscle memory that was genuinely mine.
He blocked it.
Solid. Clean. Like hitting a wall that knew you were coming.
I pressed forward anyway. I kept my guard tight, varied my rhythm, didn't telegraph. I moved like I was supposed to — controlled, technical, reading his shifts in weight.
It didn't matter.
He was just better.
Not flashier. Not louder. He didn't glow, didn't draw on anything I could see. He was simply faster than he had any right to be, and every time I found an angle he was already somewhere else, and every time I committed he made me pay for it.
He caught me in the ribs with something short and precise and the air left my body all at once.
I backed into the shelf. Books scattered across the floor.
I tried to find Aria's rhythm — that fluid, reading style I'd copied so cleanly in training. I reached for the shape of it.
It wasn't there.
Wrong. Off-tempo. Like a word you've said so many times it stops sounding like a word.
I tried anyway, got my footing, went again.
He redirected me into the desk. Papers went everywhere.
"You've gotten stronger," he said calmly, from somewhere behind me.
I straightened up.
"Thanks," I managed.
"But not enough," he added. "You'd have done well, not knowing any of this existed."
I turned around.
He was standing near the window, completely unhurried. Barely breathing hard.
"But you do know," he said. "And knowing isn't the same as being ready."
I went at him one more time.
He put me on the floor.
Not viciously. Not with any particular drama. My legs just stopped cooperating and the ground came up to meet me and I stayed there for a moment, staring at the underside of his desk.
He straightened his jacket.
"Rest," he said.
He picked up the book that had fallen nearest to him and set it back on the shelf.
Then he walked to the door.
"Don't follow me," he said, without turning back.
He opened the door.
He left.
I lay there for a while. Another loss..
The office was very quiet. One of the papers from the desk had drifted near my face. It was a graded quiz. Someone had gotten a forty-three percent on the causes of the First World War.
I stared at it.
Then I sat up slowly, because lying on the floor of a teacher's office wasn't exactly how I wanted to be found, and because my ribs hurt less when I moved than when I stayed still and thought about how much they hurt.
Getting up took longer than I would have liked.
I made it out of the building eventually.
The others found me near the east stairwell, sitting on the bottom step with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out in front of me. Leilani got there first — she always moved fast when something was wrong. She stopped two steps above me and looked down.
Her expression went through several things in quick succession.
"What happened to your face?"
"Stairs," I said.
"Kael."
"I found him."
She came down the last two steps. Ikaroa appeared around the corner a moment later, took one look at me, and for once didn't immediately say something theatrical. He just stood there.
Aria was last.
She went still when she saw me.
I looked at the group.
"Mr. Zeke," I said. "History teacher. Third floor office, end of the hall."
Nobody spoke.
"He's gone now," I added. "Cleared out when we were done."
Aria's jaw tightened slightly.
"You went alone," she said.
It wasn't quite a question.
"I found him," I said again. I exhaled.
"I just couldn't defeat him.. I was weak."
I leaned my head back against the wall.
My ribs had settled into a dull, constant complaint.
"You guys handle the rest."
Ikaroa was quiet for another second.
Then, slowly, the familiar expression came back — that particular look he got right before things became very loud.
"Finally," he said.
"Recons over."