Unchosen Champion

Seki Kitawa kept his head down and listened. He was uncomfortable sitting on his knees, directly on the floor, but he wasn’t someone that would draw attention with complaints. No, Seki had adapted to his life by shrinking away from the spotlight. Each of his older sisters took a different path to navigate their complicated family, but keeping his head down was his own. In comparison to his subdued approach, his eldest sister had been forced to embrace the focus of their elders while his middle sister rebelled against the pressure to meet expectations.

For Seki, being the forgotten youngest child was his ideal. He was content to simply listen, as he was once again. Hiding behind a mop of combed black hair, he tried to catch snippets of the conversation that was occurring between his eldest sister and his uncle. If only the middle sister would be quiet so he could hear. Without moving his head, he glanced at her from the corner of his eye.

Rather than sitting on her knees, his middle sister sat with one knee bent and the other stretched out into the middle of the hallway, with no consideration for how anyone would pass, leaning her back against a wooden post. “This is a waste of time.” She grumbled, not really looking for a response. Her bright pink pigtails and black makeup clashed with the monotone traditional clothes that they were both forced to wear while within the family compound. She had refused to remove the steel and black piercings that decorated her ears, nose, and lip, and wore her regular clothes underneath. Her punk aesthetic really was out of place among the tatami floors and ornate wooden ranma panels above the sliding fusuma doors. At least she had left her combat boots at the entrance. He would feel bad for the attendants that would have tried to get her to cooperate if she had insisted on keeping them.

His extended family had enjoyed generations of success, bringing wealth and prominence to their name that required careful management. Before the assimilation, his father had been the head of the family while his mother worked as the president of their corporate holdings. They were both highly focused people who Seki believed would have been ideally suited for leading the family through the current turbulent times. Surely, they wouldn’t be in their current predicament if they had their wise leadership present.

When they had their first child, a daughter, they had raised her with the express purpose of turning her into their successor. Reina Kitawa had risen to the occasion, unbending beneath the spotlight, growing from the ideal child to the heir apparent. She was sent to the most expensive private schools where she blossomed into a star thanks to her diligence. She was perfect in every way, becoming class president, valedictorian, club captain, and achieving every scholastic accolade available. If she wasn’t so patient and kind she would have been easy to hate. She had been on track to complete her college program a year early and begin working within the family business before mana arrived and disrupted her life plan.

Even her fiance, who had been arranged by their families, was perfect. An allstar athlete with an easy smile who was also the valedictorian of his own school and the heir of his own family’s business, he nearly matched up with Reina. At least he came as close as humanly possible. Like Reina, people couldn’t help but like him as well.

It was completely impossible for Akari Kitawa, the second daughter, to live up to the ideal that Reina had established. She wilted under the combined pressure of their parents’ expectations, rebelling to the point that she had been expelled from two different schools before begrudgingly graduating from a third. Akari hadn’t gone to college after graduating the year before mana arrived, delaying their parents’ plan and instead finding an equally delinquent boyfriend. Her routine was centered around disappearing for weeks at a time until she would show up again after running out of money.

Really, Seki was thankful for both of his older sisters and their completely opposite attitudes. If it wasn’t for their ability to occupy their parents’ attention, he wouldn’t have been able to live his own preferred life. He was only 14 years old, with four years separating each sibling, but he had been able to avoid the same concentrated mindfulness that had driven his sisters to their extremes. As long as he maintained decent enough grades to stay under the radar, he could have continued to pursue his interests while letting his parents prepare Reina for the future while doing their best to keep track of Akari.

Unfortunately, they were gone. Both of the siblings’ parents were killed as the first monsters revealed themselves. They barely had time to mourn. His father’s younger brother, a man of contradictions, had taken over the organization, and together, the family had claimed the civilization shard. In the time since, they had established one of the world’s most powerful settlements, largely on the backs of Reina and Akari who had grown into what were essentially superheroes.

Seki suspected the settlement would be one of the most organized on the planet, thanks to some of the more traditional values instilled in the population and the previous respect their family had engendered. He hadn’t believed the possibility at first, but he and his sisters had made some friends that brought news of other places. The struggles they described were beyond his imagination. Almost all of the violence around Tokyo had been humans fighting monsters, but it sounded like the political machinations that had been occurring behind the scenes had translated to violence elsewhere. They were lucky to have avoided such strife locally.

Those foreign friends were the subject of the meeting between his eldest sister and his uncle. Seki recognized the issue, but he still thought it was stupid. Their uncle’s position wasn’t as secure as it would have been for either of the siblings’ parents. He was threatened in particular by the group of Chosen who had arrived at the start of the siege and proven themselves to exceed the strength of all but the most powerful members of the settlement. They had demanded a peaceful handover of the Champion status, but had been rebuffed and had instead been biding their time, making allies and negotiating deals while others focused on survival. As he understood it, the same type of conflict had occurred elsewhere, and had quickly devolved into conflict. The combined power of Seki’s party was too much for them to dare try anything beyond threatening violence, but they had finally found a method that could give them leverage.

The truth was that with the three siblings cooperating, they were unstoppable in combat. Reina had taken responsibility for the siblings immediately after their parents died, proving herself to be even better at considering their feelings than anyone else had ever been. She had experienced the same pressures as them and was uniquely situated to relate. Previously, the sisters had something of an antagonistic rivalry, but the truth was they loved and respected each other for the choices each had made. Reina thought Akari brave and fiercely independent while Akari saw Reina as impossibly strong and dependable. In a way, Seki was the odd one out, but he was the one that had arranged their party. He wouldn’t admit it, but he had guided them using strategies meant for turn-based role playing games, but they had given him the respect to listen to his ideas, something he hadn’t expected.