Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I'll write Tower of God fanfiction about someone other than Anaak or Ran, and when that fails, I try to avoid flooding the Korean comics section with Tower of God stories, because... honestly, these are the only two characters I ever seem to write.

Then there are times Zephyr likes the end product enough to post it anyway, and this would be one of those times. Non-descriptive spoilers for the Name Change Station, specifically around chapter 292.

Anaak Jahad did not care.

"I heard you suddenly formed a death wish," she glared accusingly at the blue-haired boy in front of her. He was in rough shape, paler than usual with the dark shadows of exhaustion underneath his eyes. A normal person wouldn't have been able to so much as lift their head, but Ran stubbornly shifted into a position that allowed him to properly return her glare.

He almost failed at that.

Nobody would've believed she didn't care if they could have heard her now. Ran himself had his suspicions, and he was fairly certain – completely certain that they hated each other. If Ran had just found out one of his sworn enemies had nearly gotten themselves killed, he wouldn't have responded at all, definitely not gone to visit them, except maybe to rub it in.

That, he informed himself stubbornly, was obviously what the lizard had come here to do. Now that he'd realized her plan, Ran refused to let her take the first jab.

The time he'd spent training, between the Workshop Battle and now, he'd honed his skills while imagining the face of Anaak Jahad on half of his targets. (There were other people he hated, sure. But none quite so persistently aggravating as Anaak, who, for some reason, refused to stay out of his head.)

"You didn't even fight."

"I saved you."

"From a scarecrow that just learned how to walk?"

"And almost stole your name. Nobody thought the drinks might be poisoned?" Anaak rolled her eyes to emphasize her point – that trick had been used for as long as roadside bandits existed. Time itself was probably younger and less conspicuous.

"I misjudged him because I was tired," Ran replied slowly, selecting his words with care. They felt like the wrong words though.

The fuzz blanketing his thoughts made it harder than usual – he was barely conscious, not even his rivalry with the stupid lizard was bringing things back into focus. If A.A. couldn't, there was no way Anaak could.

"That never would've happened under different circumstances," he concluded lamely.

"So you admit you were wrong? What was Khun thinking, putting you in charge?"

Ran raised an eyebrow, curiously. As far as he knew, A.A. hadn't been particularly close to Anaak during the Floor of Test – and she was only now questioning his logic. Most people needed about twenty minutes, at most, before they started doing that.

But it wasn't like any of the others could've lead the team. Nobic, he'd wanted to and he liked to talk big, but he was weak. Although A.A. hadn't put Ran in charge, exactly –

"Your team leader doesn't think you're reliable enough to lead a mission," Ran accused back.

Anaak immediately snorted, rolling her eyes in disdain. Wrong choice of insult, apparently. It would really suck if Anaak had a higher standing in her team than Ran did in his.

"Endorsi is more insane than I thought, dragging her entire team to the Name Change Station like this."

He wished he could call them weak, but, well – even Ran had heard about how the sword guy had stood up to a Jahad's Princess. He had firsthand experience with how strong Anaak was, and even Endorsi had managed to retrieve her name from Kaiser somehow.

"I chose not to get involved in Endorsi's bad decisions," Anaak declared. "Which leads us back to where we started – "

"He wanted to die fighting," Ran cut in.

"Oh?"

The lizard girl stared at him inquiringly, intrigue written plainly in her body language. Ran bit the inside of his cheek in response.

It didn't matter how many times Xia and Dan asked if he'd lost his mind – as long as Ran didn't have to explain why he'd done it. Especially not now, to her, to this dumb lizard whose damn existence refused to leave him alone.

She surprised him though.

"...If you want to die that badly, you could have told me," Anaak grumbled. She turned away without another word, leaving Ran to recall how she'd said something similar during the Battle x Gamble.

Khun Ran didn't care either.