An Unfortunate Coincidence
"Name, age, and place of birth."
Gyousou wordlessly handed over his identification plaque. The man seated in a drab booth before him took it, reading to the scribe next to, "Boku Sou, age 15, registered residence the city of Garyou in Shin County."
Boku Sou was Gyousou's formal, registered name at birth. It was custom to give children a more personalized nickname as they grew, which they would sometimes change later in life after some particular milestone or personal development. But on official records, one's birth name never changed.
The man examining Gyousou's identification plaque was dressed in the drab armor of a common lieutenant. He had a bored look on his face, doubtlessly because Gyousou was simply one of a long line of impoverished-looking teenagers lined up outside the office of the I Provincial Ministry of Summer.
Finding no discrepancy in his record, the man stamped the form that Gyousou had filled out. "Go to the green booth for the physical exam," he said with evident disinterest, handing back Gyousou's form and plaque as he turned to holler over his shoulder, "Next!"
Gyousou headed over to the next booth as indicated. In due course he came to the front of the line and was given a cursory examination by a medic. The medic soon waved him over to a field where he was told to try to cut through a bale of hay with a sword and make three solid hits on a target board with a bow. Gyousou had trained in the art of the sword since before he could walk, and in the lean Tai winters he'd regularly gone hunting in the mountains with a bow that, while a little different than this one, functioned much the same way. Thus, neither task proved difficult for him.
"Congratulations, you passed," another bored looking lieutenant said, stamping a wooden dog tag and handing it over to Gyousou. "Welcome to the I Provincial Guard."
And just like that, Gyousou became a soldier.
Earlier that year, the I Provincial Ministry of Summer had sent out recruitment pamphlets to all the schools in the province. Youths aged fifteen to nineteen could now enlist in the Provincial Guard as extra reserves. The provincial army wanted a rush of strong young people to shore up their ranks after they'd been depleted in a recent outlaw uprising. As an incentive for young people to join the military, they offered free tuition to the royal military academy in exchange for four years of service — provided the soldier in question could pass the academy's strict entrance exams, of course.
Gyousou had seen the notice about a month before his guardian's death, but the old swordsmaster had dissuaded him from pursuing it. Life as a soldier was, by nature, a life of risk. A soldier bet his life every day he went out to fight. His master didn't want that kind of life for Gyousou, and while he lived Gyousou had had no desire to leave Garyou to pursue a life that would leave his master in a constant state of worry.
Yet, upon his master's death, the idea of staying in Garyou several more years until he was ready to take his university exams had felt suffocating.
He'd join the army, win fame as a soldier, graduate the royal academy with top grades, and climb the ranks all the way to the Royal Palace itself. There, he'd do something about this goddamn cold and barren land so that nobody else had to go through what he had growing up. Garou wouldn't even be recognizable once he was through with it. It would look like an actual district capital, not some rundown village full of orphans and layabout adults staring at the failing crops with defeated eyes.
This was his future. Even if no one else believed in it, he'd make it so. He'd take his future into his hands and carve out his way in life here and now. And the army recruitment program was his first step in doing so.
Several years passed. Gyousou employed his skills in the art of swordsmanship in practical contexts day in and day out, studying further under hardened veterans and picking up combat experience on the job. He made suggestions for strategies to his superiors, and while this earned him the irritation of many, a few praised his potential and one promoted him to captain of a small squad of fresh recruits.
Gyousou pushed the greenhorn soldiers under his command to achieve all they physically could, and won another promotion for himself. Like this, Gyousou climbed the ranks of footsoldiers while continuing his training in the art of the sword by the morning's first light and studying for the royal academy entrance exams by candlelight after his workday was done.
His requisite four years of service went by in the blink of an eye. Gyousou took and passed his entrance exams to the royal military academy. He resigned his commission and journeyed to the capital of the kingdom, Kouki, to attend the royal military academy situated there.
Upon moving into the dorms, Gyousou immediately encountered one name over and over again.
Boku Kou.
"Oh! Are you Boku Kou's little brother?" someone had asked him the day he moved into the dorms.
"No. Never heard of him."
"Boku Sou?" several of his professors had said in surprise as they took the class roll-call for the first time. "Any relation to Boku Kou?"
"None that I'm aware of."
"Boku Kou never told me there was a Boku Junior in the family!" an upperclassmen Gyousou didn't know in the slightest had said, ruffling his hair with a teasing grin.
Gyousou smacked his hand away with a scowl. "I don't know him. I do not have any brothers, Boku Kou or otherwise."
This happened to Gyousou in his first week at the academy so often that he finally broke down and asked one of his questioners,
"Who the hell is Boku Kou?"
The upperclassman—who'd been backing away sheepishly after Gyousou had shot him a sour look and said in an irritated voice he'd never met a Boku Kou in his life—stopped his retreat and said with a tinge of embarrassment,
"It's the formal birth name of the top graduate from a few years ago. He was one of those guys that has everything, you know? Looks, smarts, talent, dedication—the whole works. He was super friendly and approachable too, so he was dead popular. I hear he's already a division commander in the Royal Guard, can you believe it? Of course, he took an adult surname after coming of age, but all of us here remember him as Boku Kou."
The upperclassman flashed Gyousou a smile of sympathy.
"So I'm afraid even if you're not actually related, by virtue of the same family name you're probably going to keep being compared to Asen."
Asen. Asking around, it seemed to be a school nickname coined a bit out of friendly ribbing and a bit out of envious spite, hoping he'd fall short of his "the chosen one" moniker and salve the egos of those he'd outshone. However, Boku Kou had apparently just laughed when he heard it and from then on used it in place of his original nickname, which no one even remembered anymore.
Various people had similarly tried to attach Gyousou with flowery nicknames hiding a snide undertone, but none of them stuck. People who called him anything but Gyousou received a red-eyed death glare in return, and soon enough went back to addressing him properly. At the same time, whispers about him spread.
"He may be better with a sword than Asen, but man does Gyousou lack Asen's way with people."
"I'd take social graces over flashy swordsmanship any day."
"Who does he think he is? He might be best in his class, but Asen would wipe the floor with him!"
For his part, Gyousou did not understand how he'd entered into a rivalry with a young man he'd never met. The older students said Asen came from a merchant family in Ba Province to the far northwest. Gyousou had grown up an orphaned peasant from I Province to the southwest of the capital. Asen apparently was a man with dark hair and pale skin, whereas Gyousou had whitish hair and tan skin. As noted by all and sundry, Asen possessed exceptional social graces, and Gyousou didn't. Gyousou had trained in the sword from an early age, and Asen hadn't. Aside from their shared family name and scoring the top spot in each class, they had nothing in common.
And yet people kept comparing them.
If Gyousou did well, he'd be told, "You're going to give Asen a run for his money!" If he did poorly, they'd say, "Looks like Asen's holding onto his laurels!" Everything he did was measured up against how Asen would have performed said task.
At first, he naturally found this irritating. No matter what he did, he was always in Asen's shadow, never seen in his own right. He could have better accepted this if he really was Asen's younger brother, but it was just one of those coincidental cases of a shared surname, and any ancestral connection they might possibly possess was so old it effectively did not exist. Lacking a brotherly bond with the man he was constantly compared to, of course he found the comparisons annoying.
At the same time, Gyousou could not help but develop a sense of curiosity towards this stranger with the same name and similar talents to himself. Gyousou was not used to people his age being on par with him. Many in the royal academy were naturally quite talented, but Gyousou would be lying if he said he feared losing his top scoring spot. And yet, according to the rumor mill, up in the royal palace this division commander in the Army of the Right only several years his senior could go neck to neck with him.
There was some thrill in that, some satisfaction to take in competing with someone and not knowing who would win.
—
Six more years passed, and Gyousou graduated with the highest score. People said Asen had graduated in seven years, so Gyousou had pushed himself to the limit and graduated in six. Yet, up in the royal palace, Asen had been promoted to Regimental Commander, the military rank directly below general, so Gyousou didn't know if he could really count graduation as a victory.
In any case, Gyousou was appointed to the Army of the Left as a mid-level commander and from there clawed his way high enough that one day, quite by chance, his unit and Regimental Commander Jou Asen's were dispatched to go hunt youma together.
"Hi, it's Gyousou, right?" a young man with an easygoing smile and friendly air greeted him. Asen grinned, "The famous Boku Sou from the academy, the brother I never knew I had."
Gyousou felt a rueful grin come over his face as well. "They asked you too?"
"No matter how I told them I was quite sure I do not have a brother, I don't think they believed me."
Gyousou sighed, but still felt that slight grin on his face. "I know the feeling. At least birth names are neither here nor there for us anymore."
As adults, they both went by their own chosen surname "Jou" and "Saku". Their family name was little more than an obscure trivia fact about them now, and not something most people around them were bound to be aware of.
"Hmm," Asen said with a teasing glint to his eyes. "I wonder about that. Once it gets rolling, a rivalry is hard to opt out of, you know? For instance, today I'm curious as to which of our troops will locate the beast first — yours, or mine."
And that was the true start of the rivalry between the young military protégées Gyousou and Asen.
