The armory was two doors down from the captain's office.
It was a long room with high ceilings and wooden racks running the full length of both walls, tools organized by grade with painted lines on the floor marking where one section ended and the next began. The higher grades were further in, behind a separate cage with a lock on it that nobody had opened.
Nobody was going to open it today either.
"Fourth grade section only." Daichi said, stopping them at the first rack. "You touch anything past the yellow line and you answer for it personally."
They looked down the room at what lay beyond the yellow line. Longer blades, heavier builds, a few things with shapes that didn't have obvious names. Then they looked back at their section.
Grade four tools were the bottom of the ladder and everyone in the room knew it.
They weren't pulled from cursed spirits. They weren't refined from anything taken off the field. Artisans made them directly, channeling cursed energy into raw materials and shaping them by hand. It was skilled work but it was still manufactured work, and the gap between that and a tool made from an actual spirit's core was not a small one.
They would do the job. They just wouldn't do it easily.
"Take your time. You'll be working with whatever you pick so choose with some sense."
That was all the instruction they got.
-----
They spread out along the rack.
A boy near the front picked up a short blade, tested the grip, set it back down and picked up a longer one. Two students immediately went for the same reinforced gauntlets and had a brief silent argument about it that ended with one of them giving in.
Then there was Liana.
She moved through the rack without hesitation, like she'd already decided before she walked in. She passed the blunt instruments, the chain tools, the short range options, and stopped in front of the swords. Her fingers ran along the hilts one by one, unhurried, feeling something the others probably couldn't identify.
She came from the Valor family. More specifically from the branch of it that people called the Blades of Cursed, a line that had built its entire identity around sword technique and the cursed energy control to back it up. It wasn't just a style they practiced. It was the only thing they practiced, refined down through generations until it was less a fighting method and more a philosophy about what a blade was for.
Liana pulled one free, held it level, made a small adjustment to her grip and nodded once to herself.
Done in under a minute.
-----
Yuno walked along the rack without stopping.
He wasn't reading the tags or testing the weight of anything. His eyes moved across the tools with mild interest the way someone looks at a menu for a restaurant they're not particularly hungry at.
He reached the spears near the end, reached out without breaking stride and picked one up.
Held it for a second.
Good enough.
He turned and walked back toward the door where Daichi was waiting.
A few of the others watched him and said nothing, unsure whether to be impressed or concerned.
Neither mattered to him. He set the spear over his shoulder and looked toward the far end of the corridor where the outer door was.
He was more interested in what awaited him outside the wall.