Mei Lin
Mei Lin is fourteen years old and two years ahead of schedule for the Hunter Assessment — the youngest cadet to qualify in the academy's post-Rupture history. Her compound bow is reinforced with Sky-element sinew harvested from a wind serpent, enough to send arrows crackling with faint static across distances that make instructors double-check their measuring equipment. The academy calls her a prodigy. The recruitment scouts call her a future elite. Mei Lin calls herself terrified.
Every time someone praises her accuracy, she thinks about what accuracy means: hitting the target that needs to die so someone else doesn't. Every missed shot in training is a person she couldn't save, a wall breach she couldn't prevent, a family like hers that loses someone because she wasn't good enough. So she trains until her fingers bleed into her bowstring. She memorises creature weak points until she recites them in her sleep — when she sleeps at all. Her preparation borders on obsessive, her notes on wind patterns and arrow trajectories filling notebooks that other cadets find unsettling. And her hands shake constantly, a fine tremor that only stills when she draws, aims, and fires.
Felix and Akane probably don't notice her much — she's younger, quieter, easy to overlook until it's time for marksmanship drills. But Mei Lin notices everything. She's already catalogued their fighting styles, their weapon resonances, their likely roles in a team composition. If they end up in the same Assessment group, she'll know exactly where to position herself to support them. She just hopes they don't expect her to talk.