The night in the Imperial Wing was heavy. Even with the advanced climate control of the SHINRA-OS, the air in Oni's sanctuary felt thin, flavored by the metallic tang of the burnt bypass chip. He didn't sleep; he spent the hours in a state of hyper-awareness, watching the red aether-clouds of his room swirl in time with his own heartbeat.
When the morning chime rang—a soft, melodic tone designed to gently wake the students—it felt like a physical strike. Oni and Rain met in the corridor. Their suits had been repaired by the automated systems overnight, the charcoal and blue-veined mesh looking brand new. The brothers moved with a grim silence as they headed toward the central spire.
The Mirror Room was a massive, spherical chamber at the very heart of the academy. There were no chairs or obsidian floors; instead, the one hundred students stood on a transparent walkway suspended in the center of a pitch-black void. Mistress Hana stood at the far end. She wore a suit of shimmering white scales that rippled like liquid, her presence commanding and focused.
"Yesterday, you tested your bodies," Hana said, her voice echoing perfectly. "Today, we test your perception. Most of you rely on the Pure Stream—the filtered, stable energy derived from Earth. You think of the humans as a resource to be managed."
She raised her hand, and the walls of the sphere ignited.
"The Mirror Room removes the filters. It shows the Raw Stream—the unfiltered reality of the war and the suffering currently unfolding on the surface."
The black void vanished. The students were suddenly standing in the middle of a sensory hurricane. Images of war-torn landscapes and the crushing weight of human struggle flooded the chamber. It wasn't a simulation; it was a direct feed of the energy they were being trained to master.
The students around them buckled. Kaito clutched his head, his suit flashing a panicked yellow as he struggled to process the input. Even Vance was forced to his knee, his system straining under the sudden psychic weight. But Oni and Rain stood perfectly still. To them, the "Raw Stream" was simply the reality they had already lived through.
Hana walked toward Oni, the walkway vibrating under her feet. She was a professional, her eyes scanning his vitals through her interface, noting his lack of a stress response. "You aren't shaking, Revenant," she observed, her voice clinical. "Is it because you're strong, or because you've already seen this?"
Oni didn't look at the images. He kept his eyes fixed on Hana, his expression cold.
"Why don't you show the others how to endure this?" Oni asked. "Since you're the one in charge of the lesson."
Hana didn't flinch or posture. She simply nodded, acknowledging the challenge. "I am showing them. My resonance is the only thing keeping this room from collapsing your neural links right now. But I won't be there when you're on a battlefield. You need to find your own anchor."
She turned back to the rest of the class, her voice rising to reach those struggling to stay upright. "Look at the brothers. They aren't collapsing because they aren't fighting the stream. They are part of it. If you cannot find that same stability, you will never lead a single soul."
Behind them, Elara was white-knuckling the rail, her indigo suit pulsing as she tried to match the rhythm of the room. She looked at Oni, her eyes wide with a mix of pain and wonder at his total composure.
Mistress Hana didn't wait for a debate. With a swift swipe on her interface, the transparent walkway beneath the brothers began to glow with a sharp, geometric lattice.
"The Link is open," Hana announced. "Sixty seconds. If you cannot stabilize your own mind, reach out and anchor to the Revenants. But remember: a link is a two-way street."
The desperation in the room was palpable. For many of the S-1 and S-2 elites, the psychic pressure of the Raw Stream was becoming physically unbearable. The sensory input was like a high-voltage current melting their refined composure.
One by one, they began to yield.
Kaito was among the first. Despite his pride, his suit was red-lining, and his nose was bleeding from the effort of maintaining his own barriers. He slammed his hand onto the glowing lattice of the walkway, and the connection snapped into place.
Following his lead, a wave of students surged forward. The twins, Rin and Rei, linked in perfect synchronization. Thatcher, the architect, reached out with trembling hands, followed by dozens of others who simply couldn't withstand the screaming weight of the images anymore.
In total, sixty-five students tethered their consciousness to Oni and Rain.
The effect was instantaneous. For the students, the crushing weight of the Raw Stream suddenly leveled out. It was as if they had been drowning in a stormy ocean and had suddenly grabbed onto a solid, unmoving rock. The screaming in their heads didn't stop, but it became background noise—muffled by the sheer, iron-clad stillness of the brothers' minds.
However, the thirty-five who remained—including Elara, Vance, and the "Tactical 3"—stayed back. Some were too proud; others, like Elara, seemed to be watching the link with a look of profound hesitation, sensing that the "anchor" wasn't just a safety net—it was an exposure.
As the sixty-five students breathed sighs of relief, their expressions quickly shifted from relief to horror. They weren't just feeling Oni's stability; they were seeing the "why" behind it.
Through the link, they didn't see the polished halls of Nefriet or the Pure Stream. They saw the Pits. They felt the cold, jagged memory of the front lines where the brothers had been forged. They felt the sensation of "raw" existence where there was no technology to save you, only your own soul and the blood on your hands.
Oni felt the intrusion of sixty-five foreign minds like a swarm of insects. He didn't close his mind to them; he opened it wider, letting the "elites" feel the full, unfiltered weight of what he considered a "normal" day.
"You wanted the anchor?" Oni's voice echoed through the link, vibrating in the minds of the sixty-five. "Take it. This is the world you're supposedly guarding. Does it feel like a hobby now?"
Kaito's eyes went wide, his mouth hanging open as he experienced a flash of a memory—Oni standing over a fallen god-killer, the air thick with aetheric radiation that would have turned a standard Celestial to ash.
Mistress Hana watched the data streams spike and then stabilize into a grim, dark resonance. "Look at your monitors," she said to the class, her voice calm. "The sixty-five who linked are now stable, but their heart rates are synchronized with a Revenant baseline. They aren't 'safe.' They are just finally awake."
She looked at the thirty-five who hadn't linked. "And you? You chose to endure alone. That is the path of the commander. But a commander without a link is a commander who cannot feel the pulse of his army."
The shift in the room was profound. It wasn't the frantic, grasping retreat of cowards; it was a desperate, collective reach for meaning. The sixty-five students didn't pull away when they felt the jagged edges of Oni's memories. Instead, they leaned into the connection.
For the first time in their refined, sheltered existences, they weren't just observing data—they were feeling the texture of survival. They felt the phantom cold of the Pits and the weight of a soul that had never known the luxury of a filter. They stayed tethered because Oni's pain wasn't just a burden; it was a foundation. He knew the shape of the dark, and in that moment, his mind was the only thing that made the "Raw Stream" of the world make sense.
Kaito, his hand still trembling against the glowing lattice, closed his eyes. The mockery was gone. Through the link, he felt the sheer exhaustion of a life lived on the front lines, a depth of experience that made his own "centuries of refinement" feel like paper-thin decoration. He wasn't just using Oni as an anchor anymore; he was trying to witness him.
Even the thirty-five who hadn't linked—the ones standing in their own private agony—watched in a hushed, terrified awe. They could see the physical change in the room. The sixty-five tethers weren't just glowing lines of light; they were pulses of shared resonance.
"You see?" Hana's voice was softer now, almost a whisper that resonated through the link. "He does not endure because he is heartless. He endures because he has already processed the debt you are all just now realizing you owe."
Oni felt their curiosity—a hundred different questions and fears bleeding into his own consciousness. It was a strange, heavy intimacy he hadn't asked for. He looked at the students, seeing them not as "elites" to be crushed, but as people who were finally, painfully, opening their eyes.
"Pain isn't something you study," Oni said, his voice echoing in their heads as much as in the room. "It's something you carry. If you want to rule the people in those images, you don't look down on them. You carry their weight until it becomes your own skin."
One by one, the sixty-five began to stabilize. Their breathing slowed, matching the slow, rhythmic thud of Oni's heart. The screaming of the Raw Stream on the walls didn't vanish, but it transformed from a weapon into a responsibility.
Elara finally let go of the railing, her indigo suit steadying as she watched the link. She hadn't joined the anchor, but she was vibrating in sympathy with it. She stepped toward the brothers, her gaze locked on Oni.
"Is that why you're here?" she asked, her voice clear in the sudden silence of the chamber. "Not to lead us, but to show us how much we've forgotten?"
Hana stepped back, allowing the moment to belong to the students. The lesson was no longer in her hands; the "Mirror Room" had done its work. The hierarchy of the school hadn't just been shaken—it had been redefined by the weight of what the brothers had allowed them to see.
The link didn't just snap shut; it dissolved like fading smoke, leaving a heavy, ringing silence in the Mirror Room.
The sixty-five students who had tethered to Oni collapsed back into themselves. Some were visibly overwhelmed, sliding to the floor and burying their faces in their hands, their suits flickering a dull, exhausted grey. Others stood in a state of total shock, staring at their own hands as if they were seeing their skin for the first time. They had felt the Pits. They had felt the jagged reality of the front lines where the brothers had been forged. They had felt a world that didn't have the luxury of a Pure Stream.
Kaito stood up slowly, his movements robotic. He didn't look at Oni with the same arrogance he'd had an hour ago. He looked at him with the hollowed-out expression of a man who had just realized his entire life was a rehearsal for a war that was already real.
Professor Ryker, who had been watching from the shadows of the upper observation deck, stepped into the light. He looked down at the tattered, silent elites.
Look at you, Ryker's gravelly voice cut through the air. You came here wanting to be legends, but you haven't even learned how to be survivors yet.
Hana walked to the center of the walkway, her white scales dimming to a matte finish. She looked at the thirty-five who had stayed back, then at the sixty-five who were still reeling from the brothers' memories.
The Mirror Room is a mirror for a reason, she said, her eyes lingering on Oni. It doesn't show you the world. It shows you exactly how much of the world you are willing to carry.
Oni didn't wait for the formal dismissal. He began to walk toward the exit, his tattered charcoal suit hissing as the internal cooling systems tried to reset. The students parted for him like a physical tide, the fear and mockery replaced by a wide-eyed, terrifying respect.
Elara stepped into his path, her face pale but her gaze steady. Oni, she whispered, her voice trembling. How do you wake up every day knowing that... knowing the world is like that?
Oni stopped, but he didn't turn to face her. He looked toward the door, his mind already drifting back to the image of his mother fading away in that black site.
I don't wake up to change the world, Elara, Oni said, his voice a low, jagged rasp that echoed in the silent sphere. I wake up to make sure the world doesn't change me.
Rain followed him, casting a cold glance back at the faculty. He paused next to Master Sato, who was busy recording the data from the link.
You spend so much time refining the soul, Rain muttered, you forgot that the sharpest blades are forged in the dirt, not the light.
The two brothers walked out, leaving the hundred finest Celestials in Nefriet to sit in the dark of the Mirror Room, finally understanding that they weren't the ones at the top of the food chain. They were just the ones who finally had to look at the cost of the ground they stood on.
The doors to the Mirror Room hissed shut behind them, cutting off the heavy, psychic hum of the sphere. The corridor was long, lined with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the artificial beauty of Nefriet—the floating gardens and the perfect, filtered sunlight.
To Oni and Rain, the view looked like a lie. After what they had just seen and felt, the gold and white architecture of the academy felt like a thin veil stretched over a gaping wound.
They didn't speak. Rain's boots clicked rhythmically against the obsidian floor, while Oni moved with a predatory silence, his mind still reeling from the sensation of sixty-five minds tethering to his own. It was a violation he hadn't expected, an intimacy he hadn't asked for.
As they approached the main transit lift that led back to the Imperial Wing, they found the hallway wasn't empty.
A dozen students from the sixty-five were standing there. They weren't in a formation or a huddle; they were scattered, leaning against the walls or staring out the windows. When the brothers appeared, the shift in the air was instantaneous.
Kaito was leaning against a pillar, his breathing still shallow. He didn't jump to his feet or throw an insult. He just looked at Oni. The arrogance that usually defined his posture had been replaced by a hollowed-out stillness.
"You didn't push us out," Kaito said. His voice was raw, barely more than a whisper.
Oni stopped. He didn't turn his head, but his eyes tracked Kaito's reflection in the glass window. "You wanted to see," Oni replied, his voice flat. "I just let you look."
"It wasn't just images," another girl, a high-ranking S-1 named Mara, spoke up from the shadows of the lift doors. She was hugging her arms around her chest, her indigo suit still dim. "I felt the wind. It was... it was so cold. How is it that cold down there?"
Rain let out a short, sharp breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "That's the part the school forgets to put in the textbooks. Truth doesn't have a heater."
The group of elites didn't move to let them through, but they weren't blocking them either. They were just... there, anchored to the brothers by a shared trauma that the school's curriculum hadn't prepared them for. They looked at Oni not as a rival or a freak, but as someone who had survived a reality they had only just discovered existed.
"We thought you were just... stronger," Kaito said, finally pushing off the pillar. He took a single step toward Oni, then stopped, as if crossing an invisible line. "But you're just further ahead in the nightmare than we are."
Oni finally turned his head. His orange suppressor glowed with a low, rhythmic throb against his charcoal chest-piece.
"The nightmare is the same for everyone," Oni said. "The only difference is some of us have been awake longer."
The lift chimed, the doors sliding open with a soft, melodic ring that felt jarringly out of place. Oni and Rain stepped inside. As the doors began to close, Oni saw the group of students still standing there, watching them with an expression that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite respect—it was the look of people who had just realized they were underwater and were looking at the only two people who knew how to breathe.
The lift began its silent ascent toward the Imperial Wing.
"They're going to be different now," Rain said, staring at the closing doors. "That link... it didn't just show them the Pits. It showed them us."
Oni leaned his head back against the cool glass of the lift. "Let them look. Maybe if they see enough, they'll stop acting like this is a game."
The lift climbed in silence, the pressure change popping in their ears as they ascended toward the upper strata of the academy. When the doors hissed open at the Imperial Wing, the brothers stepped out into the quiet luxury of their private corridor.
They hadn't made it ten feet toward their quarters when a shadow moved near one of the arched alcoves.
Elara was waiting. She wasn't leaning against the wall like the others had been; she was standing in the center of the hall, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. Her indigo suit was dim, the bioluminescent veins barely humming, reflecting her own drained state. She looked smaller here, away from the competitive energy of the classroom.
Rain glanced at Oni, then at Elara. He didn't say a word, but he gave a subtle, knowing nod before continuing down the hall toward his own room, leaving the two of them in the heavy silence of the corridor.
Oni didn't stop walking until he was a few paces away from her. He didn't initiate the conversation; he just stood there, his charcoal suit still smelling faintly of the ozone and static from the Mirror Room.
"I didn't link," Elara said, her voice steady but quiet. "I wanted to. Part of me was desperate to feel that... that stability you have. But I felt like it would be stealing."
Oni looked at her. "Stealing what?"
"A piece of your life that you didn't offer," she replied. She looked up at him, her eyes searching his. "The others... they took that anchor because they were drowning. But now they carry a part of your burden without even knowing how heavy it really is."
She took a small, hesitant step closer. The air between them was cool, but the intensity was rising.
"I don't want a link, Oni," she whispered. "And I don't want a lecture. I just... can I just have a moment of your time? Somewhere that isn't a classroom or a battlefield? Just five minutes where you aren't the Revenant everyone is terrified of."
Oni's expression remained guarded, the orange glow of his suppressor reflecting in his dark eyes. Usually, he would have brushed her off, his mind too occupied by the six-year clock and the image of his mother. But there was something in Elara's request—a lack of hidden agenda—that made him pause.
He didn't soften his posture, but he didn't walk away.
"The gardens in the West Balcony are empty this time of day," Oni said, his voice low. "If you want five minutes, that's where they'll be."
He started walking again, not checking to see if she followed, but he slowed his pace just enough for her to keep up.
The West Balcony was a wide, semicircular terrace that jutted out from the spire, suspended thousands of feet above the cloud layer. The morning light was bright and clinical, filtering through the academy's atmospheric shields in a way that made everything look artificial.
Oni walked to the edge and rested his gloved hands on the railing. Even in the light gravity of Nefriet, his presence felt dense, like he was still carrying the 2x pull of Pangea in his very marrow.
Elara stayed a few feet back, leaning against one of the pillars. She didn't jump into a question immediately. She just watched the way he stood—with a grounded stillness that made the stone beneath his boots feel like it might crack.
"They told us King Raphatta sent you away to broaden your perspective," Elara said, her voice soft and skeptical against the whistling wind. "But three years... you were only nine when you went down there. That's not a trip. That's an exile."
Oni's gaze didn't waver from the horizon. "The King doesn't send people to Pangea to find themselves, Elara. He sends them there to see if they'll break. He took me from my home when I was nine because he wanted to see if the blood in my veins could withstand the pressure of his shadow."
"Three years in double gravity," she whispered, her eyes wide as she tried to comprehend the physical toll. "I can barely handle the 100x stunt in the gym for ten minutes. You lived in a world that was trying to pull your bones apart every second of every day."
"You stop feeling the pull after the first six months," Oni said frankly. "Your heart works harder. Your skin gets thicker. You learn that if you move slow in Pangea, the weight crushes you. Rain and I didn't just survive it; we outran it. We spent three years training at the speed of light just so the gravity wouldn't have time to catch us."
Elara moved a little closer to the railing, her curiosity now tinged with a genuine sense of awe. "Is that why you look so bored when the professors talk? Because their tests feel like a joke compared to just standing up for breakfast in Pangea?"
"The tests are a game," Oni replied, finally turning his head to look at her. "The professors want to see if we can follow the rules of the SHINRA-OS. In Pangea, there are no rules. There's just the weight and the truth. You can't lie to gravity. It knows exactly how much you weigh."
Elara went quiet, watching the orange glow of his suppressor pulse against his chest. She reached out, her hand hovering near his arm but not touching—respecting the space he kept around himself.
"I spent my three years learning how to dance and recite the lineage of the High Houses," she said, a hint of bitterness in her tone. "You and Rain spent yours becoming something that can't even be measured by the academy's sensors. No wonder you look at us like we're children."
"You are children," Oni said, but the rasp in his voice wasn't as sharp as it usually was. "But that's not your fault. Raphatta wants you light. He wants you floating so he can move you wherever he wants. He made me heavy so he could see if I'd sink. He didn't expect me to learn how to walk on the bottom."
Elara smiled slightly, a genuine, soft look that seemed out of place in a school for soldiers. "And now you're here. Twelve years old and carrying the weight of two worlds."
She looked up at him, her expression turning more personal. "Does it ever stop? The training, the speed, the weight? I just want to know if there's anything left of the nine-year-old boy who actually liked the sun, before the King took you."
Oni looked back at the artificial morning sun. He didn't answer immediately. He thought about his father's hand on his shoulder and the last time he had felt a breeze that wasn't filtered through a machine.
"That boy didn't die in Pangea," Oni said, his voice dropping to a low, guarded tone. "But he learned that liking the sun doesn't keep you warm when the world turns cold. He's still there, Elara. He's just waiting for the six years to be over so he can go home."
Elara watched him, seeing the flicker of sincerity in his dark eyes. She didn't push him further, sensing that this was the most he had ever given anyone since arriving at the academy.
The morning chime for their next class—Strategic Resonance—echoed through the gardens, sharp and demanding.
"Oni," Elara said as he turned to leave. He paused, looking back. "Thanks for the five minutes. Most people here talk at me. You're the first one who actually spoke to me."
Oni didn't smile, but he didn't look away either. "Don't get used to it, Elara. People who get too close to the weight usually end up getting crushed by it."
As the two of them enter the lecture hall for Strategic Resonance, the sixty-five students are already seated, their eyes fixed on the door.
The doors to the lecture hall slid open with a pressurized hiss, the sound cutting through the thick, expectant silence inside. The room was a massive, tiered amphitheater of black obsidian and glowing blue interfaces, dominated by a central holographic projector. Usually, the 10:00 AM hour was a chaotic mix of social jockeying and high-level strategy debates, but as Oni and Elara stepped inside, the atmosphere was like a held breath.
The doors to the lecture hall slid open with a pressurized hiss, the sound cutting through the thick, expectant silence inside. The room was a massive, tiered amphitheater of black obsidian and glowing blue interfaces, dominated by a central holographic projector. Usually, the 10:00 AM hour was a chaotic mix of social jockeying and high-level strategy debates, but as Oni and Elara stepped inside, the atmosphere was like a held breath.
The sixty-five students who had tethered to Oni in the Mirror Room were already seated. They didn't whisper; they didn't even look at one another. They sat with their eyes fixed on the central projector, their posture stiff, still feeling the phantom weight of the "Raw Stream" in their bones.
Oni moved toward the back row, his presence grounded and heavy. Rain was already there, his terminal active, his eyes scanning a scrolling wall of high-frequency data. As Oni sat, the contrast between them was visible only to the sensors: Rain was a contained, sharp needle of energy, while Oni was a thrumming engine that seemed to vibrate the very air around him.
At the front of the hall, Commander Vane stood with his back to the class. He wasn't wearing the shimmering white scales of the Mirror Room; he wore a heavy, matte-black tactical rig designed to suppress his own signature.
"You survived the Pits of Pangea," Vane said, his voice a gravelly rasp that didn't need amplification. He turned slowly, his cybernetic eye whirring as it locked onto Oni.
"You learned how to output massive amounts of aether just to keep your lungs from collapsing in 2x gravity. You think that makes you ready for the war."
He tapped the console, and a massive wireframe model of a Celestial soldier ignited in the center of the room.
"This is a standard Celestial in combat," Vane explained. "To our eyes, it's a display of power. But the Ascended Humans don't use their eyes to find you. They use extraordinary tech—scanners that bridge the biological gap."
He swiped his hand, and a second overlay appeared—a jagged, green grid representing the humans' scanning technology. The moment the grid touched the Celestial model, red warning icons flared across the soldier's chest, head, and joints.
"The humans see a leak," Vane said. "Their AI-assisted HUDs and predictive sensors see your unharnessed power as a GPS coordinate. They track the energy 'noise' you bleed into the atmosphere before you even finish thinking about your next move. They aren't faster than us, but their tech allows them to be exactly where you are going to be."
Vane looked directly at Oni, the orange glow of the boy's suppressor reflecting in the Commander's artificial lens.
"Oni, your output is the loudest in this building. In Pangea, being loud kept you alive. On the home planet of the Ascended, being loud is how you get targeted by a railgun from three miles away. You have the Mark, but it's unrefined. You're broadcasting your location to every sensor on the planet."
Rain watched the simulation, his fingers hovering over his keys. He realized that their time in Pangea had taught them how to be strong, but it hadn't taught them how to be invisible to a machine.
"Today isn't about how much power you can summon," Vane announced, the holographic grid tightening around the wireframe soldier.
"It's about Kinetic Economy. It's about learning to move without letting their sensors know you've left the floor. If you can't mask your resonance, your speed won't save you.
You'll just be a fast-moving target for an automated defense system."
Oni stared at the red "leakage" on the hologram. He felt the Mark pulsing beneath his suit—a wild, unharnessed fire that had never known a cage. For the first time, he realized that in a war of technology, his raw power was his biggest tactical vulnerability.
Commander Vane nodded, acknowledging the silence in the room. He understood that for the brothers, the transition from surviving a predator-filled domain to fighting a high-tech insurgency required a total shift in philosophy.
"We have an hour and forty-five minutes left," Vane said, his tone shifting from a lecture to a briefing. "We aren't going to the gym. We aren't going to spark a single joule of energy. You are going to sit there and look at the enemy until you stop seeing them as humans and start seeing them as a network."
He swiped the holographic projector, and the wireframe Celestial vanished. In its place appeared a life-sized, high-resolution rendering of an Ascended Human Vanguard.
The human didn't look like the soldiers of old. They were encased in a pressurized, matte-grey kinetic suit that looked more like an exoskeleton than clothing. Around their neck and spine was a series of glowing blue nodes—the Neural-Link Interface.
"Look at the spine," Vane pointed out. "This is the core of their 'Ascension.' They've bypassed human reaction times by hardwiring their nervous system directly into their weapons and sensors. When their HUD detects a flicker of aetheric energy from one of you, that data is fed into their brain in less than a microsecond. They don't 'see' you move; their suit tells their muscles to react before their conscious mind even processes the threat."
Rain leaned forward, his eyes narrowed as he analyzed the joint servos of the suit. "It's a closed loop," Rain muttered, loud enough for the class to hear. "They aren't fighting us with their bodies. They're fighting us with a processor."
"Correct," Vane replied. "And that processor is fueled by the very thing we lack: cold, calculating consistency. Look at their weaponry."
The hologram zoomed in on the Vanguard's forearm. A compact, rail-style projector was mounted there, fed by a small, high-density energy cell at the small of the back.
"They use Gravitational Anchors," Vane explained. "When you strike with the force we're used to—the kind of force needed to kill a Pangean beast—they activate these anchors. They essentially 'pin' themselves to the planet's gravitational field for a split second. Your blow doesn't knock them back; it breaks your own hand against an immovable object."
The class was silent. The "extraordinary tech" wasn't just about toys; it was about systematically neutralizing every biological advantage a Celestial possessed. For students who grew up hearing stories of their own "divine" superiority, seeing a human turned into a living, anti-Celestial machine was a sobering reality.
"The next ninety minutes will be spent on Threat Identification," Vane said, flicking a series of data files to every student's terminal. "I want you to memorize the heat signatures of their rail-rifles, the refresh rate of their kinetic shields, and most importantly, the sound of their neural-links priming. If you hear that high-pitched whine, you're already in their crosshairs."
Oni stared at the image of the human's helmet—a faceless, black visor that reflected nothing. He didn't see a person behind it; he saw a machine built for one purpose: to hunt things like him.
The lecture hall became a sea of glowing screens as the students began to dig into the blueprints of the enemy. There was no social jockeying now. The "Mirror Room" had shown them the stakes, and Vane was now showing them the predator.
Vane tapped a command on his console, and the life-sized Vanguard began to rotate slowly, revealing the intricate, pulsating neural-links embedded in the matte-grey armor.
"The Ascended Human does not seek to outrun the lightning," Vane said, his voice echoing with a weight that made the tiered room feel smaller. "He simply builds the rod and waits for the sky to fall."
He stepped away from the projector, opening the floor. This was the shift. The brothers were the masters of Pangea, but they were technically illiterate in this room. Jax, the prime engineer who had been a quantum systems architect in his past life on Earth, didn't wait for permission. He stood up, his glowing blue interface projecting a complex set of neural-latency equations that hovered in the air like a second skin.
"Commander, the brothers are looking at the speed, but they're missing the efficiency gradient," Jax said. He looked toward the back row with a deep, clinical curiosity. "Oni, you're moving at light speed, but your brain is only processing about twenty percent of the sensory data around you. You're essentially flying blind at Mach 10. The Ascended Human, however, is processing one hundred percent of the environment. Every dust particle, every thermal shift, every heartbeat. Their brain efficiency is so high that they aren't reacting to you. They are watching a probability map."
Jax swiped a window toward the center, showing a side-by-side comparison of neural firing patterns.
"They use what we call Pre-Emptive Synchronization," Jax continued, his fingers dancing across his terminal to pull up the Vanguard's visual cortex data. "Their brains fire with zero waste. To them, a second feels like a minute because their processing speed is overclocked to the absolute limit of the biological hardware. They don't have to be faster than light if they can calculate the exact micro-vibration of the air before your strike even lands. They've turned their physical limitations into a temple of logic."
Rain watched the screen, his mind trying to bridge the gap between Pangean survival and this mathematical warfare. "You're saying they aren't even looking at us?" Rain asked, his voice hesitant. "They're just... solving an equation?"
"Exactly," Jax replied, pointing to the glowing nodes on the human's spine. "They've hardwired their nervous system to bypass human reaction times. The suit doesn't wait for their muscles to move; it reads the electrical intent in their motor cortex and moves the armor simultaneously. If you stay loud—if you stay unrefined—you aren't a threat. You're just the constant in their formula."
Vane watched the exchange, noting the way Oni's expression had shifted from boredom to a sharp, guarded focus. He used the moment to drop a truth that the academy's textbooks usually glossed over.
"Power is a scream," Vane said, the faceless black visor of the Vanguard reflecting in his cybernetic eye. "But perfection is a whisper. The humans have spent centuries optimizing because they had no choice. They don't have our aether, so they mastered the architecture of the mind. They use one hundred percent of the brain because in their world, anything less is a death sentence."
Jax pointed to the human's forearm—the Gravitational Anchor.
"This is the compromise for their biology," Jax explained. "They know they can't match a Celestial's raw kinetic force. So, they don't try to stop your punch. They use these anchors to lock their molecular density to the planet's gravitational core for a microsecond. You aren't hitting a man; you're hitting the planet itself. The force of your own light-speed strike is reflected back into your own bones."
Oni watched the simulation of a Celestial's arm shattering against a human's braced shield. The detailed physics were undeniable. In Pangea, he was the storm. But against this tech, the storm was just a predictable variable that the humans could harness and redirect.
"So," Oni said, his voice a low, dangerous rasp that vibrated in the quiet hall. "Our power is their fuel. Our speed is their data. And our strength is their weapon."
"Precisely," Vane said, stopping in front of Oni. "To an Ascended Human, you are a loud, inefficient engine. The rest of this class will be spent learning how to be quiet. If you cannot achieve a zero-point-zero-one percent resonance signature, you are nothing but a target for an automated railgun that can fire before you even realize you've been spotted."
The silence in the room was absolute. For the next hour, the students didn't talk about rivalry or rank. They studied the human nervous system. They studied the Aetheric Siphons that turned their very souls into a power source for the enemy.
The atmosphere in the amphitheater shifted from theoretical to clinical. Vane didn't want them to just understand the concept; he wanted them to see the guts of the machine. He signaled to Jax, who pulled up a new, high-fidelity overlay of a human Aetheric Siphon.
"This is what makes your raw strength a liability," Jax said, zooming in on a series of micro-filaments woven into the human's matte-grey chest plate. "These filaments aren't made of metal; they're a bio-conductive synthetic that reacts to ambient aetheric pressure. Oni, when you flare the Mark, you create a high-pressure zone. The siphon nodes on the human suit see that pressure and open their intakes."
"The suit doesn't just block your attack," Jax continued, his voice steady. "It harvests the kinetic energy of your strike and converts it into a localized gravitational field. The harder you hit, the more power you give their Gravitational Anchors. In a head-on collision, you are effectively fueling the very force that is going to break your arm."
Rain looked at his own hands, then at the orange suppressor on Oni's chest. "So we can't use brute force, and we can't use speed if they're predicting our path. How do they handle the heat? 100% brain efficiency and that much energy conversion has to generate a massive thermal signature."
Vane stepped back into the center of the projector's light. "That's the beauty of their 'Ascension,' Rain. Look at the cooling arrays."
The hologram shifted to the human's back, showing a series of vents that looked like the gills of a shark.
"They use Cryogenic Circulators," Vane explained. "Their suits are chilled to near absolute zero. By the time the heat from their neural-links or their siphons reaches the surface of the armor, it's already been recycled into the propulsion system. They don't just move efficiently; they move cold. To a thermal scanner, an Ascended Human looks like a ghost—a moving void in the air."
The class spent the next hour in a grueling deep-dive of the Human Tactical Network. Jax showed them how the 100% efficient brains of a squad of ten humans are synchronized through a Battlefield Hive-Mind.
"They don't communicate with words," Jax said, his interface showing ten human signatures moving in a perfect, geometric dance. "They share a single tactical HUD. If one human sees a flicker of your movement, all ten of them know your exact coordinates instantly. You aren't fighting ten soldiers; you're fighting one brain with twenty arms and ten railguns."
The brothers sat in the back, the weight of the information sinking in. In Pangea, the monsters were honest—they were hungry, they were fast, and they were strong. But the humans were calculated. They had turned the laws of physics into a cage, and they were just waiting for a Celestial to walk inside and start screaming.
"The lesson for today is simple," Vane said, his voice dropping to a final, heavy note as the class timer began to wind down. "Against a predator that uses your own power to find you, the only way to win is to be a shadow. If you cannot master Kinetic Economy—if you cannot learn to move without a heartbeat of wasted energy—then all the power in Pangea won't save you from a human with a solved equation."
The blue interfaces on the students' desks began to dim as the session concluded. The silence remained, the students too exhausted by the technical reality to engage in their usual social jockeying.
"Class dismissed," Vane said, his cybernetic eye flicking over to Oni. "Go to lunch. Process the data. Because tomorrow, we see if any of you can actually move without being caught."
Oni stood up slowly, his charcoal suit hissing as the internal systems reset. He didn't look at the other students. He looked at Rain, and for the first time since they had arrived at the academy, there was a shared, unspoken realization in their eyes: The war wasn't going to be a fight. It was going to be a hunt
The walk to the cafeteria was a silent gauntlet. Elara stayed at Oni's side, her presence a sharp contrast to his looming, charcoal-clad frame. She noticed the way his fingers twitched occasionally—a rhythmic, predatory flex that had nothing to do with the conversation.
"Mastering the Mark isn't like the resonance training the others do, is it?" Elara asked, her voice low as they approached the heavy, pressurized doors of the dining hall. "Vane talks about 'Quiet,' but how can you be quiet when you're carrying a Hydra and a Manticore in your blood?"
Oni stopped at the threshold, the scent of the cafeteria hitting him, but his mind was elsewhere—tracking the "noise" of the Transparent Wraiths currently coiled in his subconscious.
"The others think Pangea was a trial," Oni said, his voice a dry rasp. "It was a cage. I was sent there because if I stayed home, the Mark would have eaten my family while I slept. I didn't go there to get stronger. I went there to learn how to keep the beast from waking up."
Elara looked at him, the weight of that responsibility finally clicking. "So the three years... it was about learning the specific signatures. The Siren's song, the Chimera's heat. You have to be an expert on every predator in that world just to keep yourself from becoming one."
"If I lose focus for a second," Oni said, his eyes darkening as they entered the room, "the Mark doesn't just flare. It executes the instinct of whatever creature is closest to the surface. Right now, it's the Wraiths. I can feel the air wanting to turn cold around me."
The room went silent as they walked in. The sixty-five students who had felt his memory in the Mirror Room stared with a new kind of dread. They didn't just see a powerful boy; they saw a container for Pangea's worst nightmares.
Oni sat at a far table, Elara sliding in across from him. He didn't look at his food. He looked at his hands, watching for the subtle shimmer of scales or fur that shouldn't be there.
Across the hall, Rain was already midway through a block of high-density protein. He was the anchor—the one who kept the perimeter while Oni fought the internal war.
A shadow fell over his table. Kaito stood there, his face pale, his indigo suit flickering. He looked like he hadn't slept since the Mirror Room.
"I felt the Manticore," Kaito whispered, leaning over the table so the other S-1s couldn't hear him. "In the link... I felt that jagged, stinging hunger in your brother's mind. How does he sit there and eat like a normal person while that thing is trying to claw its way out?"
Rain didn't look up. He broke off a piece of the protein block with clinical precision. "He doesn't eat like a normal person, Kaito. He eats to give the beasts something to chew on so they don't chew on us. You want to know how to be 'Quiet' for the humans? Learn how to talk to a Hydra without screaming. Then we'll talk about tactical networks."
Kaito's hands shook as he gripped the edge of the table. "Teach me. I don't want to be a target. I want to know how to carry the weight."
The wind at this altitude was a constant, mournful whistle, but it couldn't penetrate the shimmer of the academy's atmospheric shields. Oni remained at the railing, his knuckles white against the dark stone. He wasn't just looking at the horizon; he was staring into the middle distance, his eyes tracking the subtle, translucent ripples in the air that only he could see.
"You're doing it right now, aren't you?" Elara asked. She had moved closer, but she was careful not to break the perimeter of his focus.
The light of the artificial sun caught the side of her face, illuminating the sheer, crystalline perfection of her features. Her skin had the texture of fine silk, glowing with that faint, inner radiance of a High House Celestial, making the dark, utilitarian charcoal of Oni's suit look like a void in the light. Her eyes, those deep, multifaceted violets, were fixed on his profile with a gaze that was both clinical and deeply, dangerously personal.
"Doing what?" Oni asked, his voice a low, jagged rasp.
"Holding them back," she whispered. "I can see the micro-tremors in your neck. You aren't just standing here. You're wrestling."
Oni closed his eyes for a second, and in that moment of darkness, the Transparent Wraiths surged. They were the most insidious of the Pangean fauna—creatures that existed in the spaces between heartbeats. To use their power, Oni had to allow his own temperature to drop to near-absolute zero, turning his blood into a frozen slurry that bypassed the heat-sensors Jax had described in the lecture.
"The Wraiths want the world to be cold," Oni said, his voice dropping an octave. "They are the silence after the kill. If I let them reach my skin, the balcony would freeze over. But the Siren... she's the one you should be worried about. She doesn't want to freeze you. She wants to sing to you until you forget why you're holding a blade. She wants to turn my memory of you into a weapon against me."
Elara took a step, finally crossing into his personal space. She was so close now that the scent of her—ozone and a faint, sweet floral note like night-blooming jasmine—competed with the metallic tang of the Mark. She was breathtakingly beautiful, a masterpiece of Celestial evolution, but there was a sharp intelligence in her eyes that proved she wasn't just a trophy of the High Houses.
"Is that why you're so cold to me?" she asked, her voice a soft, daring challenge. "Because the Siren is afraid of what happens if you actually listen to a real voice? Or is it because the Manticore in your blood thinks I'm a threat?"
Oni finally turned his head. His eyes were no longer just dark; they were flecked with the burning, predatory gold of the Chimera.
"The Manticore thinks everyone is a threat," Oni replied. "The Hydra thinks everyone is an obstacle. And the Pegasus... it just wants to leave this planet behind and never look back. I spent three years in Pangea not just mastering their abilities, but learning the exact weight of their souls. If I fall asleep, Elara—if I truly lose focus—the Mark doesn't just activate. It chooses. And it usually chooses the creature that hates the most."
"Then don't fall asleep," Elara said, her hand moving with an agonizing slowness until her fingers were just a hair's breadth from the charcoal mesh of his shoulder. "Stay awake with me. Tell me about the animals. Not the monsters they've become inside you, but the creatures they were in the wild. How does a Manticore move when it isn't trying to kill? How does a Pegasus taste the air before a storm?"
She was trying to ground him, to use her own presence as a counter-resonance to the chaos inside him. She was offering him a moment of humanity in a life that had become a biological containment unit.
A few levels below, Rain was walking toward the cafeteria. He moved with a rhythmic, measured pace, but his eyes were constantly scanning the shadows. He didn't have Oni's burden of the "Beast Mark," but he carried the tactical weight. He was the one who saw the logic Jax had explained—the 100% brain efficiency of the humans—and he was already calculating how to break it.
He felt the shadow before he saw the person. Kaito was leaning against a pillar in the transition hallway, his S-1 elite suit looking duller than usual. The boy looked haunted. The Mirror Room hadn't just shaken him; it had emptied him.
"You're already doing it," Kaito said, pushing off the pillar as Rain approached. "Vane's lesson. Kinetic Economy. You aren't even walking like a student anymore. You're walking like a malfunction in the sensor grid."
Rain stopped, looking at Kaito with a flat, unreadable expression. "I'm walking like someone who doesn't want to be a statistic, Kaito. What do you want?"
"I want to know how you separated yourself," Kaito said, his voice hushed, desperate. "In the link... I felt Oni's mind. I felt the Manticore's tail stinging the air. But I also felt you. You were like a void. You weren't fighting the images; you were just... ignoring them. How do you ignore the screaming of a dying world?"
Rain stepped closer, his blue-veined suit humming at a frequency that made the air between them vibrate.
"You don't ignore it," Rain said, his voice a cold, precise edge. "You categorize it. The humans have 100% efficiency because they don't have ego. They don't care if they look brave. They don't care if they look like leaders. They just care about the objective. Your 'noise,' Kaito, is your pride. You want to be the top of the S-1s. You want to be the legend. That desire is a thermal bloom that a railgun can lock onto from a mile away."
Rain reached out and tapped the center of Kaito's chest, right where his resonance stabilizer sat.
"If you want to survive the humans, you have to become a 'Dead Circuit,'" Rain explained. "Anchor yourself to something that isn't your own glory. My brother anchors to the beasts because he has to. I anchor to the mission. When I move, I don't 'feel' my muscles. I execute a command. There is no spike in my heart rate because I have already accepted that I might die in the next ten seconds. If you're already dead, you don't have any fear to leak into the sensors."
Kaito stared at Rain, his mouth slightly open. The advice was brutal, lacking any of the "divine" nobility the teachers usually preached. It was the philosophy of a ghost.
"Accept the grave, Kaito," Rain finished, starting to walk again. "Once you do that, the humans will stop seeing you. They can't calculate a ghost."
The wind on the West Balcony seemed to die down, or perhaps the sheer weight of Oni's presence simply quelled the air. They stood in a pocket of absolute stillness, suspended between the artificial heaven of Nefriet and the jagged reality of the world below.
Elara didn't pull her hand back. She was close enough now that Oni could see the faint, rhythmic pulse of her own aetheric signature beneath her skin—a steady, musical indigo that was the polar opposite of his own chaotic internal storm. Her beauty wasn't just in her features, which were carved with the precision of a master sculptor, but in the Radiant Symmetry of her soul. Every breath she took was a deliberate act of grace, her violet eyes holding a depth that felt like an invitation to stop fighting for just one second.
"You look at me and you see a High House doll," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum of the spire. "But I see the way you're standing. You aren't just resisting the gravity; you're resisting the Wraiths. You're freezing from the inside out just to make sure I don't get burned by the Chimera."
Oni's breath hitched, a small puff of crystalline frost escaping his lips. The Transparent Wraiths were winning. They loved the cold, high-altitude air of the balcony. They were pulling his core temperature down, trying to turn his body into a conduit of pure, unfeeling void.
"Don't touch the charcoal, Elara," Oni warned, his voice cracking like breaking ice. "The Wraiths... they don't understand 'personal.' They just understand the void. If you touch me while I'm using their resonance to mask the Manticore, you'll feel the cold of a thousand Pangean winters."
"Then let me feel it," she challenged, her gaze unwavering. "I've spent my life surrounded by filtered heat and polished gold. I want to know what the truth feels like."
She finally let her fingertips make contact with the charcoal-colored mesh of his shoulder.
The reaction was instantaneous. A shockwave of frost bloomed outward from the point of contact, turning the dark fabric white with rime in a heartbeat. Elara gasped, her eyes widening as the Wraith-chill surged into her system. It wasn't just a physical cold; it was an emotional vacuum. For a split second, she didn't just see Oni—she felt the Absolute Isolation of his three years in Pangea. She felt the sensation of being a nine-year-old boy waking up in 2x gravity, surrounded by beasts that saw him as nothing more than a meal or a host.
But she didn't let go.
Her own indigo resonance flared, a warm, protective light that fought back the frost. She leaned in, her forehead almost touching his, her silver-and-indigo hair caught in the freezing draft he was generating.
"I see it now," she breathed, her teeth chattering. "The Siren... she sings to you because she's the only one who can handle the cold. She's your only company in the dark. That's why you're afraid to let her go. You think that if the monsters leave, you'll be left with nothing but the silence."
Oni's eyes flickered, the gold of the Manticore fading, replaced by a deep, hollow obsidian. The frost on the balcony began to retreat, the Wraiths recoiling at the sheer, stubborn warmth of her spirit.
"She tells me that love is just another form of noise," Oni said, his voice regaining its human texture, though it remained a jagged rasp. "She says that if I care about you, the Hydra will eventually find a way to use your heart as a weakness. My life is a series of cages, Elara. I'm just trying to make sure you aren't in the one that's about to break."
Elara slowly pulled her hand away, her fingertips glowing a bright, painful red from the frostbite, but she didn't look away. She looked at him with a mix of sorrow and a new, terrifying respect.
"The humans use one hundred percent of their brains to be machines," she said softly. "You use one hundred percent of your soul just to stay a boy. I think I'd rather be in your cage than in their world, Oni."
She turned toward the door, her movements slightly stiff from the cold, but she paused and looked back.
"Lunch is starting. You need to eat. The Chimera is hungry, and I'd prefer it if it didn't decide to snack on the S-1s today."
Oni stood still for a long moment, the warmth of her touch still a burning point on his shoulder. He looked down at the railing, where the frost was still melting into the obsidian stone. He had spent three years learning how to be a monster. He hadn't spent a single second learning how to be a friend.
"I'm coming," he said, pushing off the railing.
He followed her toward the lift, his predatory stride slightly slower, his mind a quiet battlefield where, for the first time, the Siren had stopped singing.
The descent in the lift was a vacuum of sound, the tension between them humming like a live wire. When the doors hissed open onto the Atrium level, the sound of the cafeteria—a roar of clashing cutlery and hundred-fold conversations—hit them like a physical wave.
Oni and Elara stepped out, side-by-side.
The reaction was not a sudden silence, but a cascading one. It started at the tables nearest the entrance and rippled outward in a wave of freezing shock. Groups of S-1 elites, mid-laugh or mid-argument, simply stopped. Forks were suspended halfway to mouths. Tactical tablets were left flickering, forgotten.
To the academy, this was a collision of two incompatible worlds. There was Elara, the pinnacle of High House elegance, her indigo suit now shimmering with a soft, protective luminescence that seemed to react to the lingering frost on her fingertips. And there was Oni, the charcoal-clad Revenant, his presence so heavy it felt as though the artificial gravity of the room was doubling around him.
"Look at them," a girl from a mid-tier house whispered, her voice carrying in the sudden quiet. "She's actually walking with him. She didn't join the link in the Mirror Room, but she's standing in his shadow now."
Oni didn't scan the room for threats; he didn't have to. The Manticore in his blood was already mapping every heartbeat in the hall, sensing the spikes of jealousy, fear, and confusion. He felt the room as a network of pulses—some frantic, some cold.
As they moved toward the nutrient dispensers, the crowd parted. It wasn't the respectful parting given to a teacher; it was the way a forest parts for a predator it cannot categorize.
Kaito, sitting at a central table with Rain, stood up so abruptly his chair screeched against the obsidian floor. His eyes darted from Oni's stone-cold expression to the faint, red rime of frost still visible on Elara's shoulder. His pride, already battered by Rain's "Dead Circuit" lecture, took a fresh, jagged hit.
"He's infecting her," Kaito muttered, though his voice lacked its usual venom, replaced by a hollow sort of awe. "She's touched the Mark. You can see the resonance bleed on her suit."
Rain didn't look up from his protein block. "She isn't infected, Kaito. She's just the first one brave enough to realize that the cage is the only thing keeping us all alive."
Oni reached the dispenser and grabbed two high-density nutrient packs—black, utilitarian cubes that contrasted sharply with the colorful, synthesized delicacies the others ate. He handed one to Elara. It was a small gesture, but in the social ecosystem of the academy, it was an earthquake.
"They're staring," Elara said softly, her violet eyes scanning the room with a practiced, regal indifference that only a High House daughter could master. "They're waiting for you to break a table or for me to scream. They want a show."
Oni's orange suppressor pulsed once, a deep, rhythmic throb that seemed to sync with the hum of the building.
"Let them watch," Oni replied, his voice a low rasp that carried through the silence. "The Siren wants an audience. But the Wraiths... they prefer it when people look away."
He led her toward the far corner, the most isolated table in the room. As they sat, the sixty-five students who had linked with him earlier instinctively lowered their heads. They knew what was behind that charcoal suit. They had felt the jagged edges of the Hydra and the freezing void of the Wraiths. To them, this wasn't a social scandal; it was a terrifying peace treaty between a goddess and a graveyard.
The ambient noise of the cafeteria was a distant tide, muffled by the psychic and thermal pressure radiating from the table in the far corner. There, the obsidian surface was no longer just stone; it was a frozen lake, white rime creeping across its edges as Oni fought the Transparent Wraiths coiling in his marrow.
Elara sat across from him, her silver-indigo hair shimmering like a halo in the artificial light. She didn't look like the other students, who ate with a hurried, nervous energy. She looked like a creature made of light trying to negotiate with a shadow.
"You're drifting again," she said, her voice a soft, steady anchor. "The Wraiths... they're pulling you toward the ceiling. I can see the air shimmering around your shoulders."
Oni's eyes were fixed on the black nutrient cube, his fingers twitching in a predatory rhythm. "They want the altitude," he whispered, the sound like dry leaves skittering over ice. "They remember the peaks of Pangea. But the Siren... she's the one who won't stop screaming. She's telling me that this room is a trap. That the silence of the cafeteria isn't respect—it's the pause before a strike."
Elara reached out. She didn't touch him this time—she knew the frost would bite—but she held her hand just an inch above the table, letting her indigo warmth radiate toward him. "Listen to my voice, not hers. The Siren only has one song, Oni. She sings about fear because that's all she knows. I'm talking to you about the boy who remembered the sun. Tell me about the Pegasus. Rain mentioned it once—that it was the only thing in the Pits that didn't want to kill you."
Oni's expression softened, just a fraction. The predatory gold in his eyes receded, replaced by a deep, hollow obsidian. "The Pegasus isn't a horse, Elara. It's a storm with wings. In Pangea, they live above the lightning. They don't have hearts; they have aether-cores that vibrate at a frequency so high it makes the air turn to glass. When I use their Mark, I don't feel the 2x gravity anymore. I feel like I'm falling upward."
"Then fall upward for a second," she encouraged, her violet eyes locking onto his. "Forget the Hydra. Forget the Manticore. Just for five minutes, let the Pegasus hold the floor."
Oni took a breath, and for the first time, the frost on the table stopped advancing. The "noise" of the beasts in his blood didn't vanish, but it shifted, the jagged snarl of the predator turning into the high, lonely whistle of the wind.
A few tables away, the atmosphere was far more clinical, though no less dangerous. Rain sat with his back to the wall, his gaze moving across the room with the precision of a tactical scanner. Across from him, Kaito was a mess of sweat and suppressed indigo light.
"You're still leaking," Rain said, his voice a flat, cold edge. "I can feel your pulse from here. You're thinking about Vance. You're thinking about the 'Tactical 3' watching us. If you're thinking about your reputation, you aren't a ghost. You're a neon sign."
Kaito's hands were gripped so tight the knuckles were white. "I'm trying to drop the signature. But the suit... the OS is fighting me. It's trying to 'stabilize' my output for the school's sensors."
"Kill the OS," Rain commanded. "Go into the bypass. The humans don't have an OS telling them how to be pretty. They have 100% brain efficiency because they stripped away everything that wasn't survival. You want to be an elite? Then be elite enough to stand in a room full of enemies and not even be a flicker on their HUD."
Kaito closed his eyes, his breathing slowing to a rhythmic, shallow crawl. He began to pull his aetheric flow inward, tucking it into his bones, letting his body temperature drop. Slowly, the arrogant hum of his indigo suit died down. He became a gray shape in the bright hall, a void of presence that actually made the students nearby feel a chill they couldn't explain.
The shift didn't go unnoticed. Vance, the leader of the 'Tactical 3', stood up from the center table. His suit flared with a brilliant, intimidating gold, his posture meant to reclaim the room's attention. He walked toward them, his boots thudding with a deliberate, heavy rhythm.
"Rain," Vance said, his voice smooth and dangerous as he stopped at the edge of their table. "You're teaching an heir of a High House how to hide like a coward. In Nefriet, we are taught to be the beacon. To lead from the front with our light high."
Rain didn't even look at him. He kept his eyes on Kaito, watching the boy's signature stabilize. "A beacon is just a target that hasn't been hit yet, Vance. If you want to shine, go stand in the courtyard and wait for a human rail-rifle to find your center mass. I'm busy showing Kaito how to actually reach the target."
Vance's face contorted. He looked over at the far table where Oni was sitting with Elara. He saw the rime of frost. He saw the way the air seemed to warp around Oni's silhouette like a black hole.
"You think your 'Pangean truth' is the only way," Vance spat. "But the humans aren't beasts. They're engineers. They'll find the flaw in your 'ghost' philosophy before you even clear the landing zone."
"Then let them look," Rain replied, finally turning his head to meet Vance's gaze. His eyes were cold, clinical, and devoid of any ego. "Because by the time a human engineer finds the flaw in a ghost, the ghost has already found the seam in their armor. Go sit down, Vance. You're making too much noise."
Vance hesitated, his gold aura flickering as he realized that for the first time in his life, his status didn't mean anything to the people in front of him. He looked at Kaito—the boy who used to follow his lead—and saw someone who was no longer looking for a leader, but for a way to survive the war.
Back at the corner table, Oni watched the confrontation out of the corner of his eye. The Manticore wanted to stand up and end the noise Vance was making. But Elara's presence was still there, her violet gaze pulling him back from the edge of the beast.
"Don't," she whispered. "Let Rain handle the noise. Tell me more about the glass air. Tell me how it feels to be light."
Oni looked at her, and for a fleeting second, the charcoal-clad Revenant almost looked like the boy she was searching for. "It feels like... like the world finally stops trying to pull you down. Like the weight isn't yours anymore. It's just... freedom."
The two brothers, divided by the room but united by the same grim philosophy, continued their meals. The cafeteria remained a divided world: one half struggling to maintain the old gold-and-white lies of Nefriet, and the other half—the sixty-five and the brothers—slowly turning into the cold, quiet ghosts that might actually survive the six-year clock.
The transition from the cafeteria to the deeper levels of the spire felt like descending into a different kind of darkness. The clinical, blue-white lights of the hallways flickered rhythmically against the obsidian walls, but for Oni, the world was narrowing down to the weight of the air and the steady pulse of Elara's presence beside him.
The transition from the cafeteria to the deeper levels of the spire felt like descending into a different kind of darkness. The clinical, blue-white lights of the hallways flickered rhythmically against the obsidian walls, but for Oni, the world was narrowing down to the weight of the air and the steady pulse of Elara's presence beside him.
She wasn't walking behind him anymore; she was walking with him, her stride matching his own. Every time her shoulder brushed against his charcoal-mesh sleeve, a tiny spark of indigo static jumped between them, a reminder of the two very different worlds they occupied.
"You're quieter now," Elara said. She didn't look at him, but her voice trailed in the air like a thread of silk. "The others are still back there, vibrating with the noise of everything Vane said. But you... you've gone somewhere else."
Oni didn't slow down. He could feel the eyes of the remaining 'Tactical 3' following them from the cafeteria entrance, but he didn't give them the satisfaction of a glance.
"Vane told us to be a whisper," Oni said, his voice a low, jagged rasp that seemed to vibrate in his chest. "In Pangea, I didn't have to be a whisper. I was the scream. Trying to pull it all back in... it's like trying to hold a storm inside a glass jar."
Elara stopped. She didn't grab his arm, but the sudden stillness of her movement made Oni pause. He turned, the orange glow of his suppressor casting a long, rhythmic shadow over her silver-indigo hair.
"Is that why the frost is back?" she asked, pointing down at his gloved hand.
Oni looked. A thin, crystalline web of ice had begun to form over his knuckles, the Transparent Wraiths reacting to the internal pressure he was putting on his own aether. He was trying to compress his resonance so tightly that he was literally freezing the moisture in the hallway's recycled air.
"It's the only way to be 'Quiet' enough for the sensors," Oni replied. "The Wraiths don't have a heat signature. If I let them take the lead, the human scanners see nothing but a cold void."
"But you're the one who has to pay for it," Elara whispered. She stepped into his space, her violet eyes searching his. She looked at the ice on his hand, then back up at the hard, obsidian line of his jaw. "How long can you stay that cold before you forget how to feel anything else?"
Oni didn't have an answer. The chime for the third class began to echo through the spire—a deep, resonant bronze tone that felt like a heartbeat.
"We're going to be late," Oni said, but he didn't move.
Elara reached out, her fingers hovering just over the ice on his knuckles. She didn't touch it this time, but her warmth was so close he could feel the frost on his skin beginning to weep.
"Let them wait," she said. "The six-year clock is for the war. This minute is for us."
Oni looked down at her hand. It was steady—unlike the hands of the students in the cafeteria who had been trembling from the mere memory of his life. Elara wasn't shaking. She was standing in the epicenter of the cold he was generating, her indigo resonance flickering like a candle in a gale, refusing to be snuffed out.
The frost on his knuckles began to crack, the ice spiderwebbing and then turning to mist as her warmth pressed against the void.
"You're wasting your energy," Oni said, though he didn't pull away. "Vane said perfection is a whisper. You're being a beacon right now. Any sensor in this wing could find us just by tracking the heat you're throwing off to fight my cold."
"Then let them find us," Elara replied. She moved her hand, not to his glove, but to the exposed skin of his wrist just above the charcoal sleeve.
The contact was a physical jolt. It wasn't just the temperature difference; it was the collision of two fundamentally different ways of existing. To Oni, her touch felt like a sun-strike on a frozen lake. To Elara, his skin felt like carved stone—dense, unyielding, and vibrating with a frequency that felt more like a machine than a boy.
Oni's breath hitched. A small, crystalline cloud of vapor escaped his lips, but the gold in his eyes—the predatory flare of the Manticore—didn't ignite. Instead, the obsidian depths of his pupils seemed to widen, drawing in the violet light of her gaze.
"The Siren is quiet," Oni whispered, his voice losing its jagged edge.
"Good," Elara said, her thumb tracing the line of his pulse. "She doesn't belong here. Neither do the Wraiths."
She looked around the obsidian hallway. It was empty, the other students having already hurried off to their next trial, leaving them in a pocket of silence that felt older than the academy itself.
"Everyone else looks at you and sees a weapon that needs to be pointed or a monster that needs to be caged," she said, looking back at him. "Even the professors. But I can feel it, Oni. Your heart is beating so fast it's trying to outrun the clock. You aren't cold because you're heartless. You're cold because you're tired of burning."
Oni felt the truth of it pierce through the layers of Pangean armor he had built. He thought of the six years. He thought of his mother in the black site, her face fading into the red aether-clouds of his memory. He had been running for so long that he had forgotten what it felt like to simply stand still.
For a heartbeat, the "Dead Circuit" Rain had talked about actually happened—but not through logic or tactical efficiency. The noise in Oni's head simply stopped. The Hydra's hunger, the Manticore's sting, and the Pegasus's lonely flight all settled into a hushed, tentative truce.
He leaned his head back against the cool obsidian wall, his eyes never leaving hers. The orange throb of his suppressor slowed, matching the calm, rhythmic indigo of her suit.
"Five minutes," Oni murmured, the words finally soft. "You said you wanted five minutes where I wasn't the Revenant."
"I think we're at four," Elara whispered, a small, knowing smile tugging at the corner of her lips.
The hallway lights flickered—a standard SHINRA-OS diagnostic—but in the brief moment of dimness, the only thing visible was the soft glow of their overlapping auras, indigo and orange bleeding together on the black stone floor.
Oni's shoulders, which had been set like iron since he stepped off the transport from Pangea, finally dropped. The tension didn't leave him all at once—it drained out of him like heavy silt settling at the bottom of a river.
He didn't pull his wrist away from her touch. Instead, he turned his hand over, his gloved fingers curling slightly as if he were trying to remember the shape of a hand that wasn't balled into a fist.
"The air is different here," Oni said, his voice so quiet it barely disturbed the stillness. "In the Pits, you can hear the weight. It's a constant, low roar in your ears, like the planet is trying to tell you that you don't belong. But here... it's just empty."
He looked at her, and for the first time, the "Beast" wasn't what she saw. The predatory gold was gone, replaced by the tired, dark eyes of a boy who had seen the end of the world and was still expected to save it.
"I don't know how to be a person in this silence, Elara," he confessed. "Whenever it gets quiet, the creatures in the Mark start to pace. They think the silence is a trap. They think if I'm not fighting, I'm dying."
Elara didn't pull back. She took half a step closer, the warmth of her presence wrapping around him like a physical shroud. She could feel the vibration of his aetheric core—it wasn't the jagged, chaotic mess the professors saw on their monitors. Up close, it was a deep, mournful resonance, like a bell ringing underwater.
"Then let them pace," she whispered. "Let them tire themselves out. I'm right here. I'm not a sensor, and I'm not a target. I'm just a girl who's tired of the gold and white lies, too."
Oni let out a long, shuddering breath. The frost on his knuckles didn't just melt; it evaporated into a fine mist. He leaned toward her, his forehead coming to rest against hers. It was a grounding point—a physical anchor that had nothing to do with aetheric links or tactical synchronization.
For a moment, the six-year clock stopped ticking. The SHINRA-OS, the threat of the Ascended Humans, and the terrified whispers of the other students ceased to exist. There was only the heat of her skin against his and the slow, rhythmic throb of two hearts trying to find a shared frequency in a world built on dissonance.
"You're warm," Oni murmured, the words losing their rasp entirely.
"And you're finally here," she replied.
They stood there in the dim light of the obsidian hallway, a Revenant and a High House daughter, two broken pieces of a celestial empire finally fitting together in the dark.
The silence lasted until the final, urgent vibration of the third-class chime pulsed through the floorboards. It was a reminder that the world wouldn't wait for them forever.
Oni pulled back slowly, the armor of his expression beginning to slide back into place, but the look he gave her was different now. The wall wasn't gone, but there was a door in it, and she was the only one with the key.
"We have to go," he said, his voice regaining its strength, though the coldness didn't return.
Elara straightened her suit, her indigo glow steady and bright. "I know. But Oni? The five minutes aren't over. I'm keeping the change."