Truth was, Inteja ranked among the highest Yai users in Ansep, pulled in every direction by missions that didn't wait.
She had poured more into Atiya's foundation than most instructors gave their students in a decade. His skill was simply that anomalous, that far outside the expected range of outcomes.
"I am never using that skill again," Atiya said.
"Check your circuits," Inteja replied.
He summoned the display. The concentric circles flickered to life in the air before him, magenta and steady, and he found the relevant text near the center.
Ascension 2, Stage 4.
He stared at it for a moment. An impressive milestone by any measure. And yet the skill sitting in one of his seven slots was a technique that would dissect him from the inside out if he so much as activated it carelessly. Six usable slots remaining.
One occupied by something he couldn't touch.
"What am I supposed to do now?"
"You're staying here to recover," Inteja said, straightening her singed shirt with the brisk efficiency of someone already moving on. "Then you're coding something that actually works. And I don't care how you do it. You'll be spending most of your time coding from here on out. I'll be supervising."
"Stage 4," Zelaine murmured from the corner, shaking her head slowly. "You really are an unlucky bastard, babe."
"The thing is..." Atiya scratched the back of his neck. "The coding for Portal Creation is also complete."
The room went quiet.
Inteja's eyes narrowed. She drew a slow breath through her nose, and something in her expression shifted into a register that was significantly more dangerous than anger.
"I see." Her voice dropped to a low, lethal purr. "So I need to give you a quick beating then." She raised one hand, already winding up.
"If the portal skill was finished, why in god's name didn't you activate that one first? It's not just your body that's pea-sized. Your brain too, apparently."
"Lady Inteja." Cale stepped forward immediately, voice measured. "He's a patient."
"Don't worry," Zelaine said with a wide, radiant, deeply unsettling smile. She grabbed Cale by the collar and began dragging him toward the door. "Master will patch him right back up."
Atiya accepted his fate without protest. It wasn't as though fighting it would change anything. She would have made him activate it first anyway.
What followed was exactly what everyone had expected.
A few days and several painful healing sessions later, Atiya was discharged.
Inteja never took her eyes off him.
****
He sat cross-legged on the mat, palms pressed to the faintly glowing circuits of his holographic interface, feeding his Yai into them thread by thread.
The world around him was still and observing.
'No disasters so far.'
He clenched his jaw and waited. "Please," he muttered under his breath, "let it be an actual vision this time. Not a repeat of last time."
The pain arrived like something had been dropped on him from a great height.
It started as a deep throb behind his eyes, the kind that made the edges of his vision pulse, then sharpened fast into something with edges.
Like two blades, one at each temple, driven in to the hilt and twisted with slow, deliberate cruelty. His jaw locked and clenched his fist.
A strangled sound escaped him.
"I'm getting a vision," he rasped, and despite everything his voice cracked with something that was almost hope.
Then the flood hit.
Foreign memories. Instructions that belong to him, pressing in from every direction at once like water through a cracked wall.
The Immovable Door.
Find the place where two points yearn to join. Where the world's natural Yai current once flowed freely between them, before something ancient dammed it shut. Do not shatter the barrier. Do not force the connection.
Measure. Align. Calibrate the metaphysical pressures with precision, until equilibrium gives way in the gentlest possible manner. Until the portal breathes open on its own, the way a river rediscovers a lost tributary after centuries of drought.
Atiya clung to the words, half-dazed, his skull still feeling like it was being taken apart from the inside.
Then it was gone.
The knowing dissolved as fast as it had arrived, leaving only faint echoes and a headache that made the last one feel like a warm-up.
He exhaled slowly, the breath coming out unsteady at the edges. His mother's gaze was already on him from across the room.
He reached for the nearest sheet of parchment without looking for it properly, fingers closing around it by feel, and began writing fast and without any care for neatness, dragging every fragment out of his head before the vision could finish dissolving.
When he ran out of things to write he pushed the sheet across toward her and said nothing.
Inteja picked it up. She read it once, her brow pulling together slightly.
Then she read it again, slower this time, her eyes narrowing somewhere around the middle of the page as though one particular line had said something she wasn't sure she had read correctly.
"You got a fairly easy one," she said finally, folding the note and tucking it into her sleeve. "I'll take you somewhere suitable tomorrow."
Atiya said nothing, but he felt the quiet shape of it settle over him the way it always did. He had never really struggled for anything. Effort, the grinding unavoidable kind that wore other people down to their foundations, had never quite managed to find him.
His mother, unyielding in every visible way, had always moved quietly in the background, clearing what needed clearing, arranging what needed arranging.
Even now, she was taking on the hardest part herself. Finding a place in the world where the natural flow of Yai had been blocked was not a simple thing. For most, it would have taken months.
For Inteja, it would take until tomorrow.
She just had to take him to her workplace.
"It works out rather well," Inteja said, sounding genuinely pleased with herself. "I was planning on making you a researcher at Ansep anyway."
"What about my dreams and goals," Atiya said.
"Do you have any?"
"..."
He didn't, really. Nothing beyond the quiet life he already had, which he considered a perfectly reasonable thing to want.
"You're coming with me," Inteja continued, already moving on. "And tell that brat to pack up. She's coming too."
****
The next day, Inteja cleared the sparring ground and got to work.
She stood alone in the center of the packed earth, her movements precise and without any sense of hurry. With a single sweep of her hand she drew a massive Yai circle across the ground, wide enough to swallow half the training yard whole.
Intricate symbols flared to life along its rim, pulsing with faint silver light, and inside the outer ring she began inscribing smaller concentric circles, each layered with its own dense web of formulas.
From above, the array would have looked like an endless loop of interlocking rings, a fractal mandala carved out of raw Yai.
She had called in favors beforehand. A small team of trusted space Yaicraft users from her private network arrived quickly, all business, until they got close enough to see the design properly.
A tall woman with star-map tattoos curling up both forearms stepped forward. "Lady Inteja." Her voice carried genuine hesitation.
"I'm lost here. These formulas are abnormal. I can see they'll produce exactly what you're after, but this layering, these recursive pressure vectors, this is beyond anything I've worked with."
There was real awe in it, edged with something closer to unease.
Inteja didn't look up from the ground.
"Leave."
The word landed flat and final. The woman blinked, visibly stung. It was shockingly blunt even by Inteja's standards, but no one in the group was foolish enough to say so.
They traded brief glances, bowed without a word, and filed out.
Inteja worked alone after that. Minutes bled into a hushed half hour, her fingers tracing fine corrections across the array, coaxing the Yai into alignment with the particular patience she reserved for things that mattered.
Only when every symbol balanced perfectly, when the whole structure hummed with coiled and expectant energy, did she straighten.
She looked over what she'd made with the quiet, grim satisfaction.
She turned toward the shaded edge of the grounds.
"Atiya. Come."
He walked to the edge of the circle and looked at it, then back at her. "So what do I do, just go stand in the middle?"
"Yes," Inteja said. "Step into the center and stay there. You may need to remain inside for several days. I've already told you everything you need to know. Follow it exactly."
"Yes. Step into the center and stay there," Inteja replied. "You might have to remain inside for several days. I've already told you everything you need to do. Follow it exactly."
Atiya exhaled slowly. Then a small, lopsided grin crept onto his face. "Okay, Mother." He paused.
"Oh, and please log in to Fate/Grand Order at least once a day while I'm in there. Don't let my dailies lapse."
He stepped into the center of the array and planted his feet, letting his breathing settle.
The moment he stilled, Inteja raised one hand. A low incantation left her lips, the words too soft and precise to carry beyond a few feet, spoken less like a recitation and more like something being carefully placed.
The circle ignited.
Silver light erupted from every glyph and ring simultaneously, spiraling inward from all directions at once, converging on Atiya like living thread being drawn through a needle.
The light wove around him, tightening into a shimmering cocoon, and then expanded outward in a single smooth breath, warping the air around it until the space itself thickened and hardened into something that felt permanent.
From the outside it settled into a translucent dome, the surface rippling faintly like heat rising off summer asphalt, the world beyond it slightly bent and distant.
Inside, reality had rearranged itself into something that felt like a cave without quite being one. The walls were rough and jagged, pseudo-stone that looked like it had been hewn rather than formed, a low ceiling pressing down with the suggestion of weight rather than the fact of it.
Through the rock, faint veins of pale light pulsed in slow, irregular rhythms, like something breathing very far away.
Atiya let out a long breath and looked around.
Then he closed his eyes.
Thread by thread he drew his Yai inward, channeling it down through muscle and bone, fortifying from the inside out. The pressures here would build over the days ahead.
He could already feel the early edge of them, a subtle wrongness in the air, the metaphysical equivalent of standing at the bottom of very deep water.
This place, the interior of the constructed cave, sat at the exact point where two distant locations in the world had once yearned to connect. Long ago the natural Yai current between them had flowed freely, seamless and alive, the way rivers find each other without being told to.
Something had severed that. Blocked it. Dammed it at the source without leaving any obvious sign of what had done the damming.
Finding the location had already been done for him. That was the first part.
The second part was simpler in description and brutal in practice. Wait. Align. Let the metaphysical pressures equalize on their own terms until the portal opened the way water eventually finds its way through stone, not by force but by patience and accumulated weight.
Nothing left to do but endure.
He was settling into that thought when the cave walls dissolved.
They simply came apart into liquid, jagged ridges bleeding outward into swirling crimson and indigo, the colors vivid and alive, bleeding into each other at the edges like ink dropped into still water.
"Fascinating," Atiya murmured.
He meant it.
A smile crossed his face despite everything.
The dissolution didn't stop. In the span of a few heartbeats the entire space unraveled around him, the cave was gone entirely, replaced by a vast churning sea of color that stretched in every direction without any horizon to interrupt it.
Endless tides of crimson and indigo and colors he didn't have names for surged and folded around him like an ocean that had never learned the shape of a shore.
It moved like something alive, like something that had been waiting a very long time to be seen.
Atiya's breath caught.
He stood in the middle of it and looked, and for once in his life he didn't feel the urge to curse at it at all.