"Honey, how are you? How's school? Are you eating? Are you sleeping enough? Have you made friends? You sound tired — are you tired? You should eat more, I read that students don't eat enough, Primox said you skipped breakfast last Tuesday—"
"Mum."
"—and the weather there is completely different from Kyoto so you need to layer properly, I sent you a package, did you receive the package—"
"*Mum.*"
Kimi Kobayashi paused. On the other end of the call, her son could practically hear her composing herself.
"Yes?"
"I'm fine," Hikaru said, stirring his coffee. "School is good. I'm eating. I'm sleeping. I got the package. The weather is manageable. Primox does not need to report my breakfast habits to you."
"He worries."
"He was a divine messenger of the heavens. He doesn't worry about breakfast."
"He does now," Kimi said, with the absolute serenity of a woman who had successfully domesticated an angel. "Call your father later. He won't ask, but he wants to hear from you."
"I know."
"And Hikaru—"
"I love you too, Mum."
A beat. He could hear her smiling.
"Good boy."
---
Eighteen years had passed since a glowing infant had tumbled out of a cyan egg and into the Kobayashi household, and the universe had, for the most part, been remarkably well-behaved about it.
Hikaru had grown up with every advantage — a family that loved him without condition, a home that wanted for nothing, and a personal guardian angel who took the concept of *holistic development* extremely seriously. Primox, once he had returned from the heavens and received his new assignment, had approached the raising of a divine child with the same focused intensity he brought to everything: thoroughly, methodically, and with absolutely no tolerance for shortcuts.
He had taught Hikaru discipline before he taught him anything else. Then history — not just Earth's, but the realms'. Then the nature of what Hikaru was, what his power was, and what it might one day be called to do. These were not conversations designed to frighten. They were delivered the way Primox delivered everything: plainly, patiently, and with the implicit message that knowing the truth about yourself was always better than the alternative.
Hikaru had grown up, in other words, knowing exactly who he was. A Kobayashi. A child of Kyoto. A billionaire's adopted son who could crack stone with his bare hands and had luminous lines running up both arms that glowed brighter when he was angry.
Normal. Mostly.
---
Which brought him here — to a coffee shop table somewhere on the other side of the planet from home, a campus map spread open in front of him that he hadn't quite managed to make sense of yet, and a cup of something that was either very strong coffee or a very committed impersonation of one.
**Legion Academy.**
Founded in the early 22nd century by the retired hero known as Ice Noise — a name that had made considerably more sense when she was actively using her abilities in the field — the Academy had grown from a modest training programme into one of the most respected institutions in the world. Its purpose was straightforward: take young people with abilities — mutant, alien, divine, or otherwise — who wanted to do something *useful* with what they had, and give them the tools to do it properly.
It was, Primox had explained, the logical next step.
*"You understand your power,"* he had said, in that particular tone he reserved for statements he had clearly rehearsed. *"You understand your history. What you don't yet understand is people. Society. How to exist among others who are nothing like you, and protect them anyway. This school will teach you that."*
Hikaru had pointed out that he had, in fact, interacted with people before.
Primox had given him the look — the one that meant *that is technically true and entirely beside the point* — and the matter had been settled.
So here he was.
---
**Legion Academy — Dean's Office**
The Dean's office was exactly what you'd expect from a man who had once been, by most accounts, one of the most decorated active heroes of his generation: full of awards he'd stopped looking at and photographs of moments he still thought about.
Dean Haruto Sato — formerly *Ironveil*, formerly the kind of hero whose name made villains reconsider their career choices — had retired not by choice but by necessity, a mission-critical injury three years ago that had ended his field career at what everyone agreed was an infuriating peak. He'd taken the Dean position because someone had to, and because, as he privately admitted, watching talented young people become something extraordinary was almost as good as doing it yourself.
Almost.
He looked up when Hikaru entered, and something shifted in his expression — not surprise exactly, but recognition of a kind.
"Kobayashi Hikaru," he said, leaning back. "I'll be honest with you — when I sent that invitation to your family, I wasn't certain they'd accept. A student of your background doesn't usually need to go looking for training opportunities. Training opportunities usually come looking for them."
Hikaru took the offered seat. "Primox suggested it."
The Dean nodded slowly — the name clearly meaning something to him. "Right. Well. You're behind — lectures started some weeks ago — but I suspect that's less of a problem for you than it would be for most." He reached for a folder. "I'll have someone show you around, help you get settled. Any questions before we get into the paperwork?"
Hikaru glanced around the office — the retired trophies, the old headlines behind glass, the very deliberate normalcy of a man who had once been anything but.
"One," Hikaru said. "What do you actually teach here, that I can't learn anywhere else?"
The Dean looked at him for a long moment. Then he smiled — the first genuinely unguarded expression he'd shown since Hikaru walked in.
"Sit down properly," he said. "That one takes a while to answer."
---
**The Heavens — Hall of the Elders**
The Hall of the Elders was, architecturally speaking, an exercise in controlled intimidation.
Every mythology had contributed something to it, which meant no single aesthetic dominated — instead the space existed in a permanent state of majestic contradiction. Greek marble columns stood beside Egyptian obelisks. Norse carved wood met Aztec stonework. Chinese lacquered beams intersected with Yoruba bronze. It should not have worked. It worked extraordinarily well.
Around the great table, the Elder Gods sat in their customary arrangement, which was to say: close enough to cooperate, far enough apart to maintain plausible deniability about any given argument.
"The boy," said Odin, because Odin rarely wasted time on preamble. The Allfather's single eye swept the table. "Where do we stand?"
"I have a lesser god watching him," said Tlaloc, elder deity of the Aztec heavens, arms folded. "Has been for years. I still don't understand what the Creator sees in that family." He paused. "No offence to the family."
"None taken, as they cannot hear you," said Ra, dryly. The Egyptian god of light had the particular manner of someone who had been doing this for several thousand years and had strong opinions about efficiency. "What I find more interesting is the event that started all of this. The incident with the Damned One. That family was targeted specifically."
"Which implies the Damned One knew something," said Zeus.
Silence settled briefly around the table. No one disagreed.
"The angel stationed with the boy won't permit us near him," said Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder and justice, his voice carrying the low resonance of someone accustomed to being listened to. "Primox. He takes his assignment seriously."
"Suspiciously seriously," Ares muttered from his seat, the Greek god of war looking characteristically unimpressed with everyone in the room, "And now we're expected to train the *siblings.* The whole family is strange. It was strange before the Damned One got involved, and the Damned One's interest only confirmed it."
"We train who the Creator assigns us to train," said the Jade Emperor, his voice measured and deliberate, carrying the specific weight of someone who had learned long ago that the Creator's plans revealed themselves on their own timeline and not a moment sooner. "What I would suggest — what I believe we should all consider — is that we begin preparing. Not just the siblings. Ourselves."
The table was quiet.
"You feel it too," Zeus said. It was not a question.
The Jade Emperor inclined his head. "Something is coming. Something the Creator is already moving pieces against." He looked around the table. "I would rather be a piece already in motion than one that needs to be moved in a hurry."
One by one, the elder gods nodded.
No one mentioned what they were all thinking: that the Creator had never in living memory begun preparing this far in advance.
Which meant whatever was coming was very large indeed.
---
**The Abyss**
There are places in existence that resist description — not because language lacks the words, but because the words were designed for places that wanted to be understood.
The Abyss was not one of those places.
It existed at the edge of everything, past the final realm, in the space where the architecture of creation simply stopped trying. No light entered it willingly. Sounds moved strangely here, as though they kept second-guessing themselves. It was the kind of place that made even divine beings feel watched.
He sat at the centre of it, chained to twin towers of black stone — arms spread wide, legs bound, head slightly tilted as though he had long ago stopped minding the chains and started finding them mildly amusing. His hair was long and pale gold, and it would have made him look almost ordinary if not for everything else about him.
In his lap, cradled with the careful attention of someone handling something precious, sat a glass jar.
Inside the jar: a pair of eyes. Not metaphorically. Two eyes, suspended, unblinking — and yet somehow *aware*, somehow tracking movement with the quiet attention of something that had not stopped seeing just because it had been removed from its original context.
He stared into them. They stared back.
Then he laughed — a low, unhurried sound, the laugh of someone who has just remembered a very good joke.
"So," he said softly, tilting the jar slightly, watching the eyes shift. "He's come back. Reborn, redirected, repackaged." His smile widened. "They always think starting over changes something."
He set the jar down with exaggerated gentleness.
"I'll make sure," he said, mostly to himself, "to take more than just the eyes this time."
Behind him, in the dark, something moved. A silhouette — large, still, patient. Waiting.
He didn't turn to look at it. He didn't need to.
"Don't you think so?" he said.
The silhouette said nothing.
Which was, somehow, the most unsettling answer of all.