Oni managed to duck into his room just as the cooling air began to turn the dampness on his skin into a shivering chill. He didn't even get the door fully closed before Rain's voice drifted down from the ceiling vents, sounding far too cheerful for someone whose hands were currently wrapped in second-degree bandages.
"Oh, look at that stride! That's the walk of a man who just had his soul-wires crossed," Rain's voice echoed through the metal ductwork. "Hey Oni, does the towel come in charcoal grey to match the suit, or are we going for 'Stark Naked and Confused' as the new uniform? I need to know for the logs."
"Rain, I will reach through that grate and pull your lungs out through your nose," Oni growled, grabbing a fresh undershirt from his locker.
"Can't hear you over the sound of your skyrocketing cortisol!" Rain's laughter muffled as he scurried deeper into the maintenance shafts. "See you in Bio, Loverboy! Try not to trip over your own feet on the way there!"
Oni dressed in a blur of frustration and exhaustion, pulling on a standard-duty shirt that felt scratchy against his fresh burns. He made it to Bio-Lab 4 just as the chime rang, slipping into a seat at a heavy stone bench. The room smelled like a mix of ancient forest floor and a high-end chemistry lab that had recently exploded. Dr. Ishii was hunched over a petri dish, poking a pulsating, translucent lung-sac with a glass rod. He didn't look like a legendary scientist; he looked like a man who had forgotten to sleep since the late nineties and lived entirely on spite and cheap caffeine.
"Sit down, sit down," Ishii rasped, waving a hand stained with a neon green reagent. He finally turned around, his eyes magnified behind thick, round lenses that made him look like a predatory owl. "You all look like shit. Truly. I've seen roadkill with better posture. Except you, Bane—you just look like you're trying to remember how to breathe without a gravity well pushing your ribs into your spine."
"It's a work in progress, Doc," Bane grunted, leaning back until the stool groaned.
Ishii hopped onto a high stool, swinging his legs. "Right. Today's lesson is: Why You Suck. You're Celestials. You're built like gods, you eat stars for breakfast, and yet, watching the playback of that Mirror Room was like watching a bunch of toddlers try to play violins with sledgehammers. It was embarrassing. I nearly vomited my lunch."
He pointed a laser pointer directly at Oni's chest, the red dot dancing over the fabric. "Oni. You're a goddamn mountain of meat. But your durability? It's sloppy as hell. You're bracing for impact like a human. You're tightening your muscles, screaming, and wasting forty percent of your energy just trying not to piss yourself."
"I wasn't—" Oni started, his face flushing.
"Shut up, I have the biometrics," Ishii chirped, his voice cutting through the room like a scalpel. "You were leaking aetheric radiation out of your pores like a broken radiator. If you were refined, that twenty-five percent intensity wouldn't have even made you sweat. You're durable because you're thick, not because you're smart. You're a blunt instrument, and blunt instruments break when they hit something harder than they are."
Ishii hopped down and walked over to a table covered in various types of fabric and metal plates. "Refinement is about density and flow. If a bullet hits a wall, the wall takes the hit and cracks. If a bullet hits a whirlpool, the whirlpool eats the bullet and keeps spinning. You lot are walls. You're stubborn, stupid walls. I'm going to teach you to be whirlpools before Mistress Hana decides to stop using mirrors and starts using live ammunition. And trust me, a high-caliber round doesn't care about your 'feelings' or your 'neural links'."
He winked at Oni, then looked over at Elara, who was trying to look invisible behind her tablet. "Also, Oni? Put a shirt on next time. You're distracting the Phase-Shifter and she's already bad enough at math without you parading around like a half-naked gladiator."
"I'm wearing a shirt, Doc," Oni muttered, tugging at his collar.
"Barely," Ishii snorted. He picked up a small, vibrating scalpel that hummed with a low, dangerous frequency. "Theia, front and center. I need a volunteer to show these idiots what 'Internal Tensile Strength' actually looks like. Since you're the only one who doesn't smell like a burnt circuit board or desperation, you're it."
Theia stood up, looking nervous as she smoothed her hair. "Doctor, I'm a healer. My output isn't meant for combat."
"Exactly! You're a healer, which means you know how to knit cells together. Now show me if you can keep your own cells from splitting when I apply three hundred pounds of localized pressure to your pinky finger without using a drop of your external aura." Ishii gestured for her to hold out her hand. "Watch close, boys. This is the difference between a tank and a master. If you can't refine your internal flow, you're just a very expensive pile of meat waiting to be tenderized."
Theia tentatively held out her hand, and the room went dead silent as Ishii lowered the vibrating tool toward her skin.
Theia took a deep breath, her eyes losing their nervous flicker as they settled into a calm, glassy stillness. She didn't brace her feet or clench her jaw; instead, she let her shoulders drop, her body becoming strangely fluid. As Ishii lowered the vibrating scalpel—a tool designed to oscillate at a frequency that could liquefy bone—the air around her hand didn't ripple with the usual jagged sparks of aether. It stayed perfectly still.
The moment the blade touched her skin, the room braced for the sound of a scream or the smell of burning flesh. Instead, there was a high-pitched, harmonic chime. The scalpel didn't cut. It didn't even leave a dent. The vibration seemed to hit her skin and simply... disappear, sucked into her body and neutralized before it could disrupt a single cell.
"Look at that," Ishii whispered, his voice uncharacteristically soft as he cranked the pressure gauge on the tool. "Look at the damn bio-feedback."
The monitors behind him flared to life, showing a microscopic view of Theia's cellular lattice. While Oni's cells in the Mirror Room had been slamming against each other like riot police, Theia's were moving in a synchronized, rhythmic dance. She was shifting the "reactive load" of the blade across her entire skeletal structure, using her aether to act as a thousand tiny shock absorbers.
"She's not resisting the blade," Ishii said, turning to the class with a manic grin. "She's harmonizing with it. This is peak-level refinement. Even Sephina, in all her 'High-Command' glory, would have to squint to find a leak in this girl's output. Theia isn't just a healer; she's a goddamn prodigy of internal kinetic distribution."
Theia finally blinked, pulling her hand back as Ishii clicked the tool off. The skin on her finger wasn't even pink. "It's about the 'Pulse,' Doctor," she said quietly, looking over at Oni. "If you fight the frequency, it breaks you. If you become a part of the frequency, it just passes through. My healing works the same way—I don't force cells to knit; I just remind them that they're already supposed to be connected."
"Did you hear that, you knuckle-draggers?" Ishii barked, slamming his hand on the table. "She 'reminds' them! Meanwhile, Oni over here is trying to bench-press a tidal wave, and Elara is trying to out-math a lightning strike. You're all trying too hard! You're treating your celestial blood like a muscle when you should be treating it like a language."
He paced back and forth, his lab coat flapping like wings. "If Sephina saw this, she'd have Theia in the High Guard by morning. The rest of you? She'd send you back to basic training to learn how to walk without tripping over your own power. You have the raw amplitude to level a city, but Theia has the refinement to survive the blast from the inside out."
Rain leaned over, whispering to Oni, "I think the Doc just called us all clumsy toddlers while calling Theia a surgical laser. That's... actually a pretty fair assessment."
"Shut up, Rain," Oni muttered, though his eyes were locked on Theia. He felt a weird mix of pride and a sudden, crushing realization of just how far he had to go.
Ishii stopped and pointed the scalpel at Oni again. "Theia, stay here. Oni, get up. We're going to see if the Healer can teach the Mountain how to stop being a wall. We're going to practice 'The Flow.' And if any of you cuss, make sure it's creative—I'm tired of hearing the same three words every time you get hurt."
Oni shoved himself off the stool, his joints popping with a sound like dry branches breaking. He made his way to the front, feeling the collective gaze of the other eighty-four students. At a nearby table, a lanky kid with grease-smudged cheeks and hair that looked like it had survived a lightning strike watched him with narrow, calculating eyes. This was Vax, the lead Archive Rat of the freshman block. He didn't look like a warrior; he looked like a guy who spent his nights taking apart toasters just to see if he could make them sentient.
"Check the output on the big guy, Sloane," Vax muttered, tapping a frantic rhythm on a holographic tablet that hovered over his desk. "I want to see exactly where the hull integrity fails when the Doc starts poking him."
Sloane, a girl with pale skin and dark, heavy circles under her eyes, didn't even look up. She was slumped in her seat, a pair of oversized, industrial-grade headphones clamped over her ears. She was the best Echo in the class, capable of hearing a pin drop three floors up, which meant she spent most of her life looking like she had a permanent migraine from the "loudness" of everyone else's existence.
"He's already leaking," Sloane rasped, her voice sounding like it hadn't been used in a week. "He sounds like a goddamn jet engine with a loose bolt. It's giving me a toothache."
"Alright, settle down, you vultures," Ishii chirped, waving Oni toward the center. "Since Group Seven thinks they're so clever, Vax, Sloane, Huck—get your asses down here. You're going to be Oni's support team. If he explodes, I'm failing all of you posthumously."
A kid in the back row stood up, stretching his arms until his spine gave a satisfying series of clicks. This was Huck, the Pathfinder. He was wearing boots that were caked in actual mud, a stark contrast to the sterile lab, and he smelled faintly of pine needles and damp earth. He looked like he'd spent the last forty-eight hours mapping a swamp, which he probably had.
"Does this mean I get to stop looking at these charts, Doc?" Huck asked, stepping over a bench with practiced ease. "Because the geography of this planet is depressing as hell. There's a dead zone three miles north of here that eats radio signals like candy. It's boring."
"Less whining, more working," Ishii snapped. "Huck, you're the organic monitor. If Oni's heart rate hits two hundred, tell me before his chest cavity turns into shrapnel. Sloane, mute the feedback. Vax, calibrate the sensors. Rain, you're the runner—try not to slip on your own ego while you're fetching cooling cells."
The group crowded around the central stone table. Vax immediately started slapping bio-sensors onto Oni's shoulders, his touch clinical and annoying. "God, you're dense," Vax grumbled, pressing a sensor into Oni's trap. "It's like trying to stick a magnet to a brick. Stop tensing up, you big idiot. You're messing with the baseline."
"I'm not tensing," Oni growled, though his jaw was locked tight. "You're just poking me with cold metal."
"It's cold because you're a walking furnace, you unrefined ape," Vax shot back, glancing at his tablet. "Look at this. Your internal temperature is spiking because you're fighting the air. You're literally wasting energy just existing. It's offensive to my professional sensibilities."
Sloane placed her hands on the edge of the table, her eyes fluttering shut. Suddenly, the ambient hum of the lab—the buzzing lights, the distant air filtration, Rain's rhythmic tapping on his leg—simply vanished. She had created a localized silence so thick it felt like being underwater.
"Shut up and work," Sloane's voice echoed in their heads, a trick of her frequency manipulation. "Vax, your heart is beating too fast. Huck, stop chewing that root, it sounds like a landslide. Oni... just don't die. The frequency you're putting off is making my skin crawl."
"She's a real ray of sunshine, isn't she?" Rain whispered, leaning in close to Oni. "Hey Huck, you got any more of that root? I think I need something to take the edge off before the Doc starts the vibrator again."
Huck didn't even look at him, his eyes fixed on the bio-readouts. "It's for focus, not for fun, you twitchy little prick. If you eat this, you'll see colors that don't exist for three hours. Now watch the core."
Ishii stepped forward, holding the vibrating scalpel like a conductor's baton. "Theia, guide him. Show the Mountain how to let the river flow instead of trying to dam it up with his own stupidity."
Theia stepped closer to Oni, her presence calming the frantic energy radiating off him. She placed a hand lightly on his forearm. "Oni, look at me," she said softly. "Don't look at the blade. Don't look at Vax's stupid tablet. Just feel the pulse of the room. I'm going to start the flow, and I want you to just... let it pass through you. Don't catch it. Don't hold it. Just be the bridge."
"I'm the bridge," Oni repeated, his voice low. "Right. A bridge. Not a wall."
"Exactly," Theia smiled. "A very large, stubborn bridge."
Ishii grinned, a look of pure, academic malice. "Alright, let's see if the bridge collapses. Level one frequency. Starting... now."
The moment the scalpel touched Oni's bare shoulder, his entire body bucked. A jagged spark of blue energy hissed off his skin, hitting a nearby beaker and shattering it.
"Goddammit, Oni!" Vax screamed, diving behind his tablet. "I told you! You're spiking! You're going to fry my sensors, you over-muscled kiddy-pool!"
"I felt it!" Oni shouted back, his face turning a dark shade of purple. "It felt like a thousand bees stinging me at once! How the hell did she make that look easy?"
"Because she's not a clumsy shit-show, that's why!" Ishii barked, looking delighted. "Again! And Sloane, if he spikes like that again, feel free to give him a localized migraine to remind him to focus!"
"With pleasure," Sloane muttered, her eyes glowing with a faint, dangerous light.
The lab was a symphony of frustration. While Group Seven was busy nearly blowing out the power grid, the rest of the eighty-five were having their own existential crises over petri dishes and bio-cores.
A few tables over, Lumi, the quiet girl with the white-blonde hair, was part of a group that looked like they were participating in a seance rather than a science experiment. She was the one who could sense vibrations through solid matter, and she currently had her fingertips pressed so lightly against a bio-core that she barely seemed to be touching it.
"Lower the oscillation, Kobo," Lumi whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum.
Kobo, a stout kid with thick goggles who looked like he'd been born in a machine shop, was sweating through his shirt as he tried to "plug in" to the table's power supply. He was a human battery, but his refinement was shaky. "I'm trying, Lumi! But this thing is hungry. It's sucking back more than I can feed it."
"That's because you're pushing," snapped Sariel, the group's Historian. She was hovering over them with an ancient, leather-bound journal she'd managed to smuggle in, her face pinched in annoyance. "According to the texts of the Third Era, these cores respond to rhythmic symmetry. You're giving it a seizure, Kobo. Use a four-four beat, not whatever frantic mess you're doing."
"Oh, I'm sorry, is my 'frantic mess' getting in the way of your light reading?" Kobo shot back, his goggles fogging up. "Why don't you put the book down and help me stabilize the organic mesh?"
"I am helping," Sariel sniffed, adjusting her glasses. "I am providing the intellectual framework so you don't turn us into a smudge on the floor."
Further down the line, Group Twelve was failing even worse. Garek, the hulking Warden who prided himself on being even "sturdier" than Oni, was currently red-faced and swearing. He had tried to use his internal flow to harden the air around his core, but instead of a shield, he'd accidentally created a vacuum that was slowly imploding the organ.
"It's shrinking! Why is it shrinking?!" Garek roared, his voice booming through the lab.
"Because you're an idiot, Garek!" yelled Mina, the Code-Breaker from the Archive Rats. she was frantically typing on a handheld console, trying to override the containment field. "You're suffocating the damn thing! You've turned the pressure up so high the cells are literally folding in on themselves. Back off!"
"I don't know how to back off!" Garek yelled back, his hands trembling. "I only know how to hold!"
"Typical Warden," muttered Kiran, the Echo assigned to their group. He was sitting with his eyes closed, his custom headphones glowing blue. "Your frequency is a flat line, Garek. It's boring and it's killing the core. Try to vibrate. You know, like a normal person? Or a hummingbird? Anything but a tombstone."
But then, there was Group Three. They weren't swearing. They weren't sweating. They looked like they were at a Sunday brunch.
At the center of that group was Nyx, the lead Phantom. She was leaning against the stone bench with one hand, looking bored. Her power was about the "Shadow"—not just darkness, but the absence of presence. Next to her was Aris, the twitchy Archive Rat genius, and Zane, a Warden who actually understood the word 'finesse.'
They had already stabilized their core. It was glowing a perfect, rhythmic amber, pulsing like a sleeping kitten.
Aris checked his watch, then looked over at the chaos of Oni's table. He nudged Nyx and pointed.
"Look at them," Nyx said, her voice carrying a sharp, playful edge as she strolled over toward Group Seven, followed by her team. She stopped just outside the silence-bubble Sloane had created, waiting for it to flicker before she spoke. "It's like watching a group of bears try to perform brain surgery. A lot of huffing, a lot of fur flying, and absolutely zero survival rate for the patient."
Aris smirked, adjusting his pristine lab coat. "Oni, I've been tracking your thermal signature from across the room. You're putting off enough heat to fry an egg on your bicep. Is that part of the 'Mountain' aesthetic, or are you just failing that hard at basic thermodynamics?"
"Beat it, Aris," Oni grunted, his face dripping with sweat as he tried to maintain his grip on the flow.
"Oh, don't be like that," Nyx laughed, walking a slow circle around their table. She looked at Rain, who was still trying to wipe green goo off his face. "And look at the Ghost. Covered in core-bile. Very stealthy, Rain. I'm sure the enemy will never see you coming if you smell like a fermented lung."
"It's a new camouflage, Nyx," Rain snapped, though he looked embarrassed. "You wouldn't understand. It's... tactical."
"Tactical failure, maybe," Zane added, leaning in to look at their monitors. He was a Warden, like Garek, but he was built lean and moved with a dancer's grace. "You guys have so much raw juice it's honestly impressive. If we ever need to power a small moon or blow up a mountain range, we'll call you. But for this? You're like a hurricane trying to light a candle. You're just gonna blow the candle across the room."
Nyx leaned over and whispered right into Oni's ear, her voice dropping to a teasing purr. "Theia is the only reason you guys aren't pink mist yet, big guy. Maybe ask her nicely for a few private lessons? Because right now, you're just a very loud, very bright target."
"Alright, that's enough ego-stroking from the Phantoms!" Ishii shouted from across the room, though he looked amused. "Group Three, since you're so goddamn perfect, go start the secondary extraction. Group Seven! If I see another spark come off Oni's skin, I'm putting him in a cage with a high-voltage current until he learns how to ground himself!"
"Good luck with the 'bridge' thing, Oni," Nyx called back over her shoulder as she strolled away. "Try not to burn the school down. Some of us actually like living here."
Oni watched Nyx saunter away, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the edge of the stone table. The heat radiating from his skin wasn't just aetheric leakage anymore—it was pure, unadulterated shame.
"Did you hear that?" Rain hissed, scraping a glob of green slime off his collar with a finger. "A 'surgical laser.' That's what she called Theia. And we're the 'hurricanes.' I'm a Ghost, Oni. I'm supposed to be the one making people look stupid, not the other way around."
"Shut up and get the cooling cells ready," Oni growled. He looked at his hands, which were shaking. He could feel the raw power inside him—it felt like a coiled serpent, heavy and restless, waiting to strike. But every time he tried to guide it, it just bit him.
Theia reached out, her fingers barely brushing the back of his hand. Her touch felt like ice water on a burn. "Stop trying to win, Oni. You're competing with Nyx, and you're competing with yourself. Just look at the Core. It's a living thing. It's scared of you because you're treating it like an enemy."
"I don't know how to treat it like anything else," Oni admitted, his voice cracking.
"Listen to the frequency," Sloane interrupted, her voice echoing in their heads through the silence-bubble. "It's crying, you big oaf. It's a high-pitched whine that's drilling into my skull because your output is 'jagged.' Smooth it out. Think of a long, flat road."
Oni took a breath. A long, flat road. He closed his eyes and reached out again. This time, when the scalpel touched his shoulder, he didn't tense. He felt the vibration start to tear at his skin, but instead of pushing back, he opened his internal "gates." He let the energy roll over his collarbone, down his spine, and into the table.
"Holy shit," Vax whispered, his eyes glued to the tablet. "The spike is gone. He's... he's actually absorbing the oscillation. Oni, you're at twelve percent leakage. That's a goddamn miracle."
"Don't jinx it!" Rain whispered, hovering over the cooling vent with a fresh canister.
For five minutes, the group worked in a rare, fragile harmony. The Core glowed a steady, peaceful blue. Oni felt a strange sensation—not the usual burning pressure, but a cool, rhythmic flow, like a heartbeat that wasn't his own.
"Time!" Ishii shouted, clapping his hands. The sound was like a gunshot in the quiet lab. "Group Seven, you didn't die. Barely. F-plus upgraded to a C-minus. Don't get cocky."
Ishii hopped off his desk and walked to the center of the room, his owl-eyes scanning the 85 students. "Now, since Group Three thinks they're the stars of the show and Group Seven is finally learning how to breathe without instructions, we're going to step it up. Refinement is useless if you can only do it in a climate-controlled lab while holding hands."
He tapped a command into the wall console, and the floor in the center of the room began to retract, revealing a massive, holographic projector.
"This is a joint exercise," Ishii grinned. "Archive Rats, you're providing the data. Pathfinders, you're the eyes. Combatants, you're the shields. We're going into a Full-Dive VR simulation of Sector 4—the 'Shifting Sands' Dead Zone. Your goal is to retrieve a high-output Aether-Battery from a downed scout ship."
The room erupted in groans and excited whispers.
"Wait," Aris called out from Group Three, looking at the roster Ishii was pulling up. "Doc, you've got us paired with... Oni and Rain?"
"That's right, Aris!" Ishii chirped. "The 'Surgical Lasers' are going to work with the 'Hurricanes.' If Nyx is so refined, she should be able to mask Oni's loud-ass signature. And if Oni is such a Mountain, he should be able to keep the Phantoms from getting squashed when the Dead Zone hits their internal systems. You leave in five minutes. If the battery dies or your team wipes, you're all spending the weekend scrubbing the gravity chambers."
Nyx looked over at Oni, her cocky smirk faltering just a fraction. Oni just cracked his neck, a small, grim smile appearing on his face.
"Hey Nyx," Oni called out, his voice steady for the first time all day. "Try to keep up. I'd hate for a 'hurricance' to blow you off course."
Rain let out a bark of laughter, slapping Oni on the back. "Oh, this is going to be a goddamn disaster. I can't wait."
The prep area was a frantic mess of tangled wires, pressurized air hisses, and the smell of ozone. Vax and Aris were hunched over a terminal like two starving vultures fighting over a carcass, their fingers blurring across holographic keyboards.
"If I calibrate Oni's suit to handle the Dead Zone's drain, the feedback is going to cook his nervous system," Aris muttered, his eyes bloodshot behind his glasses. "It's like trying to put a jet engine in a toaster."
"Then don't use a standard stabilizer," Vax snapped, shoving Aris aside to reroute a power line. "I'm weaving in a secondary shunt. If he starts to overheat, the suit will vent the excess energy into Nyx's stealth-cloak. It'll give her a boost and keep him from smelling like burnt steak."
"Wait," Aris paused, looking at the schematic. "You're going to use Oni as a literal battery for Nyx? If he spikes, he'll blow her cloaking field and she'll be visible for miles. She'll kill us."
"She has to find us first," Vax grunted, tightening a bolt on Oni's gauntlet. "Besides, watching her face when she starts glowing neon green because Oni can't control his pulse? That's worth a week of detention."
In the middle of the chaos, Oni was being shoehorned into a specialized "Dead Zone" rig. It was a heavy, matte-black exoskeleton that felt like a straightjacket. Rain was already suited up, spinning a VR headset on his finger and watching Huck try to cram a handful of "energy-moss" into his utility belt.
"Huck, for the love of the stars, stop bringing dirt into the simulation," Rain groaned. "It's digital. Your moss isn't going to do shit in the Shifting Sands."
"It's for the vibe, Rain," Huck mumbled, patting his pouch. "The Sands are lonely. Plus, if the sim-glitches, I've seen it render organic matter as usable code. You'll be thanking me when I'm healing your digital bruises with digital weeds."
"Alright, meat-puppets! Gear up!" Ishii's voice boomed over the intercom. "Full-dive in thirty seconds. Remember: the Shifting Sands eat your internal aether. If you run out of juice, your avatar 'faints,' and back here in the real world, I'll personally ensure you wake up with a bucket of ice water to the crotch."
The pods hissed shut. There was a sudden, sickening sensation of falling upward, and then—silence.
Oni opened his eyes to a world of blinding, shifting white. The Shifting Sands weren't just a desert; they were a sea of crushed aetheric crystals that roared like an ocean. The wind felt heavy, like walking through waist-deep syrup.
"Ugh, I hate this map," Nyx's voice crackled in his ear. She was standing five feet away, her Phantom-cloak already flickering. "I feel like my soul is being sucked out through a straw. Oni, stay close. If you wander off, I'm not coming to find you."
"Don't worry, princess," Oni grunted, testing the weight of his limbs. Every movement felt sluggish. "I'm pretty hard to miss."
"That's the problem!" Aris's voice piped in from the 'Comms' hub. "Oni, your energy signature is currently a lighthouse in a dark room. Dial it back or the sand-wraiths are going to be on you in five minutes. Nyx, you need to tether to him. Use his excess 'leak' to power your dampeners."
"You want me to touch him?" Nyx sounded genuinely offended. "He's probably sweating digital salt right now."
"Just do it, Nyx!" Sloane's voice cut in, sounding even more annoyed than usual. "I'm trying to filter the sound of the wind, and your complaining is hitting a frequency that makes me want to pop my own eardrums."
Nyx rolled her eyes—a gesture that translated perfectly through her sleek, black-and-violet avatar—and grabbed a tether cable from her belt, snapping it onto Oni's back. "Fine. But if I turn neon green, I'm stabbing you in the real world, Oni."
"Let's just move," Oni said, taking a heavy step forward.
The group trudged through the dunes, the sky above them a swirling vortex of grey and purple. Suddenly, the ground beneath them let out a low, vibrating hum.
"Contacts!" Huck shouted, pointing toward a ridge. "Sand-wraiths. And they look hungry. Probably because Oni smells like an all-you-can-eat buffet."
Three jagged, translucent shapes rose from the sand, their bodies made of shifting static. They were the scavengers of the Dead Zone, drawn to any spark of aether.
"Oni, shield!" Nyx commanded, her body already beginning to fade into a blur of shadows.
Oni braced himself, but as he tried to call up his usual wall of force, he felt the Dead Zone push back. The energy didn't form a shield; it just puffed out of his palms like a sad cloud of smoke.
"Oh, for f—" Oni cursed, looking at his hands. "It's not working! The sand is eating it!"
"Because you're bracing, you idiot!" Vax screamed in his ear. "Whirlpool! Remember?! Don't push against the zone, pull from yourself!"
One of the wraiths lunged, its static claws whistling through the air. Rain blurred into motion, trying to draw his twin daggers, but he tripped over a shifting dune. "Goddammit! The physics in this sim are bullshit! Who programmed the friction on this sand?!"
"Focus, Rain!" Theia's calm voice drifted through the comms. "Oni, find the rhythm. The sand is moving at a 60-hertz cycle. Match it."
Oni closed his eyes for a split second, ignoring the screaming static-monster inches from his face. He felt the heavy, sluggish pull of the Dead Zone. Instead of fighting it, he let his internal energy dip and rise with the wind. He grabbed the wraith's arm—not with a hard grip, but with a spinning motion.
He swung the creature, its own momentum carrying it into a dune with a sound like a crashing hard drive.
"Wait... I did it," Oni panted, his avatar glowing with a steady, soft amber light.
"Don't get cocky," Nyx muttered, reappearing right next to him as she drove a shadow-blade through a second wraith. "You still look like a glowing glow-stick. But... at least you're a useful glow-stick now. My cloak is at ninety percent power. Nice 'leak,' big guy."
"Was that a compliment, Nyx?" Rain asked, finally finding his footing and slicing the third wraith into digital dust. "I think the world is ending. The Phantoms are actually being nice."
"Shut up, Rain," Nyx and Oni said in perfect unison.
"Oh, I love the teamwork!" Ishii's voice cackled over the speakers. "Now, keep moving. The ship is just over the next ridge, and I've just released a simulated Sand-Leviathan because you lot were looking a little too comfortable. Have fun!"
Oni looked up to see a massive, serpentine shadow rising from the white sands, at least the size of a skyscraper.
"You've got to be shitting me," Oni muttered.
"Less talking, more running!" Vax yelled. "Oni, if you die, I'm never fixing your toaster!"
The horizon didn't just move; it fractured.
A mile-long coil of pressurized white crystals erupted from the dunes, shedding tons of glittering sand like a mountain shedding its skin. This was the Sand-Leviathan. Its body was held together by a pulsing, violet aetheric skeleton that throbbed with a sickly light beneath translucent plates of obsidian glass. Every time the beast shifted, those plates ground together with the screeching sound of a high-speed train derailment. Its head was a terrifying, triangular wedge of bone and static, dominated by a blooming flower of crystalline fangs that dripped with digitized liquid. Six cold, dead eyes—each the size of a storage crate—locked onto the tiny, glowing amber speck that was Oni.
"Vax! Tell me there's a 'turn off the giant snake' button!" Oni roared, slamming his boots into the shifting white grains as the wind from the beast's breath tried to peel the armor right off his frame.
"It's a simulation, Oni! The only button is your fist!" Vax's voice was frantic, accompanied by the sound of sirens and heavy typing back in the lab. "Theia, feed him everything! Aris, reroute Nyx's cloak energy into Oni's gauntlets! We're going for a 'Hail Mary' impact!"
The Leviathan lunged. It didn't strike; it overwhelmed. A wall of obsidian and white sand came crashing down like a falling skyscraper.
"Nyx, now!" Oni shouted, his voice barely audible over the roar of the beast.
Nyx didn't hesitate. She grabbed the tether snapped to Oni's back and channeled every ounce of her shadow-refined energy into him. Instead of muting his energy, she acted as a focus—a lens for the unrefined sun living inside Oni's chest. "Don't you dare miss, you big idiot!" she screamed, her violet avatar flickering as she pushed the suit's shunt to the absolute red-line.
Oni didn't brace like a wall this time. He remembered the whirlpool. He felt the crushing weight of the Leviathan's shadow and, instead of fighting the gravity, he dived into the frequency. He spun his internal flow, pulling the Dead Zone's own draining effect into his core and mixing it with Theia's golden light and Nyx's violet shadow. His amber glow shifted, turning into a blinding, white-hot corona that made the simulation's sky glitch with static.
"Rain! Get me up there!" Oni bellowed.
Rain blurred into motion, grabbing Oni's arm as he ran at a vertical ninety-degree angle up a shifting dune of crystal. With a scream of effort that sounded like tearing metal, Rain used his full kinetic momentum to catapult Oni into the air, right toward the beast's gaping, crystalline throat.
Oni soared, a streak of white fire against the purple clouds. Time seemed to drag into slow-motion as he reached the apex of his jump, looking directly into the Leviathan's primary eye. He pulled his fist back, the gauntlet Vax had modded beginning to hiss and vent steam as it struggled to contain the pressure.
"Eat... this!"
Oni punched the air. He didn't even have to make physical contact. The release of refined, pressurized energy was a kinetic shockwave that tore through the Shifting Sands like a railgun slug. It hit the Leviathan's head, shattering the obsidian plates and snapping the violet aetheric skeleton into a million pieces of glowing dust.
The beast didn't bleed; it fragmented. A massive explosion of white crystals and purple light filled the sky as the Leviathan's code collapsed. The shockwave sent Oni, Nyx, and Rain tumbling backward into the dunes, their avatars flickering wildly as the simulation struggled to calculate the localized devastation.
Silence returned to the Shifting Sands, broken only by the sound of Rain panting and the distant, electronic hum of the "Mission Accomplished" notification floating in the air. Oni lay on his back in the digital sand, his amber glow fading to a dull simmer. His right arm was numb, and his HUD was flashing red with "System Overload" warnings.
"Did... did we get it?" Oni wheezed, his digital lungs feeling heavy.
Nyx sat up nearby, her cloak in tatters and her violet eyes wide as she looked at the empty space where a god-sized monster had just existed. She looked at Oni, then at her own shaking, pixelated hands.
"You're a goddamn freak, Oni," she whispered, a small, genuine laugh escaping her. "That was the loudest, most unrefined, beautiful disaster I've ever seen."
"Hey," Rain's voice drifted over from a pile of sand ten feet away. "Can we go home now? I think I can feel my actual legs again and they really, really fucking hurt."
Back in the lab, the pods hissed open with a synchronized burst of pressurized air. Oni sat up, gasping for real oxygen, his shirt soaked in sweat and sticking to his chest. He looked over and saw Nyx sitting up in her pod two rows away. Their eyes met across the room. She didn't smirk, and she didn't make a joke. She just gave him a sharp, respectful nod before Vax and Aris descended on them, screaming about "miraculous data" and "permanently fried sensors."
Ishii stood at the front of the room, leaning against his desk with a manic grin. "C-plus," he called out, his voice echoing off the stone walls. "Maybe a B-minus if the Archive Rats can prove that shockwave didn't permanently damage my hardware. Now get out of here. You all smell like failure and ozone."
As Oni walked toward the door, he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Zane, the "refined" Warden from Nyx's group.
"Nice hit, Mountain," Zane said, his voice low and serious. "But don't get used to it. Next time, the simulation won't be so gentle, and Mistress Hana definitely won't be."
Oni just grinned, his chest still humming with the remnant of the flow. "I'm counting on it."