"Again."
Soshiro Hoshina's voice was sharp as the crack of a whip.
Kafka, panting, his black training suit drenched in sweat, stood in the center of Training Ground Gamma. This was not the wide-open field of their first session. This was a "steel garden"—a dense, three-dimensional forest of steel beams, concrete pillars, and moving obstacles, a labyrinth designed to test an operative's spatial awareness and agility to their absolute limit.
For the past week, his days had been a public hell under Hoshina's command, and his nights a private one in the Monarch's dreamscape. The two experiences were beginning to bleed into each other in horrifyingly effective ways.
"You're projecting again, Hibino!" Hoshina called out from an observation deck high above. "I can read your intent a full second before you move! You're still thinking like a heavyweight. You're telegraphing your every move like a cheap villain in a Saturday morning cartoon!"
Kafka gritted his teeth. 'Projecting intent…' Jin-Woo's dreamscape lessons had been brutal on this very point. [To a true assassin, intent is a weapon, but also a beacon,] the Monarch had taught him, as a hundred shadow daggers had found their mark. [Learn to mask your spirit, to quiet the loud pronouncements of your soul. Move with no purpose, until the moment of the strike. Only then, does the killing intent bloom.]
It was a beautiful, poetic concept that was incredibly difficult to put into practice.
"The objective is simple," Hoshina announced, his voice echoing through the steel garden. "Retrieve the flag from the top of the central pillar. Do so without being tagged. The 'taggers' for this exercise…" He snapped his fingers.
From the shadows of the steel forest, a dozen high-speed, arachnid-like combat drones emerged. They were sleek, silver, and silent, their multiple legs ending in sharp points, their single red optical sensors glowing with predatory light. Each was armed with a low-power laser designed to "tag" a target's suit.
"...are set to 'sadistic'," Hoshina finished with a cheerful grin. "Begin."
The drones moved instantly, their eight legs carrying them up pillars and along beams with an unnatural, skittering grace. They moved in perfect, networked coordination, their red eyes all swiveling to lock onto Kafka.
Kafka moved too, darting behind a massive concrete support column. His first instinct, the one that had been beaten into him day after day, was to armor up and try to bull his way through.
No. Think like the wind.
He took a calming breath, just as Jin-Woo had forced him to in the dreamscape after every painful failure. He quieted his breathing, his heart rate, and most importantly, the raging furnace of Kaiju power inside him. He didn't suppress it; he just… soothed it. Turned the roar into a hum.
Blackwing, his sentient power, responded. It flowed, unbidden, not to form armor, but to coat the soles of his boots in a thin, energy-dampening layer. He could move now with almost no sound.
He peeked around the column. A drone was scurrying up the other side, trying to flank him. Above him, two more were descending from a crossbeam, preparing to box him in. Their predictive algorithms were top-notch; they knew where a normal human would try to run.
But he wasn't a normal human anymore.
He looked down at the dark, sharp shadow cast by the column he was hiding behind.
'A shadow is a pathway.'
He channeled a minuscule, precise amount of his will into that shadow. He didn't try to perform a full, flashy Shadow Exchange like he had in the dreamscape. He just… sank into it. A minor, localized phase-shift.
The drones converged on his position. Their lasers fired, triple-beaming the spot where he should have been. The tags lit up an empty space.
Kafka emerged silently from a different shadow ten meters away, behind a different pillar. The drones' sensors whirred, recalibrating, their perfect logic momentarily thrown into chaos. A human-sized target had just violated the conservation of mass.
On the observation deck, Hoshina, who had been leaning back in his chair, sat up straight. His eyes, which saw everything, widened slightly. "What the hell was that?" he muttered to one of his aides. "Run that back. Thermal."
The aide complied, bringing up a replay on a side screen. On the thermal feed, Kafka's heat signature didn't run. It simply… faded out in one location and faded back in at another, with a faint, impossibly fast, cold flicker connecting the two points. It looked like a faulty sensor reading.
Down in the garden, Kafka was now moving. He used the brief confusion to his advantage. He ran, not with brute speed, but with a calculated, flowing grace, using the Monarch's brutal lessons in evasion. He vaulted over a low beam, slid under a rotating piston, and used his wall-walking ability—a basic trick of channeling power to his feet—to run vertically up a pillar for a few steps before kicking off.
The drones, their logic reasserting itself, gave chase. They were faster in a straight line, but Kafka was now unpredictable. He used their own network against them. He knew if one saw him, they all saw him. So, he stayed in the shadows, broke line of sight, and used his new, minor shadow-shifting ability to constantly reposition, turning their perfect network into a source of confusing, contradictory data.
Zip! A laser tag sizzled past his ear. Too close. He was still reacting too slowly.
He reached the base of the central pillar. It was a sheer, hundred-meter-tall cylinder of smooth, polished steel, with the red objective flag waving mockingly at the top. The drones were sealing off all the surrounding structures, effectively cutting off any path to climb from an adjacent beam. The only way was straight up.
He placed a hand on the pillar. He could try to run up it, but the surface was too smooth, and he'd be completely exposed. He'd be tagged a hundred times before he got halfway.
He needed a different approach. He needed to stop thinking like a man who climbs, and start thinking like a monster.
He looked at his hands, and Blackwing responded to his will. Not claws this time. Not armor. He visualized the serrated, gripping talons of the centipede-Kaiju he had fought in the Umizu complex. Blackwing flowed, and the tips of his fingers and the toes of his boots grew small, incredibly sharp, hook-like talons of hardened biological matter.
He tested them. They dug into the polished steel with a faint scrrriiit, finding purchase where there should be none.
And he began to climb.
"He's adapting his biology on the fly," Hoshina observed from above, a look of genuine fascination on his face. "Creating custom tools for the task at hand. The versatility is…" He trailed off, shaking his head in disbelief.
Kafka climbed, his new talons giving him a solid grip. The drones swarmed the pillar, skittering up and around it, firing their lasers at him. Now it was a game of pure agility. He climbed, twisting his body, using the curvature of the pillar to keep the metal between him and most of their firing lines. He was like a spider being hunted by a faster, more numerous swarm of other spiders.
A drone got above him, firing down. He let go with one hand, swinging his body around the pillar, using his own momentum to evade, the laser scorching the spot where his head had been.
He was twenty meters from the flag. He could see it. But the drones were converging, sealing off his path completely. A dozen red laser sights painted a net of death on the pillar around him. There was no escape.
Any physical move he made, they would predict and intercept.
So, he made a move that wasn't physical.
He was out of options. Out of tricks. He had one last, desperate card to play—the one he'd been explicitly warned against. The one that had put him in this mess in the first place. The shadow-spear. Hoshina's orders were to learn to control it. The Monarch's orders were not to be so stupid as to reveal his hand again. He was caught between two masters once more.
He made a choice.
He looked up at the flag, and then at the drones. He let go.
He fell.
The drones' sensors whirred, their logic stuttering for a fatal half-second. Why would the target abandon the objective and fall to its certain defeat?
As he fell, Kafka smiled.
His shadow, cast on the pillar by the bright training lights, remained where he had been clinging. And from that stationary shadow, a single, perfectly controlled, razor-thin tendril of blackness shot upwards with the speed of a bullet.
It wasn't a crude, violent spear. It was a whip, a finger. It gracefully, silently, wrapped around the pole of the red flag, plucked it from its holder, and then snapped back, faster than the eye could see. The flag, now wrapped in a sliver of darkness, was pulled into Kafka's shadow and, through it, to him.
He hit the ground in a controlled, crouched landing, the flag already in his hand.
The drones, their objective now gone, ceased firing. They froze, their red eyes all swiveling from the top of the empty pole, down to the man standing at the bottom, holding the prize. Their logic banks had been completely and utterly broken. They had been out-thought.
On the observation deck, Hoshina stood up from his chair. The other agents were speechless. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't excited. His expression was one of cold, hard, terrifying gravity.
Kafka Hibino had not just passed the test. He had cheated in a way that shouldn't be possible. He had displayed a level of control, cunning, and otherworldly power that had just leapfrogged from 'dangerous asset' to 'existential threat we happen to be pointing at the enemy.'
"That's enough for today, Hibino," Hoshina's voice, now flat and cold, echoed through the training ground. "You pass."
Kafka stood there, holding the flag, his heart hammering. He had done it. He had succeeded. But as he looked up at the observation deck and met the Vice-Commander's hard, calculating gaze, he knew he hadn't won a victory. He had just confirmed his keeper's worst fears, and in doing so, had probably made the bars of his cage infinitely stronger.