Training the next morning felt like walking with a new spine. The world had seams now. He could sense where the air would yield and where it wanted to resist, like invisible currents under the surface of reality. Aetherkinesis—no longer just rumor in his blood, but a language with verbs and grammar he could almost name.
Riku cracked his knuckles and pounded his chest like a war drum. "Today you learn the hard thing: moving without moving. If you're sweating, you're doing it wrong."
Aya rolled her eyes and handed Seigi a towel. "Ignore him. Sweat is allowed. Bruises too."
"Bruises are love letters from training," Riku shot back, grinning. "Collect enough and you'll be irresistible."
Aya smacked him lightly on the arm. "To the morgue, maybe."
Seigi managed a laugh, though his chest was tight with the memory of last night—the veins, the visions, the weight of voices that weren't his.
They worked in drills no manual would ever print. Aya lobbed pebbles with uncanny aim while Seigi tried to anticipate the arc before they finished. Sometimes he managed. Sometimes he flinched. Riku whistled once if Seigi's elbow was too high, twice if he locked his knee. His corrections were blunt, almost mocking, but beneath the noise Seigi caught something else—encouragement dressed as heckling.
Hana was quieter. She circled behind him like a shadow, her fingertips tapping his ribs, shoulder blade, hip. She never explained what he'd done wrong, only redirected him by millimeters. A shift here, a breath there, until a push hardly looked like anything—and yet the training dummy slid across the floor. Seigi's chest tightened with awe, but Hana's expression never changed. To her, this was normal. To him, it was proof.
Finally, during a break, Seigi sat back against the wall, sweat dripping from his brow. His voice came out rougher than he intended.
"What's the difference? Between me and you. Between… origin veins and what you three have."
Aya's expression softened. She folded her hands in her lap. "Lineage is inheritance. Gifts passed down. My family always healed faster than they should, reacted sharper than others. With training, it became something more. Riku's strength, my precision, Hana's awareness… they're echoes of bloodlines that have carried pieces of the thread for generations."
Riku leaned over and jabbed Seigi's shoulder with a finger. "But you? You've got something shinier. Veins. Special wiring. Congratulations, Detective—you're the luxury model."
Seigi frowned. "Does that mean I'm… stronger?"
Riku barked a laugh. "Stronger? No. Just more likely to explode in style if you screw it up."
Aya gave Riku a look, but didn't deny it. "Veins don't make you invincible. They make you a vessel. A vessel can overflow… or it can shatter."
Hana, still standing with arms folded, added quietly, "And vessels are only useful if they endure."
The words landed heavier than Seigi wanted. He stared down at his raw knuckles, flexing them slowly. A vessel. Not chosen by blood, not sharpened by lineage—but carrying something that might break him if he carried it wrong.
Riku clapped him on the back hard enough to jolt him forward. "Don't look so grim, Hero Boy. Fancy veins or not, you're still just another rookie until you prove yourself. And right now? You still fight like laundry in a dryer."
Aya shook her head, smiling faintly despite herself. "Ignore him. Again."
Seigi grinned weakly. "I think he's impossible to ignore."
"That's the point," Hana said dryly, though her eyes softened as they lingered on him.
---
The drills went on.
Riku drove him through endurance—laps until his lungs burned, push-ups until his arms trembled. Aya tested his precision, setting up bottles on narrow rails and demanding he strike only the middle without disturbing the rest. Hana honed his reflexes further, whispering a warning a heartbeat before she struck, forcing him to listen instead of think.
By the end of the session Seigi collapsed onto the mat, chest heaving, every muscle thrumming with exhaustion. Yet beneath it, he felt the veins stir—not like fire, but like a quiet river waiting for him to dip his hands into.
---
Between drills, the talk shifted, as it always did.
Riku, staring at the ceiling beams: "At the funeral, I swore I'd carry my sister's name into every fight. That oath made me heavier. The thread uses oaths like nails. Be careful what you hammer to yourself. Some weights don't come off."
Aya, cross-legged with her palms open: "Hope is a muscle. Everyone wants it without the ache. But if you stop using it because it hurts, you lose it. Train it like anything else."
Hana, her voice soft, gaze on nothing in particular: "Grief doesn't end. It just changes outfits. Some days it wears steel, some days silk."
Seigi looked at his hands. "When I was a kid I thought belief was a ladder I could climb out of anything with. Now it feels more like a rope you throw to someone else—and hope they grab it."
Riku nudged him with an elbow. "That's progress. Yesterday you would've said it was a baseball bat you swung until the world behaved."
The laugh broke the solemnity, and even Hana's mouth tilted almost imperceptibly.
"Welcome to being useful," she said.
For a moment, they were just people on a mat, trading burdens like gifts. The silence after was not empty but full.
---
That night, Seigi slept like the exhausted are supposed to—heavy, dreamless. Until the tap came.
Three taps. Patient. At his window.
He rose silently, heart thudding, every instinct clawing at him to move, to fight, to reach for the thread. But he forced himself still and drew the curtain a fraction.
A figure stood in the alley below. Hooded, faceless in the dark. Not Wraith—he knew that immediately. Wraith moved like a rumor; this one stood like a message.
The voice that drifted up was distorted, calm. "We do not need to harm your family." The phrasing was casual, conversational, as if discussing weather. "You can stop that from happening."
Seigi's jaw clenched. He thought of his parents' laughter at dinner, the frame turned the wrong way, the scar in the photo. Rage pressed against his teeth, but he didn't reply.
The figure waited a moment, then turned and walked into the dark, leaving the alley as it had always been.
Seigi stayed at the window until dawn, sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands open, fingers spread wide as if holding something fragile. Something he didn't want to crush.
---
Far below the training chambers, beyond doors Seigi had not yet been shown, the Guild's observation deck thrummed with the faint hum of crystalline arrays. From here, every pulse of energy during drills, every fluctuation of the thread, was recorded and charted in quiet precision.
Kurogami stood at the glass, hands folded behind his back. His gaze was fixed on Seigi's figure below—restless even in stillness, the veins in him burning like a lantern in the dark.
"He's raw," Kurogami said at last. His voice carried like smoke, curling into the corners of the chamber. "But the veins answer. Not brittle. Not shallow. Elastic. There's potential there."
From the shadows near the console, a figure shifted. Gone was the heavy cloak of the streets; in its place, a plain black jacket, hood low. His face was obscured in the reflection of the glass, but the weight of his presence was unmistakable. Wraith.
"He doesn't know what he carries," the mercenary murmured. His tone was calm, but something sharp hid beneath it. "That ignorance will break him long before the Veil does."
Kurogami's lips curved faintly, not quite a smile. "Or it will free him. The world doesn't need another soldier. It needs a symbol. One who survives his own fire."
Wraith's reflection tilted, unreadable. "Symbols burn brightest just before they go out."
Silence settled. Only the hum of the arrays filled the chamber.
Kurogami did not turn. His eyes remained locked on Seigi, watching as the detective returned to the mat, fists still trembling with effort but refusing to unclench.
"Then let us see," Kurogami said softly. "If the vessel cracks… or if the vessel becomes the flame."