The Balance Grid settled with a last metallic sigh, tiles locking into a flat plane. Kori hopped down as if she'd simply stepped off a stair, silver hair still swinging.
Raizen couldn't stop staring at her left eye - now covered by her hair. The glimpse he'd caught a moment ago was still replaying in his head.
Mina's voice drifted from the booth above.
"Heart rate, around five hundred beats per minute. Nice recovery curve!"
Raizen decided to confront her head on.
"Miss Kori... Your eye. That… Isn't human."
"First of all, it's"Kori" not "miss Kori". For you, I'm Kori." Kori laughed. "Second of all... So that's why you were staring!"
"Huh?"
"I thought you were charmed by my beauty!"
"I'm just trying to breathe, thanks... But... What even is that!?"
Her grin broke through anyway. "Oh, the eye? It's called a Chasmis."
"Chasmis?"
"You don't buy it. You don't train into it. It opens when something breaks you so much that the spirit has to grow a new edge."
"What does that even mean?" Hikari asked, quietly.
"They say the eyes are the gateway to the soul. So when the soul brutally changes shape, the eye follows."
Both listened, quietly.
"Default package..." Kori went on, counting on her fingers, "your muscles move faster, your timing sharpens, sometimes the world slows down. And you can read someone's hit by their muscles contracting, way before they even raise the knuckle.
"Unfair!" Hikari protested.
"That's the baseline. But man, it's tiring! That explains the heart rate, too... I cover it with my hair, so it doesn't get too exhausting"
"That's it?"
"Not even close. The rest? Abilities? It pretty much depends on who you are and how you fight."
"How is that even possible!?"
She stretched her back. Frost bloomed in her hand, a thin blade of ice formed from nowhere and sat between her fingers.
Mina's mic popped. "Please no more frozen daggers inside the grid, Kori. We talked about this…"
Kori rolled her eyes and let the ice evaporate into a sparkle.
"Mine does ice. It's surprisingly useful for convincing bastards to calm down."
Hikari was poking the tile with her shoe, testing whether Kori left any frost behind.
"Come on" Kori clapped. "Stop looking so dead! Field trip!"
"Haa... Field trip?"
Kori didn't bother to answer Raizen's question. She just started walking.
They moved down a long white corridor, past rooms that thudded, hummed or echoed with brutal yet efficient violence. A reaction room pulsed with lights all over the walls, teaching hands to move without thought, from pure reflex.
A grappling bay reset its mats like a living thing. In one lab, a metal vehicle hurled itself down a test track and braked hard enough to make Raizen's teeth ache just watching.
In another, hundreds, if not thousands of locks. Complex ones. Two individuals were trying to crack them, with no luck.
They were nearly past a wide doorway when Hikari suddenly stopped.
On the other side, a matte-black motorcycle sat mounted on a rig, wheels held just over a track... But the track wasn't a track at all - more panels and rollers that could change angle and texture in the blink of an eye.
A curved screen wrapped around almost the whole room, dark for now. The rig itself swiveled a bit.
Hikari took a step toward it, almost unconsciously.
"What… is that?"
Kori followed her look and grinned. "Bike rig. Teaches balance, speed, control. You break your fear here, not your neck on the tunnels."
She smiled. At the room above. "Mina, sim?"
The screen blinked to life - an underground road winding along a cavern wall, thin rails and rusted pipes, glowing marks flashing as checkpoints. It looked almost like the Underworks. The bike rig buzzed awake, tilting forward a degree.
Hikari didn't smile too often. She did now, shyly. "Can... I?"
Kori smiled back, and gestured with her hand. "Yes. Boots on the pegs. Grip with your knees and legs, not your hands. Eyes where you want to go, not where you are. And when you think you're leaning enough… Lean even more."
Hikari swung a leg over. The bike dipped, rig catching smoothly.
"Beginner assist is on" Mina said. "No over-rotation. Throttle curve softened, impact minimal."
Raizen stayed by the door, turned on a bench, watching. He felt a bunch of contradictions - tired to the bone, wired in the head, yet something else tugging at the corners of his mouth.
The track rushed up the wrap-around screen. Hikari abruptly accelerated, slamming into a virtual barricade and the rig jolted - softly, by design. She laughed out loud, surprised at herself, cheeks flushed.
The world moved for her, rig tilting forward, softly imitating impact. Rewinding, she overcorrected the first turn - too cautious - then too bold on the second.
The rear end drifted. The motor vibrated strongly, and in the last second, she saved herself from a wall.
Her hair flicked at her jawline as she leaned again.
The next corner she took easier. Then quicker. Kori jogged alongside, one hand hovering by the kill switch. But she never touched it. She didn't have to. There was something in Hikari's movements that seemed... Too perfect.
"That's it!" Kori said. "Breathe through the turn. Let the machine guide you... Good."
"Lap time improving by twelve percent" Mina reported, not being able to hide a smile.
Hikari's second lap was faster. The third was messy and joyful - too much throttle, a slide saved by pure instinct.
On the fourth, she threaded a tight "S" curve with a move she definitely couldn't have known, hips and shoulders in a perfect line, eyes already looking ahead. Then, she finally stopped.
Kori slapped the tank twice, proud and smug. "You two are trouble" she said, but it sounded like she was one percent proud. Which, for Kori, is huge.
Hikari dismounted, breathing quickly, eyes shining in a way Raizen had never seen.
"Did you see that?? I was... Free! It felt like... Like I was flying!"
"Yeah, yeah, you might be a fast learner, but you still have things to improve" Kori interrupted, looking at Raizen. "But you're not getting out of balance work."
Back in the Balance Room, the floor had become a lot of small platforms again, shifting in an unpredictable pattern.
"Basic first" Kori said. "Mina, give me mid-shuffle, no drop."
"Mid-shuffle" Mina echoed, fingers already sliding.
This time Raizen didn't fight the floor. He started feeling his Rythm and didn't fall... As much. Hikari moved like she had springs in her bones.
"Light feet, Raizen! They look like depressed pasta!" Kori laughed.
He adjusted, reducing the delay between read and step. Kori's grin widened.
"Oh look who's getting better... Again!"
---
Across the Underworks, Obi's smithy was filled with warm air. Sparks exploded like tiny fireworks as he kept hammering a glowing piece of brass, face blackened with coal at the cheekbones.
"Come on, come on, don't embarrass me!" he muttered to the glowing billet on his anvil. He brought the hammer down in a hard, happy rhythm, with considerable force.
"One for glory, two for money, three for wome- OW! These sparks really do bite! fine, three for honor."
He overheard a pair of regulars in the doorway, trading news.
"The pot's doubled this week, can you believe that?" one exclaimed.
"Yeah... The Scrapper's Gauntlet's gonna be ugly!"
Obi's hammer paused mid-swing. He didn't look up, but his eyebrows raised slightly.
He looked at the metal shaped into a set of knuckles, made to sit perfectly over his own fingers.
"You two beauties need a name..." he made a satisfied face.
"Obiterator? Too much. Obijection? Meh."
He just sat there for a second, biting his tongue in pure concentration.
"Obi-Wand? No. Obi-Wan! I'm a genius..."
Suddenly, someone knocked at his door. Granny Louissa's voice slipped in.
"Obi, you eating or pretending not to be hungry again?"
"Not hungry, Gran!" he sang back. "I'll swing by later. Promise."
She didn't step inside. Instead, she chose just to yell at him from the other side of the room.
"Keep your hands where they'll still be functionable in the morning!"
He blinked at the door, then back at the glowing steel. "That's… Weirdly specific, Granny."
After he gave them a bath, he dried the knuckles on his apron, slid them on, and threw a couple of jabs into a sack of coal with a satisfying look. "Okay..." he told himself. "It's a conversation starter, alright?"
The two men had moved on, their gossip trailing into the hall. Obi set the knuckles on a cloth, stared at them a long second, and then at a big poster on the wall:
SCRAPPER'S GAUNTLET - NO RULES. NO LIMITS. WINNER TAKES IT ALL.
He blew out a breath through his teeth.
"World's loudest smith" he said to the anvil, "is going to be the loudest fighter, too."