Kori stood barefoot at center of the weaponized combat bay. White knives the length of a forearm hung from twin chains that wound around her wrists like silver vines. The blades were shaped to catch light and give none back.
Mina watched from behind her monitors with her arms folded tight, lips thin.
Raizen and Hikari circled in. Their Luminite weapons pulsed faintly, a heartbeat in metal. Raizen's grip was lower than before, elbows close, footwork clean. Hikari's stance was smaller, efficient, like she had made a home inside the smallest movement possible.
"You have gotten better these few weeks since your duel with Keahi and Arashi," Kori said, voice even. "Your weight is finally where your feet think it is."
Hikari raised a brow "We can draw out a total of two percent multiplier now. Like Mina said"
"Two percent and you look this pleased?" Kori said, making a funny face. "It matters, I have to admit. At two percent the body listens. "
She turned her head just enough to meet Hikari's eyes. Caution lived there, the kind she only showed Hikari now. "That said, I am not eager to replace the room again."
Raizen exhaled. "Then do not hold back. Not with me."
"Top five worst decisions you could ever make in this life…" Mina muttered.
Kori's eyes shined for a second. She eased the chains from around her wrists and let them fall to the floor with a sound like coins poured slow. "Mina, relax. I will not do anything that… Cannot be undone."
"That's as comforting as you think it is " Mina said, her hand unconsciously hovering over the emergency button.
The first exchange belonged to Raizen and Hikari. They moved better because of the stones. The Luminite in their weapons loved them the way certain instruments love certain hands. Their cuts ended where they meant to end. Their balance recovered before it needed to. Two percent looked like crisp edges on the same blade.
Kori let them come. She turned a shoulder and a strike slid past. She lifted a wrist and a chain took Hikari's thrust on a link, kissed it aside. Her eyes counted, not worried. When Hikari stepped inside, Kori stepped out. When Raizen spun, she had already decided where not to be.
"Stop reading," Raizen said, sweat at his temples. "Fight."
"You want the truth of it," Kori asked.
"I want what is real."
"Very well."
Raizen literally blinked and she wasn't in his field of view anymore. It was not a trick. There was no smoke and no magic, only a decision made faster than his body could understand. One arm snared him around his chest in a quick, almost casual hug. Cold kissed his throat. One of the white knives had ridden the chain home to find the small space under his jaw that did not belong to him anymore. He did not know when he had stopped breathing. It was the kind of speed that looked more like instant teleportation.
Kori's chin touched his shoulder. "This is my real."
Hikari had not moved. Her eyes were on Kori's feet, then the chain, then the other hand, cataloging every entry and exit like she could force the pattern into belonging to her.
Kori let Raizen go and the knife withdrew, chain whispering back across the floor. "You are lucky," she said, and for once there was something like approval in it. "The stones in your weapons are very compatible with you. That does not happen often. Don't waste it."
Raizen swallowed, angry at his own surprise and angrier at the part of him that wanted to be impressed. "Then tell me how to make two percent mean something."
"It already does," Kori said. "Two percent is proof. Keep at it. The rest will come."
Then, she let out a wide Grin. "Hey, Mina! Tell them what the machines read on my end, just for reference!"
Mina exhaled, visibly disappointed. "Let me see… 2987 percent… Not your best numbers, Kori! Personal advice? Enough for today. Before you end up in the walls."
They walked home in a quiet that did not need words. The corridor outside Takeshi's place was the same as always - a low pipe that sang, a cracked tile that clicked underfoot, a door that stuck if you did not lift as you pushed.
Inside, the table was neat when it should not have been. No bowl out of place. No rag left wrung and forgotten. A single envelope lay at the center, edges squared, paper the color of old pure snow. Their names sat on it, in Takeshi's unpracticed hand.
Raizen broke the seal. The letter inside was thick, the folds… Too careful.
He set it on the table between them so they could both see, and he read.
To Raizen and Hikari,
If you are holding this, I was not brave enough to say these words out loud. I will write this the way I live - plain and not pretty. You deserve the truth, not the show.
I have found them. Or as close to them as anyone like me can get. The Moirai. I do not know if you will ever see their faces. I hope you do not.
I was not always the man you met. Before the patch and the metal, before the quiet, I was very loud. I was Takeshi, the errand nobody wanted to chase. People said I was the strongest in the Underworks. That sounds good in a drunk mouth. It buys you free tea and bad sleep. Back then I thought strength meant arriving first and leaving last. I thought it meant a weapon that knew your grip better than your own fingers did.
I had a family. Read that again if you need to. It is not a word I used often. A wife who laughed with her whole face and would not let a day end without a joke. A daughter with quick hands and quicker excuses, who swore the cat had learned to open jars. They were my better part. They were the only part of me that got softer with time.
Neoshima once promised that softness could live. When the Nyx attacks were worst, the city built us a place under its own bones. A bunker with gardens grown under lamps, a map of the city copied below the city. People were meant to wait there until the sky stopped breaking. That place is – was, our Underworks. Time did what it does. The lamps went dim. The maps got torn. The people with money forgot the stairs. What was meant to shelter us became the place they sent anyone who made the surface ugly to look at. The Moirai stepped into that forgetting and learned to control in the dark.
The night my lantern went out, I learned the shape of their hands.
Men with masks came through a door that should not have opened. They moved like a memory and left like a secret. I fought. I bled. I lost an eye and a hand. They left me a name to bury. They thought they had done it for me.
They were wrong. I was still alive, with the price of becoming what's left. For a long time that meant only a list of places where shadows gather and a list of names I could not say without shaking.
Then I met the two of you.
I was not looking for new blood to tend. I was looking for a corner of the room where nobody would ask me if I was still breathing. You did not ask. You assumed I was and told me to teach you how to keep being it too. Brave children are a problem. They are also a cure.
I will not lie to you. Revenge has lived in me so long that I do not know where it ends and I begin. It is a small animal that eats one thing very carefully. It does not know what to do with a warm room or a hand on its head. I tried to starve it by feeding it work. The work learned to taste like it.
In the time we have shared, I remembered how a house sounds when people come home at different hours and leave shoes in the wrong place. I remembered how a table looks with three cups and not one. I remembered that someone can say your name from another room and mean it kindly. For almost a year, you made me feel like the word father could sit in my mouth without choking me.
I am writing now because the same old shadow is back at the door I thought I escaped. I believe I know where to cut to make it bleed. If I am wrong, the dark will laugh at me and that will be the last sound I hear. If I am right, the dark will still laugh, but it will have less to say.
You will want to follow. Do not.
I know you think you are obligated to stand in front of the people you love when the knives come. I am asking you to stand where you are and keep the world lit instead. If you follow me, I will look back and that will kill me faster than any blade.
I am ashamed to admit this, but I am also relieved I can write it instead of saying it - I am afraid for you. I have watched men sell their hearts for the promise of a cleaner strike. I have watched them come back empty or not at all. I even saw humans that experimented on orphans, implanting pure luminite into the poor children's bodies. You have something I did not carry when I was your age. You have a reason that is not your own name.
Listen to me, both of you. Eon will answer the hand that asks without hate. Power will come whether you earn it or not. If you let revenge teach you how to hold it, it will own you. You will wake up one morning and find that you kept nothing but your blade.
Do not become the killers this city tries to make of you. Let your strength be filled with kindness. Let it embarrass the men who call cruelty a plan. If you must cut, cut clean and for the living, not for the ghosts.
Hikari, I saw how fast the world wants to move in you. It is a beautiful thing and a dangerous one. Do not let anyone make you believe that being careful is the same as being weak. The stone in your hand chose you. It chose your stubborn gentleness. Keep it.
Raizen, I have watched you fail better than men twice your age succeed. That is a compliment. You do not throw people overboard to make the boat lighter. Do not start. Protecting is not the same as bleeding for every stranger who asks. Learn the difference without learning to be cold.
I wanted to drag a line through the floor between Neoshima and the Underworks and tell everyone to step over it. No one would have listened. I understand that now. Lines are not erased with speeches. They are worn away by feet going back and forth until the paint gives up. If I do not return, wear the line down for me. Teach people to climb the stairs both directions.
If you wonder whether I loved you, I will write this once so you do not have to guess. I did. I do. I am not good at saying it and even worse at showing it. But it is there, in the cups I washed because you forgot, in the stupid way I learned to make noodles because I was concerned you didn't like my horrible stew, in the chair I fixed when you did not know it had broken. Love is a quiet thing until it is gone. I am sorry I kept it quiet for so long.
I have sharpened the only thing I know how to sharpen. I am going to see if the smoke bleeds. If it does, the city will breathe easier. If it does not, breathe for it.
Live long enough to be kind when it is inconvenient. Live long enough to be happy on purpose. Live long enough to become the people I would have been proud to stand behind.
There is one more thing I should say because men like me pretend it does not matter. Forgive me if you can. If you cannot, keep walking anyway. Look forward. Forgiveness is a door you do not need to open to leave a room.
You are my best work.
If I do not come back, let that be enough.
~Takeshi, the one who wished to be called your father