The room had found its rhythm again; mornings no longer paused for bad news, after days, if not weeks. Lights came on in slow rows. The rigs stretched and clicked as they warmed. Cables lifted and settled like tired snakes. Behind the thick glass, on Mina's usual monitors, rows of numbers blinked awake one by one.
Kori stood at the center, chain-knives wrapped loose at her wrists. Mina sat behind the glass with her monitors already lit, hair tied up, pen in her teeth. A handful of assassins-in-training had drifted in and found reasons to linger near the rail. They tried to look busy. They watched anyway.
Raizen and Hikari stepped onto the floor together.
Their Luminite weapons, the real ones this time, answered the light with a soft pulse. No show, just a clean, steady glow along the veins set into steel. Raizen rolled his shoulders once and let his weight drop into the floor. Hikari brushed her thumb along the spine of her blade, then set her feet in a stance so small it almost wasn't a stance at all.
"You've gotten better these last few weeks!" Kori said. "That's how it should look."
Mina tapped a screen. "Again? They already cleared high on every rig last week."
"Verification, not proving" Kori said.
A ripple moved through the trainees. High meant the machines stopped pretending to be fair. Training had sanded the days smooth - weeks slid by the same way steel learns to listen, when heated up.
"That's them! The pair that ran all high clean!" they whispered
The floor broke into segments with a low hum. Panels rose and fell by fingers and hands. Pillars slid out of nowhere, then back. Targets snapped out of the walls, flashed red, and disappeared before eyes could get bored. The old ropes shivered once and waited.
"Warmup," Kori said.
They didn't waste words. They moved like people who had already done this, and were here to do it right again. The first minute was footwork only. Raizen's steps were the same ones he'd been drilling for months, but the edges had been sharpened. He cut corners off his own bad habits and left them on the floor. Hikari didn't waste anything. She moved like a thought that had already decided to be correct.
Panels dropped without warning. They adjusted without looking down. Targets filled the room with quick circles of light. Raizen's blade instantly found them, short and honest. Hikari's blade hit them too, but she did it on the half-beat before they were truly there. Mina glanced over the rim of her monitor and squinted. The speed of everything happening was almost like neat chaos
"Numbers," Kori said - her normal eye not being able to keep up. She didn't want to use her Chasmis. It tired her way to much.
Mina let the pen fall onto the desk. "Eleven point eight. Eleven point nine. There's a spike - twelve point one, twelve point two - holding, holding! Ah, back to twelve flat."
The rigs cranked up. Rods and targets swung wide and high, forcing body and balance into arguments. Platforms slid. The targets changed their rhythm - now low, now high, now stacked in threes. Raizen cut through, blocked, pivoted, cut again. Hikari's blade made less sound than it should have. When she slipped between two swinging ropes, there was a split second where she looked like she'd stepped out of the room and back in.
"Switch," Kori said, watching Hikari the way she always did - with caution, observing micro movements she never wanted to miss.
They switched - left footwork to right, high guard to low, rope work to beam work. The beams were thin, set like bones across the floor. A wrong step meant a long fall to a mat that didn't care about your excuses. Raizen took the thin path with a quiet center. Hikari followed, blade tucked to not catch the rope. They crossed in the middle and didn't touch.
"Twelve point zero. Twelve point three," Mina called. "Don't get cocky. You wobble when you do."
Raizen smiled without meaning to. Hikari didn't. Her eyes measured everything to make sure she didn't waste any second.
"Enough," Kori said, smiling. "Now let's try sparring."
She unwound one chain with a flick, then another. The knives dropped, sang across the floor, and leapt back up with a tug. She let them kiss the air once and then sheathed them again. "Not me. Each other."
A hum rolled through the room. Even Mina sat forward.
Raizen and Hikari faced each other. They didn't bow. The bow wasn't for this place. They did the small nod that meant "I'm here" and "Let's play fair" and stepped in.
First contact was soft - a test. Steel met steel and slid rather than clashed. They stepped out, reset, stepped back in. Raizen set a rhythm. A really fast one, that. Not loud, just enough to see if Hikari would leave her own. She didn't. She ran parallel for two exchanges and then crossed. Her blade clipped his guard and slid toward his wrist; he let it and gave back the angle he'd been waiting to use for some time now. Hikari's eyes said "good." She took it away before he could hit it.
Mina's numbers ticked along with the fight, calm and factual. "Twelve point one. Twelve point two. Sync drift zero point two seconds - now zero point three. Raizen, don't chase. Let it come to you."
He didn't answer. He didn't have to. started predicting and reading. When Hikari stepped left with her shoulder, her right foot always wanted to cheat. He got there first and made the floor scold her for it. She corrected on the next pass, already different.
Other assassin trainees gathered, silently watching. A few stepped down off the rail and stood on the far edge of the floor without crowding. People who'd spent months being told they were fast watched two bodies move like the room had decided to be honest about speed.
Hikari's edge always showed itself in the third minute. It always did when she forgot she was holding back. Not this time tho. She didn't need to restrain her movements. She cut a line that should've taken two moves and took it in one and a half. Raizen's guard should've failed him. It didn't. The block came from the wrong hand, but it came, and he made the next step count as if he'd always planned to be stubborn there.
Kori didn't smile, but her eyes got a shade warmer. "Now! his balance is off! Push, her guard is open! Come on, you could have gotten her with that, Raizen!"
Mina looked at her the way a mom looks at her small daughter when she's making two bugs fight.
"You're way too invested into this, Kori!" She laughed
"Come on, you have to give it to them! Look how much they've changed! Another point to my teaching skills, hehe!"
The spar turned from a conversation into an argument, then back into a conversation again. Raizen pressed with a tight pattern that forced Hikari to answer on his rhythm. Hikari answered - only to steal the rhythm and hand it back differently. His blade wrote short notes. Hers wrote words in the margins, like ridiculously detailed sketches.
Kori stepped in close without stepping into the fight. "Both of you. Watch for subtle signs from your own weapons. Luminite sings a beat before your hand does when you're tired. Don't let the light get you hit."
They lasted seven more minutes at full. Sweat ran into Raizen's eyebrow and made his left eye sting. Hikari's breath came faster but wouldn't dare be loud. They both touched the cliff edge and didn't throw themselves off it.
Then, Raizen's sword ever so slightly pulsed. He saw the small opening it was trying to warn him about. Then, with almost supernatural speed, re rewrote his weapon's trajectory, and barely made it.
Raizen's blade stopped centimeters from Hikari's neck.
Kori lifted a hand. "Stop."
Silence swallowed the room for a count of three. Then a few of the trainees remembered they needed to move their legs and did, like a spell had let go.
Mina pushed her chair back and stood with the printout. "Average sustained multiplier twelve point zero two," she said. "Spikes to twelve point five on Hikari's side. Twelve point four on Raizen's. Minimal drift. No overload. You didn't break my room. Thank you for that."
Kori walked to them with a towel and handed it to Raizen first. Old habit. He passed it to Hikari first. New habit. She wiped once and gave it back.
Kori's eyes ran over them like scales run over fish, quick and practiced. She didn't dress the moment in grandeur. "You're at twelve. That's way more than enough for what you're aiming at. The entrance exam, I suppose. It's not at all the best you can do, and I hope you know that. It just means your bodies finally listen to the stones at the speed your heads always wanted. Don't chase the next number like it will fix your life. You'll get it by doing the same work and sleeping when you're told."
Raizen and Hikari nodded at the same time, still catching their breaths.
Kori turned her head toward the rail. "All right. Show's over. Let's say I taught you all of the basics. And I gotta give it to you – you two fully mastered them"
Mina flipped a switch and the rigs began to swallow themselves back into the floor. The ropes climbed to their hooks. The beams slid away. The room took a breath and smoothed its face.
Kori looked back at the pair. "Last adjustments," she said. "If there's anything you want to recalibrate, do it now. After this, you don't get me in your ear. You get strangers who don't care about your names."
Raizen checked his grip and the wrap at the base of the blade. He shifted a knot a thumb's width and let the leather settle. Hikari adjusted the angle of the guard by a degree and got what she wanted. Small changes. Enough.
"You've both run every rig on high," Mina said, more to herself than to them. "You've held twelve without frying. You didn't get cute. You listened. Honestly… you're ready!"
Kori didn't disagree. Which, from Kori, was bigger than a medal.
She added one last thing, like a nail driven without hurry. "When you walk into the Lotus, don't try to impress anyone. Be hard to knock down, and quick to surpass others. Be honest about what you're bad at. Don't let anyone convince you mercy is weakness. It isn't. It will get you farther than any trick."
"We won't forget," Raizen said.
Hikari slid her blade home and tied the strap. "When is the call?" she asked.
"Soon," Kori said. "You'll hear it. It's loud, and it doesn't wait."
Mina cleared her throat. "Get water. Get salt. No hero training tonight. If I catch either of you back here, I'm locking the doors and telling the rigs to chew. Yes, Raizen. I'm talking to you." She said, after throwing a very meaningful look.
Raizen almost smiled. "Alright, alright. We're done for today."
They left the Rust Room without ceremony. The door shut behind them and the hush they carried with them softened the hall. The Underworks greeted them with its usual noises - pipes knocking like a tired neighbor, someone arguing about bread, a cart wheel squeaking in protest. The city was itself again.
Following Hikari's small request, they climbed to the Tangle - a stretch of catwalks and crosswalks that braided above the market and under the old pipes. Up here the air moved better. The noise blurred into something almost kind. Raizen leaned on the rail with both forearms. Hikari stood next to him close enough for elbows to touch if either of them decided to move wrong.
Below, a woman laughed at something she shouldn't have found funny. A boy sprinted and didn't get yelled at for it. A string of laundry pretended to be flags. The lights on the far wall buzzed, stuttered, settled. It had been weeks since the forge went cold; the city's noise had learned to fill the space.
They didn't talk for a while. They didn't need to. Everything that needed to be understood was understood through the silence - the kind that didn't ask to be filled. It was the kind that said "you did what you needed to do" and let your lungs decide what to do next.
Hikari lifted her chin and looked toward where the city ended. She loved the small lights scattered all across the underworks and the tangle: small lanterns, lightbulbs, vendors and so on.
"Well? Everyone says that we can do it" Raizen broke the silence.
Hikari let out a faint smile. "Yes"
He let the words sit where they'd been placed. They didn't need to be moved around to be true.
"Tomorrow," Raizen affirmed.
"Or the day after, we don't really know" Hikari said. "Soon enough."
He exhaled and felt his shoulders drop the way a door settles into its hinge when someone fixes the frame. He looked down at the blade at his side. The Luminite pulsed, small and obedient. It would do what he asked if he asked correctly. It wouldn't save him if he lied to it.
"We'll walk in," he said. "We won't be ghosts or rumors."
Hikari looked at him with the expression that meant she'd heard and cataloged it next to the other things that mattered.
"We'll walk out too. Not sure who's going to get his back smacked first" she laughed. Pretty sure that was supposed to be a joke.
He returned the smile. "Yeah, we'll see about that"
They stood a little longer with the city moving under them. A flyer tore free of a board and sailed past like a lazy bird. Hikari caught it without thinking, glanced at the writing, didn't care, let it go. It drifted, caught a beam, and stayed.
When they finally left the rail, they didn't look back at the Rust Room's door. It had taught them what it could teach. The rest would be decided somewhere that didn't know their names yet.
They kept walking. The noise of the Underworks faded to a steady hum behind them, and the way forward held its breath.
Just long enough to feel like the beginning.