"Affine transformation, that shit is interesting. Very interesting." Atiya stabbed a fry into his sauce. "But it is goddamn tiring to solve five hundred questions just to put together a single working formula for maintaining portal rotation."
Zelaine said nothing. Her attention was elsewhere, specifically inside the KFC bucket in front of her.
"I'm telling you, those webnovels are complete bullshit. Why do those protagonists get skills when they don't even understand the concept?" He shook his head with genuine grievance. "They don't deserve it."
Zelaine reached for another piece and thought.
'Nothing is better than a KFC date on a Wednesday.'
"I used complex matrices to compute the translation of mass," Atiya continued, undeterred. "Ensuring every atom maintained its orientation during the jump. I even had to use topology to connect two distant points in three-dimensional space, I treated it like a sheet of paper being folded until the corners touched."
Zelaine wiped her mouth and hands clean with a tissue, then turned to the digital menu on the table and ordered five more buckets without a word.
"At least pretend to listen, will you," Atiya said annoyed by her indifference.
He'd been buried in equations for weeks, and somewhere along the way she'd started to he had been negecting her.
She felt she had to fix their relationship somehow.
So she'd dragged him here.
For his sake, to give him a break.
Not because she'd run out of money to eat at home.
Probably.
"I can see how frustrated you are," Zelaine said, eyeing the excessive amount of sauce drowning his chicken breast.
"...Oh."
Atiya looked down, noticed it, and quietly moved the piece aside, reaching for another one instead.
"Why do you hate cheese, sauce, pumpkin. They're delicious."
"...I find it odd that people like them."
Zelaine let it go. "Whatever. What about those sheet skills?"
Her eyes settled on him, just slightly more attentive than before.
"Sheaf theory, topology, manifold theory." Atiya leaned back, a small smile of quiet pride crossing his face. "Everything's going extremely well. To the point where I feel confident, which naturally makes me suspicious that I've somehow screwed it up."
Despite all his complaining, he took his coding seriously. That had always been true.
"I don't want my boyfriend's personality to even slightly resemble Sheldon Cooper," Zelaine said flatly. "Stop pushing yourself so hard or I'm lying to your mother."
"Excuse me, you once disappeared for two years with a half-assed excuse about coding a skill. You have absolutely no right to talk about person—"
He stopped.
Zelaine's expression had shifted. Not anger exactly. Something quieter and worse than that.
"We talked about it before," she said, setting her fork down near his neck with deliberate calm, her eyes open and steady and hurting. "Don't bring it up. It hurts both of us."
"...I'm sorry."
He meant it. He'd crossed a line and he knew it the moment the words had left his mouth.
Zelaine's lips pressed together for a moment. Then she set the fork down properly and looked away.
"Cale texted me. He's coming today."
Atiya after collecting himself said:
"Mother sent him to help me."
Later that day, Cale Artem arrived.
Atiya opened the door and looked at him for a moment.
"I didn't know the proud, righteous prince of the great Artem family would grace my humble abode with his presence," he said, dipping into an exaggerated bow. "I am eternally, profoundly, fucking blessed."
"You and that glib tongue of yours," Cale muttered, stepping past him into the entryway.
"I have to cook an extra plate for someone I didn't invite," Atiya said, following him in with a smile. "You'll understand if I'm not overcome with joy."
"I regret having you as a friend."
"The feeling is occasionally mutual."
From the back of the house, past the open corridor that connected the entryway to the wide kitchen terrace where the evening grill was already smoking, Zelaine had heard the door. She came around the corner with the kind of speed she reserved for things she actually cared about, her eyes bright with anticipation.
She took one look at Cale and her entire face collapsed.
"It's just you," she said. "You disappoint me, you lucky jerk."
Cale stared at her. "Hello to you too."
"I'm coming in," he added, mostly to himself, already moving toward the kitchen and the smell of grilled meat.
****
With Cale's help, Atiya finished the coding in a week.
The sparring room had become something between a workshop and a war zone over those seven days. Empty tea glasses lined the windowsill that overlooked the rear grounds, where the trimmed hedges of the Pharsa estate caught the late afternoon light and threw long shadows across the grass.
Holographic screens floated in stacked layers above the center mat, dense with variables and spatial framework notation that most Ascension 4 users would have found uncomfortable to look at directly.
Zelaine watched from the corner, chin resting in her hand, as Cale leaned over Atiya's shoulder and pointed at something in the code with a knuckle.
Strictly speaking, a Yaicraft's code was meant to be written solely by its user. Personal resonance was the key ingredient, the invisible thread that tied the skill to the harnesser's specific Yai signature.
Outside help could guide and correct, but the final integration, the moment of compiling the code into reality, had to come from Atiya alone.
Still, with Cale there to catch the errors Atiya had been too close to see, the last pieces finally clicked into place.
Zelaine straightened up, stretching her arms above her head.
"So," she drawled, "the skill you've been agonizing over for an entire year is finally done. Now you just have to do the task." She smirked. "As the pretentious ones call it."
Cale glanced over at Atiya with something between admiration and amusement. "You really are something of a pipsqueak. Only two skills coded in a year, even with that monster of a mother of yours in your corner?"
"My skills are not as simplistic as yours," Atiya said, not looking up from the interface. "Some of us have standards."
"Who told you to make your skills complex?" Zelaine leaned forward, eyes gleaming. "Simple codes are obviously better for starters, you idiot. Living in a backwater like Derry but hoping to become Sung Jin-Woo?" She clicked her tongue. "Tch, tch. Know your place."
Atiya stood up.
Cale stepped between them before anything could happen.
"Both of you, shut up," he said, pressing two fingers to his temple. "Don't ruin my precious time. Let's get on with it."
Zelaine bit her tongue, swallowed the next insult, and sat back.
Atiya took a breath. Then another.
He was ready.
He turned to face the center of the room and began feeding his Yai into the circuits. The air around him seemed to thicken, pressing against his skin like something alive, and the circuits flared open in brilliant, vibrant magenta. He held himself still, waiting for the vision, the Enactment phase, the task the system would set him before the skill could be locked into reality.
The light pulsed.
Then settled.
The skill icon solidified in his Circuit without fanfare, clean and complete.
Atiya stared at it.
"What." He looked up. "I don't have to perform a task?"
Zelaine was already on her feet.
"That's impossible."
Skills that skipped the Enactment phase existed, but they were utility abilities, low-tier, administrative things. Spatial repositioning of small objects. Minor environmental adjustments.
The kind of code an Ascension 1 student could write in an afternoon.
The algorithm Atiya had spent a year constructing was a spatial-severing mechanic built on sheaf theory and manifold mathematics. It was supposed to be lethal.
Something like that didn't just slide into reality without asking for something in return.
"You're getting an OP ability just like that?" Zelaine's face was going red, somewhere between fury and envy she wasn't bothering to hide. "No penalty? Nothing?"
"Something feels off," Cale said quietly, his eyes not leaving the Circuit.
Atiya wasn't listening. He was staring at his own hands, feeling the new current moving through his circuits like a second pulse. It was clean. It was his. A grin pulled at the corner of his mouth despite everything.
"Activate."
A thin cross-section of transparent magenta light appeared in the air before him. Flat, two-dimensional, no thicker than a sheet of paper, catching the light of the room like a blade held sideways.
"What is that?" Cale asked, squinting at it.
Then it multiplied.
Ten sheets. Then twenty. They materialized in the same space, overlapping, vibrating against each other with a frequency that made the air itself feel wrong. The magenta light stuttered and pulsed, the sheets rattling like they were under pressure from the inside.
Atiya's grin disappeared.
"Stop," he said. "Deac—"
He didn't finish the word.
The sheets detonated outward in every direction at once. There was no sound of cutting, no resistance, no impact. The light simply passed through matter as though matter had never been a serious suggestion.
In less than a second, Atiya's arms and legs detached from his torso.
Atiya didn't collapse. He slid, slowly, the pieces of him separating with a dreadful, weightless quiet, and then the thud came, heavy and final, as his torso met the floor.
The blood didn't splash. It poured, steady and dark, spreading outward across the mat in a slow, patient circle.
"Babbbe!!!"
Zelaine's jealous scowl lasted half a second longer than it should have before it shattered completely. The scream that tore out of her was raw, the kind that came from somewhere beneath thought.
Cale stumbled backward, his own shout punching out of him in pure reflex, his hands already moving toward Atiya without any clear plan behind them.
But Atiya couldn't hear either of them.
As his torso settled against the ground, the full shape of what had happened arrived all at once. The cross-sections hadn't materialized around him.
They had appeared inside him.
He felt it in a way that didn't feel like pain yet, too large for that, too total. His ribs were separating, not broken but divided, pried apart along clean geometric lines. His femur had split lengthwise down the middle.
The skill was still working, still running its uncontrolled logic through him, dissecting from the marrow outward with the same patient precision he had spent a year coding into it.
The darkness came at the edges first.
'Am I going to die.'
It wasn't quite a question. There wasn't enough air left for questions.
'I refuse.'
He survived. Only barely, and only because Cale's hands were already on his phone before Atiya's torso had finished hitting the floor.
Inteja arrived without a word.
She unleashed her Yaicraft, and it didn't look like healing. It looked like a controlled catastrophe, a roaring brilliance that flooded the room and swallowed her son's shattered form whole. The fire didn't scorch. It rebuilt, seizing severed limbs and hauling them back into alignment, fusing bone to bone, nerve to nerve, with a ferocity that made Cale look away and Zelaine unable to.
It was discovered afterward that Atiya's skeleton had been sliced in over forty places. The skill he'd coded was not a technique. It was a perfect, elegant, self-inflicted execution. Uncontrollable by design, though not by intention.
****
Outside the hospital room, Zelaine and Cale sat in the corridor and said nothing.
The overhead lights hummed. Somewhere down the hall a trolley wheeled past. Zelaine stared at her hands, which were still stained with dried blood in the creases of her knuckles. She hadn't noticed until now, or maybe she had and hadn't cared enough to do anything about it.
She didn't look at Cale.
"Is he going to be okay?" Her voice came out cracked at the edges.
"Master Pharsa is in there," Cale said. His voice was flat, the kind of flat that was holding something else down beneath it. "He'll live."
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
The door creaked open and Inteja stepped out. Her face was the color of old ash. Her clothes were singed at the sleeves and collar from the ferocity of her own flames, and she smelled faintly of burning. Her eyes moved to both of them and stopped.
"He is stable," she said. "The bone fusion held."
Zelaine was already standing. "Can we see him?"
"He's awake." Inteja leaned back against the wall and produced a cigarette, lighting it without any acknowledgment of the oxygen warnings posted directly beside her head. "But don't expect much from him. He saw the inside of his own marrow." She exhaled slowly. "That's not something you just move past."
Zelaine didn't wait. She pushed through the door.
Atiya lay mummified in heavy medicinal bandaging from his neck to his toes, the white wrappings thick enough that he looked less like a person and more like something being carefully preserved. His eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling with the particular blankness of someone who had been staring at the same point for a long time.
They moved to Zelaine as she approached.
"I finished the code," he whispered.
"You almost killed yourself, you idiot," Zelaine said. Her voice was trying to be steady and wasn't quite making it.
"The math was right," Atiya said. "I accounted for everything. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with the framework."
"It is because you coded a skill that far exceeds what an ascension two vessel can handle. That innate skill is literally an ultimate spatial offensive technique that even ascension 3 yai users can't fully utilised."
Inteja spoke with her voice steady. "An innate Yaicraft skill should be a surplus, an easy to wield. But Atiya's... it turned out to be a suicide technique."