Shiori Taira woke in her father's house to the scent of ozone and bleach, a silence as polished as the marble floor beneath her feet. The suite—she refused to call it a bedroom—stood at the pinnacle of the Taira family compound, a glass-and-steel fortress sheathed in a perpetual blue-white glow. There were no windows that opened, only a kinetic wall of panels that darkened or cleared at the whim of a neural gesture. Shiori kept them transparent, always, as if watching the city sprawl beneath her might remind her that she lived in something other than a vault.
The ceiling broadcasted the morning's first headlines in gentle, floating script. "Port Incident: No Civilian Casualties," the banner read, the words shifting hue with the sunrise. Below it, a holo-anchor smiled with symmetrical teeth and delivered a summary of the "minor security event" at Dock 7-G. The screen muted itself the instant Shiori's eyes flicked upward—house etiquette, an algorithmic courtesy perfected by the Taira for generations. But she'd heard enough.
Shiori peeled herself from the clinical white of her bed, bare feet whispering against the heated marble. She padded to the vanity, where her school uniform had been laid out on a carbon-fiber frame: the skirt was navy with platinum piping, the blouse starched enough to serve as armor. Her reflection in the mirror was that of a ghost in a luxury brand—skin pale as rice paper, black dye hair still damp from its nightly conditioner regimen, eyes dark with a green undertow. The color was a Taira trademark, or so the genealogical marketing suggested.
She looked at her hands, at the way they hovered and trembled before the synth-wood surface. Her knuckles were small, delicate, but the nails were sharp, uncut. Shiori never bothered to trim them; it was a quiet rebellion, a reminder that she was not yet finished mutating into her father's vision of the perfect successor.
A soft knock. The door slid open on its own, allowing a servant to glide in—a Feran, badger-variant, head bowed and ears pinned flat. He didn't meet her gaze, only approached and set a tray of breakfast on the table. Porridge, miso, a perfect arc of nori folded over steamed rice. All piping hot, all portioned with the precision of an algorithm that knew her caloric needs down to the microjoule.
"Good morning, Shiori-sama," the servant intoned, voice filtered through a linguistic softener. "Your father wishes to remind you of the councilor's visit at ten. Also, the school shuttle will arrive in thirty-seven minutes. Your medicine—"
"I know where it is," she said, too sharply. The servant blinked, ears twitching, and withdrew without another word. The door shut, vacuum-sealed.
Shiori sat. She traced a finger along the rim of the miso bowl, then pushed it aside. Her appetite was never present at this hour, not when the first thing she tasted in the morning was the afterimage of whatever her father had done the night before.
The news feed ran muted footage of the port, hovering drones and hazmat crews sluicing the concrete with anti-magic foam. Shiori watched the looping segment three times, looking for details—anything that hadn't been sanitized. She caught a flash of blue, then nothing. The rest was a carefully orchestrated ballet of workers in white, agents in black, and the city's usual indifference in the background.
She swiped the holo off with a flick of her wrist. It spiraled into the ether with the same finality as a bug down a drain.
The house itself was alive with protocol, every corridor mapped and optimized for efficiency and security. Shiori moved through it with the ease of someone who knew every hiding place and blind spot. She stepped over the sunken living room (unused), past the koi pond (genetically engineered, never hungry), and into the central foyer where a column of sapphire glass ran from basement to roof. Behind it, a pair of security drones hovered, eyeing her in silent anticipation.
They parted at her approach, their sensors recognizing the family's second heir, and resumed their rounds. Shiori almost smiled. Even the machines in this house showed her more deference than her father.
At the exit, she paused. The morning had laid a film of fog over the city, muting the angles of the skyline and making even the floating billboards seem tentative. The Taira compound overlooked the rest of Nueva Arcadia, a raised thumb on the city's pulse, designed for oversight as much as for intimidation.
She inhaled, then caught a whiff of her father's cologne—ancient, bitter, and still warm in the air. She turned and saw him at the end of the corridor, already dressed for the day in a suit cut from some nanoweave so dark it seemed to eat light. His eyes, the same dark-green as hers, regarded her with all the affection of a machine calibrating a new part.
"Early," he noted, voice like sanded glass.
"You told me to prepare for the councilor."
"Did you finish your report on the parliamentary simulation?" His mouth didn't move; only the left eyebrow twitched. A tell, if she'd cared to look.
Shiori nodded, spine straightening. "I sent it to your inbox. Annotated and translated."
He walked toward her, not so much approaching as moving in a perfectly straight line. "There's a board meeting today," he said. "After school, come directly home."
She could have asked why. Could have argued, or even hinted at her schedule. But she saw the unspoken in his posture: the day's plan had already been carved into the compound's logic. Shiori was a variable, not a person. "Of course, Father."
He paused, not quite close enough to touch her. "Good. Make sure to—" But whatever he wanted her to do, it didn't matter; his hand flicked to his earpiece, and a data stream cut the sentence in half. He turned, already moving away, already gone.
The door to the garage slid open in anticipation. Her transport—a silver AV (aerial vehicle), emblazoned with the Taira crest—waited at the curb, its interior cooled to her exact comfort settings. The seat recognized her and adjusted before she even sat down. Shiori swiped her thumb over the panel, igniting the console and a new set of headlines.
"Student Honors: Taira Heiress Accepts Science Prize," one read, and Shiori almost barked a laugh.
Another: "Feran Curfew Lifted in Lockwood," followed by a debate banner, already loading her father's pre-approved talking points.
She ignored them all, slouched into the seat, and watched the city slide past as the pod descended the drive.
In the distance, the port's security cordon pulsed with blue-white lights. Shiori watched the flashes, remembering the newsfeed, and wondered how many deaths it had taken to keep that incident off the real headlines. She felt the beginnings of a headache, a pressure behind her left eye. She pressed her palm to her temple, breathed, and forced herself to count the trees lining the road.
Twenty-seven. Each genetically identical, pruned into submission.
She knew exactly how that felt.
The AV cut through the city's arteries, bypassing the slow traffic with privileged contempt. Shiori reached into her bag and pulled out her notebook—not the official Taira one, but the battered spiral she'd bought from a street stall in Sombra. She flipped to a blank page and, in tiny, perfect strokes, wrote:
"There are twenty-seven cherry trees between the house and the station. Each one is dying, no matter how much they prune. I wish I could watch them rot."
She tore the page out, crumpled it, and shoved it into the recycling port.
When the AV reached the school gate, Shiori hesitated before stepping out. She could already see the other students gathering, uniforms crisp, hair perfect, eyes cold and carnivorous behind the veneer of respectability. The Taira name was a shield, but also a target.
She tightened her jaw, smoothed her skirt, and stepped into the daylight.
The school's entrance scanned her, registered her ID, and flashed a "WELCOME, TAIRA SHIORI-SAMA" in a font designed to humble lesser families. The other students parted around her, eyes tracking her every move, mouths poised to parrot the day's talking points.
Shiori ignored them all. She kept walking, every step echoing off the stone in a rhythm that was almost, almost human.
The last thing she saw before the doors shut behind her was a new headline, flickering briefly on a public holopanel:
"Mercenaries Activity Suspected in Port Attack."
Shiori allowed herself the faintest smile, the first real one of the day.
Then she entered St. Gregory's Academy, and let the alabaster cage close around her, one more time.
The halls of St. Gregory's Academy glimmered with the hush of old money and the hush-hush of new power. Every inch of the building had been designed to amplify perfection: marble staircases arcing like the vertebrae of a leviathan, glass floors pulsing with slow currents of blue mana, even the sunlight itself refracted through enchantments so that it hit every surface just so. It was, Shiori thought, the architectural equivalent of a pearl—flawless on the surface, a slow rot at its heart.
She was barely inside before she felt the first eyes on her. Not just any eyes—the bred-for-espionage stares of children who had been taught from birth to find weakness and mine it for entertainment. The Taira legacy preceded her by several generations and at least one war crime, and it didn't help that her mother was dead, her older brothers gone to a school in Zurich, and her only close relative the man who put the "inter-" in international financial crime. Most students would have killed for a spot in the Taira dynasty; at St. Gregory's, they just tried to kill her reputation.
Shiori walked through the corridor at an even, gliding pace, head high, posture perfect. It was the only defense—let them think you didn't notice, let them wonder if you noticed and didn't care. Her own animal features were subtle: the eyes, the ears, the way her teeth cut through toast. Enough to mark her as Feran, but not enough for anyone to make a scene in public. St. Gregory's prided itself on progressive admissions, as long as the hybrids acted like purebreds.
The first assault was a note, slid with surgical precision across the floor as she passed her locker. Red paper, folded into a crude triangle. She didn't stop, didn't even lower her gaze, but scooped it up with her shoe and let it ride the momentum into her palm. Unfolded, it read:
No signature. No need. The handwriting was familiar—ultra-neat, all-caps, probably machine-aided. Shiori smirked and crumpled it, dropping it into the first incineration slot she passed. The slot glowed blue, then spat out a puff of sterilized air.
By the time she reached her first class, two more notes had appeared in her path. She let them accumulate in her pocket, an arsenal of minor grievances, as she navigated the hive.
In the classroom, the seats were arranged in a shallow amphitheater, each one a throne upholstered in organic leather. The desks adjusted to the students' biometrics—height, angle, olfactory signature. Shiori's desk greeted her with a soft chime, but the students on either side immediately picked up their belongings and moved one row back. Their silence was more eloquent than any slur.
She stared at the blackboard, waiting for the teacher—a human, genetically unremarkable, who wore his mediocrity like armor. "Welcome, welcome," he said, never once making eye contact with Shiori as he passed out the syllabus via drone. "Today we continue with the legacy of magical constitutionalism—what does it mean to self-govern when even your will is a commodity? Let's discuss…"
Shiori tuned it out, eyes drifting over the room. Everyone else sat in clusters, whispering just loud enough for her to catch snatches.
"…her father paid for the new library wing, did you know…?"
"…saw her in the arcade last week, alone, what a psycho…"
"…bet she uses spells to cheat at exams…"
And then, the inevitable: "I heard she tried to adopt a street Feran last year. Like a rescue pet."
That one stung, not because it was true, but because of how neatly it inverted her real shame. She'd only tried to help Mouse once—a year ago, in the shadow of the old canal. Mouse had bitten her, hard, and run. She'd never forgotten the look in his eyes: not fear, but total contempt. She wondered where he was now. If he'd been rounded up. If he'd survived last night.
She clenched her fists in her lap. Her claws bit tiny crescents into her palm, a self-mutilation so small it never even left a mark.
The teacher droned on, something about mana contracts and regulatory capture. Shiori's gaze flickered to the window. Outside, the city gleamed, a thousand stories of glass and alloy. She could almost see the port from here, the blue-white shimmer of the security teams still cleaning up. Above it all, her father's skyscraper loomed: a single obsidian spike in the heart of the financial district.
Halfway through class, a student in the row ahead—human, male, already bald in that way that screamed "old money's plaything"—turned and offered her a dazzling, empty smile.
"Hey, Taira," he said. "You doing anything after school? I heard there's a board meeting. You could tell us what really goes on, if you survive the bloodletting."
Snickers from the crowd. Shiori smiled back, a small, deliberate display of fang.
"Maybe," she said, "if you pass the entrance exam to my world first."
He blinked, momentarily thrown, then shrugged. "Whatever. You Ferans always think you're so clever."
She didn't bother to answer. The rest of class was a slow-motion car crash, the teacher's words bouncing off walls that had heard it all before. When the bell rang, Shiori gathered her things with the care of someone setting a trap, then swept out before anyone else could get in the last word.
Her next class was Mana Theory—her strongest subject and her least favorite. The lab was a circular vault, walls lined with crystal prisms and floating rods of enchanted copper. Each student had their own workstation, complete with isolator gloves, visors, and an AI proctor that monitored for cheating or magical misconduct.
The room buzzed with static as students settled in. Shiori donned her gloves, ran through the calibration, and waited for the exercise to start.
Today's challenge: stabilize a plasma filament using nothing but willpower and an array of archaic runes. The goal was to keep the filament contained for sixty seconds without triggering a containment alarm. Last year, Shiori had broken the record with ninety-seven. Today, she just wanted to get through it without attracting attention.
The instructor began the countdown, voice calm and slow.
At "zero," Shiori extended her hands, closed her eyes, and summoned the flow. Mana welled in her chest—cold, pure, a second heartbeat. She visualized the runes, layered them in her mind, and wrapped them around the filament like a cocoon.
There was a hitch. A slip of focus, just as the plasma stabilized.
On her desk sat a red origami crane, folded with more care than the earlier notes. Shiori's hands stuttered, the mana flickered, and a low hum sounded as the safety field tripped. The AI registered her failure with a polite chime.
The rest of the class hadn't noticed; they were too busy wrestling their own filaments. Shiori stared at the crane. Red paper, the kind used for old Shinto blessings. Her throat tightened.
She reached out, pinched the crane by its wing, and unfolded it. Inside was a tiny, hand-drawn sketch: a Feran, tiger like her, strung up by the tail and flayed open, ribcage splayed. The detail was obscene, the blood rendered in frantic red pen.
Underneath, in that same all-caps handwriting: Your days are numbered at this academy, ML.
Her fingers trembled. The world narrowed to a single point, a pinprick of heat behind her sternum. The lab spun around her, voices distant, the instructor's words suddenly a million miles away.
She tasted copper in her mouth. Sweat prickled her neck, soaked the collar of her uniform. Her claws dug deeper, enough that this time she would leave marks.
For a long moment, Shiori stared at the drawing, at the cruelty in its lines. She felt the old panic clawing at her chest—the same one that used to wake her in the middle of the night, years after the family "incident" in Tokyo, years after her mother's blood had dried on the hotel carpet.
The instructor walked past, glanced at her, then at the crane, then back at her. His face betrayed nothing. She realized with a kind of cold clarity that he'd seen it all before, and had chosen not to care.
That was the last straw.
Shiori refolded the paper, slower this time, turning the grotesque sketch inward, until the blood and the pain disappeared inside the crane's body. She set it in the center of the desk, then pressed her palm down, flattening it with a single, decisive motion.
The whispering in the class faded. Shiori looked up, eyes clear and bright.
She had no intention of letting them win. Not here, not now.
When the bell rang, Shiori was first out the door. She made for the nearest empty stairwell, ducked into its shadow, and allowed herself a single, trembling breath.
Then she pulled out her notebook, opened to a fresh page, and wrote:
"They can break my body, but I will never let them have my mind."
She underlined it twice, then tore out the page and folded it into a crane of her own.
She set it on the railing, watched it tremble in the updraft, and let it fly.
The decision was made.
By midnight, the world outside the Obsidian was a mess of neon and rain, a city-wide hallucination bleeding through Nueva Arcadia's Crystal District. Here, pleasure was both weapon and currency. Power drank itself sick, then woke the next morning to rule again.
The entrance to the club was nothing: a matte black door, no sign, no bouncer, only a soft pressure at the threshold, like a velvet paw on your throat. Shiori wore no jewelry, carried nothing but a clutch with her ID and a custom-engraved cred stick. Her uniform—swapped for a simple graphite dress and a cream shawl—fit perfectly. She hated that it made her look older, hated even more how easily she passed for a young executive, the kind they bred in tanks above the thirty-fifth floor.
The pressure at the door stilled her, just for a heartbeat. She felt the scan of her retinas, the cold brush of a magical glyph tickling the base of her skull. The door opened, and the club's foyer swallowed her.
Inside, every surface was polished black or a soft, synthetic velvet. The air was heavy with the perfume of engineered pheromones, subtle and shifting—first flowers, then ozone, then something that reminded her, with surgical accuracy, of her mother's breath on the back of her neck.
She moved through the entry like she owned it. She'd watched her father do the same at board meetings and funerals: let the space bend around you, never the other way. On the main floor, bodies crowded together in constellations of dances and boredom, augmented with horns, tails, eyes like wolf's gold. Mana flashed in delicate glasses, mixed into drinks that cost more than most rent. Drones, feather-light and impossible to notice unless you already knew they existed, orbited the floor with silent menace.
Shiori ignored them. She'd been here once, years ago, back when her father needed to remind the underworld who held its leash. Tonight, she came for her own leash.
Security was three layers deep. The first was a hulking Feran, bear-type, whose arms were covered in old military tattoos. He blocked the VIP elevator with an arm the size of a bough.
"Not on the list," he rumbled, voice like a downshifted engine.
Shiori smiled, small and razor-sharp. "Check again. Priority access, per arrangement." She passed her cred stick, and he looked at it, then at her, with growing suspicion.
He scanned the stick, then her face. The little red light on his collar flicked from "ignore" to "escort." He grunted and stepped aside.
The elevator was real obsidian, inside and out, with no buttons—only a touchpad and a thin slot for genetic verification. Shiori pressed her palm to the reader. A faint heat pulsed against her skin, then receded. The elevator dropped, silent as a sarcophagus.
At the bottom: a corridor lined with living obsidian, veins of raw mana pulsing under the surface. The air was colder, quieter, but every step triggered a new surveillance measure. Shiori counted four cameras, three biometric sniffers, and a final invisible line of defense—a pressure wave that tested her for concealed spells. She passed, but only barely; she felt the warning, a prick of static behind her eyes, and tamped down the small fire of her own magic.
At the end of the hallway, a single door waited. It slid open at her approach, exposing the sanctum.
Aika sat behind a desk grown from living wood, its branches writhing softly in the shadows. She was Feran—fox, beast type, the ears tall and tufted, the fur a molten red that shimmered even in low light. Her hands were small, precise, folded over a notebook made of something like leather, but thicker, less forgiving.
She didn't stand when Shiori entered. She didn't smile, either.
"Shiori Taira," Aika said, voice as flat as a judge's gavel. "You're early."
"Timing is everything, isn't it?" Shiori replied, stepping forward. She stood until Aika gestured—minimal, but absolute—and only then did she sit. The chair was soft, but left her a centimeter above the desk, a calculated imbalance. She liked that. It meant Aika didn't want her too comfortable.
"Drink?" Aika asked.
"No, thank you."
"Good." Aika made a small mark in her notebook, then closed it. "You know why you're here?"
Shiori glanced at the obsidian walls, the lack of recording devices. "I want to activate a contract. Off-record. I want UMBRA."
Aika's left eyebrow twitched. "Expensive. Also dangerous. Why?"
Shiori inhaled, let it out slow. She'd rehearsed the speech, but now that it was time, it tasted bitter.
"Because there's something in the port. Because my father's people are lying about it. Because someone needs to fix what happened last night, and it won't be the police."
Aika waited, expressionless. "You're not telling me the real reason. Yet."
Shiori's jaw clenched. She looked at her own hands, the way the fingers curled into her palm.
"Because they won't just erase the evidence," she said. "They'll erase the people who saw it. And I'm done letting them." She looked up, met Aika's gaze dead-on. "Some debts can only be paid in blood."
Aika's ears flicked once. The ghost of a smile.
"That's more like it. Your family has enemies. Some of them sit in this very building. You understand what happens if I say yes?"
Shiori nodded. "I do."
"There's no recall. No forgiveness. If UMBRA takes the job, you live with the outcome. All of it."
A pause, long enough to let Shiori think of her brother, her mother, the city she hated and loved.
"I accept."
Aika's smile was there, now—small, but undeniable. She slid a palm-sized contract across the desk. It shimmered, the surface a holographic blur of letters and runes.
"Blood or mana," Aika said. "Pick your poison."
Shiori drew her thumb across the edge of the contract. It bit her, just a pinprick, and the paper drank her blood, sigils blooming red along the edge.
The deal was made.
Aika stood, all slow grace, and extended a hand. Shiori took it, feeling the static crackle between their palms.
"Congratulations, Shiori. You've just set the city on fire."
The moment held, then broke. Aika stepped back, and the room's lighting changed from shadow to blinding white, resetting the world to its default.
"Go home," Aika said, already turning away. "We'll handle the rest."
Shiori walked back through the corridor, up the elevator, past the bear-man who didn't even blink as she exited. The city's rain had stopped, and for the first time in years, she felt the air on her skin. Not inside a cage, not behind glass, but real.
She pulled her phone, found Mouse's number still saved in her contacts—never once used—and hesitated.
Then she typed a single line: Be careful.
She sent it, erased the message, and melted into the night.
Above her, the world kept turning, silent and unafraid.
But Shiori knew: by morning, nothing would be the same.