The Deep Water
Eel stood over Dimakatso's body, grey skin gleaming in the dim prison light, every inch of him built to conduct the currents he killed with. Beyond him lay the dark pool — the place where the prison's most dangerous inmates went to stop being problems.
"I hear this man was an earth user," Eel said, delivering a casual kick to the body. "A spy sent by the rebels. They pulled him out after we caught him, but he won't be troublesome anymore."
Najo didn't answer. He brought his hands together.
The architecture groaned. Stone walls slammed inward from both sides with the sound of a building reconsidering its dimensions. Eel was already moving — slipping backward, dropping into the dark water without a ripple.
Silence.
Then a surge of electricity tore through the floor's foundations. Najo threw himself backward, the zap crackling through stone where his feet had been. Enclosed space, water access, the current working for Eel and against him. He pushed both walls back outward, forcing the space open, forcing a direct confrontation.
Eel surged from the water — massive, fast, built for this. But as they clashed, the gap became clear immediately: Eel had the mass. Najo had something else entirely.
The Narrow Hallway
Aemon and his clones sprinted down a claustrophobic corridor, putting distance between themselves and what was behind them.
Onion didn't hurry. He reached up to his face and peeled off a thick layer of skin. The raw layer beneath hissed immediately, releasing a noxious compound into the cramped space.
The gas hit Aemon like a physical blow. His eyes burned fiercely, turning violent red as they watered beyond usefulness. His vision collapsed into stinging, swimming shapes. He stumbled and kept running blind, one hand trailing the wall.
The Reunion
The freed prisoners ran past Lilly's cell in a frenzy. No one stopped.
Then footsteps slowed. Someone stopped directly in front of her door.
Moto.
They looked at each other through the bars. The weight of everything between them occupied the silence completely. He stepped forward and unlocked the door. It swung open.
His usual expression cracked, just slightly, at its edge.
"I'm sorry," Moto said. His voice was low. He held out his hand. On his palm: the Glitch Blade, its surface darkened to a deep, lightless black. "I vow to never use a sword again."
Lilly took the familiar hilt. Her eyes softened. "Don't be silly. I'd be more upset if you never used the skills I spent all that time teaching you."
She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.
Moto went completely rigid. His hands found nowhere useful to go. He cleared his throat.
"Yeah, well," he managed, pulling back. "Aemon probably needs backup. I hear he went to free Byron."
Lilly stepped back and tested the grip. One practiced arc — a deep slash gouged into the stone wall behind Moto. Not a mark on her skin. She had no idea what Moto had done to the blade or what it had cost him, but in this moment she wasn't going to ask.
She thanked him once more, gripped the hilt, and sprinted into the corridor.
The Clash
Moto watched her go. Then movement caught his eye through the barred window.
Bizure, in the courtyard below, looking up.
Their eyes met. The memory of the kick — the specific, total darkness that had followed it — sat somewhere in Moto's body rather than his mind. He glared down. Bizure looked back with an unhurried, arrogant smirk.
Moto flooded the room with smoke. He watched Bizure until the grey closed off the window entirely.
Then — boom.
The cell block wall exploded outward. Moto came through the debris like something launched, driving straight at Bizure.
Bizure drew the baton and swung. Moto brought his arms up. The impact launched him backward with a force that had no business coming from that arc — he hit the side of the prison building hard, stone cracking around the outline of him.
Bizure surveyed the damage, turning the baton in his hand. "Whoo. Makes things pretty unfair, doesn't it." He looked at the rubble. "You're still alive, right? What if I put it down? Give you a handicap."
Moto shoved a chunk of rock off his chest and stood. "Do what you want."
"'Kay." Bizure tossed the baton aside. It clattered against the stone. "Keeping property damage to a minimum tonight anyway. Tax money."
Moto charged. A furious barrage — kicks, punches, every combination he had — and Bizure didn't move. Didn't shift weight. Moto pivoted and drove a harder punch into Bizure's chest. The impact produced a distinct heavy thud that resonated through the ground beneath Bizure's feet rather than through Bizure's body.
He tried to jump back. Bizure was already there — grabbing him mid-air, driving a punch deep into his stomach.
All the air left him at once. He hit the ground.
From an upper walkway, a prisoner winced. "That gut punch of his. No way the kid gets up from that."
Moto got up. One hand on his stomach, eyes working. Bizure started pacing, talking. Under the cover of his hunched posture, Moto pulled a kunai and snapped it at Bizure's chest.
Bizure caught it an inch from his face. "Decades of experience. I'm quicker than I look."
Moto smirked. A razor thread of smoke connected the kunai to his fingertip. He ignited it. The spark raced the thread and detonated the kunai in Bizure's face.
The smoke cleared. Bizure's face: fine. One of his shoes, however, lay smoking several feet away.
The explosion was at his head. Moto filed it.
They resumed. Moto worked carefully, testing, watching. He ignited his left hand and leaped — driving the flaming punch at centre mass. Just before impact, Bizure reached out and tapped Moto's lower ribs with one finger.
The force rebounded. Moto took the full weight of his own strike and hit the wall.
Blood moved down his forehead as he slumped against the stone. He looked up at Bizure.
Bizure looked at the blood. At that specific shade, that exact line of defiance still written in the boy's eyes despite everything.
Something surfaced in him that he kept buried.
Apeworth
They were young. Bizure was always the instigator — start something with the older kids and run, leaving Byron to plant his feet and finish it. Bizure always came back. That was the pattern of them.
He spent half his time at Byron's place. They played along the river at the border between Sango and Pasi where the ambient radiation from both nations collided and the death rate was staggering and, occasionally, the brutal environment gave certain people something extraordinary.
Bizure talked constantly about leaving. About getting out of the dirt. Byron took immense pride in where they were from. Where Bizure saw a squatter camp, Byron saw people who survived conditions that would end anyone else — resilient, independent, forged by the place rather than broken by it.
The day Queen Yasmin's military arrived with their offer, Bizure jumped at it. Byron was unsettled from the start.
The offer became a mandate. The military returned and took what they hadn't been given. They burned Apeworth to the ground. Because the people there belonged to no recognised nation, the rest of the world looked away.
They were lined up in the dirt and ordered to kneel before a Sango General.
Byron refused.
The General walked up to him — hand on his blade, face set. "Pledge your life to your Queen."
Byron looked up. "I have no queen."
The General's face twisted. Before he could draw, Bizure threw himself between them and dropped into a bow. "Please forgive him, sir — the radiation affected his mind. It's a defect. I swear I can get him to cooperate with time."
Disgusted, the General let them live.
That single refusal became the first stone of the rebellion. Byron taught the people of Apeworth that Sango had come for them because the Queen feared what they could become. He vowed they would never yield.
Bizure tried, after. Many times. Tried to talk sense into Byron, to make him see how the world actually worked. But eventually he understood: Byron was going somewhere Bizure wouldn't follow. So he made his choice. Climbed the ranks. Chased comfort and title and the seat at the table he'd always wanted.
Byron, carrying the weight of it, felt a deeper obligation to his people. And in the ashes of Apeworth, something was born.
The Rebound
The dust settled. Moto wiped his forehead and looked at Bizure.
The thud through the ground rather than through his body. The shoe blown off when the explosion was at his face. The rebound from my own punch.
He's transferring it. Any kinetic energy, any force, any damage — redirected into whatever his palms or bare feet are touching at the moment of impact. The only way to hurt him is if he isn't grounded.
Moto's expression shifted. The plan formed in the space of one breath.
Bizure noticed the change in his eyes — the specific quality that meant figured it out. He rolled his shoulders and pressed his bare foot firmly against the stone.
"Stubborn kid, aren't you," he said.
Descending Darkness
Below, frustrated that Najo kept countering his brute force and showing no signs of tiring, Eel changed tactics. He sent a violent surge of electricity through the overhead lights and plunged the room into absolute black.
Before Najo's eyes could begin to adjust, a slippery hand closed around his ankle and yanked him off his feet. He was dragged across the stone floor and pulled straight into the deep-water pool.
The cold hit his system like a door slamming shut. He thrashed, but Eel's grip was iron, pulling him down into darkness. He reached for the lightning — and stopped. Completely submerged. It would cook him alive.
His lungs began to burn. The last of his oxygen left him in small escaping bubbles, rising toward a surface that felt very far away. The dark closed in.
Freefall
Two kilometres above the prison, the wind was freezing and absolute.
Hawk had stopped waiting for Snake to engage her. She'd grabbed him by the collar and taken off, climbing until the landscape below was a miniature map and the air was thin and cold.
She stopped. Looked him dead in the eye.
And let go.
She flared her wings and flew the other direction.
Gravity made its decision. The wind screamed in Snake's ears as the earth rushed up. A cold sweat broke across his forehead for the first time since their reunion.
She's actually serious.
The Alleys of Zen
In the tear-gas corridor, Aemon's tricks had run out entirely.
His clones — blind, choking — stumbled and fell. Tomato moved among them at a leisurely pace, bringing his foot down on each one until it disappeared. Crunch. Gone. Another. Gone. Onion watched from the back of the corridor, laughing.
Then there was one left.
Aemon dropped to his knees, eyes burning, vision dissolved into pain. He felt the cold tip of Tomato's blade press against the centre of his chest.
His mind, in the absence of any other option, went somewhere unexpected. Not the rebellion. Not his friends. It went to Zen. To the monks who used to chase him through the streets. He had always told himself he hated it there — the strictness, the expectations, the walls of the palace.
But looking back at it now, from the floor of a Sango prison corridor with a blade at his chest — it had been fun. The monks had been patient with him past any reasonable limit, which he understood better now, knowing what Grillet had been doing behind his back all along. Even when he ran away and refused to come back, the civilians left food in the alleyways so he wouldn't go hungry.
They were good people.
A strange peace settled.
He stopped screaming. He stopped thrashing. He closed his burning eyes and waited.
The Glitch
The whistle of a blade.
Then a sequence of wet, slashing sounds, and something heavy hit Aemon's shoulders and the floor around him.
He snapped his eyes open.
Tomato was gone. In his place: a diced pile of quivering wet plant matter.
Aemon let out a high-pitched sound, scrambled backward, and looked up.
Lilly stood over the remains.
He slapped his hand over his mouth. Play it cool. He cleared his throat and forced his posture into something that might read as calculated. "I was distracting them."
"Are you okay?" Lilly's eyes were wide.
"Yeah, well." His voice cracked slightly. "There's a lot of stuff you don't know about me." He reached into his pouch. "Buy me some time. I need this herb to heal my clones."
"You bet," she said.
The chopped plant matter was already twitching. Tendrils snapped together, roots finding roots, Tomato pulling his severed form back into a shape and reaching for the fallen katana.
Aemon paused.
His enhanced vision caught something Lilly couldn't see.
Hovering at her shoulder, mimicking her exact stance with a phantom blade of its own: the spirit that lived inside the sword. Settling into the fight the way a long-absent thing settles back into a familiar place.
But as the spirit shifted its weight, Aemon's eyes narrowed.
Around the spirit's neck — fresh, deeply scarred, burned into the ethereal flesh in the precise shape of a human hand.