After their introduction to sensory training, Squad 4 took a breather. After all, that was the first time Elementaru Hayate had used his augment on them seriously. Fucking time dilation and energy tendrils. And they knew he was holding back severely. Most of the ports on his suit and arms never even opened.
Nathaniel remembered the last moments clearly as his sensory output captured each second in impossible detail.
Augment: AUTHORITY active.
The ten-meter radius around his body was the highest sensory move he could pull off at that point. In that instant, he felt the immediate giant gauntlet-sized void breach before it fully formed. He avoided acting on the basic tactile and immediate telekinesis he had subconsciously subsumed off Valarie, instead using it subtly on himself as he dodged. Even then, the blow grazed his left bicep.
Then the rest came.
A right hook.
A storm of energy tendrils.
He was slammed against the wall hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs.
They were fighting blind, and Elementaru was enjoying every second of it.
Hell, Ria bumped into Shiro. George accidentally shocked Alucard. Oliver seemed to be the only one partially keeping up, and even then it was a challenge. He couldn't pin Elementaru down, while Alucard somehow kept managing to find him regardless.
Elementaru enjoyed their lag in decision-making in the most literal sense. He pulsed and flared their power signatures in intervals just to let them see. Under his mask, scarred flesh stretched slightly as sharp orange irises came alive. Three glowing bars reminiscent of hour, minute, and second hands illuminated within his pupils as he accelerated further.
Thin tendrils fired out rapidly, tripping them up. A far safer version of a technique that would normally dice people and abhorrent beings into mangled flesh.
Oh, the joys of teaching the next generation.
Now they were on break after two hours of sustained combat, exhausted beyond reason, while Elementaru merely looked slightly worse for wear.
The false biome tech shut down.
Lights returned.
Sound returned.
Everything came flooding back at once after being trapped in what felt like a sensory deprivation chamber.
It hurt.
The moment the lights turned on, Nathaniel shut his eyes tightly as the sudden return of sensory output fucked with his vision. His eyes shifted from their rainbow mantis shrimp adaptation back to base form.
Elementaru noticed immediately.
His mind began reaching conclusions about what his student's augment really was.
Because then Nathaniel removed his gauntlet out of view of the others.
And a fast-moving tendril shot toward him like a kill strike.
Not that Elementaru would actually kill him.
He just wanted to poke the bear with intent.
What followed was not expected.
A reflex.
Maybe more than that.
Nathaniel's eyes flared crimson before shifting into that strange mantis shrimp configuration again. His uncovered right arm popped and segmented violently, hardening and expanding into a steel-like shell. An elbow spine extended outward, the tip almost resembling a blade as the arm rapidly reshaped itself into a form eerily similar to the discarded gauntlet on the floor.
The tendril stopped dead against it.
Quietly.
Effortlessly.
Then his silver eyes returned.
Awareness caught up.
Nathaniel looked surprised for only a fraction of a second before forcing himself to play it cool, but internally he was screaming.
He had just reacted to an attack above his power grade while in base form.
He wouldn't realize it, but whatever resided in his mind was active. It possessed enough foresight to match attack patterns for plausible deniability, reshape the armor into a familiar form, and move fast enough to intercept what was supposed to be an unavoidable strike.
Inside the void of his fractured consciousness, Arc Kodonaki laughed.
Easy.
That was slow.
The man could go harder. Any time, really.
Arc had seen Elementaru work in the past. What Nathaniel experienced was a grossly reduced version of his actual combat style. The man was practically joking while maintaining plausible deniability.
Now watch Elementaru conclude Nathaniel was some kind of elemental rainbow mantis shrimp.
Arc even mimicked the same punching pattern intentionally, channeling the absorbed kinetic energy from the fight into the motion.
It had been a while since he laughed.
In here, he was somewhat free.
Free to express long-suppressed emotions while floating within the void, staring down at his own astral body bound to the crimson star-like core at its centre.
Bored.
Amused.
Angry.
Whatever happened after the Darium incident had shattered him mentally. Multiple personalities. Fractured consciousness. And now some blank knockoff sat in the driver's seat wearing his body while Sanctum tampered with what was already a broken mind.
Fucking Sanctum.
Messing with his head while he was unconscious after the Darium fuckup.
The break room was silent except for heavy breathing, crackling residual energy, and the distant hum of cooling biome generators.
Nobody wanted to move.
Ria was sprawled across the floor face-first, one arm raised weakly.
"I'm filing a complaint," she groaned. "There is no fucking way old men should move like that."
"I am thirty-eight," Elementaru Hayate replied flatly from across the room.
"That is ancient."
George barked out a tired laugh before immediately regretting it as pain shot through his ribs. "Nah, she's right. You were trying to murder us."
"I was trying to educate you."
"You threw me through a wall."
"You survived."
"That is not the point."
Elementaru ignored him.
His eyes remained on Nathaniel.
Not openly.
That would've been suspicious.
But Nathaniel noticed anyway.
Or rather, Arc did.
Inside the void, Arc leaned back against nothingness, one leg hanging over empty space as crimson stars drifted around him lazily.
There it is.
Suspicion.
Curiosity.
Calculation.
Elementaru wasn't stupid. Far from it. The man had decades of combat experience and enough perception to notice irregularities others missed instinctively.
Nathaniel Alderman was becoming an irregularity.
Back in reality, Nathaniel flexed his right hand slowly beneath the table.
Normal.
No armor.
No segmentation.
Nothing.
Yet the memory remained vivid.
That reaction speed.
That shape adaptation.
That feeling.
It hadn't felt like activating an augment.
It felt automatic.
Natural.
Like his body had remembered something before his mind did.
"You okay?" Shiro signed quietly from beside him.
Nathaniel blinked before giving her a small grin.
"Yeah. Just tired."
She stared at him for another second.
Not convinced.
Shiro had become frighteningly good at reading emotional fluctuations. Nathaniel's aura never fully aligned with his expressions anymore. Sometimes it felt layered, like multiple emotional frequencies occupied the same space.
Most people couldn't perceive that.
She could.
Across the room, Oliver sat against the wall with his arms folded, shadows lazily twisting around his fingers.
"I noticed something," he said suddenly.
The room quieted slightly.
"That's dangerous," Ria muttered.
Oliver ignored her.
"When Hayate accelerated beyond our visual range, everyone lost track of him except Alucard."
Alucard remained seated silently, massive frame relaxed while blood slowly regenerated torn tissue beneath his shirt.
Oliver continued.
"But Nathaniel reacted too."
Nathaniel's smile stayed perfectly intact.
"Barely."
"No," Oliver replied calmly. "Not barely."
George glanced over now.
Ria lifted her head.
Even Elementaru stayed quiet.
Oliver's dark eyes narrowed slightly.
"You reacted before impact. Your body moved before the tendril fully entered your blind spot."
Nathaniel shrugged loosely.
"Instinct?"
"Instinct doesn't overclock your god damn reaction time."
Silence.
Arc laughed internally.
This guy is annoying.
Nathaniel rubbed the back of his neck casually. "Probably my augment compensating under stress."
"Your kinetic muscle augment does not generate armored bio-metal."
"That sounds racist against augments somehow."
Ria snorted.
George coughed trying not to laugh.
The tension loosened slightly, but Elementaru remained observant.
His enhanced perception replayed the moment repeatedly in his mind.
The transformation wasn't random.
It was adaptive.
Purposeful.
Efficient.
Something learned and perfected.
Most importantly, it resembled a pre-emptive transformation rather than reactive activation.
That bothered him.
Because there were only a handful of augment classifications capable of doing something like that naturally, and every single one was considered dangerous.
His gaze drifted toward Nathaniel's discarded gauntlet resting near the wall.
Then toward Nathaniel's arm.
The resemblance was exact.
Not close.
Exact.
Interesting, he thought.
Inside the void, Arc slowly stopped smiling.
Because beneath the humour and amusement, another feeling lingered.
Something colder.
Fragments.
Disconnected memories surfaced around him like shattered glass floating in dark water.
Steel tables.
White rooms.
Restraining mechanisms digging into flesh.
Voices.
"Subject compatibility unstable."
"Increase Norvanite integration."
"Memory partition successful."
"If this personality survives, proceed with behavioural conditioning."
Arc's expression darkened.
Around the crimson core, the void pulsed once violently.
Far away in reality, Nathaniel suddenly froze mid-conversation.
A sharp pain stabbed through his skull.
His vision distorted.
For a split second, the room became white.
Surgical lights.
Blood.
Screaming.
Then it vanished.
Nathaniel nearly fell forward before catching himself on the table.
"Nathaniel?" George asked immediately.
"I'm good," he said too quickly.
Elementaru's eyes narrowed again.
Not because of the stumble.
Because for the briefest instant, Nathaniel's uratsu had spiked and changed completely for a brief instant.
It stopped then it was back to normal.
Nathaniel exhaled slowly, forcing his heartbeat down.
Inside the void, Arc stared silently at the floating memory fragments.
His smile was gone now.
Amaterasu.
Even after all this time, just thinking about the Organization made him want to tear something apart.
The break room settled back into uneasy silence after Nathaniel brushed the moment off.
But inside the void, Arc Kodonaki stood motionless.
The fragmented memories surrounding him shifted again, but this time they were older.
Far older.
Not white surgical rooms.
Not Sanctum laboratories.
Cold steel chambers.
Prayer chants.
Black-and-gold insignias burned into reinforced walls.
The smell of incense mixed with blood.
Amaterasu.
Now that brought genuine irritation.
Arc clicked his tongue as memories surfaced in broken pieces around the crimson core.
Children lined against walls.
Failed vessels.
Bodies burned apart by excess energy saturation, not uratsu, not ura but something refined , divine even and that's why they started using norvanite.
because most subjects were imply hollowed out from within , drained and dying from the process of trying to hold such condensed power.
The Amaterasu weren't scientists pretending to play Arbiters like Sanctum.
They were believers.
Fanatics.
Cultists.
That somehow made them worse.
They didn't create monsters out of ambition alone.
They did it out of worship.
Back in reality, Nathaniel remained leaned forward slightly, fingers pressed against his temple as the lingering headache faded.
He didn't understand the flashes.
Only emotions came through clearly.
Disgust.
Violence.
Hatred old enough to feel instinctual.
All coming through like suppressed static
Across the room, Elementaru Hayate watched quietly while pretending not to.
Nathaniel' uratsu fluctuations were becoming increasingly inconsistent.
Not unstable.
Layered.
Like something supressed occupied the same body and or mind .
Most people would've written it off as stress or a sudden headache or trauma after all he was dealing wit nutcases on his team and this one was supposed to be an amnesiac.
Elementaru wasn't most people.
Inside the void, Arc exhaled sharply through his nose.
Sanctum only scrambled what was already damaged.
That realization annoyed him more than the memories themselves.
The fractures started long before Darium.
Long before Nathaniel Alderman existed.
The Amaterasu had done the real damage.
He remembered glimpses now.
Being treated less like a child and more like an offering and or sacrifice and test subject then later tool.
Monitored constantly.
Tested constantly.
Every emotional response observed for "compatibility, then suppressed."
Every violent instinct encouraged.
Because to them he wasn't Arc Kodonaki.
He was a potential vessel.
A container.
one of three
A future body for Evaltol.
The Herald of Energy.
Arc's expression darkened further.
The irony almost made him laugh.
They spent years trying to shape him into something capable of containing a god only for him to somehow disappear die a bunch of times after fighting in a murder gauntlet and end up hear mind separated living in a shell behind a dupe in the real world
Around him, the crimson void pulsed softly.
Fragments of memory continued drifting.
A younger Arc standing over corpses inside a ruined testing chamber.
Instructors and scientists pretending not to look afraid.
Energy so dense it distorted surrounding space.
Then another memory surfaced.
one of a white haired odd looking woman with weird horns.
For the first time since the fragments began appearing, Arc's expression softened slightly.
Not much.
Just enough.
She had looked at him differently back then.
Not like a vessel.
Not like a weapon.
A person her son her magnum opus he wanted to see her again Mother.
That memory faded quickly.
The void dimmed again.
Back in reality, Nathaniel suddenly relaxed without understanding why.
The violent pressure inside his chest eased slightly.
Shirou noticed immediately.
Her gaze lingered on him quietly.
She couldn't hear thoughts, but emotions carried weight, and for a brief moment the suffocating hostility around Nathaniel had lessened.
Then Ria ruined the atmosphere immediately.
"If we're doing sensory training again tomorrow," she groaned from the floor, "I'm bringing a gun."
"You don't own a gun," George replied.
"I'll steal one from my mom's guild armoury."
"That explains so much about you."
Meanwhile, Elementaru finally stood from the wall.
"You all performed adequately."
"That is the nicest insult I've ever heard," Oliver muttered.
Elementaru ignored him.
"But your reaction timing remains poor. Most of you still rely too heavily on visual confirmation before decision-making."
His orange eyes drifted briefly toward Nathaniel again.
"Combat perception is not sight alone."
Nathaniel met his gaze calmly.
For a moment, neither spoke.
Then Elementaru continued walking toward the exit.
"Rest. Training resumes tomorrow."
The door shut behind him.
Silence lingered for a second.
Then George groaned loudly. "He's definitely trying to kill us."
"No," Oliver replied calmly. "If he wanted us dead we'd already be dead."
"That somehow made me feel worse."