The Great Siphon hummed with a sound that wasn't heard so much as felt in the teeth. It was a deep, sub-atomic thrum that shook the very foundations of the obsidian spire. Mistress Hana stood at the center of the vertical shaft, her silhouette framed by a pillar of white-hot energy that roared upward from the moon-base's core. This wasn't the filtered, polite energy of the upper classrooms; this was the Raw Stream, a supercritical fluid of aetheric ions that moved with a turbulence factor so high it could shred a standard Celestial's neural network in seconds.
Hana gestured toward the roaring pillar, her voice amplified by the room's internal resonance. She explained that they were no longer dealing with simple power, but with molecular valence. A Celestial body, she told them, was not a container for energy, but a conductive bridge. To survive the Siphon, they had to eliminate their own internal resistance. If a student's Ohmic resistance was too high, the energy would build up in their joints, turning their bone marrow into ash through a process of rapid Joule heating. If it was too low, the stream would simply strip their consciousness away, leaving behind a hollow, breathing shell.
Oni felt the Hydra stir in his blood, sensing the predatory nature of the current. He looked at the holographic terminal on his platform, watching the scrolling data of his own specific conductivity. In the doubled gravity of Pangea, he had learned to keep his aetheric density high just to stay upright, but here, that density was a death sentence. It was like trying to shove a river through a needle. He had to change his fundamental physics.
He closed his eyes and began to visualize his internal architecture as a series of open gates. He started by polarizing the ions in his skin, creating a dielectric sheath that allowed the Raw Stream to slide over his body rather than penetrating his vital organs. It was a delicate, dangerous game of thermal dissipation. As the energy hit his platform, the air around him began to hiss and warp. He called on the resonance of the Transparent Wraiths, using their void-like chill to act as a heat sink, drawing the lethal thermal energy out of his blood and into the cold dark of the Mark.
To his left, Rain was working with the cold precision of a master engineer. While Oni used the beasts to absorb the shock, Rain was practicing phase shifting. He was timing his molecular vibrations so that he only became solid during the troughs of the energy waves, allowing the high-pressure peaks of the stream to pass through his atoms as if he were nothing more than smoke.
Hana pointed at the brothers, her lead-lined cloak snapping in the aetheric gale. She told the class that the Revenants had eliminated the drag of their own ego. They were becoming superconductors, allowing the raw power to move through them with zero net loss because they weren't trying to possess the energy; they were simply letting it exist.
Across the narrow gap of the shaft, the situation was far less stable. Elara's platform was vibrating with a violent, erratic frequency. Her High House suit, designed for the smooth, laminar flow of a peaceful estate, was being hammered by the turbulent flow of the Siphon. The potential difference in her system was peaking, and the indigo glow of her suit was turning a blinding, unstable white. She was trying to store the energy in her internal buffers, acting like a capacitor when she needed to be a wire.
Oni saw the bottleneck effect happening at her solar plexus. The energy was backing up, creating a localized pressure zone that threatened to shatter her nervous system. He didn't think; he simply acted on the instinct of a hunter who knew the shape of a breaking soul. He roared over the sound of the Siphon, telling her to stop trying to hold the charge and to open her gates.
He reached out his hand, flaring his orange suppressor to create an inductive link. By dropping his own internal pressure to near-zero, he turned himself into a low-resistance path, a spiritual grounding wire. He felt the massive overflow of Elara's charge surge into his own body. It felt like molten lead being poured into his veins, the Joule heat of her energy competing with the freezing void of the Wraiths inside him. He gritted his teeth, his charcoal suit beginning to smoke as he balanced the two opposing forces, using his own marrow to bridge the gap between her light and the Raw Stream's fire.
He told her to sync her heartbeat to his pulse, to let his own heavy resonance stabilize her flickering frequency. In that moment, the sixty-five students watching from their own platforms saw the true meaning of conductivity. It wasn't about who had the most power; it was about who could carry the weight of the world without breaking the connection.
The roar of the Great Siphon was a living thing, a physical weight that made every word feel like it had to be carved out of the air. Mistress Hana didn't move from her central dais, but her eyes were narrowed as she watched the data streams for Oni and Elara merge into a single, jagged harmonic on her display.
"Master Sato," Hana said, her voice cutting through the mechanical scream of the shaft without the need for a microphone. "Report on the Revenant's thermal gradient."
Sato's fingers blurred across his holographic interface, his face pale in the reflected white light of the aether pillar. "It's impossible, Mistress. His core temperature is hitting the upper limits of molecular stability. He's taking eighty percent of her inductive load. If his internal grounding fails, the discharge won't just kill them—it'll liquefy the platforms of everyone within ten meters."
Hana stepped to the very edge of her platform, looking down at Oni. His charcoal suit was beginning to glow a dull, dangerous cherry-red at the shoulder joints. "You're playing a dangerous game, Revenant!" she shouted. "You're acting as a transformer for a frequency your body wasn't designed to carry! How long do you think your marrow can act as a heat sink before you reach total structural failure?"
Oni didn't look up at first. His jaw was clamped so tight that a vein in his temple looked ready to burst. The frost from the Transparent Wraiths was fighting the Joule heat of the Siphon, creating a thick, localized fog around his boots.
"As long as it has to," Oni gritted out, the words sounding like grinding stones. He glanced toward Elara, whose indigo suit was finally stopping its erratic flickering. "Open the gates, Elara! Stop fighting the current and just let it wash through the link I've built! Use my blood as your ground!"
Elara's eyes were wide, fixed on the smoke rising from Oni's sleeves. "Oni, stop! I can feel the heat coming off you through the tether! It's too much—you're going to burn out your neural links just to save my buffers!"
"I said open the gates!" Oni roared, and for a second, the predatory gold in his eyes flared so bright it rivaled the Siphon itself.
Mistress Hana watched the exchange with a cold, analytical curiosity. She tapped her wrist, and the roar of the pillar deepened as she increased the flow by another ten percent.
"Mistress, what are you doing?" Sato hissed, his terminal flashing a series of red warnings. "The conductivity levels are already at redline!"
"I'm testing the bridge, Sato," Hana replied calmly. She looked back at Oni. "You want to be the anchor for the Sixty-Five? You want to be the grounding wire for a High House daughter? Then show me the true capacity of the Pangean Mark. If you can't handle the overflow of one girl, you'll never survive the raw feedback of a battlefield."
Rain, standing on his own platform, watched his brother's vitals spike. He didn't move to help; he knew the physics of the link better than anyone. "He's shunting the excess into the void-pockets of the Mark, Mistress!" Rain called out, his voice steady despite the chaos. "But he can't filter the turbulence forever! The entropy is building up in his central nervous system!"
Oni felt the truth of Rain's words. The energy wasn't just passing through him; it was leaving scars. Every cell felt like it was being vibrating at a frequency that wanted to turn his DNA into steam.
"Is that all you've got, Hana?" Oni gasped, his head snapping up to meet her clinical gaze. He reached out with his other hand, symbolically grabbing the air as if he were physically holding the Raw Stream in place. "The Pits were heavier than this! Increase the flow! Let them see what it actually takes to keep this school from falling out of the sky!"
Hana's eyes flashed. "Be careful what you ask for, boy. The Raw Stream doesn't just feed the soul—it judges the vessel."
She made a sharp, sweeping motion with her hand, and the Great Siphon reached maximum capacity, the white light turning a blinding, violet-tinged blue that threatened to swallow everyone in the room.
Oni's head remained bowed for a long moment, his chest heaving as the internal cooling systems of his suit fought to stabilize his core temperature. The charcoal mesh was scorched, the once-sharp lines of his sleeves now blurred by heat-warped fibers. When he finally looked up, the gold of the Manticore hadn't just receded—it had been burned away by the sheer purity of the resonance he had shared with Elara.
His eyes were dark, hollowed out by exhaustion, but they held a clarity that silenced the room. He watched her stumble toward him, her hands trembling as she reached out to steady him.
"You almost burned out," Elara whispered, her voice cracking as she scanned the damage to his suit. "Why didn't you sever the link when it started to redline? You could have saved yourself the scarring."
Oni reached out, his gloved hand catching her shoulder to keep her from falling. His touch was no longer the biting cold of the Wraiths; it was a steady, heavy warmth that felt as solid as the moon beneath them.
"I spent three years in Pangea watching things break because they tried to stand alone," Oni said, his voice a low, tired rasp that carried through the silent chamber. "The Hydra, the Chimera... they're strong, but they're lonely. They fight the world until the world eventually pushes back harder."
He looked at her, his gaze locking onto hers with an intensity that made the surrounding students pull back.
"Vane wants us to be whispers. Hana wants us to be bridges. But a bridge is useless if it doesn't have a foundation that won't move." Oni took a slow, heavy breath, the steam still rising from his scorched chest-piece. "If you're going to be the anchor that keeps me from drifting into the beasts, Elara, then I have to be the mountain you lean on. A mountain doesn't let go just because it gets hit by a storm. It just waits for the sky to clear."
The Sixty-Five students who had been watching from the shadows felt the weight of his words. They hadn't just seen a display of power; they had seen the birth of a new kind of hierarchy—one built on a grim, unyielding loyalty rather than the competitive ego of the S-1 elites.
Elara leaned into his hand, the indigo of her suit flickering back to life as it drew from the residual stability of his field. "You're a stubborn fool, Oni," she murmured, a small, tired smile touching her lips.
"I'm a Revenant," Oni corrected, though his grip on her shoulder softened. "We don't know how to let go."
Rain watched from his own platform, his arms crossed over his chest. He saw the way the other students were looking at his brother—the mockery was gone, replaced by a terrified, hushed reverence. He stepped forward, his boots clicking rhythmically on the metal docking ramp.
"The bridge held," Rain said, his voice a cool, grounding edge. "But the bridge needs maintenance. Mistress Hana is already looking at the data, Oni. You just showed the school that a Revenant's conductivity can't be measured by their standard sensors. They aren't going to let that go."
Oni didn't look at the faculty. He kept his eyes on Elara, the orange throb of his suppressor finally settling into a slow, peaceful rhythm. "Let them look. They wanted to see the Raw Stream. I just showed them what it looks like when the stream finds a reason to stay still."
Mistress Hana watched them from the central dais, her expression unreadable, but her hand was still hovering over the manual override for the Siphon. She knew that the "mountain" Oni had built today wasn't just a tactical advantage—it was a defiance of the very way Celestials were supposed to function.
The walk back to the dorms was a gauntlet of silence. It was 5:00 PM, and the artificial "dusk" of the academy's lighting system had shifted to a deep, bruised violet. Every student they passed in the obsidian corridors pressed themselves against the walls, their eyes darting between Oni's scorched charcoal mesh and the steady, protective way he walked beside Elara.
When they finally reached the heavy reinforced doors of the brothers' quarters, the air felt thick with the day's residue—the cold of the Mirror Room, the scream of the Siphon, and the lingering heat of the Raw Stream.
Rain moved immediately to the tech-bench, his fingers dancing over a diagnostic array. "Suits off," he commanded, his voice clinical but underscored with a brother's concern. "I need to check for micro-fractures in the weave. If the conductivity nodes are fused, you'll be walking around in a Faraday cage tomorrow."
Oni sat heavily on a bench, his movements stiff. As he peeled back the scorched sleeves, the skin of his forearms revealed the cost of his "mountain" philosophy. Fine, jagged lines—Lichtenberg figures—traced his veins where the electricity had tried to ground itself through his tissue.
"You're lucky you're a Celestial," Rain muttered, scanning Oni's arm with a handheld sensor. "A human would have had their blood boiled into steam. Look at these readouts. Your Ohmic resistance spiked so high it nearly inverted your aetheric polarity."
Oni watched the diagnostic screen, his eyes tired. "It was the only way to stabilize her, Rain. If I hadn't taken the load, the turbulence would have shattered her nervous system."
Elara stood by the window, watching the moon-base's artificial horizon. She looked back at Oni, her own indigo suit showing signs of stress at the seams. "It's 5:00 PM. We've been awake for twelve hours, and I feel like I've lived six years already. The clock hasn't even finished its first day, and the school is terrified of us."
"Good," Oni said, his voice a low vibration. "Fear is a better shield than these suits. They need to know that the 'truth' they learned about the black site isn't the only thing we're hiding. They think we're monsters? Let them. As long as they stay out of the way of the mission."
Rain tossed a fresh canister of bio-conductive gel to Oni. "Apply that to the nodes. It'll help the suit re-knitting process. But Elara's right. We didn't just survive the classes today; we redefined the curriculum. Hana isn't going to let that go. Sato was looking at your data like you were a new species of engine."
"I am an engine," Oni replied, his gaze shifting to the orange throb of his suppressor sitting on the table. "I'm just an engine that finally found a reason to run smooth."
He looked at Elara, the silence between them no longer heavy, but grounding. The day had started with the terror of the Mirror Room, but it was ending here, in the dim light of the repair bay, with the knowledge that the mountain could hold.
"Six years," Elara whispered, looking at the countdown timer on the wall. "Do you think we can keep this up for six years? Being the anchor and the mountain?"
Oni stood up, the bio-gel already beginning to cool the burn of his nerves. "We don't have a choice. The humans are coming, the school is watching, and my mother is still in that hole. We don't just keep it up. We get heavier."
The door hissed shut as Elara stepped out into the corridor, leaving the brothers in the humming quiet of their quarters. The air in the room still smelled of ozone and ionized charcoal.
Oni didn't move from his seat. He looked at his hands, watching the Lichtenberg patterns on his skin slowly fade under the cooling layer of bio-conductive gel. The school wasn't some human laboratory; it was a Celestial fortress, founded by their own kind to forge their people back into the apex predators they were meant to be. The "Perfect Frequency" wasn't a human experiment—it was a Celestial science, a refinement of their natural-born sovereignty over aether.
"The Siphon's output was tuned to 500\text{ THz}," Rain said, breaking the silence. He was hunched over the workbench, his fingers moving with surgical precision as he stripped back the scorched layers of Oni's sleeve. "The faculty knows exactly what they're doing. They weren't trying to break you today, Oni. They were calibrating the room to see if we could actually handle the resonant load of a full battalion."
Oni looked at the scorched mesh on the bench. "The suit failed because it's still using standard Dielectric Barriers. If the school is teaching us to be Superconductors, the gear needs to match the biology. We aren't humans in tin suits; we're Celestials. Our gear should be an extension of our skin."
Rain nodded, picking up a spool of Hyper-Conductive Silver Filament. "Exactly. The faculty expects us to recognize the inefficiency. Sato didn't look worried when your suit started smoking; he looked like he was waiting for me to fix the flaw. He wants to see if I can integrate a Transverse Electromagnetic (TEM) wave guide into the weave."
The brothers worked in a practiced rhythm. This wasn't about "fixing" broken clothes; it was a high-level engineering session. They were students at the most advanced martial academy in existence, and they were treating their equipment with the same reverence a scholar treats a manuscript.
"I'm re-routing the cooling channels to run parallel to your primary nerve clusters," Rain explained, his blue-veined suit glowing as he interfaced with the repair-bay's nanites. "It'll increase the Thermal Dissipation Factor by forty percent. If we hit the Mirror Room tomorrow and Hana cranks the pressure, you won't have to shunt the heat into the Mark. You can keep it in the suit and use it as a feedback loop."
Oni stood up, testing the range of motion in his shoulder as the suit's self-repair nanites began to weave the new filament. "The faculty is right to push. If we can't find the 'Perfect Frequency' here, in a controlled environment, we'll never hold a line against the Ascended. They have the numbers; we have the resonance. The frequency has to be flawless."
He walked to the window, looking out at the sprawling obsidian architecture of the academy. This place was built by their ancestors to ensure they never lost their grip on the stars. The 100x gravity, the Siphon, the Mirror Room—it was all a rigorous, beautiful tradition of excellence.
"It's 6:15," Oni noted, checking the internal chronometer. "The suits will be finished by 7:00. We should review the Siphon data again. I want to see exactly where the Impedance Mismatch occurred when Elara joined the link. If I'm going to be the mountain, I need to know my own structural limits down to the last micron."
Rain smiled, a sharp, academic glint in his eyes. "Already pulling the logs. If we get this right, tomorrow's lesson won't just be about surviving. It'll be about mastery."
Rain's hands were steady as he stood beside Chief Engineer Kael in the depths of the Hangar. The sheer scale of the machinery was staggering—the base's Integrated Suit-Fabrication Matrix was a massive, humming loom of aetheric printers and microscopic laser arrays.
"Sato told me you've got a knack for the internals," Kael said, tapping a console that displayed a cross-section of a standard Revenant suit. "Standard issue is built for durability and generic conductivity. But you? You're a Revenant. You're pushing more raw power than these silver-ion threads were meant to carry. Look at the Valence Band."
Rain leaned in, his eyes darting across the readouts. "The bottleneck isn't just the thread density. It's the Skin Effect. At high frequencies, the aether only travels on the surface of the conductive fibers. The core of the thread is wasted space. If I can weave the threads in a Litz configuration—braiding them so each strand takes turns on the outside—I can reduce the resistance and stop the overheating."
Kael grunted, a look of genuine respect crossing his weathered face. "Litz braiding for aetheric flow? That's advanced. It'll double your assembly time, but it'll let you carry 30% more load without the Joule heat. Go ahead, initiate the manual override on the loom. Let's see if you can program the weave yourself."
Rain's fingers flew across the interface. He wasn't just fixing a suit anymore; he was engineering a masterpiece. He began to redesign the Capacitive Buffers near the gauntlets, integrating a feedback loop that would allow Oni to store the kinetic energy of an impact and convert it back into raw conductivity.
High above the hangars, on the moon-silvered balcony, Oni stood with Elara. The data he projected between them flickered with the math of their shared resonance.
"Rain is down there rewriting the physics of our gear," Oni said, watching the graphs. "But the gear is only half the battle. This part—the Symmetric Conductivity—that's on us. Look at where our waves overlapped during the peak of the Siphon."
He pointed to a section where their two signatures had smoothed into a single, unbreakable line. "When you stopped fighting and let the energy flow through me, we hit a state of Quantum Coherence. The resistance dropped to zero because we weren't two separate Celestials anymore. We were a single circuit. That's the 'Perfect Frequency' the school wants."
Elara moved closer, her gaze moving from the holographic math to the quiet intensity in Oni's eyes. "It felt... different," she admitted. "In the High House, we're taught that our power is a throne—something to sit on and guard. But today, with you, it felt like being part of the wind. I didn't feel smaller because I leaned on you, Oni. I felt larger."
Oni turned to her, the orange glow of his suit reflecting in the violet of her eyes. "The school calls it a tactical advantage. But in Pangea, we called it a Blood Anchor. It's the reason the brothers survived the Pits. You don't just lean on the mountain, Elara. You become part of it. If we can do this in the Mirror Room tomorrow, we won't just pass the trial. We'll change the way this academy thinks about power."
He reached out, his hand hovering near hers. He didn't touch her, but the air between their palms began to thrum with a low, synchronized vibration—a private frequency, honed by trust and refined by the hard science of their survival.
"Tomorrow," Oni whispered, "we show them that the mountain doesn't just stand still. It leads."
Rain focused entirely on the loom, his consciousness seemingly merging with the fabrication matrix. He wasn't just watching the silver-ion threads weave; he was monitoring the Molecular Valence of every single strand.
"The standard weave uses a simple lattice," Rain explained to Kael, his voice tight with concentration. "But at 100x gravity, the aetheric particles undergo Bose-Einstein condensation—they clump together. If the weave isn't adaptive, the clumped aether creates a 'dam' that causes the suit to rupture. I'm programming the nanites to create a Variable-Density Mesh."
He adjusted the Litz configuration, ensuring that the primary conductive channels were braided in a way that maximized their Effective Surface Area. This would prevent the "Skin Effect" that had caused Oni's suit to smoke earlier. By spreading the energy across thousands of micro-filaments, the heat would be dissipated before it could ever reach the skin.
"Look at the Joule Heating projections," Rain pointed to the screen. "By using this braid, I've dropped the thermal resistance by sixty percent. Oni can stay at peak output for three times longer now."
Kael watched the fabrication arms move with a speed that would have blurred human eyes. "You're not just fixing a suit, kid. You're building a Superconducting Shroud. If this works, the SHINRA-OS sensors won't even be able to find his internal heat signature. He'll look like a cold ghost until he chooses to strike."
Rain initiated the final sealing process. The two suits—one charcoal for Oni, one deep blue for himself—emerged from the matrix. They looked identical to the standard issue, but beneath the surface, they were masterpieces of Celestial engineering. Rain had even integrated a Harmonic Bridge into the gauntlets—a dedicated hardware link that would make the "Blood Anchor" with Elara even more efficient.
"It's done," Rain said, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. It was nearly 10:00 PM. He felt a deep sense of satisfaction. He hadn't just studied the machine; he had mastered a piece of it.
He packed the suits into their pressurized carrying cases. He knew that when Oni stepped into the Mirror Room tomorrow, he wouldn't just be a student in a uniform. He'd be a weapon wearing a skin specifically designed to channel the "Perfect Frequency" without a single watt of wasted energy.
"Thanks, Kael," Rain said, nodding to the old engineer.
"Don't thank me," Kael grunted, watching him go. "Just make sure you don't blow a hole in my moon with those things."
Rain carried the cases back to their quarters, the weight of the new technology feeling solid and purposeful in his grip. When he entered, the room was dimly lit, save for the blue holographic glow of the lunar tide charts Oni had been studying. It was nearly 11:00 PM, but the air was charged with a restless, pre-combat energy.
Oni stood up as Rain set the cases on the central table. Without a word, Rain flipped the latches. The suits didn't just sit there; they seemed to drink in the ambient light, the charcoal and deep blue surfaces matte and hungry.
"The Litz braiding worked," Rain said, his voice quiet but filled with the exhaustion of a successful hunt. "I managed to integrate a secondary cooling loop that taps directly into the kinetic energy of your movements. The harder you fight, the more the suit breathes. And the Harmonic Bridge in the gauntlets... it's hardware-locked now. When you take Elara's hand, the suit won't wait for your brain to tell it what to do. It'll sync the moment your skin breaks the dielectric field."
Oni ran a hand over the charcoal mesh. It was cold—unnaturally cold. "You didn't just fix it, Rain. You turned it into a predator."
"I turned it into a Celestial," Rain corrected.
They spent the next hour in a meticulous final check. They didn't talk about the school's "Perfect Frequency" or the looming threat of the Ascended Humans. They talked about impedance matching and thermal thresholds. They were two masters prepping their blades. By midnight, the suits were sealed back in their pressurized units, and the brothers finally collapsed into a deep, disciplined sleep.
The 0700 alarm was a sharp, electronic chime that cut through the dark. They moved through their morning routine in synchronized silence, sliding into the new suits. The fit was perfection—the silver-ion threads tightened against their muscles, reacting to their heart rates before they even stepped out the door.
As they marched toward the Mirror Room, the obsidian halls of the academy seemed to hum in anticipation. They met Elara at the Observation Wing. She was dressed in her standard High House indigo, but she looked pale, her eyes darting to the heavy, crystalline texture of Oni's new sleeves.
"You look different today," she whispered as they walked. "Both of you. Like you're vibrating on a frequency I can almost hear."
"That's the bridge," Rain said, checking his wrist-comm. "Don't fight it today, Elara. Just lean into the mountain."
They reached the massive, vacuum-sealed doors of the Mirror Room. Mistress Hana was already there, her tactical shroud shimmering. She didn't offer a morning greeting. She simply looked at Oni's suit, her eyes narrowing as she picked up the lack of a thermal signature.
"You've been busy in the hangars, Rain," Hana remarked, her voice echoing in the polished hallway. "Kael told me you have a talent for 're-threading' the standard. Let's see if your engineering can survive a Phase-Inversion."
The doors hissed open, revealing a perfect, shimmering sphere of reflective alloy. The Sixty-Five were already lined up along the transparent perimeter, their faces tight with a mix of awe and genuine terror. They had seen what Oni did with the Siphon; they were here to see if the Mirror Room could break the god he was becoming.
"Inside," Hana commanded. "The exercise is Active Resonance. The room will mimic your frequency, invert it, and fire it back at you. If your timing is off by a millisecond, the destructive interference will collapse your internal organs. You have to be perfect, or you will be nothing."
Oni stepped onto the central glass dais, the silver-ion threads of his suit glowing a faint, dangerous orange. He held out his hand to Elara.
"The mountain is ready," Oni said, his eyes locking onto Hana's. "Turn on the lights."
Hana signaled the booth, and the mirrors began to glow with a blinding, predatory light.