"Can't!" Kidlat hollered back, spinning around with that infuriating grin that made Master Kanlaon's left eye twitch. "I'm conducting a field test!"
The old herbalist stumbled to a halt, ladle still raised like a weapon of mass destruction. "A field test for what exactly?!"
"Theory of gravitational jumping!" Kidlat announced with the kind of scientific confidence usually reserved for people who actually understood science.
To prove his point, he scrambled onto the nearest boulder, the same one where Mrs. Berta, dried her laundry and had explicitly forbidden anyone from climbing. With the theatrical flair of a circus performer and the common sense of a concussed chicken, Kidlat launched himself into the air.
For one glorious moment, he actually seemed to defy the laws of physics. His lab coat billowed dramatically behind him, his wild hair caught the afternoon light, and his blue eyes sparkled with pure, unadulterated joy. He looked like he might actually achieve flight through sheer stubbornness.
Then reality kicked in with the subtlety of a brick to the face.
THUMP.
Ki crashed directly into Meredith, the village's most philosophical sheep, who had been peacefully contemplating the meaning of grass in the square below. The impact sent both boy and sheep tumbling in a tangle of limbs, wool, and wounded dignity.
Meredith, to her credit, took the unexpected human projectile with remarkable composure. She extricated herself from the pile with the patient expression of someone who had long ago accepted that the universe was fundamentally absurd. Fixing Kidlat with a look that somehow managed to convey both disappointment and mild concern for his mental health, she let out a single, judgmental Baaaaah and returned to her philosophical grass-eating.
"Did I fly?" Kidlat mumbled from his new position face-first in the dirt, his voice muffled but his optimism undimmed.
"You flopped!" Master Kanlaon wheezed, finally reaching the scene of the crime. "Like a dying fish! With less grace!"
Kidlat rolled over, spitting out a mouthful of grass and grinning up at the sky. "Flop is still technically a form of flight. Just... more horizontal than expected."
A small crowd had gathered, because nothing drew villagers like the promise of Kidlat making a spectacular fool of himself. Elder Diwa shook her head with the weary resignation of someone who had watched this exact scenario play out at least twelve times before. Young Berto snickered behind his hand until his mother swatted him. Even Mushu the champion goat had wandered over to observe, probably taking notes for his own inevitable triumph over the laws of physics.
"Boy," Master Kanlaon said, offering Kidlat a hand up, "one of these days your experiments are going to get you killed."
"But think of the scientific breakthrough!" Kidlat protested, accepting the help and bouncing to his feet with the resilience of a rubber ball. "I was airborne for at least three seconds!"
"You were falling for three seconds," corrected Mrs. Rosa, who ran the village's tiny market stall. "There's a difference."
"Philosophically speaking---"
"No." Master Kanlaon pointed his ladle at Kidlat with the authority of a man who had dealt with thirteen years of this nonsense. "No philosophical speaking, no theoretical discourse, no scientific breakthroughs. Just... just go wash the sheep smell off yourself before dinner."
Kidlat opened his mouth to argue, probably about the fundamental nature of achievement or the relative merits of plum-based propulsion, but Master Kanlaon's expression suggested that further debate might result in the creative application of that ladle to sensitive parts of Kidlat's anatomy.
"Fine," Kidlat sighed dramatically, as if he was making an enormous sacrifice for the sake of domestic harmony. "But for the record, I still think it counts as flight."
As he trudged toward Master Kanlaon's house, still picking grass out of his hair, he couldn't shake the feeling that something was different today. Not the usual different, he was well acquainted with that feeling, this was something else, a silence in the air like the moment before lightning strikes, or the held breath before a surprise.
The afternoon sun caught his Soul Mark aura as he walked, that blank space on his soul that had puzzled everyone since he was old enough to be puzzled about. Unlike the other, whose marks flickered and danced with aura images of their legendary connections, Ki's mark was perfectly, stubbornly empty. It wasn't broken or damaged, it was just... waiting.
Waiting for what, exactly, was the million-gold question that had been driving the village elders crazy for years. They'd consulted scrolls, brought in specialists, even asked the traveling merchant who claimed to be an expert in Spiritual Mysteries and Also Premium Rice Wine, though his expertise seemed more concentrated on the rice wine.
Nothing. Kidlat's mark remained as blank as a fresh sheet of paper, as mysterious as Master Kanlaon's secret dumpling recipe, and about as helpful as a chocolate teapot.
But Kidlat had stopped worrying about it years ago. He figured that when his mark was ready to reveal whatever mythical joke it was waiting to tell, it would do so in the most dramatic and inconvenient way possible. That was just how his life worked.
What he couldn't ignore was the restless energy that had been building in his chest for weeks now, like a storm gathering on the horizon. It made his fingers twitch and his thoughts race, and it whispered to him in dreams about golden birds and distant tournaments and adventures that tasted of lightning and freedom.
Tonight, as he cleaned sheep hair from his lab coat and listened to Master Kanlaon mutter about "reckless children" and "why couldn't I have adopted a nice, quiet plant instead," Kidlat felt that energy coiling tighter. Something was coming to Apo, something that would shake their comfortable little world like dice in a cup.
He just hoped it would be more fun than his last encounter with gravity. Outside, thunder rumbled in the distance, and in the darkening sky, something golden glittered like a falling star, growing larger with each passing moment.