Kori stood barefoot at the center of the combat bay. Two white knives the length of her forearms hung from the ends of a long white chain wrapped around her shoulders and wrists.
Mina watched from behind her monitors, arms folded tight.
Raizen and Hikari circled in. Their Luminite weapons pulsed faintly - golden light breathing from the cores of the twin blades, blue luminescence flowing down the staff's handle. Raizen's grip was lower now, better, elbows close. His stance had stopped looking like something he'd struggled to learn and started looking like something he simply was.
"You've gotten better these past few weeks," Kori said, genuine approval in her voice. "Your weight's finally where it's supposed to be."
Hikari raised an eyebrow. "Mina says we're pulling a two percent multiplier from the Luminite now."
"Two percent and you look this pleased?" Kori's smile was sharp but warm. "It matters, I'll give you that. At two percent, the Luminite starts to consider you. That's when it decides whether you're worth the trouble. This is as far as most Gravers go. Let's say, maybe 5-6 percent, if they're lucky."
Raizen exhaled, settling into position. "Then don't hold back. Not with me."
"Top three worst decisions you could make in your life," Mina muttered from behind the glass.
Kori's eyes widened, her mouth doing that half-smile again. She unwound the chains from her wrists slowly, letting them fall to the floor with a sound like silver coins scattering.
"Mina, relax." Her voice carried an edge of amusement. "I won't do anything that… Can't be undone."
"That's not comforting."
Raizen moved first - not rushing, but committed. Clean footwork, blades angled perfectly. Hikari came from the opposite side, staff spinning to control space. The Luminite helped. Their swings went right where they meant to, their balance recovered on instinct.
Kori let them come.
She turned her shoulder and Raizen's strike slid past, missing by millimeters. She lifted one wrist and a knife shot forward - the chain wrapped around Hikari's staff with perfect precision and yanked, tearing it from her grip so fast Hikari stumbled forward.
When Raizen stepped inside her guard, Kori simply wasn't there anymore. When he spun to track her, she was already behind him, drawing lazy circles with one of the chained knives.
"Stop defending!" Raizen's voice carried frustration. Sweat beaded at his temples. "Fight me properly."
"What do you want, exactly?" Kori asked, tilting her head.
"I want to see what's real." Raizen's eyes burned. "Don't hold back. Show me your actual power."
Kori's smile changed. Something colder moved behind her eyes. Her Chasmis eye shimmered for a second, like water rippling.
"Very well."
"OH NO—" Mina's voice cracked through the speakers.
Raizen blinked.
In that single fraction of a second - the space between closing his eyes and opening them - Kori disappeared from his vision.
It wasn't a trick. No smoke. No illusion. Just movement so fast his brain couldn't process it as motion. It looked like genuine teleportation. Like the world had skipped a frame.
Then he felt it.
One arm wrapped around his chest in a casual embrace. A chin resting on his shoulder. Cold steel kissing his throat - the white knife pressed just firmly enough to remind him how easily skin parts.
He hadn't seen her move. Hadn't heard her steps. Hadn't felt the air shift.
She just arrived behind him.
His breath stopped somewhere between his lungs and his mouth.
Kori's cheek touched his, warm against his cold sweat. She whispered directly into his ear, voice soft as silk and sharp as the blade at his neck:
"This is my real."
Hikari hadn't moved. Her eyes tracked from Kori to the chain to Raizen, trying to reconstruct what had just happened. She couldn't.
Kori released him. The knife withdrew. The chain dragged back across the floor.
Raizen stood frozen, heart hammering, anger and awe fighting for control of his face.
"You're lucky," Kori said, completely casual now, as if she hadn't just demonstrated the difference between a candle and the sun. "The stones in your weapons like you. They resonate cleanly. That doesn't happen often, so don't waste it."
Raizen swallowed hard. "Then tell me how to make two percent mean something."
"It already does." Kori smiled, but gentler this time. "Two percent is proof the Luminite trusts you. Keep working. The rest will come when you're ready."
She turned toward the observation window. "Hey, Mina! Tell them what the readouts showed on my end. Just for reference."
Mina was quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice carried resignation and something close to disappointment, somehow.
"5,987 percent multiplier." A pause. "Not even your best numbers, Kori…"
The bay went silent.
Raizen's grip on his blades loosened. Hikari's eyes went wide.
Five thousand percent.
The gap between them and real power wasn't a gap. It was a canyon. An ocean. A distance so vast it redefined what the word "strong" even meant.
"Enough for today," Mina added quietly. "Before someone ends up in the walls."
✦ ✦ ✦
They walked home in silence.
Not because they had nothing to say - the opposite. They had too much, and exhaustion had stolen the words before they could form. Their shoulders ached. Their legs felt distant. But underneath the fatigue sat something else: A tiny bit of pride. They'd improved. Kori had seen it. Said it out loud.
"Think Takeshi will be impressed?" Hikari asked, breaking the silence.
"Probably." Raizen smiled despite the tiredness. "He'll pretend he's not, but he'll ask questions. Lots of questions."
"He's probably making dinner right now," Hikari said. "Complaining about the stove."
"…And his… Less-than-mediocre cooking skills."
"Or tinkering with something that doesn't need fixing." Hikari offered another guess.
They turned the corner into the familiar corridor - the cracked tile that clicked underfoot, the faint smell of oil and metal that meant home.
Raizen reached for the door.
It was unlocked.
He stopped. Hikari stopped behind him.
Takeshi never left the door unlocked. Not once in all the weeks they'd lived here. It was reflex for him - lock, check, lock again.
"Maybe he just forgot," Hikari offered, but her voice lacked conviction.
Raizen pushed the door wider. The room inside was too quiet. Not the comfortable quiet of someone working in another room. The heavy quiet of absence.
Raizen stepped inside.
Everything was wrong. Not broken. Not ransacked. Wrong in a way that made his chest tighten.
The table was spotless. No tools left scattered. No half-finished projects. No rag wrung out and forgotten. Every surface had been wiped clean.
The workbench stood empty except for three things arranged with too much care: Takeshi's spare mechanical arm parts laid out on a clean cloth, each piece disassembled and organized by size. His favorite knife - the one he always carried - resting beside it. And his tools, lined up in perfect order from smallest to largest.
He never organized his tools like that. Ever.
On the far wall, the map had been stripped. All the red threads removed, all the pins pulled except one. A single black pin stuck in a location Raizen didn't recognize, with one red hanging from it.
Three cups sat on the table. Clean. Empty. Waiting. Even the air smelled wrong. Too clean.
"He cleaned" Raizen said, voice barely above a whisper.
"That's..." Hikari started, then stopped. "That's good?"
"No." Raizen's throat felt tight. "He cleaned."
Then, Hikari saw it. The envelope.
It sat at the exact center of the table, edges perfectly squared, paper the color of fresh snow. A rarity In the Underworks – clean, white paper. Two names written across the front in Takeshi's elegant handwriting:
Raizen, Hikari
Neither of them moved for a long moment.
Then Raizen picked it up with trembling hands. The paper was thick - expensive. He broke the seal carefully, as if breaking it wrong might change what was inside.
He unfolded it. The letter was long, dense with text, each line written with the kind of care that takes a lot of time.
They sat at the table together, the letter held between them so both could see.
Raizen started reading first. His voice was steady.
Then it wasn't.
✦ ✦ ✦
To Raizen and Hikari,
If you're holding this, I wasn't brave enough to say these words out loud.
So I'll write them the way I live - plain, honest, and not pretty at all. You deserve the truth, not the lies people use to feel less guilty.
I found them. The Moirai. Or as close as a man like me can get.
I don't know if you'll ever see their faces. I hope you never do.
I don't expect to make it back from this. But I'm fine with that. Death isn't the part that scares me. I've seen it from the wrong side of a blade too many times.What scares me is that you won't understand why.So I need you to know who I was. Because you only met what was left.
Before the eyepatch and the metal hand, before my silence, I was loud. Fast. Proud in the stupid way young lads confuse for strength. People down here used to say I was the strongest in the Underworks.
Yes, that sounds good in drunk mouths. I believed it too.Then the world proved how small I was.
I had a family.
Raizen stopped. The words sat there on the page, impossible to read past.
Hikari's voice came out barely above a whisper. "Let me."
She took the letter with shaking hands.
Read that again if you need to. I don't say it often.
A wife who laughed with her whole face and wouldn't let a day end angry. A daughter with quick hands and quicker excuses, who always blamed the cat.She even practiced her innocent face in the mirror for hours. Still terrible at it. Her left eyebrow always gave her away.
They were my best part. The only part of me that ever got soft without feeling ashamed.
I couldn't protect them.
That night, I wasn't fast enough. Not smart enough. Not strong enough. Just a man, bleeding and reaching for something already gone.
I remember the exact second. The way her hand went loose in mine. The way silence has weight when it replaces a voice you'll never hear again.
The silence after is what I remember most. How a room can still smell like tea and warm bread while your whole world is missing.
You should know what the Underworks was supposed to be.
When the Nyx attacks were at their worst, before Vanguards, before the Phalanx, Neoshima built another city beneath its own bones. A bunker with gardens grown under lamps. Stores, workshops, power lines, pipes - everything meant to keep people alive until the world above stopped burning.
That place was – is – our Underworks.
But time did what it always does. The lamps got dimmer. The maps got torn. The people with money forgot the stairs. What was meant to shelter us became the place they threw anything that made the surface ugly.
Outcasts. Fighters. The scared, the poor, the inconvenient.
The Moirai stepped into that forgetting and wore it like a crown. Powerful families with assassin roots. Men in masks came through doors that shouldn't have opened. Only death followed where they came.
Then they came through mine.
I fought. I bled. I lost an eye and an arm. They left me names to bury and wounds that don't close.
They thought that would end me. They thought it was enough to erase me forever.
It wasn't. But the price was becoming what was left.
Revenge lived in me so long I stopped knowing where it ended and I began. It's not a fire that keeps you warm. It's a fire that eats you until there's nothing left but ash and the longing for heat.
Then I found the two of you in the dirt.
Hikari's voice dropped to barely a whisper.
I wasn't looking for anyone to care about. I wanted a quiet corner where nobody would ask what I was hunting.
But you made me remember things.
How a house sounds when people come home at different hours and leave things in the wrong places. How a table looks with three cups instead of one. How someone can say your name from another room without spite.
How laughter sounds when it isn't followed by violence.
When I found you, I wasn't looking for a second chance. I was looking for a reason not to throw myself at them until one of us stopped moving.
You gave me something I didn't ask for and didn't deserve.
You gave me a reason to come home at night.
So listen. These are the parts that matter.
You will want to follow me.
Don't.
Not because you're weak. I introduced you to the Rust Room because I couldn't lose anyone anymore. You're strong. I know that.
But despite all of that… Don't follow me. Because if you will, I will look back. And the second I look back, I will die faster.
I have watched men sell everything for power. For implants. For strength they didn't understand. I have seen people experiment on orphans like spare parts.
Power will come whether you earn it or not. That's the danger.
If you let revenge teach you how to hold it, one day you'll wake up and realize you kept nothing but your blade.
You don't beat darkness by becoming it. You beat it by staying upright while it tries to make you fall.
Keep the world lit.
Hikari - I saw how fast the world tries to move you. Don't let anyone convince you that being careful is the same as being weak. A steady hand ends more nightmares than a powerful one.
Raizen - I watched you fail better than men twice your age succeed. Take that as a compliment. And listen, because you'll hate it: protecting isn't the same as bleeding for every stranger who asks. You don't throw yourself overboard to make the boat lighter. Learn the difference.
If I don't return, here is what I ask.
Keep the world lit.
If you can spare a life, do it. If you can't, don't be proud for taking it.Live long enough to be kind when it's not convenient. Live long enough to be happy for no reason.
And the Nyxes - I know you both want to fight them. But if you do - Don't bury yourselves in dirt, with the rest of the Gravers. Don't settle for cheap jobs and death contracts.
Kori is a wonderful teacher - I myself trained her... In the good times. She'll teach you well. Listen to her, and become Vanguards. Not because of the money. Not because of the fame. Not because of the pride. But because you're humanity's last line against the darkness.
Keep the world lit.
If you wonder whether I loved you, I'll write it once so you don't have to guess.
I did. I do.
It's there: in the cups I washed because you forgot, in the chair I fixed when you didn't know it was broken, in the stupid way I learned to make noodles because I couldn't stand watching you eat my stew and lie about it being good.
I'm sorry I kept it quiet for so long.
Now I'm going to see if those masks bleed.
Forgive me if you can. If you can't… Don't look back at me.
Keep the world lit.
~ Takeshi, the one who wished to be called your father.