Chapter 27: Madoka's Workshop
The workshop smells like burnt copper and regret.
Six hours. Madoka knows this not by the clock but by the particular weight of the silence outside — and the fact that her lower back stopped hurting somewhere around hour four. When the pain goes quiet, it means she's pushed past the point where her body bothers protesting.
Never a good sign.
Storm Pegasus sits under the magnification lamp.
Through the lens, the fusion wheel looks like a war zone. Deep gouges run parallel to the attack points — not cosmetic, not surface damage, but the kind of scarring that means the metal has been stressed past its designed threshold and simply given. Stress fractures spiderweb outward from the worst gouge, thin as hair, easy to miss if you aren't looking for them.
She's been looking for eleven minutes.
He almost lost him,she thinks, before she can stop herself. Ryuga almost—
She reaches for the calipers. Measures. Records. Sets them down.
The energy channels have hairline separations at the junction points. Not catastrophic. Not yet. The kind of damage that holds right up until the exact wrong moment, under exactly the wrong amount of pressure.
Battle Bladers, she thinks. Sure.
She switches the lamp to Rock Leone.
Her hands start shaking.
Microfractures through every single contact point. Not clustered — distributed, like damage accumulated across multiple fights and finally reached the point where it showed everywhere at once. The performance tip warped from heat stress. And then there's the hairline crack running from the face bolt housing clean through the clear wheel.
She traces it with the probe tip without touching it.
Kyoya, she thinks. You've been running this bey on stubbornness for at least two fights.
Forty-three percent structural integrity. The number sits in her stomach like swallowed glass. Estimated time to failure — five to ten battles. Maybe less.
"He'll push it."
She makes a note. Underlines it twice.
Somewhere around hour three she'd started checking the other beys just to give her hands something to do. Dark Bull first — no structural damage, just ordinary wear. She was almost done logging it when the numbers snagged her attention. The S145 track is showing unusual wear. The height adjustment is running a degree low. Not wrong by spec. Just wrong for him — for how Benkei actually fights, which is pressure and persistence and grinding sustained contact. The current setup optimizes for initial impact. Every launch, he's been working fractionally against his own bey without knowing it.
How long, she wonders. How long have you been working against yourself and just trying harder to compensate.
Probably the whole time, she thinks. It's always the whole time.
Flame Sagittario has the opposite problem. Too much defense for a stamina-type.
Her hands move before she fully processes the decision. Disassemble both. Swap the tracks. Reassemble. Twenty minutes. Both confirmation diagnostics come back cleaner than they've read in weeks.
She should document the changes. Write it up so she remembers to mention it in the morning.
Her hand reaches for the notebook.
Stops halfway.
The exhaustion hits like a wave — vision doubling, the workshop tilting sideways, her grip tightening on the workbench edge to stay upright.
It's just track swaps." She said quietly to herself. "I'll remember."
She won't write it down. She'll tell them when they pick up their beys.
***
She finds the photograph when she's looking for calipers.
It's been living in the front pocket of her kit bag long enough that the edges have gone soft. She holds it under the lamp.
Her parents are young in it. That's always the first thing — not the specifics of where or when, but how young they look. Her father has his arm around her mother's shoulders with the careful ease of someone still learning the geography of another person. He's smiling. He smiled easily in photographs.
She inherited that. The easy smile that doesn't always mean what it looks like.
Her mother is not smiling. There's something in her expression adjacent to happiness but watching — like the moment might require defending before it was over.
She always looked like that. Already preparing for the part where things went wrong.
What Madoka remembers most isn't the appearance — though she remembers that too. Tall. Blonde hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. The kind of muscular that came from actual use, broad shoulders and thick arms and the scar running down her left cheek like a sentence she'd stopped mid-word. What she remembers is the quality of her — the way she moved through a problem without panic, without drama. The way she could walk into a room and make it feel like it had a load-bearing wall it hadn't had before.
I do that, Madoka thinks. I do exactly that.
She doesn't know if she learned it or inherited it or built it herself in the specific shape of the absence her mother left.
The army. That was what they'd been told, and it was technically true, and it explained the leaving without explaining anything about how — so clean, so organized, like a problem solved rather than a family broken. Her father carried himself differently for months after. Madoka had started staying late at the B-Pit. Then finding reasons to be the last one anywhere, because empty spaces were easier when you'd chosen them yourself.
She looks at her hands flat on the workbench.
Her mother's hands. Same shape, same proportions. She'd noticed this at thirteen.
*If she came back tomorrow, I wouldn't know what to say to her.*
That's the part she never says out loud. Not the anger — she's made a kind of peace with that. Not the missing — that's just weather at this point, something that moves through and passes. But this specific helplessness. Six years of becoming someone her mother hadn't been there to see, and now there's this whole person standing where her daughter used to be.
The thought lands somewhere complicated. Half comfort. Half something that isn't.
She puts the photograph back in the pocket.
Puts her head on her arms, just for a minute.
The lamp hums over Pegasus. Leone sits in its case with its hairline crack. Bull and Sagittario with their swapped tracks, quiet and unknowing. Each one somebody's anchor. Each one her responsibility.
The beys are all I can actually fix, she thinks, somewhere between awake and not. Everything else is just—
She's asleep before she finishes the thought.
***
Something warm and heavy lands on her shoulder and she inhales sharply and nearly knocks over the fiber-optic probe.
"—okay, she's alive."
Benkei. Too loud for this hour.
"I told you she was fine," Kenta says. "She always does this."
Madoka lifts her head. There is a face bolt ring stuck to her cheek. She knows this because Gingka is looking at her with an expression that is trying very hard to be concern and failing against something else entirely.
"Don't," she says.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
She peels the ring off her cheek. Sets it on the tray with as much dignity as the situation allows, which is not very much. The fluorescent lights are aggressively bright and she hates all of them equally.
Kyoya is surveying the workbench with the expression of someone doing a damage assessment. His gaze moves from Leone's case to the diagnostic readouts to her 3 AM notes, which deteriorate visibly as the page goes on.
He doesn't say anything. That's almost worse.
Benkei's voice crashes her throught.
"Madoka! Is Bull ready to charge?!"
Kenta's right behind him, practically vibrating with excitement. "And Sagittario? Did you fix the scratches on the face bolt?"
I don't look up just gesture toward the trays on the counter.
"They're finished. Take them."
Benkei grabs Dark Bull and immediately hefts it, turning it over. "Looking clean, buddy!" He slots it into his launcher without looking. She watches the microsecond adjustment in his grip when the weight distribution lands differently than he expects — the unconscious recalibration — and then he's spinning it on the countertop and nodding like everything is exactly as it should be.
The S145 track catches the workshop light. Clearly a different colour than what was there before.
Benkei does not notice.
Kenta picks up Sagittario and holds it to the light. "It feels so smooth," he says, delighted.
The C145 track is right there. Different shade. Different shape. She'd swapped them while half-asleep and she meant to say something and then Benkei's voice happened to her and it went out of her head entirely.
They'll figure it out, she thinks.
One of them has a completely different profile and neither of them—
"Thanks Madoka!" Kenta is already halfway to the door.
"Yeah, good work as always!" Benkei follows.
Silence.
She stares after them.
Or they won't.
She picks up her cold coffee and drinks it. Some days you did the work and nobody saw it and that was just how it went.
"What about Pegasus?" Gingka's voice comes out soft. Careful. Like he's afraid of the answer.
"And Leone?" Kyoya's tone is sharp as broken glass.
I turn my chair to face them. Every muscle in my back screams in protest but I ignore it.
I turned back to the workbench.
Okay, she thinks. Okay. Let's do this.
She turns her chair to face them and picks up both cases. Sets them under the lamp.
"Sit down," Both of you."
Neither of them sits. She lets it go.
She opens Pegasus's case first and adjusts the lens. "Come here."
Gingka leans in and looks.
She watches his face. The words stop — and that's how she knows it's bad, because Gingka's default state is constant and overlapping, and when they stop it means something has landed somewhere too deep for language.
Storm Pegasus looks like someone took a baseball bat to it. The blue paint is scorched black in places. The fusion wheel has these deep parallel gouges that catch the light wrong. Under the magnification lamp, you can see the spiderweb of microfractures spreading from every impact point.
"Sixty-seven percent structural integrity," she says. Her voice stays level. She's practiced this. "Performance tip is warped three millimeters off-center — you'd feel it in a sustained battle. Energy channels have separation at the junction points. Stress fractures spreading from every major impact site." She pauses. "Estimated time to catastrophic failure is fifteen to twenty battles at current stress levels."
Gingka pulls back from the lens. "Define catastrophic."
"Mid-battle fragmentation." She meets his eyes. "Not might. Will. The question is just when."
His jaw tightens. His hands go very still at his sides.
She closes Pegasus's case and opens Leone's. Kyoya steps forward without being asked. She moves the lamp to the hairline crack.
Rock Leone is somehow worse. The green metal has this dull, fatigued look that makes my skin crawl. The microfractures are so dense they've started connecting to each other. Creating these stress concentration points that will shear clean through the first time Kyoya pushes too hard.
"Forty-three percent structural integrity," she says. "Microfractures through every contact point. Performance tip melted in three locations. The clear wheel is cracked completely through." She sets the diagnostic readout on the table where he can see it. "Estimated time to failure — five to ten battles. Possibly less, depending on how hard you push it."
"Possibly less," Kyoya repeats.
"Yes."
The workshop goes quiet enough that she can hear the lamp hum.
"They're in critical condition."
My voice comes out steadier than I feel. Professional. Like I'm delivering a diagnosis instead of a death sentence.
"Gingka, Pegasus... I can try to repair it. But my resources here are limited. The equipment I'd need to properly restore the structural integrity—I don't have it. Not in this shop. Not with what the B-Pit has available."
I take a breath. Force myself to meet his eyes.
"It'll take time. Weeks, maybe months to source the right materials and do it properly. Time I don't know if we have."
Gingka's face goes pale. His hands clench at his sides.
I turn to Kyoya before I lose my nerve.
"And Kyoya... Leone is worse."
The words taste like ash.
"Between Kai and that mountain and then Gingka—the metal is fatigued beyond what repair can fix. I can try. I can spend months carefully rebuilding the molecular structure. But honestly?"
I gesture at the diagnostic readouts on my screen. The numbers don't lie.
Arms crossed. "Here's where I land on both of them." She crosses her arms — not defensively, just to give her hands something to do. "Pegasus I can restore. Painstakingly, carefully, given the right materials and enough time. I can give Gingka back what he had."
"Leone is past restoration." She turns to Kyoya. Doesn't soften it. He wouldn't want her to. "The metal fatigue is too distributed.
" I can spend weeks trying to rebuild what's there, or I can strip it down to the core components that are still viable and forge something new around them." She pauses. " It's faster, more reliable, and with proper upgrades you might actually stand a chance against—"
I stop.
"—you might actually stand a chance against Ryuga." The name catches in my throat like broken glass.
The name lands in the room like a dropped blade. Gingka's expression tightens — just slightly, just at the corners — but she sees it. The muscle in Kyoya's jaw shifts once before going still again.
Good. They should feel it. She does.
I shake my head. Focus.
"And Kai."
His name comes out different. Quieter. There's something complicated tangled up in my chest when I think about him. Anger and worry and this sick twisting fear that I can't quite name.
I saw the phoenix. Saw those wings manifest on his back. Saw his eyes go crimson and stay that way.
Saw him walk away from me without looking back.
I clear my throat. Push the feeling down where it belongs.
Both of them look at her.
She keeps her voice even. "I've seen the resonance data from the rooftop. The 47% synchronization. I know what Black Dranzer is doing to him — the boundary erosion, the crimson eyes, the way the mindscape is bleeding through." She looks at Gingka directly. "You saw him up there. You know what you saw."
Gingka doesn't answer immediately. When he does, his voice comes out careful, like he's choosing each word.
"...I know," Gingka admits.
Kyoya says nothing. But he's stopped looking at Leone's case. His expression doesn't change. That face he does — perfectly controlled, like the stillness itself is a choice — she's learned to read the edges of it. The slight tension at the jaw. The way his eyes going feral like a wounded beast a degree flatter which means something has actually landed and he's serious about it — which is the closest thing to admission she'll get from him.
Good, she thinks. Sit with that.
She looks at Gingka and Kyoya directly.
"But what had almost broke permanently. And Battle Bladers is three months away. And both your beys are approaching the point where I can't guarantee they'll survive a serious fight."
"Before I start anything, I need your permission." My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the workbench to hide it. "Should I try to repair what's broken? Painstakingly restore your partners to what they were? Or should I forge something new? Build upgrades that might actually let you survive what's coming?"
Gingka and Kyoya exchange this look. Heavy with meaning I can't quite read.
Gingka opens his mouth—
"CITIZENS OF THE WORLD."
The voice booms from outside — so loud it rattles the windows. Then helicopter blades, multiple, the whir-whir-whir vibrating through her bones.
They rush to the window.
Every screen in Metal Bey City flares to life simultaneously. The giant monitors on buildings. The displays in shop windows. The small TV in the corner of her workshop.
All of them showing the same face.
Doji.
End of chapter.
***
Next chapter: Road to Battle Bladers.
Last chapter with ginga and gang after that a poll.