More forks began to float around my older brother. There were about five of them, counting the one he'd initially thrown at me. Five pieces of domestic metal suspended in the air, wrapped in that cyan glow that only Nairo's Helion could produce.
Five floating around him, like obedient satellites.
With a flick of his finger, he hurled another one at high speed. I'd already predicted its trajectory—my mental map had expanded in fractions of a second, covering the entire room—but when the fork entered my field, something changed. Not its trajectory, but its essence. As if Nairo had impregnated the metal with an extra layer of energy that distorted my perception for an instant.
But my body didn't need my mind to process.
I dodged. A slight twist of my torso. The metal grazed the fabric of my shirt.
The fork, instead of embedding itself in the wall like the first one, curved in the air with an impossible arc and attacked again. I dodged again, this time tilting my head back, feeling the displaced air from its passage.
And then Nairo moved his wrist.
A subtle gesture, almost imperceptible. But the five forks responded as a single organism.
The attack became a storm.
They weren't five random flying objects; it was a choreography of metal and light, an aggressive dance designed to find every gap in my defense. The forks zigzagged, crossed each other's paths, feigned straight trajectories only to shatter into impossible angles. And behind each one, a trail of blue light—Nairo's Helion—painting the air like brushstrokes from a mad artist.
The flash of blue light the forks left behind after I dodged them, or when they came dangerously close, was hypnotic. And beautiful.
A gust, like tangled threads, but blue threads. That's how I saw the forks as Nairo tried to land hits with them. An endless cascade of blue flashes enveloping me, cornering me, testing my reflexes again and again.
But I dodged them without much effort.
My body moved before my mind registered the threat. Every twist, every tilt, every minimal shift was an instinctive response to the information my mental map gathered. The forks never quite touched me.
"You've improved way too much, little brother," Nairo said.
The forks halted their attack simultaneously. They hung in the air for one more second, as if hesitating to abandon the dance, then clattered to the floor with a metallic ring.
Nairo crossed his arms. His eyes, still faintly blue, evaluated me with that mixture of pride and demand that only an older brother can have.
"So then," he said, and his tone shifted. It was no longer the morning game. No longer the interrupted breakfast. "How about we really fight?"
His eyes lit up. Not gradually, but as if someone had ignited a flame behind his pupils. A deep blue, the color of the ocean in depths where light doesn't reach.
"Sounds perfect to me," I replied.
And I let my own Helion answer.
My green irises turned blue. Not Nairo's blue, not water-blue. Mine. That particular shade, colder, emptier, the one Omega had catalogued as Space.
---
Helion:
The innate power of us, the Helions from the planet Helion Astra.
It's an energy we master… or awaken. Not everyone succeeds. Only some, at some point in their lives, feel that internal click, that spark that ignites the engine of stars within their bodies. It's a mysterious power, visually beautiful, and terribly dangerous in the wrong hands.
It's based on colors.
From the most common: blue, red, green, yellow, among others. Each color reveals something about the essence of its bearer. With just a hint of your energy released, an experienced opponent can read you like an open book.
If you see red, you know that talking, reasoning, negotiating… none of that will work with that person. Just prepare to get pummeled. Reds think more with their fists than their brains. If, for whatever reason, they even have that part called a brain.
Blue is more variable. More docile, more orderly, more fluid. In the blue category, you can find different types: water, ice, wind, even some rarer ones.
Although I'm blue, I'm different. My Helion is called: Space.
An extremely, extremely rare extended branch. One that doesn't exist in any other Helion besides me. As far as I know.
But Helion isn't everything. It wasn't always.
Since ancient times, our technology was ultra-advanced. Our ancestors, who were incredibly powerful, didn't really have fun. They were bored. And the super-advanced technology they had was rusting, gathering dust in warehouses no one visited.
For this reason, after dozens upon dozens of meetings, they reached an agreement. They wanted to feel that thrill of battle. Because not every planet had powerful enemies, and destroying an enemy with a single blow wasn't satisfying either.
So they created the system.
From a young age, they train young warriors. Hellish physical training. Various martial arts. Days and days spent on hostile planets without using our powers. Surviving on pure physical will, pure endurance, pure adaptability.
Helion is the last resort. The ace up the sleeve. The ultimate "if things go south."
It's not that activating it is forbidden or a planet-level crime. It's simply… not the point. The point is the thrill. The point is the battle. The point is feeling like every blow counts.
That's why we have the suits. The various suits we create, the technology we develop and use on every mission, is so it doesn't rust. To remind us that we have it, but also to remind us that we don't depend on it.
If we've had such advanced technology for millennia, why not use it all the time?
That would be like a rich person deciding to eat from the trash every day.
And besides…
We're no longer the same as we were in the past.
---
Nairo's palm filled with a dense, watery blue. It was water. Pure water, condensed from the air's humidity, shaped by his will.
And he vanished.
There was no displacement of air. No sound. Simply, one instant he was there, and the next he wasn't.
But my eyes—already imbued with Space—caught the flash. That brief blue flash that indicated where he'd come from and where he was headed, just like with the forks.
I'd had my eye on him since he appeared.
Nairo emerged from the void to my left, at face level. His elbow drew back, his palm wrapped in that aqueous energy, aiming for my abdomen with surgical precision.
I didn't try to dodge.
At the last instant, a hexagonal dome appeared at the exact point where his attack would land. Not a full shield, not an extensive barrier. Just a point. A tiny hexagon, barely the size of his palm, suspended in the air between us.
The clash of energies was silent but profound. As if two opposing frequencies had tried to occupy the same space.
The dome held. Only a second. Just long enough for Nairo to frown, surprised. Then, his energy pierced my defenses.
Our apartment's catastrophe defense system activated. Silent alarms, red lights flashing on control panels. But it wasn't necessary. Everything was being controlled by us. There would be no destruction.
Not outside the room, at least.
The floor beneath my feet opened.
It didn't collapse, didn't crack. It opened, as if metal and concrete had remembered they were liquid in another state. A circular passage unfolded beneath us, revealing a tunnel plummeting toward the tower's lower levels.
Toward the training room.
Nairo had pushed me. His attack, combined with my own resistance, had created such pressure that the only place to dissipate it was downward.
We fell.
---
The training room was a spacious area, with pristine white walls crossed by black lines forming a perfect grid. Reinforced flooring, high ceilings, impact sensors in every corner. The place where Nairo and I had spent countless hours since we were kids, learning to hurt each other without truly hurting each other.
I landed on my feet, absorbing the impact with my legs. Nairo, just meters away, was already moving.
He vanished again.
This time he appeared in the air, to my right side, three meters up. His left leg, wrapped in that watery blue, descended in a roundhouse kick aimed at my temple.
I raised my forearm. Blocked.
The impact was brutal. My arm sank—not from the blow, but because the floor beneath my feet ceased to exist. My Space had replaced it, creating a momentary vacuum that absorbed part of the force.
And in that instant of controlled imbalance, I counterattacked.
My right fist traveled toward Nairo's abdomen at supersonic speed. The shockwave arrived after the impact, a delayed thunder that shook the room.
Nairo blocked it. His forearm, also wrapped in water, absorbed the blow. But the force was such that his body launched like a humanoid projectile, straight toward the ceiling.
He was going to hit at full speed.
But he didn't.
Half a meter from the ceiling, Nairo stopped. He hung upside down, balanced on the tip of a single toe against the white surface. His posture was impossible, unnatural. And yet, there he was, looking down at me with a smile that chilled the blood.
With his index finger, he made a gesture.
A blade of water—as thin as a hair, as long as my arm—detached from the air and fell toward me.
I dodged it easily. A lateral step, a minimal shift.
But the reinforced floor, that resilient metal designed to withstand high-level training impacts, split as if the water were poison. The blade pierced it from side to side, opening a gap exactly the width of its edge.
Nairo didn't give me time to react.
He arced his Helion. His fingers traced a curve in the air, and five arrows of solid water appeared, suspended for an instant before launching.
Not even a second passed.
Five arrows flew. Then another five. Then another five.
A downpour.
I expanded my mental map to its maximum. The entire room became an extension of my consciousness. Every arrow, every trajectory, every possible deviation—it was all there, available, processed in fractions of a millisecond.
I dodged them all.
But the floor wasn't me. The floor took every hit. The arrows pierced it again and again, leaving fist-sized craters, cracks spreading like spiderwebs.
Nairo descended.
He flipped in the air, spinning with an elegance that only years of training can bestow, and landed on his feet on the shattered floor.
The moment his feet touched, I was already in front of him.
My eyes blazed with that blue flash. The air around me compressed, displaced by the pressure of my fist as it traveled toward his face.
I struck.
It was a powerful blow. Almost on par with the one I'd used to disintegrate the guardian's arm on Luminus. Not with the same killing intent, but with the same raw force.
Nairo's water shield activated by reflex. A translucent, dense barrier that should have absorbed any impact.
It wasn't enough.
The fist pierced the shield—didn't break it, pierced it, as if the distance between us had distorted—and connected with his torso.
Nairo was launched.
He crashed into the wall with a violence that cracked its entire surface. The black grid lines shattered, displaced by the impact. White dust fell from the fissures.
And then I moved.
It wasn't teleportation. It wasn't speed. It was Space. The distance between Nairo and me simply… ceased to exist for an instant. A fold in space that placed me in front of him before he could even hit the ground.
My fist loaded again.
Hypersonic speed.
Bummmmmm.