The morning light, pale and slanting, cut Reiden Kagetori's office in half. Dust motes danced in the beam, as if hesitant to settle on the desk cluttered with scrolls and strange mechanical parts. Akira and Seiya stood on the other side, waiting.
"Ruins of the Silent Bell," Reiden, not looking at them, unrolled an old parchment with cracked edges. "Not a cheerful place. Three hundred years ago, fanatics of some forgotten cult slaughtered each other there. The place's Kokurō has been... unwell since. And now there are background glitches too." He jabbed a finger at a point on the map. "Your task—conduct diagnostics. Calm the ether if needed. A formality, but good training."
Seiya silently nodded, his fingers involuntarily gripping the edge of his own modest haori. Akira merely glanced over the map, noting the route, distances, possible cover.
A heavy silence hung. Akira broke it first, which was rare.
"Sensei... Akatsuki Magoro. Who is he?"
Reiden looked up from the map, surprised. A light smirk touched his lips.
"Tenmao. A living legend that got bored three hundred years ago and decided to take a nap. 'King of Magi'—that's what those afraid to even think of him called him. A being for whom the laws of physics are more like soft suggestions than rules."
"If he were at full strength... could you defeat him?"
The question hung in the air. Reiden leaned back in his chair, his golden eyes becoming cold and clear as a mountain lake on a windless day.
"If he fully recovers, drawing from the Well of Souls..." he made a theatrical pause, "...it'll hurt. A lot. But I'll still win. I am the strongest." He slapped his palm on the map. "Your battle is right here. Don't mess up. Either of you."
The Forest
An hour later, they were walking along an old trail leading into the foothills. The air smelled of pine and damp earth.
Akira moved ahead. His steps were silent, his breathing so even he seemed not to expend it at all. He didn't run, didn't walk fast—he moved as if his body already knew where to place his foot so no branch would crack, no moss would slip. His eyes, usually empty, now scanned the surroundings: a fresh break on a young tree, an indentation in the ground from someone's heavy load, a stone with an unnatural chip. He read the forest like an open book.
Seiya followed, trying to imitate, but failing. His movements were naturally sharp, angular—his father's legacy, honed in street fights, not "Tenran" halls. He stumbled over invisible bumps, his breathing grew ragged. But that wasn't the main thing. As they neared the ruins, he began to feel sick. Not from smell—from sensation. A quiet hum, reaching not his ears but directly into his mind. Whispers of fear, echoes of rage, hoarse whispers of despair. The place was in pain. And that pain resonated with something inside him.
The Ruins
The ruins of the former temple appeared before them like a rotting tooth amidst greenery. Half-collapsed stone arches, crumbling walls overgrown with moss. The silence here was different—thick, oppressive.
In the central hall under a leaky dome, Akira froze. He crouched, fingers running over the stone floor.
"Look," his quiet voice made Seiya flinch.
On the floor lay fragments—not of stone, but of some dark, light alloy with neat cuts. Nearby—four-sided indentations, as if from tripods. In the corner, a stone was burned to a glassy crust smelling of chemical bitterness. Someone had been working here. And trying not to leave traces. Unsuccessfully.
Seiya didn't see that. He heard something else. The hum grew, turning into an obsessive ringing in his temples. Images flashed before his inner eye: shadows in ritual masks, the gleam of knives, silent screams. His "antenna," his gift he didn't understand and feared, caught every echo of past pain. He vomited. A sparse stream onto the ancient stones. He leaned against the wall, white as chalk.
And at that moment, the silence was torn apart.
Not by magic—by technology. A piercing, icy shriek, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once, struck their eardrums, passed through their skull bones. Seiya screamed, pressing his palms to his ears. Akira only winced slightly, his vestibular apparatus, trained over years, withstanding the blow, but his concentration was broken for a moment.
From hidden niches in the walls, with a quiet hiss of pneumatics, three mechanisms on chassis rolled out. TAMA combat drones. Their matte black alloy frames were studded with emitter slits, optical sensors glowing cold blue. They didn't stand on ceremony. Two fanned out to the flanks, one remained center. Slits on their bodies flared—and space thickened. Kokurō suppression. Any attempt to summon a Scar here was doomed.
For Akira, it didn't matter.
The first drone fired a compressed air slug capable of breaking a rib. Akira didn't dodge sideways. He shifted just enough for the projectile to whistle a centimeter past his shoulder and stepped forward, inside its range. His hand, folded into a "sword," shot forward not to strike the chassis, but into a slit near the optical sensor. A dry crunch. The drone jerked, its "gaze" blinded. Akira was already gone—behind the second drone, using the first as cover from the third's fire. His leg whistled down onto a chassis joint. Metal groaned but held. Akira didn't break. He crippled, immobilized, studied their tactics—a silent, lethal surgeon on a battlefield where his scalpel was his own body.
The Unleashing
Seiya Fujisaki possessed a non-standard Kokurō—"Summoning of Forgotten Echoes." His brain was not a generator but an antenna tuned to the frequency of Scars left not by people, but by pure emotions and instincts that over time crystallized into autonomous entities. Fourteen such Echoes comprised his arsenal—a number rooted in ancient traditions of fourteen kinds of fearlessness.
Seiya didn't summon them. They burst forth on their own, responding to the cocktail of his panic, external aggression, and the ancient pain of the place.
From the shadow tangle at the feet of a downed drone, "Shadow's Claw" erupted and took form—a small panther of condensed gloom with burning amber points for eyes. It didn't roar. It simply vanished and rematerialized behind the central drone, its claws of pure darkness slashing through a critical wiring bundle. Sparks, smoke, the drone froze.
From Seiya himself, from his chest clenched in powerless rage, "Whirlwind of Fury" erupted—a formless vortex of crimson energy with glowing slit-eyes. It roared down upon the first, already blinded drone and simply crushed it as if it were tin. Metal screeched, broke. A spasm of pure, mindless malice crossed Seiya's face.
And under the ceiling, in the hall's center, "All-Seeing Eye" appeared—a floating crystal orb with a cold pupil inside. It didn't attack. It watched. And into Seiya's mind, drowning in panic, flowed clear, emotionless data: thermal signature, a weak point in the third drone's armor, trajectory of the next shot. Seiya didn't even think. His hand instinctively hurled a stone fragment at the indicated point. A hit. The drone crackled, its targeting system scrambled.
Akira stood aside during this, leaning against a column. He didn't intervene. His empty eyes observed. He saw how with each manifested Echo, Seiya's face changed: contorted with malice, became predatory and focused, then chillingly calculating. The boy wasn't controlling the power. It was controlling him.
The Aftermath
The silence that fell after the last drone crackled with sparks and went still was deafening.
The Echoes didn't vanish. "Shadow's Claw" sat on the debris, licking a non-existent paw. "Whirlwind of Fury" slowly circled as if seeking a new target. "All-Seeing Eye" hung motionless in the air, its pupil fixed on Seiya. They looked at their bearer. Waited.
Then, as if by an invisible command, they began to dissolve. The shadow flowed back into the floor, the whirlwind dissipated with a quiet sigh, the crystal orb faded. And only then did Seiya collapse to his knees. He shook with fine tremors. Inside, everything burned and froze simultaneously. He felt residual emotions: blind, sweeping rage; cold, tenacious hunger for the hunt; and that terrifying, detached curiosity towards all living things. He felt disgust. With himself. With this power.
A shadow fell over him. Akira stood nearby, offering a canteen of water. Seiya took it with difficulty, his hands trembling so badly he nearly spilled it. Akira silently collected a few surviving drone fragments, stowed them in a pack. Then his gaze fell on Seiya's right hand, still convulsively gripping the empty hilt of his katana (the blade itself remained sheathed).
"Look," Akira said quietly.
Seiya looked. On the back of his hand, where the skin stretched over his knuckles, a pale, barely noticeable pattern had appeared. As if drawn with silver ink. It was a stylized, vertical eye. Clear, emotionless. The imprint of the "All-Seeing Eye." The first Mark. Physical evidence that the Echoes didn't just come and go. They left traces. They clung.
Seiya stared in horror at this mark, this seal his own power had branded him with. He wanted to erase it, scrape it off, but knew—it was useless. It was inside.
Akira turned away, looking through the destroyed arch towards where "Tenran" lay. His face, as always, showed nothing. But deep within the empty eyes, something stirred—understanding, foreboding, acceptance of the inevitable.
"It begins," he uttered so softly the words were almost lost in the ruins' silence.