The morning sunlight spilled across the city of Arabres in long, warm streaks of gold, reflecting off the glass of the high-rises and the dusty hoods of the morning commute. Arav and Sonic stepped out of the hostel gates, the heavy metal bars clanging shut behind them. Each dragged a travel bag, the wheels clicking rhythmically against the pavement—a sound that, to them, was the first note of a song of freedom.
A yellow-and-black taxi waited at the curb, its engine idling with a low, mechanical growl.
Sonic didn't wait for an introduction. He tossed his bag into the trunk with the casual confidence of someone who owned the entire street. "Airport, boss," he said to the driver, flashing a grin. "And don't spare the horsepower. We have a flight to catch and a legacy to build."
The driver gave a short, knowing nod and pulled into the flow of traffic.
The city was waking up in its usual, vibrant layers. Roadside tea stalls were already crowded with men in white shirts holding steaming clay cups; students with heavy backpacks hurried toward bus stops; and vendors were busy arranging pyramids of bright fruit on wooden carts. From the outside, it was just another Tuesday in the Arabres Sovereignty.
Inside the taxi, however, the atmosphere was electric.
"First stop?" Sonic asked, leaning back into the cracked vinyl seat and stretching his arms as far as the small cabin would allow.
"The beach," Arav replied immediately, his gaze fixed on the passing horizon. "I want to see the ocean. I want to see something that doesn't have a wall around it."
"Good choice. Then surfing," Sonic added, counting off on his fingers.
"Then water bikes. I want to see how fast those things actually go."
"Then clubbing. I heard the north coast has places that don't close until the sun comes up."
"Then bungee jumping."
Sonic paused, frowning. "There's no bungee jumping in Goa, Arav. It's too flat."
"Then we'll find a bridge or a cliff. We'll find something that feels like it."
Sonic laughed, a sharp, genuine sound. "That's the spirit! This is what life is about, brother. No more algorithms. No more 'Yes, Sir' to the Captain. Just us and the horizon."
Arav looked out the window, watching the college buildings recede into the distance. For the first time in three years, there were no assignments looming over him. No 4:00 AM drills. No lectures on the geopolitical stability of the 10 Nations. Just the open road.
"You realize," Arav said, his voice dropping into a calm, serious tone, "that if our families find out we skipped the trip home, we are effectively dead men walking. My father will look at me with that silent disappointment that feels like a physical weight, and yours... well, yours might actually call for a public execution."
Sonic waved the concern away with a dismissive flick of his wrist. "Future problems for future us. We'll deal with the parental wrath when we're tan and well-rested. Besides, I'm still alive despite all my previous bad decisions. My luck is legendary."
"Your luck is just me cleaning up after you," Arav corrected, but he was smiling.
Traffic slowed as they approached a massive flyover. The taxi moved steadily through the sea of vehicles. Sonic leaned forward, his eyes bright. "You know what I'm most excited about? The jet skiing. High-speed maneuvers on open water."
"Sonic, you don't even know how to swim properly. You panicked in the college pool because the water was 'too blue.'"
"Confidence, Arav! It's all about the mindset."
"That is not how buoyancy works. Physics doesn't care about your mindset."
Sonic shrugged, unfazed. "I'll figure it out. How hard can it be? Point the handle, pull the trigger, try not to die. Standard operating procedure."
Their laughter filled the cramped car, a stark contrast to the silence of the city's working class outside. They were planning ridiculous, impossible combinations of adventure, unaware that their "luck" was being fueled by the golden energy still settling into their bone marrow.
They had no idea that only a few kilometers away, someone else was driving toward the very same airport—under entirely different, and much darker, circumstances.
On the other side of the city, the atmosphere was far from lighthearted.
Aysa gripped the leather-wrapped steering wheel of her sleek, black sedan. The car was a marvel of Aetherion engineering, silent and predatory. Her phone was connected through the dashboard's holographic system, the blue light reflecting in her cold, sharp eyes.
"Yes, Father," she said. Her voice was calm, but a simmer of irritation vibrated beneath the surface.
"They left without informing you?" her father's voice asked over the encrypted line.
"Yes. My so-called 'friends' from the delegation decided to leave for the airport two hours early. They claimed it was for security reasons, but we both know they just wanted to avoid my oversight."
"And you are returning now?"
"I'm halfway to the terminal already. I'll be on the private transport by noon."
There was a long pause on the other end. "If there is no further Intel to be gathered from the Arabres labs, then return home immediately. The Aetherion high council is restless."
"There won't be any problems," she said evenly.
She ended the call with a sharp tap on the screen. Her jaw tightened. She hated being left behind, and she hated this city's crumbling infrastructure.
The road surface grew rougher as she took a shortcut through an industrial district. Suddenly, the car hit a shallow but jagged pothole.
"Seriously?" she muttered, her knuckles whitening on the wheel. "Is this road designed for bullock carts? How is this a sovereign nation?"
Another bump followed, more violent this time. A warning light flickered on her dashboard. The engine gave a pathetic, wheezing cough. The sleek machine began to lose momentum.
"No. No, no, no. Not now."
She steered the dying vehicle to the side of the dusty road. The engine shut down with a final, metallic groan.
Silence.
Aysa stepped out of the car, her designer boots hitting the dirt. She scanned the empty, desolate stretch of road, the heat of the morning beginning to shimmer off the asphalt. She exhaled a sharp, frustrated breath. "This country is testing my patience. I should have taken the transport."
She checked her phone. Low signal. No ride-share apps were responding in this zone.
"Fine," she murmured, her eyes narrowing. "We'll do this the old-fashioned way."
She walked toward the edge of the road and raised a hand as a vehicle approached in the distance. The first car, a rusted transport truck, passed her without even slowing down, kicking up a cloud of red dust. The second, a small family car, slowed slightly before the driver saw her sharp, intimidating expression and sped off.
Finally, an old, dented sedan rolled to a stop. The window slid down slowly, revealing an elderly man with greying hair and eyes that scanned her up and down with an unsettling, lingering intensity.
"Well, well," he said, his voice a greasy rasp. He smiled, showing yellowed teeth. "What a beautiful girl to be standing all alone on a road like this. Heaven must be missing an angel."
Aysa's expression remained neutral, like a mask of carved ice. "My car broke down. Could you drop me at the airport? I'll pay you for the trouble."
"Of course, of course! A beautiful lady in distress? Come in, come in. I'll take you wherever you want to go."
Aysa hesitated for a fraction of a second. She could feel the man's intentions—they felt like a stagnant pool of mud in her mind. But she had a flight to catch. She entered the passenger seat, the smell of stale tobacco and cheap incense filling her nose.
The car pulled back onto the road. The man kept glancing at her, his eyes moving from the road to her legs, then to her face.
"Airport, you said?"
"Yes. As quickly as possible."
"You don't look like you belong in Arabres. Too refined. Too... expensive."
She didn't respond, staring straight ahead at the horizon.
His gaze lingered even longer, his hand shifting subtly away from the gear stick and toward her side of the seat. "So young," he muttered softly, his voice dropping into a creepy, intimate tone. "Traveling all alone? A girl like you should have a protector."
Aysa turned her head slowly. The air inside the car seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant. "You should focus on the road," she said, her voice like a razor.
The man chuckled, misidentifying her coldness for fear. "Relax, sweetheart. I'm just being friendly. Life is hard, you know? We have to help each other out."
His hand reached out, fingers stretching toward her knee.
That was enough.
Without changing her expression, Aysa lifted her right hand. She didn't strike him. She didn't scream. Instead, she tapped into the cold core within her.
The moisture in the air inside the car condensed instantly. A thin, jagged blade of pure ice formed between her fingers, shimmering with a lethal, blue-white light. She pressed the tip of it gently against the side of his neck, just below the jawline.
The temperature plummeted. Frost began to form on the inside of the windshield.
The man's laughter died in his throat. He froze, his hand paralyzed mid-air.
"What—what is that? Is that a knife? How did you—"
"You don't need to know what it is," Aysa replied, her voice a terrifyingly calm whisper. "You only need to know what it does."
The ice blade pressed slightly harder, the coldness stinging his skin.
"If one more finger moves toward me," she said softly, "this blade will go through your throat and out the other side. Do you understand?"
The man's hands shot back to the steering wheel, gripping it so hard his knuckles turned white. "I—I wasn't going to do anything! I was just... I'm sorry!"
"Your hand was moving. Your eyes were moving. Your thoughts were moving," she said. "Drive."
A faint line of red appeared where the ice touched his skin—not a cut from a blade, but a burn from the absolute zero temperature. He began to tremble, his teeth chattering.
"You... you can't hurt me," he stammered weakly, trying to regain some sense of power. "The law... the police will find you..."
Aysa gave a small, humorless smile. "The law?"
Her wrist moved a fraction of an inch. The ice blade sliced lightly across the back of his hand resting on the wheel. He gasped in pain, a thin trail of blood trickling down his wrist.
"If this car stops or slows down anywhere before the airport terminal," she said evenly, "the next time I strike, it won't be your hand. It will be your heart."
"I understand!" he whispered desperately, his eyes wide with terror. "I'm driving! See? I'm driving!"
The rest of the trip was conducted in a heavy, suffocating silence. The man drove rigidly, his eyes locked on the road, his breathing uneven and shallow. Aysa watched him with the detached interest of a predator watching an insect. She slowly dissolved the ice blade back into mist, the frost on the windows evaporating.
By the time they reached the airport entrance, the car rolled to an obedient stop at the departures curb.
Outside, only a few meters away, a taxi had just arrived.
Arav stepped out first, stretching his back and taking a deep breath of the jet-fuel-scented air. Sonic followed, stumbling slightly as he tried to pull both their bags out of the trunk at the same time.
"I told you I'd handle the luggage!" Sonic shouted, struggling with a caught strap. "I'm the logistics manager of this operation!"
"You're the disaster manager," Arav joked, reaching in to help him. "Just grab the small one, I've got the heavy lifting."
They stood there for a moment, arguing about who would carry the backpacks, two college students excited for a beach holiday.
Across the parking lane, Aysa stepped out of the old sedan. She looked as composed and elegant as if she had just stepped out of a spa, not a car she had hijacked with an ice daggers.
Before closing the door, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, hexagonal device. She placed it on the dashboard of the man's car. It activated silently with a soft, amber pulse of light.
The light spread through the interior of the car like a ripple in water. The cut on the man's hand sealed instantly, leaving no scar. The blood vanished. The dent in the side of his car—caused by his panicked braking earlier—smoothed itself out.
Most importantly, the man's memory began to blur. The shards of the last twenty minutes dissolved into a vague, pleasant haze of "dropping a nice girl at the airport."
Aysa leaned slightly toward the open window. "Thank you for the ride. Have a safe day."
The man stared at her, blinking. For a moment, something felt missing in his mind, a gap in his timeline he couldn't quite identify. "Oh... yes... of course. You're welcome, miss. Have a... have a good flight."
He nodded slowly, looking confused but unharmed. Aysa stepped back and walked toward the entrance, her light scarf partially covering the lower half of her face.
The man watched her go, a wistful smile on his face. "Such a beautiful girl," he muttered to himself. "What a shame I didn't get her name." He started the engine and drove away, the trauma erased by Aetherion technology.
Inside the terminal, Arav and Sonic walked through the automated gates, merging with the river of travelers.
"Bro, look at the board!" Sonic pointed toward the giant LED screen. "Flight 402 to Goa. Status: On Time. It's happening. Goa feels real now."
Arav nodded, a strange thrill of anticipation humming in his chest. "Yeah. It does."
Neither of them noticed the girl in the expensive scarf walking past them on the opposite side of the hall. They were focused on the future; she was focused on the shadows.
Aysa stepped into a quiet corridor near the VIP lounge and dialed her father again.
"I'm at the terminal," she said, her voice returning to its professional chill. "But this country is terrible, Father. There is no respect for the basic codes of conduct. The commoners are... unruly."
"There are bad people in every corner of the 10 Nations, Aysa," her father replied. "What happened?"
"An old man tried to overstep. I had to remind him of his place."
There was a pause. "Did you record the vehicle's identification?"
"I did. Sending it now."
She forwarded the car's number plate.
On the other end of the call, in a skyscraper that pierced the clouds of the Aetherion Federation, Aysa's father stood in a vast, marble office. Behind him stood a young man—sharp-eyed, with shoulders like a soldier and a gaze that felt like a physical weight.
Kael, Aysa's older brother.
The father looked at the number on his screen and turned the phone toward his son.
"So much courage," the father said quietly. "To think a common insect from Arabres thought he could touch my daughter."
Kael looked at the number, his expression flat and emotionless. "Send me the GPS coordinates of that vehicle's registry," he said to an unseen assistant. "He will not see tomorrow's sunrise."
The father gave a small, approving nod. "If we weren't bound by these fragile government contracts, we wouldn't even have to hide the bodies of such pests."
Kael's eyes didn't move. "I understand. It will look like a simple heart failure. No one will question it."
The call ended. In the airport of Arabres, Aysa boarded her private jet. In the main terminal, Arav and Sonic boarded a budget airline.
The roads had crossed for a second, but the journey was just beginning.