Chapter 67: Hard Path, Bright Road
The next three weeks peeled off the calendar like tape.
By day, the arena felt like a polite forge; by night, the Petal Hall glowed like a quiet shrine that had learned to put up with footsteps. Kori’s clipboard multiplied checkmarks. Kenzo’s hammer found new ways to hum. Between them, the eight learned to do the same thing over and over until "impossible" got bored and found another word.
Progress looked ridiculous until it didn’t.
Esen invented levitation.
I mean no, not really. Twenty glorious centimeters above the floor. He’d lift with the concentration of a locksmith, face flushed from effort - and stay there, a hovering doorstop of destiny. But he discovered that he could just explode his way up with his shockwaves, without hurting himself. It was tricky, but he managed to do it somehow. Don’t ask me. Esen bent more laws of physics than my fingers.
Arashi would drop to a squat beside him, deadpan. "You’re majestic. I can barely see you from up here."
"Jealousy" Esen said, drifting with the speed of a tired leaf.
Keahi rolled a pebble under him. It nudged his heel, continued on, pinged a post. "Untouchable" she said solemnly.
"Don’t jinx it" Kori called. "If he hits the ceiling again, you’re all doing laps."
"I have never hit the-" bonk. Esen’s head grazed a beam.
Kenzo clapped like a delighted sunrise. "Excellent! Again!"
Hikari learned levitation, too - the real kind, brief and clean. Ten seconds. Then twelve. Then fifteen, body uncurled, hair lifting like it belonged to clouds. She could hold herself still enough that you might forget gravity owed her rent.
Until Raizen dashed past.
The air told her about him a fraction too late. She drifted sideways, bumped a post, slid down with offended dignity.
Arashi applauded. "Our team’s kite."
Hikari pursed her lips. "I am going to learn to steer. Eventually"
"Good" Kori said. "Do not make me install strings."
Raizen’s dashes turned from sentences into words. He threaded through hoops Kenzo floated and stopped on coins Kori tossed without warning. He entered and canceled momentum like it was a switch he had put on a shelf and now knew exactly where to find. The floor stopped being a suggestion and became a partner.
Now he nailed ten perfect stop-starts in a row, Kenzo’s smile took up a whole wall. "Again."
Raizen blinked. "We... celebrate?"
"Again" Kenzo said, softly relentless.
By the twentieth, Raizen’s lungs felt like he’d traded them for gravel. By the thirtieth, Kori lifted one eyebrow - her version of praise - and slid him a bottle. "Boring wins" she said.
Raizen nodded between breaths. "Boring... also kills."
"Only if you do it wrong" Kori said.
He laughed then, because of course this was his life.
Feris negotiated with fate.
Her mace’s projection obeyed... Kind of. Sometimes, with a purr of Eon, a second head would bloom ahead of the first like a luminous twin and float along on a phantom chain. Sometimes the handle would lengthen into a four-meter sledgehammer shaft and she’d wind up with a weapon taller than her bragging rights.
"Which will it be today?" Arashi asked, hiding behind a pillar with theatrical caution.
Feris spun it up. The head split into a smaller head that drifted up and booped her on the nose.
She blinked. "I accept this outcome."
Next try, the handle telescoped out, absurdly long. Kenzo leaned back to let it pass, bumping into Kori, the picture of a teacher trusting the process. Kori didn’t move.
"Kori" Kenzo whispered, "your cheeks are-"
"Shut up." Kori cut him off, cheeks pinker.
Fate had a sense of humor. Feris learned to roll with it. She anchored the mace head, not the handle, let the world help, and the weapon settled into a language they both understood. Sometimes it even listened on the first try.
Keahi dragged fire out of the blade like a stubborn thread, wound it into a bright sphere, and threw.
At first, the fireball had all the elegance of a sneeze. It tore itself apart in midair, leaving the room smelling like singed pride. Then, one morning, it held - tight and patient - and went where she told it to.
"Behold" Arashi breathed. "The sun, but with manners."
Esen clapped a shockwave at the wrong angle. The polite sun swerved and smacked the ceiling with a deep whump that dusted everyone equally.
Keahi winced. "Teamwork?"
"Absolutely" Esen said, already sorry.
They learned to clap with her. Keahi threw - Esen clapped a corridor - the fire rode the invisible lane like a train that had studied good manners. Once, Kori made them run it until none of them missed a beat. At the end, Keahi leaned heavy on her knees, sweaty and grinning. "Again?" she asked, voluntarily.
Kori’s mouth almost smiled.
Ichiro stopped arguing with small things.
Stone had always loved him - pillars, arcs, terraces that lifted you like they’d been waiting for you all day. Rubber had laughed last week and run circles around his patience. Now the bouncy ball hovered above his palm, obedient as a tamed mistake. He rolled it along an invisible track, flipped it into a hoop, and let it settle back into his hand like that had been the plan.
"Show-off" Arashi murmured, affection hiding beneath the grumble.
"Picking you both" Ichiro said, and the floor rose beneath Arashi and Esen at the same time. They yelped in harmony as the platform carried them like a patient elevator.
Esen waved regally from his moving pedestal. "I am ascending."
"You’re ascending more than twenty centimeters" Arashi said, clinging to dignity.
Ichiro leaned and the platform tilted just enough to convince them to stop talking and bend their knees.
"Now catch" Kenzo called.
Ichiro sent them forward on a gentle stone arc. Lynea laid a fragment plane mid-path. Esen clapped on contact and the shockwave tucked neatly around Arashi’s orbit, redirecting him to a safe landing. When he hit the second fragment - a platform that had not existed a blink before - he landed like a gymnast who’d paid extra to the gods of not-breaking.
"Ten out of ten" Hikari judged, then floated for six seconds and drifted toward the wall. "Seven out of ten for me."
"Six" Arashi said, "for honesty."
Arashi learned to control the impossible.
His bullets rose around him like obedient moons. He could split one into two and make them both find the same target from opposite sides, then whistle them back into his palm without drawing blood. He discovered Lynea’s fragment fields could be rails for his shots - clean lines that taught ricochets to grow up.
The first time he laced three bullets through a triangle of Lynea’s making, bounced them off an Ichiro-built plate, and threaded them through the floating hoop Kenzo loved to dangle at ridiculous heights, he threw his hands up like he’d finished a magic trick.
Kori checked her watch. "Now do it without drama."
He did. He even bowed exactly the right amount to be smug and survive.
Lynea didn’t steal the room. She edited it.
Her fragments placed platforms like stepping-stones only she could see, then invited the others to find them. She spun up a field midair that turned Arashi’s ankle-twister into a clean step and then cut a beam of Keahi’s flame in half without burning either half, just to prove kindness could be sharp.
"Physics is resilient" Arashi said, familiar line delivered with a smirk.
"Good" Lynea said. "Better."
She woven two shards together with thread-thin Eon, the line humming with potential. Kori, watching, nodded once - a tiny trust granting - and Lynea stopped there, not testing the thread on flesh, not showing off, just placing the knowledge where it should live.
Catching each other before the floor did became a religion.
Kenzo made them jump from platforms that blinked out a heartbeat early, or dive into hoops that moved with the worst kind of teacherly malice. Lynea’s fields cushioned. Ichiro’s terraces appeared like decisions. Hikari floated for a specific count, long enough for Raizen to flash underneath and arrive exactly where her feet would be when she came down.
The first week, the floor collected six bodies and two egos. The second week, three and one. By the third, Kenzo scribbled on the whiteboard: CEILING COLLISIONS: 3 (down from 11) and drew a smiley face that looked suspiciously like Kori.
"Who drew that" Kori asked, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"Art is anonymous" Arashi said.
Between drills, there were small wars with gravity and wit.
Esen drifted his sacred twenty centimeters across the hall like a solemn glacier. Hikari matched him, levitating for ten seconds, then twenty, black-ended but bright dark hair lifting like a slow wave.
"You’re both very brave" Feris said, clapping softly. "Heroes."
"Hold this" Keahi said to Esen, tossing him a fireball. It passed beneath him, harmless. She blinked. "Oh. Untouchable."
"Science" Esen said.
Arashi tried to levitate himself just once, cheeks puffed, eyes grim. He lifted approximately the thickness of regret and immediately accepted that his thing was other things.
They weren’t just getting stronger. They were getting tidy.
Hikari’s spells stopped exploding impressively and started exploding on purpose. The blue of her energy sensed when it was needed and when it was drama - the circles that used to be everywhere only bloomed when she cast, quick and exact. She stitched a ray between two fragment planes Lynea held so steady it might as well have been a ruler. The ray hit the target drone in the center. The drone decided to become academic about pain and lay down.
"Better than everyone" Arashi announced. "As usual."
"I am standing right here" Keahi said, drawing fire from her blade and compacting it into a cherry-bright sphere. She threw. It kissed the far plate, rolled off without scorching, and popped where Esen told it to with a clap that felt less like violence and more like punctuation.
Feris dropped her four-meter handle-trick with enough control to lay it along the ground like a bridge. Ichiro walked up it with the dignity of a man who had always wanted a ridiculous sledgehammer catwalk. She still let it up to fate though. Kori pretended not to look at Kenzo. Kenzo pretended not to look right back.
At the end of most evenings, they lay on the floor in an eight-point star, counting bruises like beads. They kept score, because scoreboards are how you trick your brain into loving suffering.
Kenzo’s whiteboard sprouted columns. HOVER DURATION (Esen): 00:01:32. LEVITATION (Hikari): 00:00:39. DASH SERIES CLEAN (Raizen): 67. FIREBALLS WITHOUT SINGE (Keahi): 12. MACE PROJECTIONS WITHOUT PROPERTY DAMAGE (Feris): 9 (debatable). PLATFORM STREK (Lynea): 12. BULLET SPLITS RETURNED TO PALM (Arashi): 28/28. ARCADES BUILT & RECOVERED (Ichiro): 35. TOTAL CEILING COLLISIONS: always displayed larger, always trending down.