Chapter 66: Courage over Legend
The Underworks did not hiss that morning. It breathed.
Air moved with the patient rhythm of places that have learned how to keep going. Cables hung like vines. Steam lifted from a food cart where someone scraped a pan with the stubborn tenderness of earning. Children chased a ball stitched from fabric and wire - when it hit a wall it made a soft clank and a burst of laughter. A woman argued prices with a vendor and lost by a coin but smiled anyway. Poverty had its hands in everything, but fear had loosened its grip. The alleys were still narrow, still wet in places, but the shadows felt like shade instead of threat.
Kori led, not fast. She kept her hands in her pockets as if that alone could keep the world calm. Raizen walked a half step behind, Hikari beside him, Lynea quiet as a held breath at his other shoulder. They took turns not talking. The Underworks did enough speaking for all of them.
"Doesn’t feel like a battlefield anymore" Raizen said finally, barely above the hum.
"Just tired," Hikari answered, and her voice made the word gentle.
Kori cut left down a narrower way, then right through a gate that looked welded shut until her key convinced it otherwise. The rust room opened again.
They passed the main training room first, empty at this hour. Heavy bags slept with their straps tucked. She stopped at a door near the back, plain and honest, but the door didn’t have a keyhole. It was open
The door swung inward on quiet hinges.
The walls were the same white as outside. Dim lamps glowed at knee height along the baseboards, making the light feel like it knew it was entering a shrine. The air was cooler here. The quiet was not emptiness. It was company you didn’t have to talk to.
At the center stood a gravestone. It was not marble - you could tell because marble shows off. This stone was white like a kept promise. Edges clean. No flourish. A small crescent carved at the top had not been gilded. It didn’t need to be. The name was cut with a hand that had loved letters:
TAKESHI
Beneath, the inscription:
True Courage doesn’t live in triumphs,
but the failures you stand up from.
No dates. No ranks. A training knife, its edge blunted smooth, rested in a bracket to the right of the stone. To the left, a folded gray armband sighed into a niche, threadbare from being touched. All around, the walls were crowded - but the crowd was made of paper. Torn notebook lines, clean envelopes, folded scrap, tape, chalk and whatnot. Some notes had been here long enough to wrinkle and yellow. Some were new enough to still hold a curl. The whole room felt like it had been built from breath held and then let go.
Kori didn’t step past the threshold yet. She put her hand flat against the door and closed her eyes for one second - the kind of ritual you invent without meaning to. Then she let them go in.
Raizen moved slow. He wanted to run to the stone and he wanted to back away. He paused and did neither.
He taught me to stop before I was a tragedy.
He stood, he fought, he won.
He spared me and I did not deserve it.
He made me hold a stance until I hated him.
I am alive because of that hatred turning into respect.
He turned knives into choices.
Fewer ghosts.
Not a myth. A man who made myths embarrassed.
I miss your bad tea, old man - O
You told me courage was patience with a blade in hand.
When I wanted revenge you gave me stairs.
I did not become what they wanted for me.
Thank you.
Hikari’s eyes moved, catching words not with hunger but with the reverence you give other people’s truths. A small page near her shoulder read in careful block letters: He taught me that sparing is also a kind of brave. She exhaled softly, and the paper didn’t flutter - the tape had done its quiet job.
Lynea stood a few feet from the stone with her hands loose at her sides. She read without reaching, perhaps because the act of adding herself to a wall of thanks she had not yet earned felt presumptuous, perhaps because correctness, for her, is a way to show respect. Her gaze found a line that said He spared when he could and did not move for a while. Her fragments, as if they knew, came to stillness so perfect they seemed part of the room.
Kori stepped in last. She drifted along the wall until her fingers found a chalk stub on a low shelf that had been put there by a person who understood altars. She did not pick it up yet. She stood before the stone.
"Hi," she said to it, so quietly the word barely dared to be spoken. "I brought them."
The lamps hummed politely in the silence that followed.
Raizen reached into his jacket and took out a square of cloth. It wasn’t special. That was why it was the right one. It was the cloth he used to wipe his blades when he remembered to be a person before being a weapon. He folded it in half and then in half again and set it at the foot of the stone. His fingers touched the edge of the name, just briefly, as if confirming it could exist without becoming a story.
"Thank you," he said. It was not a prayer. It was inventory.
Hikari knelt, knees quiet against the floor, and drew a circle in the dust at the base of the stone with her index finger. Not a spell. Not an invitation. A shape that meant hold. She let it stay a moment, then swept it away with her palm, and the act of erasing felt like completion, not loss.
She rose and touched Raizen’s sleeve, a small thread between their moments. "We should write," she murmured.
They found a small stack of clean paper and a pencil in a tray carved into the wall—a kindness left by an earlier visitor. Hikari held the paper against the plaster while Raizen wrote, and the angle made his script straighter, steadier. The pencil was dull. It made the letters honest.
To a father who chose courage over legend.
To a father twice—once to a daughter we never met, and once to a discipline that keeps us alive.
We see you, and we will stand up again.
—R. & H.
Hikari read it once, then nodded and made a tiny correction by adding a dot where the pencil had failed to press, and in doing so she matched his rhythm. She folded the top edge, tore a neat strip for tape from the roll sitting in the tray, and fixed the note beside a cluster of others that had come from hands with calluses like theirs.
Lynea stepped to the stone. She didn’t kneel like a supplicant. She stood like a student. Like a survivor. Then she went down on one knee in something that was not supplication either. It was competence given a posture. She cupped one of her fragments out of the air and set it on the stone’s base. For an instant it looked like an offering.
"Thank you for ending what made me."
She stood. If the scar on her leg, now hidden behind her black tights, remembered fire. She did not fight it. She let it be a line that belonged in the room.
Kori had at some point picked up some chalk. She didn’t write on the wall. She looked at the smooth white face for a long time and then - because some things want sound to carry them - spoke.
"You told me boring wins," she said. "I have been trying to keep them boring. It is harder now. They are loud in ways that matter." A pause that felt like she was listening for a reply she knew would not come. "I am, indeed tired" she admitted to the stone, and that was a gift, not a complaint. "But I am not done."
She set the chalk back where she had found it, deciding not to write anything on the wall.
They stood there together for a while, not in a line, not in any formation that could be called military or ceremonial.
It would have been enough to leave like that. But Kori lifted her chin and stepped back from the stone and faced the empty space of the training floor with the stance of someone who expected the floor to talk back.
"Go on" she said, turning to the three, voice softening into order. "Back to the dorms. Tell nobody who didn’t walk down here with you. I’ll... stay a while." She glanced at the main room beyond the door, then back to the stone, then to them again. The expression didn’t need translation. "Train a bit."
Hikari opened her mouth - Do you want us to wait? - but then closed it on a small smile. "We’ll see you at breakfast," she said instead.
"Early," Kori said.
"Early" Raizen echoed.
Lynea bowed slightly - not to the room, not to Kori, but to the stone.
They went out. The door whispered shut on Kori, the white stone, the notes and the lamps with their petal glow.
Kori set her clipboard down on a bench at the edge of the main floor. The bench had an old dent where someone’s heel had made a habit of hitting it at the end of runs. She stepped onto the training lines, found the mark where a dash would start if a dash were the point, and did not dash. She breathed in four, held two, breathed out four, held two, again. The rythm in her head ticking like a distant heart agreeing. She settled her feet and moved through a sequence that had been taught to a hundred bodies in a hundred versions of this room: step, stop, step, step, step, stop. Each stop was a choice, not an accident. She changed tempo. The metronome kept up. Her face emptied of everything that was not muscle and attention. When she reached the end of the line, she turned on the ball of one foot and came back the other way without breaking rhythm. Somewhere in the movement, grief found a place to stand that didn’t hurt and stayed there.
Down the hall, the three climbed back through the building’s layers, through the corridor where the smell of oil gave way to tea and smoke and worn soap. At the gate, a boy with a kettle had steam rolling out. The children had shifted their game to a patch of smoother ground - the ball made a friendlier sound here. The city above sent a low ache down through the pipes that felt, for once, like music instead of warning.
They didn’t talk much. Raizen’s fingers still had the weight of stone in them. Hikari’s palm still remembered the circle she had drawn and erased. Lynea’s fragment had a cool spot that was not temperature.
At the mouth of the stair that would tilt them back into Academy light, Hikari paused. "It said failures," she said, thinking of the stone. "Not failure. Plural."
"Generous" Raizen continued.
"Exact" Lynea added.
They went up.
When the Rust Room’s door settled behind them, the metronome kept time for one more phrase and then, for no reason the rythm inside could have explained, stopped. A breath later, a palm clicked it back on. Kori kept moving, each stop a promise, each promise something she intended to keep until promises were no longer needed.
On the white stone in the quiet room, the new note sat with the old ones, edges catching a draft too small to be called wind.
To a father who chose courage over legend...