Chapter 74: Error
Alteea led them to a square of floor that had opinions. Lines lit themselves and then held - clean, surgical geometry. A white column lifted out of the tile with a soft hydraulic breath. At chest height, a hexagonal recess unfolded like a quiet mouth. Beneath the glass skin, nested lenses ticked in micro-steps around a crystalline core that turned as slow as tide.
"Fortitude column" Alteea said, glasses catching a slice of light. "You point your weapon into the panel and give me everything your body can push through it - cleanly. The column reads raw Eon, your channel quality, and what you’re best at. Saffi, if you could, please?"
Saffi’s slate woke with a tiny sigh. She stood a half-step back, eyes on no one and everything.
Arashi eyed the machine like it might bite first. "So we just... blast the mouth?"
"Panel" Alteea corrected, amused.
Kori folded her arms, clipboard under one elbow. "If you wobble, step out. Overexertion here is as foolish as underperforming."
"Underperforming?" Arashi murmured, horrified. "On a weekday?"
Alteea pointed at feris. "You first."
Feris blinked. "Me?"
"Strength doesn’t like waiting" Alteea responded. "It starts honest."
Feris stepped up, square and sure. She set her mace like a post, rolled her shoulders, and lifted. The hex mouth hummed a welcoming note, concentric rings lighting under her boots.
"Deep breath" Kori reminded her. "On your exhale."
Feris exhaled and pushed. The air itself seemed to grip. Light gathered at the mace’s head and ran down the shaft in a bright ribbon - then leapt clean into the hex. The column drank it; the vertical strip climbed like a mercury line coaxed by a sun. Feris held until her forearms trembled and her breath turned into a growl.
White-blue numbers snapped above the column: 690... 700... 710... 718... 720...
724 – STRENGTH
Feris stumbled one step, palms on her knees, then laughed under her breath. "Okay. That stole my breakfast."
Alteea’s brows lifted a degree. "Seven-twenty-four with half a year on the mats" she mused. "Most entrants start six hundred-ish. No wonder you defeated the second years! I heard some things."
"About that..." Arashi interrupted. "It was more like a four on one..."
"Then what I believed was the first fake piece of information in... What? Four months? Anyways, you’re next, then" Alteea said, the column resetting with a glassy breath.
Arashi stepped into the ring with the confidence of a man about to be vindicated by science. He drew a sidearm with theatrical neatness, leveled at the hex, and rolled his shoulder like loosening a joke.
He didn’t roar. He threaded. A pencil-thin line of Eon left the muzzle dead straight, like a chalk mark that refused to wobble. The strip climbed in exacting, insultingly even increments: 760... 780... 795... 798... 799.
Chime.
799 – ACCURACY
Arashi stared as if numbers could be bullied. "Come on" he told nobody in particular. "At least eight hundred?"
Keahi made a sympathetic noise that did not reach her eyes. Hikari covered her mouth and failed to hide a smile.
"It’s beautiful" Esen said, slapping Arashi’s shoulder. "Infuriatingly precise."
"If it comforts you" Alteea added
"It does not" Arashi said. "But say it again."
"You – red hair!" Alteea called, moving on before 799 became a personality.
Keahi’s hand found the familiar leather wrap of her legendary claymore. She brought it up from her hip in a smooth, grounded arc, the blade heavy as a promise and twice as honest. Inhale. Exhale. She drove power through the steel the way she’d driven a thousand clean strikes - no preen, no waste.
The core inside the column spun up fast. The strip climbed; the room’s air leaned. Another chime. The numbers climbed forward, finally stopping.
813 – HANDLING
Keahi stepped back, heat on her cheeks. "Average" she said, lying through her teeth.
"Very average" Arashi echoed, purely to suffer.
Kori’s glance said one day, and Keahi tried not to grin like a blessing had been smuggled to her in a reprimand.
"Esen" Alteea said, a little sparkle in her lenses like she’d been waiting to see how reflex would translate to a machine. "That’s your name, right?"
Esen rolled his wrists; the rings around his fingers clicked and settled. He set both hands to the hex - metal to glass. He didn’t look like he was pushing much. Shoulders low, spine long. But the line that left those rings was clean as a scalpel, with no flare at the edges. Very not Esen-like. The numbers rose and decided to stop after a few seconds.
781 – REFLEX
Esen breathed out and smiled like a magician after a neat trick he did mostly for himself.
"Cute" Alteea approved. "The column likes you. It hates most people."
"Mutual" Esen said. "We had a talk."
"Lynea!" Kori called.
Lynea didn’t fidget. She gave the plushie whale back to Feris. Scatter of fragments answered her silent call, lifting as if remembering a previous shape. At her will they slid together into a short spine - no blade, just a clean conductor. She set its tip to the hex, exhaled, and let the energy through.
It didn’t spike. It lifted. The column drank like it had been built for that exact shape of current. Numbers climbed steady and stopped exactly on:
865 – ADAPTABILITY
Lynea tilted her head at the trait, considered it, and nodded once: fair.
Alteea’s mouth did that pleased, tiny curve. "I love an honest scanner day."
Kori’s voice, from the edge: "Raizen."
Raizen stepped into the ring. The small folded packet in his inner pocket - the star earrings - sat warm against his ribs like a reason. He set his feet. The Heart’s hum answered the line of his bones. He drew both twin blades; they felt like the correct length of his arms. No shove. He let Eon run the way it wants to when he gets out of its way.
Light slid - no bloom, no spill - narrow as a thought into the hex.
The strip shot: 700, 750, 800, 820, 860, 900 - slowed - 912... 916.
916 – SPEED
Arashi made a soft sound that was ninety percent respect and ten percent spite. Keahi whistled between teeth. Hikari’s eyes went bright, the kind of bright that warmed things that forget to be warm.
Raizen let his breath go. The column had taken more than he meant to give. His hands shook, so he sheathed the blades before anyone noticed it.
Alteea’s eyes narrowed - not suspicious, cataloguing. "Noted" she murmured, and then: "Pretty eyes, you’re next!"
Hikari stutter-stepped, then squared. She spun her double-ended staff once, the motion neat, and leveled the sharp one end at the hex. The floor rings brightened.
She exhaled.
There was no climb.
The strip jolted to the top like it had been yanked by a string from the ceiling. No ramp, no drama - just a single absolute answer. The column’s inner lenses rotated, then rotated again, as if recalibrating for a sunrise it had not scheduled. A fresh digit appeared to the left that had not bothered showing up for anyone else.
1000 - –
No trait. Just a long em-dash, the quiet of a machine refusing to lie.
For a second, nobody breathed.
"Oh that’s rude" Arashi said at last, delighted and offended. "That’s - "
Kori clapped once, genuine. "Hikari."
Hikari stood with the staff lowered, eyes wide, pupils huge like she’d stepped from shade into noon. "Is that... alright?"
"It is... something" Esen tried to laugh, but only a faint wheeze came out. "But Raizen beat you..."
The drained weight settled late - Hikari’s shoulders slumped, a soft "oh" escaping.
Alteea’s head tilted, the tiny click of an oh in her mind. She was impressed and did not hide it. "Clean" she said, voice softened. "Very clean." She glanced at Kori.
Kori’s mouth had remembered how to be a line. "Keep your stance" she said to Hikari, which meant I’m proud and we’ll talk later at the same time.
"Last" Alteea said, turning. "Ichiro. Let’s find your song."
Ichiro pushed off the rail with his unhurried steadiness. He set his palm to the hex.
Esen snorted. "It doesn’t work like th-"
The column woke like someone had whispered its true name.
A second core inside the glass spun - the one none of them had seen before. Not even at Hikari. The vertical strip climbed in a stutter, then smoothed: 820, 840, 851. And next to it, the machine tried to be helpful and got confused.
851 - HANDLING - ERROR
The word hung beside the trait like a torn page. A thin red bar flickered along the column’s seam and died.
"What?" Hikari whispered.
Alteea didn’t answer. She crossed the distance in three quiet steps, decision already made.
"Alteea!" Kori said in the tone that meant I trust you, not this moment.
Too late. Alteea’s hand found the edge of Ichiro’s cloak and pulled.
The cloth fell. The white lights found the angle and told the truth.
A stone glowed in Ichiro’s right shoulder - dark yellow, the color of old gold. Not nested in a harness. It was... In him. In his shoulder. Skin had grown around the facets the way a tree swallows wire, flesh taught by years to make room for what didn’t belong. From the shard, fine veins of color ran under the skin - oil-on-water shimmer, wrong in the way of beautiful lies. They traced down his bicep and to his heart, delicate and unforgiving, and flared faintly when the column hummed, the glow a murky gold that made Raizen’s memory of bright training-room luminite feel like another species.
Nobody made a joke.
Saffi’s slate captured a single neat line while her eyes did not move from the thing in the boy.
Kori changed by half a degree, enough that those who knew her felt the landslide. "Ichiro." she said, as if saying his name had multiple meanings, it did.
Alteea didn’t look triumphant. She looked like a blade that had remembered its job. The flirt folded away. The professional stood in its place. "How...?" she added, to Ichiro, because when tells a different story than who.
Ichiro’s jaw tried to work once. It failed. He stared forward at nothing, as if still listening to that private room only he could hear. The faint light in the veins pulsed with the beat of his heart.
Arashi swallowed. "That’s - luminite."
The white space contracted. The Heart’s hum seemed to lean in. The column stood, polite as a witness.
Raizen didn’t hear the next breaths. The sound in his ribs pitched to a note with a memory nailed inside. An older room. A low voice. A tired smile that should have been a warning.
Takeshi, leaning back, saying:
The Moirai took kids nobody would miss. Strays. They simply took them. Stitched stones into their bones. Called it research until something finally screamed like a weapon. Rumors are that the test subjects all died.
The colored veins in Ichiro’s arm flickered again, quiet heartbeat under glass. Raizen’s palm closed, hard enough to hurt. The small packet in his pocket crinkled - the star earrings like two tiny truths begging for a better world. His mouth was dry. The apartment’s morning felt a lifetime away.
And for the first time since the door had opened, the white walls felt less like safety and more like witnesses.