Chapter 75: Abyssal Red
Kori didn’t look at the stone in Ichiro’s shoulder a second time. Not really. She found a neutral patch of air and pinned it to her focus.
"Later" she said. Sharp. Final.
Arashi almost said something else and found nothing but the edge of Kori’s voice. Esen’s rings chimed once against each other, then stilled. Hikari’s fingers hovered as if touch could make sense and then folded back into her palms. Ichiro’s cloak lay like a shadow on the white floor.
The light overhead blinked.
Once. Twice.
Then the world went red.
Not a warm red - an emergency red that cut across the Heart’s white like a knife. Lines along the walls stuttered crimson. The Heart’s hum pitched up. The column they’d just used sank back into the floor as if embarrassed to be furniture in a crisis.
Speakers found every ear at once. The voice was calm and enormous.
"ALERT. FORTITUDE 7.4 ABYSSAL NYX DETECTED. DISTANCE: 14.2 KILOMETERS. BEARING: NORTHEAST. ALL SUPERVISORS TO LANTERN."
The floor beneath them seemed to make a decision; people appeared out of side rooms like blood rushing to a wound. White coats, gray uniforms, techs with slates already in their hands - moving with the kind of speed that’s practice wearing its best suit.
Alteea didn’t flinch. She leaned into the red light like it had been staged for her.
"Perfect timing" she said, and smiled like a conductor hearing tuning notes. "With me."
They moved. The eight had never moved with that much purpose while doing nothing but following in their lives. Saffi ghosted half a pace back, slate alive, logging as she walked. The corridor curled to a set of doors too wide to be doors. They parted with a low, decisive rush and revealed a freight elevator that could have swallowed a van and still been hungry.
They stepped into a room that was pretending to be a box. Rails along the sides hummed. The floor under their boots sighed and shifted, finding level like a ship in rough water. The doors sealed, and for a breath the only sound was breathing and the far-off heartbeat of machines learning a new song.
"Hold on to a rail" Kori said, already braced.
"Why would we-" Arashi began, and the elevator turned sideways.
It didn’t lurch. It tilted, smooth and merciless, reorienting their floor into a wall and then back to a floor again as the cab slotted into a vertical shaft with the confidence of a blade finding its sheath. Hikari made a soft surprised sound and decided to keep her feet under her for the rest of her life. Keahi grinned despite herself.
The next movement was up.
The elevator rose with force you felt more in your teeth than your stomach. White lines slid past the glass like the inside of a throat. Numbers flashed across a panel - L-6, L-5, L-3 - then the cabin slowed, kissed a level, and opened.
The Lighthouse wasn’t a tower. It was a bridge. A bridge to the rest of the world, ruling over it.
They stepped into a round command hall with a throat of glass windows that gave them Neoshima like a map under their feet. The city’s rings held, the wall a clean arc beyond the Lotus, Ironvein’s cranes frozen mid-sweep, Hearthway’s market roofs pebbled like scales, the Glowline a smear of color even in daylight. Above, the Lighthouse’s crown.
Stations ringed the room below, each with its own floating slate and bank of quiet screens. People slid into chairs without asking who owned them. Labels glowed on rails and around pillars: OPS-N. AIR. STRK. DRON. MED. COMMS. A central pillar rose from the floor three meters into a narrow mezzanine: Alteea’s vantage, a conductor’s podium in steel and glass.
"Open petals twenty-one degrees" Alteea said as she moved, her voice dropping the flirt and picking up the whole city. "Go."
"Petal frame unlocking, twenty-one on your mark" OPS-N answered, fingers flicking, windows above them unlocking with a sound like rain starting.
"Now."
The Lighthouse’s crown obeyed. Outside, eight massive petal segments unlatched and rotated, their edges glinting, opening the sky with elegant hostility. Dim light shifted in the room, white brightening to a bluer cast as sensors activated.
"Air" Alteea called. "Ready an F–51 on lane three."
"Copy" AIR said, already moving. "Lane three is... Spinning, now."
Somewhere below and to the south, near the Academy’s edge, a jet highway lifted out of the ground like a blade rising from a scabbard. The eight watched it come up on a huge screen set into the north wall: plates locking, rails revealing, hazard lights blinking into a perfect runway where there had been campus stone. A schematic appeared on the adjacent display with cool arrogance: FALCON 51 - swept-back wings, narrow body, twin tailfins like fangs.
Alteea went on without pausing. "Half of Vanguard Five."
"Preferences?" someone asked from the floor.
Alteea didn’t look down. "I don’t care. Whoever answers first."
Kori’s mouth flickered - that was an answer she understood. The room liked it too. Voices stacked, in order and on time:
"V–5, HAZEL here" a young woman’s voice came through - calm, clipped. "On call."
"V–5, RUNE" a man’s voice followed, a fraction older, a fraction amused. "At your mercy. Please don’t leave me alone like last time, command!"
"Pairs designated" COMMS confirmed. "Hazel and Rune. Five minutes to flight."
"Five is a suggestion" Alteea said, and the bones of the room smiled. "DRN, launch ten eyes. Tag: Abyssal Red. I want a web within two minutes. MED, prep Gate Two for evac element - no assumptions, just readiness. COMMS, civ channels on standby if this shifts."
"Eyes ready, 40 seconds till launch" DRN answered. "Angles streaming."
"Gate Two spun and waiting" MED said, already texting teams five floors down.
"Channels listening" COMMS returned. "No push."
Kori stood with the eight at the back rail, hands on the bar, the city wide around them. "Watch" she said, quiet. "Learn."
They watched.
The screens filled with angles. Drones left the Lighthouse in pairs, curving out and away in clean arcs that stitched a web of perspective over the land beyond the wall. The terrain out there wore the same palette it always had - gray-greens under a hide of clouds - but it looked different through the Lighthouse’s eyes: distances measured, elevations considered, every line annotated with someone’s idea of useful.
The F–51 sliced into view on the runway cam, nose pristine. Its wings were swept back, not forward, pulled like knives ready to draw. Heat shimmered under its engines. The rails under its wheels glowed.
"Falcon is up" AIR called. "Lane three hot. Pilot RUNE in the cage. HAZEL standing by."
On the pilot cam, they saw a face: pale blue hair, clipped short, eyes like water under winter. Rune’s mouth tilted in what might have been a grin and might have been the way his face was when it forgot to be serious. Another inset showed Hazel strapping in on the rear bay, two brown buns neat against her skull, staff laid along her thigh like a promise.
"Bird is ready" STRK announced.
Alteea let out a wide smile, almost a scary grin. "WE’RE ON!" She shouted. It was her domain, and she knew she was the best of the best.
The F–51 didn’t roar. It left. The rails kissed it, pushed, and the jet took the push as an insult and turned it into speed. It launched up the lane, touched sky, and became a line.
The eight leaned forward as one organism.
"Distance thirteen" OPS-N said, tracking. "Bearing holds. Abyssal signature steady at seven point four."
"What does ’seven point four’ look like" Arashi asked, not really expecting an answer.
"Big enough not to fit in your jokes" Keahi said without looking away.
"That must be pretty harsh then!"
"Eyes on" DRN cut in. "Angle one. Two. Five. Nine."
The monitors climbed in front of the windows - gravel and thorn scrub, a skeletal stand of half-dead trees - and then found the thing the numbers had been terrified of.
The Nyx stood in a small hollow that disrespected being small. It was tall, but tall wasn’t the first thing you saw. You saw the head - an abomination that looked like an axe blade driven point first into the idea of a face. Its "edge" gleamed along the top and bottom like polished bone; its "eyes" burned cold along the sides of that blade, set wide like prey animals built wrong. Arms too long by a measure no tailor would accept hung from a torso that didn’t agree with geometry. Its surface absorbed - as Nyx skins do - like looking at a midnight lake with something alive under it.
"Rune and Hazel in range" COMMS said.
"DRN, hold angles off the blade head. Those eyes ping." Alteea continued.
"Copy" DRN murmured. "Nine is high right. Five is low left. Keeping distance."
"Vitals in check" someone else said, but Alteea didn’t bother to answer. She was too hyped. Nobody knows how, as this is the thing she does daily, yet for quite some years now, she’s never bored.
"Give me every information on that Nyx." She said to nobody in particular.
The F-51 streaked into a drone’s frame and either went by or the drone decided not to be there - hard to say which. The rear bay opened like a mouth. They jumped.
Rune left like a thrown knife. The wingsuit caught, snapped into shape, micro-vanes popping open along his arms and sides. His silhouette sharpened as little stabilizers lit. He arrowed through the air with absurd, serene confidence.
Hazel didn’t fall. She aimed downward. Mid-air, she spun her staff into her hands, flipped it vertical, and blasted beneath her - an Eon bloom that looked, from this distance, like a bomb actually deciding to be a bomb. The ground bucked under the push. Dust leapt. She sank the last meters like she was being lowered by a careful god and hit with knees bent and head up.
The eight made a sound they might each call something else and was the same sound.
"Pressure" Kori said, almost to herself. "Keep it pinned."
Hazel moved first, because everything in her posture said she liked to ask first and wait for forgiveness later. She flanked, staff flickering, strikes landing with small suns at the points of contact. The Nyx turned and Hazel wasn’t there anymore - she was sideways, then forward, carving space into shapes it didn’t consent to.
Rune arrived on the Nyx’s other side like a rumor arriving late - low, fast. He didn’t touch the ground so much as skim it when he had to, his wingsuit flaring, folding, re-flaring like an organism of its own, blade in his hands saving their shine for when it counted.
"Not like us" Esen said, soft. I wish I could say that he said it with no envy. I can’t.
"Not yet" Kori replied.
The drone angles did their best. The Nyx threw its too-long arms like whips, the axe-head canted, eyes tracking the wrong way so that right felt wrong and wrong felt like getting cut. Hazel stuttered the earth under its feet with compressed blasts. Rune dug cuts where cuts would matter, aiming at tendon analogues and hinge illusions.
"Seven point four" Arashi whispered. "Okay..."
"You could take it on if you had over eight hundred forty fortitude. Just barely, a true gamble if you want to try to win." Kori told them, her eyes not sticking off the screens.
The Nyx learned.
It always happens at a second the human brain hates. The rhythm was theirs - faint, but real - and then the thing in the hollow remembered it wasn’t from here and changed the song.
On a high right angle, the drone caught a shift and then lost it. On low left, the world blurred. Rune shouted something the mic didn’t catch. Hazel turned to fake left and commit right, and the Nyx admitted it could be faster than camera math.
The axe-head flicked.
One clean motion. A line. A decision.
Hazel screamed. On screen, the color left her arm and her leg below the knee - they were there, then they weren’t, the edges too neat to be anything as honest as torn. Blood became fact in a second. Her body went to ground like a tower politely deciding to relocate.
"MED!" someone yelled without knowing they’d yelled. "Gate Two-"
"Hold" Alteea said, voice cutting without raising. "Rune!"
Rune was too far. He had committed to the last cut and the distance being reasonable. It wasn’t. He killed speed wrong, wings flaring, dove hard on a line that even the drones couldn’t love. Hazel was on her back, eyes wide, staff three meters away like a friend running parallel who would never catch up.
The Nyx pivoted. The eyes on the side of the blade found her without looking at her. One long arm uncoiled, the edge thought about coming down, and most of the Lighthouse forgot to breathe.
Hikari’s hand clenched until her knuckles hurt. Keahi’s other hand found Arashi’s wrist and did the same thing without asking. Arashi’s mouth opened and had nothing in it. Esen’s neck muscles went rigid. Lynea swallowed a prayer that had not been taught to her and did it anyway. Ichiro’s jaw set - the faint, wrong gold at his shoulder pulsed once.
Alteea’s grin was gone.
Voices answered. Screens chaotically obliged. On the main monitor, helping lines appeared over the Nyx’s head - impossible geometry trying to be useful. The desk teams didn’t type faster. They typed right.
The axe-head rose.
And for the first time, the eight saw what it.
Alteea Sage moved.