Chapter 82: Ruler
The lab lights were the soft kind that made metal look honest. Fans whispered somewhere in the ceiling. On the table, a projection glowed - a stack of lines and numbers and tiny arrows, all of it precise and not at all interested in explaining itself to anyone who didn’t already belong.
Raizen leaned in, forearms planted, shadow cutting the light at a clean angle. "If we shave two grams here" he said, tapping near a curve that might have been a joint or might have been nothing, "this should let me change direction without blowing my spine up."
Saffi stood on his right, slate cupped against her ribs like a small animal. "Two grams is... uhh... we can..." she murmured, and pushed her glasses up with a knuckle. "But it... uh... changes your moment of-" She stopped, breathed, started again smaller. "It’ll feel different. In a good way." Her stylus hovered, didn’t touch. "Maybe."
He didn’t look away from the light. "Yeah, that’s exactly what I said...?"
Saffi nodded too many times for a single sentence. "We, um... we could add a-" She sketched in the air, not on the projection, the shape of something that wanted to be a line. "Or we leave it..."
He smiled a little, more with the voice than his mouth. "Leaving is hard."
She tried to laugh and made a faint, breathy sound you could mistake for the ventilation. When she handed him a tool - a thin driver that knew where it belonged - her fingers hovered an unnecessary heartbeat over his. He took it without noticing the hover. She noticed. Her cheeks warmed a careful shade.
"Anchors there" Raizen said, tracing three neat points around an invisible circle. "If they hold, I can-"
"Turn actual corners" Saffi finished, too quickly. She winced at herself, then stood perfectly still so she wouldn’t knock anything down. A lock of hair slipped forward; she tucked it back behind her ear twice just to make sure it stayed. "Sorry. I’m... excited."
"Good" he said, sincere. "I don’t have math for the feeling, but it’s getting closer."
Her mouth tipped toward a smile and backed away from it. The projection threw pale blue across her throat. She looked like a person trying to be brave in a language she didn’t speak often yet.
The door hissed. Hikari stepped in with a paper bag folded at the top and grease blooming a small, blessed circle near the bottom. Her helmet was hooked on two fingers, her hair pinned up haphazardly, smile ready - until she saw the two of them standing close with the light between them like a secret.
She set the bag down a touch too firmly. The table pinged in offense.
"Working overtime?" Hikari asked, tone gentle and edged enough to cut tape.
Raizen glanced up, blinked, smiled for real. "Savior" he said, reaching for the bag like a drowning man who had been raised to say please. "You brought life."
Saffi straightened so quickly her slate squeaked against her jacket. "Just... Trying out different stuff. It’s nothing." She retreated half a step she didn’t need and pretended to check a number that didn’t need checking. The projection washed her face a little bluer.
Hikari opened the bag and the lab traded its honest metal smell for peppered steam and sweet fried bread. She slid a bun toward Saffi without looking directly at her. "You should eat."
"Thank you" Saffi said, like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to be included in the ordinary.
Raizen tore a bun in half and handed the bigger piece back. "You two are saving me. Quite literally!" he said to both of them and not particularly to either.
Saffi’s stylus fluttered in small, nervous arcs over the slate: a note, then another, then a tiny correction written so neatly it might have been a prayer. "If you... if you want to try the weight tonight" she offered, "I can... stay."
"Tomorrow" Hikari said, mild. "We have a thing."
"What thing?" Saffi asked, then looked immediately like she regretted having a voice.
The answer was the chime that meant Alteea’s name. It came from the hall like a bell deciding it had waited long enough.
The vehicle bay was an elegant mess. Lifts hummed. Cables draped. Engineers ghosted between machines with the careful arrogance of people who knew exactly how much of the world they held together.
Hikari’s Kestrel-X sat on a stand, front fairing glowed under a diagnostic strip. A tech spun the rear wheel and the bike purred like it had opinions about the day’s agenda. Hikari touched the tank as if to calm it, which it did not need, and refused to let anyone polish the tiny scratch on the side fairing that felt like it belonged to her.
Keahi stood under a ceiling rig while a tech clipped a slim, black harness to her shoulders. "If your bird gets tired" the tech said, trying not to sound impressed or terrified, "this line loves you more than you love it."
"It’s mutual" Keahi said. The harness settled like a promise.
Feris wore her wing-pack, straps snug, jets quiet. A pair of engineers murmured about thrust tolerances in tones people usually reserve for wine. "Spin" Feris reminded them, bright. "I need to spin."
"We know. This is... The fifth time you told us today" one of them said, resigned but fond, as if the word had already been a long conversation.
Arashi’s hoverboard floated in place on a cradle, nose lifted like it had considered mischief and decided to rehearse it quietly. He leaned on his own self-satisfaction and asked, "Sniper mode?"
"No" three engineers and a sign said without looking up.
Esen scowled at his rings while Saffi’s clean handwriting on a tablet near his elbow read: HIGH SPIN RISK, underline, underline. "Slander" he told the note. "I spin beautifully."
Lynea stood with her fragments humming near her ankles, light stitching into lane-thin wheels that formed and reformed as she moved. She slid one foot forward and the wheel found it, the sound all silk and precision.
Ichiro’s hover quadbike rested two inches over the tile, steady as patience. He liked that about it.
Alteea arrived the way she always did when rooms were already working: she made them feel like they had just started. White coat, glasses tilted to catch the light exactly once, smile that meant yes and maybe and you’re not ready and also you might be.
"Alright, kiddos" she said, letting affection and amusement blend. "Upgrades will fit themselves while you pretend to listen. Today isn’t about toys. It’s about wearing your nice faces and not tripping in them."
Esen raised a hand. "We only trip in style. And we have nice faces!"
"I shall not comment." Alteea said. "But try to bring that to the brief."
They were herded toward a glassed-in room that pretended not to be important. Chairs lowered themselves out of the wall and then thought better of it and lifted one more centimeter. A map glowed on the far pane: Neoshima’s ring, the teeth of the wall, the long smear of green beyond, not flat green but the textured, layered green that forests use to hide the sky. A little sigil pulsed in that green, a name under it: Ukai.
"The weather has decided air is a myth" Alteea began, hands loose on the back of a chair she refused to use. "Nothing flies through that front that wants to live. Which means our Ruler won’t fly. He will go by ground and bridge and courtesy. And you will escort him."
"Us?" Arashi said, noble and wounded by order. "Shouldn’t an actual Vanguard unit-"
"Who in their right mind would attack the Ruler?" Alteea countered, dry. "This is ceremony in boots. You’re the Academy’s student showcase. Not even I would want to send your upperclassmen, that you so elegantly beat. Veterans look like conclusions. You look like beginnings. Also" and here her smile sharpened, "I don’t bet on sanity."
Kori slipped in at the back with a paper bag she did not admit held pastries. She leaned against a wall, arms crossed, eyes soft, mouth unhelpful. "Keep your cuffs clean" she said. "It notices everything."
Hikari, quietly: "Ukai?"
Kori nodded to the map’s pulse. "A city that forgot what ground felt like and didn’t miss it. Bridges braided between trees that make our buildings feel insecure. They’ve kept something for a very long time - something our Ruler will see with his own eyes and not trust to couriers. Nobody knows, and it’s not your business. Yours is to get him there looking like this wasn’t hard."
"Rain forest paths" Alteea added, eyes on a different set of numbers. "Humidity, slipperiness, load variation..."
Esen wiggled his fingers. "My enemy list grows."
"You all will adjust" Alteea said, not as a wish but as a law. "Expect rope bridges with opinions. Expect heights that forget to be polite. Expect local wildlife that thinks your sleek machines look like snacks. Expect the weather to take requests from no one. But luckily for you, the storm won’t hit you as hard under the giant trees"
Raizen’s gaze went back to the patch labeled Ukai. He could already feel the flexibility in the path, the way the route would want him to be a line that wasn’t straight. The projection in the lab behind his eyes hummed.
"Questions?" Alteea asked, knowing better.
"Will we meet the Ruler before we leave?" Hikari asked.
Alteea’s mouth did something like a secret sharing itself. "He’s waiting."
A private room was simple and exactly the right kind of simple. Wood that wanted to be touched. White that remembered other colors. They lined up because their bodies knew how to do that. Boots evenly spaced. Hands behaving. The room had a second hum to it, like a held breath.
Two luxurious-looking Wardens stepped out first and took their places as if they had fused with the doorway at birth. Then the door completed its slide.
A boy walked in.
Thirteen, if math had mercy. Ceremonial white with silver seam-work that made the fabric lie perfectly along angles too slight to be called a man’s. Shoes quiet. Sash across his chest that carried a weight measured in years he did not yet own. He had the posture of someone who had learned to divide himself between being looked at and doing things worth looking at. His hair lay obediently. His eyes were knives that had chosen not to cut this morning.
Kori’s arms uncrossed without her permission. She bowed her head the way she did for no one. Even Alteea lowered her chin and that was somehow more. "I’m glad you’re going fine! These are the royal scholars."
The eight stood that fraction straighter you can’t fake.
The boy came to a stop in front of them, and the room decided to make silence into a thing with shape.
"Neoshima’s Ruler" Kori announced, doing it like words were tools and could be sharpened. "Solomon."
He looked at each of them as if they were questions on a page he intended to finish without showing his work. "You may call me Solomon" he said, and then, as if rescuing them from formality. "Or Ruler, if it helps you forget my age."
No one breathed wrong. Esen’s rings chimed once and then regretted it. Arashi’s mouth opened and chose wisdom. Keahi’s fingers uncurled from an invisible hilt because habits are stubborn. Ichiro dipped his head the exact amount that meant respect without surrendering himself. Lynea blinked and did not look away. Feris, who had never been shy in her life, was shy.
Hikari’s whisper had no business escaping. "He’s... Just a kid."
Solomon’s mouth tilted in a private agreement with the universe and then flattened again into work. Outside the window, the clouds thickened like a closing fist. The route to Ukai waited in the green.
They bowed, finally, because there are rules that are also kindnesses. Solomon returned the gesture as if meeting people halfway were part of the job description.
"Well then. Shall we?" he said.
The city rearranged itself to make room for the answer.