The Ember Blossom

If you live long enough at Seiryoku, you learn the geography of the excuses.
The hallway outside the locker rooms was a junction of three doors and a thousand alibis. Boys to the left, girls to the right, equipment closet dead ahead. Thin wardlines pulsed at each threshold—frosty-blue sensor runes that tasted for mana signatures and logged traffic to Facility Control. Somebody had stuck a weak illusion over the signs again—barely a shimmer, the kind of trick that makes your eyes read what your brain expects by nudging the pattern-recognition rune in your head. Most days, I kept my head down and my feet pointed left. Most days, that was enough.

Not today.

“Hey, Nullborn,” someone called behind me, voice casual the way a cat is casual toward a mouse. “Coach wanted extra sparring pads, right? Think they’re in storage.”

I didn’t slow. “I’m headed to practice.”

“Five minutes,” another voice pushed. “You want to impress Kaien-sensei, don’t you?”

I did. That was the problem.

I should’ve kept walking. Instead I glanced up just long enough to see the illusion’s shimmer catch at the edge of the sign—anchored sloppy to the threshold lattice. My brain told me the right-hand door said BOYS. My eyes told me the same. The hallway told me nothing; even the ward diode over the door winked innocently, fooled by a low-grade overlay.

“Fine,” I muttered, and pushed through the right-hand door.

It was quieter inside, tile cool under my shoes, the air sharp with the scent of soap. A row of lockers ran along one wall. Steam breathed from behind a frosted partition where privacy veils hummed like sleeping bees. Safety sprites—thumb-sized constructs with tiny ward-badges—floated near the ceiling, on standby. Voices—girls’ voices—echoed back, bright and careless and very much where I did not belong.

Every molecule in my body locked.

I turned on my heel immediately.

And slammed into someone walking in.

She was buttoning the cuff of her white jacket with brisk, neat movements, the kind you perform when your hands are always sure. Fire-colored ribbon at the throat, red trim crisp against white. Hair bright as a lit match, pulled back with a comb that caught the light and refused to let it go. Eyes amber-red, ember-bright—cool and precise, like a blade held still.

Ayaka Himura.
The Ember Blossom.

We stared for a heartbeat that lasted a year.

A shout went up from behind the partition. I lifted my palms instinctively, fingers splayed in the universal sign for I didn’t see anything, I’m leaving, please don’t kill me. My mouth opened to explain. Nothing useful came out.

Ayaka didn’t shout. She didn’t flinch. She took one step forward and the temperature of the room rose by a few degrees; the safety sprites chimed once as the dome’s siphon vents above us opened a hair, drinking the spill-heat.

“What,” she said, each word clipped clean, “do you think you’re doing.”

I focused on anything that wasn’t her face—the silver locker vent, a stray thread on my sleeve, the floor where tile met tile in a hairline crack. “Wrong door,” I said. “The sign—someone—”

A laugh echoed from the hallway, thin and triumphant. The illusion quivered and dropped as if it had heard enough; the ward diode blinked from fooled-amber back to regulation blue.

“Out,” Ayaka said.

“I’m trying,” I said, and took a step sideways, except she took the same step, and now we were close enough that I could smell rosemary and a hint of singed cotton, like fire had looked at her uniform and decided they were on a first-name basis. Micro-ward stitching along her cuff glowed and faded, the suit’s heat-buffer doing its quiet work.

Her eyes were furious—but not wild. There was nothing sloppy in her anger. It was a clean cut.

“You think you can walk in here like you matter?” she said softly enough that only I heard it. “You can’t even turn on a desk.”

All the words I should have said jammed in my throat. It was a setup. I didn’t look. I looked; I didn’t see. I’m sorry.
What came out was honest and useless. “I’m leaving.”

“Not yet,” she said.

Heat shimmered around her hand. Not flame—just the suggestion of it, the way a line on a page suggests the edge of a blade. She shut the door behind her with a firm, polite click and stepped into the hall.

“Outside,” she said again, and I went, because she had neither patience nor reason to give me, and because staying would have been worse for everyone.

The three boys who’d steered me in loitered at the corner like they were glued there. One had his arm slung over the other’s shoulder; another twirled a conjured ember between two fingers as if it were a coin. The corridor’s wall-ward camera iris tightened; their grins dried up when Ayaka walked out.

She didn’t look at them. She didn’t have to. Attention bent around her anyway.

She looked at me. “You want to prove you belong here?” She flicked a hand at the practice yard visible through the archway beyond the hall. “Midterms. Arena. You and me.”

An entire corridor of students inhaled. Someone’s AR overlay flashed up the midterm rules in the corner of my vision—capture, redirect, no lethal, healers on standby—then vanished when my null field failed to ping it.

My chest felt hollow. “You’re challenging me?”

A tiny, incredulous sound escaped her. “You walked into my locker room.”

“I was shoved.”

“That’s between you and your spine,” she said. “I don’t care about your excuses. I care that you respect me enough to fight me properly.”

Something in the back of my head admired that sentence even while the front scrambled for footing. She wasn’t asking for an apology or a confession or a speech. She was giving me a line to pull myself up to—or hang myself from.

“Fine,” I said, before my brain could vote.

Her chin lifted half a degree. “Good. Try not to burn too fast, Nullborn.” She turned on her heel and left as if she’d merely adjusted the weather; the siphon vents sighed closed behind her.

The corridor held its breath.

Then exploded.

“Midterms? With Himura?”

“He’s dead. He’s so dead.”

“Does Kaien know?”

“Do you think the Nullborn owns a burial plot?”

Laughter rippled along the walls. It sounded like I was being congratulated at my own funeral. Sprite-notes—tiny animated messages—zipped between hands, gossip already atomized into the school’s veins.

I stood there for a second, notebook clutched under my arm, the smell of rosemary and heat still lodged behind my teeth. The boys who’d pushed me in avoided my eyes so hard they almost tripped over their own feet.

I considered going after them. I let it go. Ayaka’s challenge had been so clean it made everything else look cheap.

I headed for the yard.

—

Renji found me first, because of course he did.

He sprang into my path like someone had wound him up and let go. “Tell me a rumor, and tell me the rumor is true.”

I rubbed a hand over my face. “Which rumor.”

He grabbed my shoulders. “The rumor where you, a humble protagonist, have just been challenged to a midterm duel by Ayaka Himura, the Ember Blossom, princess of fire, destroyer of grade curves, terror of overcooked steak.”

“Do you just keep that list on a note in your pocket?”

“Do not avoid the point.”

“It’s true,” I said.

Renji’s shout of joy startled a flock of second-years into dropping their illusions. A koi fish hit the floor, flopping before dissolving into sparkles.

“Yes!” he yelled. “Stage debut! Perfect! Mark Zero is going to—”

“Do nothing,” another voice cut in, flat as a shut book.

Kenji slid into our orbit with a notebook under his arm and an expression like he’d tried optimism once and found it statistically unwise. He flicked his gaze over me, catalogued the lack of char, and turned a page.

“On average,” he said, “Himura ends first-year duels in under three minutes. She favors pressure—wide arcs that deny approach lanes. Your footwork buys time, but not victory. Also, you cannot shoot anything.”

“We’re working on that,” Renji said brightly. “Tonight we—”

“—will not discharge anything in the workshop,” Kenji said. “Because you will be found and arrested by senseis.”

“Arrested is a strong word,” Renji breathed, already plotting.

“Executed, then.”

I stared at both of them. “Can this conversation go five seconds without planning my death?”

Renji patted my arm. “Buddy. I plan your triumph. Kenji plans the million ways it can fail. Together we equal one reasonable person.”

“Half,” Kenji corrected.

“Three-fourths,” Renji argued.

“Point six repeating,” I said, because math jokes are how you hide a tremor in your hands.

Renji’s grin softened when he saw me rub my palms against my trouser legs like I was trying to erase heat that wasn’t there. “Hey. You okay?”

I opened my mouth to say yes.

Hana stepped into view like she’d been trying to be brave the entire width of the hallway.

She held a paper bag in both hands, shoulders up to her ears. “I…um…brought snacks,” she said, and then, apparently remembering how to breathe, added, “for later. If you…after training.”

Renji reached automatically. She dodged him, thrust the bag at me instead, and looked up with an expression like a small animal about to run.

“You heard,” I said.

Her cheeks turned pink. “Everyone heard.”

A pack of first-years drifted past, whispering into their hands as if that made the sound less sharp. Dead, burned, toast. The words braided together until they were a rope around my chest.

Hana’s mouth set. “They’re wrong.”

“Well,” Kenji said, reading from his notes, “they’re probably—mmph—” Renji’s elbow introduced itself to his ribs.

“I’m okay,” I told Hana, because I wanted it to be true. “Kaien’s drills help. And—Renji and I are…”

“Making contraband,” Kenji supplied.

“An assist,” Renji corrected. “A technological supplement to raw talent.”

Hana was quiet for a second. I thought that would be it—her nodding, me thanking her for the snacks, Renji making a joke so none of us had to feel how heavy it all was.

Then her eyes flicked to the side, toward the wing we’d just left.

“I’m…glad you’re okay,” she said. Her voice wavered, then steadied, small and determined. “I—I heard about the locker room. If you wanted to see a girl there, you—” Her hands clenched, then flew up to cover her mouth. “I mean—no—you shouldn’t—obviously—but—if you really wanted—” Her face had gone as red as Ayaka’s trim. “I mean—ask me—”

All three of us froze.

Hana looked like she wished the floor would open and grant her release.

“It was an accident,” I said, too quickly. “Bullies. Illusion on the sign. I—didn’t see anything.”

“I know!” she burst, words tripping over themselves. “I know, I know, I just—” She swallowed hard, stared at her shoes, and said, so quietly I almost didn’t catch it, “I don’t like them laughing at you.”

A different kind of heat rose under my skin. Not embarrassment. Something with edges and a center.

“Thank you,” I said softly.

She nodded three times like a bird pecking seed and thrust a thermos at me with both hands. “Tea,” she said. “For courage. And hydration.” She spun on one heel and speed-walked away before gravity could remember how to hold her.

Renji let out a sound he probably thought was subtle and failed at it. “Oh-ho.”

“Don’t start,” I said.

“Never,” he lied.

Kenji flipped his notebook shut. “Statistically,” he said, “you should accept all support available to you. Emotional, strategic, culinary.”

“Thank you,” I said again, because apparently it was the only functioning phrase I had.

“Come on,” Renji said gently. “Kaien’s going to carve your footwork into poetry.”

—

He did.

The yard baked in afternoon heat. Runes threaded through the stone like veins, glowing with the heartbeat of the school’s grid. Mana-siphon vents ringed the roofline like silver gills, ready to drink any misfire. Kaien set me at one end and planted himself at the other, a dark slash of patience under a bright sky. A slim display above the bleachers ticked quietly through safety statuses: Wards: GREEN // Capture Mesh: ARMED // Healers: READY.

“Again,” he said.

I went.

Step. Slide. Pivot. Weight where it belonged, then where it didn’t, then where it could be if the world cooperated.

“Center,” Kaien said, and tapped my shoulder with the practice blade to slide it down. “You are not a statue.”

I breathed. Loosened. The burn low in my calves gave me a rhythm I could trust; the capture mesh under the flagstones answered each step with a pulse I felt more in bone than magic.

“Again.”

I went.

Sweat stung my eyes. The yard blurred and sharpened, blurred and sharpened, until the only thing left was the geometry between my feet and the ground and the figure in front of me who refused to be impressed.

“Again.”

I cut a line and another. Not through air—through space. Through the argument my body made with itself every time fire wanted to turn it back.

Kaien watched without comment, then lifted his own practice blade and advanced, clean as a metronome. He didn’t hit hard. He hit in the places where my balance was a lie, where my stance wanted to pretend. The wood kissed my forearm; the sting ran up to my shoulder and set up camp.

“Again.”

Time lost edges.

When he finally stepped back, my hands shook. Sweat ran under my collar, soaking into the stiffness of my uniform. The world had narrowed to two facts: my lungs worked. My feet could learn.

Kaien let the silence stretch. When he spoke, his voice was quiet enough that the runes had to lean in to hear.

“You agreed to fight Himura.”

It wasn’t a question. Someone had told him. Or the school had. Rumors were another vein that ran through these stones.

“She challenged me,” I said. “And yes.”

He rolled his wrist once, loosening tendons. “If you fight her fight, you’re already dead.”

“I know.”

He shook his head once. “No. You think you know. Knowing is different.”

I closed my mouth and listened.

“She will push,” he said. “She will widen the ring and deny your approach lanes. You will believe you’ve been given space to breathe. You will not. The space is bait. She will change rhythm when you think you’ve found it. She will punish you for believing her story about the timing.”

He stepped forward as he spoke, blade moving in small arcs that suggested larger ones. Without meaning to, I matched them with my hands, my shoulders, my breath; the yard’s mesh lit faintly under our feet, mapping the dance in ghost-circles.

“What do I do?” I asked.

“Make her fight yours,” he said simply. “Refuse the story she tells about where you can stand.”

“I don’t have a story,” I said before I could stop the words. “I have…work. And a stick.”

His mouth twitched—maybe a smile, maybe a muscle that had forgotten how. “You have feet,” he said. “And hands that learn. If you must carry a tool, carry it. But do not let it forgive you for being lazy.”

“I’m not—”

“I know,” he said, and this time the word felt like a hand under my ribs holding me upright. “That is why I am saying it now, while your pride is quiet.”

I exhaled.

He lowered his blade. “One more thing.”

I waited.

“Pain is not a strategy,” he said. “If you choose it anyway, choose it with a purpose.”

The afternoon air felt heavier.

I nodded. “Yes, sensei.”

He turned away, then back, then away again, as if wrestling down three other lectures. “Go. Breathe. Eat. Hydrate,” he added, like the word had been delivered to him on a thermos at some point in the past hour. “Then sleep. Tomorrow we will make your feet argue better.”

—

The rumor storm rained all day and didn’t let up at night.

Even the walls seemed to hum with it. The campus chat boards lit like a cursed Christmas tree: HIMURA VS NULLBORN?! // Three minutes or less. Place your bets. // Does Kaien have a grave plot discount? Renji replied to half of them with a physics joke about combustion that made no one feel better. Kenji wrote a gently savage rebuttal so dry it caught fire in five places. Hana sent me a single message: You’ll do great. Don’t let them decide your future. She followed it two minutes later with Sorry that was bossy, then Tea tomorrow?

I stared at my screen until the words rearranged into quiet. The dorm’s window vent thrummed with the campus grid’s night-cycle; thin blue wardlines chased each other along the eaves like a slow neon river.

The room felt smaller than usual. I sat on my bed with the notebook open, pencil hovering over the sketch of the thing Renji and I were still pretending not to name out loud in front of senseis. Mark Zero. The lines of the frame still looked wrong. The balance was off. The chamber cradle needed another millimeter of give. The sound-rune we’d grafted in Chapter Three was good, but the housing around it stole space from my grip. I jotted notes—three, four, five—and then put the pencil down, because the shadow of Ayaka’s gaze kept falling across the page.

Someone knocked softly on the door.

Renji poked his head in without waiting for me to say come in, because of course he did. He held up a wrapped sandwich in one hand and a grin in the other. “Delivery.”

“From who?”

“Me. Also Hana. Also Kenji,” he amended. “But mostly me.”

He tossed the sandwich. I caught it. He leaned against the doorframe and studied me with a seriousness he usually reserved for soldering irons and tiny wires that hate you.

“Temo,” he said.

“Renji,” I said back, because names are safer than feelings.

“We’re going to make it work,” he said. “I don’t know how yet. But we will.”

“Kaien says tools are tools,” I said. “He’s right. If I get lazy—”

He rolled his eyes. “You? Lazy? Please. I’ve seen you file the same burr for ten minutes because it offended you.”

I snorted.

He sobered. “If you need me on the day—when you’re in the arena—”

“You’ll be the loudest person there,” I said.

He grinned. “I was going to say I’d be quiet and let you focus, but now I’m reconsidering.”

“Be yourself,” I said, and realized I meant it. “Just…don’t start a small fire.”

“No promises,” he said cheerfully, then sobered again. “Hey. One more thing. And you can tell me this is a terrible time to ask.”

“Ask.”

“When Mark Zero is done,” he said, voice dropping, “we should probably shave some weight. It’s a little big.”

I wanted to argue. My brain had spent days drawing and redrawing the frame until the paper had grooves you could feel with your fingernail. But he was right. The weight distribution was a problem. The nose-heavy pull was a problem. The part of me that wanted to make something perfect hated that the path to perfect ran through ugly first.

“I know,” I said, quietly.

He squinted. “And you’re going to say something insane like ‘attach a blade to it,’ aren’t you.”

I blinked. “…Eventually.”

He threw his hands up. “Of course. What is a gun but a sword that wants to be longer.”

I laughed, because if I didn’t I was going to start thinking about heat again, and about the way Ayaka had looked at me like a problem she intended to solve.

“Sleep,” Renji said, backing out. “I need your feet not to betray you. I need my invention partner alive. And Kenji needs a living subject for his spreadsheets.”

“Good night,” I said.

He saluted with the sandwich wrapper like it was a flag. The door clicked shut.

—

I dreamed of lines.
Not flames. Not runes. Just lines—the kind you draw between two points when you’re trying to make a world that holds.

Morning burned the rumor fog away, but only to reveal how many eyes the school had. Everywhere I walked, glances snagged and stuck. A first-year asked for my signature as a joke. I gave it to him without changing my face, because if I reacted—

If I reacted, they’d win.

I reached the yard early. Kaien was already there.

“Center,” he said by way of greeting.

I found it. Or it found me.

We started.

“Again.”

We went.

When he broke me down this time, it was with less mercy and more math. He pushed until my hands trembled, then pushed a step past that, then nodded, once, as if I’d answered a question correctly that I hadn’t known he’d asked.

As I bent, hands on my knees, catching breath I’d dropped somewhere around the fifth pivot, I felt it—eyes on my back like heat from a window you didn’t know was there.

I straightened slowly. Ayaka stood at the edge of the yard beneath an arch, hands in her coat pockets, posture so relaxed it had been engineered. She watched like a judge. Or a scientist. Her hair burned bright against the wardlight; her ember eyes weighed angles.

Kaien didn’t turn. “She’s not your problem right now,” he said.

“I know,” I said, and went back to work.

When I glanced again, she was gone.

—

By noon, the whole academy sang it like a chorus: Midterms. Arena. Himura vs Kuroganezu.
The words chased me into the cafeteria, up the stairwell, onto the rooftop. Renji was already there, cross-legged, drawing a diagram of hell on a napkin. Kenji was annotating it with ways to die. Hana held the thermos between both palms like it could warm more than air. Vending shrines below chimed—mana tea for those who could taste it, plain sweet cans for the rest of us. Beyond the parapet, Energis-7 wore its day-to-night skin: skyrails looping bright sigils between towers, rune-banners sliding down glass like disciplined auroras.

They made space without saying anything. I sat in it. I drank the tea. It was too sweet today, or maybe my mouth had forgotten what balance was.

I didn’t say I’m scared. I didn’t say I don’t know if I can do this. I didn’t say Ayaka looked at me and I felt like a wire stretched between two points and I don’t know if I’ll sing or snap.

I said, “Midterms,” like a weather report.

Renji said, “We’ll shave weight,” like a promise.

Kenji said, “Survive the first two combos. She changes rhythm on the third,” like a map.

Hana said, very softly, “Please don’t make me bandage you,” like a prayer that already had a place for yes.

The wind tugged at our sleeves. The city spread beyond the wall, bright and careless and alive.

I set my palm flat on the notebook, felt the grooves my pencil had carved there over nights that had been too long and still too short.

“Feet, not fear,” I said.

No one asked what I meant.

They didn’t need to.