Building Fire

After classes, Seiryoku pretended to be quiet. The bell rang, the halls emptied, and the wards over the windows dimmed to their evening pulse. But the school wasn’t sleeping. It was holding its breath.
Outside, Energis-7 put on its night-skin—skyrails humming like taut strings, rune banners sliding down glass façades, and the big scrubber stacks on the horizon exhaling a cool blue that the dorm vents echoed back in miniature. Inside, corridor sprites drifted like lazy fireflies, reading wrist-bands and logging door opens to Facility Control.

Renji and I slipped into Applied Thaumaturgy like we’d been born with a key.

“Okay,” he said, tossing his bag onto a bench. Tools rattled; a coil of wire actually purred—aetheric alloy with a sympathetic resonance you could feel in your teeth. “Tonight, we make the ugly baby slightly less ugly.”

“Mark Zero is not ugly,” I said, setting the case down with both hands like it was a living thing.

Renji pushed his glasses up, which made them slide down again. “He’s gorgeous on the inside. On the outside, he’s…well. Personality-forward.”

I opened the case. The prototype lay in foam like a secret: matte frame, crystal chamber cradle, skeletal rune lattice running along the barrel. The sighting glyph we’d scavenged from a dueling mask had dried on at a slightly crooked angle. I hadn’t decided whether to fix it or start calling it a feature. The sound rune we’d grafted last night sat under the top rail like a throat, ready to sing saturation levels to someone who couldn’t feel mana on skin.

We powered the workbench sigils just enough to guide our hands. Bench-lights breathed awake; the lab’s mana scrubbers kicked into low, pulling stray charge out of the air with a soft hiss. The room smelled like warm resin, copper dust, and the faint metallic tang of spent mana—home, if home were a toolbox with delusions of grandeur. At the back, the rune-printer idled, its printhead inscribed with microglyphs; spools of conductor thread glinted like tame lightning.

Renji leaned close. “Grip still feels wrong. You can’t carry a nose-heavy frame into the ring unless you’re planning to swing it like a club.”

“I’m not,” I said, and earned myself a skeptical eyebrow.

He handed me the frame. Even with the chamber empty, the balance wanted to stage a rebellion. The weight pulled forward like it had questions for my wrist.

“Too big,” Renji said decisively. “Admit it. You built a concept artist’s gun. It’s trying to impress a magazine cover.”

“We built it,” I said, because accuracy mattered even when he was teasing. “And yeah. It’s heavy.”

“Which is fine if you’re bench-pressing Ayaka’s ego,” he said cheerfully. “But we need it light enough to track and fire.”

I turned the frame in my hands, feeling for the truth under his joke. He was right. I could see it—the falter between target and barrel during a pivot, the micro-hesitation my footwork didn’t have time for.

“We shave weight,” I said. “Cut the top rail. Slot the baffle. Drill out the grip core.” I pinched the sighting rune between thumb and forefinger. “Un-glue this and—”

Renji smacked my hand. “Leave my boy’s eye alone.”

“You glued it on crooked.”

“It’s rakish,” he said. “It has character.”

I stared at him. He grinned back. We both started laughing, quietly at first, then harder until the sound bounced off the cabinets and felt like oxygen.

When we could breathe again, I set Mark Zero down and picked up a stylus. “Okay. Operations: weight reduction, recoil pathing, chamber shock mounts, sight alignment.”

Renji waggled a finger. “Sight rakishness maintained.”

“We’ll see.”

“We won’t. I’m hiding the solvent.”

We got to work. I etched tiny vents along the barrel shroud with a micro-etcher that left hair-thin glyph grooves; Renji printed a new baffle with a honeycomb lattice that sang like a tuning fork when tapped. I re-profiled the grip core while he scavenged shock mounts from a dead barrier projector, its compliance rings still tinged with ward-blue. The more we took away, the more the thing revealed its real shape—like it had been waiting for us to stop being precious and start listening. The sound rune got a clean mount and a short run to the containment lattice; when I brushed a knuckle over it, it answered with a quiet note, a heart I could hear.

“Temo,” Renji said after a while, voice low like he didn’t want to scare the idea off, “if—when—we get past midterms, we should aim for Mark One. Change materials. Go skeletonized. Maybe a split frame to swap barrels.”

I nodded, already writing on the bench in pencil: Mark One → light frame / quick-change chamber. The graphite smeared under my palm, black streaks on skin that Kaien’s drills had already turned sore.

“And…” Renji stretched the word out like he kept meaning not to ask and then asking anyway. “You’re still going to say it, right?”

“Say what.”

“That you want to stick a sword onto it,” he said, resigned. “Because you’re you.”

“I want to add a blade eventually,” I said, casual as breathing.

He covered his face with both hands and peered through his fingers. “Why. Why do I love you and hate you at the same time.”

“Blade for close,” I said. “Shot for far. A tool that respects distance but doesn’t surrender it.”

“That’s poetry,” Renji said. “It’s also physics. Also, currently, weight. Which we are removing now.” He tapped the frame. “Future-me will cry about the blade later.”

I looked down at the prototype—the not-quite, the becoming—and tried to picture steel kissing the underside of the barrel like a promise. The thought anchored something. Not for the duel. Not yet. But someday.

The door eased open.

We didn’t jump this time. We were expecting her.

“H-hi,” Hana said from the threshold, as if greeting a shy animal. She held a paper bag in one hand and a thermos in the other. A lock of short brown hair had escaped her clip and curled against her cheek. Her uniform cardigan caught the bench-light and returned it softer, like it had a glamour for warmth woven into the weave.

“Perfect timing,” I said, and heard how honest it sounded.

Her cheeks colored. “I brought tea. And…um…snacks. For science.”

Renji gasped. “For once, someone understands my needs.”

Hana edged in and set the bag between us, then looked at Mark Zero the way some people look at fireworks too close to their faces. “Is it…safer tonight?”

Renji and I said, “Yes,” at the same time.

“No discharges,” I added. “Just dry cycle and fit.”

She exhaled, just a little, shoulders dropping. “Good.”

I poured tea. She’d made it perfectly this time—no bitterness, no sweetness hiding its purpose. The warmth moved into my fingers and stayed there; the sound rune gave a faint answering hum, the note I was learning to trust.

Kenji arrived without a sound, the door snicking closed behind him. He deposited a folder on the bench and began laying out pages like a croupier with a grudge against hope.

“Patterns,” he said. “I watched Himura’s last six recorded duels. She favors pressure in wide arcs, then tightens the spiral when she smells fear. Rhythm tends to shift on the third exchange—first long, second longer, third deceptively short. That’s where she punishes approach.”

Renji peered over his shoulder. “You say that like you weren’t enjoying the spectacle.”

“I enjoy outcomes,” Kenji said. He used a piece of chalk to draw a rectangle on the floor, then another inside it, like a ring inside a ring. The lab tiles answered with a faint ward-glow, accepting the marks and lacing them to the room’s capture mesh. He labeled the lanes with neat block letters: A, B, C. “Temo. Walk the edges.”

I did, sighting invisible flame, feeling for where space usually lies and where it betrays you. Kenji called counts under his breath—one-two / one-two-three—until my feet began to argue less and listen more.

“Her comfort zone is here,” he said, tapping the outer lane. “But she kills in this band.” He traced the inner rectangle. “Your job is to refuse her story about you being outside. You stand where her arcs look wrong.”

“Kaien said something similar,” I murmured.

“Then for once,” Kenji said, “I’m in excellent company.”

We rehearsed the ring like a dance that didn’t like to be called one. Renji muttered to himself while tightening shock mounts; chalk dust collected on Hana’s sleeves where she’d knelt to refresh the lines between my pivots.

Hana’s humming started as a nervous habit. It turned into a thread through the room.

At first it was just a sound—soft as tea steam, small as a breath you hold so you don’t ruin a moment. Then her illusion caught: barely there, like the echo of her hum had forgotten to stop. It didn’t change anything physical. It changed the space—took the jitter in my muscles and smoothed it, just enough to help. No glamour. No trick. Just…permission to focus. The sound rune under the rail seemed to find her pitch; the note it gave me landed faster, steadier.

She noticed me noticing and flushed. “Sorry. It—it gets loud in here…”

“Don’t stop,” I said, surprised at the roughness of my own voice.

She smiled, a tiny and luminous thing. Her humming swelled a fraction, then slipped back to almost nothing, the way the ocean whispers after a wave.

I cycled Mark Zero—click / reset—until the trigger break lived in my finger bones. The sight rune glinted—crooked, rakish, Renji insisted—and the chamber cradled a dead crystal that pretended to be a live one so we could feel weight without exploding. The tone it made when I staged the trigger settled into my ear like a compass.

“Grip test,” Renji said, shoving a wrapped bar into my free hand. “Also sugar.”

I bit, chewed, swallowed. It tasted like someone had weaponized caramel. My shoulders confessed they were human.

Kenji scratched something in the margin of a chart. “Odds improve if you survive the first three sequences,” he said. “Her stamina is excellent. Her patience is better. But not infinite. She expects quick kills.”

“Which means she expects me to behave,” I said, and the words surprised me with their shape.

Kenji looked up, pleased. “Exactly.”

We didn’t notice the door the first time it opened. The room was too full of singing wire and chalk and the soft, stubborn beat of our work.

I noticed the heat first.

Not temperature—attention. The weight of someone at the threshold who had come to judge and found herself…curious.

I looked.

Ayaka stood just inside, hands in the pockets of her uniform coat like she’d taken a walk and happened to end up at the workshop by chance. The lamplight caught at her red hair and flared, like it had been waiting for an excuse. Her eyes, ember-bright, reflected the bench runes as a hotter color.

She didn’t move farther in. She didn’t need to. Rooms make space for people like her. Somewhere in the ceiling, the lab’s siphon vents cracked half-open, reflexively sampling the heat signature her presence teased from the air.

Renji went very still. Kenji did an impression of a statue. Hana’s humming hiccuped, then resumed.

Ayaka’s gaze took in the chalk ring, the bench, the case, the frame in my hand. Her mouth didn’t smile. It didn’t need to.

“That toy won’t save you,” she said mildly.

Renji made a noise like an injured kettle. I didn’t look away from her.

“It’s not supposed to,” I said.

A pause. A flicker of something hard to name crossed her face. “Then what is it supposed to do?” she asked, perfectly polite.

“Let me speak your language,” I said. “Without pretending to be you.”

The air rearranged itself in a way I didn’t understand until later. Not softer—truer. There’s a difference.

Ayaka glanced at the case again, and her eyes—not her face, just her eyes—warmed a fraction, like she’d seen a new angle on an old problem and begrudged it respect.

“Hm,” she said. She turned, hands still in her pockets, and started to leave. At the door she added, without turning back, “Don’t be late to midterms. I don’t wait.”

The door sighed shut behind her.

Renji detonated silently, then not so silently. “She was here. She was here and she taunted and you metaphor’d and I—Kenji did you write that down?”

Kenji blinked. “I memorized it. Against my will.”

Hana let out a breath like she’d been trying to hold a balloon and had finally admitted physics existed. “She’s scary.”

“She’s good,” I said, because it didn’t feel like betrayal to admit it. “And she’s not going to let me close.”

“Then we force her rhythm to break,” Kenji said. “Or make her write a new one at a bad time.”

Renji clapped once. “Yes. Science. Also magic. Also friendship.”

We worked until the lamps sighed toward midnight.

By then, Mark Zero was still heavy—but less so. The grip fit my palm like it had been waiting for my hand to grow into it. The shock mounts made the chamber hug the cradle instead of rattle. The sight rune was still crooked. Renji was still proud. The sound rune sang a brighter comeback after dry cycles; even Kenji admitted the recharge tone was “usefully annoying.”

“No live fire,” Renji reminded me, and then himself, and then me again. “Kaien will sense it with his mentor senses and materialize like a disappointed ghost.”

“That’s a real phenomenon,” Kenji said solemnly, nodding at the ceiling sprite that logged energy spikes for staff alerts.

Hana cleaned the chalk until the floor was only floor again. Her fingers were dusted white when she wiped them on a handkerchief. I wanted to say something about the humming, about how it made the room easier to carry. I didn’t. I think she heard it anyway.

We locked the prototype up. Renji whispered, “Good night, son,” at the case. Kenji pretended not to hear. Hana smiled like she’d seen a star do something private.

On the rooftop, the wind tugged at us. The city breathed light—looped skyrails tracing perfect parabolas, ward halos blooming on tower crowns as the night-shift grids took over. Seiryoku’s perimeter shimmered like a soap bubble, old magic answering new circuits.

Renji sprawled, arms wide. “I propose a motion.”

“You’ll propose six,” Kenji said.

“One motion,” Renji insisted. “We name the team officially. Until now we have been the Outcasts Club in spirit. I propose we adopt bylaws.”

“We are absolutely not writing bylaws,” Kenji said.

Hana sat down beside me—too close for her, not close at all for anyone else—and put the thermos between our hands. “What would the bylaws say?”

Renji sat up, suddenly dignified. “Article One: We believe in applied chaos. Article Two: We bring snacks. Article Three: We do not die.”

Kenji considered. “I agree with the third article.”

“Only the third?” Renji demanded.

“The snack clause is implied,” Kenji said, and actually smiled, which made Renji blink like he’d seen a myth.

Hana’s shoulder brushed mine. She didn’t move away for a heartbeat longer than habit allowed. It felt like a bell struck in an empty room—small, clear, and echoing.

“I second the bylaws,” she said, voice tiny and brave.

“Motion carried,” Renji crowed. “Temo, say something leaderly.”

“I’m not the leader,” I said.

“You’re the protagonist,” Renji said. “It’s the same thing with worse sleep.”

“Feet,” I said, before my mouth could fill the silence with something less true. “Not fear.” I lifted the thermos. “And…friends.”

They clinked their cups to mine. Tea tasted like a promise we hadn’t learned how to break yet.

We sat there while the sky pulled on its night colors and the school tried to remember how to dream.

Later, in the corridor outside my dorm, I nearly walked into a wall of coat.

Kaien.

He leaned there like the wall had asked for advice and he’d agreed to supervise. His hair was tied back carelessly. His eyes were the patient kind you get from counting a lot of students and not as many victories. A corridor sprite hovered near his shoulder, pretending not to eavesdrop.

“Evening,” he said, as if he hadn’t watched me bleed sweat into the yard all week.

“Evening, sensei,” I said, trying not to feel like the prototype was written on my face.

He studied the band of chalk dust around my shoe like it was a line on a map only he could read. “No explosions.”

“No, sensei.”

“Good.”

Silence walked a lap around us.

“Grip,” he said finally, like he’d only just remembered to mention it. “You’re choking it. You do that when you’re afraid it will leave.”

I blinked. “I—yes.”

“Trust your hands. Trust your feet more.” He hesitated, then added, “Tools are just tools. Elevate your feet, not your fear. If you choose pain, choose it with purpose.”

He’d said pieces of that before. Hearing it again felt different, like the words had learned my name.

“Yes, sensei.”

He nodded once. “Midterms in two days. Sleep while you have the option.”

He pushed off the wall and vanished into the corridor like an idea deciding it could wait.

Inside, the dorm felt too small for all the things I was pretending not to feel. I set the notebook on my lap and drew lines I didn’t intend to keep—blade sketches under the barrel, lock-up mechanisms, a hinge that would never hold and a second one that maybe could. I added a tiny rail mark in the margin—Hana’s skyrail loops as a future pattern—so even when it spoke spellfire, it would look like it belonged to the city that taught me stubbornness.

I erased it all and wrote, in the corner where only I would read it: Make her fight my story.

The school’s night wards hummed beyond the window. Somewhere out there, Ayaka burned in clean arcs, sure of the way fire writes its name in the air. Somewhere closer, Renji probably slept with a wrench under his pillow, Kenji dreamed in graphs, and Hana hummed a little melody that had gotten stuck in her day and didn’t want to leave.

I closed the notebook.

The world belonged to the gifted. The ring belonged to the brave.
I intended to be both, the hard way.