How Does This Thing Work?

He stumbled groggily out of bed in the morning to pandemonium.

An alarm that reached a pitch far too close to the howl of a rabid pack of wolves for his half-awake brain echoed through his skull, blaring for at least a minute as he cursed his way into a uniform that proved annoyingly tight, especially across the shoulders. Probably made for some five-foot Nihonjin teen. The padded gloves were also a bit small—better to stay with his leather ones.

So with a half-unzipped pilot-style suit digging uncomfortably into all the wrong places, all his flatmates already vanished to who-knew-where, he ran headfirst into his first day.

And of course, he first spent another ten minutes lost, because he couldn't find the mess, and when he did, the cook-officers had to direct him off to a training room. Which meant by the time he jogged in, fifteen sets of eyes unanimously turned to judge him. Some of them girls, surprisingly. Apparently the Shadow Corps didn't go by the same rules as the rest of the military.

"Ah, Roku-chan! There you are! I was just about to send someone to find you," Kyubi—or at least he assumed it was her, since this time she wore an actual uniform and had no fox ears or tail—practically damned him with her bright, attention-grabbing greeting.

Also, Roku-chan?

If there was anything he'd learned from his two stunted years in secondary-school, it was that he was about to be eaten alive. He smiled anyway, slotting into the end of the line next to the big lad he'd run into yesterday, and saluted. "Good morning, Kyubi-sama. 'Fraid I got a bit lost."

Someone in the line near him scoffed, and he glanced over to see a lad with white hair and rectangular glasses—clearly Nihonjin, but featuring industrial levels of bleach—currently eyeing him with enough scathing contempt to turn the sea to salt. He'd also fit Lachlan's uniform much better.

"Ah, you should have been here for orientation, then. You would have gotten the tour." Her smile had a definite edge to it. "In any case, today, we'll be assessing you, our lovely future Samurai masters, and introducing you to the program proper. We'll begin with testing your minimum Ki threshold."

Ki? He felt like he'd just walked blind into a pit of snakes, armed with a bluff and the hope that "assessment" didn't mean "getting thrown out" if any of them happened to fail.

Kyubi gestured behind her at four... unidentifiable flattened-pod machines with a technician standing by each, and selected four of them to go inside. Leaving the rest of them to themselves as nothing much happened, apart from a low and not-very-reassuring hum starting up.

Which left him with a roomful of highschool graduates eyeing him.

Always the head-turner, wherever I go. He met the attention with a half-wave, half two-fingered salute, keeping up a smile. "Bronnewhin Lachlan, better known as Roku out here, nice to meet you."

"I think you got so lost you walked into another country, gaijin." The slightly smirking smile of a teen with dirty blond hair met his, folding his arms and flicking sharp, cool blue eyes over him. "And you stole someone else's uniform, too."

"Ah, and where are you from, honoured Blond-san?" Lachlan said into the rustle of snickers He-who-missed-his-reflection-in-the-mirror left in his wake, offering a respectful bow. "Does the cloudless sky in Nihon kiss wheat fields?"

Perhaps Oji had taught him the ways of polite insults too well, because in the abrupt silence of everyone's snickers choking off, he found himself face-to-face with an angry Nihonjin kid. "You bastard— who do you think you are? Shut your insulting gaijin mouth—!"

"Ari-san, please." Blondy's smile had cooled to a sharp smirk. "He's only an ignorant foreigner using words he barely knows. How could he know what's rude?"

"Ari" glared with brown eyes glowing faintly orange, all vibrating anger, and Lachlan tilted his head. "Ah, my deepest apologies for my mistake, honoured Nihonjin-sama. I've upset your bodyguard."

Said bodyguard took a step forward, his eyes flashing—

"Roku-chan, please don't antagonise your teammates," Kyubi drew their attention, smiling at him slyly. "Takanashi Ariake here is one of your Samurai brothers, along with Nokami Eden and Ryu Drake. Don't insult his senpai. Hirano Goudon is our most promising cadet."

Hirano? As in the general? So he had status, eh? And his friend just so happened to be on whatever team Lachlan was a part of. Well, this set of first impressions had gone off to a roaring start. Fantastic, I've made at least one enemy today. I'm already over my quota.

"And since you're clearly bursting with energy today, you can be next."

Fantastic. Open mouth, insert foot, make everything worse for himself. He'd blame it on the morning fuzz if it'd make any difference.

Kyubi beckoned him, a bristling Ariake, the tall maybe-foreigner, and the white-haired teen as the four who'd gone in before emerged, looking mostly alright.

"Be careful, gaijin," Hirano called. "The Ki might bite you."

He smirked over his shoulder. "Good thing I bite back."

The technician handed him a helmet, directing him into the hole, and he eased down onto what looked like a pilot's chair, two levers on either side and a monitor screen in front of him.

"All good?"

He glanced up. "Hai. No idea what I'm supposed to do, though."

"Just wait," she reassured him, and shut the hatch.

The monitor blinked to life, showing a bunch of numbers and kanji he could half make sense of. At the same time, a soft hum rose around him, a voice crackling to life in his ear. "Roku-chan, welcome to the Ki massage! Otherwise known as a Core-En simulator."

Wait, Core-En? Also, did she plan to keep calling him that? "This is for Core-En?"

"Indeed it is. Core-Energy, known as Ki, is what powers your soon-to-be introduced Samurai. It's a highly concentrated form of glimmer gathered using the celestial bridge, and the closest thing to the power of the God-core itself."

"I know Core-En." He nodded. "Never heard it called 'Ki' before, though."

"Well, in part that's because we use it differently to you heathens in the first corner."

"By using it to power a 'Samurai' instead of a fridge?"

Her laugh had a wicked edge to it. "Using it as a mere source of electricity is a waste, as you'll see. What you're sitting in right now is a mimicry of a core. And just like the world's core gives it life, so does a Samurai's."

"They're... intelligent?" He doubted it. Nothing could measure up to that burning light, no matter how much power you drew and put into it. The God-core wasn't just some lightbulb. He should know.

His scars itched, and he absently rubbed at his left arm. Even the light that'd melted his skin off his bones hadn't held a candle to that Core. He wouldn't call himself a religious type, but you couldn't claim something was just a big ball of energy when you'd witnessed its molten omniscience firsthand.

"—yuurei is what lets you control it more intimately than a simple glimmer projection, so I suppose it has your intelligence."

He'd missed that. He shook himself, glancing around the cockpit. "So it's nothing to do with the pod? Just a glimmer projection?"

"Like that little dragon you whipped up," she confirmed, and he could hear the toothy smile. He kept forgetting she'd technically been Yuka. "But much denser. And its form depends on your spirit rather than what you imagine."

What, it'd look like a wolf? "I can't just make it a dragon, then?"

"Nope!"

Disappointing. "I've never heard of glimmer working like that."

"Ki works slightly differently, if on the same general principle. For now just think of it like a yokai. You'll understand soon. Right now, though, we're doing a simple tolerancy assessment for safety's sake, to make sure you can handle it."

Handle... what? "So, what exactly am I supposed to do?" He had a vague inkling, and he hoped he wasn't right.

"Those levers you see control the flow of Ki into your cockpit. They're modelled off a Samurai's, but with one important difference. The left one, you'll see, has notches. Each notch corresponds to a set level of Core-En. The right slides freely, and in the simulator it allows you to control the flow of Ki more precisely."

Interesting. The sinking feeling wasn't improving.

"In your Samurai, however, both are notched, and the left controls how much Ki is directed to the Samurai projection itself, while the right is the same as this set-up's left, and controls what's sent to the core."

Left, right, right, left. He set his gloved hands on the grips, resigning himself to probably having to clarify later, and taking a look at the aforementioned notches. "So there're ten levels."

"Notches, yes. Though today, you'll only be going up to three." She audibly smiled. "Whenever you're ready, just grip the left throttle until it clicks, and push it to the first notch."

Simple enough. He made sure he had it gripped tight, unsure if he felt the click or imagined it from the faint sound, and, feeling a little like a kid in a spaceship, pushed it.

It only clicked forward a measly centimetre, but the whirr it summoned made him wonder if he was about to lift off. Instead of his stomach lurching off the floor, though, a torrent of sparkles poured out of the walls from a pair of pipe endings he hadn't noticed, the bite of glimmer abruptly itching at his skin.

Hell, they were just pouring it straight on him? Wasn't this stuff supposed to be more potent? Biting off a curse, he prepared to be slapped with a flood of hallucinations, and....

Wasn't?

No hallucinations, no odd experiences. He could definitely feel it tingling through him—didn't seem to need to directly touch his skin for that—but it was practically tame.

Huh. He flexed his hands lightly on the grips. Refined and concentrated. And far less likely to screw with reality, apparently. Now that he paid attention, he could see black-and-white bar graphs on the screen, the largest in the middle holding steadily at the bottom.

"Very good. Now push the right up."

He did so, kid-in-a-spaceship feeling lifting with the faint thrum all around him as he eased it up, and he couldn't help a little grin. Just like Space Hike, if he imagined the glitter as stars.

Except that the tingle increased with it. His smile turned to a grimace as the lever slid to the top, gritting his teeth against the crawling prickle digging down into his skin and stabbing needles into his hands.

"Excellent. Now to two on the left, and repeat the process."

A small amount of dread took up residence in his stomach, the right automatically snapping back as he followed her instructions. Didn't feel much of a difference until he started pushing the right up again, and then things began to get dicey.

He cursed under his breath. "Is it supposed to feel like this?"

"Explain?"

"Pins-and-needles," he said shortly, closing his eyes against the itch under his skin trying to make his hands clench as it went past the midpoint. "Tingly."

"That's within acceptable parameters," she assured him. "You aren't fluctuating much, and that's the important part. I wouldn't worry, you'll get used to it soon enough. Now, up to notch-three."

Grunting around his clenched teeth, he set it at the top, dragged in what breath he could, and clicked the left lever up.