TRAINING UNDER PRESSURE

Rin trained him like time was already running out.

Because it was.

She never said that out loud, but Akiro felt it in the way she moved them constantly, never letting a place settle into familiarity. Storage rooms beneath abandoned malls. Closed libraries after hours, the smell of paper and dust clinging to everything. Utility tunnels that hummed faintly with electricity and something older, something buried.

Places where the city forgot itself just enough for magic to breathe—but not enough to scream.

Akiro learned quickly that “training” did not mean explanations.

It meant repetition.

“Again,” Rin said.

Akiro stood in the center of a faded chalk ring, hands trembling despite his best efforts to steady them. The concrete beneath his feet was cold, gritty. The air tasted faintly metallic. The mark beneath his skin glowed low and watchful, like a thing that had decided to supervise.

“I already did it,” he said.

“You did it badly.”

“Why don’t you do it then!”

Rin did not look amused. She rarely did it during training. Her coat was off, sleeves rolled to her elbows, revealing faint scars along her forearms—thin lines, pale against her skin, like reminders she hadn’t bothered to erase.

“Focus,” she said.

Akiro inhaled slowly, counting the breath the way she’d shown him. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. Again.

He tried to remember how it had felt the first time—the warmth, responsiveness, the way the power slid into place like it had always been waiting for him to notice it.

He reached.

The magic stirred.

And then—

Nothing.

Akiro frowned. “It’s not—”

The backlash hit without warning.

Pain snapped up his arm, sharp and electric, like static biting straight into his nerves. His vision went white around the edges. He cried out, stumbling backward out of the circle.

Rin moved instantly, catching him by the shoulder before he hit the wall. Her grip was steady, practiced.

“You hesitated,” she said.

“I didn’t!” He sucked in a breath, clutching his arm. “I did exactly what you said.”

“You doubted the cost.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

She let go of him, stepping back. “You were scared for a moment, weren’t you?”

He laughed weakly, rubbing his forearm where the pain was already fading into a dull ache. “Sorry for valuing my internal organs.”

“You can’t negotiate with it.”

Akiro sank down onto the floor, back against the wall, breathing hard. “Then why does it feel like it’s negotiating with me?”

Rin didn’t answer.

That silence—deliberate, weighted—was becoming a pattern.

They took a break. Or at least, Rin said they were taking a break, which meant Akiro sat on a dusty crate in a service corridor while she checked seals etched into the walls.

The fluorescent light overhead flickered irregularly.

Akiro stared at it, counting the flickers without really meaning to.

“I forgot what my favorite song was,” he said suddenly.

Rin stiffened.

“It came on in a shop earlier,” he continued, voice quiet but steady. “I knew I liked it. I knew I used to play it on repeat. But I couldn’t remember why.”

She finished adjusting the seal before answering. “Memory loss doesn’t come in order.”

“Good,” he muttered. “I was worried there’d be a schedule.”

She turned to look at him then. Her expression was unreadable, but her eyes were sharp, assessing.

“You’re progressing faster than most,” she said.

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

“It isn’t.”

He let out a breath that might have been a laugh. “Of course not.”

They moved again after that. Always moving.

In a closed library, Rin made him practice stabilizing small distortions—bending light just enough to blur a corner, dampening sound without silencing it completely.

“Too much,” she snapped when the air rippled visibly.

“I barely did anything!”

“That’s the problem. You felt it instead of directing it.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means you let it control you.”

Akiro clenched his jaw. “You’re being vague on purpose. Why?”

Sighs.

“Because if you rely on words, you won’t survive when you lose them.”

That shut him up.

In an abandoned mall storage room, dust coating everything like a second skin, he failed three times in a row to hold a barrier steady. Each failure came with a price—a headache that lingered too long, numbness in his fingertips, the unsettling sense that something important had slipped just out of reach.

After the third failure, he dropped to the floor, back against a shelf stacked with broken mannequins.

“I don’t think I can do this,” he said quietly.

Rin crouched in front of him. “You already are.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I feel like I’m…fraying. Like if I pull too hard, something won’t come back.”

“…...I know...”

He stared at her. “You could’ve lied.”

“I don’t lie during training.”

“Seems to me it’s the only time you tell the truth.”

“Maybe.”

Silence stretched between them, thick but not hostile.

Finally, he asked, “How did you start?”

Rin hesitated.

“I was younger than you.”

“…. What happened?”

“I didn’t survive a ritual,” she continued. “I survived someone else’s mistake.”

Akiro tilted his head. “Someone you cared about.”

She didn’t answer.

That was answer enough.

Later, when they were hiding in the bathroom of a closed café—windows papered over, door sealed—Akiro stared at himself in the mirror.

Same face. Same tired eyes. A faint bruise along his jaw from a collision he didn’t quite remember.

But when he blinked, his expression lagged.

Just for a second.

His smile came a fraction too late. His eyes caught up after.

He pressed his palms to the glass.

“I’m still me,” he whispered.

The reflection did not answer.

That night—if it could be called a night underground—he dreamed of walking through the city while people passed through him like fog. He tried to speak, but his voice stayed behind. He felt the pull of a presence tugging at him from inside, drawing him back through the dream, away from the city, away from himself.

Akiro woke up in cold sweat, lungs tightened, arms reaching out to grab something—anything—someone, Rin sat at the edge of the futon, watching him.

“You were screaming,” she said.

“Did you wake me?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” he said gripping the sheet.

She handed him a bottle of water. He took it, noticing the way his fingers shook.

“Rin,” he said.

“Yes.”

“If I stop…if I don’t keep using it—”

“It will still take,” she said.

“And if I keep using it.”

“It will take faster.”

He nodded slowly. “The trick is…balance.”

“No,” she corrected. “The trick is choosing what you can afford to lose.”

He laughed softly. “I don’t like that answer.”

“You won’t like most of them.”

Somewhere above them, the city continued—crowded trains, office arguments, people complaining about weather that had nothing to do with collapsing seals.

And beneath it all, Akiro learned, piece by piece, what it meant to be visible to something that did not care if he survived whole.

The mirror never lied.

It just showed him a little less each time.