Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

Kori's mouth pulled into the smallest possible smile.

"Found you."

She closed her eyes. The Chasmis released, her body completing its arc through normal time. She landed on the next rooftop with both knives drawn, the blades held in reverse grips with their points angled outward, her stance set for the impact she was a half-second away from intercepting. The light was almost on her. She could feel it - the heat of a fully-channeled Eon user closing distance at running speed, the air warming around her, the boots on the rooftop in front of her. But she knew this light – this head, this signature. She spent years around it, enough to recognize it even with her eyes closed.

She didn't even need to look.

"Ah," she said, lowering the knives. "It's just you."

She opened her eyes.

Osamu stood a meter away.

He was exactly as she remembered him. Tall - almost as tall as Kenzo, which put him at a height most people couldn't even dream of. Wider through the chest than any reasonable person needed to be. His hair was cut short and practical, slicked back, his posture solid in the way only people who never had to think about their weight could be solid.

The shield was on his back, a shaped disc of layered metal alloy with a huge chunk of pure Luminite powering everything that glowed faintly through the very few slits, its size and weight enough that most people couldn't carry it for more than a few minutes. Osamu just wore it like a backpack.

He'd come over the rooftops with it secured to his shoulders, and he was still standing there with both hands free, the shield humming softly in the night air behind him.

"Good evening, Kori."

"Osamu."

She stepped forward and hugged him briefly. Her arms didn't make it all the way around, which was true of every hug involving Osamu and a person of normal size. She patted his side once and stepped back. Osamu's expression didn't change - it almost never did.

"Alteea sent you, huh" Kori said.

"She did."

"Have you found anything?"

"No."

"No signature?"

"No signature."

He said the words the way he said most things - flat, certain, literally no effort put behind any words.

Kori nodded slowly. She looked towards the eastern districts. The figure had gone east, into the dense canyon of the residential towers, somewhere inside the closing dome of the petals. The Wardens were still saturating the streets, being as useless as ever. Osamu and Kori were on the rooftops. Between them, theoretically, the figure was contained.

Theoretically.

She looked at Osamu. "Hey, soo..." she said, "get me up?"

Osamu's look toward her was the same of a parent's look after his kid just told him he wants a pink, fluffy whale with white circles for his birthday.

"No."

"Pleeaaaseeee??" Kori made the fakest puppy face she was capable of.

Then he sighed. It was a deep sigh, originating somewhere in the lowest part of his chest, the sigh of a man who had been receiving requests like this from this specific woman for the entirety of their old working relationship. His expression remained neutral, but his sigh contained every emotion he had to convey in that moment.

"You know I hate doing that."

"Oh, come on. I asked nicely."

"You asked."

"Same thing."

"It's not the same thing."

"Osamu."

He looked at her.

"If we lose any more time it's going to escape."

"Escape where?" Osamu said. "The streets are filled with Wardens. The petals are almost closed. The only safe terrain is the rooftops, and we are on the rooftops. It will be spotted within minutes."

"Yeah, but I want to find it fiiirst. Come ooon…!"

He looked at her. Kori abandoned the sad puppy face and came back to the neutral, businesslike one - the standard set of features she presented to the world. But somewhere in the millimetres of her expression, around the corner of her mouth, was the faintest possible suggestion of mischief. Osamu had known her long enough to recognize it.

He sighed again. Even longer than the first one.

Kori rubbed half her face with her right hand, gripped her knives, and raised her left leg toward him. The boot extended in his direction, ankle exposed, the gesture as casual as a person offering a tool to a coworker.

"Come on. It's been a while since we've done this. Heh."

Osamu's face did not move. But he reached out – gently, not as if the same hand had crushed Nyx heads before - and grasped her ankle.

"Ready?"

"Just go already!"

Osamu pivoted on his right foot.

His weight dropped as low as he could. His left leg drove into the rooftop, his core engaged, his arms locked at full extension with Kori's leg held above his head - and he began to spin. Fast. The momentum built across the first half of his rotation in a way that made the rooftop tar paper crack under the pressure of his planted foot. The spin accelerated. Kori's body, held at the end of his outstretched arms, became a horizontal line, then a blur, then a centrifuge.

She was laughing like an idiot, just the way a person laughs on a carnival ride that they have been wanting to ride for years and have finally gotten in line for - full-throated, slightly delirious, the specific laugh of an adult who had located a feeling she'd thought the Chasmis had taken from her and was, for thirty seconds, getting to feel it again.

The rotational speed reached its peak.

Osamu felt it - the specific moment when the centrifugal force was at maximum and any further rotation would just dissipate energy. He timed it the way he had timed every release like this one over the years he and Kori had worked together. He found the angle that would put her trajectory on the line she wanted, oriented his body, locked the release point in his head -

And let go.