Chapter 392: Last Morning
Raizen didn’t sleep.
He lay in bed with his eyes open and watched the ceiling change colour as the night gave way to morning. The cloud glow shifted from the deep white of the second day’s peak toward something thinner, paler, the luminescence beginning its slow retreat as the second of the three-day phenomenon wound down. Through the window, the hole in the sky was visible - a perfect circle of darkness that would be blue again in an hour when the sun climbed high enough to fill it.
His mind wouldn’t stop. Not racing - he was too tired for racing. Just... running. A low, continuous process that cycled through the same set of inputs and refused to produce a conclusion.
Saffi. The bench. The confession delivered with the precision of a mission briefing and the vulnerability of someone handing you the softest part of themselves. The tears that fell in clean lines. The question - there’s someone you already love, right? - and his answer that was honest, uncertain and the best he had and not enough.
He’d handled it the right way. He believed that. Lying would have been crueller, and deflecting would have been cowardly, and the truth - clumsy and incomplete as it was - was the only thing he could have given her that respected what she’d given him.
But believing you did the right thing and feeling good about it were different experiences, and the gap between them was wide enough to keep a person awake all night.
The house stirred. Kenzo got up first - heavy footsteps, a yawn that could have come from a bear, the sound of water running in the kitchen. Then Eiden’s almost-silent footsteps, signsling that he was awake, too.
This was the day of the departure.
Raizen got up. He was already dressed, from yesterday. He didn’t bother changing clothes tonight. Packed his bag - twin swords, the scanner in its transformed casing, the sky lantern from the unicycle boy that he’d never lit. His clothes went in last, folded with the careless efficiency of someone who’d packed enough bags in enough temporary rooms to stop caring about wrinkles.
And then...
The black lotuses. They were still in his chest pocket, but somehow, the cloth holding them felt warmer.
The cracked one – the one his blood touched accidentally – its center was shining bright, and the base of its petals... It had changed. Only the base, but it was there. An opalescent white, somehow one color that had every other one in the same place. The colors seemed to shift when you tilted it – just like the scanner, somehow. As if the lotus had its own Eon currents flowing through it, and something made it react and change like this.
But Raizen was too tired to give it too much attention. Once back in Neoshima, he’ll probably take a seat in his lab, and take a few moments to think about everything.
He stepped into the common area. Kenzo was at the table, eating something that involved rice, seaweed and more rice. He sat silently, holding a cup of tea with both hands and looking at it as if it contained answers he hadn’t found yet.
Saffi was awake. Raizen saw her go to the bathroom with a new dress under her arm and her little skincare bag – he honestly had no idea what all those products did, but he didn’t really care, either. Saffi picked a few up from the market some time ago, blabbing that the extract was natural, and that everything was organic.
Eiden emerged from the hallway. Dressed, composed, his dark hand gloved. He moved through the kitchen with the unhurried precision of someone who had slept well, or wanted people to think he had. His face carried the calm, professional mask that Raizen had learned to read as a surface rather than a depth.
Raizen let the architecture activate. Not fully - just enough. A fraction of the cold precision, summoned to the surface the way reinforcement was summoned to a muscle group, targeted and temporary.
"Professor Eiden, good morning!" he said, his voice carrying the bright, slightly awed tone of a student who’d been too busy at a festival to notice the world changing. "What actually happened yesterday? With the hole in the sky? We heard it was the Echelon’s gift for the festival, but -"
Eiden glanced at him. The professor’s eyes held steady - assessing, measuring, running their own calculations behind the calm exterior. Then the mask settled into its teaching position, and Eiden explained. "A controlled demonstration" he said. An Eon experiment that produced a larger-than-expected result. The hole was an unintended but not necessarily unwelcome outcome - a gesture of goodwill, embraced by the Echelon as a gift to the city that had hosted their summit.
The lies were smooth and professional and built on the same foundation as Raizen’s own lies - close enough to truth to survive casual scrutiny, far enough from it to hide what mattered.
Raizen nodded at the right moments, asked the right follow-up questions, wore the right expression. The architecture operated beneath the surface, cataloguing every word Eiden said for inconsistencies while the boy on top smiled and said "that’s amazing" with convincing enthusiasm.
A knock at the door interrupted them. Kenzo opened it, and the host stood on the porch - the same quiet man who’d greeted them on arrival, wearing a formal vest, his expression carrying the specific blend of apology and disappointment that preceded unwelcome news.
"I must deeply apologize for my absence these past few days," he said, bowing slightly. "Some unexpected... Preparations... Required my full attention, and I was unable to attend to your needs as I should have."
Kenzo waved the apology away with a gesture that said the needs had been attended to just fine, but the host pressed on, his eyes moving across the packed bags and the travel-ready postures of his guests.
"Oh," he said. The disappointment surfaced. "You’re not going to stay for the coronation?"
Raizen looked at him. "Coronation?"
"Tomorrow. Alan will be crowned the new Ruler of Ukai." The host’s face brightened at the mention - the pride of a citizen whose city was about to crown a leader worth being proud of. But Raizen could see it – the bitterness underneath his expression. He accepted Alan as the new Ruler, but he still had some small doubts. "There will be a ceremony. The whole city plus dozens of visitors from other continents attend. It’s quite something."
In the meantime, Saffi had stepped outside of the bathroom. Her eyes were slightly red, but she made sure to cover them with Ukai-authentic makeup. Everything about her – her facial expression, her pose, her movements, they were all very composed.
She wore a white summer dress that somehow looked both casual and elegant at the same time. Topping everything off with a striped cardigan and a white baret, it didn’t really look like an outfit for the rainy season.
Talking about the rainy season... Raizen looked out the window. The ran had stopped for a few days, and the Echelon didn’t even need to activate the barrier. Everything around was dry, bathed in the new kind of light sneaking through the hole in the sky.
Kenzo kept talking with the host – he genuinely was interested about this whole "coronation" and who Alan was. The host tried to explain In easy-to-understand terms, but trying to explain such a complicated situation – that the Ruler actually chose an outsider as the heir, on his deathed - without giving out confidential information was kind of difficult.
Raizen thought about Alan - the sharp-eyed man who snuck inside of Elin’s cave, who’d spoken about Ukai with the quiet authority of someone who understood it deeply enough to lead it.
...Yet... He was an outsider. Raizen remembered the first time he met him – when Ichiro almost killed him out of rage, when the stone in Alan’s stomach glowed so dimly it looked like he was about to give his last breath any second.
Yet Ukai welcomed him with open arms. And he was going to be crowned tomorrow. A Ruler stepping into the role while a permanent hole in the sky hung above his city like a reminder that the world could change without warning and the leaders had to be ready for whatever poured through.
"We can’t stay, sadly" Kenzo said. Gently, with genuine regret. "We’re expected back."
The host nodded. Accepted it the way hosts accept departures - with grace and the standing offer of return. Ukaian guards arrived shortly after, four of them, to carry the luggage to the departure platform. They moved through the house with efficient courtesy, collecting bags and cases and the sealed containers that held the group’s equipment.
Raizen watched them take Kenzo’s hammer case - two guards, one on each end, their faces struggling despite it only being the case. Then he looked at the corner of the room where he’d left his purchase from the market: the massive wooden spoon. The one for Kori.
He picked it up. Tested the weight - solid, heavy, the carved wood dense and smooth. The spoon was almost half as tall as he was, its bowl wide enough to serve as a small shield, its handle thick enough to double as a bat. It was absurd and funny and exactly what Kori would either love or use to hit him with, and both outcomes were... Acceptable.
He threw it over his shoulder.
"I’ll carry this one myself, thanks" he said.
