Chapter 401: In The Underworks
Raizen’s chest felt too tight to breathe properly. He needed to leave. He’d come down here without a reason and stayed for too long and now the room’s walls felt like they were pressing in.
He slowly walked backwards toward the door. Raizen slowly took a step... But he didn’t even finish the second one-
The door snapped open.
And in the frame, the hallway light creating a soft blurry halo around her head...
Kori.
She looked tired. The kind of tired that was visible in her shoulders rather than her face - her expression was the same neutral set it always was, but her posture was a fraction lower than usual, the weight of recent hours visible in the angle of her stance. Half of her silver hair was pulled back, still covering her Chasmis. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbows. She stood there, looking at Raizen.
Raizen looked back at her.
His brain, which had spent the last several minutes processing graphs, lines and chest pressure that wouldn’t quit, did not immediately classify the figure in the doorway as Kori. It classified the figure as something, and the something triggered every leftover stress response his body still had loaded, and his foot - already in motion to step away from the central table - caught on a piece of paper that had drifted slightly inward from the edge of the room.
Time slowed down.
His weight shifted. His balance, already compromised by the awkwardness of trying not to disturb anything, tipped past the point of recovery. His arms came up, slowly, in the helpless windmill of a body that had been ambushed by physics. His face went through every available stage of oh no in the half-second his brain had to process what was happening.
Across from him, Kori’s eyes widened. Her hand twitched upward - an instinctive movement, the start of a reach, her body responding to the shape of someone falling before her conscious mind had decided whether to intervene.
Their eyes met. His were wide with surprise. Hers were - for a moment, just a moment - soft. The fall continued. The narrow path between them, lined on both sides by years of Eiden’s research, watched the slow descent of a Royal Scholar toward its teacher.
Time snapped back.
Splat.
Raizen hit the floor face-first.
Kori hadn’t moved. The instinctive twitch had stalled, her brain concluding that catching him would require too much effort, and her hand had returned to her side.
She looked down at him.
"Hi, Kori" Raizen said, voice muffled by the floor.
"You weren’t supposed to be down here."
"Mm-hm."
"Get up."
He pushed himself off the floor slowly. Both palms flat against the paper-covered tile, arms straightening, knees stabilizing. Kori watched silently, without offering her hand. When he was upright, she gave him a brief, business-like pat on the shoulder - the closest thing to physical comfort she had - and stepped back into the doorway.
"Out."
"Yeah," Raizen said. "Yeah, I’m out."
He moved carefully, his eyes scanning the floor for any sign that his fall had damaged anything - disturbed papers, knocked instruments, scuffed graphs. Thankfully, the room was as it had been. Whatever cosmic luck had governed his descent had at least granted him a clean landing on a section of floor that hadn’t held anything important. He stepped over the threshold. Kori pulled the door shut behind him firmly.
The corridor’s silence reasserted itself. The pressure in his chest didn’t ease - but the ringing in his ear faded. He could at least breathe normally, and he was more than alright with that.
Kori was already talking.
"...Where’s Kenzo? Why was Ukai covered in black smoke for hours? Did you have anything to do with the Ukai Ruler’s assassination? What was the huge discharge, what was that? Where’s the file scanner? Did Alteea get it? What’s wrong with your face? Hey, are you dead?"
The questions came without pause for breath, each one stacked on the back of the last. Raizen’s brain, still half-tangled in graphs and frequencies, produced no useful response.
He held up a hand. "Slow down."
Kori stopped.
"Please," Raizen added. "Just - go slow. One at a time."
Kori considered this. Adjusted. Started again.
"So. Where is Kenzo?"
"He went to eat. Probably."
"Without -"
She caught herself before finishing the sentence. The word me almost made it out. Her mouth instantly closed. Her face - neutral, controlled, the standard Kori expression - did something it almost never did. The faintest pink crept into her cheeks. Not a blush, exactly. Raizen – and nobody he knew of – had ever seen her fully blushing. But there was a more vivid colour, where there usually wasn’t any, and Kori was aware of it the moment it arrived.
She slapped both her own cheeks. Twice. Not hard - just firm enough to redistribute blood, to bring the rest of her face up to match the parts that had betrayed her, to disguise the localized colour as a general redness from the slap itself.
Raizen watched this, but didn’t say anything. His face did not move.
"Next question," Kori said.
"Yeah."
"Why was Ukai covered in black smoke for hours?"
Raizen had several options. He could tell her about the mission, about Elin’s cave with the wonderful specimens, about how Alan mysteriously appeared there, about how he was kind of trapped in freeing Ukai’s Ruler from an Eon-binding contract that kept half the continent safe from an Anathema fragment, about how Atman fell asleep whilst controlling all the smoke. He could explain how he got involved with a Sovereign, one of the Silent Hand’s leaders.
Suddenly, his right hand tingled. A faint sensation at his fingertips, going down into the palm.
Raizen was about to explain everything. After all, he could trust Kori, and she probably already knew these people. But the words just couldn’t come out. Something, like a soft hand gripping his throat, just didn’t let them come out.
Then Raizen remembered the last time when he saw Elin’s home. Right before leaving. Her hand extended forward, whole face and eyes smiling, thin red Eon threads circling her arm, waiting for him to shake her hand.
"I told you" he said. "I will not tell anyone."
Instead, he said another, half truth.
"Eon experiment. Big one."
Kori’s eyes narrowed. Her skepticism didn’t make her look angry - it made her look like a meter that had received weird data and was deciding whether to recalibrate.
"That’s all?"
"That’s... All I know about that, yeah."
"Mm."
She didn’t press. Kori didn’t press. If a story had holes in it, she let the holes sit and assumed someone better-positioned would fill her in later. Information, for her, was either present or absent. Pursuing absent information was Alteea’s job.
"Next question," Raizen sighed. "What was it?"
"Did you have anything to do with the Ukai Ruler’s assassination?"
Raizen’s face did several things at once.
"Woah, woah, woah," he said. "Did you say assassination?"
Kori blinked. "Yeah. Wasn’t he killed?"
Raizen’s brain detonated for the second time that day. Assassination? The Ukai Ruler - the old man, the white-haired man who had passed away in the days after they arrived, whose successor was now being crowned as Alan - had been killed? Had people thought he was killed? Had the public version of the news been assassination instead of -
"That’s how people understood it?" he said. "People thought he was assassinated?"
But even as the words came out, his mind was already working against the premise. The white burial ceremony. The pale flags. The joyful, ceremonial atmosphere of a city saying farewell to a leader they had loved. None of it had been the kind of grieving that follows political violence. There had been no anger. No fear. If the Ruler had been killed, the city would have been louder. More dangerous.
Kori watched him work through it. Her face stayed neutral for two seconds, three.
Then she started laughing.
Not loudly. Kori’s laughter was quite rare and physically minimal - a quiet exhale through her nose, her shoulders rising a few times and falling, the corner of her mouth pulling upward in a brief, restrained curve. But it was a laugh. The first one Raizen had heard from her in weeks.
"Nah," she said. "That’s just what I thought happened."
She nudged him with her elbow. The contact was firm, the gesture casual. "You know how the press is. They lie about stuff like that all the time, just to make people happy and docile while the truth stays hidden."
Raizen sighed. The kind of sigh that comes from a person who has just been held over a small cliff for theatrical purposes.
"Couldn’t you just ask Alteea? She gets her information right all the time."
"Almost all the time," Kori corrected. "And she was gone for a few days."
The casualness of the sentence didn’t quite match the content. Raizen caught the shift in her tone - the slight flattening that Kori applied to information she considered noteworthy or dangerous.
"Gone?" he said. "Where?"
"Nobody knows."
She let the silence sit for a beat.
"But I have a small hunch."
Raizen frowned. "...Yes?"
Kori tilted her head slightly. The angle she used when she was about to say something she wasn’t sure she should say.
"Alteea disappeared..."
She paused.
"...in the Underworks."
