Chương 28: Mountain Forge

Exiting the school, Kenji and Kurisu moved with the crowd of students until Kenji steered them toward a brick wall away from the primary flow of traffic, leaning back against the masonry while keeping his voice low.

"You said the Miller brothers awakened to those elements yesterday, right?" Kenji asked. With his arms crossed, he looked around the courtyard before focusing back on Kurisu.

"If they stay in that house they're gonna burn it down or crack the foundation. Plus, as annoying as you can be, using these powers is actually pretty fun."

"We need space to train. Deer Creek Canyon is the best spot. There are tons of wide-open spaces and off-trail spots up there where no one will bother us. My parents are down for a camping trip this weekend, so I'll text Mr. Miller right now and see if you guys can head up there tomorrow after school." Kurisu nodded, looking toward the line of buses rumbling near the exit.

"I am in agreement." Pulling his phone from his pocket, Kenji fired off the text mid-stride as the two headed toward the parking lot. In the passenger side of the back row, Kurisu watched the city vanish as the urban sprawl abruptly shifted to rising pines. Leading the procession, the Tetsuyas' silver sedan climbed steadily up the mountain switchbacks with the black pickup following behind. The evening sun cast long shadows across the canyon walls.

The vehicles transitioned from asphalt to a rutted dirt path, tires crunching over loose rock until they broke through the trees to park in a secluded clearing shielded by large boulders. The group stepped from the cars into a sharp drop in temperature, boots crunching over a bed of fallen pine needles. Steven and Roland enlisted the boys to help pitch the tents, leaving Charlotte and Gloria to organize the supplies near the tailgate.

Once camp was made, Kurisu stepped apart and gestured for the three other boys to follow him toward a wide dirt patch.

"You shall conduct your training here." For independent practice, Kurisu started with Kenji, guiding the boy to separately draw upon his Kaki and Kōki before leaving him to balance the flow. With the brothers needing far more direct guidance after only just awakening to their abilities, he focused strictly on teaching them to draw from their Tanden, walking them through the basics.

Kneeling beside Kellevra, Kurisu pressed his palms flat against the dirt, showing the boy how to draw on his power, pushing his awareness deep into the earth. Beside Ace, he formed a loose fist, shifting the ambient air temperature to create a faint shimmer of heat above his knuckles while instructing the boy to mirror the internal draw. With the boys settled into their practice, Kurisu walked away and stopped under a tall pine.

His intent focused on the base of his spine, he mentally flicked his Teirin, setting the ring into a rapid spin." Genkai," he whispered, the word vibrating with a metallic resonance. The familiar electric buzz ignited through his system, and he carved out a ten-foot cube of air around a few branches. Stripping the atmosphere away to form a localized pocket of dead space that matched the exact volume used to extinguish the kitchen fire.

Inside the vacuum, the trapped pine needles drifted into stillness, isolated from the world while the rest of the tree continued to sway in the evening breeze. One second passed. Then five. Then ten. The air outside the cube pressed against the invisible barrier, but his structure held fast. At fifteen seconds, a mild ache began to register in his Tanden before he released his grip on the void with an exhale, hardening a dense atmospheric shell around the collapse zone.

During the kitchen fire, trapping Ace and Steven inside the vacuum had forced him to execute a slow, controlled bleed to prevent the returning pressure from crushing their lungs, a reckless oversight that had put him in a bad way yesterday, and could have ended much worse, a moment's lapse that would have crushed his adoptive family. Some genius, he scoffed, recalling the endless praise of the chōnin during his youth. Lacking such restrictions here, he simply allowed the atmosphere to snap back.

The displaced air collapsed inward, his barrier absorbing the kinetic impact and muffling what would have been a thunderous crack down to a gust of wind and a dull thud. With his arms crossed, Kurisu pinched his chin and considered the result. This form is incredible. The throughput required to maintain such control over spatial pressure should have overloaded his channels, yet here, his Keiraku handled the surging flow with ease. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He sat cross-legged on a nearby boulder, closing his eyes to cycle his Ki. Beyond just the physical throughput, the form felt as though it had drastically altered his capacity, but how could a man gain something from nothing? One could not reap what was not sown, after all. If the physical volume of his Tanden remained unchanged, then the form had to be significantly increasing the efficiency at which his body utilized energy.

Under normal circumstances, isolating a vacuum of this size would have depleted his reserves in two or three seconds. Here, despite the continuous draw on his core from the Genkai form, he felt as though he could maintain the dead space for half a minute before running dry. Three seconds stretched out to thirty. It was a tenfold increase. Exactly where the true limits of this form lay remained to be seen, but the immediate result was undeniable: a flat enhancement to both his efficiency and his throughput.

Back in the clearing to check on his three accidental disciples, Kurisu observed Ace and Kellevra dripping in sweat, their brows furrowed with the effort of using their Ki, Kellevra grinding loose pebbles into fine sand, Ace producing brief tongues of flame with the snap of his fingers. Kurisu then turned his attention to the boy standing frozen, eyes squeezed shut. As a sudden divine presence dropped over him, he dropped into Senryū no Kamae before realizing where the energy was coming from— Oh?

A blinding wave of gold radiance erupted from Kenji, rolling outward as a physical shockwave of glittering light. It bleached the color from the clearing, casting the trees in stark shadow for a heartbeat before the light died, leaving the boy gasping on his knees.

"Woah," Ace said, blinking as he stepped closer.

"Hey, wrong colored eyes there, Sephiroth." In the sedan's window, Kenji caught his reflection, staring at his silver hair and red irises. With a groan, Kenji threw his head back and squeezed his eyes shut, Kurisu feeling the boy clamping down on his Tanden as he attempted to revert the changes, but the color remained fixed.

"Ah, shit..." Kenji muttered, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

"Kenji! Watch your mouth!" Gloria shouted, making her way over to him. Scrambling to his feet, Kenji pointed at his face.

"But Mom, look! It won't change back! I cut the flow, but my hair is stuck! Dude, what's going on, you're the elemental guru here!" He looked toward the Terran. From a few paces away, Kurisu let his gaze pierce into the boy's core, finding a secondary organ partially hidden by Kenji's Tanden depositing golden energy into the meridians.

"We shall speak of this matter tonight," he said.

"For now, you must rest." Slowly chewing a mouthful of steak, Kellevra looked around the camp with a mischievous glint in his eyes as the silence stretched just long enough to become uncomfortable. The orange embers lit the camp chairs, cedar smoke filling the clearing as Steven settled back to pass a plate of food to Kenji, the quiet camp alive with the popping of sap within the logs and the scrape of plastic forks against paper plates.

"So, we gonna talk about the elephant in the room, or we just gonna ignore that Kenji looks like a vampire now?" Kellevra asked, smirking as Kenji glared back across the fire.

"Keep it up and I'll bite you, Kel," Kenji snapped, scowling into the coals as he stabbed a potato.

"Besides, I'm not a vampire. I just pulled on the wrong thread of energy. I'm the same person even if I look like a metal album cover. Ugh, but what am I supposed to do about school?!"

"How can the sparrow understand the ambitions of the swan?" Kurisu asked.

"Why concern yourself with the judgment of others?"

"Maybe because I look like a freak!" Kenji shot back, gesturing wildly at his silver hair. Kurisu shrugged, the concept of blending in holding no meaning to him. Gloria gave him a soft smile, her hand squeezing Kenji's shoulder.

"You look perfectly fine. Don't worry about it." Her smile tightened, the corners of her eyes pinching with nervous energy as she looked toward Kurisu.

"Kurisu-dono. What is happening to him?"

"I cannot be certain, but in the moment preceding the eruption, I perceived a divine presence," Kurisu answered, glancing up from his plate.

"A divine presence?" Gloria asked, her voice dropping.

"Do you understand what that means to us?"

"I do not make such assertions lightly," Kurisu said.

"This energy is most likely Seiki. That he is capable of containing Seiki... the most logical conclusion points to a divine lineage." From across the fire, a soft, distant look washed over Gloria's face, her eyes drifting from Kurisu to the flickering flames.

"My boy, an angel," she mused.

"What divinity? Gods? Heaven?" Kenji scoffed, shaking his head.

"They're just stories people tell to feel better about the world! We just go to church and crap to play like we're doing the right thing. This has to be some kind of fluke or a weird side effect of the magic!" Steven stirred the coals with a broken tree branch, leaning forward with his eyes fixed on the glowing center of the fire.

"Look, we're sitting in the middle of the woods with a boy from ancient Japan who throws electricity around like he's Thor or Zeus while you guys throw literal flames. If those things are the new normal, maybe gods and angels do exist."

"You possess knowledge of them as well?" Kurisu asked.

"That's not the point," Steven said.

"Angels don't exist!" Kenji shouted, shoving his plate away before storming toward the edge of the clearing with his hands buried in his pockets. In the silence that followed, broken only by the crackle of the fire, several long moments passed while the group watched him pace through the shadows of the tree line.

"You claim angels do not exist," Kurisu noted, his voice dry.

"Yet until recently, neither did the ko-oni."

"Ware mo mata..."