Gilded Ashes

Chapter 408: More Than Quintupled

Kori walked to the door.

Behind her, on the couch, the slate Raizen had brought home was still on the cushion, buzzing.

She ignored it.

Kori stepped outside, only to see that the street was full of Wardens.

So full, actually, you couldn’t take five steps without bumping into one. At least seven units on the same street. A patrol unit had stopped outside her house, its lights still cycling, two Wardens on foot working a perimeter sweep. Beyond them, the wider artery was choked with vehicles - the long ribbon of emergency lights she had seen from the roof now resolved at street level into a living current of patrol cars, motorcycles, and tactical vans converging on the eastern district. The air smelled of brake dust and ozone. Somewhere overhead, a drone passed in a hard arc that didn’t slow.

"Gosh, you lot are so useless..." Kori whispered as she crossed to the nearest officer

He saw her coming. His face shifted - recognition, the specific deference Wardens learned to perform around Phalanx members and higher-ups in general - and he straightened automatically. She didn’t acknowledge or greet him. She reached up, snatched the headset off his ear, and put it on her own.

"Hey -"

"Hey what? Got a problem?" Kori looked at him dead in the eyes, as she was already typing the code into the handset’s interface. Six digits - the sequence Alteea had given her years ago, the one that opened the personal channel that didn’t appear on any official frequency log. The handset’s display flickered once, switched to a private mode, and connected.

"Kori?" Alteea’s voice came through clear, slightly out of breath, the sound of a person who was already moving around, doing what the situation demanded.

"Permission to go all-out."

There was a pause. Two seconds, maybe less. Long enough for Alteea to weigh the question. On the other end, she knew how risky this permission was.

"I mean - yeah, sure-" Alteea said. "Just don’t destroy anything."

A short pause.

"By the way, I sent Osamu there, too."

Kori’s eyebrow shot upward.

She looked up.

Above the eastern district, the city’s defensive infrastructure was activating. Neoshima’s petals - the great structural plates that ringed the entire city - were unfolding from their sockets along the city’s perimeter. Slowly. Smoothly. Each petal a curved sheet of reinforced alloy, hinging upward and inward, beginning the process of forming the protective dome that the city deployed only in the most serious of incidents. The petals’ edges were lit from beneath by their own activation lights, the blue-white glow tracing out the edge of a closing flower across the eastern half of the sky.

The petals didn’t deploy for theft. They didn’t deploy for assassinations. They didn’t even deploy for normal defense protocols - even the bad ones - those got handled by Wardens on the ground. The petals deployed when there are City-level threats, which had happened maybe four times in Kori’s entire career. They deployed when the city wanted to make absolutely certain that whatever was inside stayed inside, or whatever waited outside couldn’t enter.

Kori frowned.

"Alteea."

"Mm?"

"You know I was going to track this thing down because I’m hella bored, right? I was just going to take a look."

"Yeah. I know." freeweɓnovel.cøm

"And?"

"Neither me or Osamu are hella bored. And neither is it."

Kori let that sit for a second.

"Just curious - what is so important," she asked carefully, "that you needed two Phalanx and authorize all-out engagement?"

Static came through the headset. Not a connection problem - the cold fuzz of an active channel where the speaker was deciding what to say but couldn’t really find the right words.

"I’m... Not entirely sure I know what we’re dealing with," Alteea mumbled through the microphone. It sounded half like a whisper, like she didn’t want anyone else to hear her.

More static.

"That person -"

The static thickened. Whatever Alteea was doing on her end, the channel was struggling to hold the signal as more Wardens flooded the eastern district and the radio band became congested with overlapping transmissions. Kori pressed the headset closer to her ear.

"- No -"

The signal cut out for a fraction of a second.

"- Eon -"

Cut out again. Kori could hear movement on the other end. Vehicles. The deep mechanical thrum of something large activating in the background of Alteea’s location.

"- Signature."

Then the channel died. Just static. The flooded radio bandwidth had finally overwhelmed the connection, and Alteea’s voice was completely gone, replaced by the white noise of a dozen overlapping Warden channels all trying to coordinate around the same incident, even though it had been a private channel.

Kori sighed quietly and took the headset off.

She held it in her hand for a moment, then looked up at the closing petals, then at the eastern district where the figure had gone, where Osamu was already moving toward, where every Warden in the city was now converging on a single point.

No... Eon... Signature.

Three words. Delivered through static, separated by interference, but unambiguous in their meaning.

The thing she had just watched cross her roofline, leaping something around fifty meters and catching itself on a Luminite-less hooked blade and running across the buildings of Neoshima at a speed no human body should have been able to sustain - the thing she was now being authorized to engage with no restrictions on her use of force or Eon -

Did not register on Eon detection equipment.

At all.

Kori dropped the headset back into the Warden’s hand. She didn’t speak, didn’t acknowledge his confused expression, didn’t even say "thanks". She just started walking toward the last known location, both knives glowing softly at her hips with the steady blue-white of luminite that was awake and waiting.

She let herself fall into the space she hadn’t visited in a long time - the operational quiet, the focus, the part of herself the Chasmis loved the most.

She reached for her left wrist, where she always had that one hairband Kenzo once gave her as a joke a few years back. He claimed it was indestructible – and up until now, Kori wasn’t able to prove him wrong. Then, with more care than neccessary, she caught the front part of her hair backwards, in a small ponytail, completely revealing the Chasmis.

Before properly gripping her knives, she threw one last look up, at the last slices of cloudy sky. The multicolor threads, the beauty now obstructed by the human safety measures.

"I don’t know who you are..." Kori mumbled to herself.

"But you chose a really bad time to piss Alteea off." She finished, thinking about the third-day rainbow clouds, and how tonight her power would essentially be...

...More than quintupled.