The Undergrowth — Later That Night
They emerged from the tunnel into the central cavern and the Undergrowth erupted.
Cheers rolled through the space as rebels surged forward, voices bouncing off the stone ceiling and coming back doubled. Lilly raised the raw blade and the firelight caught the unfinished metal — rough in places, still carrying the shape of something interrupted. Not polished. Not complete.
But real.
"You did it!" Moto called, grinning.
Lilly shook her head. Her breath was steady. "It's not done," she said. "My ancestor has waited a long time. I'll start now and I won't stop until it's finished."
The cheers didn't die — they deepened. Became something more settled than noise.
Aemon studied the blade from a distance. He didn't so much feel it as notice it — a quality behind the metal, patient and very old. Something that had been waiting without urgency and had not yet made up its mind.
Lilly stepped away from the crowd toward him, holding out a small bundle of six-leaf leaves.
"Found this in Kariba," she said simply. "Thought you might need it."
Aemon's brain stopped working for approximately two seconds. "Oh," he said. "Uh — thanks. That's... really thoughtful."
She smiled once, turned toward the forge.
POP.
Love materialised mid-motion with both hands clutching his chest.
"THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL," Love cried.
The clones lost all cohesion simultaneously. Aemon stumbled. They collapsed in a heap.
Moto watched Lilly disappear into the forge's glow. Then he looked down at Aemon on the ground.
"Hey," Moto said slowly. "You like her. Don't you."
Aemon blinked up at him. "I thought you knew."
Moto frowned. "What made you think that?"
Aemon's mouth fell open.
"So why did you think I was giving you the cold shoulder during the tournament whenever you two were together?"
Moto tilted his head, genuinely thinking about it.
"I thought you were jealous that I was getting stronger faster than you."
Aemon put his face in his hands and exhaled.
"After everything Grillet said," he muttered. "You were just... innocent the whole time."
They lay there for a moment in the noise of the celebrating Undergrowth.
Moto shifted. "Speaking of Grillet. Is he still in there?"
"Yeah." Aemon stared at the ceiling. "Can't get rid of him that easily."
Aemon's Mental Plane
Rage stood guard at the door.
Behind him, the structure Aemon had built — layered, dense, reinforced. A prison within himself, nested cube by cube, each wall a choice.
Inside, Grillet lay sprawled on the floor with spray cans in his hands and a grin stretched across his face. The once-white walls were darkened with grotesque images — Aemon broken, abandoned, alone in a hundred different endings.
"He's my Vice," Aemon said.
"Vice?" Moto repeated.
"Trust can explain it."
Trust stepped forward, voice level. "Even when the dominant clone is defeated, the one who received the most time and attention holds a kind of residual authority over the inner plane. When the others take damage outside and retreat here, recovery runs through them."
Love folded his arms. "Think of it like a lens. Everyone moves through the world looking through something — love, rage, fear, joy. The lens shapes what they see."
Trust continued. "Someone who sees through love asks why they were hurt. Someone who sees through rage asks how to strike back."
Aemon looked at Grillet through the layered walls.
"The lens shapes everything," he said quietly. Then, after a moment: "I wonder what yours is."
He said it to Moto.
Moto had no answer for that. He thought about it for a while.
Sango — Flora Medical Bunker
The bunker moved with the quiet urgency of people who have done this before. Medics packed supplies, checked stretchers, passed orders hand to hand. In the middle of it, calm and directing, stood Kuna — warmth radiating from her in a way that made the whole space feel less urgent than it was.
She saw Tanaka and smiled.
"Took you long enough," she said, and pulled her into a brief hug.
"How did you know it was me?" Tanaka asked.
From behind a supply rack, Maka stepped out — features close enough to Tanaka's to mark the relation, different enough to mark the distinction. She said nothing, just studied.
"We're done here anyway," Kuna said. "Patients stabilised. We're being reassigned to the eastern base." She fell into step beside Tanaka as they walked out.
Soldiers greeted Kuna along the path. Children waved. A few ran up to hug her legs and she said their names without being reminded.
"Have you met him?" Kuna asked, eyes forward.
Tanaka knew who she meant. "By accident. Long after I stopped caring whether he existed."
"He just... landed nearby. Smiling. Like it was nothing."
Maka slowed slightly.
"I told him exactly what he was," Tanaka said. "He laughed. Then jumped away."
Silence for several steps.
"I need to check on a patient," Kuna said quietly. She turned back toward the bunker.
Tanaka watched her go.
Maybe that was too blunt, she thought.
But she didn't take it back. She hoped, quietly, that her sisters would never have to find out for themselves what Chandler actually was.
The Undergrowth — Training Pits
Moto trained alone. Not hand-to-hand — movement. He kept replaying the tournament: Lilly slipping out of his smoke before ignition, the way hesitation had cost him each time. He needed to set a trap and escape it in the same motion. The smoke bloomed, cleared, bloomed again.
The clones trained with rebel sparring partners — stumbling, reforming, learning what they were each made of separately. Rage alone in the corner, working something methodical and heavy.
Aemon sat nearby, watching, unfocused.
The Undergrowth — The Forge
Days passed. Lilly barely left the forge.
When the blade was finished it was lighter than her natural preference and balanced differently. Not designed for her style. She noticed this and said nothing.
She reached for the hilt.
The blade cut her arm — shallow, precise. A refusal. Not random. Directed.
Aemon saw it a moment before she did — the presence within the metal, the attention of it, and where it pointed.
At Will.
Lilly looked at the thin line of blood on her arm. A long silence. She lowered her head and held the blade out toward her brother.
"It's yours," she said quietly.
Will looked at the blade. Then at her.
He stepped back. "No."
"Will—"
"This was your dream," he said, and his voice was hard in the way of someone refusing to be moved. "Not mine. It was never mine." He shook his head. "If that spirit can't see that, it should have stayed buried with the rest of its era."
He walked out.
Lilly held on. The blade cut her again — deeper. A statement.
She dropped it.
Moto stood still, watching her. There was nothing useful to say, so he didn't say anything.
Dimakatso apologised softly and buried the sword under a layer of earth.
Sango — The Royal Castle
Bizure went to the castle alone.
Queen Yasmin heard him out. Authorization granted — with oversight. Cicada would co-lead the operation. Bizure accepted without argument. The prison became a fortress overnight, and the paper printed the truth about it in hidden ink that only reached those who knew to look.
When the message arrived in the Undergrowth, it sat on the crowd the way bad news sits.
Cicada read her own copy of the report later that evening. Her eyes moved over Thando's name.
She didn't trust him. She'd find out why.
The Undergrowth — Central Cavern
The next day, the cavern shook with the dull percussion of training — Moto and Aemon's clones trading blows in measured arcs, the ground cracking under controlled bursts.
Then the horn sounded.
One blast. Low, ancient, carrying through stone.
The effect was immediate and absolute. Sparring stopped. Clones dissolved mid-motion. Weapons lowered. Every person in the Undergrowth turned and surged toward the central space.
"Byron has returned!"
The cry became a roar.
A figure vaulted onto the massive stone stage. Shirtless. Dense with muscle, skin mapped in tribal tattoos that seemed to shift as he moved. He slammed a fist into his chest and loosed a shout that shook dust from the ceiling above.
A challenge.
Dozens of rebels swarmed him at once.
Byron laughed — loud, unrestrained — and became motion. He ducked, twisted, caught attackers mid-strike and sent them across the floor with careless ease. A bright red aura pulsed at his fists and feet, shockwaves spreading outward with each impact. Bodies flew. None of them broke.
Painful. Humbling. Not lethal.
Human-based power, raw and honest. Moto felt his pulse quicken. This was the kind of fighting he understood.
He took a step forward.
A hand closed on his shoulder — firm, gentle, not moving.
Lilly.
"Trust me," she said quietly. Not afraid. Careful.
The chaos burned itself out. Rebels groaned and laughed from the floor as Byron dropped from the stage and landed directly in front of Moto and Lilly. He gave her a respectful nod, then looked out over his people with something close to possessive pride.
"Is it always like this when he comes back?" Aemon asked, trying to sound casual.
"He's truly one of us," Lilly said, smiling. "That's why we accept him. Or at least — part of it."
POP.
"Ooh! What's the other part?" Joy burst out, leaning forward. "Tell me—"
Lilly opened her mouth.
And froze.
The change in Byron was subtle at first — a tightening, a pressure shift in the air around him. Then the dread hit.
It moved through the cavern like something alive. Every Sango native in the space — Lilly, Dimakatso, the hundreds packed into the underground — broke out in goosebumps at the same instant. Conversations died mid-word. Cheering stopped. Hair rose on arms and necks.
Moto felt it too. Not the animal recognition that the Sango people felt — something else. Like standing close to a storm he didn't yet have the language for.
Byron hadn't moved. Hadn't spoken.
And yet the cavern held its breath.