The canals of Reflynne glimmered with late-winter light. The city was always beautiful from above—sunlight dancing along waterways, the slow churn of trade barges, the distant calls of gulls. Yet beneath the streets there was another city: unlit, windowless, the air pressed flat by enchantments older than any of them.
Iroko Ryusei and Kouki Nozomi walked beside Seiko Nakahara, Reflynne's mayor, and Kaisei Aoi, guild leader and warden of the city's underground sanctum. Neither host spoke during the descent. None of them wanted to.
The stone stairs spiraled downward. Mana thinned as they went—like sound dying in a vacuum.
Kouki noticed it first.
His magic didn't just feel weaker; it felt absent.
"Anti-arcane lattice." Kaisei's voice echoed flatly, dead of reverberation. "Mana cannot form intent here."
It was not a warning. It was a fact.
The hallway they emerged into was carved from black stone, veined with rust-red sigils that pulsed like a quiet heartbeat. Three doors stood along the corridor. Each thicker than a fortress wall. Each sealed with a crest that shimmered faintly when seen from the corner of one's eye.
Seiko led them to the first cell.
---
1. Gaikotsu Honekuni
He lay in a stone cradle, arms and legs bound by layered mineral cuffs carved from the bedrock of Reflynne itself. His breath was slow, shallow, dreamless. White hair pooled around him like frost. A mask covered the lower half of his face, not for silence—but to keep his body from consuming ambient mana.
Kouki stepped forward.
"Gaikotsu," he said quietly. "We—"
No response. No twitch. Not even recognition.
Iroko tried next, voice steady, military command carried in it.
"Gaikotsu Honekuni. Attend."
Silence.
Seiko walked forward with no ceremony at all.
"Gaikotsu."
The man's left eyelid lifted. A single eye—colorless, ancient, sick with exhaustion—looked at her.
He looked, and he saw—
—and then he closed his eye again, as if even the act of acknowledging existence was a burden.
Kouki exhaled.
"He's… barely alive."
Seiko shook her head.
"He is alive precisely as much as we need him to be."
A human being turned into an infrastructure component.
A legend reduced to a battery.
---
2. Shinjitsu Jitsuzai
The second chamber was colder.
No bed—only floor.
No bindings—only nails.
Shinjitsu's arms were pinned into the ground by spears of petrified blackwood, and a silk blindfold covered his eyes. Magic coiled around him like fine threads—constant, precise, suffocating.
His voice cut into the silence before any of them could speak.
"I smell a cat," he murmured.
His head tilted toward seiko.
"I smell a dog," he continued, turning toward iroko.
A faint sniff. Toward kouki.
"I smell rusted steel and unanswered guilt."
No one moved.
No one spoke.
His voice was not conversational. It was observational.
As though the world came to him in scents and sins.
Kouki stepped back without realizing it.
---
3. Masaboru Hoshigare
The last door was heavier. Reinforced. The sigils along its surface trembled constantly, like something inside was breathing against them.
When it opened, even the air seemed to recoil.
Masaboru sat chained to a pillar of obsidian, wrists encased in runic metal so dense it seemed to swallow the light. At his abdomen, a massive needle of stone was embedded, siphoning mana into a network of conduits that pulsed with slow, ritual precision.
He should have been dead years ago.
He raised his head when they entered, eyes dull but impossibly aware.
Iroko spoke, his tone the same he would use to address a war council.
"Masaboru Hoshigare—we require your assessment."
Masaboru did not lift his chin. Did not strain against the chains.
His gaze drifted to them as if they were dust particles.
"None of you are worth my interest."
The words did not insult.
They dismissed.
Kouki's jaw tightened. He noticed the shackles—denser than any material he recognized. Layered inscriptions. Triple redundancy. Designed not to restrain—
—but to erase potential.
Seiko's voice was barely above a whisper.
"If he gathers mana enough for one breath—he will break free."
Not could.
Will.
---
They left the chamber in silence.
The surface air felt wrong. Too alive. Too loud. Too bright.
Kouki was the first to speak once the city's light touched them again.
"If we are thinking of releasing them… we're planning to drown fire with poisoned tidal waves."
"No," Iroko corrected quietly.
"We are considering whether we are still the kind of people who refuse to."
No one answered.
Because the answer would define whether Ostoria remained a nation—
—or became something else.
The line was there.
And they were standing on it.