"Do you know why there are people specifically trained and selected to record awakenings?"
They were walking down the corridor now, the noise of the hall already fading behind them.
Atiya thought about it for a second. "To keep tabs on possible threats."
"What kind of threats."
"Sometimes when someone awakens a Yaicraft, something else comes with it. Uninvited." He slid his hands into his pockets. "They call them Sins."
Inteja didn't respond right away. A few more steps passed under their feet.
"You awakened one too," she said. "The Sin of Murder."
Atiya stopped walking.
Just for a moment. Then he caught up.
"...Did you know I'd have sins." Not quite an accusation. Not quite a question either. "Is that why you came. To silence them before they report me to the higher ups."
Inteja said nothing.
She was thinking about the first time she'd seen him.
***
The report had been two pages containing informations of a lab conducting Illegal experiments on childrens.
Their method went as far as take out unborn children directly from fetuses.
She'd read it once, set it face-down, and decided to go herself.
The lab was already destroyed by the time she arrived.
"Lady Inteja." Zextire stood just inside the threshold, his eyes moving across the wreckage with the same calm he brought to everything.
"I heard what they were doing to the children, but..." His gaze drifted and settled somewhere specific.
"What is this."
A boy sat in the middle of it all, perched on a metal chair, surrounded by corpses. Still. Like the concept of stillness had been built into him rather than learned.
Something moved through Inteja that she didn't bother to spare moments to think about it. She walked straight toward him.
Zextire stayed where he was.
The boy watched her approach without flinching, without moving at all. She crouched down to his level and looked at him for a long time, the way you look at something you're not sure yet how to read.
Then she reached into her coat, pulled out a piece of roasted lamb wrapped in waxed paper, and set it on the ground halfway between them.
She stood back up. Turned slightly away, giving him her shoulder instead of her face.
"I'll wait at the edge of the field until the second moonrise," she said to him.
"If you want to be my son, come find me. If you don't, stay where you are."
She started walking.
"I won't ask again."
He had come.
That was all there was to it. He'd crossed the field, and she'd taken him home, and eventually the Pharsa name embraced him.
Inteja kept walking, her coat shifting with her stride.
"I came because you're my son," she said, like that settled it. "That's all."
"I haven't killed a single person since you took me in, mother," Atiya said. "Because there's been no reason to."
They walked in silence for a while after that.
"Aren't you the instructor?" Atiya asked as they drifted toward the exit. "Why are you heading home with me?"
"There are fifty other instructors back there." Inteja waved a hand. "Besides, I only agreed to be an instructor for exactly one hour."
The two of them stepped through the Awakening Center's towering doors and out into the afternoon light.
"So..." Atiya glanced at her sideways, a chill already crawling up his spine at the thought.
"Are you going to train me yourself? Can I get a separate teacher? The way you train Zelaine is genuinely terrifying."
Inteja ignored his shivering. "I told her to stay with you. Where is she?"
A small, petty smile crept onto Atiya's lips. Heh. She's definitely getting an earful.
They reached the car. The driver was already standing at attention, and he dipped into a bow the moment he saw them. "Lady Pharsa—"
"Cut the crap," Inteja said. "Where is that bratty disciple of mine?"
The driver didn't say a word. He simply raised one hand and pointed toward a street stall on the corner, where a flash of scarlet hair was hard to miss.
Atiya reached into his pocket and froze. He patted the other one. Then the back of his trousers. His face fell. "That fucking bitch stole my card."
Smack.
Inteja's hand connected with the back of his head casually.
"Don't curse in front of me," she said, sounding less offended than someone who simply preferred order.
Meanwhile, Zelaine was busy making the shopkeeper's day significantly worse.
"Pack me ten orders of that shrimp chowmein, fifteen steaks, ten pieces of bacon..." She was practically fuming, eyes locked on the sizzling grill like she hadn't just eaten ten plates of fried rice.
A boy appeared at her side with a pleasant, slightly unsettling smile. "Excuse me, could you pack me some insecticide? I have a vampire to deal with back home."
"We...don't sell that here, sir!"
The shopkeeper stared. His spatula hovered motionless over the grill.
"Already over? How?" Zelaine muttered, frowning at her card as the transaction beeped and failed.
"Because you took my card," Atiya said from directly behind her. "Give it back. Let's go."
Zelaine spun around, entirely unbothered by being caught. "So? How did it go? What did you awaken?"
"I grew an extra dick," Atiya replied. "Come on."
Smack.
Inteja's hand found the back of his head for the second time in five minutes. "Is that how you speak to a woman?"
The moment Zelaine registered who was standing behind Atiya, something in her physically changed. Her spine straightened and her eyes went wide.
The stolen credit card suddenly became very interesting to look at.
"I... I didn't expect to see you, Master," she managed.
"I gave you one job," Inteja said, her voice dropping into something quieter and therefore more dangerous.
"To accompany him. Instead I find you trying to buy out a street stall with his money."
"Language," Atiya muttered.
Smack.
"Don't talk back to me."
****
The Pharsa residence was the kind of place that made people forget how to speak. Clean lines, floor-to-ceiling glass, grounds that looked like they'd been trimmed with scissors blade by blade.
Tucked somewhere behind all that elegance was the sparring room, which looked like it belonged to a completely different building.
Cold, reinforced, and lined wall to wall with enough weapons to make a small army feel exposed and underdressed.
Inteja stood in the center of the mats, casually hefting a broadsword.
"I'm suggesting you choose between two skills for your first framework," she said, testing the edge with her thumb. "Spatial Healing, or Portal Creation."
Atiya looked at the sword. His feet stayed where they were. "I suggest you put that down. It's scaring me."
"This isn't the time for small concerns." She swung it in a whistling arc that stopped a few inches from his chest.
"That is my only concern! Put it away before you turn me into sushi!"
Inteja ignored him and moved to the racks, picking up additional blades with the ease and started playing with it like someone arranging flowers.
"Portal Creation lets you fold space, but the code is a nightmare. Even if you complete the task perfectly, your early portals will be useless. Tiny, short-range, limited in number." She tossed a dagger into the air and caught it by the hilt without looking.
"Spatial Healing stitches space back to its original state. Precise work. Clean with solids, a disaster with liquids or gases. If you get stabbed, don't count on it saving you. Blood is liquid, so it won't stop you from bleeding out."
She spun a third blade between her fingers, eyes on him. "Choose."
"I choose for you to put the weapons down and explain all of that again," Atiya said, his voice half an octave higher than usual. "Slowly. Without the decapitation angle."
Inteja sighed like she was the one being reasonable. She returned the weapons to their racks one by one, each landing with a sharp metallic clack.
"Portal Creation makes you a budget Dr. Strange. Tiny portals, short distances. Spatial Healing lets you fix a shattered blade or a cracked wall instantly, but you can't heal a hemorrhage with it." She turned to face him.
"Well?"
"Okay," Atiya said, in the tone of a man who understood but would have preferred not to. "I get it."
Meanwhile, Zelaine was lying on a mattress in the corner with a plate of roasted buffalo wings balanced on her stomach, doing absolutely nothing and was already tired.
Zelaine had been lying on the mattress long enough to finish half the plate before a thought drifted through her head.
'...wait. Why are they talking about coding a new skill when he already has one half-coded?'
"Massterrrr!"
She called out to Inteja once, then twice, her voice stretching into a long lazy whine that bounced off the walls and died somewhere between them. Neither of them so much as glanced her way.
She let her eyes drift to Atiya instead and tried his name with the same result.
She tried one more time, drawing it out until anyone of them heard him.
Inteja turned her head toward the mattress, slowly, with the particular expression of someone who was being constantly pestered by a bug. "What!"
"Doesn't he have an inbuilt skill? I saw it earlier."
Inteja paused at that. Atiya looked confused.
"Yai users with sins sometimes get an additional skill to make up for it," Zelaine continued. "Just like I got one, though I should have gotten two since I have two sins."
She took a large bite of roasted wing and instantly swallowed it whole without chewing as Inteja and Atiya both turned to stare at her.
She set the plate down and cleared her throat.
"Anyway, Master, you saw his Yai circuits too. How could you not have noticed?"
"Summoned your yai Circuit, son."
"Mkay," Atiya muttered, closing his eyes to focus.
Atiya spared a thought about materializing it and summoned his Yai Circuit.
Two concentric circles of glowing magenta materialized in the air before him, hovering like a sleek, digital interface.
It was the size of a tablet, but circular, with only a few words written on it.
"Summon your Yai Circuit, son."
"Mkay," Atiya muttered, closing his eyes.
He spared a thought toward it and the Circuit answered. Two concentric circles of glowing magenta materialized in the air before him, hovering like a sleek digital interface. The size of a tablet, circular, clean.
There weren't many words on it.
Zelaine rolled off the mattress and padded over, leaning in to point at a specific section. The part labeled skill.
It was blank. Not blank like empty. Blank like something should have been written there and wasn't.
Inteja's eyes furrowed. She was quiet for a moment, then let out a short breath through her nose.
Atiya reached out and touched the blank space.
Text bloomed across it.
An immensely powerful ability that severs the fabric of reality, cutting through physical and conceptual constructs, including space-time. Used to obliterate opponents, ignore durability, and nullify spells.
A one-hit-KO technique.
Manifests as multiple sheets which can be manipulated and layered on top of one another to build larger, more complex Yai constructs.
Atiya's face lit up.
"It's already half coded too."
Inteja's eyes sharpened with interest, a glint of sudden hunger flashing across them. Her mouth parted, the start of a smile tugging at the corners.
Her phone rang on the table, the shrill sound cutting through the silence.
It was Zextire.
Inteja cut the call with a flick of her thumb. She exhaled sharply, pushed the phone aside, and turned back to zelaine.
"It's now up to you to help him code. I have work to do, and if either of you slacks off, I'm freezing your accounts."
She turned around and left.
They waited. A few seconds of silence passed after the door clicked shut.
Inteja let out a long, quiet breath the moment she was clear of the building.
Finally.
Back in the training room, Zelaine was already bouncing on her heels.
"You finally awakened, babe. Treat me to beef and pork."
"I'll cook whatever you want tonight," Atiya said. "But help me code first."
Zelaine's expression shifted into something more serious, which on her face always looked slightly wrong. She crossed her arms and looked at the hovering Circuit.
"Solve all the Griffith Spacecraft questions first. Space is a purely mathematical attribute, babe. If you don't master the math, you don't master the space." She gestured at the flickering magenta screen.
"Every line of code in that skill is built on high-level theory and complex calculation. For a normal person, coding a single Ascension 2 skill takes ten years. Go study. Come back in a year when you can actually differentiate a spatial fold."
She knew he was a mathematical genius, someone who saw patterns where others saw complex symbols. She also knew he was possibly the laziest person alive.
"Fuck you, babe," Atiya muttered, staring at the wall of variables like it had personally wronged him.
Zelaine smirked. "Hey, don't be a sore loser. I acquired my first skill in under a year after I awakened." A pause. "But then again, I actually worked for it."
"...Which skill should I choose?"
Zelaine didn't even look up from her wings. "Code both simultaneously. The inbuilt one that's already half done and Portal Creation."
Atiya smiled at that, slow and a little pained, already seeing the upcoming future laid out before him like a sentence.
"Have mercy on your love, okay."