The vehicle carrying Sora had already left the underground facility. The tinted windows cut away the world as if he were being transported through a sealed tunnel, but miles above, several layers of steel and concrete above Regulus headquarters…
A meeting room vibrated with tension.
Three figures sat at the central table.
Director Akitsugu Reizei — head of operations, an old aristocrat whose lineage once brushed against the edges of imperial fire.
Maira Hoshikiri — liaison officer between the political sponsors and Regulus. Young, calculating, never raising her voice.
And lastly,
Colonel Garan Natsume — former Dominion strategist, now Regulus's internal critic. A massive man with an expression carved out of unyielding stone.
The holo-display flickered on.
On screen: a destroyed convoy. Dominion insignias. Burned-out containers. Men lying unconscious, not dead — their Fault cores forcefully collapsed.
A signature mark.
Maira tapped the screen.
"Sable Union again. This is the third time this month."
Garan's jaw tightened.
"They're escalating. Dominion wants to blame us for smuggling, but the Union keeps hitting their routes instead. At this rate—"
"At this rate," Reizei interjected, "Dominion will overreact the way they always do. They'll mobilize internal forces. Tighten the leash on all civilian Fault holders. And then… the public will beg us for intervention."
Maira smirked.
"That's one way to phrase it."
Reizei ignored the implication.
"What disturbs me is not the raid. It's their consistency. These patterns are not random sabotage — they're mapping something. Narrowing down locations."
Garan leaned forward.
"They're after the Null Field data. Again."
Silence thickened.
Maira broke it.
"Dominion thinks they're terrorists. The public thinks they're a cult. But we know exactly what they are."
Reizei nodded.
"A relic."
"A remnant."
"A wound that refuses to heal."
He continued calmly:
"The Sable Union was born from the war. They want to erase Fault powers entirely. That idea alone makes them dangerous. They don't care what breaks along the way. Countries. Economies. Equilibriums."
Garan scoffed.
"You say that like Dominion is any better. Bad governance is what allowed the Union to exist in the first place."
Reizei's expression didn't shift.
"Which is why Regulus exists — to expose their failures. And to fix what they can't."
"At this rate it seems we might need to call him back," Maira spoke with a hint of uncertainty and even nervousness from her previously calm tone. "If this keeps happening we can't keep pointing towards the dominion much longer"
The room fell into silence again, deep down each of them knew that there's a limit to how much longer they can exploit the sable Union, and when that limit is crossed..
"Gah! You dare brought him up?! He's a traitor to the imperium and I will not! Let any of you even brought him up again!" Reizei spoke harshly his voice filled with rage breaking the silence, despite knowing the circumstances he refused to ever acknowledge it.
He brought his hand up to his face touching the deep scar beneath his eyes, his hand quivering for a moment, the scar immediately reminding him of his greatest failure.
"But it's not impossible, he doesn't have anywhere else to go," garan with his arm crossed shot a look towards the fuming aristocrat, he knew that this is a gamble even bigger than releasing the Astral veins.
"We still have enough powerhouse on our side, even a controlled aberrant, we won't need him!" Reizei snorted leaning back to his chair, his gray hair falling to his face as he does so.
"Speaking of forces, I heard there's a new promising recruit yesterday?"
"Hmm? Ah you mean the kid brought by tarou?" Maira reached down to her watch typing something on the hologram before it enlarged with the data of a particular young man.
——
NAME: Sora Daburu.
AGE: 17.
GENDER: male.
TYPE: impulse.
FAULT ENERGY: exceptionally high.
STABILITY RANK: C-S.
FORM: Potential all rounder, currently conjecture - conceptual.
——
The moment their eyes landed on the data a sense of interest seems to grow on them
Reizei spoke his tone losing the harshness it had replaced with interest and elegance. "This is.."
"Unnatural?" Maira answered turning her head towards reizei.
"Indeed, no one in the history of mankind with this much control already," garan spoke his eyes filled with certain greeds which's indistinguishable.
"Does the union know about this boy?"
"Highly likely, they have several Alpha grades and even Multiple Omega's," with each words her voice grew heavier and so does the atmosphere.
Omega level, those at that levels can be called 'gods' amongst normal people, the weakest can turn the entirety of Asia upside down, who knows what multiple of them can do?.
This is the biggest factor of uncertainty, in Regulus's eyes the Sable union are a double edge sword.
On one hand they greatly helped further ruin and exhausted the forces of Dominion, on the other hand their goal.
the Null field is theoretically capable of permanently erasing fault energy from a person thus erasing their powers.
Not only that, the fact that with each day their forces only grew further, their method became more radical, and their goal, the erasure of fault energy will not only ruin the structure of the world but threw it into chaos perhaps far larger than Hiroshima and nagasaki incident.
But for now, it's just a heavy suppressant not yet capable of erasing one's fault energy, but at the thought of their single leverage against both dominion and the public gone.
"... I think, it's time for the Archangels to start moving."
---
Morning light filtered through the classroom's dusty windows, washing the room in a pale, tired yellow. The lesson had been going on for half an hour, and Sora hadn't heard a word of it.
He sat at the far corner by the window, chin resting on one hand, eyes on the sky. Not a calm, peaceful kind of staring—more like someone trying to hold his own thoughts still.
Yesterday's briefing replayed in his head.
Regulus personnel calling him "asset," "irregular," "priority case."
The quiet car ride home with a nameless driver who didn't bother making conversation.
The apartment he returned to empty, cold, quiet enough that he could hear his heartbeat echo in his own skull.
He wasn't afraid.
He wasn't excited.
He was simply… unsettled.
His fingers tapped the desk unconsciously, a rhythm he didn't recognize. A habit from before awakening? Or after? Hard to tell anymore.
"Impulse control remains unusually stable…"
"…the boy's behavioral profile doesn't fit the anomaly pattern…"
"…don't let the Dominion sniff this one out yet."
That's the exact words he heard when eavesdropping one of the workers from yesterday.
Regulus never spoke plainly. They always wrapped things in half-truths. But even without the details, he understood one thing:
Something about him wasn't normal.
Not in the grand, heroic way.
In the "keep him quiet and controlled" way.
A memory flickered.
His father yelling—
a slammed door—
the old radio static ringing in his ears—
a pressure rising in his chest like something clawing its way out—
Sora blinked hard. The memory slipped away like steam.
"—Daburu!"
The teacher's voice snapped him back.
Sora straightened, blinking at the rows of students now staring at him. The teacher stood near the podium, holding a textbook like he'd been seconds from throwing it.
"If gazing at clouds is more important than my lesson, by all means, enlighten the class. What's the answer to question nineteen?"
Sora looked at the board.
He hadn't even opened his textbook.
"…I don't know," he said plainly.
A ripple of snickers rolled through the room.
The teacher clicked his tongue. "Then stand. Outside."
He pointed to the hallway. "No lunch break for you today."
Sora stood, chair scraping the floor. He didn't argue; he didn't feel like wasting the energy. As he walked out, a student whispered before trying to hide a laugh.
The door closed behind him with a dull thud.
---
Sora leaned against the wall, arms crossed, breathing slowly. His chest felt tight, not emotional, not angry, more like something inside him was pressing outward, looking for a crack.
His Impulse was reacting.
It always reacted when he felt cornered.
He inhaled deeply, grounding himself.
Counting the seconds.
Keeping the pressure suppressed.
Regulus called it "control."
He called it "survival."
A faint tremor vibrated under his feet.
Sora paused.
That wasn't from him.
…Below?
He pushed off the wall and listened. Students chatted inside the classroom. Footsteps echoed down the far end. But beneath all that-
A low, rising hum.
Like a wire pulled too tight.
Like a breath sucked in right before a scream.
He'd felt this once before.
During his own awakening.
Sora's expression hardened.
Someone below the floor—maybe in the old storage room or the maintenance wing—was losing control.
A Fault awakening.
An unstable one.
He moved without thinking.
The moment he descended the stairwell, the air thickened. Dust shook loose from the ceiling. A locker clanged somewhere deeper in the hall.
Then he heard it.
A hoarse, warped scream.
"—DON'T COME CLOSER!!"
Sora rushed toward the sound. Around the corner, a boy, maybe a first-year was clutching his head, body convulsing. His arms cracked at unnatural angles, not breaking but reshaping, bone and Fault energy blending in messy, uncontrolled ways. His skin pulsed with erratic veins of red light.
Panic hung around him like a stormcloud.
A classic late-bloom awakening.
Triggered by stress.
Or fear.
Or something ugly bottled up.
Sora recognized the signs instantly.
The boy wasn't malicious.
He was drowning.
"Stop—don't—!" the boy cried as his arm lashed outward, flesh stretching into a jagged limb of bone-like spikes.
Sora ducked on instinct.
The spikes pierced the wall behind him.
He had no stance, no training, nothing refined.
He fought like he always did— desperate.
Sora grabbed a fallen metal pipe, swinging it like a bat to redirect the boy's next lunge. Sparks flew as the warped limb scraped metal.
"Get back!" Sora shouted.
Not at the boy—
at whatever inside him was thrashing for dominance.
Impulse surged in Sora too, crawling up his throat, begging to be released.
But he held it down.
"I'm not trying to hurt you," Sora muttered under his breath, circling the boy. "Just breathe. Slow down before it takes over—"
The boy shrieked. His body jerked violently, and he charged.
Sora dodged. Barely.
He retaliated with a blow to the ribs, clumsy, sloppy, but enough to stagger the boy.
Another misstep.
Another wild slash.
A ceiling tile crashed down between them.
Too unstable.
He can't stop himself.
If this keeps going—
The spike-arm recoiled for a final, lethal strike.
Then...
Block it sora
The world seems to distort in front of him as a red like energy burst forward blocking the spike arm, it coiled for a moment shape shifting like a snake it slithers up the spike arm before crushing it effortlessly.
"-AGH! Y-YOU BASTAAARD!!!"
See that? That's how you do it sora.
Sora turned his head at the voice, a translucent red version of him with a wide grin on his face, his arm extended towards the boy.
Your turn.
Before he can answer a foreign feeling entered him, like a drug nullifying all pain and stress, his body felt like floating at that moment, a wide grin naturally spread on his face as if it was a facial feature all along.
Sora extended his hand, suddenly a strange sound reach the awakened boy's ear.
~chooo~chooo!
A cartoonish train honking accompanied with by a loud banging sound.
--
"Will you marry me?"
A young man spoke while on his knees, his voice carries the emotion of love and warmness reaching to the heart of those witnessing this ethereal moment.
"Oh..my..god.. OF COURSE I WOULD!"
a young woman with a bob cut happily agree, even scream infact
At the confirmation the young man smiles warmly ready to put the ring on his lovers finger. Unfortunately for him..
~chooo~chooo!
SPLAT!
"...E-eh?"