The world tasted different.
As Ryosuke walked back from the vault, the air was no longer just a mixture of gases. It was a lattice of pressure, temperature, and potential energy that he could feel with a new, tactile intimacy. The hum of the academy's power grid was a symphony of specific frequencies. The distant footfall of a training mech was a seismic event he could map in his mind.
Kurokaze's presence wasn't a voice in his head. It was a new layer to his own consciousness—a silent, razor-edged awareness resting beneath his thoughts, like a sheathed blade against his soul. He could feel it in the hangar, a cold, gravitational pull at the edge of his perception, sleeping but present.
The medical team, expecting a pilot either catatonic or babbling from psychic feedback, was baffled by his calm. Their scans showed his neural activity was off the charts, but perfectly ordered, like a frozen lightning storm. His Cursed Energy reserves, previously a deep well, now felt like an ocean with unseen trenches.
They released him after 24 hours of observation with orders for "light duty and psychological monitoring."
Light duty was not in the cards. Commandant Idris summoned him directly to his office. The room was spare, dominated by a window overlooking the repair bays where the shattered Steadfast was being stripped for parts.
Idris didn't offer a seat. "Report."
"I bonded with the Enochian asset. Designation: Kurokaze," Ryosuke said, his voice even.
"I have the Magos's report. What I don't have is an understanding of what that means. What can it do?"
"It's… an extension," Ryosuke chose his words carefully. "My spatial manipulation is now… sharper. More intuitive. The mech doesn't have weapons systems as we understand them. It has the katanas. And it has me."
Idris's bionic eye whirred. "The preliminary data from the vault sensors is classified above my level. But the summary stated 'local reality-compliance metrics were temporarily suspended' during your bond. Do you understand what that means?"
"It means the rules of physics in that room took a break," Ryosuke said, the ghost of a smirk touching his lips.
"It means you are now a walking ontological hazard, Tanaka. A valuable one, but a hazard nonetheless." Idris leaned forward, his scarred face grave. "Your team has been granted leave before reporting to the Academy of Realms. You have one month. Use it. Not for rest. For integration. You need to learn the limits of this new… symbiosis. And you need to do it somewhere you can't accidentally unmake a city block."
"Where?"
"A place called The Crucible. It's a dedicated Awakened Training Planetoid in a quarantined system. It's where we send assets that are too dangerous for standard facilities. You'll go alone. Your team will undergo their own specialized prep elsewhere. This is not a punishment. It is a necessity. Dismissed."
Alone. The word echoed. He had just forged the ultimate bond with a weapon, and his first order was to leave his team behind.
He found them in their reclaimed cargo bay, which now felt like a shrine. Their gear was packed for departure. The mood was celebratory but brittle.
"We got our assignments!" Chen said, waving a data-slate. "Sera's going to some 'Sun-Forge' on a star-freighter! Aris is headed to a Jedi/Psyker meditation retreat on a water world! Varg got tapped for advanced augmetic interface training with the Mechanicus! And I'm…" he grinned, "I'm going to a Force-sensitive agility course run by the Green Jedi! It's gonna be wild!"
They were being scattered to the corners of the Federation, honed into even sharper tools. They were thrilled. And they assumed he was coming with one of them.
Ryosuke felt the weight of the order in his pocket. "My assignment is different. I'm being sent to a place called The Crucible. Alone."
The celebration died.
"Alone?" Sera's face fell. "But… we're a team."
"For integration," Ryosuke said, keeping his voice neutral. "The bond with Kurokaze is… volatile. They need to see what it can do in a controlled, isolated environment."
"Controlled. Isolated." Varg repeated the words like curses. "They are separating the weapon from its sheath."
"It's temporary," Ryosuke said, and he meant it. "One month. Then we reunite at the Academy of Realms on Omnius Prime."
The silence stretched. They understood the logic. They didn't have to like it.
Chen forced a smile. "Hey, when you get to the Academy, you'll probably be so OP they'll just give you a teaching degree. 'Professor of Reality Bending 101.'"
It broke the tension. They spent their last hours together not talking about mechs or war, but about nothing. Sharing memories of the Gauntlet's absurd moments, speculating about the wonders of Omnius Prime. It was a fragile, precious thing.
When the time came to part, there were no dramatic farewells. A nod from Varg. A quick, fierce hug from Sera. A complicated handshake from Chen. A deep, silent look from Aris.
Ryosuke watched their shuttles depart from the academy's pinnacle, one by one, streaking into the sky towards different futures. The cargo bay felt cavernously empty.
The transport to The Crucible was a stark contrast to the victor's pomp. A single-pilot, long-range courier ship, automated and sterile. As it broke orbit, Ryosuke looked back at Terra Prime, a blue-green gem scarred by the colossal memorials of the first Kaiju War. He was leaving the world of his second birth.
The trip took three days in subjective time, spent in a form of meditation. He explored the new contours of his mind, the silent presence of Kurokaze. He tried to reach for it, to feel its capabilities. The response was not data, but instinct. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that the mech's katanas could cut things that were not just matter, but information, energy, even weak causal links. It was a terrifying, exhilarating understanding.
[Symbiosis Stabilizing.]
[Host/Kurokaze Synergy: 15% (Active Bond, Full Integration Requires Physical Merging).]
[New Perception Unlocked: 'Fate-Lines' - Visual perception of probabilistic causality and structural weak points in all phenomena.]
The System's cold analysis was the only company he kept.
The Crucible was not a planet. It was a jagged, irregular planetoid, maybe 500 kilometers across, tumbling slowly in the dead space between stars. It had no atmosphere, no life. Its surface was a tortured landscape of canyons, impact craters, and bizarre, crystalline structures that grew like fungi. It was a place where reality was… thin.
His courier ship docked with a solitary station in orbit—a spartan hub with a single attendant, a taciturn old tech-priest who said nothing, simply pointed him to a dropship.
The descent was silent. The surface rushed up—a monochrome nightmare of grey rock and shimmering black crystal. The dropship set down in a designated landing circle near the base of a particularly large crystal spire that glowed with a faint, internal violet light.
His orders were simple: survive. Train. Explore the limits of his symbiosis. The planetoid was littered with automated training drones, holographic threat emitters, and "reality-anomaly zones" where the laws of physics were deliberately unstable. There was also a prefabricated hab-unit with supplies.
He was alone on a rock at the end of the universe.
The first week was brutal. Not physically—his enhanced body handled the null-gravity and temperature extremes with ease—but psychically. The silence was absolute. The only sounds were his own breathing, the crunch of his boots on regolith, and the occasional shriek of a training drone he obliterated with a careless flick of Blue or a precisely cut Red pulse.
He practiced. He learned to scale his power through the amplifier of his bond with Kurokaze. A simple Infinity barrier, which once could stop a laser blast, could now hold against a simulated plasma torpedo from a drone frigate. A focused application of Blue could create a gravitational vortex strong enough to tear a small drone apart.
But it was the Fate-Lines that were the true revelation. Through his Six Eyes, he could now see the world as a tapestry of threads. He saw the stress points in a rock, the exact angle to strike to make it shatter with minimal force. He saw the probabilistic path of a drone's next move, a faint ghost-image of its future position. He saw the "seams" in the holographic projections of Kaiju-spawn, the lines of code that held their form together.
He began to experiment with Kurokaze's signature ability. He didn't have the mech, but he had its principle. He focused on a small, floating rock. He didn't try to crush it or push it. He imagined a blade of pure severance. He willed the concept of "cut" along one of the rock's brightest Fate-Lines—a line of structural weakness.
The rock didn't break. A section of it, along a perfectly smooth, atomically thin plane, simply… ceased to be in a relationship with the rest. It drifted apart, the severed faces mirror-smooth and glittering. There was no energy discharge, no sound. It was a negation.
[Ability Refined: 'Spatial Sever' (Rudimentary). Can now impose 'cut' status on non-living matter along perceived Fate-Lines. Energy cost: High.]
He was learning to edit reality with a scalpel.
The isolation was a forge for his mind, but it also stripped away all pretenses. There was no one to perform for, no one to lead, no one to protect. There was just him, the void, and the ancient weapon in his soul. The narcissism born of his appearance had no reflection here. The confidence born of his power was tested against the absolute indifference of the cosmos.
He found himself talking to Kurokaze. Not aloud, but in the shared space of their bond.
What were the Primordial Wars like? he would think, during the long "nights" in his hab-unit.
The response was not words, but a sensory echo—the taste of dying dimensions, the cold fury of fighting entities that were less beings and more natural disasters given intent.
Why do you have blades? Why not cannons? Guns?
An impression of disdain, vast and ancient. A concept: Cannons are for those who shout at the universe. Blades are for those who converse with it. To cut is to make a definitive statement. To understand what you separate.
It was philosophy from a weapon of mass destruction. He was starting to understand. His Limitless was about control, about creating distance or enforcing closeness. Kurokaze was about definition. About drawing the line between "is" and "is not."
Halfway through the month, the Crucible decided to offer its own test.
A massive reality-anomaly zone, a kilometer-wide area where gravity, time, and causality fluctuated wildly, began to expand, drawn to his unique energy signature like a moth to a flame. The training drones fled. The holographic emitters fizzled out.
He stood at the edge of the zone. The air shimmered like a heat haze, but it was cold. Rocks floated upwards. Some drifted sideways in time, appearing in two places at once before snapping back. The very light was stained with impossible colors.
A challenge.
He stepped in.
The effect was immediate and disorienting. His sense of up and down vanished. Time stuttered—he would take a step and feel like hours had passed, then another and feel like microseconds. His Fate-Line vision went haywire, showing him a thousand possible futures for every pebble, a cacophony of probabilities.
He felt a pressure, not physical, but existential. The anomaly was trying to un-write him, to scatter his coherence across its chaotic field.
Kurokaze's presence, which had been a silent observer, reacted. It didn't fight the chaos. It imposed order.
The icy-blue awareness within him flared. He felt it extend outwards, not as a barrier, but as a domain. A bubble of absolute, cutting clarity in the heart of the madness.
Within ten meters of him, gravity reasserted itself, pointing towards his feet. Time flowed in a single, unwavering direction. The gibbering probability threads of the Fate-Lines were silently severed, leaving only the one, true, present path.
He was creating a pocket of reality where his rules applied.
He walked deeper into the anomaly, his personal domain moving with him like a cloak of stillness. Where he passed, the chaos was cut away, leaving clean, normal space in his wake. He was a scalpel excising a tumor of unreality.
At the center of the zone, he found the source: a pulsating knot of corrupted spacetime, a "wound" in the fabric of the planetoid. It thrummed with sickly energy, lashing out with tendrils of disintegrating causality.
He didn't raise a hand. He simply looked at it through his Six Eyes, through the lens of Kurokaze's severing principle. He saw its Fate-Lines—not thousands, but one. A single, ragged thread of existence holding the anomaly together.
He focused. He imagined not a blade, but a conclusion.
He applied Spatial Sever not to matter, but to the concept of the anomaly's coherence.
There was no explosion. The pulsating knot, the tendrils, the shimmering haze… simply stopped. One moment it was a raging tear in reality. The next, it was gone, leaving behind only ordinary, boring rock. The entire kilometer-wide zone snapped back to normal with a sound like a universe sighing in relief.
He stood at the epicenter, not even breathing hard. The effort had been mental, profound, but not draining. It had felt… correct. Like using the right key in a lock.
[Symbiosis Level Increased: 42%.]
[Domain Manifestation Unlocked: 'Unlimited Void' can now be projected as a localized reality-compliance field (Radius: 10m).]
[Warning: Extended use of Severing Principle on causal or conceptual structures may have unpredictable recursive effects.]
He returned to his hab-unit. The planetoid was silent again, but the silence now felt respectful, not empty. He had not just survived the Crucible. He had tamed a piece of it.
That night, for the first time, he dreamed not of the past, or of black blades. He dreamed of a place of impossible scale—a city built on a planet a million times bigger than Earth, where spires touched the void and armies of a thousand universes marched under a single banner. He dreamed of a black mech standing beside a Jedi's starfighter, a pyrokinetic's flames, a telekinetic's will, and an augmented warrior's strength.
He dreamed of his team.
The month ended. The taciturn tech-priest arrived with the courier ship. He boarded without a word, leaving the dead planetoid behind.
As the ship accelerated into the warp-jump lane for Omnius Prime, Ryosuke Tanaka looked at his reflection in the dark viewport. The ice-blue eyes were the same, but the being behind them was not. He had been a soldier, a cadet, a leader, a weapon.
Now, bonded to a legend from the dawn of creation, he was something else. A singularity. A definer of realities.
He was ready for the Academy of Realms. He was ready for the war. And he was ready to reunite with the only family he had in this infinite, fractured multiverse.
The crucible had forged him. Now, it was time to see what he could cut.