Gilded Ashes-Chapter 66: Days Till Vacation

Three weeks.

That’s how long it took for the impossible to get bored and become routine.

Kori’s clipboard filled with checkmarks. Kenzo’s hammer found new ways to be lifted by Esen. The training hall stopped smelling like chalk and started smelling like sweat, burned air and the particular kind of exhaustion that means something is working.

Progress looked ridiculous at first. Then it stopped looking ridiculous. Then it started looking dangerous.

Esen discovered he could hover. Not fly. Not levitate. Hover - twenty glorious centimeters above the floor, face flushed, every muscle locked, drifting with the speed and majesty of a man standing on an invisible rotating chair. He figured out that if he aimed his shockwaves straight down in short, controlled pulses, the ground pushed back just enough to keep him airborne. It shouldn’t have worked. But Esen didn’t care about what should work anyways.

Arashi dropped to a squat beside him, eye-level with Esen’s floating ankles. "Majestic. I can barely see you from up here."

"Jealousy hits hard, huh" Esen said, drifting sideways.

Keahi rolled a pebble under him. It nudged his heel, continued past, and pinged a post. "Untouchable" she said.

"Don’t jinx it" Kori shouted. "If he hits the ceiling again, you’re all doing laps again!"

"I have never hit the-" bonk. Esen’s head grazed a beam.

Kenzo clapped once, grinning wide enough to light a room. "Excellent! Again!"

Hikari learned to levitate too - the real kind of levitation. Slowly but surely. She’d slowly lift her legs from the floor, hair floating everywhere, body still, and hold up there for ten seconds. Then twelve. Then fifteen. Perfectly motionless, perfectly controlled.

...Until Raizen dashed past and the displaced air nudged her sideways, accidentally slamming her lightly into a pillar. She slid down with the expression of someone composing a formal complaint.

Arashi applauded. "Our team’s kite."

"I’m going to learn to steer" Hikari mumbled. "Eventually."

"Good" Kori said. "Don’t make me install strings."

Raizen’s dashes sharpened. What used to take a full breath now took half of one. He threaded through hoops Kenzo floated at random heights and caught coins Kori tossed without warning. Momentum became a switch - on, off, on, off - and his feet learned to trust the floor instead of fighting it. For him, the space around him started to feel controllable.

Five quick dashes, stopping one meter forward. Kenzo smiled. "Again."

Raizen blinked. "We... Celebrate?"

"Again."

By ten, his lungs burned. By fifteen, Kori lifted one eyebrow - her version of a standing ovation - and slid him a water bottle. "You promised me you wouldn’t try to hard" she said.

"When you said that boring wins..." Raizen managed between breaths. "I didn’t know you meant it literally"

"Only if you do it wrong."

Keahi’s fire found its shape. She drew flame from her blade, wound it tight into a bright sphere, and threw. The first attempts tore apart midair - nothing but heat and singed pride. Then one morning, the fireball held together. It went exactly where she told it to go, and upon impact, it blew up in a wonderful blaze.

"Ah, yes." Arashi gasped "Keahi can throw THE SUN at me now!?"

Esen punched a shockwave at the wrong angle. Another fireball swerved around it and both hit the ceiling, blast doubling in size and colors.

Keahi winced. "Teamwork?"

"Absolutely" Esen said, already sorry.

But that accident became their own little thing. Keahi threw - Esen punched the air, sending a corridor of force - and the fire rode the invisible lane, guided and accelerated. They ran it over and over. Kori apparently saw potential in it and made them repeat it until the timing was seamless. At the end, Keahi leaned on her knees, sweaty and grinning. "Again?" she asked. Voluntarily.

Kori’s mouth curved. She bit her lip, trying not to look pathetic in front of Kenzo, that was still looking at the organized chaos with a small proud grin on his face.

Feris kept fighting her mace.

The projection still had opinions, and swung with a delay every time. Sometimes a second head bloomed ahead of the first on a phantom chain. Sometimes the handle telescoped out to four meters and she’d end up holding a weapon taller than her own confidence.

"Which will it be today?" Arashi asked from behind a pillar. "Did your mace tell you its mood?"

Feris spun it up. The head split into two smaller copies, turning the mace into a weird kind of spear.

She blinked. "Eh... I accept this outcome."

Next try, the handle shot out sideways. Kenzo leaned back to dodge and bumped into Kori. She didn’t dare move. He quickly apologized, and straightened his coat again.

"Kori" Kenzo whispered, "your cheeks are-"

"Shut up."

Feris with her mace had two outcomes - lucky or unlucky. Some days it even listened on the first try. Some days it didn’t. She rolled with both.

Ichiro stopped fighting small things.

The rubber ball - his nemesis from the first session - now hovered above his shoulder, stable and obedient. He rolled it along invisible tracks, flipped it through hoops, caught it without looking. Stone still loved him more - pillars, platforms, walls that rose when he needed them. But now everything else was starting to listen too.

"Picking you both" he said one afternoon, outside, in the training grounds, and the floor rose under Arashi and Esen at the same time. They yelped in harmony as the platform carried them upward.

Esen waved from his moving pedestal. "I am ascending."

"You’re ascending past twenty centimeters, yes" Arashi said, gripping the edge. "This is my territory now."

Ichiro tilted the platform just enough to make them hold on to the edges harder and stop talking.

Arashi’s bullets became something else entirely. He could split one round into two and send both halves at the same target from opposite sides, then call them back to his palm if the round was still intact. He discovered that Lynea’s fragment fields worked perfectly as walls – smooth surfaces that gave his ricochets direction and purpose.

The first time he laced three bullets through a triangle of Lynea’s fragments, bounced them off a stone plate Ichiro raised, and threaded them through the floating hoop Kenzo loved to hang at absurd heights - he threw his hands up and bowed to an imaginary crowd. "Trickshot!"

Kori checked her watch. "Now do it without the performance."

He did just that, enough to be smug.

Lynea’s shoulders weren’t tense at all anymore. Her fragments could create thin fields between them and place platforms where the others needed them before they knew they needed them. She spun a field midair that turned Arashi’s bad step into a flawless one. She wove two shards together with thread-thin Eon - the line humming, bright, then split a beam of Keahi’s flame in half without burning either side. Kori watched, nodded once, and Lynea stopped there. She didn’t push it further.

And then - the real work.

Catching each other before the floor did.

Kenzo made them jump from platforms, he sent them through hoops that moved with the kind of malice only a teacher could love. Lynea’s fields cushioned falls. Ichiro’s platforms appeared where they needed to be. Hikari floated for a small number of seconds - long enough for Raizen to dash underneath and arrive exactly where she would land when she came down.

The first week, the floor collected six bodies and two egos. Arashi hit the ground so hard once that Kori stopped the session and made everyone sit in silence for five minutes. Esen miscalculated a shockwave cushion and sent Feris spinning into the wall - she got up laughing, which was worse than if she’d been angry, because it meant she expected it. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

The second week, three falls and one slightly bruised ego. Hikari floated for exactly the count Raizen needed, and when she came down, his hands were already there, making sure she didn’t trip. They looked at each other for half a second - confidence and something smaller underneath - before Kenzo threw the next drill before either of them could think about it too hard.

By the third week, the falls stopped entirely.

Not because they got lucky. Because they stopped being eight people doing eight things and started being one unit with eight moving parts. Lynea placed the platforms before anyone called for them. Ichiro raised protective walls before anyone hit them. Keahi pushed forward first, Esen blasted the ground at the perfect time and force, and Arashi sent his bullets down the corridor before Keahi’s fire faded.

One afternoon, Kenzo set up the worst drill yet – said it was basic training for a full-fledged Vanguard: a course that required all eight of them to move through a series of borders, moving platforms, and closing gaps without touching the floor. No practice run. No walkthrough. Just a start signal and chaos.

And Kenzo held all of the course in the air – by himself. Effortlessly.

Ichiro built the first platform. Esen launched himself off it with a pulse. Feris caught him on the flat of her blade and redirected him sideways. Arashi fired two rounds through the gap to shatter a barrier Kenzo conjured. Lynea sent a few fragments through the opened path to shatter another target, reaching there right before of Raizen’s dash. Hikari floated through the lane, counted to four, and dropped – falling straight into Feris’s hands.

Eight people. One sequence. No one hit the floor.

The room went quiet. Then Esen whooped. Then everyone did.

Kenzo scribbled on the whiteboard: "CEILING COLLISIONS: 3 (down from 11)" and drew a smiley face that looked suspiciously like Kori.

"Who drew that" Kori said, covering half her face with her palm.

"Art is anonymous" Arashi chuckled, then he tried to levitate himself once. Cheeks puffed, body straining. He lifted approximately nothing and immediately accepted that his talent lay elsewhere.

"Science has spoken" Esen said from his twenty centimeters up, drifting past.

They weren’t just getting stronger. They were getting closer.

Hikari’s blue lines stopped blooming everywhere and started appearing only when she wanted - quick, exact, gone the moment after. She stitched a ray between two of Lynea’s fragment planes and the beam hit a target drone dead center. The drone fell over and stayed down.

"Better than everyone, as usual..." Arashi sighed. "a drone like that took me... What, fifteen bullets? More or less..."

"I’m standing right here" Keahi said. She drew fire from her blade, compressed it into a bright sphere, and held it forward, blasting flames forward, evaporating a wooden target.

Kori pretended not to look at Kenzo. Kenzo pretended not to look back.

At the end of most evenings, they lay on the floor in an eight-pointed star, counting bruises.

Kenzo’s whiteboard grew columns:

HOVER DURATION (Esen): 01:32. LEVITATION (Hikari): 00:39. DASH SERIES – NO CRASHING INTO SOMETHING (Raizen): 17. FIREBALLS WITHOUT SELF-BURN (Keahi): 12. MACE PROJECTIONS WITHOUT PROPERTY DAMAGE (Feris): 9 (debatable). FRAGMENT PLATFORMS (Lynea): 12. BULLETS RETURNED TO PALM (Arashi): 28/28. STRUCTURES BUILT & RECOVERED (Ichiro): 35.

And at the bottom, always displayed larger than anything else, always counting down:

DAYS TILL SPRING VACATION