Gilded Ashes-Chapter 72: White Walls, Again
"Welcome" Kori said. "This is..."
"The Heart of the Lotus."
With a breath of conditioned air coming from inside, the door finished opening.
The first thing they saw was white.
Not sterile white. Lived-in kind of white. Polished floors that held light and returned it with a pretty glare. Matte walls stitched with thin seams between reinforced panels. The corridor ran straight for twenty steps, then opened and kept opening until you couldn’t even see the end. Bridges crossed above at irregular intervals, wherever they were most needed. Elevators moved inside glass columns. Rooms branched off in every single possible direction, and some rooms branched into more.
The place didn’t have an end. It always had more.
Nobody spoke. Not even Arashi.
They stepped through as a group. Kori waited just inside, letting their eyes adjust.
"This is the Heart" she said, voice low and clear. "We sometimes train here. We plan here. We build here. If the city needs a fist, this is where it starts forming."
Raizen understood the hum now. Not in words - in the way his legs felt it in the ground. Somewhere way below him, a huge mechanism activated from time to time. Then, he looked through a room’s big window far away, and saw it.
A solid steel wall, just moving upward. Shifting with enormous weight.
He tried to figure out where he’d seen that kind of steel alloy before. It felt familiar, but somehow also like a distant memory. He looked at it for a few seconds, and then the pieces clicked together.
These were the enormous lotus petals keeping Neoshima covered. Powering from here. The Heart.
That’s what he had been feeling in the ground below the Academy – the petals shifting into a new position.
A walkway carried them into the main atrium. White platforms ringed a central shaft, each level offset from the last. Labels glowed neon at the edges - T-03, R-11, OPS-N, FAB-2 - the shorthand of a facility that organized itself by function. Far across, a window showed a room where targets zipped on rails in patterns fast enough to make anyone watching dizzy. To the right, a corridor of identical doors, each with a small display cycling between RES and OCCUPIED and back again. People moved everywhere on the levels above - white coats, a few gray uniforms, the occasional flash of something that might have been a weapon being carried with the casual authority of someone who used it daily.
The scale kept growing. Every time Raizen thought he’d found the edges, the Heart opened another angle.
Keahi’s fingers flexed - reflex, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there. Ichiro watched the moving parts with the focus of someone who wanted to take everything apart and understand it. Lynea walked close to the center of the group, her fragments dim at her shoulder, drifting without purpose, as if even her weapons didn’t know what to do with this place yet.
Feris leaned toward Esen. "This is under the Academy" she whispered. "We’ve been walking over this for months."
"I know" Esen answered, but he didn’t look too happy about that.
They passed a glass wall that showed a room the size of a whole gymnasium. White hexagonal plates covered the far wall, each inset with a faint crosshair that shifted when you weren’t paying attention. The floor was sectioned into rings and grooves that could rearrange themselves - channels waiting for instructions, precise measurements for anything they’d ever need
Arashi found his voice. "Hm... The Rust Room grew up and got a real job."
"The Rust Room is for forging the basics" Kori said. "This is for everything else."
They crossed to a balcony that overlooked a shaft wide enough to land a whole building in. Lifts rose and fell in pairs. Three levels below, a few armored Wardens ran drills in formation - the sound of impacts traveling upward like distant thunder. On another platform, technicians in white cabling through the open shell of a drone the size of a horse, its interior looking like a ribcage of metal.
"How far down does it go?" Raizen asked, still looking around.
"As far as it needs to" Kori answered, like the Heart truly knew no limits.
They kept moving. The Heart liked movement - every corridor led somewhere, every "somewhere" connected to the next. A room on the left flashed with a grid of pale dots that shifted at someone’s gesture. A room on the right hissed as sterile pale green mist settled over equipment. They passed a door with a warning bar and amber light. Kori didn’t slow down there.
"Why now?" Esen asked. Quiet. Respectful, for once. "Why show us this?"
Kori kept walking. "Because you’re leaving these walls soon."
She meant the starter missions they’ll soon be assigned to. "...And I’d rather you don’t go out blind."
To that, Hikari gasped once, softly. Half excitement, half uncertainty. They entered a gallery with windows on both sides. Behind the first, a treadmill built like a runway tilted in every direction while a mannequin with prototype armor ran against it. Behind the second, racks of modular weapon components - not blades, but the infrastructure that supported them: grips, counterweights, mounts, attachments, calibration tools waiting to be assigned a purpose.
Arashi’s head tipped toward the glass. "May I please touch all of that."
"No" Kori said, at the exact instant Esen said, "Please don’t."
Then her mouth curved. "One day."
"One day" Arashi agreed to the terms.
Behind another corner, a big lift descended in the central column opposite them and stopped - precise, frictionless. The doors parted.
A woman stepped out.
She wore her fit like it was designed around her specifically - tailored coat, sharp skirt, glasses with thin frames that caught a strip of overhead light and threw it back. She looked early thirties. She also looked like she hadn’t slept properly since she was sixteen but looked good anyways. She ran her hand through her long, black hair, throwing it behind her back.
At her shoulder, half a pace behind, moved a girl with a slate tucked against her chest. Hair wavy and the intense color of coffee with milk, and glasses almost identical to the woman’s.
"Kori!" the woman shouted, grinning like she was seeing her best friend after a while. You could hear history in the word. Respect, even. "You finally brought me the presents."
Kori’s chin rose, and her mouth’s corner lifted without her noticing. "Alteea. Nice to see you, too."
Alteea spread her arms to take Kori, and hugged her tight. So tight, Kori actually grunted.
Then she turned, and took in the eight with a swipe of her careful gaze. "So these are my miracles and my headaches."
Her smile widened. "Hello, future paperwork!"
Arashi didn’t trust himself to respond. Keahi blinked and forgot how to breathe for a few seconds. Esen’s mouth pressed flat - the face of someone who wanted to say something smart and knew better.
Alteea stopped in front of them and swept her gaze across the group again – longer now, as if she was confirming what she saw the first time. Each of them got exactly one second of attention. Not more. Not less. Whatever she was looking for, she found it fast.
Kori nudged her. "They still don’t know who you are."
"Oh, so you didn’t tell her about the amazing friends you have! I feel betrayed" the woman made a dramatic face. "Watch out – I have access to the cameras and I know the little date you went with mister Kenzo after checking the most useless stuff in the Glowline."
Kori’s ears went red again. "Just present yourself already."
The woman turned toward the group again. "I’m Alteea Sage. Head of Operations in Neoshima and half the continent." She let that sink in for two seconds, then continued. "Yes, I’m younger than you think I should be. No, I don’t sleep more than I look like."
Then she tipped her chin toward the girl beside her. "This is Saffi. She has a better memory than I do, which by itself is impressive enough for me. She earned her place here through the recommendation track - the one they mentioned at your entrance exam."
Saffi inclined her head. She didn’t say anything, but greeted everyone. Her eyes lingered on Raizen a fraction longer.
"You’ve been running operations since you were sixteen?" Arashi asked, the words escaping before the part of his brain that filters could catch them. "That’s what Kori told me a while ago"
Alteea shrugged casually. "Darling, things were on fire and the people in charge were less competent than me." She pushed her glasses up with one finger. "We don’t get to pick our ages when the alarms sound."
"Tour first" she continued, clapping once - not loud, just precise. "You’ll see more than enough to be scared and just enough to be greedy." She took the lead without asking.
Kori didn’t say anything else, and just followed silently.
Raizen looked at her, then at Alteea. He could see why they were friends – Same craziness, but Alteea seemed a bit sweeter.
They passed a suspended bridge along the edge of a room where harnesses hung from ceiling rails. "I personally love this one" Alteea pointed with her hand, like a kid showing his parents the small lego castle he made. "Here, we spin your body so much, motion sickness becomes a myth"
They crossed a bridge and looked down on a long hall where columns flickered faintly in neat ranks. "Pulse corridor. You’ll learn to feel the difference between Eon working and Eon about to blow up in your soft face. Yes, Kori blew up a couple of those columns with her Eon strength alone, back in the day"
Before Kori could protest or say anything, they passed through a sector where the doors were thicker and sealed twice. A sign overhead read CONTROLLED. The air here was different - heavier, denser, like the walls were working harder to contain whatever lived behind them.
The faint tremor under his skin recognized these gates. Something behind them was built to hold Eon, or to test it, or both. He didn’t ask. The answer would come eventually.
At the far end of the level, a motion sensor opened a wide door. Behind it - a small amphitheater with tiered seating facing a curved bank of displays. The screens spit out tons of data Raizen didn’t understand: pulsing rows, fast readings, a radar sweep that looked like something on Mina’s monitors Raizen saw once. A map of Neoshima sat on one screen, the different districts marked in colored zones. Two more screens showed the land beyond the walls - the territories, the distances, anything else the antennas reached.
Alteea didn’t linger too much – she went past that room intentionally, just to show off. "The field tests will come sooner than you’d like. I want my hands on your numbers before it does."
They ended up in a corridor that widened into something that lookde like a weird testing room. The white floor here were different - marked with faint concentric rings, like a target laid flat. To one side, a thick steel column with a hole inside, wide enough to fit your head inside if you wanted. And on the inner part – polished luminite rings. To the other side, a glass partition showed a monitoring station with three empty chairs and displays waiting to be turned on.
Alteea stopped at the center of the rings. The overhead light put a shine across each lens of her glasses. When she spoke again, the charm was gone. What replaced it was the voice of someone who measured things for a living and didn’t accept approximations.
"I want everything" she said. "Height. Weight. Resting stamina. Stress stamina. Standing balance. Blast tolerance. Skill lists I’ll get from your instructors." She looked at Kori. "Weaknesses I’d rather hear from you before they surprise me on the field."
Kori lifted one shoulder. "Not even they know all of them... Yet." Then she added. "...And neither do I. Every one we found, they somehow broke through it."
Alteea took that in. "Good. Curiosity keeps you alive." She paused. "Or kills you faster. Depends."
She looked at each of them again, one by one. When her gaze passed over Raizen, it stayed an extra beat – maybe recognizing him from a security camera or from stuff Kori might have told her.
"Lastly, and most importantly" she said, "I’ll need the precise value of each one of you’s Eon output."
Kori folded her clipboard against her chest. "We’ve never measured that. They only started practicing with basic Eon a while ago-"
"Then we fix that" Alteea cut her off. Her eyes were bright, curious, always thirsty for new information, but not negotiating. "I have a policy disagreement with leaving that number unknown."
Esen spoke first, recovering his grin. "Why does that even matter when we can blow stuff up?"
Alteea turned. "Sorry, dear, could you repeat that? I didn’t hear you"
"What he actually wanted to ask" Arashi nudged Esen hard enough to make him bend "Is what that number tells you"
"Oh, I see" Alteea grinned again, but it wasn’t the charming grin this time. It carried a shadow of something dangerous in it. "That number... Your Eon output..."
"It tells me what nightmares I can feed you to."
