Gilded Ashes-Chapter 74: Abyssal Red

Kori didn’t look at the stone in Ichiro’s shoulder again. She stared at the far wall, jaw tight, breathing through her nose.

"We can talk later, alright?" she said, trying not to stir anything.

Arashi almost spoke, but nothing came out. Esen’s rings chimed against each other once, then went still. The cloak lay crumpled on the white floor. Ichiro hadn’t moved. The gold veins in his arm pulsed with his heartbeat - slow, steady... Wrong.

Alteea watched him. Then looked at Kori. Her mouth was a pressed line.

The overhead lights blinked.

Once. Twice.

Then every surface in the room turned red.

Not pleasant red. Emergency red - hard crimson strobing across the Heart’s white walls, painting their faces in pulses. The hum in the floor suddenly pitched higher. The testing column retracted into its housing with a sharp mechanical snap.

Speakers hit every corner at once. The voice was flat, calm, enormous:

"ALERT. ALERT FORTITUDE 7.4 ABYSSAL NYX DETECTED. DISTANCE: 14.2 KILOMETERS. BEARING: NORTHEAST. ALL SUPERVISORS TO LIGHTHOUSE."

All of the doors snapped open along the corridor. Staff came out quickly - white coats, gray uniforms, technicians with slates already lit, and aggressively tapping in commands. Nobody hesitated. They moved the way people move when they’ve drilled this a thousand times: quick feet, eyes already reading screens before they sat down.

Alteea straightened instantly when she heard the sound. Her chin came up.

"Perfect timing" she said. "With me."

This time, her smile returned. This was her zone.

Saffi quickly fell in half a pace behind Alteea, slate alive, fingers logging data as she walked. The corridor curved to a pair of oversized doors that split apart with a heavy rush of air. Behind them - a freight elevator, wide enough and tall enough to hold a transport vehicle.

They stepped inside. Rails along the interior walls trembled for half a second, then the floor shifted under their boots - hydraulic plates finding level.

"Hold onto the rail" Alteea warned everyone. She already had both hands on it.

"Why would we -" Esen started.

The elevator tilted sideways.

Hikari managed to grab the rail with both hands just in time, almost getting launched towards Saffi. Esen’s sharp white teeth showed in a grin.

Suddenly, it stopped for a single moment, then it launched up. Hard. The acceleration pressed into their legs and rattled their teeth. Level numbers started blinkinb on the panel above the doors - L-6, L-5, L-3 - then the cab slowed down leveled, and the doors opened.

The Lighthouse from the inside didn’t look like a tower. It was a command bridge.

A round hall, wrapped floor-to-ceiling in glass. Neoshima spread below them in every direction - the city’s rings visible from above, the defensive wall curving beyond the Lotus Grounds, Ironvein – the industrial district – with its cranes frozen mid-swing to the south, The Hearthway – The only market neoshima needed - packing rooftops to the west, the Glowline still visible as a thin band of color in daylight.

Stations ringed on the lower level. Each one had its own screen bank and floating slate. People quickly dropped into chairs, hands already moving. Labels glowed on every surface - OPS-N. AIR. STRK. DRN. MED. COMM. A central pillar rose three meters into a round mezzanine right in front of the whole room, with steel rails and a clear view of every station below.

Alteea was already climbing the stairs to it.

"Open petals, twenty-one degrees" she shouted. Her voice filled the room without effort.

"Petal frame unlocking. Twenty-one on your mark" someone from OPS-N answered.

"What’re you waiting for? Now!"

Outside, the eight petals serving as Neoshima’s walls groaned and opened up, their edges flashing in the light.

"Air - ready an F-51 on lane three." Alteea shouted to the other side of the room.

"Copy. Lane three spinning" AIR said.

On the main screen, a runway emerged from behind the Academy’s grounds: plates sliding into alignment, rails extending, hazard lights blinking in sequence. A flat field behind the main building became a launch infrastructure in under ten seconds. A schematic filled the adjacent display - FALCON 51: swept-back wings, narrow fuselage, twin vertical tailfins.

"Give me two of Vanguard Five" Alteea said. "Whoever picks up first."

A few seconds later, two voices, stacked on comms answered:

"V-5, HAZEL. I can hear you." A young woman’s voice echoed slightly against the glass walls.

"V-5, RUNE, copy." Older by a few years, judging by his voice, with a loose edge to the words. "At your mercy. Try not to leave me alone this time, Command."

"Pairs designated" COMMS confirmed. "Hazel and Rune. Five minutes to flight."

"Five is a suggestion" Alteea mumbled. "DRN – I want ten eyes, web in two minutes. MED - prep Gate Two for launch, no assumptions. You have maximum fifteen minutes. COMMS - civilian channels on standby, if there’s anything near that area."

Responses came back flat and fast:

"Eyes launching, forty seconds."

"Gate Two preparing, medical wing just answered."

"Civilian channels – We’ve only got radio frequency, a small village 7 kilometers away from our signal."

Kori stood with the eight at the back rail. Her hands rested on the bar. "Watch" she said. "And learn."

Esen inhaled, ready to say something. But before he could say anything – and before Hikari could kick him again – Kori added one more thing. "If you’re going to become Vanguards, she’s going to be in charge of everything."

They watched.

Drone feeds filled the screens quickly. Ten angles stitching together a picture of the terrain beyond the wall - gray-green scrub, gravel flats, half-dead trees standing in clusters. Every surface annotated with distance markers, elevation gradients, wind readings.

The F-51 aircraft appeared on the runway camera. Wings pulled back tight, heat rippling beneath the engines, rails under its landing gear glowing orange. On the pilot feed - pale blue hair, clipped short. Rune’s face was still, his eyes locked forward. In the inset beside him, Hazel sat strapped into the rear bay: brown hair in two tight buns, staff braced along her thigh, chin up.

"Falcon is up" AIR called. "Lane three ready to go, on your command."

Alteea gripped the mezzanine rail with one hand. "Go."

The F-51 launched. The rail system threw it forward so fast the runway camera couldn’t track the transition - one frame on the ground, the next frame a black point climbing into gray sky, already shrinking.

The eight leaned forward together. All eight hands tightened on the rail. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"New reading" OPS-N said. "The signal moved 120 meters, north. Signature steady at seven-four."

"What does seven-four look like?" Arashi asked.

"You’ll see" Kori said.

The drone feeds were blurry, because of the speed with which they were moving. Below the round mezzanine, ten pilots with special headsets raced towards the objective.

"Eyes on target in ten" Someone that wasn’t piloting said. "Angles one, two, five, nine arriving"

The drone feeds found it.

The Nyx stood in a shallow opening between dead trees. Three meters tall, maybe more. But height wasn’t what made it look special first. The head was - an axe head right into the space where a head should be. The upper and lower edges gleamed like polished bone. Eyes burned cold white along the sides, set wide and horizontal where no vertebrate would put them, spaced far apart, each one a flat slit of pale light. Arms hung from a torso that didn’t follow anatomy - a full meter too long, jointed in the wrong places.

Raizen’s fingers tightened on the rail. Fourteen kilometers from Neoshima. This was what lived out there. This was what Kori meant by leaving these walls.

"Rune and Hazel in range" COMMS shouted.

"DRN, keep your angles off the blade head" Alteea said. "Those eyes can track lateral movement."

"Copy. Nine high right, five low left. Keeping distance."

On the F-51’s front feed, the cockpit roof opened. Wind tore through the frame.

The two vanguards jumped.

Rune went first. His wingsuit snapped taut - fabric extending along his arms and ribs, small stabilizers lighting in sequence down his sides. He fell quickly, body angled exactly forty-five degrees, cutting through the air without a sound.

Hazel followed. She just fell for a few seconds – way faster than Rune. Mid-fall, she flipped her staff vertical and fired straight down - a concentrated Eon burst that hit the ground and blew a crater three meters wide, enough to kill her momentum. Dirt and gravel sprayed outward. She dropped through the dust, landed with both knees bent and her staff already horizontal, and was moving before the debris settled.

Above them, the F-51 aircraft’s hatch closed, and it switched to Autopilot mode, circling the area.

Hazel engaged first. She flanked wide and fast, staff spinning, each strike connecting with a bright flash at the point of impact. The Nyx turned toward her and she was already gone - three meters to the left, coming in at a new angle, blasting another hit on its lower torso. She moved the way someone moves who spent years learning exactly how much space something that size needs and how to take it out.

"Oh my days... We’re not even close to them" Esen said, quietly, like a note to self.

"Not yet" Kori answered.

The drone feeds tracked what they could. The Nyx swung its arms in wide, whipping arcs. The axe-head tilted to follow movement, those side-mounted eyes tracking in directions that made the footage hard to watch - you’d swear it was looking left while its body moved right. Hazel punched compressed rays into the dirt beneath its feet to try and make it stumble.

Suddenly, Rune landed.

Like a guided missle, hitting the Nyx head-on. From the drone’s view, it wasn’t clear what weapon he was weilding, but it was some kind of long luminite blade.

"Will we get to fight stuff like that?"Esen asked, radiating with excitement, like he couldn’t wait to punch a strong Nyx in the face. "Are we even close? I got seven hundred eighty-one in the eon output test!"

"That Eon output number is just there so you can compare your fortitude with that of Nyxes. You’re gonna need way more than seven hundred eighty and a hope to not get absolutely toasted by something like this" Kori said, eyes on the screens. "Even then, it’s a coin flip."

Arashi looked at the 7.4 next to the creature’s tag. He remembered the scores they pulled from the Fortitude column. He said nothing.

Back to the screens, Raizen observed something. The Nyx learned. Mid-fight.

It happened at the worst second - the second where the Vanguards’s rhythm had settled, where Hazel committed to a right-side feint and Rune extended for a cut on the far flank. The Nyx’s weight suddenly dropped. Its arm blurred on the high-right drone feed. On the low-left angle, the image smeared - the camera couldn’t keep up with the speed.

The axe-head flicked.

One motion. A single horizontal arc, faster than anything that large should be able to produce. The air split along the edge.

Hazel screamed through the comms.

Her left arm below the elbow and her right leg below the knee - gone. Severed completely. The edges where flesh ended were smooth, clean, cauterized by the speed of the strike. Blood hit the dirt before she did. She went down back-first. Her staff bounced once and landed three meters away in the gravel.

"MED-" someone started, half out of their chair.

"Hold!" Alteea’s voice got louder, every syllable clear. "Rune."

Rune was already turning, but the distance was not in his advantage. He extended for his last cut, committed to a position that was safe only two seconds ago. He killed his forward momentum - wingsuit snapping wide, body wrenching sideways - and dove toward Hazel on a steep, ugly line.

On Hazel’s vitals feed, her heart rate spiked past 200. The numbers beside her name - monitoring every possible information – started flashing red, one by one.

"A simple tourniquet’s not going to hold on the leg" MED said. Flat. Professional. "She’s got about ninety seconds before the blood volume loss takes her."

"Rune is ten seconds out" STRK shohuted.

On screen, the Nyx was four meters from Hazel’s body. It pivoted, eyes on the blade’s edge finding her without the head turning. One long arm uncoiled - slow, almost lazy - and the five tapered fingers at its end spread wide, each one as long as a human forearm.

Raizen couldn’t look away. Couldn’t help. Couldn’t do anything except grip the rail and watch a woman bleed out on a screen fourteen kilometers away while the thing that took her limbs decided whether to finish. He thought of his number. 916. It felt enormous in the testing room. Here, watching this, it was nothing. A number on a strip of light.

Hikari’s knuckles were bone-white on the rail. Keahi’s hand was on Arashi’s forearm and squeezed hard enough he grunted.

On the main monitor, trajectory projections appeared over the Nyx - dotted lines showing the arc of its raised arm, the estimated strike zone, Rune’s approach vector. The dotted lines crossed in the wrong order. The arm would come down before Rune arrived.

The Nyx’s arm rose, reaching the top of its arc, starting its deadly swing down.

And from the mezzanine, without a word, without warning -

Alteea Sage jumped.