Gilded Ashes-Chapter 81: Temporary Machines

They came off the lift into a testing bay - wide, white, functional. Stenciled lanes ran the length of the floor. Tools hung in organized rows along the walls. Movable walls divided the space into sections. In the far corner, a shutter door with hazard stripes led to what looked like a testing track.

"Two left" Alteea said. "Let’s be civilized." She turned to Ichiro first. "And by civilized, I mean: we’re not letting you rip up the foundation with floating rocks."

Ichiro had the decency to look almost sheepish. "I can launch myself off of them" he said. "Quite high. Controlled. It’s... quiet."

"It’s a path of incoming minor earthquakes" Alteea said. "You’d tear tiles, jam vents, upset the dampeners, and give maintenance new reasons to riot. We like our walls."

His answer was a simple nod.

Alteea thumbed a panel. A cradle rolled out somewhere near, carrying a machine that sat low to the ground - four ducted fans in armored rings where wheels would normally be, a flat body with no curves. Functional, no aesthetic ambition whatsoever.

"Stable, quiet, low-profile" Alteea said. "It strafes, it pivots, and it gets the job done without anyone noticing. Think of it as the vehicle equivalent of you."

"Sold" Ichiro smiled. His body language was just too easy to read. Raizen saw his excitement the way he was tapping his leg on the floor.

A couple of technicians that appeared from nowhere helped him into the harness - hip clips to anchor him to the frame. He settled onto the saddle, hands loose on the bars. The fans engaged with a clean whirr, pushing air straight down. The bike lifted two centimeters off the tile, wobbled once, and stabilized.

Ichiro couldn’t stop a smile from forming on his face.

✦ ✦ ✦

After trying it out - which basically meant riding it for half an hour straight, until the technicians started worrying about the thing running out of battery mid-flight - Ichiro stepped off and set his palm on the housing. "Temporary." Was the most honest answer he could have given.

"Everything is" Alteea said. She looked past him. "Alright, speedy. Your turn."

Raizen had been standing with his arms folded for the last ten minutes, watching every vehicle test, cataloguing what worked and what didn’t. He stepped forward. "I... Am not too sure. Is it alright if I want to try a few things?"

"Keep it gentle. The foam’s fresh, it was changed two days ago." Alteea smirked.

Raizen tried a drone-pack first - a harness with two small ducted fans on an armature along the spine, controlled by a yoke at chest height. A tech cinched the straps. "Half-pull for lift. If you panic, let go - it auto-levels."

"I don’t panic" Raizen answered.

He pulled, and the propellers rose him a half. Slid forward, wobbled a bit, but didn’t hit the wall. He allowed himself a small, private feeling of competence.

Then he lifted his left hand to scratch his cheek.

The pack interpreted this as a command to rotate left and accelerate upward. He corrected - fast, faster than the tech expected - and only clipped a vent grill with his shoulder. The foam panel deployed. He landed on his feet.

"Low-altitude travel" Esen teased. "Dazzling."

Raizen unclipped the harness. "Not bad... But not me." The problem wasn’t the pack itself. The problem was that flying took his hands away from his blades. His speed was in his feet, his cuts, his dashes. Anything that put the movement somewhere else - in a yoke, in a throttle - added a translation layer between instinct and action. He needed something that worked with his body, not instead of it.

Raizen bit his nail, thinking. Arashi stepped quietly behind him, threw hand behind Raizen’s shoulder, and whispered something in his ear. The grin on his face probably meant that his idea wasn’t too brilliant.

Raizen turned towards him. "Hm? Try out your Astra-203?"

Arashi nodded slowly.

✦ ✦ ✦

"Ok, ok, ok. Before I step onto that..." Raizen found himself standing in front of the device. "I want to know at least how it works."

Alteea sighed. "Where’s your courage now, huh, Raizen?"

"With all due respect, ma’am... Did you ever try to step on something that floats before?" Raizen frowned.

"Oh, darling, you have no idea!" Alteea laughed out loud. "Tell him, Saffi!"

Saffi flinched, startled by Alteea’s laugh "Um... Hmm... The Astra-203 works by emmiting an extremely strong electromagnetic pulse at regular intervals, essentially turning the ground below into a temporary magnet, which it then uses to amplificate or decrease altitude, speed-"

"Oh, no! Not that!" Alteea completely lost it. "Tell him on how many floating things I stepped!"

Saffi’s face turned red. "Oh, that..." She tried to hide behind her slate. "B-but Alteea... I can’t tell them what-"

Kori stepped in from behind Saffi. She had been absent up until now, but somehow she appeared at the right moment. "Alteea used to hang herself from illegally modified drones and film smaller Nyx operations." Then she looked at Alteea, and her eyes sharpened. "I hope you deleted that footage"

"Oh-ho! Never!" Alteea finally stopped laughing, only a grin remaining. "I’ll make a movie out of it and show your grandchildren – If you’re even gonna get married to him already."

Check mate. As soon as Kori heard "him" her ears automatically turned the shade of soft roses, and she stepped back.

In less than two minutes, Alteea managed to make two faces red and the other eight royal scholars dead silent.

Trying to break the awkward silence, Raizen inhaled sharply and stepped on the board.

Surprisingly, it didn’t sway under his weight.

He turned towards Arashi, putting on a wide smile with a thumbs-up. But the moment he even tried, the hoverboard tilted, and flipped Raizen upside-down.

...The floor didn’t taste good.

✦ ✦ ✦

"Well... I guess the Astra still wasn’t calibrated to your weight" Alteea tried to lift the atmosphere.

"I couldn’t handle that in a hundred years" Raizen mumbled, holding a red-stained napkin to his nose.

Hikari kept raising his hands – to try and help, to adjust maybe, but every time she changed the mind at the last moment.

After his nosebleed stopped and Saffi made sure it wasn’t broken, he tried some propulsion boots - compact pods strapped to his shins, heel-and-toe triggers.

Three clean strides down the test lane, jets firing in tandem. Fast. Then his right foot fired a fraction ahead of his left and the asymmetry bounced him sideways. He recovered - cleanly, impressively - but the fundamental issue was the same. The boots responded to his feet, but his speed came from his whole body. Isolating the propulsion to his ankles was like trying to steer a car with just the bumper.

"Mhm... They’re fast" he said, unstrapping them. "But they don’t know what the rest of me is doing."

Alteea had been watching him reject each option with increasing interest. Not disappointment - interest. He wasn’t being difficult. He was being specific. He knew what he needed even if he couldn’t name it yet.

Her eyes moved to a rig hanging from the ceiling in another room. "Hmm... I think I have just the thing"

The grapple harness was simple. A waist belt. A chest clip. Two hand-grips, each connected by a high-tension line to a compact launcher mounted on the forearms. Test anchors studded the gallery’s ceiling beams at irregular intervals - metal plates bolted to the structure, each one a different height and angle.

Raizen buckled in. His breathing changed. Not nerves. The opposite – he was kind of excited for this one.

"Hook one" Alteea called. "High left."

He aimed. Fired. The launcher kicked - a sharp, mechanical snap - and the line caught the anchor with a metallic sound. He didn’t yank. He leaned into the line, let his weight load it gradually, and stepped off the ground. The pendulum carried him forward in a smooth arc across the lane. His knees tucked. At the apex, he released.

He landed with two steps to bleed the momentum. His feet were already turning toward the next anchor before Alteea could say anything else.

The second hook was faster. He fired mid-turn, caught a higher anchor without looking - his hand aimed where his mind already knew the plate was - and swung up and across in a tight arc. The line tightened under the tension. He released at the top and dropped three meters, landing in a half-painful crouch.

Third hook. He misjudged the angle by a fraction. The harness caught his center of gravity with a sharp tug that would’ve been painful on a weaker spine. He laughed - one short burst - and walked it off.

"Better" Alteea said. Her voice had shifted. The teasing was gone. "Your spatial awareness is good. You’re reading the anchor positions without looking at them."

"I know where they are" Raizen said. He flexed his right hand - the knuckle ached where the grip had dug in. "And the weight of the line tells me the distance. The tension tells me the angle."

He was describing the same thing that made his blade work - the ability to read a system through physical feedback, to know where he was in space by what his hands were telling him. The grapple didn’t put movement somewhere else. It extended his movement. His feet stayed free. His blades stayed free. The lines just gave him more directions to move in.

"Again" he insisted.

Alteea didn’t argue.

He went again. This time, between hooks, he added something - a short spin, covering the gap between release point and the next anchor’s effective range. Spin, fire, latch, swing, release, land, fire. The rhythm built itself. Each repetition was faster than the last. His body found the timing: the exact fraction of a second between releasing one line and firing the next where he was weightless, moving on pure momentum, and the dash filled that gap.

Four swings. Fast. The lines zipped, the anchors rang, his boots hit the floor between arcs with barely a sound.

On the fifth, he pushed too hard. Clipped a padding post, and scraped his knuckle. He dropped down, shaking his hand, grinning.

The gallery was quiet. The group had been watching without speaking. Hikari’s hands were still on the rail. Alteea was leaning against the wall with her arms crossed. The expression on her face was the one she’d worn watching Keahi’s phoenix: measuring something she hadn’t expected.

"You looked kind of good up there, not gon’ lie" she said. Back to teasing. But the approval underneath it was real. "Now let’s give you something to actually arrive in. That’s still unusable"

"Why?" Raizen asked, taking the metal off of his back.

"Want a list?" Alteea raised a brow. "Well... One, It’s too heavy. Two, It doesn’t help your dashes much. Three, its dimensions are not fit for you. Four, it’s practically useless in combat: you’ll break your spine before you can even do something. Five, it doesn’t even have padding, so unless you want scars-"

"Alright, fine! I get it!" Raizen raised his hands in surrender.

They took the lift up into a different bay.Raizen looked at the floors rising as they descended. The Heart never seemed to end.

The lights inside came on in sequence. Two shapes sat under covers. A technician pulled the first sheet away.

The car was very low. Silver - metallic, angular, every surface designed around airflow. The front and the hood were both aggressive, with thermal exhausts on the side. The roof was flat and plated. Carbon fiber parts blended with the silver along the hood and across the headlight housings. The cabin was narrow, the glass a horizontal slit. Gullwing doors. Everything about it was tight, compressed, built to go fast and change direction hard.

Raizen stared at it.

"Valkyr-Δ" Alteea said, pointing at a sign. "And yes, it reads like "Valkyrie" but we call it "Valk". Variable ride height, adaptive torque distribution, active adjustable aerodynamics. The tires adjust their angle and heat based on surface reading. Don’t hit anything expensive."

"Why delta?" Arashi asked, squinting at the sign.

"Because here in the Heart, there could be fity more inventions with "Valkyrie" - without the delta – in their name" Alteea explained.

They opened the gullwing. The cockpit was tight: a steering yoke instead of a wheel, two pedals, a center display that showed telemetry without any decoration. Raizen slid in. The seat shifted around him - firm, shaped to hold a body under lateral and vertical load. The proportions of the cockpit matched his reach exactly - arms slightly extended, wrists neutral, fingers wrapping the grips at the natural angle.

He thumbed the starter button. The engine engaged – a really deep, even purr. The engine was electrical, but its insides made it sound like a sleeping cat. The yoke trembled and turned once, calibrating, then went still, waiting.

A tech waved him toward the test lane: one smooth curve, one chicane, a section of broken tile, a small ramp, then a stretch of synthetic gravel.

First meter. Slow. Feeling the throttle response - how much input produced how much acceleration, where the dead zone ended, how fast the steering responded. Second meter. Faster. The car tracked straight, no drift, no play in the yoke, no delay.

Raizen floored it.

The first curve he took clean - the active aerodynamics adjusted at the entry, rear surfaces tilting to add downforce, the car holding the line through the apex. The chicane cost him one unnecessary correction - he turned in too early on the second gate and had to straighten with his shoulders. Over the broken tile, the suspension absorbed the impacts in sequence, each wheel adjusting independently. On the ramp, the car left the ground by a handspan. He kept his hands steady and let it land in its own way.

The gravel section tested him. The rear drifted out. He let it - a fraction - then brought it back without fighting the slide. His hands were quiet on the yoke. His feet were precise on the pedals.

Then the straight.

He opened the throttle all the way. The acceleration pressed him into the seat. The speedometer climbed: 100. 200. 250. The tunnel vision started and he pulled back. Braked. Brought it to the mark and idled. Heat rose from under the hood, carrying the smell of warm steel.

"How does it feel?" Keahi asked.

Raizen ran two fingers along the yellow accent strip on the dash. "Oh!! This thing flies."

"So, temporary?" Alteea asked.

He nodded. "Maybe, but I love this thing. Just until I build something."

"Build what?"

Raizen looked back toward the gallery - toward the ceiling where the grapple anchors were still bolted to the beams. Then at his hands. "A line. A swing. A dash. Combined into something that lets me change direction as fast as I can think of the direction." He paused. "Something that keeps up with what my feet already want to do."

Alteea’s teasing dropped away. "Two warnings. One: your spine is not optional. Don’t build a rig that punishes you for being talented. Two: don’t fall so in love with movement that you forget you need to be somewhere on time."

"I won’t" he said. Then: "I’ll try not to."

She tipped her chin toward Saffi. "You’ll need lab access. Saffi’s your point of contact - she handles safety compliance and fabrication scheduling. She’ll help bring it to life. Don’t underestimate her."

Saffi nodded. "Uh... Hi. If you have sketches, measurements... If you don’t have either, we’ll start from your body mechanics and work outward."

"Right" Raizen said.

Hikari’s expression shifted - barely, just for a moment. That meant more time for Raizen with Saffi. A small tightening around her eyes that could have been anything. She adjusted the helmet at her hip.

Feris elbowed Raizen’s arm. "If you build a zipline across the Glowline, I’m using it."

"Illegal" Arashi immediately contradicted.

"Romantic" Feris countered.

✦ ✦ ✦

On the way to the lift, Hikari fell into step beside him.

"The car looks like you" she said. "Sharp. A little mean."

"I look mean?" Raizen turned his head to look at her with a grim face.

"No – I mean... Your dashes are." She gave him a small smile. Then bumped his shoulder with the helmet. "Don’t let Saffi -" She stopped. "Never mind."

Raizen looked at her. She was staring straight ahead, expression carefully neutral, the helmet pressed against her side. He decided not to push it.

"You were ridiculous today" he said instead.

"The cone?"

"The curve after. The one you didn’t miss."

Her mouth lifted at the corners and fought to stay down. "You were very good at dangling."

"Thank you. I love hanging by a thread."

Raizen’s hand went to his jacket pocket. The packet was still there. The brass stars pressed against his fingers through the fabric - small, cool, the edges distinct even through the lining. Hikari was right beside him. Her hair still had the crease from the helmet. Her cheeks were still flushed from the ride. She was close enough that he could smell the laventer scent from her jacket.

He almost said something. His fingers closed around the packet.

He didn’t.

Later. Again. The same word he’d been telling himself for two days. But it felt different now - less like delay and more like waiting for the right line in a conversation that wasn’t finished yet.

He let go of the packet and put his hand back at his side.

Alteea pressed the lift button, and stepped outside.

Saffi stood with the group, after Alteea told her "No, you’re not allowed to dig through unregistered prototyped lying around without my permission"

Alteea didn’t say it out loud, but the look she gave the group as the doors closed: she liked this team. They’d earned the day.

"Alright, kids. We’ve outfitted a city’s worth of chaos today. Dismissed before I assign homework on tire compounds."

The doors closed, and the lift carried them up.

Raizen closed his eyes for three breaths. Behind his eyelids: lines crossing a room, anchors catching, a dash turning into a swing turning into flight. Not a plan yet, but it was there.

He took a glimpse of Saffi.

She was looking at the ground, slate hugged close to her chest. She had bright brown eyes, and long lashes, and her hair flowed onto her shoulder like a small smooth river of silky brown hair.

If he wanted his ideas to come to life, he kind of depended on Saffi.

...And Raizen hated that.