Chapter 16
Morning came fast.
Kota hadn't really slept—he'd drifted in and out, every doze cut short by the need to move, to check. Each time he woke, he pressed his fingers lightly against the bandage on Aisha's thigh, checked for fresh warmth, for swelling, for bleeding that had restarted in the dark.
He rinsed cloth in their limited water, swapped out wrappings when they soaked through, forced himself to be as gentle as his shaking hands would allow.
By the time the alien light began to seep in through cracks in the ruined ceiling, he was already sitting up, back against the wall, sword nearby, eyes on Aisha.
She stirred with a small wince, lashes fluttering before she blinked fully awake. It took her a second to focus. When her gaze found him, she squinted.
"You look terrible," she rasped.
"You sound worse," he replied, voice rough with fatigue.
A corner of her mouth twitched. "Staying up all night just to stare at me? That's… committed."
He snorted. "Staying up all night to make sure your leg didn't fall off."
"Romantic," she muttered, though there was a faint warmth beneath the dryness.
He reached over and brushed the back of his hand across her forehead. It was warm from the blankets and the enclosed space, but not burning. No obvious fever.
"Head feel weird?" he asked. "Dizzy? Sick?"
"Just… tired," she said. "And like someone took a cheese grater to my leg."
"That tracks," he said.
Every few hours, as the day wore on and bled into the next, he repeated the routine: unwrap the bandage, clean what he could with carefully rationed water, check for signs of infection, rewrap with whatever semi-clean material they still had left. The wound looked ugly, but over time the rawness dulled, the bleeding slowed, and the angry redness around the edges stopped spreading.
It wasn't healing fast. But it was healing.
A week slid by in a slow, grinding rhythm.
Kota didn't range far. He left the shelter mainly to forage for berries and the few safe plants he'd identified, to refill water where he could, to check the surrounding streets for moving shadows. The rest of his energy he poured into two things:
Keeping Aisha alive.
And wrestling with whatever Treacherous Mind was doing to him.
He learned very quickly that he couldn't just "turn it on" and "turn it off" at will. The skill rode on his attention. The more intently he looked at something, the more likely the information would slam into him—and the harder it would hit.
Around midday on the eighth day since the rune-blast, Kota stood just outside their shelter, watching a new creature edging nervously around a toppled column.
It was small, about the size of a stray cat back in Inkto. Its body was low to the ground, supported by four thin legs that bent in odd, double-jointed angles. A smooth, pebbled shell—almost like overlapping stone scales—covered its back, mottled in faint greens and grays. Two dark, beadlike eyes peered out from under a ridged brow, blinking slowly.
It sniffed at a patch of creeping plants, then began to nibble cautiously.
Kota narrowed his eyes.
The warmth in his core flared.
Galapis, the Treacherous Mind whispered. Unawakened variant. Threat: negligible. Primary behavior: grazing. This creature—
His focus wavered.
The mental voice cut off mid-sentence. His vision blurred for a heartbeat, the edges of the world smearing like wet ink. For the first time since the skill awakened, the pain backed away instead of spiking.
He blinked hard, surprised.
Before he could even process that, his attention snapped back to the creature.
—this creature is docile. Non-aggressive. Feeds primarily on low-tier flora. Instinctually avoids high-Resonance organisms and structures.
The rest of the information crashed in, and with it, the familiar sharp throb behind his eyes.
"Damn it," he muttered, squeezing them shut and turning his face away.
The pounding in his skull subsided more slowly this time, ebbing instead of vanishing. Sweat prickled along his hairline.
So if I unfocus… it drops, he thought. If I don't stare, it doesn't grab as hard.
That was something. Not control. But a pressure valve.
He pushed off the wall and headed back inside, intending to tell Aisha before the fragile logic slipped away.
"Aisha, I think I figured something—"
He stopped dead in the doorway.
Aisha was half-turned away from him, sitting on their bedding. Her shirt was off, her bare chest lay in front of him, skin patterned with healing scrapes and faint bruises as she used a wet rag to wipe dust and sweat from her arms and torso.
She froze.
He froze.
For a fraction of a second, his brain recorded too much at once: the curve of her spine, the light catching on clean strips of skin between bandaged scrapes, the mess of her hair hanging down and sticking to the back of her neck. The way her breasts bounced slightly when she moved.
Heat shot up his neck into his face so fast it made him dizzy.
Aisha whipped around, eyes wide, then immediately went crimson. The rag slipped from her fingers.
Kota spun on his heel so fast he nearly tripped, turning his back to her and bracing a hand against the wall beside the entrance.
"Sorry," he said, voice strangled. "I—I should've— I didn't—"
Silence behind him, except for the quick, frantic rustling of cloth.
He stared at the broken stone in front of his face, willing his pulse to calm down.
You're an idiot, he told himself.
After a moment, he heard the small, uneven sound of her breath evening out. The rustling slowed.
"Okay," she called, a bit breathless. "You can… talk now."
He stayed at the entrance, leaning his shoulder into the wall, not trusting his feet yet.
"There was something you wanted to tell me?" she added, tone carefully neutral.
"Yeah," he said, glad she'd given him something to grab on to. "About the skill."
He explained what had just happened with the small creature outside—the way the information stream had abruptly cut when his focus slipped, how the pain had eased for a second, then hit again when his attention snapped back.
"If I blur my vision a little, or don't lock onto something too hard," he said, "Treacherous Mind doesn't grab as much. It's like… it can't get a clean hook."
Aisha didn't comment on what he'd walked in on. He didn't mention it either.
The silence around that unspoken moment was thick enough to feel. Not cold, exactly. Just… charged. Awkward.
"Like squinting at a test answer so you don't accidentally memorize the wrong one," she said finally, grasping at the metaphor. "You're… controlling the input by messing with your own focus."
"Yeah. It's not perfect. But it's something."
"Something is better than your brain bleeding out your ears," she said. "I'm… glad."
He glanced back, careful to keep his eyes above her shoulders.
She was properly covered again, though her cheeks were still faintly pink. She met his gaze for half a second, then looked away, pretending to busy herself with the edge of a blanket.
He let the subject drop.
That afternoon, while Aisha rested and muttered occasionally about rune patterns, Kota stepped outside again with his sword and started moving.
At first it was just basic forms he'd picked up in Inkto's alleys—how to swing a length of pipe without telegraphing it, how to shift weight between steps so you could change direction mid-lunge, where to place your feet so you could always run.
With a real blade and more space, those half-feral movements stretched, smoothed. He cut the air in controlled arcs, testing his side, his balance, the pull of healing muscles. His body felt lighter than it had any right to, energy coiling around the warm knot in his core and spilling into motion.
Somewhere between one swing and the next, he realized he was moving faster than he used to. Not just stronger—cleaner. His feet landed where they needed to without thought. His weight shifted ahead of his decisions.
Treacherous Mind didn't dump text into his head this time. It whispered in subtler ways: a nudge to twist his wrist a few degrees, an urge to step half a pace left instead of right.
By the time the sky dipped into its dimmer phase and the city's bioluminescent veins brightened, sweat plastered his hair to his forehead and ran down his back. His breath came hard, but he could've kept going if he needed to.
He forced himself to stop anyway. Overuse led to mistakes. Mistakes got people killed.
Inside, they ate the last of the berries he'd gathered the day before, along with a few bitter leaves Aisha had grudgingly agreed were probably not poisonous.
As they chewed in relative quiet, Aisha picked up a stick and began to sketch in the packed dirt.
"I've been trying to cement the runes we've seen," she said. "So I don't lose them when we finally get back. If we get back."
"We're getting back," Kota said automatically.
She didn't argue this time.
She finished a circle with branching lines and stepped back slightly so he could see.
"This is the one from the glass panel," she said—the same panel that had thrown her twenty feet. "I think it's a composite. See here?" She tapped a jagged curve connected to the edge. "Pressure symbol. And this little spine pattern—amplification. Then these… maybe anchor points for direction."
To his eye, it was just scratches. Elegant scratches, sure, but still.
He leaned over, studying it closely anyway.
"Doesn't look like much," he admitted.
"It never does," she said. "That's the point. If anyone could just look and understand, the world wouldn't be in the mess it's in. You have to know the structure underneath."
He watched her hands as she redrew one line, fixing its angle. She was in her element despite the pain—voice steadier, focus tighter. The fact that her "element" had nearly blown her apart a week ago didn't seem to deter her.
He changed her bandage again before they settled in, rinsing the stained cloth with the last of that day's water, wringing it out, hanging it over a jut of stone to dry. The wound looked cleaner now. Edges knitting. No alarming streaks.
"Still ugly," he said.
"Still my leg," she replied. "So watch how you talk about it."
He huffed a faint laugh and secured the fresh wrapping.
Night, such as it was on this world, deepened.
He didn't know how long he'd been out when the ground shuddered.
It wasn't subtle. The vibration ripped straight through his makeshift bedding into his spine, jerking him awake with his heart already hammering.
He was on his feet before his mind caught up, sword in his hand without remembering reaching for it.
Aisha snapped awake too, eyes wide, hand flying instinctively toward her injured leg before stopping halfway with a hiss.
"What—?"
Another shock rolled through the stone, deeper this time but further away. Dust sifted lazily from a crack in the ceiling.
Kota moved to the entrance, every sense straining.
"Stay here," he said, not taking his eyes off the gap. "I won't be long."
She gave him a look that said I hate that sentence, but she didn't waste breath arguing. Movement was still pain, and they both knew if something hit the shelter directly, he'd need to be the one on his feet.
He slipped outside.
The air was cooler, the city's bioluminescent vines casting eerie glows along broken walls and deserted streets. In the distance, toward the northern quadrant they'd visited before, plumes of dust rose in intermittent columns, blooming and shrinking like slow, dirty fireworks.
A third, faint shock rolled through the ground, followed by a distant, muffled roar.
Beasts, he thought. At least two. Maybe more. Something big enough to crack old stone.
He watched the dust for a while, eyes narrowed, Treacherous Mind deliberately kept on a loose leash—no hard focus, no grabbing for details that might stab his brain.
Nothing moved toward them.
He backed into the shelter again.
"Beast fight," he said. "Far north. Big enough to rattle things, but… they're busy with each other."
Aisha let her head drop back against the wall, eyes closing briefly.
"Good," she murmured. "Let them kill each other and save us the trouble."
"That's the plan," he said.
He took one more slow look around the interior—the way the shadows lay, the cracks in the ceiling, the doorway's narrow frame—mapping everything again out of habit. Then he set his sword within arm's reach and lay back down on his bedding.
The echoes of the explosions faded gradually, swallowed by the constant, low hum of the alien city.
Sleep didn't come easy.
But eventually, somewhere between thinking about beasts tearing each other apart in the dark and Aisha tracing impossible runes in the dirt, his eyes slid shut again.