📍 The Ship — Deck | Crossing to Heraki
Mahori Aki stepped forward.
"What are you two babbling about?"
Kavato stiffened immediately. He rubbed the back of his neck with a nervous chuckle. "Oh — nothing."
Mahori Aki looked at them both for a moment. Then something shifted in her expression — not warmth exactly, but the particular sharpness of someone who has just decided something.
"How about some intensive training, then?"
She placed a hand on each of their shoulders.
Then the air changed.
The red tips of Mahori Aki's hair faded. Her swordsman coat blurred at the edges. And standing in her place — same body, same height, same hands still resting on their shoulders — was Mahori Tiya, her white hair catching the dim grey light off the water, her purple uniform perfectly still. Beside her, Mahori Vami stood in her matching uniform, glasses gone, arms folded, watching.
But something was wrong.
Tiya's eyes were cold. Not unfriendly — cold in the way deep water is cold. The composure was there, the calm was there, but underneath it something had been set aside. Something soft.
The others had gathered. Sakura stood with her arms at her sides, violet eyes moving between Tiya and the horizon. Daishi had stopped fidgeting. Even Kavato had gone still.
Mahori Tiya unfolded her arms slowly.
"It is a form of mental test or you can see you worst future," she said. Her tone was measured, unhurried, each word placed with care. "Completely safe — in the sense that your bodies will be unharmed." She paused. "But I want you to understand exactly what you are agreeing to before I cast it."
No one spoke.
"This spell induces an experience," she continued. "Not a dream. Not an illusion you will recognise as false. An experience — one that you wish you would never have to face, but that you may encounter in the future. You will be placed inside a situation that will require you to risk your life to survive. Most people who face this spell fail." Her eyes moved across each of them. "I use a version of this spell on opponents — large groups, weaker fighters — to break their will before a battle. I will not go to that extent with you. But I want you to understand what the spell is capable of."
Kiyoshi's brow furrowed. "But if it's just happening in our minds — how can our lives be at risk?"
Tiya's gaze moved to him. Something in it darkened, just slightly.
"You will forget this conversation," she said. "You will forget everything real. Everything happening now — this ship, this water, this moment — will be gone. You will only remember the events leading up to whatever situation you are placed in. It will feel like your life. Your actual life." Her voice dropped, not for effect but for weight. "Inside the spell, everything is real. The pain of a wound is real pain. The heat of battle is real heat. The weight of fear sits in your chest the way it does in any fight where you might not survive." She held his gaze. "Victory is not always about defeating an enemy. Sometimes it is simply about surviving. And the pain you feel inside the spell — it will be real."
The air on the deck felt heavier. The fire in the small lamp mounted to the mast threw long unsteady shadows across all of them. No one moved.
Then Kiyoshi closed his fists at his sides.
"I'm in."
Kavato exhaled — a long, controlled breath. Then he nodded. "Count me in too."
Sakura stood still for a moment. Her eyes were burning — not with fear, but with something quieter and more determined underneath the fear. "I want to be stronger," she said. "I'm in." A beat. "But promise me — no tricks."
Tiya's expression hardened slightly. "This is serious, Sakura."
Sakura didn't flinch. "I know. I'm in."
Daishi cracked his knuckles with a grin that was slightly too wide for the mood. "Me too, me too!"
Mahori Tiya looked at all of them for one long moment. Then she gave a single slow nod and raised both hands.
"Then brace yourselves."
The world went out.
📍 Inside the Spell — The Void
Darkness swallowed him whole.
Kiyoshi gasped, his hands flying out to catch himself — but there was nothing. No ground. No sky. No ship beneath his feet. Just an endless void pressing in from every direction, heavy and absolute, the kind of darkness that has no edge and no bottom and no sound except the sound he was making himself.
His voice came out strange. Hollow. Like the dark itself was eating it.
"Where—?"
The echo came back wrong. Muffled and distorted, as if the shadows were swallowing it before it could travel anywhere.
Then — from somewhere in the nothing —
"Kiyoshi! Where are you?"
His heart seized.
Sakura.
"Sakura?!" He spun, straining his eyes against the dark. "Is that you? Where are you?"
A figure stumbled out of the black ahead of him.
And his blood went cold.
She was moving toward him, but wrong — her steps uneven, her body listing to one side, one arm hanging low. It took him two full seconds to understand what he was seeing.
Arrows. Three of them, sunk deep into her right shoulder and side, the shafts snapped short, the feathers dark with blood. Her face was white as bone. Blood ran from her lips — thin lines of it, the kind that comes from internal damage, from something broken inside. Her nose was bleeding steadily, drops falling from her chin with every dragging step. Across her abdomen, a gash ran deep and wide, the fabric of her coat soaked through and clinging, and beneath it the wound was dark and wet and too large.
Her fingers reached for him. Trembling. The tips of them already going cold.
"Kiyoshi…" Her voice was barely a sound. "Please… help me… heal me."
His breath came out in pieces.
No. No, no, no—
She fell.
Not slowly — heavily, the way a body falls when it has nothing left to hold itself up. She hit the ground in front of him and the sound of it went through him like a blade.
"Heal — heal, damn it—!" He was on his knees beside her instantly, his hands pressing to her, magic rising — and flickering. Guttering like a flame in wind. The wounds were too many and too deep and his healing reached for the worst of it and came back with nothing. Not enough. Not nearly enough. His hands were shaking. The blood was everywhere, soaking into the dark ground, spreading in a pool beneath her that kept growing no matter how hard he pressed. "We need — someone stronger — a real healer — someone—"
Footsteps.
He heard them before he saw them — the heavy measured rhythm of armoured boots on stone, many sets of them, approaching from the dark. One by one they emerged. Soldiers in full steel plate, faces hidden behind closed helms, weapons drawn. He counted them and stopped counting at thirty because it didn't matter, the number didn't matter, what mattered was the man at their head.
He was tall. Broad. His voice, when he spoke, was like two stones grinding together.
"Is she dead?" He looked down at Sakura with the specific detachment of someone discussing weather. "She was always a troublesome one."
Something inside Kiyoshi ignited.
He stood up. He stepped over Sakura's body and placed himself between her and every single one of them, and his hands were shaking — but not from fear. The shaking was something else. Something hotter.
"You won't lay a hand on her."
The commander looked at him for a moment. Then he laughed — a short, contemptuous sound. "Step aside, boy. Unless you want your head separated from your body."
Kiyoshi bared his teeth. "Try me."
Steel clashed.
What followed was not a fight. It was a storm with a body — Kiyoshi moving through them with everything he had, blade in hand, the rage in his chest burning so hot he barely felt the hits landing on him. He felt the cuts. He felt the blunt impacts. He bled in four places and kept moving. The soldiers screamed. Bones cracked under his blade. Blood hit the dark ground and spread and kept spreading. He was not thinking. He was just moving, and every single one of them was between him and Sakura, and he was going to cut through every one of them until there was nothing left between him and her.
Then —
A whistle.
High and thin. The sound an arrow makes when it is already too late.
A thud.
He turned.
The arrow had found her neck. It was buried deep, the shaft quivering with the force of the impact, blood running fast and dark down the side of her throat and pooling in the hollow of her collarbone and soaking into the ground that was already soaked.
Time stopped.
Kiyoshi moved without thinking, without breathing. He was at her side. His hands found her face, her shoulders, holding her as her body shuddered — once, twice — the convulsions of a body that is fighting to stay and losing. Her blood was on his hands, on his sleeves, soaking through to his skin, warm in a way that felt wrong, in a way he would not forget.
Her eyes found his. Wet. Glistening.
Her lips moved.
"Kiyoshi…" The words came out broken, each one costing her something she didn't have left. "I want… to be with you. Please…"
"No." His vision was blurring. The tears came without permission, hot and immediate. "No — no, no, no — why? WHY—"
Kiyoshi runs back to her.
Her fingers rose. Barely. Just enough to brush his cheek — the lightest possible touch, like she was checking he was real one last time.
And then, so softly he almost didn't hear it at all:
"I love you, Kiyoshi."
Her hand fell.
Her chest went still.
The blood kept spreading.
And something inside him broke — not cracked, not bent — broke, clean through, the way something breaks when it was never meant to hold that much weight.
He didn't know how long he knelt there.
The armoured men were still behind him. He could hear the commander barking something. He didn't care. He couldn't make himself care. His hands were still on her — still pressing, still trying — as if the act of not letting go meant something, as if his hands still working meant her heart was still working.
The grief hit first. Vast and total, filling every part of him.
Then it turned.
It turned to fire.
His tears dried on his face. His hands stopped shaking. The sword in his grip — which he had dropped without noticing — rose back into his hand, and it was not trembling anymore. It was still. Perfectly still in the way that things are still before something catastrophic.
The armoured men had hesitated.
They should not have waited.
Kiyoshi moved through them like a storm that has stopped caring about what it destroys. Blade through armour. Through bone. Through the gaps between ribs. Blood on his face and his hands and his chest. He took hits — a sword across his back that opened the skin, a shield bash that cracked something in his side, a blade that went through his left hand — and none of it stopped him. None of it even slowed him. The pain was real and he felt every piece of it and he didn't care.
The commander's eyes finally showed something other than contempt.
"End him!"
"Sir — he's too powerful—!"
"It's not that he's strong." The commander's voice was cold with fury. "It's that you're weak."
A weapon rose — a massive hammer, easily four feet of steel and iron, runes along the head glowing a sick orange, the air around it warping with the magic loaded into it.
It came down on Kiyoshi's ribs.
The world detonated.
He felt the ribs go. Multiple — the crunch of them was something he felt in his teeth, in the back of his skull. The impact picked him up and threw him sideways through the air and he hit a tree hard enough that bark split and wood cracked and he fell, and the ground came up to meet him and he lay there and could not move.
Move. Get up. Fight—
His body would not answer.
His lungs would not fill properly. His left arm was wrong — bent in a direction it shouldn't be. Blood ran down the inside of his mouth where he had bitten through his cheek on impact. The dark ground beneath him was wet now with his own blood as well as hers, the two pools separate but close.
And then — her voice.
Not from outside him. From inside. From somewhere deep in the broken place where she had just been.
"It's all because of you, Kiyoshi."
Her voice. Exactly her voice. But hollowed out. A ghost of it.
"I was here because you brought me. I chose to protect you. I believed you'd save me…" A breath — wet and shuddering, the sound of a dying thing. "But you let me die."
His vision blurred. Blood and tears ran together down his face and dripped onto the cold dark ground.
"It's your weakness that brought me here."
Each word landed like a boot on a wound.
"You bear the weight of my death… alone."
His fingers twitched. Reached. Found the cold of her hand and held it, even though she wasn't there, even though there was nothing in his grip, even though the cold he felt was the cold of the ground and not of her skin and he knew that and couldn't stop.
"I'm… so sorry…" His voice came out as almost nothing. Crushed. "So… sorry…"
A sob tore out of him — not a quiet thing, not restrained — raw and broken, the sound a person makes when they have nothing left to hold anything in with.
"I shouldn't…" His forehead dropped. Pressed against hers, or where hers had been, or the ground — it didn't matter, nothing had edges anymore. "I shouldn't have been with you. I was holding you back. I was always holding you back. If I had been stronger — if I had—"
His body shook with the full weight of it. The guilt and the love and the grief and the wrongness of a world where she was gone and he was still here, still breathing, still taking up space in a world that no longer had her in it.
"Forgive me…"
A whisper.
A plea.
The last thing he had.
Darkness came for him slowly — not like sleep, not like unconsciousness. Like a tide. Like a patient who had been waiting for him to stop fighting.
He stopped fighting.
And the darkness took him.
✦ CODEX — Chapter Twenty-Five ✦
World Archive: Entries Relevant to Chapter Twenty-Five
ENTRY 110 — MAHORI TIYA: THE MENTAL TRAINING SPELL
Mahori Tiya possesses a spell that induces a fully immersive mental experience in the target. It is not a dream and not an illusion the target can recognise as false. From inside the spell, the experience is indistinguishable from reality.
How it works: the spell severs the target's access to their real memories. They forget the casting, forget the conversation beforehand, forget that anything unusual has happened. They retain only the memories leading up to the situation they are placed in — memories that feel like their own real life. The situation itself is constructed around the target's deepest fears and worst-case futures. It is not random. It is personal.
Everything experienced inside is physically real to the body and mind of the target. Pain from wounds is real pain. Heat, cold, fear, exhaustion — all real. If the target is wounded inside the spell, they feel that wound completely. The body does not take actual damage, but the mind does not know that.
Victory inside the spell is not always about defeating an opponent. Sometimes it is simply about surviving — enduring long enough, making the right decision under unbearable pressure, not breaking. Most people who face this spell fail. Failure means psychological breaking point — the target collapses inward and the spell ends.
Mahori Tiya uses a version of this spell in actual combat — cast on large groups of weaker opponents to destroy their will before a fight begins. She did not use that version on the group. She used a training variant.
End of Chapter Twenty-Five Codex.