Tadex Arc Pt1 (Chapters 6-10)
The house was comfortable in a way Moto didn't entirely know what to do with.
He ended up on the roof anyway.
He lay on his back, arms behind his head, the stars doing what they always did - staying where they were, indifferent and permanent. He smiled at them.
"I'm one step closer, Amber," he said quietly. "I'm gonna give it my all. Especially now that I have a rival."
A breeze moved past him, warm and unhurried, and drifted down toward the window below where a light still burned. Inside, Sheu smoothed her new uniform across the back of a chair with the focused attention she gave most things, her father's letter sitting on the bedside table where she'd placed it carefully before lying down.
They met outside Ginimbi's mansion the next morning.
Moto looked at Sheu and brightened immediately. "You look great. Neat as always." He meant it - the navy blue shirt sat well against her dark caramel skin, and the blue of it matched her eyes in a way that seemed almost deliberate.
"Thank you," she said, looking him over. "Wish I could say the same."
Moto puffed out his chest. "Function over form. My body is a weapon, not a doll."
"You could have at least washed your hair."
"I did!"
Sheu raised an eyebrow and said nothing, which said everything.
Najo appeared then, ginger hair slicked back, wearing a blue tracksuit that had clearly cost someone a significant amount of money.
"Wow," Sheu said genuinely.
"I know, right?" Najo straightened slightly. "I told the old man I wanted to do sports. He said he'd make a call."
"So cool," Moto muttered.
Najo looked at his reflection in the mansion's front window for a moment, then reached up and scruffed his hair back out of shape. "That's more like it."
"Yeah." Moto grinned, adjusting his own dark green afro in solidarity. "Now you look almost as good as me."
The elite school was enormous.
Not bigger-than-expected enormous. Genuinely, disconcertingly enormous - multi-storey buildings stacked around vast arenas, courtyards feeding into more courtyards, students moving through it all with the ease of people who had never been impressed by it. A prefect with a stern face and no interest in small talk pointed them toward their class.
In the crowded corridor, Sheu moved closer to Moto without commenting on it.
The classroom was already alive with established groups when they pushed the door open. Moto's eyes moved across the room and snagged - a blue-haired boy, arms folded, watching the three of them with an expression that wasn't quite a glare but was working toward one. Around him, others wore variations of the same look.
What's their problem?
Across the room, one student stood apart from the hostility - long hair, fair skin, watching Moto not with the cool suspicion of the others but something that looked more like concern. Moto filed that away.
"What's that guy's problem?" Najo muttered.
"Dunno," Moto said. "Let's find out."
They'd taken two steps when two large figures stepped into their path - identical twins, broad-shouldered, prefect badges visible, each placing a hand on one of Najo's shoulders simultaneously.
"You're Najo, right?"
"Who's asking?"
"I'm Dope." Faint arcs of lightning ran along the first twin's forearms. "This is Gango. Lightning Village. We can show you around."
Najo glanced back at Moto once, then went with them.
Moto watched him go.
"Let's just sit down," Sheu said.
"I thought you wanted to find out what's up with that guy," Moto said.
"I said no such thing."
They found two empty desks as Mr. Jumbo swept in, robes rustling, and the room went quiet before he'd finished crossing the threshold. He offered a brief greeting with the energy of a man who had delivered it several hundred times, then paused, his gaze landing on Moto's face.
He sighed.
"For our new students - the school sits closest to the Earth Ore. The radiation strengthens your abilities naturally, which is why training here produces better results than anywhere else." He looked at Moto. "You look like you need more than that."
The blue-haired boy across the room raised his hand.
"Yes, Prince Mukai."
Moto straightened slightly. Prince?
"Allow me, sir." Mukai's eyes moved across all three of the new arrivals without warmth. "This is prerequisite knowledge to qualify to be here. The Earth Ore is one of six fragments of the meteor that gave humans their powers. Each nation holds one, and each grants control over one of the six concepts that make up reality. Ours governs physical matter - the elements. The closer you are to its radiation, the stronger your natural abilities become."
"Well said," Mr. Jumbo said.
Sheu leaned toward Moto. "My dad explained it better."
Mukai caught it. His eyes cut to her.
"Right," Mr. Jumbo continued, moving on. "Split into your elements. Sheu - Cyclone. Moto - Volcano."
Moto turned to Sheu and held up his hand. She slapped it.
"You're gonna do great," he said.
The Volcano training centre was purpose-built - fireproofed walls, temperature instruments lining every surface, the air carrying a dry, mineral heat. They began with a run and Moto was fine, better than fine, outpacing most of the group without effort.
Then the power tests started.
A girl melted a steel beam between her palms like it was warm wax. A boy exhaled and the air around him turned to living flame, floor to ceiling, unhurried and controlled. Someone else raised both hands and a pillar of fire rose from the ground and stayed there, steady as a column.
Moto stood in the middle of it all and breathed out his smoke, thin and grey, and watched it curl toward the ceiling.
He didn't look discouraged. He looked like a man who had just learned exactly how far he had to go.
In the Lightning hall, Dope and Gango were already running Najo through drills with an ease that suggested they'd been waiting for him. In the Cyclone arena, Sheu watched a classmate summon a full tornado between their hands, and another simply lift off the ground and stay there.
They walked Najo to his mother's place after school, the three of them falling into the easy quiet of people who'd already had a long day.
Inside, Naomi was seated with another woman. Dressed entirely in black, still, her hands folded in her lap. She nodded when they came in, polite and contained, and something about her sat in the room differently than everything else in it - not threatening, not warm, just present in a way that registered somewhere below conscious thought.
Naomi introduced her.
The twins' mother.
She explained it simply. When Najo was born, Nawick had sent his chief guard - a man named Ryan - to kill them both. Ryan had arrived. He had also, that same week, become a father. He couldn't do it. He let Naomi go and made her promise: when Najo came into power, tell my sons what I did. Ryan hadn't lived long enough to tell them himself.
The woman across the room had raised those sons alone. She was here now because she wanted to see the boy her husband had chosen to spare. She looked at Najo the way you look at the answer to a question you've carried for a long time.
Moto watched her for a moment - the stillness of her, the quality of it - and then looked away, turning the feeling over without quite finding the edges of it.
He let it go. For now.