The southern canals did not smell like the Eastern corridors of the Sanctuary.
That was the first thing Akira noticed when his legs carried him here, driven by some blind instinct pulling him away from the school route, the market noise, and the suffocating press of bodies in the central hub. He had not planned to come here. He rarely planned anything—a habit Klein was attempting to beat out of him with varying methods of fear and violence. But his feet knew where quiet lived. And quiet, in the Sanctuary, was a rare and precious resource.
He found it here. South of the gates where Klein had taken him, far from the endless abyss and the flare of human bloodlust.
The canals near the western residential blocks ran thick with the Dain's overflow. Every wave was choked with rusted scrap metal and the harsh, stinging chemicals used to treat molten iron. It was a black slurry made from the discarded waste of ten thousand bodies pressed too close together. In the East, the canals carried the cloying, sweet scent of faith and unwashed priests. Akira and his mother often debated which stench was worse. Akira had grown up breathing that rot. It was simply the smell of home, the way the blood-spice in his mother's cooking was home, the way oxidized iron was home. You stopped noticing it after a while, just as you stopped noticing the hum of the artificial lights or the agonizing screams of the crippled and the old.
But the southern stretch was different. He didn't know if it was maintained in secret by a different sector of the Maintenance Groups, or if the old engineering down here was simply better—built before the Sanctuary began its slow, rusting rot inward. The water ran cleaner here. Not clean—nothing in this place deserved such a word—but clearer. He could see almost two feet down before the dark swallowed the light. The canal walls were steel-grey rather than rust-orange. The bridges overhead showed their age and wear, but the corrosion was a silver-grey tarnish rather than the angry, bleeding red that infected the lower districts.
Even the air tasted different. Cooler. Stripped of the iron tang that coated the back of your throat in the Gershlands, and free from the fractured old buildings he constantly had to watch for falling debris whenever he passed by.
Akira sat on the edge of the walkway, separating himself from the structurally sound grey fence. With his legs dangling over the canal, he held onto the steel bars, the toes of his worn boots hovering an inch above the water's surface. He had not gone to the academy. He had not finished the chapter his mother had tasked him with. The Book of Resurrection sat in his lap like a stone he had no interest in turning over, its oiled black cover catching the warm-white of the artificial lights above. The letters didn't get any older.
He picked up a piece of loose grating—a flat sliver of old steel the size of his palm, broken off from the walkway's edge like a shed scale—and flicked it at the canal.
It skipped twice before sinking.
He reached for another. Flick. Three skips. Still not far.
He didn't know why he kept doing it. The stones didn't answer anything; they only reminded him of more wonders to ponder. The water didn't care; it simply let its natural flow take its course. But watching them—the small arc of their flight, the brief, cheerful tap-tap-tap against the surface before they surrendered to the dark—was something he could understand. Something that obeyed simple rules. You throw. It flies. It skips. It sinks.
Unlike everything else.
He had not eaten since the noodles that morning. The salve on his muscles had long since dried into a faint, chalky residue along his forearms, but the ache it had soothed was creeping back, slow and deliberate as a rising tide.
The old man's eyes appeared behind his own every time he blinked.
Save me.
He threw another piece of grating so hard his shoulder complained. It did not skip at all. It simply punched through the surface and vanished into the black.
I said I would save him, Akira thought. I said it out loud. I promised. And I stood there and did nothing.
He had told himself on the long walk south that it was fine. That you could not fight Aaron Krovnic. That even Klein might have hesitated. That an eleven-year-old boy with bruised muscles and a jaw that could barely chew noodles had done exactly what anyone with sense would have done. He had told himself all of this with the careful, insistent logic of someone who does not quite believe what they are saying.
It hadn't worked then. It wasn't working now.
He was reaching for the next piece of grating when something walked toward him, its soft paws brushing the stained floors with a faint tap-tap.
He did not flinch. Instead, he watched as it approached. Akira felt as if he had been waiting for this creature, as if the entire reason for coming here was just so he could meet it.
It was a cat.
A small thing, yet fully grown, with long, clean fur the color of the ceiling's dark void. Its eyes were an unsettling, pure crimson—the color of the artificial lights at their warmest setting. It had appeared from nowhere, or perhaps from the shadows beneath the bridge forty feet to his left, and now it sat on The Book of Resurrection with the absolute authority of a creature that has decided something belongs to it.
"Too heavy," the cat said flatly.
The cat looked at him. Not at him the way animals look at you—curious, absent, skittish. It looked at him the way Roste had looked at him when they first met. The way Klein looked at him always. As though it were waiting for him to stop saying something stupid and get to the point.
He reached out and gave it a gentle push. It planted its feet, absorbing the push like a sack of wet sand, and did not move.
"I'm serious. Sit anywhere else but that," he said. He was aware he was negotiating with a talking cat. He was also aware he did not particularly want it to leave.
It opened its mouth and made a sound that was not quite a meow. It was lower. Longer. He had heard cats in the Central platforms sometimes—half-feral things that hunted the pale, blind rats in the deep tunnels—and they made that sound when they wanted something and intended to be patient about wanting it.
"You cannot push me away from my own home," the cat told him. It felt the need to be honest.
Akira blinked once. "You do not own this book... it belongs to me, and my mother," he said, snatching the book and flipping the cat off its base. Instead of running away or forcing a fight, the cat simply sat on the cold metal floor, watching the distant walls together with him.
"I wasn't talking about the book, child!" the cat said, licking its paw. "I was talking about the Sanctuary, and guilt... you cannot push me away!"
They sat together for a while. Akira threw another piece of grating. The cat watched the trajectory with genuine interest, then looked back at him.
"It doesn't mean anything," Akira said. He wasn't sure if he was explaining the stone or the old man or both. "Throwing things at water. It's just... I don't know what else to do with my hands."
"Maybe flip a page?" the cat replied, its crimson eyes glowing brighter.
"As if that's gonna change anything for the better?" Akira asked.
"Again... I am not talking about the book." The cat stepped forward, one deliberate paw at a time, until it was standing on his thighs. Its weight was surprising for its size. It pressed its forehead against his jaw, right where the muscle had been seizing all morning, and pushed.
The pressure sent a bolt of pain so sharp his vision went white at the edges.
He grabbed for the walkway railing instinctively and missed.
He went into the canal sideways, the book tumbling from his hands, and the cold hit him like a closed fist.
He was not in the water.
He understood that the water was there—he could feel it, the freezing cold, the crushing pressure, the muffled roar of the current—but he was also somewhere else entirely, the way you are somewhere else in a dream while still knowing you are asleep. The two facts existed simultaneously without contradiction.
There was a pathway. Or the idea of a pathway. It was made of nothing he had vocabulary for: it was dark but not dark, it was vast but also close, and it stretched in directions that were not quite directions. It felt alive in the manner that the Sanctuary's deepest infrastructure felt alive—not with consciousness, but with purpose. As though it had been built by something that had a destination in mind.
He was standing in it, or near it, or perhaps he was it; he couldn't determine the distinction. And there were things in the pathway that he understood on some animal level were not separate from him. There was his body—not as he looked in the scratched tin mirror above their washstand, but as something structural, a network of channels and gates and pressures, breathing and pumping, always at work.
There was a woman standing at a distance. Strange and tall, dressed in fabric that didn't exist in the Sanctuary, her face averted. She didn't speak. She simply walked forward, with gentle, tiny, slow steps. She was young—older than him but younger than Klein. He couldn't make out her eyes, but they felt sad. Her hair, brushed clean and royal, shone like a moon that the night had tried to dampen.
It felt as if the stories of the moon and the outside world had come alive within the waters of the southern canal, but here he could breathe and walk. He walked as she guided. Or he followed her and she wasn't aware. Her small, skinny hands, rivaling his own, were placed carefully over her protruding belly. A weird sight, Akira thought. He had seen Haveth's fat belly, but this was no fat. It felt alive, and familiar. She uttered strange words in the language his mother had taught him, but he could not make out their meaning.
Akira's body moved on its own once again. The last time this happened, it had refused to move. This time, it wouldn't let him stop, as if his body resonated with her cries. That was when he realized: she was the only other person he had ever seen shed a tear. A tear as round as a pearl, and as fragile as him. His hand moved on its own. He nearly grazed her shoulder. He wondered why, but the answer came to him almost instantly: He wanted to shoulder whatever burden she had to bear.
Her warm pink flesh burst into droplets of water and splashed across the endless sea. The light through the pathway flashed before vanishing forever, and the dark abyss clouded him once again.
"Kyre..." he whispered.
He looked down at his own arms. There was nothing to see in this wide, tainted night, but he could make out the shape, the size, and the texture of them.
They weren't fragile. The skin wasn't smooth, and the palms bore thick calluses. He felt stronger. His thumb pressed inward, and instinctively, Akira started exploring his body amidst the void. He massaged his tight chest, feeling certain patches where the skin was smoother and dead. Scars, he realized, like the one on his mother's leg he had touched before. His hands moved to his abdomen. It wasn't prickly, thin, and skeletal like before; he could feel tight, protruding ridges of muscle. It strangely felt powerful.
Once he had finished exploring his torso, he went lower. Everything was different. It felt fully grown, more masculine. When he reached his legs and feet, a smile developed on the boy's face.
"A man," he breathed. "Could I have saved the old man if this was me?" Akira wondered.
As soon as he spoke, the pathway lit up from the ground. It was dim, and Akira could stare directly at it—it did not feel intimidating like the artificial lights of the Sanctuary. All the way to the end, from east to west, roads were built, and north to south, seas were parted. In the middle stood Akira. In front of him, a long road stretched infinitely, its edges covered in white powder. The black road was painted in translucent white.
"Snow!" Akira gasped, and the hail set in. It felt cold, but not as cold as the floors of the Sanctuary, or the dead eyes of Aaron Krovnic.
Within the long roadway, the black cat that had pushed him into the canal sat facing him, its eyes as crimson as ever, its dark fur refusing to blend in with the white.
And then there was the voice.
It began as the cat's sound—that low, patient, wanting tone—and then it layered, thickened, and became something else. Became a man's voice. And the man's voice was nothing like Klein's controlled menace or Roste's amused rasp. It was calm in the specific way that truly powerful things are calm: not because there was nothing to fear, but because the speaker had already decided the outcome did not concern him.
"What will you do with the weight?" the voice asked.
It was not a question the way most questions are questions. It didn't rise at the end. It sat flat and enormous, the way the canal sat—patient, willing to wait.
Akira tried to answer. His mouth moved.
"The old man," the voice continued, as though he had spoken. "The weight of him. What will you do with it?"
He wanted to say I'll carry it. He wanted to say I'll do better. He wanted to say all the things you say to a voice in the dark when you are afraid and the dark has a face.
But the words did not arrive. Because some honest part of him—the part that had thrown stones at still water for the past hour—knew that saying and doing were two entirely separate pieces of machinery, and he only knew how to operate one of them.
"You don't know yet," the voice said, and it did not sound disappointed. It sounded like a man writing down an answer in a ledger. Recording a fact. "That is allowed. For now."
Akira had to blink a few times to clear his vision from the hail. He could swear the cat had just looked a bit different—taller, as tall as Murad Xie. The crimson eyes matched him too well, but the hair was long and black, and his beard patchy.
"Who are you?" Akira asked, as a faint sense of consciousness emerged within him.
The pathway began to close, swallowing his vision, his thoughts, and his hearing into the dark. But just before the void took him entirely, a final voice echoed through the freezing breeze.
"Idris Xie Ryukzen," the man called himself.
"Break it," he commanded with a kingly, absolute presence. Yet as it echoed, it felt less like an order, and more like a regretful cry.
Akira woke up.
He pushed himself up, gasping for air, gripping bedsheets made of cheap soiled leather and recycled fur from the lowest parts of the market. Unlike the bed at his home, this offered no insulation; it felt exactly like sleeping on a cold metal floor, the only difference being the persistent itch of the crude fur.
Roste was standing on the steps in front of the makeshift kitchen, brewing hot tea. He looked like a man half-eaten by the world, yet possessing a will that refused to bow to his fate. Akira wondered briefly how Roste had gotten into his home but sooner he realized it was Roste's.
But this was not unusual. Roste had a talent for appearing in places with the ease of someone who had already been there for a long time and simply hadn't made himself visible until now. He was old in the Sanctuary sense, which meant he was not particularly old in any other sense, but decades of poor rations and poorer air had given him the worn, careful look of a man who has been processing difficult information for a very long time and has made a kind of peace with it.
He took one look at Akira—soaked through in sweat, blue-lipped, the vomit stench rising off him in visible waves—and made the face of a man who has decided not to ask.
"You shouldn't get up now," Roste said. "Your head hit the ground pretty hard. Drink the Turove Tea. It'll warm your brains well."
Akira sat down on the step below him. His leather top clothes, the Book of Resurrection, and the cat were missing. He didn't care.
"The old man," Akira said.
Roste was quiet.
"In the Gershlands." Akira kept his eyes on the middle distance, on the flow of bodies through the far corridor. "Krovnic was dragging him."
Roste exhaled through his nose. It was a long breath. "I know."
"I didn't do anything."
"No," Roste said. "You didn't."
Akira had been braced for something softer. He had been braced for you were just a child or there was nothing to be done or one of the other true but ultimately comfortable lies his mother fed him after something terrible occurred. He had been braced for the warm version. He had not been braced for Roste simply agreeing with him.
The silence that followed had a heavy texture to it. He sat in it.
"Would you have wanted me to tell you it wasn't your fault?" Roste asked.
Akira thought about it honestly. "No," he admitted.
"Good." Roste rested his elbows on his knees. "Because it was."
The words landed without cruelty. That was the remarkable thing. Roste said them the way you state a fact of engineering—this joint is weak, this seal is compromised—with no pleasure in the saying and no softening of the implication.
"Not because you're a child," Roste continued. "Lots of children in this place have done more than you did yesterday. Deinne would've thrown something. Even if it was stupid. Even if fighting didn't increase his own survival chances. Even if Krovnic had turned around and taken his head off for it. He'd have done something."
Akira said nothing.
"Your fault isn't doing nothing," Roste said. "Your fault is that you didn't know yourself well enough to know you were going to freeze. You've been walking around promising to save people." He paused. "People who haven't asked you to. People you've decided need saving based on nothing but your own—" He searched for the right word and seemed to reject several before settling. "Based on your own want to matter."
It was the most unpleasant sentence Akira had ever heard. Not because it was wrong. Because it wasn't.
"That wanting isn't a problem," Roste said. "Everybody in this Sanctuary wants to matter. It's the only thing that keeps people standing. But wanting to save someone and being able to save someone are two separate rooms. You keep walking around in the first one acting like you've already visited the second."
Akira pulled at the loose bedsheet.
"Klein isn't teaching you to be cruel," Roste said. "He's teaching you to know the difference. Between what you can do and what you want to do. Because in the moment—when Krovnic is dragging someone and you're standing there—your body will only do what it already knows how to do. It won't listen to what you want it to do. Not unless you've already made it learn."
Somewhere far above them in the artificial sky, the third-hour cycling of the circulation vents switched on, sending a low, rhythmic pulse through the air.
"If I had been stronger," Akira said, "would it have mattered?"
"Yesterday? No." Roste said it without hesitation. "You couldn't have taken Krovnic at twice your current capability. Maybe three times. Maybe never. Some things you don't win by being stronger than the person in front of you." He glanced sideways at the boy. "But you could've done something. Something small. Small is still something. Small is still not nothing."
Akira turned that over.
"Small isn't going to change a thing," Akira muttered, glancing at his tiny, fragile arms, remembering the dream, the tough muscular ones he had possessed.
"Your small, gracious eyes saved my life," Roste said quietly. "Even if you couldn't save my arms or legs, you gave me a reason to live. And fight for."
Akira sulked, covering his face.
"I want to go back to Klein," he said.
Roste looked at him properly then. For a moment his weathered face did something complicated—assessment, maybe, or a complicated variety of hope that had learned not to show itself too plainly.
"Why?" Roste asked.
"Because I don't know how to make my body do what I want it to do," Akira said. The words came out flat and precise, the way he spoke when he was not performing for an audience. "And I need to learn. Not so I can save everyone." He heard himself say it and felt something click into place. "Not yet. First I need to learn how to stay standing when I'm supposed to."
Roste was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Alright."
Just that.
Klein did not remark on the fact that Akira was there the following evening. He did not remark on the red bruise still faintly detectable on the boy's chin, or the deep hollows under his eyes from poor sleep, or the way he held himself differently than he had in the morning—less like a child trying to seem brave and more like a child who has had a specific conversation with a specific part of himself and reached an uncomfortable agreement.
He simply looked at him. Then he turned and began the session.
"We cannot do it on the outskirts today... but I'll take you somewhere better," Klein said.
Together they passed the Xie Imperial office, the military grounds, and finally the training facility for the reserved, high-performing elites and special soldiers. With the word of an Elite, it was accessible to anyone. The path was long, and it was only getting colder. For that, like everything else, Klein had a perfect solution to loosen Akira's flesh: the warmup. Yesterday, it had been nearly impossible for him to complete a set. Today, it remained agonizing, but Akira managed to push two or three additional reps each set.
When that was over, Klein took him further into the middlemost ground of the training facility.
The facility itself was nothing but an abandoned sports stadium, said to have existed at the time of Rainne Xie Ryukzen when they had migrated to the final depths of the Sanctuary. But time had long passed since then. Now it was rusted; the stadium seats had been swapped for clothing racks, weapon stands, and resting places for the soldiers. But one thing remained unchanged: the ground itself. It was made from pure mud, watered several times a week to replenish its fertility and provide a manufactured sense of a long-lost home.
The second day was not what Akira had expected. After the brutality of the first—the daggers, the darkness, the systematic dismantling of every assumption he'd carried about what his body was capable of—he had been braced for another violent excavation of his limits. He had shown up prepared to suffer and had told himself he would not cry.
Klein made him stand.
Not run. Not walk. Just stand. Along a measured length of the eastern maintenance corridor, Klein forced Akira to widen his legs by a massive margin, arching them slightly while lowering his hips to a specific axis. He gave precise instructions about posture, the distribution of weight between heel and toe, and the angle of the knee. Klein stood beside him without touching him and narrated every error in a tone so quiet and dispassionate that Akira had to listen carefully to catch it—which was itself a kind of lesson.
Your left heel is wider. It costs you power on the right. When you're pushed, that half-inch becomes a full inch, and then you fall.
Stand. Correct. Stand again.
Then they moved to something Klein called recovery breath. It was not exercise in any form Akira recognized. It was simply standing cross-legged on the cold floor, breathing in a particular sequence while Klein counted. Inhale for four counts. Hold for four. Exhale for six. Hold for two. Repeat.
"This is boring," Akira said on the third cycle.
"Yes," Klein agreed.
"I want to fight... not stand."
Klein looked at him. "You did not lose consciousness yesterday because you stood. You lost because you fell. If you can't even stand your ground against something as simple as fear, you won't find yourself fighting anytime soon."
Akira voiced his concern. "But how long do I have to stand?"
"In a real scenario. In the outskirts. With something behind you, bad air in your lungs, and your legs already exhausted from the climb to the gate... you must be able to position yourself to resist any attack. Like the roots of the ragtree, you must learn to balance." Klein waited. "How long do you think you can survive without being pushed into the dirt by a gritmaw or by pure fear?"
Akira closed his mouth.
"You collapse when your balance and breathing fail," Klein said. "Not your legs. Not your arms. Your breathing and your posture. Because you've never taught your body how to recover while standing under pressure. This is the real training. The other parts are just learning how to fall correctly, or how to make others fall."
He sat across from the boy and resumed counting.
They breathed together in the warm-white light of the artificial afternoon, in the quiet of the maintenance corridor within the training facility where nothing lived and nothing watched, until Akira stopped being aware of the count and simply existed inside the rhythm of it. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold.
He thought about the voice in the dream pathway. What will you do with the weight?
He did not have the answer yet. He knew that now. He had been trying to answer a question his body wasn't built to answer.
That is allowed, the voice had said. For now.
He breathed in. Four counts.
He held.
He breathed out. Six counts, slow and even, the way a body does when it has decided it is going to be around for a while and there is no reason to hurry.
He held.
Klein counted.
The next day was different. Rather than the training facility, Klein suggested they return to the outskirts at the earliest light, before even the miners had arrived. It was the fifth cycle today; only two cycles remained until the harvest. Akira could already start to smell the feces stench of the gritmaws closing in. But underneath Mawtorus's methane reek, there was a newer smell brewing—something far more dangerous.
Unlike the last few days, he had learned how to stand better. His legs still shivered intensely at the sight of the dark or the grip of fear, but he was able to control the trembling a lot better. Because they had arrived at the gates early, Klein surprised Akira by gifting him a small bite of his own recipe—a cookie he had made, referencing Syuri's cooking. Akira still did not have the courage or the heart to teach the Elite the difference between forging a weapon and baking food.
Before long, their warmups began. Today, an additional count was added to each set: eight pushups, thirteen jumping jacks, and nine situps. But the real training was not about releasing heat, as Akira quickly learned.
"Yesterday, I taught you how to stand!" Klein barked, waiting a beat. "Today, I will teach you to walk. To arrange your footwork."
He explained the stances of the Ryu fighting style. The grounding Akira had learned yesterday was the core aspect of Ryu. Klein detailed the compass of violence: The Western Hand, The Eastern Foot, The Southern Blade, and The Northern Grip. And finally, the synthesis of them all: The Ryu Flow State.
Standing correctly was the mechanical foundation for the Northern Grip, which had been hard-injected into Akira—only the basic posture, not even a fraction of its lethal application, developed through ages by Murad Ryukzen the First and perfected by his legionnaires and commanders. Because only two cycles were left, Klein intended to drill the absolute basics of the first three core stances into the boy. Even if Klein had a year to teach, he would have stopped at the fourth; the Ryu Flow State was unmastered even by himself, as Murad had adamantly refused to teach it to him.
"Remember the breathing. Stand with your legs crossed, then return them to the position of origin. Widen them. Let the weight balance," Klein instructed.
Akira did as commanded, stumbling through a few errors due to the deep, burning soreness from the previous day's isometric holds. Klein quickly fixed those errors by sharply poking Akira's ribs and joints with his fingers until the alignment was perfect.
Once the Northern foundational stance was corrected, Klein moved on. "Now for the Eastern footwork."
"Breathe with each step. Do not cross your legs when you slide. The right should explode from the start, and the left should brace for the blow!" Klein commanded.
Akira followed. Instead of the lightning-fast speed, dodging, and rushing Akira had pictured in his head, he ended up falling flat on his face. Again.
The red bruise on his chin swelled, and when he hit the rusted floor, he lost one of his milk teeth. Just one. Even though he wept for a day, convinced death was near or that his face would forever be tainted by the missing tooth, his mother simply held him when he limped home after the training.
"The weaker teeth are replaced by the stronger ones. You only need to pull," Syuri told him.
"What if the stronger one falls out?" Akira asked.
"Then you get to have a tooth made of steel!" Syuri claimed, teaching Akira the methods of human ingenuity forged in the lands above.
On the sixth cycle, just like the days before, Akira awaited Klein at the entrance, and together they went to the outskirts to train one final time before the harvest. Today wasn't about the heavy Northern stance or the rapid Eastern footwork. Instead, it was his first attempt at learning to fight: the Southern Blade stance.
Akira wondered why Klein would teach him to use weapons when most others, even in normal training, learned to throw physical punches first.
"Weapons are the extensions of yourself," Klein explained. "Because the gritmaws will always out-evolve you in terms of nails and claws, you must rely on the superiority of the weapon."
He drew a blade. "And the superiority of the weapon comes from technique."
Finally, real training, Akira thought. But he would soon come to regret it. The daggers, strapped to his waist with fine black cable, felt impossibly heavy. He fell to his knees multiple times before Klein violently reminded him to utilize the Northern stance. The balance.
Once Akira rooted himself correctly, he could move properly. Rather than being dragged down by the weapon's weight, he was able to manipulate it using his own center of gravity. It wasn't perfect—it was the equivalent of a child learning to walk—but tomorrow, that same child was expected to run a marathon across the entire Sanctuary, including over the canals.
When Akira was exhausted from the drills, he and Klein sat down to eat. They consumed medicinal herbs and freshly sliced monster hearts to recover torn muscle.
"Your tooth won't grow back unless you drink a lot of milk!" Klein laughed.
"Wasn't milk extinct?" Akira wondered.
"For the poor, yes. But when we harvest those female monsters, we occasionally end up with udders filled with monster milk. I'll bring you some next harvest," Klein smiled, enjoying his rough meal.
"I don't need weak teeth that'll just fall out anyway!" Akira bragged. "My mom said when I reach the outside of this Sanctuary, I'll be able to have metallic teeth as strong as a dagger!"
Klein's smile faded. He looked at the boy, a heavy sadness settling in his eyes. "Will you patch your body with metal every time you break yourself?" he asked quietly.
"If I can, then I will. Only metal is stronger than Aaron Krovnic or Murad Xie!" Akira replied defensively.
"If you replace every piece of your flesh with iron... can you still call yourself human?" Klein asked.
Akira did not detect any malice or immediate advice in his words. The only thing he could think of was finding a suitable answer. But none were to be found, neither in his mother's teachings nor in Klein's.
Except one quote from the Book of Hyrae popped into his mind.
"The next evolution of mankind is to leave the weakness of the flesh for the superiority of the metal."