"What the actual fuck was that," Atiya bellowed, his voice bouncing off the dissolving walls and coming back at him from every direction.
The Yai cave collapsed in on itself around him, the colors bleeding out and the concentric circles unwinding like thread pulled from a loom, until there was nothing left but the sparring ground beneath his feet.
He sucked in air and said:
"I did it." The grin came before the words were fully out."Holy shit. I actually did it." He laughed once, short and disbelieving.
"Guess I really am a genius. Hah."
"Ten months and fourteen days," said a voice to his left, flat and familiar. "You really know how to make an entrance."
Zelaine was leaning against a nearby pillar and paid attention to the dramatic behaviour of her boyfriend who had just returned after a long break.
Atiya's vision blurred without any warning. He blinked and the tears came.
"I never thought I'd say something this cringe out loud," he said, his voice going quiet and then cracking slightly at the end of it. "But damn. I actually missed you, Vampy."
He moved before the thought finished forming.
One moment on the ground. The next, airborne, a ridiculous physics-defying leap that carried him straight across the distance between them.
"Your face right now is genuinely terrifying!" Zelaine barked, eyes going wide.
She tried to sidestep but he did not make it in time.
He hit her full force, arms wrapping tight, and they went down together, rolling once through the dust before coming to a stop in a graceless heap. He kissed her there in the dirt.
Zelaine huffed under his weight but made no move to push him off.
A silence settled between them, warm and unhurried.
Then she said, quietly, "I'm hungry."
Atiya lifted his head and looked at her, tears still on his face and the grin still firmly in place. "Shouldn't I be the starving one here, babe?"
"Shut up." She poked his cheek. "I missed your cooking. Go and cook."
He laughed, loud and shaky and full of something that was mostly relief, and buried his face in her shoulder for one more second before finally letting go.
****
Cale lobbed a handful of small pebbles toward Atiya.
Atiya raised his hand. A palm-sized portal snapped open mid-air, perfectly placed in the pebbles' path. The stones vanished into the shimmering rift and reappeared harmlessly a meter to the side, clattering against the ground.
"Good." Inteja nodded, arms crossed. "He's getting the hang of it. Throw a baseball at full speed."
A week ago, a paper plane had nailed him square in the forehead.
'Why don't you just shoot a bazooka at me while you're at it,' Atiya thought, forcing a grin as he tracked the baseball Zelaine had already casually picked up.
Inteja had two disciples. Cale Artem and Zelaine Roseblood, both were from the Seven Great Families.
Cale was Atiya's closest friend, loyal and easygoing, the kind of person who took a hit for you without stopping to ask whether he should.
Zelaine was more complicated. She had started as something like a sibling figure and evolved, through a series of events Atiya still wasn't entirely sure how to explain, into his girlfriend.
She was also, without any question whatsoever, a genuine sadist.
Zelaine wound up and threw the baseball fast, precise, and completely without mercy.
It cracked him square in the face.
'You confessed to me first,' he thought at her, rubbing his nose.
Zelaine only smiled wider.
Time passed. Baseballs became part of the routine.
Bruises faded faster than his complaints did.
"Good," Inteja said eventually, in the tone of someone already thinking about the next thing. "There should be a revolver in my drawer. Go bring it."
Zelaine was already moving before the sentence finished. She reappeared from the training hall seconds later with the weapon in hand, twirling it once and giving it to her master..
What followed was a period of Atiya's life he would later decline to discuss in detail.
He got shot more times than any tollywood action hero he'd ever watched on screen. The portals redirected the bullets well enough, but the timing had to be learned through repetition, and effective repetition meant getting it wrong first.
He adapted eventually like always did. He had adapted being a son of the crazy Inteja V Pharsa after all.
By the time Inteja called a halt, he could hold three portals open simultaneously, each with roughly a five centimeter radius.
Hiss portals were small and precise, built for redirection rather than teleportation which was supposed to be the main use.
Along the advancement of Ascensions, yai user also get their physical body, and mind enhanced too.
Once infused through the body and mind it granted reflexes and physical strength well beyond the normal human ceiling, with Ascension level determining how high that ceiling could go.
Atiya was Ascension 2. So he was fast enough and urable enough to survive the whimsical trainings.
The one thing Yai didn't seem to touch, for reasons nobody had ever satisfactorily explained to him, was the psychic side.
Though, his strngth was befitting of a yai user, still his muscles was not the reason of it and he was still short.
"Good," Inteja announced, dusting off her hands with the air of someone wrapping up a productive afternoon. "I'm going to go buy some bazookas."
"One for me too, Sensei!" Zelaine's hand shot up immediately, eyes bright.
Atiya threw both hands in the air.
"I am seriously starting to question this relationship!"
Zelaine laughed and blew him a mocking kiss.
Inteja was mid-correction, adjusting Atiya's portal placement with her finger, when the phone inside her pocket buzzed urgently.
She glanced down. Her expression barely moved.
But the air around her went colder.
"Son."
No answer. Atiya was too busy weaving through the air, twisting and redirecting the barrage of objects being hurled at him from every angle.
"Son."
She said it again, calm and even. Still nothing.
Atiya twisted mid-air and redirected two high-velocity Yai bullets with a flick of his wrist, a portal snapping open just long enough to swallow them before blinking shut again.
'Oh my. A baseball. How adorable.'
He tilted his body a fraction and let the large sphere whistle harmlessly past his ear.
More things followed. Glittering saint quartz straight out of Fate/Grand Order. A kitchen ladle.
A plushie holding a knife that looked suspiciously like chucky.
"Pikachu! Thunderbolt!" Zelaine commanded.
A tiny yellow creature squeaked from somewhere behind the couch. A jagged bolt of electricity crackled toward him with genuine enthusiasm.
'Seriously. Pikachu now.'
A portal flared up at the last instant and absorbed the lightning with a soft pop.
Then his eyes landed on the next projectile.
A single well-worn slipper.
He went completely still.
'I cannot dodge that.'
Smack.
The rubber sole connected with his forehead at a velocity that suggested it had been thrown with great personal satisfaction.
"What did I even do, Mom!"
Atiya crumpled dramatically to the floor and stayed there, clutching his face.
Inteja lowered her arm, looking satisfied with the result. "Good. Now that I have your attention," she said, her tone returning to its usual even register, "I am going out for a while. Do not leave the facility."
She turned toward the door without waiting for a response.
Atiya groaned from the floor, pressing his palm against the red mark blooming on his forehead. "Yes, Mom."
As his training continued in that chaotic and consistently escalating fashion, pebbles giving way to baseballs, baseballs to bullets, bullets to whatever Inteja could procure on short notice, Atiya had also quietly begun coding a new skill on the side.
Just one, this time.
He had learned his lesson, and he had learned it in a way that tended to stick.
Greed and overreach in imaginary space had nearly kept him there permanently. No more multitasking visions.
No more stacking half-finished frameworks on top of each other and hoping the whole thing held.
One skill at a time, slow and deliberate and obsessive, built properly from the ground up.
Four people sat around the private wooden dining table, steam rising from heaped plates of sizzling steak.
As always, the food Atiya put out looked unreasonably good. There was no rational explanation for it. It was simply one of those facts about him that everyone had quietly accepted.
Everyone's plate, that is, except Zelaine's was filled with delcious dishes. Hers had been dusted generously with chili flakes, a detail that had been applied with obvious deliberateness.
Atiya sat at one end of the table, slouched comfortably, holding his fork loosely in his right hand and watching her with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had planned something and watched it work.
Zelaine's cheeks had gone red. Her eyes were watering. Her fork had not slowed down once.
"Isn't this a bit too spicy?" she said, digging into another piece without breaking stride. Tears tracked steadily down her face. "Or did you do it on purpose, dear."
"You gonna play innocent with the I-like-spicy-things card?"
Atiya leaned back and crossed his arms, the grin spreading across his face slow and satisfied. "My, my. You know me so well. Yeah, I like it spicy, babe. Heard it's great for tsuyang wannabes who steal their boyfriend's money to eat at parlours."
Zelaine's fork clinked against the plate. Her eyes slid sideways.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You used half my monthly salary on food and parlour trips without asking." His voice stayed perfectly calm, his face perfectly smooth. Then something shifted in his expression, something that could only be described as pure evil, and he stabbed a piece of steak and watched the juices run off it. "Play dumb and keep my card? I swear on the gacha gods, babe. You will be shitting bazookas by the time I'm done with the next meal."
Zelaine stared at him for a long moment, then sighed and wiped her mouth with a napkin. "It's in your bag. I put it back already."
"Seriously." Shilial set her knife down with a faint scrape against the plate, steam curling up from the piece she had just cut. Cale's wife had witnessed this exact dynamic too many times to be surprised by it anymore. "When are you two going to grow up."
Zelaine's head snapped toward her, cheeks still bulging with half-chewed steak. "Isn't this unfair though. I have been training him this whole time, giving up hours I could have spent coding, and this is how he treats me."
"You blew five months of my allowance on steaks alone," Atiya cut in, waving his fork in her direction.
He chewed slowly, then turned to look at Cale and Shilial, the violet-haired woman seated across from him, and said with complete sincerity:
"And aren't you two a couple. Go do couple things somewhere else. Why do you always end up in my room at mealtimes."
Cale cleared his throat. When he spoke his voice came out meek and dipped in boyish innocence, barely clearing the soft clatter of silverware around the table.
"Your food is the best in all of Ansep." A pause. "Also your mother asked us to keep tabs on your progress. Since Zelaine is a nutjob."
"What did you just call me," Zelaine said, her eyes narrowing slowly, lips curling into a disgruntled sneer. "Nutjob."
Cale said nothing, wearing the composed face of a man who had chosen his words carefully and was comfortable standing by them.
"For once I agree with my husband," Shilial said.
"Hey." Atiya turned to zelaine and loudly, pointing his fork at her, continued. "Argue with them or train me. Pick one." He crossed his arms and leaned back.
He had barely gotten his fork halfway to his mouth again when something whistled past his ear.
He jerked his head sideways just in time. A stainless steel fork embedded itself in the wall behind him, quivering with the impact.
"Why are you throwing cutlery at me during dinner! Stop it!"
He ducked as a spoon followed in a low silver arc. Zelaine did not look up from her plate. She was already twirling another knife between her fingers calmly like someone doing something perfectly reasonable.
"It improves your focus and instincts," she said. "Bullets don't announce themselves."
Atiya brought his palm down on the table hard enough to make the plates jump. "Stop it. Let me eat in peace, atleast."
Another knife spun toward him, low this time, aimed at his thigh. He twisted in his seat, caught it mid-air by the handle between two fingers, and drove it point-first into the wooden table hard enough that the blade sank a full inch into the grain.
The room went quiet except for few moments.
Zelaine raised her eyes for the first time, one brow lifting slowly.
"Impressive catch," she said. A small approving smile settled on her face. "See. It's already working."
Atiya stared at her, breathing through his nose.
"Dodge better," she said, quieter now and almost gentle with it. "Because the world won't wait for you to finish your rice."
He looked at the knife still trembling in the table. Then at the fork buried in the wall. Then at his half-eaten curry sitting there getting cold.
He exhaled slowly and at length.
"I am hiding all the sharp objects tomorrow."
"Aw," Zelaine cooed, folding her hands under her chin and producing an expression of exaggerated sweetness that somehow made her look more dangerous rather than less. "You are really cute when you are annoyed, love."
The two of them continued their back and forth in that familiar chaotic orbit while Cale watched from across the table.
His eyes drifted to Shilial, who had her phone out and was typing something. He glanced at the screen out of mild curiosity.
Her status read: "Living the best day of my life. I hope my husband dies somewhere with his scrotum crushed."
Cale considered this for a moment. She had just come back from her vacation.
She had probably forgotten to update it before leaving and just updated her status now. He decided to bring it up later and reached for another piece of steak.
He was still composing his response in his head when Zelaine's voice cut across the table without any particular buildup.
"Go kiss your wife or something. Both of you, get out."
Zelaine had always possessed an exceptional talent for dismantling the atmosphere of any room she entered.
The rest of the meal dragged on in exactly that fashion.