Straight at the machine, because of course he did. Boots punching stems, sending pale shards of light flying. Shoulder down. Foxfire poured over his skin like a second, impatient body finally let out of its crate. The world narrowed. Flowers blurred into an anonymous white smear. The joint on the nearest leg stood out clear and sharp, a weak spot framed in his sight.
The air thickened as the barrier slid into place. To anyone watching, a faint warping wrapped his chest and shoulders, bending the glow around him. To him, his weight shifted sideways in his own body. He felt smaller, denser, harder.
He hit the armor full-bore.
The impact rang up his spine like a bell hammered with bad news. His teeth slammed together. The barrier flared, crazed with hairline cracks, but held long enough to dump most of his momentum into the machine instead of into his own ribs.
Something in the joint snapped. The leg bowed a handspan and screamed in metal.
Kyo ricocheted off and went down on both knees, skidding a trail through the petals. They didn't just give—they crushed wet and soft under him, then resisted in patches, cold seeping through the fabric at his knees. Pain white-out'd his vision for a second.
It didn't clear clean.
The world came back doubled—two machines, offset a handspan apart. The ground tilted wrong under him. His stomach lagged behind the motion, floating high. Sound collapsed into a high, thin whine that sat on top of everything else.
He tried to stand.
His right leg didn't answer the first time. The command went out—nothing came back. A delay. Then a twitch, late and too hard, pitching him forward. He caught himself on one hand. Petals slid, then bunched under his palm, shifting in uneven layers.
His breath hitched. He pulled air—too shallow. Again. His ribs stopped halfway through the inhale, stuttering before finishing.
The barrier peeled off him in brittle, translucent flakes that turned to nothing before they reached the flowers. Where it shed, the foxfire underneath flickered unevenly—bright along his left shoulder, guttering thin across his right ribs.
He blinked hard. The double image dragged, then snapped closer to one.
The machine rocked, then caught itself.
It shoved its weight back onto its other legs. The red eye swung—overshot—snapped back. Not smooth. The movement hit in stutters, catching and correcting a fraction too late each time. The pitch of the weapon tone went up into the kind of range that made his eardrums want to pack up and leave, cutting through the ringing still lodged in his skull.
On the far side of the clearing, the black fox lunged at the opposite leg. Mid-leap, its body stretched. For half a heartbeat Kyo saw the long, narrow outline of a boy in a battered jacket, thin shoulders hunched, bare hands reaching like claws. Then fur snapped over the image and those hands were a muzzle and the muzzle was full of teeth, and those teeth hit metal. Sparks spat.
The clones hit too—
Kyo saw it wrong.
Shapes slammed in that didn't match the ground. Petals didn't compress where they should have. No weight followed some of the impacts—no sound, no give—just flashes of motion that the machine reacted to anyway. Its leg jerked at empty air, correcting for hits that didn't land, then missing the ones that did.
The red eye snapped between them—left, right, center—too fast, then not fast enough. Each correction came a fraction late. The damaged leg shuddered under it, failing to take weight clean. A hitch ran up through the body—alignment slipping, then forcing itself back.
The hum climbed.
It wavered. Spiked. Dropped a hair. Climbed again—unstable now, vibrating through the air instead of sitting clean in it.
The leg staggered, but it didn't go.
The air changed.
Pressure pulled tight across Kyo's skin, like the space around him had been stretched thin. Heat gathered—not on him, but ahead, a sudden gradient that prickled across his face and the backs of his hands. The petals nearest the machine flattened before anything touched them, pressed down by something that hadn't arrived yet.
His teeth buzzed harder. The ringing in his ears split around the rising tone, the two grinding against each other.
The weapon finally fired.
There was no pretty beam. Just a brutal flaring of air—pressure, heat, nothing. The far edge of the Lunar Garden turned into a wound. Trees, earth, everything in the way ceased to exist. For a fraction of a second there was a hole where the world had been—edges too clean, air sucked thin toward it—then steam and debris rushed in to pretend it had always been like that. The smell hit a beat later—sharp, ionized, then wet burn, then raw earth ripped open.
The shockwave reached before it struck.
Air shoved past him from the front—then slammed back from the side, a crossing force that twisted his shoulders. Then it hit. A hot slap that picked him up and shoved. He threw an arm up out of reflex. The last scraps of his barrier cracked, took some of the fire, and died. Heat licked through the gaps—sharp along his side where the foxfire had thinned.
The side of his jacket went from "seen better days" to "smoldering relic." Fabric curled and blackened. Underneath, his skin burned unevenly—sharp, localized patches where the barrier had failed, dull heat where it had held.
He hit the ground hard, petals collapsing under his shoulder with a damp, layered crush. Cold seeped up through them a second later, wrong against the heat still crawling over his skin.
His lungs rebelled. He hacked on air that tasted like burnt copper.
Down instead of sideways—
White.
Garden gone.
Him—
He choked the thought off before it finished.
Behind him, something small sounded. Almost nothing. A scuff. A single petal's pitch bending.
Foxfire in him flared, startled—uneven, guttering where it had been stripped thin.
He twisted.