Chapter 24: “Kyokuto Qualifier: Part I”

  Scene 1: Briefing

  —-: Rin

  The war room wasn't actually a room—more like an overgrown closet behind the Hangar 2 engine pit. But with schematics taped to every vertical surface, glowing ring-route maps strewn across the floor, and a half-drained kettle of tea long gone cold, it might as well have been a command center.

  Rin stood near the chalkboard, arms crossed, lips pressed thin. Across from her, Mei pointed at a hovering ring schematic slowly rotating in midair. The crystal projector hummed like a fly trapped in a bottle.

  “This isn't like the Exhibition,” Mei said, voice clinical. “It’s war wrapped in pageantry. Look.”

  She tapped the first layer.

  “Color rings are doubled. Every blue, green, or gold target gives twice the score. They're baiting aggression.”

  Another layer revealed a thin red arc above the map. “Engine strain penalties. If you redline or crystal-flare, you drop points. On purpose.”

  Rin squinted. “That’s… brutal.”

  “Efficient,” Mei replied.

  Ren, slouched against the wall nursing his third steam bun, raised an eyebrow. “So fly fast, but not too fast. Chase rings, but not too many. Try to win, but don’t look like you’re trying.”

  “Basically,” Hana said, flipping a page in her notebook. “Also, they’ve added proximity bonuses. The closer you fly to terrain, structures, or other ships… the more points you get.”

  “Wait, wait, what?” Taiga squawked from the back, arms tangled in a half-unzipped flight harness. “So now we’re supposed to almost crash on purpose?”

  “They’re rewarding risk,” Mei said flatly. “Because they know most teams won’t take it.”

  Rin’s mind ticked like clockwork teeth grinding together. Kyokuto was playing chess while everyone else flung darts. And she hated that she could already see the beauty in their design.

  “This race isn’t about speed,” she murmured. “It’s about pressure.”

  Jiro raised a hand. “Question: How much pressure before I throw up in my mask?”

  “Just bring a second mask,” Hana said without looking up.

  Saki appeared in the doorway, press badge askew, pencil behind her ear. “Onikaze’s crew didn’t even show for briefing. Scouts say they’re already on the launch rails.”

  Of course they were.

  Rin stepped forward, picked up a dry bit of chalk, and circled three points on the map—one near the canyon curve, another near the glider ruins, and a third in open sky.

  “Then we don’t match them. We fly our own path.”

  Ren stepped beside her, eyes on the plan but voice soft. “That means trusting each other.”

  She looked at him. Really looked.

  “Then let’s earn it.”

  Scene 2: Launch

  —-: Ren

  Ren adjusted the leather strap under his goggles for the fifth time. Maybe sixth. The wind had started picking up, tugging gently at the canvas banners hanging from the tower rails above the canyon mouth. It should’ve been comforting — home turf winds, the familiar cough of steam lines, Hana’s checklist muttered in the background — but it wasn’t.

  It felt like the sky was holding its breath.

  From the launch pit scaffold, he looked across to Kyokuto’s ship.

  The Onikaze didn’t move.

  It didn’t need to move.

  It hovered.

  Polished obsidian plating, swept-wing silhouette, no exhaust hisses, no idle crystal pulse. The thing was a shadow carved into the air, just there, like it had always been and always would be. Even its anchor chains didn’t rattle.

  Beside him, Rin muttered, “That’s not a ship. That’s a threat with lift engines.”

  Jiro whistled low from behind the pressure valve gauge. “Do you think it has a tea dispenser?”

  Taiga, chewing on the end of a wrench, shrugged. “Probably dispenses fear. Or ramen.”

  Ren took one more breath, one more look at the Onikaze, and turned back to the Silver Dart.

  Steam curled from the under vents like nervous sweat. The side panel still bore a smear from last night’s welding patch — a thin, bronze-colored seam right beneath the feather crest.

  Beautiful? Maybe not.

  Alive?

  Very.

  He ran a gloved hand across the hull. “We built you for days like this,” he whispered.

  The launch official raised a red flag. Thirty seconds.

  In the cockpit, Rin buckled in behind him, voice tight but steady. “Throttle to 60 on takeoff. No more. She’s still favoring left if you over-pitch.”

  “Got it.” His fingers moved through the familiar controls, settling on the main lever like it was muscle memory etched into bone. “Hey…”

  He didn’t turn around. Just said it to the wind between them.

  “Thanks for flying with me again.”

  Rin’s answer was a short scoff — but when she settled her gloved hand on his shoulder, it stayed there.

  Twenty seconds.

  A low hum echoed from across the airfield.

  The Onikaze moved.

  Not a roar. Not even a hiss. Just movement — sleek, silent, chilling.

  It lifted from the platform like a ghost freed from gravity, then angled into place on the starting rail, nose tilting upward. Four thin fins deployed with surgical precision, blue light flaring from ports that made Hana gasp aloud from the pit.

  “It’s got vented lift fans on the inside of the intake housing,” she whispered. “That’s not legal. That’s art.”

  The flag snapped up.

  Ren set his jaw.

  “Ready?”

  Rin clicked her mask into place. “Born ready.”

  The whistle sounded.

  The Onikaze launched — and the crowd barely heard it.

  The Dart followed a beat later.

  It didn’t glide. It shouted.

  Steam erupted from the pressure rings, a ribbon of white trailing behind as the ship hurled itself forward with all the defiance of scrap made sacred. The engines screamed with joy, with rage, with the voice of a thousand welded mistakes finally getting their day in the sun.

  And somewhere in the roar, Ren grinned.

  “Let’s make the sky listen.”

  Scene 3: Opening Maneuvers

  —-: Rin

  The wind at 300 feet didn’t care if you were famous, frightened, or forged in fire. It clawed at your wings just the same.

  Rin held the stick steady as the Dart banked wide into the first curve of the canyon circuit. Turbulence kissed the port-side fin. She didn’t flinch.

  Kyokuto had already taken the lead.

  Their ship, the Onikaze, didn’t race like the others. It didn’t race at all. It just… moved. Cold, elegant, relentless. Every pivot was precise, every ring passed at the exact center. The Dart had chased speed before — but what they were chasing now felt like something carved out of inevitability.

  “Ren,” she said through the comm crystal, “you’re drifting. Compensate two ticks starboard.”

  “Got it,” his voice crackled back. “She’s pulling harder today. Might be the new blade angle.”

  “You calibrated the pressure arc?”

  “…No?”

  Rin closed her eyes for a half-second. “Then stop fighting it and feel it.”

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  She didn’t wait for a response. Didn’t need one.

  Below, Iron Blossom was struggling with their turn radius, one of their outer engines coughing bursts of copper exhaust as they clipped a vapor checkpoint and veered wide. Disqualification territory if they missed another. Behind them, Wild Tempo — now missing Kazuki thanks to that lake stunt — still tried to fly like a firework show instead of a team. The crowd loved it.

  Rin didn’t.

  She wanted the win.

  The next checkpoint loomed — a double ring, one inside the other. Tight spacing. Impossible to clear both unless—

  “Switch to inner lift and give me full rudder,” she ordered.

  Ren hesitated. “You sure?”

  “No.”

  The Dart tilted like a knife in wind.

  Rin threw her weight into the turn, timing it to the pitch of the engine whine and the split-second contraction of the front stabilizers. The world twisted — stone walls blurring, the rings rushing closer.

  For a breath, everything lined up.

  They shot through the center, skimming both rings with inches to spare.

  The crowd screamed. She didn’t hear them.

  Inside her chest, something loosened — not fear. Not relief.

  Control.

  “They’re still ahead,” Ren muttered.

  “They’re predictable,” she replied, eyes tracking Kyokuto’s tail drift. “That’s their weakness.”

  “They’re a hundred meters up.”

  “Then we fly under them.”

  He laughed — short, startled. “You’ve been talking to Grandpa.”

  “No. He talks to tools. I talk to sky.”

  And the sky… was listening.

  She felt it in her bones — the wind tugging just right, the weight of the Dart a familiar pressure instead of a burden. She wasn’t her mother. She wasn’t Crimson Gale.

  She was this.

  Steam twisted behind them in a blooming arc as the Dart slipped into a low flank route, skimming the canyon edge. Close enough that Ren’s wingtip kicked up dust from a stone outcrop.

  “Rin…” he said, slower this time.

  “I see it.”

  The Onikaze was steady. Too steady. They didn’t need to hide. But that meant they didn’t expect anyone to dare challenge the high path.

  Which meant they weren’t looking down.

  Perfect.

  Scene 4: Mei’s Plan In Play

  —-: Mei

  Mei stood alone on the edge of the upper control deck, her sleeves rolled past her elbows, eyes fixed on the telemetry panel glowing beneath her fingers. Lines of data pulsed in steady rhythm — elevation curves, crystal flow stability, gear torque compression. Beautiful numbers. Numbers that told a story louder than any pilot’s scream.

  To anyone watching, she was just adjusting lift metrics. But underneath the humming gauges and gently hissing steam coils, Mei was playing a different game.

  "Five seconds to canyon vent cross," she said, barely above a whisper. Her voice was relayed to the Dart’s comm crystal. “Drop altitude by 2.5 meters. Angle 12 degrees to starboard. Use the thermal updraft.”

  On the other end, Ren’s reply was ragged. “There’s a what updraft? There’s no vent marked here—”

  Rin cut in. “He means do it.”

  A flicker of heat passed under Mei’s fingertips, the pressure shift blooming across her control array. The canyon looked empty from the surface. But she knew better. Knew how Kyokuto’s ship avoided turbulence like it could predict the wind. Knew how their flight patterns wrapped around invisible airstreams the others couldn’t even feel.

  But Mei had mapped the wind like others mapped regrets. Quietly. In layers. By memory and by math.

  Ren and Rin dipped low.

  The Dart caught the vent — an unmarked thermal pulse rising through a crack in the rockface, born from sun-scorched metal seams in the old canyon base. Natural. Hidden. Dangerous.

  Also — perfect.

  The ship lifted.

  A burst of steam jetted from the portside engine as the entire hull pitched upward with a grace it had never shown before. It wasn’t raw speed. It wasn’t brute-force turn power.

  It was flow.

  “They’re using it,” Mei murmured to herself, hands clasped behind her back now. Her pulse was steady. Her lips didn’t move again.

  The crowd hadn’t noticed. But Kyokuto had. The Onikaze shifted slightly in the air, as if momentarily unsure whether the Dart was climbing to challenge or falling into failure.

  It wasn’t either.

  It was repositioning. Reframing the race. Cutting across air the others had ruled un-flyable.

  “They’re watching now,” Mei said softly.

  Ms. Shiraishi stepped up behind her, arms folded. “You found lift where they found limits.”

  “They don’t own the sky.”

  “Maybe not,” the teacher replied. “But they act like they bought the deed.”

  Mei didn’t look away from the rising vapor trails. “Then we’ll redraw the map.”

  Below, the Silver Dart cut a new path between the old race lines — its own line, drawn in heat and guts.

  Mei allowed herself a tiny smile.

  Akio would’ve hated this race.

  But he would’ve flown it anyway.

  Scene 5: Sabotage Uncovered

  —-: Hana

  Hana’s fingers darted across the crystal-lit console like she was unpicking a locked gear valve with a scalpel. Data was streaming too fast. Pressure readings were fluctuating at decimal points she didn’t like. And one of the ring gates ahead—Ring Nine—was jittering out of alignment.

  That wasn’t wind. That wasn’t thermal drift.

  That was wrong.

  “Mei,” Hana barked into the comm, her voice low and tight, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing on Ring Nine?”

  A pause. Then Mei’s voice crackled through the comm line, perfectly calm. “Yes.”

  “That's not natural. The gyro’s unbalanced.” Her tone was clipped, precise. “It’s twisting mid-rotation. That means someone tampered with the pivot.”

  Another pause. Longer. Mei finally said: “It wasn’t weather.”

  And that was all she needed to hear.

  “Rin—Ren—adjust trajectory! Ring Nine’s axis is misaligned—angle’s 7.3 degrees off vertical. If you try to pass through center, it'll spin-slap the wings off.”

  Rin didn’t ask questions. She banked hard and rolled the Dart into a tighter arc, carving around the ring’s unstable edge like threading a moving needle.

  The audience gasped. Some clapped.

  But Hana wasn’t watching the crowd.

  Her eyes were fixed on the flickering diagnostic model spinning in front of her. “That ring’s pivot servo is registering a reset signal every 0.7 seconds. It’s not just broken—it’s being remotely controlled.”

  “Are you saying sabotage?” Ms. Shiraishi’s voice came through the instructor override channel—tight, controlled, dangerous.

  “I’m saying they’re cheating,” Hana growled. “And they’re not even hiding it.”

  A shadow flickered in the upper air feed. The Onikaze had just passed cleanly through the same unstable ring. No dip. No roll. Like they’d known the twist was coming.

  Of course they did.

  Hana’s knuckles went white on the railing. She wasn’t prone to anger—precision, sure. Pride, always. But this? This was calculated dishonor.

  “They planted it,” she muttered, mostly to herself. “They planted it. They knew we’d be behind them on the loop path. They set the ring to twist just in time to destabilize us.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Ren asked. He sounded breathless but steady. “Avoid it? Cut around?”

  Hana’s eyes narrowed. “No. Burn through the center. Hard.”

  Rin's voice cut in. “Are you serious—?”

  “I’ll override the port stabilizer now. You’ve got .8 seconds of safe axis rotation at 34% throttle. Time it perfectly and you slip through like a knife. Miss, and the Dart eats metal.”

  “Great,” Ren muttered. “Just a knife’s-edge maneuver in front of a thousand people.”

  “Welcome to racing,” Hana snapped.

  Steam blasted from the venting coil beside her as she hit the override. One of the engineers in the booth yelped. Hana ignored him. The Dart was already angling down toward the cursed ring.

  Rin breathed in. Ren held his grip.

  And the Dart sliced through the rotating gate just as the axis tipped.

  Metal screamed.

  So did the crowd.

  But they cleared it.

  Rin whooped.

  Ren choked.

  And Hana… just exhaled, cold and furious.

  “Let them cheat,” she said under her breath. “We’ll still win.”

  Scene 6: Rin Takes Control

  —-: Rin

  Rin didn’t blink.

  The ring behind them spun like a trap sprung too late, slicing air with a hiss that sent flocks of mechanical gulls scattering from their sky perches.

  She didn’t smile.

  She didn’t speak.

  She moved.

  “Ren,” she said flatly, already pulling on the secondary control yoke. “Switch to dual-input. I’ve got lead.”

  He didn’t argue. The clunk of the mechanical yoke lock disengaging confirmed his compliance. That, more than anything, told her he trusted her. Or he had completely lost his mind. Probably both.

  The Dart jolted from turbulence—no, not turbulence. Wake pressure. The Onikaze was above them now, close enough to spit steam down their backs.

  Fine. Let them watch.

  Her eyes scanned the race map burned into her retinas. Kyokuto had taken the outer wind tunnel path, trading speed for calculated height. But Rin could feel the pulse of the wind slipping—shifting—to the inner canyon layers. Riskier. Faster.

  She remembered her mother’s voice in her ear: The wind speaks before it turns. Listen first. Then fly.

  “Diving,” she warned. “Cutting the upper route. We'll slingshot under and match altitude by the gate three bends ahead.”

  “Uh, isn’t that where the heat vents are venting steam bursts every—”

  “Exactly. Hang on.”

  The Dart dropped like a feather caught in a cyclone.

  The temperature spike slapped her cheeks inside the cockpit as the lower canyon rose around them—rust-colored stone, flickering heat-haze, and pipe-exhaust towers releasing rhythmic plumes of scalding pressure.

  Steam vents. Six of them. Each timed by the second.

  “Now!” she hissed, banking hard left—just under the fourth plume—while Ren fired the side vents to give them a momentary drift.

  The burst scorched past the tail fins.

  But the Dart stayed whole.

  “You’re insane,” Ren coughed into the comms.

  Rin’s voice was ice. “Then match my rhythm.”

  The vents behind them erupted in a whoosh of thunder that nearly deafened the crowd above.

  But ahead—through the shimmer—she saw the Onikaze hesitate.

  Too clean. Too high.

  They hadn’t accounted for someone taking the death path.

  Good.

  Rin angled the Dart up into their slipstream and felt it—that click—the one that told her she was flying right.

  For once, not chasing a record.

  Not proving something to her mother.

  Not covering fear with speed.

  Just flying.

  With someone.

  She didn't say a word, but her grip on the yoke softened just a little. Beside her, Ren had stopped checking gauges. He was flying with her—not behind her—just… with.

  It didn’t mean anything.

  Except it kind of did.

  A faint smile touched her lips as she tipped the nose into a tighter ascent.

  “Rin,” Ren said softly. “You’re kind of glowing right now. Like—‘pilot in the zone’ glowing.”

  “Shut up and fly.”

  He chuckled. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Scene 7: Cliffhanger – The Redline

  —-: Ren

  The air stank of metal and ozone.

  Ren’s hands were slick on the controls, every bolt of turbulence rattling up his arms like the Dart’s bones were screaming through his own. He could feel the edge coming—the limit they were never supposed to cross.

  And they were about to blow past it.

  “Crystal temp’s in the red,” he said, eyes flicking to the gauge. “Pressure valves are starting to—”

  “I know,” Rin snapped. Her voice was tight. Fierce. But focused. “We’re not backing off now.”

  They were tailing Onikaze. Somehow. The Kyokuto ship glided like it was on glass rails—silent, surgical. It cut through the next vapor ring like it owned the sky.

  Ren leaned forward. The Dart’s cockpit whined in protest, seams flexing, throttle control spongy with stress.

  This wasn’t just pressure. This was defiance.

  He heard the distant crowd in pieces—cheering, gasping, some kind of siren wailing as another school’s ship veered too close to the cliff walls.

  None of it mattered.

  Rin adjusted trim and banking torque with micro-taps like she was playing a piano built from lightning.

  And they gained another meter.

  “Ren,” she said without looking. “Open the secondary pressure intake. Manual override.”

  He paused. “That’s an experimental valve. It hasn’t been tested under—”

  “Do it.”

  He didn’t ask again.

  With a twist and a click, the system hissed, a scream of released energy venting behind them in a spiraling stream of silver vapor.

  The Dart jumped forward—leapt—like the sky had finally let go of its leash.

  They passed within two body lengths of Onikaze’s tail.

  And for the first time, Ren saw the Kyokuto captain—Rei Kurosawa—turn and glance back.

  Not shocked.

  Not angry.

  But smiling.

  Like he’d expected this.

  “Why is he smirking?” Ren muttered.

  Then the warning panel blinked. No—blared.

  CRYSTAL CORE OVERLOAD.

  ENGINE REDLINE EXCEEDED.

  The noise came next.

  A deep, groaning whine from the core—a sound like metal praying to survive.

  “Engine temp’s spiking—eighty-nine… ninety-two—ninety-six!” Ren yelled.

  “I see it!” Rin shouted, yanking the control yoke. “Dump throttle!”

  “I can’t! It's stuck—”

  A sharp bang! from behind them.

  The cabin lights flickered.

  Smoke hissed through the right vent.

  The Dart was about to blow.

  Ren reached for the emergency cutoff—

  —and the whole ship jerked sideways with a gut-twisting lurch, both wings shuddering like wet canvas under a storm gale.

  The last thing he saw was the next checkpoint ring tilting sideways, the sun flashing off its edge like a blade.

  Then—

  Black.

  Silence.

  A single, shrieking steam whistle trailing behind them like a scream that had lost its voice.