"You're doing it again," Akari said.
My thoughts cleared.
Her voice was sharp, a hook pulling me back from the dark. For a moment, the storm—the memories of the Garchomp and the cold weight of the abyss—vanished, blown away by the mundane reality of her presence.
I blinked, and the memory of the frozen Highlands mud receded as the warmth of the Survey Corps office settled back into my bones.
The room was small and cramped, tucked away in a corner of the Galaxy Hall where the air always smelled of damp pine, old paper, and the sharp tang of medicinal herbs.
Dust motes danced in the single shaft of amber light that pierced through a small window. Outside the glass, the village of Jubilife was a blur of thatched roofs and dirt paths.
At my side, Kishin was a heavy, familiar weight. He had long since evolved; his plain hilt I'd pulled from the Highlands dirt was now a golden guard, and the blue cloth had deepened into the royal purple tassels of a battle-hardened Aegislash.
"I'm not doing anything," I replied, though my fingers had already curled around the grip, catching the faint, rhythmic hum of Kishin through the silk wrap.
"You're brooding. And it's loud. It's making Kishin nervous." Akari finally looked up from her workbench. Her grey eyes were sharp as she held a jagged crimson stone. "Sit down, Corvin. You're blocking my light."
I shifted in the wooden chair, the floorboards groaning under my weight. The office was thick with the rhythmic, focused scrape of metal against stone.
Akari leaned over her workspace, her shadow stretching long and thin against walls lined with half-finished maps, bundles of dried Apricorns, and jars of iron chunks. A single ink bottle sat precariously near the edge of her desk, vibrating with every movement.
She was working on a small fragment she'd salvaged from the mire—something that, in her hands, was becoming something else entirely. She didn't use a hammer or a forge; she simply used a set of fine chisels and a stubborn, defiant tilt of her jaw.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
Every few seconds, she blew away a fine red powder. Her brow was furrowed in a concentration so deep she seemed to have forgotten I was even in the room.
I watched the way her jaw set—that specific, iron-willed look she only got when she was determined to beat the world into a shape she preferred.
"You're staring," she said. Her voice was barely a whisper, yet she never broke her rhythm.
"I'm observing," I countered, my hand moving instinctively back to the hilt of my blade. "The Professor is waiting for your report on the Mirelands. He didn't say anything about you spending your afternoon playing with a rock."
Akari finally stopped. The chisel hovered an inch above the stone. She didn't turn around, but I saw her shoulders tense into hard, unyielding lines.
"It's a fragment of the Red Chain," she stated simply, before the scraping began again.
I didn't answer. I just watched her hands—stained with fine red dust, her knuckles pale from the pressure she was putting on the stone. She didn't go back to the scraping immediately. Instead, she picked up a stiff-bristled brush and swept the debris off the workbench with a sharp, irritated motion.
"The Professor believes these shards are important," she muttered. She sounded more annoyed with Laventon than she did awestruck by the gods. "He spent an hour lecturing me on how they 'vibrate' with the energy of the lakes and mountains. He wants a full analysis by tomorrow morning."
I leaned back, the wood of the chair biting into my shoulders. "Professor Laventon thinks every rock in the Highlands is a holy relic, Akari. Last week he tried to tell me a Geodude was a messenger from the Almighty Sinnoh—until it tried to take his finger off."
She let out a short, dry snort. It was a sharp, honest sound in the quiet office.
She reached for a strip of rough twine from a pile of scraps and began to thread it through the crimson stone. Her movements were jerky; her fingers trembled from three days of arduous work and lack of sleep.
"Maybe," she said, her eyes never leaving the piece. She pulled the cord through, tying a knot with a forceful yank that made her skin go taut over her joints. "But this one is different. It's harder than iron. I've broken two chisels just trying to smooth the jagged edges."
I watched her hair fall over her shoulder, obscuring her face. The office felt small—the smell of cedar and medicinal herbs pressing in on us, making the world outside Galaxy Hall feel distant.
"You've been at that for three days," I said, my voice flat. "You haven't been to the canteen. You're skipping your patrols. Why, Akari? If Laventon just wants a report, why spend half the night polishing it until it looks like a jewel?"
She finally stopped. She set the needle down with a deliberate clack and held the pendant up by the cord, letting it dangle in the amber ray of light between us.
The crimson surface caught the sun, glowing with a deep, inner fire that pulsed as if it were breathing.
"Because if you're going to carry a piece of the gods around," she whispered, her thumb tracing the curve of the shard, "I'm not going to let it look like a piece of trash. I have a reputation to keep."
"What?"
"It isn't for the report, Corvin," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, defensive tone she used when she was being a little too honest. "The Professor can have the dust and the sketches. This... this is for you."
I froze. "For me?" My hand, still tight on Kishin's hilt, went slack. It was a strange, hollow sensation—the instinct to fight or flee had nowhere to go.
Akari's smirk returned, though it was thinner than usual–a fragile facade pulled up to cover the flush creeping into her cheeks. She tossed the cord toward me.
The crimson shard spun through the air before I caught it in a clumsy, reflexive snap of my fingers.
She finally looked up. A smudge of red dust streaked her cheek, and while her grin was as sharp and dangerous as ever, it couldn't hide the shadows under her eyes.
I looked down at the stone, then back at her hands. Small cuts along her thumbs were beginning to scab over, stained a dark, rusty red by the dust of the fragment. She looked exhausted, her hair fraying from its tie in messy, dark strands—yet, to me, she had never looked more beautiful.
"Don't make a thing of it, Corvin," she said. Her voice regained that familiar, biting edge, though I could see the slight tremor in her fingers as she reached for her tools. "Laventon thinks these stones are tethers. He says they bind things to this world so they don't drift away when the skies get angry. And since you have a habit of walking headfirst into every Space-Time Distortion in Hisui, I figured you needed a shorter leash."
She reached out, her hand twitching as if to snatch the cord back, her face blooming into a scarlet that rivaled the shard. Then came the laugh–short, forced, and brittle.
"Besides…" she added quickly, "we can just call it a wedding ring or something. Save us the trouble later."
She paused.
Just for a second.
"They can be… our tokens of love."
Her voice was quieter now—less certain, stripped of its usual edge.
I didn't answer.
Her grey eyes searched mine, like she was trying to take the words back and couldn't.
"You know…" she muttered, "for people who actually have hearts."