Crimson Creed Arc Part 1/3
1. The Road Home
Snake had offered his back without being asked, and Moto had taken it without arguing, which told Snake everything he needed to know about how bad the damage was.
He powered up his physical enhancements and set a pace. Najo matched it easily. Behind them, Tanaka struggled.
"Just fly," Najo called back. "Like you did in Sango."
"It doesn't work like that, I can't just —" Tanaka stopped mid-stride. Her eyes went somewhere else entirely. She pulled out her notebook.
"Wait," she breathed, uncapping her pen while jogging. "I've awakened flight — an innate Denga technique. And I already carry Pasi's healing factor from my other bloodline. Do you understand what that makes me? I'm a perfect specimen. The things I could learn if I ran controlled tests on —"
Najo stopped, turned around, grabbed her by the hips, and threw her straight up into the air.
"Fly."
"AHHHHH —"
She did not fly. She came down face-first into the tall grass with a sound like a sack of rice hitting a dock.
A second passed. She came up slowly, spitting dirt, notebook still somehow in her hand. Then she started running — not to catch up, specifically at Najo. He was already moving.
They caught up to Moto and Snake. Tanaka was still glaring. Najo was pretending to look at the scenery.
Najo glanced at Moto.
"You've been quiet since you got your powers back," he said.
Moto shifted slightly on Snake's back. His eyes were half-closed, but the corner of his mouth moved. "You still can't beat Snake though."
Snake kept walking. "Come on. That'd be unfair."
Najo nodded, satisfied. Obviously unfair. Obviously.
"Yeah," Snake said. "I'm washing both of you in a one-on-one."
Najo's head turned slowly.
"That's — that's not what you meant."
"Thought it was pretty clear."
"You said unfair—"
"It is unfair. To you."
"That's — okay, you know what—"
"You couldn't beat me before Sango," Moto said, eyes still half-closed. "Snake's a different conversation."
"Okay now you're teaming up on me because you're on his back—"
"I'm just saying what's true."
Najo walked faster. "Both of you, give it a week. Give it a week, and I'm coming for both of you in the same afternoon."
"Sure," Snake said.
"I mean it."
"I know."
"You're not taking me seriously."
"I'm taking you very seriously."
The banter carried them for miles. Then, gradually, something shifted in the rhythm of the group. Snake adjusted his grip on Moto's legs, slower than before. His breathing had changed — not laboured, but heavier than it should have been. He said nothing.
Najo, going the opposite direction, had started stretching his arms, rolling his neck — moving like someone getting comfortable in a body that fit better than it had in weeks.
"I can feel it," he said.
Tanaka looked at him. "Feel what?"
"The radiation. Nyika's ore." He cracked his knuckles. The smirk came, and then settled into something quieter. "I'm home."
He said it lightly. He meant it.
"Dope and Ganjo are gonna catch it," he said, after a moment.
Moto opened one eye. "You sure? You left losing to them."
"I got significantly stronger since then."
"Okay. But on sight is how you end up in another situation."
"On sight," Najo repeated, as if Moto hadn't said anything.
Snake adjusted his grip again. "Lead the way, Nibz. Your turf."
2. The Border and The Return
The border guards didn't know about the assassination order. Douglas had kept it classified — which meant when Ginimbi's grandson walked up to the gate, they smiled and waved him through.
"Good to see you in one piece," the captain said. He looked at Moto. "Master Gwen came through two days ago. Barely standing. We weren't sure what he ran into out there." A pause. "Glad it didn't catch up with you."
Moto, Najo, and Snake walked through without responding.
They went straight to Najo's house. Naomi and Tinashe were in the yard doing laundry when they came up the path.
Naomi dropped everything.
She had Najo in her arms before he could say a word, checking his face with both hands, kissing his forehead, moving to check his jaw, his shoulders, the bruising along his ribs. Najo stood very still with his ears going pink.
He glanced back. Just once — a quick, involuntary check — and found that Tanaka had already looked away. She was watching the yard, arms loose at her sides, expression neutral. Nothing to see here.
He turned back to his mother.
Tanaka covered her mouth with her hand.
Tinashe crossed her arms and looked at Moto.
"When," she said, "did you become a troublemaker."
It wasn't a question. Moto rubbed the back of his neck. "It's a long story."
"Amber's at the academy," Tinashe said, the sternness softening slightly around the edges. "The one you attended."
He nodded and started explaining. He kept it brief — the important parts, the order they happened in, what it meant for what came next. Tinashe listened without interrupting.
The front gate squeaked.
Amber stopped in the doorway with her backpack half off her shoulder, looking at him.
Then she ran.
She hit him hard enough that he took a step back, and he caught her and held on. He stood there with his face in her hair and didn't say anything for a while.
Behind him, Tinashe watched. She didn't say anything either.
After a moment, Moto pulled back and looked at Amber properly — the length of her, how much her face had changed in weeks — and something he hadn't expected moved through him. He'd been thinking about her since the train memory, but that was the baby on the train. This was someone else. Someone he'd been away from long enough to miss who she'd become.
He didn't say that. He just kept his hand on top of her head.
"You good?" he said.
"I'm good," she said, voice muffled against his jacket. "You're not."
"I'm fine."
"You look terrible."
"I'm fine."
3. On Sight
Later that evening, Najo stepped outside. Moto waited until the door closed, then looked at Tanaka across the table.
She nodded slightly.
"We need to tell you about Najo," Moto said, to Naomi and Tinashe. "He won't want it made into a thing, but you need to know."
He told them. He kept his eyes on the table while he said the last part — that Najo came home deaf, and that it happened in the fighting, and that it was on him.
Naomi put her hand over her mouth.
"I said I'd keep him safe," Moto said. "I didn't."
The back door opened. Najo came back in for something — he stopped when he saw his mother's face.
"What happened?" He looked around the table.
Naomi stood up. "I never should have let you go —"
"Mom." He crossed the room and put his arms around her. She was shaking slightly. "You didn't do anything wrong." He held on until she stopped. "I don't regret any of it." He looked back over her shoulder at the table. At Moto. "I wasn't alone out there. That's the whole reason I went."
The front door knocked.
Najo was already moving before the second knock landed — not to answer it, toward it, the lightning already formed in his hand, the specific reaction of someone who has been expecting a particular kind of visitor and has been ready.
He pulled the door open and swung.
A hand caught his wrist.
Clean. No scramble, no adjustment — the catch landed at the exact right position, like it had been sitting there waiting. Dope stood in the doorframe in a cream blazer, Najo's fist suspended in his grip. His eyes held two symbols where pupils should have been: an X in one, the number 4 in the other, both carrying the faint luminescence of something active.
Beside him — same blazer, same frame, same unhurried expression — Ganjo stood with one hand still at his side. He looked at his brother's occupied fist. Then he cocked back his own.
The punch landed on Moto's forehead.
Moto had stepped into it — not a block, a reception, letting the impact find him instead of Najo. He stood there afterward looking at Ganjo without blinking. Smoke began to curl at his collar.
Sixtus moved from Snake's arm in one fluid motion and coiled around Ganjo from behind, the scales pressing his arms to his sides before he'd registered the angle of approach. Snake had come through the side of the porch without anyone seeing him move.
The twins had enough sense to read the room. Their weight shifted but their feet stayed.
Then Dope's eye changed.
The 4 became a 6.
The porch boards shuddered first, then the walls — a deep low tremor running through the ground and up into the structure, the earth responding to something below it that had been disturbed. In the doorway, Naomi had her hand pressed flat to the frame, her expression the specific stillness of someone who has decided something.
The light came from behind her. Tinashe, standing further back, her hands at her sides, a low amber-orange glow rising from the floor around her feet — the particular heat of Gehen fire, old and patient and not interested in negotiating.
The twins looked at them.
Then at each other.
Ganjo gave Sixtus a specific look. Snake withdrew. Ganjo straightened his blazer.
"Your mother won't always be here to cover for you," Dope said to Najo, backing down the first step.
Something struck the back of his head. He stumbled forward half a step, caught himself.
Amber was on the porch with her hand still extended, dusting her palm off.
Ganjo grabbed his brother's arm without looking back. "We'll come back."
They walked off down the road.
Najo stood on the porch and watched them go. Fists at his sides, completely still in the way that meant the opposite of calm. The lightning was gone but his jaw was set.
He didn't say anything. He went back inside.
Two streets over, out of sight, Dope touched the corner of his eye.
His fingers came away red. Not a lot — just the specific leak that comes from pushing something harder and faster than the body was ready for, the cost of going from 4 to 6 in the time it had taken. He pressed his sleeve against it.
Ganjo was already looking down at his blazer. Cream fabric, clean cut — except for the two dark spots spreading through the weave at his forearm. Where the lightning strike had been intercepted. Where the fabric had held but the skin beneath it hadn't entirely.
"This isn't good," Ganjo said.
"Yeah." Dope lowered his sleeve. "We should tell mother."
Back in the house, the thing that had happened between Najo and Tanaka was still there — the way it had been since the road, sitting quietly in the ordinary distance between two people who haven't decided what to do with it yet. Neither of them had named it. But then, something else caught her attention.
4. Class 5
Tanaka was already out of her chair. "The radiation. Nyika's ore is different from what you're calibrated to — your body's been recalibrating overnight, which means your abilities are in flux until it settles."
She reached for his arm.
"Don't," Snake said.
"I'm just going to invert the Grace, it'll take two seconds—"
"You're not touching me with that."
"Why not?"
"I saw what you did to the Beetle guy."
"That was a controlled inversion, this would be completely—" She stopped. She was still looking at his arm. At the tattoos, the pale ink, the shift in the shapes. Something in her expression changed — not away from the argument, but past it, onto something else entirely.
"Typically," she said, more slowly, "a class four entering a foreign radiation zone at that rate of exposure would die. The body doesn't recalibrate. It rejects." She looked up at him. "You're not rejecting. You're adapting. In real time, overnight." A pause. "Have I just found the first class five?"
The table was quiet.
Snake looked at her.
"Or," he said, "you touch me and it turns my live snakes into dead snakes."
Sixtus, still materialised on his arm, coiled slowly inward — pulling toward Snake's chest in the specific manner of something that has heard a hypothetical it did not enjoy.
Tanaka looked at Sixtus. Then back at Snake. She sat down.
"I'm noting this," she said. "I'm noting all of this."
5. Training and The Heir
After breakfast, Amber pulled Moto into the hallway.
"Can I pick your new outfit?" she said. "So you actually look like you have taste."
"Sure."
She came back with a jacket. Dark, textured, the kind of fabric that had weight to it. She turned it over in her hands once before holding it out.
"The inside is red," she said. "So it's still you."
She looked down at her hands.
"I want you to have something good. For when you leave again."
Moto looked at her for a moment. Then he crouched down to her level.
"I'm coming back," he said.
"You always say that."
"Because it keeps being true."
She didn't look convinced. He stood and took the jacket from her. Put it on. Ran a thumb along the red lining. She watched him with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose work has come out right. She didn't say anything about it.
"Let's go then," he said. "Train."
That afternoon, Moto went to the river to run drills. Amber followed him and he didn't tell her to go back.
She picked things up fast. No ability yet — nothing had awakened — but her footwork was sharp and she adjusted quickly when he corrected her. After a while he stopped correcting her and just watched.
"I want to come with you," she said, breathing hard. "Next time. I don't want to be the one waiting."
Moto didn't answer right away. He thought about being twelve years old and standing at his father's shoulder, asking to go. He thought about what Asher used to say — you're too young — and how useless those words had felt.
"Let's start with the basics," he said. "You're not going anywhere you can't defend yourself first."
"So I can come?"
"I didn't say that."
She set her feet in the stance he'd shown her and looked at him evenly. He looked back.
"...We'll talk about it," he said.
"You don't visit old friends anymore, huh, Moto?"
He stopped.
Standing at the top of the riverbank, looking down at them both with an expression that gave nothing away, was Mukai. King Douglas's firstborn. He took in the scene — Moto, Amber, the training stance, the smoke that always sat somewhere at Moto's collar — and his eyes didn't change.
The river moved behind him, slow and quiet.