Pressure didn't arrive with alarms.
It arrived with routine.
Royushi Kairo noticed it while brushing his teeth.
The mirror reflected a version of him that looked… normal. Same messy hair. Same half-lidded eyes. Same faint scar near his jaw that he only remembered when his hand brushed it by accident. Nothing about him screamed anomaly. Nothing about him suggested a problem.
And yet the toothpaste tube trembled slightly in his hand.
Not fear.
Anticipation.
That scared him more.
He rinsed, wiped his face, and stared at the reflection longer than his schedule allowed. The Citadel's strictness loved punctuality, and Royushi's inner clock hated being late. There was a ridiculous checklist in the back of his head—wake, stretch, brush, pretend to care—and the part of him that actually kept it had begun to feel as if the list itself could be judged.
"Don't do anything stupid today," he muttered to the man in the mirror.
The reflection didn't answer.
Echo did.
"That depends entirely on how you define 'stupid.'" Rikishu's hologram blinked into existence, lounging against the ceiling as if he owned the lighting fixtures.
Royushi flinched. "Do you have to appear while I'm vulnerable?"
"You're brushing your teeth," Rikishu said, sounding as if he was sampling a fine insult. "If that qualifies as vulnerability, the Citadel has larger systemic issues."
"I meant mentally," Royushi said, spitting a final foam into the sink because dignity had its final stand.
"Yes." Rikishu's face was thin with the kind of dry amusement that was immediately infuriating. "That too."
Royushi capped the toothpaste with force that made the cap click louder than necessary. "So what's today's disaster?"
Rikishu tilted his head. "Today, the Citadel decides whether you are an inconvenience… or an investment."
Royushi paused, toothbrush in hand, and watched a drip of water travel like a tiny, embarrassing comet down the mirror. "I don't like either option."
"No one does," Rikishu said.
He walked out of the quarters with a pocketful of awkwardness and a mouth that tasted vaguely of mint and existential dread.
Morning Assembly
The central hall already buzzed before the bell finished tolling. Not louder this time—the Citadel's acoustics never let noise simply happen—but more focused. Conversations folded and reformed around him like water moving around a rock. Eyes skimmed him briefly and then darted away, pretending as all instructed citizens did: not see what they were looking at.
Royushi kept to the back. There are advantages to being invisible: fewer people asked for opinions, fewer people asked him to hold banners, fewer people expected speeches. He slouched with practiced nonchalance, which he had read somewhere was called "performative indifference" and felt suspiciously athletic.
"Stop acting bored," Rikishu murmured.
"I am bored," Royushi lied.
"You are nervous."
"I can multitask."
"That's not how emotions work."
He wanted to tell Rikishu to stop correcting his metaphors. He wanted to tell the hall to stop breathing in the way that sounded very much like an audience warming up. He wanted to be anywhere else. He did none of those things. Instead, he breathed in and out and kept his hands in his pockets.
Announcements rolled on—rotations, supply inventories, new directives that sounded important and also like slogans. Then his name was called, and the room did something subtle: it paused.
"Royushi Kairo—additional evaluations scheduled."
The words hovered for a second longer than any other name. A murmur washed through the crowd. Not loud, not aggressive; more like a weather change. Curious faces did not look malicious, exactly, but they looked like they had been given a puzzle with missing pieces and no instructions.
"I hate being special," Royushi muttered.
"You aren't," Rikishu said. "You're inconvenient."
"That's worse."
He tried to imagine the difference. "An inconvenience sounds like a delayed train."
"You mean like a train deliberately moving in odd rhythms to confuse the timetable."
"Exactly," Royushi said. "I prefer the train metaphor."
Rikishu did not laugh. That bothered Royushi more than it should have.
Ishara Veyl — Perspective
Ishara had never liked guessing. Predictions were sloppy things that smeared intelligence into superstition. She preferred facts: posture, breath cadence, visible Shuryoku flow. She'd mapped more than a few personalities into clean graphs; arrogance was a jagged spike, desperation an erratic signal, discipline a steady hum. Royushi was a blank space in her system, and blanks bothered her more than any obvious error.
She watched him during warm-up drills. He moved, when he moved, with surgical precision and then—like a film jump cut—he would hesitate, mistime a step, or let an otherwise fluid circulation loop collapse at the last second. Mistakes, yes, but curated: failures chosen and performed.
"You're doing it again," she said later, catching up to him near the equipment racks. The corridor smelled faintly of oil and sweat and the permanent tang of performance.
"Doing what?"
"Playing dumb." She said it not asan accusation but an inventory.
"I am dumb."
She rolled her eyes. "No. You're tired."
He blinked as if the word had been thrown, not at him, but into the air where it might land and be retrieved. "What?"
"You look like someone holding up too much for too long."
He looked away. "That's oddly accurate."
"I'm observant."
"Yes," he said. "You've mentioned that."
She folded her arms. "They're watching you."
"I know," Royushi said too casually.
"They're not curious anymore. They're deciding." The shift in tone made the word precise and cold.
He exhaled. "Yeah."
"…Do you want help?" she asked after a moment.
He hesitated in a way that said more than any yes or no. When he finally answered, it was small. "I don't know. I don't even know what 'help' would look like right now."
Ishara looked at him for a long time, the corner of her mouth softening. "But if you fall, I'm not stepping back."
It wasn't heroic. It wasn't a vow. It was a placement of a hand without drama. Royushi's chest made a tiny, surprised noise, which he tried to pass off as a cough.
"Thank you," he said, which was as close to a proper phrase as he got.
She left him with the feeling that she had done more than offer words and less than take an oath. It was their kind of truce: practical, immediate, and with no future promises written in ink.
The Evaluation
The evaluation room could have been a chapel built for dispassion. Bright, sterile lights. Two-way glass with no obvious cracks. Chairs are set in careful alignment. Royushi sat with his hands flat on his knees and felt like an exhibit.
Three instructors faced him: Halvek, an old man whose uniform carried medals like bookmarks; an analyst whose eyes were precise and tired; and a recorder that hummed. The drone whispered data up into the ceiling with the efficiency of a pest, and Halvek's mouth pursed as if he'd tasted something sour.
"Relax," Rikishu whispered from a corner where the hologram had chosen to be less intrusive than usual.
"I feel like I already confessed to something," Royushi muttered.
Halvek leaned forward. "Cadet Kairo. Brief answers."
Royushi tilted his head as if he could mechanically un-layer the questions. He had rehearsed some lines—sarcasm, nonchalance—but the air in the room was a different currency. He emptied his mouth of rehearsed nonsense and gave truth, filtered only with the exact amount of usable honesty.
"Your recent performance has been… contradictory," Halvek said.
"Yes," Royushi agreed.
"You demonstrate advanced control without corresponding output."
"Yes."
"You fail basic drills immediately afterward."
"Yes.
"You survive encounters that should incapacitate you."
"…Yes."
Halvek's thin lips drew into a line. "Explain."
Royushi considered lies—neat, plausible, comforting lies. He rejected them in part because speech felt like a responsibility he hadn't yet consented to.
"I don't like being watched," he said. "I don't perform well when people expect things from me."
The analyst raised an eyebrow. "That's not an explanation."
"It's the closest one I have," Royushi said.
Halvek's expression hardened. "The Citadel exists to manage threats. Unmanaged potential is itself a threat. Do you consider yourself one?"
He thought of circulation, of pressure, of a vanished man who had chosen to leave his tools in a place that said, in effect, trust me with this. He thought of Sevran and the phrase that felt like a blade being slowly sharpened—property. He thought of Ishara's soundless vow.
"No," he said honestly. "But I could become one if mishandled."
The analyst—the one whose eyes always found the heart of any façade—leaned back and laughed just once. It was unexpected, a quick sound, like a glass breaking politely. "He's self-aware. That's rare."
Halvek did not look amused. "You're dismissed."
"Already?" Royushi asked, surprised to have passed through one tribunal with so little bloodshed.
"For now," Halvek said.
Outside, the analyst whispered to Halvek, a dry observation that was not meant to be kind: "He's scared."
"And that," Halvek replied with that slow, old certainty, "is what makes him dangerous."
Royushi walked out feeling the weight of that sentence settle against him, heavier than any medal.
Training Goes Wrong
Patrols had a way of rearranging expectations. The assignment that afternoon was reassigned twice, the route shortened, and a team member pulled at the last minute. There's a winter in the Citadel that isn't weather but administration: schedules chilled to remove surprises. Royushi noticed the alterations like a dog notices a shifted scent trail.
"This isn't random," Rikishu said the moment they left. The hologram—once again—hung like a thought in the corner of Royushi's vision.
"It never is," Royushi answered.
Three hostiles hit them in the narrow corridor that connected old warehouses—a quick ambush meant to test improvisation, not slaughter. They moved cleanly, like knives with choreography.
Royushi paused in the middle of it.
"Wait," he said aloud. The word felt absurdly domestic amidst training chaos. The squad glanced at him. "I need a second."
"Now's not—" a teammate began.
"I know," Royushi said. He stepped forward instead of backward.
Circulation started, then stuttered on purpose; the flow he used as camouflage hiccupped and haltingly corrected. The first strike clipped his shoulder, a bright flare of pain that made him hiss. He tasted metal.
"Okay, that was too much realism," he said to himself under the noise.
Echo's voice was sharp: Focus.
He redirected the second attack—imperfect, human, messy. He slipped, then recovered, then staggered into a position he'd never practiced. His defense held because it was not clever; it was improvisation. The fight ended with the hostiles retreating in coordination, having been made to look foolish by a squad that did not execute a single flawless maneuver.
Royushi dropped to a knee afterwards and breathed like someone who had run a race they had planned to lose.
"I hate this," he muttered.
Ishara reached him faster than his own relief. "That wasn't training," she said.
"No." He wiped his hands through his hair. "That was pressure."
"You can't keep doing this alone," she said sharply.
"I'm not," he replied. He didn't know the truth of that yet, which made the answer honest through absence.
"I don't know who I'm allowed to lean on yet," he admitted.
She didn't let go of his arm. "Then lean on me."
He wanted to say something witty. His mouth produced, instead, a soft: "I'll try not to be a burden."
"Don't be melodramatic," she snapped. "Just don't die on me, and we'll call it a deal."
He laughed, a short thing that sounded like a crack in ice. It made her huff.
Sevran Axiom — Elsewhere
Sevran watched through a web of intent. He didn't look so much as listen—listening here meant parsing vibrations in Shuryoku that to others would have been meaningless noise. He perceived a fluctuation: inconsistent, punctuated, deliberately awkward. It was like hearing someone clear their throat in a library of whispers.
A smile touched his lips, small and efficient.
"Rikishu," he said softly into a room thatdid not need voices. "You always preferred fragile subjects."
He rose from his chair—if it could be called a chair; a throne would overstate the archaic things he liked—and turned to the map-lattice that shimmered in the air. Royushi's signal pulsed dimly, like a lantern behind frosted glass.
"You chose someone who doesn't want to be chosen," Sevran mused. The fact seemed beautiful to him, like a paradox wrapped in silk.
"And you," he added, steepling his hands, "have taught him to fail in ways that sound convincing. Intriguing."
He would increase the weight. Not by direct assault—not yet—but by slow, administrative pressure: the Citadel's slow hands, the careers of observers, rumors that congealed into policy. He liked layers; he liked opponents who buckled at inconvenience rather than brute force. Such people were easier to refine.
"Let's see how loud he becomes," he said. The words were not a threat exactly. They were instructions, both to others and to the inevitable future.
Night
He lay awake, listening to the Citadel breathe. The lights dimmed in the corridors like eyes going sleepy. He could hear Ishara's footsteps moving away down the hall, measured and sure. He could hear old men's murmurs and new rules being whispered into compliance. He could hear, threaded beneath it all, a faint circulation sound—a little like a river under ice.
Rikishu appeared without fanfare, as if appearing were simply a more honest form of visiting than any lightless phone call.
"You did well," Rikishu said.
Royushi laughed, a tired, ragged thing. "That's the nicest thing you've ever said."
"I don't intend to repeat it often."
"Figures."
Silence lay its hand on them.
"…I'm scared," Royushi admitted.
Rikishu's face softened, infinitesimally. "Good."
"That's it?"
"Yes," Rikishu said. "Fear means you're here."
Royushi considered the statement. Fear felt like cold metal pressed to his ribs, and the not-very-pleasant knowledge that he had been holding something up long enough for his muscles to ache.
"What are we doing?" he asked finally.
Rikishu's hologram looked out at nothing, as if scanning timelines. "We are making noise that sounds accidental. We are teaching you to be wrong convincingly. We are letting the world try to name what it cannot yet understand."
"And when it names me?" Royushi asked.
"Then you will decide whether to keep the name." Rikishu's voice dropped. "And decide whether you will answer to it."
He lay back and stared at the ceiling until the stars on the Citadel's dome blurred. Pressure had arrived not with sirens, but with choices. The question at the center of it felt older than the Citadel's walls.
What are you going to do now?
He did not have a ready answer. He had a breath that moved with purpose for the first time. That, he suspected, would have to be enough for tonight.
Somewhere, a corridor light hummed. Far away, a man called Sevran plotted the slow tightening of a map. Between breaths, between failures, between guarded laughter and whispered vows, a small current kept moving.
It was easier than he'd thought—and harder than he'd feared—to be present.
For the first time in a very long time, that scared him more than anything else.