Gilded Ashes-Chapter 299: Day after tomorrow

The pieces suddenly clicked all together.

Raizen stared at the hall - at the dark shape behind it, the silhouette of the aircraft sitting against the platform like it had always been there. A stealth engine. Multi-ton capacity. Guards who didn’t flinch. Cargo being loaded or unloaded in the middle of the night, in the rain, when everyone was supposed to be asleep.

The Echelon weren’t storing their things in the hall.

They were storing them in the aircraft. Always moving. Always ready to disappear. Always safe.

"Saffi" he whispered. "It’s the aircraft. Everything - the files, artifacts, whatever they’re hiding - it’s all in there. That’s why the hall’s completely empty. That’s why the guards don’t care about the building. They’re protecting that."

Saffi’s eyes narrowed. He could see her overthinking again - like she always did, checking his words against the signals Alteea had flagged, against everything they’d observed. Her lips pressed together, then she nodded. Once, short.

Raizen shifted his weight from one foot to the other, not really knowing what to do.

"Remember" she said. Her voice was low and flat. "We’re only scouting now."

She looked at him for a few seconds, and as if it was absolutely necessary, she added:

"So don’t do anything stupid."

Raizen looked at her hand still clenched on his wrist. Then at the hall. Then back at her. "Yeah. I know."

Even if he agreed, the thought was already forming. He needed to get closer to the aircraft and the building. He needed to see it. If he was right - if the aircraft really was the Echelon’s mobile vault - then this was the only chance they’d get. Tonight. In the rain. While Eiden was still sleeping soundly on his mattress.

They moved along the outer edge of the clearing, staying behind the line of roots and undergrowth that bordered the main path. The guards’ flashlights traced their slow arcs on the far side of the hall. Predictable. Timed. Raizen counted the intervals between passes - eight seconds of darkness between each sweep. Enough to cross open ground if they were fast.

They reached an area close to the hall’s back without being seen.

Raizen scanned the area. A thick trunk rose beside the platform’s edge, its bark rough and wet, branches jutting out at irregular angles. The one he climbed with Hikari before.

He could do it again. So he reached for the first handhold.

Saffi touched his arm with the tips of her fingers. A small signal. She didn’t say anything. Just tilted her head toward the base of the platform - toward another trunk, thicker but more hidden. It didn’t go up. It went down, trunk curving beneath the platform itself, disappearing into the dark space underneath.

Raizen paused. Then he looked at the wet bark of the tree he was about to climb. The wood was wet and slippery. He looked at the rain still coming down hard. Looked at Saffi. She was right. Climbing in this rain was asking to slip. And from above, anyone who glanced up would see them silhouetted against the sky. But underneath - underneath, nobody would look. Nobody ever looked underneath.

He let go of the branch.

"Fine" he muttered. "Your way."

Saffi was already moving.

✦ ✦ ✦

Going down was way worse than Raizen expected.

The trunk beneath the platform was wide enough to hold him side by side, but that didn’t matter much when the bark was slick with moisture that had seeped through the cracks above. A thin, constant drip - not quite rain, not quite runoff - coated everything in water, making each surface feel like it was trying to make them slide.

Raizen went first. He turned his back to the trunk and pressed his shoulders flat against it, arms spread, fingers searching for anything solid. His feet found a ridge in the bark - narrow, maybe ten centimeters wide - and he put his weight on it slowly. It held. He shifted one foot sideways. Found another ridge. Shifted again.

Above, the underside of the platform stretched out like a low ceiling - rough stone and concrete, tangled with roots that had grown into it over decades. Some of the roots hung a bit loose, swaying slightly in the wind that funneled through the gap. Others were thick and anchored, solid enough to grab. The problem was telling which was which before you committed your weight.

Raizen reached for a vine to his left. It looked sturdy - dark, fibrous, woven into the bark. He wrapped his fingers around it and pulled.

It was indeed sturdy.

He moved another step. Below him, everything dissolved into fog. Thick, grey-white, swallowing the trunks and roots and everything else into a formless nothing. He couldn’t see the ground. He knew it was there - Ukai was built in trees, not floating - but the fog made it look like an endless void. Like the trunk he was clinging to simply went down forever, vanishing into something that had no bottom.

He swallowed. Hard.

His foot slipped. Just slightly - a half-inch slide on wet bark - and his stomach lurched. His fingers clamped down on the vine so hard he almost ripped it. For one terrible second, his weight shifted forward, away from the trunk.

He steadied himself. Pressed his back flat. Breathed slowly.

"Don’t look down again." He told himself.

Behind him, Saffi moved in near-silence. She had her eyes closed - fully closed, he realized when he glanced back. She navigated entirely by touch, both hands exploring the surface ahead of her before committing to each new grip. Every few seconds, she’d crack one eye open just long enough to check her hand placement, then squeeze it shut again.

They were maybe halfway across when her foot found nothing.

The vine she’d been following snapped. Her boot slid, and for a single, airless moment, she tilted sideways, her center of gravity drifting past the point of no return.

Raizen’s hand shot out.

He caught her forearm. His grip was clumsy - too high, too tight - but it locked. Saffi’s other hand still hung from a root. Raizen pulled, grunting from the effort, and Saffi swung back against the trunk with a dull thud.

Neither of them spoke. Saffi’s breathing was the only sound - quick, a bit panicked, still, forced steady through her nose. Her eyes were still closed. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

After a few seconds, she adjusted her grip. Nodded once, her small way of saying "thank you", then kept moving.

The minutes stretched. Every second felt like ten. The roots Raizen grabbed creaked under his weight, and each creak made him even more alert.

Then they finally reached the aircraft.

From where he was, Raizen could only see its underside - smooth, dark metal, close enough to touch if he jumped up. But it had no markings. No seams he could identify. Just a featureless hull, matte-finished, absorbing the faint light rather than reflecting it. The thing was hovering - completely still, connected to the edge of the stone platform. No gap between aircraft and platform. You could step from one to the other without breaking stride.

It was massive. Twenty meters long, at least. Maybe ten wide.

Raizen pressed himself against the underside of the platform again, wedging his feet into a thick junction of roots where the trunk wrapped against stone. The junction was solid - years of growth had fused wood and rock into something that could hold both of them without shifting. Saffi settled beside him, fingers locked around a vine, her shoulder pressed against his. Her breathing had leveled out. Controlled again.

They waited.

The engines hummed above them - a low, persistent vibration that passed through the metal, into the stone and into Raizen’s jaw. He could feel it in his teeth. It wasn’t loud, but it was constant. Then, beneath the hum - voices.

Some from inside the aircraft. Some from the platform above. Fragments, broken apart by the engine noise and the rain.

"...getting ready..."

A different voice, deeper: "...in two days..."

A third, almost too quiet to catch: "...weird kind of Eon, they said..."

Guards. Just guards. The cadence was casual - not briefing-room formal, not command-structure rigid. Just men talking to each other on a night shift they probably wished would end.

Raizen held his breath. Then one of the guards spoke louder. Clear enough that every word cut through the engine hum.

"I wonder where Professor Eiden is."

Raizen’s grip tightened on the root.

"He promised to be here by now. Told us the crate we’ll be getting ready for the day after tomorrow is more valuable than our lives."

A pause. The guard exhaled - the kind of exhale that carried a specific weight. Not disrespectful, exactly, but annoyed. The sound of a man who followed orders and didn’t always agree with how they were given.

"Hah - talk about arrogant."

The other guards murmured something. Agreement, maybe. Or just the tired sounds of men who’d heard this kind of talk before.

But Raizen didn’t hear any of that.

Eiden. Here. Tonight.

A crate more valuable than their lives.

The day after tomorrow.