Gilded Ashes-Chapter 334: Kenzo’s Way

They stood on actual ground.

Raizen couldn’t remember the exact last time his feet had touched earth that wasn’t a platform, a bridge, or a rooftop. The forest floor beneath Ukai was dark and soft, covered in decades of moss that compressed underfoot with a soft, spongy give. The trunks rose around them like pillars in a cathedral with no ceiling, their bark wide enough that five people could stand behind one and disappear. Above, far above, the underside of Ukai’s platforms formed a distant wooden sky - walkways and bridges and the dark bellies of buildings, all connected by the massive trunks that held them aloft. Lanterns glowed up there, faint and amber, and the sounds of the city drifted down in fragments - a voice, a hammer strike, the squeak of a wheel that might have been the unicycle boy on another delivery.

Down here, though, it was quiet. Green, dim and enormous.

Kenzo had insisted that whatever they were about to do needed more space than the Academy’s training platforms could offer, and looking around at the open ground between the trunks - twenty, thirty meters of clear forest floor – with tall roots here and there - in every direction, Raizen understood why.

They went back to the house first. Raizen collected his twin swords, checking the edges out of habit and adjusting the sheaths across his back. Kenzo retrieved his hammer from beside the door, lifting it one-handed with the casual ease of someone picking up a walking stick. Eiden still wasn’t home, his room corner exactly as it had been that morning - bed made, shoes by the door, everything in its place. Atman had returned to the Academy, sighing with the theatrical exhaustion of a man who still had afternoon classes to teach and would rather be doing literally anything else. Saffi had gone with him, saying she wanted to wander through the greenhouses again - though Raizen suspected the greenhouses were secondary to whatever she was actually thinking about. The lizard’s words, maybe. Built for something specific. Or the failed summoning. Or the festival. Knowing Saffi, probably all three at once, running in parallel, being cross-referenced against each other in that "cathedral of a mind" the lizard had described.

The walk down from Ukai’s platforms to the actual forest floor had taken almost twenty minutes - a winding staircase carved into one of the older trunks, the steps worn smooth by centuries of feet, the walls narrowing and widening as the trunk’s interior shape dictated. Despite Raizen’s protests, they didn’t take the elevators or rising platforms. But the walk down was surprisingly pleasant - the deeper they went, the quieter it got, the city’s noise thinning out slowly until the only sounds were their boots on wood and the distant drip of water somewhere below.

It was around five in the evening now, and the light filtering through the canopy had turned from grey-white to grey-gold.

Raizen’s mind drifted. Unconsciously, the way it always did when he had a quiet moment and nothing to anchor his thoughts, it went to Hikari. He wondered what she was doing right now, whether she’d left Ukai already or was still somewhere in the city. He wondered if Keahi was with her, and if they were heading back to Neoshima together, and what Hikari’s face looked like when she walked through a forest this old - if she’d look up at the trunks the way he did, or if she just wouldn’t bother.

He wondered if she ever thought about him during her quiet moments. The question sat in his chest with a weight that felt a bit too heavy, but he let it sit there for a second before pushing it away.

The lizard shifted in his pocket. A sleepy readjustment, nothing more. But the small movement brought Raizen back to the present - the forest floor, the massive trunks, the dim light, and the large man standing across from him who was about to teach him something that could potentially completely change the way he fought.

Kenzo’s hammer hit the ground - a single, heavy thud that sent a vibration through the soft earth and shook the leaves off a fern three meters away. Kenzo had driven the hammerhead into the soil like a stake, and it stood there, handle pointing upward, while he rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck from side to side with a series of cracks that sounded a bit too loud for someone his age.

He pulled the hammer back up, rested it across his shoulder and looked at Raizen.

"Well, Raizen" he said, "I’m not going to teach you the way the Academy students learn it."

Raizen set his feet. "What’s that supposed to mean?"

Kenzo smiled, genuine and completely unconcerned with Raizen’s comfort.

"The Academy teaches physical reinforcement as a theory first" Kenzo said. "Weeks of lecture, diagrams and charts showing Eon flow through the nervous system, practice sessions where students stand still and try to channel into one muscle at a time. Very controlled. Very methodical. Very slow." He rotated the hammer in his grip, the heavy head swinging in a lazy circle. "By the time students actually use reinforcement in a real fight, they’ve spent so long studying it as an abstract concept that their bodies treat it like homework instead of instinct. They think about it instead of feeling it, and in a fight, the gap between thinking and feeling is the gap between living and dying."

He straightened his back. His posture shifted - the lazy, post-meal ease dissolving, replaced by something balanced and alert. His grip on the hammer adjusted, sliding down the handle to a combat position.

"...So I’m going to teach you my way."

Raizen pulled his twin swords from their harness. Slowly. The blades cleared the sheaths with a quiet hiss of metal, and he settled into a loose guard, the kind that kept his options open and his weight balanced. His face carried an expression that said he had absolutely no idea what Kenzo’s way meant, but was going to commit to it regardless of what it cost him.

"So" Kenzo said, rolling the hammer off his shoulder and letting it swing to his side, the heavy head hanging at knee height, ready. His eyes were bright and focused and thoroughly entertained. "Ready?"

Raizen nodded.

"Good. Try to hit me."