The obsidian corridors of House Rotchy held the morning light like something folded into themselves — thin, silver slivers that barely found purchase on the polished stone. Jin walked with the measured ease of someone newly acquainted with a power that made the world thinner at the edges. His steps were quiet; the runes in the pillars sent back faint, answering pulses as if acknowledging the shift in him. He felt the world differently now. Not louder — sharper: the scent of incense at the far end of the west wing became a distinct note rather than a blur; the hum of a distant lantern was a string he could pluck. If he concentrated, the filaments of mana that threaded the palace like veins appeared clearer, like glass-wet lines under the skin of a living thing.
He lifted his left hand and watched the ring on his finger glow a soft, persistent red. The band was thin and simple, but the light within it hummed—an echo of promise, of tethered thought. Jin let his breath slow and smiled with a small, half-mocking curl at the corner of his mouth.
"So this," he murmured to himself, "is what it means to be half-god."
The feeling was strange and precise. Where before sight blurred with distance, now he could refine it: draw a line from a distant window and make the panes snap into focus, pick the thread of a candle's breath and watch it tremble. Power sat in him like a new instrument — eager and raw — and he liked the taste of its possibility. A tide of restless certainty rose up with the knowledge of movement and consequence. The ring pulsed once more at his finger and he felt a faint tug toward the sea of commitments he had not yet honored.
He exhaled and made a choice with the casual gravity of a man setting a course. "Atlas," he said out loud, more to mark his intention than to summon permission. "I'll go to Atlas."
The path to Naoko's chamber was a familiar one and yet it felt different in the new light of the day. Obsidian corridors always seemed to listen, but now they were keenly attentive to him — the small echoes of his steps, the barely available secrets of the walls. He reached the great door that led into Naoko's private room and knocked gently once.
"Enter, Jin," came Naoko's voice, measured and spare. Even after all this, her voice retained its austere edge, like silver struck in a temple.
He opened the door and stepped inside. The room received him with the cool, careful order of its mistress: a single chair, a low couch, the curtains drawn to let a thin ribbon of light mark the floor. Naoko sat where she always did — the very image of contained authority. Her silver hair gleamed like a blade's spine; her gray eyes — cold and reflective — watched him without turning the world into anything soft. Her posture was composed, the sort of stillness one practised to make purpose legible.
"What is it?" she asked. The question was more a blade than an inquiry.
Jin smiled, crimson eyes glittering with the half-prankster cadence he'd worn sometimes around his tutors. "Mother," he said, deliberately formal and maddening all at once, "I want to go to Atlas. I want to test my strength a little. There will be demons; I could use a few strikes."
Naoko's face did not register surprise. If anything, her coolness deepened into the familiar hardness that carved reason from impulse. "Very well." She folded her hands and watchful lines sharpened around her. "You may go. But do not be foolish. Your body has not yet grown used to this—god-energy is not merely a new coat you can slip on. The core is reformed; your mana center is rebuilt. It will take time. Your god-heart—what now lives inside you—cannot be thrown into strain without consequence."
Jin inclined his head, quiet as a man hearing a cautionary law. "I promise," he said. "I won't call on the god-energy. I'll use mana only."
Naoko was still, a statue of concentration. Her silver gaze flicked over him with a surgeon's assessment. "When I grafted the god-heart into you," she said slowly, voice like a ledger, "I intended you to forsake Nihil and take up another sword—one of ruin and decree, crafted for the new energy inside you. But with Elizabeth and Tishara returned to the palace, they will be able to forge something different. A weapon built not solely for destruction but for alignment with what your body can bear."
There was a small, human muscle of reaction in Jin — a softness that came out as a stubbornness rather than argument. "Mother," he said, quiet and almost pleading, "I prefer Nihil. It was your sword. I trained with it first. I won't give it up for another just because something new was put into me. If anything, refine Nihil. Let it become what I need. It is the first thing you gave me to learn with. I want it to be mine still."
Naoko's eyes lingered on him. For a long moment the room seemed to narrow down to that exchange. Her voice, when it came, wore the coldness of command and the brittle edge of a caution sharpened on memory.
"Is this weakness?" she asked, not cruel but direct. "Are you clinging to the past because you cannot stand the present? I forbade emotions. They bind and corrode resolve. You are not to let attachments grow—especially for battle-forged things that wrap themselves around a heart. I will not accept sentiment."
Her words were blunt as steel. Jin felt their force but smiled in return — not in defiance but in a small, bright rebellion that was his alone.
"You're right," he admitted. "I will not let feelings root me to anyone. Not to Rina. Not to Sion. Not to Elizabeth or Tishara. You are different, Mother. You are my mom ."
Naoko's gaze held his with the unblinking calm of a cold ocean. For a moment the air between them hummed, an unspoken ledger of power and possession. "Then swear it," she ordered, voice flat. "Everything else will be cut away. You will remember Estelle only as a lesson, not a shackle. She disobeyed orders that exposed god-power to the mortal world. That is what cost her life. Remember that. You are not the child who blamed himself. You are not responsible. Do not be bound by grief."
Jin closed his eyes briefly, felt the memory of the girl his mother had named all the same — a pale, bright existence that had suffered and vanished. He understood why Naoko said what she did. Estelle's defiance had been fatal and very public; the lessons were severe. He exhaled and opened his eyes, and the resolution that settled into his posture was less a concession than a pact.
"I am yours," he said with quiet gravity. "I swear it — by my name."
There was a pause so long that the lamp on Naoko's table seemed to settle into the silence and the carved runes in the room whispered like distant sea. The air tasted of incense and iron.
"Good," Naoko murmured at last. She had the appearance of a ruler who accepted a black truth and folded it away, like a map creased for later use. At once a faint violet gate shimmered mid-room — an arc of space folding into itself, a doorway old as coded rites and younger than dawn-light. "Enter," she said simply. "This will send you to Atlas."
Jin looked from the portal to his mother. For a moment a childish impulse — or the ghost of one — crossed him. Without thinking, without ceremony, he closed the short distance between them and folded his arms around Naoko in a sudden, impulsive embrace. His forehead rested against the smooth metal of her chest armor; for a breath he let himself be small and held. Naoko did not stiffen to push him away. She did not press the contact into anything warm or soft; she remained as she always was — composed, measured. Yet she did not withdraw.
Then, as quickly as it had come, Jin released her. He stepped back and turned toward the gate. Naoko watched him move; her expression did not betray whatever moved beneath that immaculate stillness. With a single motion he stepped into the violet light, and it closed like a blink — a seam cut in space reunited and sealed.
Silence sank back into the chamber. Naoko sat very still, the faintest shift in her lips the only change anyone could have pointed to. For a heartbeat, a small, private thing — as fragile as a flame sheltered from wind — lifted on her face: a slight upturn at one corner of her mouth. It was quick and almost apologetic, an unmeant warmth that left the rest of her unchanged.
She breathed, soft and controlled, and the smallest sound escaped her: a whispered word that might have been a scold or an expression folded into affection. "Idiot," she murmured, and the syllable was neither sharp nor cruel. It was less than a laugh and more than a reprimand: the briefest proof that something in her had shifted, if only for the brief width of an afternoon.
The violet gate's afterlight faded, and the chamber resumed its ordered hush. Outside the palace, the corridors waited with their patient runes, while the ring on Jin's finger pulsed faintly — a small, glowing compass that tugged him toward an island and a future he had chosen, for better or worse. Jin won't care about that because Jin is basically evil
---------------------
Heat: Thanks so much for reading, guys