The training yard was quiet in the way empty spaces never truly were.
Breath. The soft creak of cloth. The distant murmur of wind moving over the palace walls.
Kei opened one eye.
Then the other.
He looked at the three figures seated around him — still, composed, utterly unmoved — and couldn't stop the grin from crawling up the side of his face.
"Are you guys already able to sense your chi?" he asked, breaking the silence like a stone through still water. "Because I can."
*Smack.*
Two knuckles landed on his skull at almost exactly the same time. Hori from the left. Peiren from the right. The coordination was almost impressive.
"**Owwwww**—" Kei grabbed his head with both hands, wincing. "This actually hurts, you know."
Across the yard, Hayatte kept her eyes closed. Her lips pressed into a thin line — the particular expression of someone fighting very hard not to react to something.
"Kei." Hori's voice was flat. "Get serious."
He got serious.
Mostly.
---
Meanwhile, in the imperial palace—
Smoke curled toward the ceiling in a slow, unhurried ribbon.
The Grand Lord exhaled.
"This generation," he said, watching the smoke of his cigarette dissolve into the high air of the court room, "is known as the last generation. Whether our world is saved — or destroyed — depends entirely on how we guide them."
The Grand Regent, Seshomaru, sat to one side. The Regent, Anoki, sat across from the Grand Lord with the particular stillness of a man who was thinking harder than he was letting on.
"Then we must move quickly." The Grand Regent's voice was measured. "Both in training, and in the missions that need to be carried out. If my estimates are correct, we have four years — give or take — before the Sandlands make their final move. We cannot afford to be caught off guard."
Anoki looked at the Grand Lord. Something unspoken moved across his face — a weight he hadn't quite learned to carry yet.
"My Lord," he said. "To guide the prophesied last generation... it is no small thing. What if we fail?" A beat of quiet. "What if they truly do become the last?"
The Grand Lord looked up at the ceiling. He drew on his cigarette, long and slow, and released the smoke into the silence between them.
Then he looked at Anoki.
"Do you know why I asked you to lead a squad?"
Anoki said nothing.
"Because when you agreed, I already knew how it would go." The Grand Lord's voice held no flattery in it — only the quiet certainty of a man who had long since learned to read people. "And the four you chose — Kei, Peiren, Hayatte, Hori." He let the names settle. "They will be a fine team. I trust that."
The Grand Regent stood. He inclined his head toward the Grand Lord with the efficient grace of a man who had somewhere to be.
"Then I'll take my leave. There are matters that require my attention."
He walked out.
Anoki remained.
In the quiet that followed, the Grand Lord exhaled once more, then spoke without looking at him.
"Kei and Peiren — I won't pretend it'll be easy. Getting those two to come along friendly with one another." A faint pause. "But I think you'll bring them up right."
"My Lord." Anoki straightened slightly. "I'll train them well. I promise. I won't fail."
The Grand Lord rose from his seat. He walked toward the corridor without hurry, already somewhere else in his mind.
"A new age is dawning," he said. "Everything that unfolds from this point forward will be engraved in history."
He didn't look back.
The court room doors closed behind him, and Anoki was left alone in the silence.
---
The meeting had ended.
---
Seshomaru walked without urgency.
His footsteps were steady on the stone corridor — not the strides of a man rushing toward something, but the measured pace of one who had learned that the world would still be there when he arrived. He had left the court room ahead of Anoki, and he had no particular destination in mind. Just walking. The kind that powerful people do when they need a moment before the world begins asking things of them again.
The path took him past the Regent's house.
He heard them before he saw them.
He stopped at the edge of the yard.
They hadn't noticed him yet.
Without Anoki present, something in the dynamic between them had loosened — the careful posture of students performing for a teacher had given way to something more honest. More real. This was how they moved when no one was watching.
*Interesting,* he thought.
Peiren was off to one side. Separate, the way he always seemed to be — working through something alone with a focus that clearly did not invite conversation. Hori and Hayatte were moving together, their rhythm familiar and practiced, the kind that came from genuine hours rather than drills.
And Kei—
Kei was in the centre of the yard, throwing himself at something clearly beyond his current level. Pushing at the outer edge of what his body knew. Falling short. Hitting the ground. Standing back up. Trying again.
Seshomaru watched.
Not the technique. The technique was raw — unpolished in places it had no business being unpolished for someone his age. What he was watching was something else entirely.
The way the boy stood back up.
The look in his eyes when he did it.
Hori noticed him first.
She didn't say anything, but her stillness changed — some small, almost invisible shift in attention. Hayatte caught it. Peiren's gaze moved sideways without his head turning.
Then Kei turned around.
He looked at the stranger standing at the edge of the yard, hands loose at his sides, watching them with the unhurried ease of someone who had every right to be exactly where he was. No uniform that carried meaning. No marking that announced anything. Just a young man who had appeared from nowhere, looking at them like they were something he was quietly measuring.
Kei walked over.
"You've been watching us."
Seshomaru looked at him. There was a calm around the Grand Regent that was not performed — it was simply there, the way it existed in people who had long since stopped needing to prove anything to anyone.
"Your left side drops when you commit," Seshomaru said. "Every time."
Kei's jaw tightened.
"Who are you?"
Seshomaru didn't answer.
*Idiot,* Peiren thought from across the yard, watching Kei square up to a stranger without a second thought. His expression didn't change. But his hands had stopped moving.
Something shifted behind Kei's eyes. The squad recognised it — they had seen it before. That particular stillness that settled over him just before he stopped talking altogether.
"Fight me."
It wasn't quite a question.
Seshomaru regarded him for a moment. Something moved at the corner of his expression — almost imperceptible. Not amusement, exactly. Not anything with a clean name.
"Come then," he said quietly.
---
Kei moved first.
No chi. No power drawn up from somewhere deep. Just his body, and everything Anoki and the academy had built into him across months of relentless training. He was fast — *genuinely* fast — and he came in with the kind of controlled aggression that made it clear to anyone watching that this wasn't recklessness. This was commitment.
Seshomaru didn't shift his stance.
The first exchange lasted less than two seconds. Kei committed to the strike. Seshomaru adjusted — barely, almost lazily — and Kei's own momentum carried him through empty space where a body should have been. A single redirection, clean and almost offhand. Kei caught himself. Reset. Came again.
The second time was worse.
He had read the adjustment from the first exchange and tried to account for it — and Seshomaru simply let him account for something that wasn't going to happen, and put him on the ground with a leg sweep so clean it was almost gentle.
Kei hit the dirt.
Got up.
Peiren had stopped entirely. His eyes moved between them now, reading the geometry of every exchange with the quiet analytical focus he applied to everything. Hori and Hayatte stood motionless.
Kei came again. And again. And again. Each time with the same intention burning in his eyes, each time finding that Seshomaru had already read that intention before Kei's body had fully expressed it. No chi. No power. Just a total and complete read of every movement Kei made — and an economy of response so precise it looked almost unkind in its simplicity.
A kick, redirected at exactly the wrong moment, threw his weight off-axis.
A shift, subtle as breathing, turned his own momentum against him.
A final movement — unhurried, precise, without a single wasted motion — put Kei flat on his back in the dirt with the sky above him and all the air knocked cleanly out of his lungs.
He lay there.
Then he started to get up.
Seshomaru watched him do it.
He looked at the others. Peiren with his measuring eyes. Hori and Hayatte standing side by side, completely still. Then back to Kei — upright again, breathing hard, not saying a word, just looking back at him with that same thing in his expression that no amount of hitting the ground seemed to touch.
Seshomaru held the look a moment longer than he needed to.
Then he turned, and walked away without a word.
The thought moved through him as he went — quiet, private, entirely his own.
*So these are the last generation.*
*...I hope they save us.*
---
He was nearly out of sight when footsteps came from the opposite direction.
Anoki rounded the corner of the house and stopped. His eyes moved across the yard in a single sweep — Kei standing in the middle of the training ground, a particular kind of dust on his clothes, the squad's silence, the direction every one of them was still looking.
He followed their gaze.
Understood.
A beat of quiet settled over the yard like something held.
Anoki looked back at Kei.
"That," he said, "was the Grand Regent."
No one spoke.
"Get up straight," Anoki said — and walked past them all toward the house.
---