Scene 1: Silent Eyes
—-: Rin
The sound of a wrench clinking off metal echoed far too loud in the open-air training yard.
Rin flicked her goggles up and cursed under her breath. “Tighten your cross-struts, Kazuki. That lurch on corner three nearly bent the frame again.”
Across the tarmac, Ren’s voice called from inside the Dart’s cockpit, “Throttle flow’s spiking again! Hana, are you seeing this on the rear feed?”
Hana’s voice, sharp and controlled, cut back through the steam: “Yeah — venting too early. I’ll patch it.”
Just another day of prep.
Except it wasn’t.
They were being watched.
On the far end of the field, the Kyokuto team stood in formation. Six figures in matte black uniforms with mirrored visors — no faces, no movement, no noise. The tallest one, Rei Kurosawa, stood with arms folded behind his back, the Onikaze looming like a shadow behind them. Every so often, one of them scribbled on a narrow clipboard or tapped a pad that looked suspiciously like a flight data recorder.
They weren’t clapping. They weren’t even blinking.
They were studying them like prey.
Rin’s shoulders burned beneath her harness as she adjusted her vest straps, the heat rising from the pavement making the air feel thick as syrup.
Ms. Shiraishi crossed the field with a forced smile — all tight eyes and clipped heels. “Just observers, not evaluators,” she had said at morning briefing.
Rin hadn’t believed her then.
She definitely didn’t now.
“Is it just me,” Jiro muttered nearby, “or does it feel like they’re taking notes on our breathing patterns?”
“They are,” Mei said flatly, not even looking up from her wrenchwork.
Ren hopped down from the Dart’s rear step-ladder, sweat streaking one side of his neck. “Should we… wave?”
“Absolutely not,” Hana hissed.
He waved anyway. Big. Awkward. Friendly.
None of the Kyokuto team responded.
“They’re not waving back,” Ren mumbled.
Saki, snapping candids from under a parasol like it was a battlefield photo shoot, leaned over to whisper, “Because you waved like a tourist in a war zone.”
Jiro, now holding a clipboard upside down, added, “Pretty sure one of them blinked just to signal ‘terminate.’”
“They haven’t spoken all day,” Rin said under her breath.
“They don’t have to,” Mei murmured, tightening a bolt. “They already know what they came to find.”
A sharp buzz sounded from the Onikaze. Just a shift in its cooling system. But Rin flinched anyway.
Her mother used to say: The loud ones crash. It’s the quiet ones who win.
And this team?
They didn’t make a sound.
Scene 2: "Ghost in the Gearbox"
—-: Mei
The click of her socket wrench echoed louder than it should have inside the rear stabilizer cradle of the Silver Dart. Mei adjusted the torque—just three notches lower—and twisted.
Click. Whirr. Breathe. Click.
Keep the rhythm. Machines don’t ask questions. Machines don’t remember.
But people do.
“Still doing your own maintenance?”
The voice froze her mid-turn.
It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t mocking. It wasn’t even surprised.
Just familiar.
Mei slid out from beneath the stabilizer, wiping her palms on a rag already soaked with oil and chalk dust. She didn’t look up. She didn’t have to.
The glint of mirror visor. The pristine Kyokuto jacket. The stillness of someone who didn’t need to make an entrance.
“Didn’t expect to see you again,” the pilot said. A pause. “Then again, no one expected you’d fly again. Not after what happened to Akio.”
A pulse spiked behind Mei’s ribs — quick, sharp, brutal.
She stood slowly. Her hands were perfectly steady. Her voice, not quite.
“I’m not flying.”
“You're here.” Another pause. “That’s close enough.”
The hangar around them buzzed faintly — fans, pressure valves, distant drills. The mechanical lullaby of safety. But Mei heard it now — the sound underneath the sound. The way the Kyokuto pilot’s breathing never shifted. Never faltered.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said at last.
“And yet.” A small tilt of the helmet. “Still patching up ships that shouldn’t work. Still trying to fix things no one else dares to touch.”
She didn’t rise to it. Not out loud.
Inside, though, her thoughts crackled like stripped wiring.
They don’t know what happened.
They weren’t in the cockpit.
They didn’t watch it spiral.
They didn’t scream his name when the lift engine seized—
Stop. Stop.
She turned away, back to the Dart, voice flat as coolant. “I don’t have to explain anything to someone still hiding behind a mask.”
That one hit. Just a little.
She didn’t need to see their eyes to feel the flinch.
The pilot took a step back. “Kyokuto’s not interested in excuses. Only outcomes.”
“And you’ll lose,” Mei said, not loud, not cruel—just certain.
Because deep down, that’s what scared them most.
She went back to work without another glance, dropping the socket head with a calm clink onto the tray.
The other pilot didn’t reply.
When she looked up again, the hangar was empty.
But the air was colder.
And the ghosts were awake.
Scene 3: “Bird-Brained Engineering”
—-: Ren
The chalk snapped in half. Again.
Ren blinked at the broken stub in his hand and muttered under his breath, “Fifth one today… I swear they’re getting more brittle.”
“Or maybe your grip is just panicked,” Hana said beside him without looking up, eyes sharp behind her goggles as she erased a set of gear ratio calculations and began rewriting them—again.
Ms. Shiraishi had barely made it ten minutes into today’s lecture on dual-prop torque balance before Hana and Rin had hijacked the entire class with a full-blown board argument.
“The dual-chain system destabilizes at high Gs. The left prop would overcompensate during torque drop,” Rin said, her tone like a scalpel. “Unless you’re flying straight up a waterfall, it’s inefficient.”
“It’s only inefficient if you’re expecting the system to fly like yours,” Hana shot back. “The Dart’s frame flexes, Rin. It absorbs strain, it doesn’t fight it. Like a reed in wind.”
“The sky doesn’t care how poetic you are.”
“Neither does engineering.”
They glared at each other, chalk dust in their hair, equations scrawled across two-thirds of the blackboard. The class was split — some pretending to take notes, most pretending not to be invested.
Jiro leaned over to Ren and whispered, “Ten galdens says Hana throws a wrench by the end.”
“Twenty if Rin catches it,” Taiga chimed in from the back, mid-crunch on a snack that was technically illegal in class.
Ren didn’t say anything. His eyes were locked on the center of the board, where two arrows—one from each girl—had been drawn, colliding mid-diagram with an angry scribble that looked vaguely like an explosion.
He stepped forward, grabbed a different piece of chalk, and without thinking, drew a quick series of loops and curves through the mess.
Feathers. Wings. Bird skeleton.
Then a spiraled prop path along the edge—resembling a falcon’s dive.
Silence.
Hana stared. “Is that…?”
Rin narrowed her eyes. “A bird.”
Ms. Shiraishi raised an eyebrow. “Care to explain, Ren?”
Ren cleared his throat. His heart tapped somewhere near his ears. “Uh… okay, so… instead of trying to balance the prop strain mathematically, I thought, maybe we… let the gear ratios emulate organic wing motion.”
No reaction.
So he kept going.
“You know, like… how birds twist their feathers at different angles for left-right corrections midflight? Maybe we don’t need identical gear ratios. We just sync the torsion pulses. Think… flying by rhythm, not numbers.”
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A beat.
Hana dropped her chalk. “That’s—”
“—Actually brilliant,” Rin finished.
Ren blinked. “Wait. Really?”
Jiro mouthed What just happened? while Taiga silently offered Ren the rest of his snack out of what could only be described as religious awe.
Ms. Shiraishi turned to the board. “Mr. Lawson’s… aviary metaphor aside, this is a potential breakthrough in asymmetric prop compensation. Homework: test this against your current builds. Graph results. Due tomorrow.”
The class groaned.
Ren sat down slowly. Hana elbowed him, stunned.
“You really just—doodled your way into innovation.”
“I panicked,” he said. “And then I drew a falcon.”
“You’re lucky that chalk bird can fly.”
But for the first time, both Hana and Rin were smiling at him at the same time.
And for a moment, Ren didn’t feel like an imposter.
He felt like an engineer.
Scene 4: “The Dumbest Spy”
—-: Taiga
There were a few key principles Taiga considered sacred in the art of covert operations.
- Always wear neutral colors.
- Never eat crunchy snacks during surveillance.
- Duct tape is better than rope. Always.
He ignored all of them.
“C’mon, baby,” he whispered to his new gadget, an extendable periscope-glove hybrid he’d named The Spyga?, currently duct-taped to his sleeve. “Just need one good peek at that Kyokuto reactor core…”
The Onikaze loomed in front of him like a predator in hibernation. Black-paneled, crystal-ribbed, and utterly silent even when idle. Its hull shimmered faintly in the morning sun, as though daring the rest of the sky to challenge it.
He crouched beside a crate marked “TENSION CABLES – DO NOT TUG.” Naturally, he tugged them for balance.
Sproing.
The crate snapped backward with a cartoonish skreeeeek across the hangar floor. The noise echoed like a scream in a canyon. Taiga froze mid-squat.
One of the Kyokuto students, still helmeted, slowly turned toward the sound. Another cocked their head like an owl hearing something in the void.
Taiga dropped and rolled behind the air duct like he’d trained in three ninja schools and one circus. Unfortunately, he hadn't trained in ventilation sizing, and his knee struck the sharp corner with a yelp.
“Totally fine!” he whisper-yelled to no one, biting his glove.
He peeked through The Spyga? again.
Inside the Onikaze’s open side panel, he saw something terrifying: a condensed twin crystal array, harmonized and humming. Not just ahead of Hinode's tech—illegal in three prefectures.
He gasped.
And then The Spyga? let out a mechanical wheeze. The viewing lens popped loose. It pinged off the floor like a guilty coin.
The Kyokuto team turned as one.
Taiga bolted. Sprint, zigzag, duck—straight into a low-hanging valve pipe that clanged his forehead into a new dimension. He spun, collapsed, and blacked out.
He awoke gently swinging.
Bound.
In gift wrapping ribbon.
A bow on his head.
“Oh. Good. You’re awake,” said Ms. Shiraishi dryly as she opened the staff room door. “I wasn’t sure if you were unconscious or just dramatically regretting your life.”
Taiga blinked at her upside down. “Can it be both?”
Behind her, two Kyokuto pilots stood like statues.
One of them spoke for the first time: “Your security system is cute.”
Ms. Shiraishi sipped her coffee without breaking eye contact. “He’s not security. He’s Hinode’s emotional support mascot.”
“…Hey,” Taiga said weakly.
Later, Ren and Jiro helped untangle him in the hallway while Hana and Mei stood by silently, unimpressed.
“So,” Ren said, trying not to laugh, “how’d the recon go?”
Taiga gave a solemn nod. “They have death lasers. We’re all gonna die.”
“Anything useful?” Mei asked, arms crossed.
Taiga grinned. “They’re using an unregistered crystal harmonizer. I saw it. Heard it. Smelled it.”
Jiro paused. “Smelled it?”
“Burnt almonds and sin,” Taiga said, completely serious.
Ren looked up at the ceiling and muttered, “We are so not ready.”
Scene 5: “Loose Bolts and Tight Nerves”
—-: Hana
Hana didn't panic.
She catalogued every part, every wire, every micro-thread of braided copper, before even touching the Dart. She took mental snapshots. She counted bolts in her sleep. When you built a ship held together with ambition and borderline-illegal steam routing, you didn’t guess. You knew.
Which is why, when she opened the Dart’s belly hatch for the midweek test, her heart stopped.
The pressure sync regulator—a brass-tube component shaped like a spinal cord, key to the entire closed-loop lift cycle—was gone.
Not misplaced.
Not cracked.
Gone.
Her wrench clattered to the floor.
She dropped to her knees, scanning the interior like a surgeon checking for a missing organ. Tubing sagged where it should’ve been taut. A smear of oil led nowhere. And worst of all, the bolts were still there—unscrewed cleanly, lined up on the tray like someone had done her job, just… backward.
“Okay,” she whispered, rocking back on her heels. “Okayokayokay. Maybe Grandpa moved it. Maybe Mei borrowed it. Maybe—”
She looked up.
Rin was across the hangar, mid-squat, balancing a calibration tool on her knee like nothing had happened. Ren was fiddling with the rudder. Mei sat in the corner, polishing her goggles, too still.
Maybe not.
She stood abruptly. Walked—marched—over to Mei.
“Where is it?”
Mei didn’t look up. “Where’s what?”
“The sync regulator. From the Dart’s underside panel. The one I locked with a double-latch and pressure seal and reinforced with an electromag bolt that only I have the code for.”
Mei blinked. “Sounds secure.”
“It was.”
They stared at each other.
“Maybe someone else took it,” Mei offered.
Hana crossed her arms. “Are you accusing Kyokuto?”
“Do you want me to?”
That stopped her cold.
“Because if you’re asking whether I think they’d do something like this,” Mei added, voice like silk wrapped around broken glass, “I don’t think. I know. But if you want to accuse them, you better have proof that’ll hold in front of the whole League committee. Or else we’re not just out of the race—we’re blacklisted.”
Ren walked up behind them, holding the Dart’s side panel with grease-stained hands. “What’s going on?”
Hana turned, still rattled. “The regulator’s gone.”
His face went still.
“Could it have fallen out during flight?”
She shot him a look.
“Right, right. Dumb question.”
Jiro wandered in, humming, and paused at the tension.
“Oh no. Who died?”
“No one,” Hana snapped. “Yet.”
That night, as she locked the hangar’s main doors herself, she added two more latches. Then carved a tiny mark under the Dart’s rear stabilizer—a line no one but her would notice.
Next time… I’ll know.
And if Kyokuto had taken something?
She hoped they hadn’t taken the wrong girl’s patience.
Scene 6: “Like Fire, Like Fear”
—-: Rin
Rin hated the rooftop.
Too many people came up here to feel dramatic. To pretend they were alone with the sky. But they weren’t. The school lanterns bled light into every corner. The wind carried every whisper. The airships—like drifting sharks tethered to mooring towers—were never far enough away.
She was not here to be poetic.
She was here to breathe. And to clear the scream building in her chest before it detonated in the workshop.
Then she heard it.
Soft footsteps. No wind.
She turned before he spoke. She already knew it was him.
Rei Kurosawa.
Kyokuto’s ice-blooded captain. Their black-uniformed ghost. He didn’t walk like a student. He moved like a storm forecast—inevitable and unwelcome.
He didn’t smile. “Flying alone again?”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“You’re never in the mood,” he replied, stepping up beside her like they were equals. They weren’t.
She turned away. Looked out toward the airfields, where the Dart rested in Hangar 3, glowing faintly in the moonlight. A thousand feet down, and still too close.
Rei said nothing for a long time. He simply stood there, visor pushed up to his forehead like it was a crown.
Then:
“She flew better than you.”
Rin froze.
“You clench your fingers too much. Tension in the turns. Your descent arcs are flat. Your mother curved them like song.”
“Don’t,” Rin said quietly.
Rei tilted his head. “She was beautiful in the air. You? You fly like you’re afraid the sky might remember what you did.”
Rin turned. Slowly. Her voice scraped out from under her ribs.
“You don’t know me.”
“I know your team left you behind last season.”
Rin didn’t blink. “Because I flew through a storm no one else would touch.”
“You crashed.”
“I finished.”
Rei finally smiled. “You broke your ship.”
“And I rebuilt it.”
“With help.”
Rin stepped closer. She was shorter, but her gaze didn’t flinch.
“You’re not a pilot,” she said. “You’re a machine with a pulse. But you don't fly. You trace paths. You calculate. You memorize. My mother used to say the wind doesn't respect math.”
Rei’s eyes narrowed. “She also said your temper would kill you.”
“You leave her out of this.”
“She made a mistake, once. You know that, right? Not even your headmistress could cover it up.”
Rin’s fist clenched. For half a second, she nearly threw it. But she stopped—just short. Her nails dug crescents into her palm.
“I’m not her.”
“No,” Rei said. “You’re worse. She burned. You flinch.”
He walked away, boots silent against stone.
Rin didn’t move for a full minute.
Then she sat down, knees tight to her chest.
Her breath fogged in the chill air, and she pressed her hands together like they were the only thing keeping her steady.
She wasn’t crying. Not yet.
But the fire in her chest?
That wasn’t fear.
Not anymore.
Scene 7: “If It Breaks, We Fly What’s Left”
—-: Ren
The workshop was too quiet.
Not silent. Never truly silent—not with steam veins running through the walls, the low gurgle of coolant drip systems hissing like mechanical breath, the ever-present tick-tick of the pressure gauges pacing out their rhythms like anxious hearts.
But the voices were gone.
Jiro had left to chase Taiga’s sabotage rumor. Mei had vanished after whispering something cryptic about backup stabilizers. Even Grandpa was absent—no off-key whistling, no sarcastic grunts, no tools thrown like surprise quizzes.
Ren knew that silence.
It was the kind that came before something cracked.
He didn’t hear Hana until he rounded the engine block and found her crouched against the wall, behind the spare parts shelf. Her goggles were still on—cracked slightly—and her hands were buried in a tangle of tubing. Not fixing. Just… holding it. Like it was the only thing keeping her anchored.
Her gloves were off. Her hands were shaking.
Ren didn’t say her name. Just sank down beside her, careful not to touch anything. Not yet.
For a long time, neither of them spoke.
Finally, Hana let out a sound—not a sob, not a word. Just a muffled breath, like a crystal under too much pressure.
“I thought it would work,” she said. “I thought—if I got the ratios right, if I reinforced the bracing, if I built it strong enough—” Her voice broke. “I thought we’d at least finish the next test.”
Ren nodded slowly. “You did everything right.”
“Then why did the pressure valve explode, Ren?” Her voice cracked—sharp, painful, raw. “Why is it always almost with me? Almost stable. Almost safe. Almost enough.”
He looked at her—really looked. The oil smudged across her cheek. The strands of hair stuck to her forehead. The faint shimmer of tears she kept refusing to wipe away.
“You’re terrified,” he said.
Hana turned toward him, startled.
Ren kept going.
“You build everything like it’s going to fall apart. Because maybe, somewhere inside, you think you will. That if you stop fixing things, they’ll see you the way you see yourself.”
Hana opened her mouth—then shut it. Her lip trembled.
“But here’s the thing,” Ren said, voice soft but steady. “You built something that flew. You built something that mattered. Not just to me. To all of us.”
“It’s breaking,” she whispered.
“Then we push it,” he said. “We push it until it breaks again. And again. And again.”
He leaned forward.
“And then we fly what’s left.”
Silence.
Then—so soft he almost didn’t hear it—Hana laughed. Just once. A broken, stunned breath of disbelief.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
“I’ve been told.”
She wiped her face with the sleeve of her coveralls. The grease smeared, but the tears stopped.
Ren reached into his jacket pocket and held something out.
It was the fractured valve. Still warm from the blowout. Still buzzing faintly with residual crystal pulse.
“You kept it?” Hana asked.
“Yeah. Figured if I’m gonna fix something, I should start with the thing that blew up in our faces.”
She took it.
Not like it was broken.
Like it was important.
Like maybe—just maybe—it still had more to give.
Scene 8: “The Morning Break”
—-: Hana
The hangar always smelled like metal before a storm.
Hot copper. Old steam. Sweat-soaked canvas and scorched weld lines. Hana breathed it in as she flicked on the diagnostic panel and listened for the slow, climbing whir of the Dart’s crystal core igniting.
The Silver Dart’s new stabilizer—her stabilizer—clicked into place with a low chk-chk that made her teeth grind. It wasn’t supposed to sound like that. Not at idle.
She told herself it was nothing. Just ambient torque. Settling tension. Like how Ren always shook his left leg before a flight. Unstable but functional.
“Throttle at thirty percent,” she called. Her voice echoed in the half-lit bay.
Ren, already strapped into the pilot’s seat above, gave a quick salute. “Copy. Bring the heat, Chief.”
Taiga leaned on a toolbox nearby, chewing on a rice cracker like this was a breakfast performance and not a systems test that could end in combustion. Mei stood off to the side, holding a clipboard she hadn’t looked at in ten minutes. Her eyes never left the sky outside.
She’s reading the air currents again, Hana realized. Like she’s waiting for something.
She pushed the thought away. Checked the final clamps. Heart pounding against her ribs like a trapped bird.
“Throttle to fifty.”
The Dart hissed, crystal veins pulsing blue, engine plates rattling with low-frequency vibrations.
Ren gripped the stick. “Feels tight.”
“That’s because the mod works. You’re not allowed to jinx it.” Hana typed in the pressure sync command.
And the Dart screamed.
The whine of the pressure valve spiked to a shriek. A shockwave of heat blew from the undercarriage like a backfired cannon. The rear strut flared crimson—then snapped with a gut-punching POP.
Ren shouted.
The left side of the Dart dropped half a meter and slammed into the hangar floor with a sound like metal crying.
Everyone froze.
Smoke hissed from the left intake. Something dripped—a thick, viscous stream of crystal coolant—and sizzled as it hit the reinforced tiles.
Taiga actually dropped his rice cracker.
Hana couldn’t breathe.
Not because it broke.
But because she knew, before it happened, that it would.
She rushed to the side, throwing herself under the frame. The stabilizer brace was cracked. Not in the weld—but in the alloy itself. Split down a seam that wasn’t supposed to exist.
“What the hell—” Ren climbed out, voice rattled. “Was that sabotage?”
“No,” Hana whispered. “Worse. It’s stress fatigue. Microscopic. We missed it.”
Mei knelt beside her. Quiet. Calm. Unreadable. “The whole support structure will need to be reforged. There’s no shortcut.”
Ren’s face paled. “But the race—”
“Five days,” Hana said. Her throat felt dry. “We don’t even have a replacement alloy.”
The hangar fell silent again.
Until Grandpa’s voice echoed from the upper deck:
“Well, good morning! I assume that screech-pop wasn’t part of the design?”
Nobody laughed.
He didn’t either.