Chapter 23: “The Last Forge”

  Scene 1: “Aftermath”

  —-: Rin

  The hangar didn’t hum.

  It breathed. Slow and shallow like a wounded animal.

  The Silver Dart sat crumpled on its left side, half-gutted and fully shamed. Steam hissed from a cracked strut like it was trying to hide the sound of failure, but everyone heard it. Everyone felt it.

  Rin leaned against the stair rail, arms crossed, jaw locked so tight her ears rang. A small burn curled across her right wrist—caught it on the edge of a heat sink when she dove in too late.

  Now the whole ship wore bruises.

  Ms. Shiraishi’s heels clicked across the hangar floor like accusations.

  “Well,” she said, adjusting her glasses with a sigh sharp enough to split rivets. “I suppose we all know what I’m going to say.”

  Ren stood beside the wreckage, still smeared with coolant. Hana looked like she hadn’t blinked since the explosion. Mei hovered nearby, stone-faced as ever.

  Jiro had grease in his hair again. Taiga was just… eating a sandwich.

  Shiraishi pointed to the scorched floor beneath the Dart. “That’s not just a setback. That’s a hazard. If that stress fault had ruptured in midair, you’d be in the lake, or the infirmary. Or worse.”

  “We know,” Rin said quietly. Her voice scratched like rusted chain.

  Shiraishi turned her gaze. “Then you’ll understand why I have to pull the Silver Dart from the qualifier.”

  Ren flinched. Hana’s head snapped toward her, eyes wide.

  “No.” Rin straightened.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said we could fly as long as the ship passed safety checks. That we earned the slot.”

  Ms. Shiraishi’s expression tightened. “And now the ship is—”

  “Grounded, not gone.” The voice came from above.

  Everyone looked up.

  Grandpa stood on the catwalk, arms folded over a long pipe wrench slung like a weapon across his back.

  “If you ground the Dart, then you ground me,” he said, hopping down the stairs with a clang and landing in front of the team like some kind of grease-stained war god. “I’m not stepping one foot back into your mechanical theory class unless that ship flies.”

  Shiraishi narrowed her eyes. “You’re bluffing.”

  “Try me.” His grin wasn’t playful. It was the smile of a man who once welded a gearplate shut while it was still spinning and lived.

  Rin stepped forward. Her pulse thundered. “We’ll rebuild it. Together.”

  “And how long will that take?” Shiraishi asked, hands on her hips. “The race is in five days.”

  “Then we work like it’s five hours,” Hana snapped, suddenly alive with fire. “We don’t need time. We need tools. And each other.”

  The room held its breath.

  Mei finally spoke. “I’ll rework the frame. Jiro, you’re good with flexible mountings.”

  “On it!” Jiro saluted, then looked confused. “Wait. I am?”

  Taiga gave a thumbs-up. “I’ll… bring snacks.”

  Shiraishi looked at the wreck, then the kids, then the engineer who refused to age.

  She sighed like the world weighed too much and she was tired of lifting it. “One condition.”

  Everyone stiffened.

  “If it doesn’t pass the first fire-up test by sunrise on race day…” She turned. “I pull you myself.”

  Rin bowed. “Understood.”

  Shiraishi walked out, coat snapping behind her like a flag of retreat.

  Rin turned to the team. Her team.

  The air still reeked of scorched fluid and shattered pride.

  But behind their eyes—there was steel.

  Ren grinned, lopsided and tired. “So. What’s step one?”

  Grandpa cracked his neck. “Step one?” He pointed a greasy thumb over his shoulder. “We break into the forbidden storage room.”

  Scene 2: “The Midnight Fix Team”

  —-: Ren

  It started with a wrench dropped on Ren’s foot.

  Not a small one either—one of those double-head, twelve-pound monsters Grandpa kept around “just in case physics got cocky.” Ren howled, Jiro tripped over a loose hose trying to help, and Taiga accidentally turned on the fire suppression valve and got misted like a burnt waffle.

  Midnight had come and gone.

  Ren’s hands were raw, his shirt was stuck to his back, and someone had definitely soldered over the schematics for the stabilizer linkage. But the Dart—bless her creaky, temperamental heart—was still in one piece. Or, more accurately, ten thousand pieces, half of which were scattered across the hangar like confetti from a steampunk apocalypse.

  “We are so not going to make this in time,” he muttered, wiping grease across his forehead and smearing it into his eyebrow like a war stripe.

  “We don’t have time,” Hana said from where she crouched under the cockpit, sparks bouncing off her gloves. Her hair had escaped its usual neat twist and now hung in frizzy waves stuck to her temples.

  “We don’t need time.” Mei stood at the back wall, wiring together a strange, triangular subframe that hummed with barely-contained energy. She didn’t look up. “We need us.”

  Ren blinked at her.

  “Wow,” Taiga said, munching a sugar bun from the snack cart he’d wheeled in like a battlefield medic with no priorities. “That was actually… kind of inspirational?”

  Mei didn’t respond.

  Rin dropped down from the top beam with a new stabilizer blade in her arms, face streaked with oil and her tank top clinging to her like she’d wrestled a boiler—and won. She dumped the blade beside Ren and glared.

  “You said you tightened the frame bolts on the port side.”

  “I did!” Ren held up the wrench with the dramatic offense of an injured knight. “Twice!”

  “Well, the second one came off in my hand.”

  Jiro peeked over the wing. “Should I tighten it?”

  “No!” said three voices at once.

  “I’ll weld it,” Mei offered.

  Hana grunted. “I’ll bless it, if that helps.”

  There was no music, no cheering, no glowing scoreboard. Just the rhythmic clatter of metal and voices rising and falling like a song no one planned to write.

  And slowly—like steam gathering pressure—something shifted.

  Rin didn’t complain when Ren took over her alignment gauge.

  Mei didn’t flinch when Hana adjusted her wiring route.

  Jiro actually used a manual instead of guessing.

  Even Taiga stopped narrating his own sandwich consumption and started sweeping debris away from the wheel supports.

  “We need a name for this,” Jiro said, stretching his back with a dramatic groan. “This legendary moment. This beautiful co-labor of souls.”

  Hana snorted. “You mean the ‘Oh-gods-we-might-die Fix-It Party’?”

  “I was gonna say ‘Midnight Phoenix,’ but yours works too.”

  Ren looked around the hangar—tools scattered, faces sweaty, tired eyes locked on deadlines—and something warm bloomed in his chest.

  This wasn’t just rebuilding a ship.

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  This was rebuilding belief.

  “Okay,” he said, voice steadying. “Let’s get the heart back in the bird.”

  Scene 3: “Grandpa’s Workshop Secret”

  —-: Ren

  The door had been bolted shut since day one.

  Not just closed. Bolted. Welded. Riveted with strips of hand-pounded steel and a heavy rotary lock that looked older than the school itself. Students joked about it. Jiro said it held Grandpa’s long-lost love letters. Taiga swore it was where he kept a doomsday pie.

  Ren had assumed it was where old tools went to die.

  Until tonight.

  Grandpa stood in front of it now, arms crossed, backlit by a single hanging bulb that swung like it had a secret.

  “You kids think you're clever,” he said.

  Ren straightened, hands behind his back, like a busted cadet at roll call. “Um… we hope we’re clever?”

  Grandpa’s mustache twitched. Not a smile, but something near its cousin.

  “I told your parents I'd never open this again,” he muttered, mostly to himself. Then louder: “But this ain’t about pride. This is about proving Hinode’s still got soul left in its gears.”

  He spun the dial—click, click, chnk—and the lock dropped like a guillotine.

  The door creaked open.

  Ren’s breath caught.

  Inside was chaos—but a special kind. A sacred kind. Organized by madness and genius in equal measure.

  Stacked shelves of folded blueprints. Gear arrays. Crystal regulators. Half-complete prototypes that pulsed faintly with violet glow. A suspended flight frame—sleek, needle-thin, like a wasp made of copper and ambition—hovered near the back, propped on pivot arms.

  Hana made a sound between a gasp and a swear.

  Mei’s hands went to her mouth.

  “Is that—?” she whispered.

  “The twin-phase intake model,” Grandpa confirmed. “Illegal in three districts. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.”

  Jiro tiptoed toward a cylinder marked “Unstable – Yell Before Touching” and was promptly smacked with a rolled schematic.

  “Hands off unless you can spell thermocombustive bifurcation,” Grandpa barked.

  “...With or without the silent ‘e’?”

  “Out.”

  Taiga stayed behind Jiro like a human shield.

  Ren stepped forward, drawn to a narrow crate near the center of the floor. Unlike the others, it was sealed with wax and etched in Kanji he didn’t recognize.

  “What’s this one?”

  Grandpa didn’t answer at first. Just looked at it like it owed him an apology. Then—

  “That was your grandfather’s last mod before the ban.”

  Ren turned. “You mean your mod.”

  A pause.

  Grandpa cracked his neck. “That’s what I said.”

  He crouched and cracked the seal. Inside lay a polished brass ring—too large for a standard valve, too small for a full stabilizer. It gleamed with faint ridges, the grooves filled with etched crystal filaments like veins through gold.

  “It’s a pressure harmonizer,” Grandpa said. “Meant to sync input surges across multi-crystal arrays. Problem is… it either works like a dream or rips the back end off your bird.”

  Ren picked it up. It was warm in his palm, almost pulsing with breath.

  “So… can we use it?”

  Grandpa’s eyes crinkled.

  “Pick something,” he said, sweeping a hand at the room. “Just don’t die using it.”

  Scene 4: “Hana + Mei Collaboration”

  —-: Hana

  Hana never liked working with other people.

  Too many hands in the bolts. Too many voices over the hum of pressure valves. Too many chances for someone to mess up, or worse—see her mess up.

  But tonight, under the low brass glow of the backup lamps in Hangar Three, she found herself kneeling beside Mei, elbow-deep in the same tangled mess of insulated tubing and snapped wiring, and not hating it.

  Not even a little.

  “Pass me the micro-crimp,” Mei said quietly.

  Hana handed it over without hesitation. No labels needed. No over-explaining.

  She liked that.

  The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable. It was like the warm hiss of the old kettle in Grandpa’s back corner. Present. Useful. Just enough space to think.

  “You rerouted the flow path around the pressure split,” Mei said finally, eyes scanning the new schematic they'd sketched in chalk on the hangar floor. “Smart. It’ll lose 2% boost on the left bank, but avoid another blowout.”

  Hana shrugged. “We don’t need perfect. We need alive.”

  A flicker of something crossed Mei’s face. The chalk paused in her hand.

  Alive.

  It clung in the air for a moment like soot.

  “…Akio used to say that too,” Mei murmured.

  Hana blinked. “Akio?”

  Mei didn’t look up. She twisted the crimper with precise clicks, fusing a copper band around the new valve coil.

  “My brother,” she said. “We flew together. A long time ago.”

  “Oh,” Hana said, sitting back on her heels. “I didn’t know you had—”

  “No one does.” Mei reached for another part, hands steady, voice steady. But her eyes glimmered, catching the lamplight like glass. “He smiled like you. All teeth and optimism. Right before the storm.”

  Hana didn’t know what to say. Her mind raced through half-formed sentences, all of them wrong.

  She settled on the only thing that felt real.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Mei finally looked at her. “Don’t be. You’re not him. And I don’t want you to be.”

  A long beat passed. Then Mei rolled the diagram forward, tapping a corner with her knuckle.

  “But if we cut the front baffles and reroute the rear venting here…” she glanced sideways. “We might survive three laps before it melts.”

  Hana smirked. “Only three? Slacker.”

  Mei allowed the smallest curve of a grin. “We could maybe push five… with the right shielding.”

  Their eyes locked. And just like that, the collaboration clicked.

  Not because they had to work together.

  But because somewhere, in the smoke and copper heat of midnight rebuilding, they wanted to.

  Scene 5: “Jiro Builds a Shield”

  —-: Jiro

  Jiro adjusted his goggles and took a step back from his masterpiece.

  Well—semi-masterpiece. Okay, half-glued, still-smoking pile of maybe-it’ll-work engineering brilliance.

  He stuck a hand on his hip. “Behold,” he declared, to absolutely no one, “the Arc-Rebounder Mark One! Patent pending. Maybe.”

  The only answer was the faint sizzle of scorched insulation.

  In the far corner of the hangar, Ren and Mei were double-checking coolant tubing. Hana and Rin were arguing quietly but intensely over the gear ratios again, something about reverse tension calibration.

  But Jiro—Jiro had vision.

  “Everyone’s too focused on flight,” he muttered, wrenching down a coupling bolt that didn’t really fit. “But what if—what if—we didn’t need to dodge anymore? What if we could bounce the pressure rings right off us?”

  He jammed a crystal capacitor into its socket.

  The device hummed.

  Promising.

  Dangerous.

  Glorious.

  Jiro grinned, backing up three paces. Then another four. He held the activation coil like a game-show buzzer.

  “One test. Just one—” he whispered, then shouted toward the others, “—for science!”

  Ren looked up, instantly alarmed. “Wait—what are you—”

  Too late.

  CLICK.

  The shield sparked to life.

  For precisely two seconds, it shimmered—a radiant blue dome flickering around the test scaffolding.

  “YES!” Jiro fist-pumped.

  Then it shrieked like a dying kettle, overloaded with crystal backwash, and—

  KRAK-BWOOOOM!

  A geyser of steam exploded upward. Ren ducked. Mei shielded the control panel. Taiga, somehow holding a sandwich, dove behind a stack of fireproof blankets.

  Jiro, meanwhile, stood in the center of the blast zone, coughing and blinking through the smoke.

  Half his shirt was singed.

  His eyebrows… questionable.

  “…Okay,” he rasped, blinking soot out of his eyes. “Mark Two will have a vent limiter.”

  From across the room, Hana called, “That was your shield idea?!”

  “Shield-slash-experimental-display-platform-slash-room-heater!” Jiro yelled back, grinning.

  Ren limped over, brushing ash off his jacket. “You almost roasted my tools.”

  “Correction: I almost revolutionized defensive tactics in close-quarter flight. You’re welcome.”

  Everyone groaned.

  Except Grandpa, who’d been watching from his perch above the scaffolding. He let out a short cackle and tossed down a wrench.

  “You got guts, kid,” he said. “And no common sense. You’ll fit in just fine.”

  Jiro caught the wrench. Barely. And smiled.

  Even if it exploded, at least he was building something.

  Scene 6: “Steam Bath Reset”

  —-: Ren

  Steam curled off the surface of the hot spring like lazy ghosts.

  Ren sank into the water up to his shoulders, exhaled long and low, and felt his bones thank him. Every bolt-tightening, rivet-hammering, nerve-frying hour of the last forty-eight clung to his muscles like rust. And now—dissolving. Just a little.

  A faint splash sounded as Jiro flopped in beside him, arms draped dramatically over the rocks like he was dying of heroism. “I deserve a monument,” he groaned. “A bronze one. With my arms just like this.”

  Ren side-eyed him. “You nearly blew up the hangar.”

  “Exactly. Greatness always comes at great personal risk.”

  From the girls’ side of the spring—mercifully separated by a bamboo divider—laughter rippled out. Hana’s voice floated over: “I’m telling you, Mei actually smiled when it exploded.”

  “She did not,” Rin said, skeptical and half-laughing. “That was her grimace of ‘mild approval under duress.’ She has three expressions. That’s the second one.”

  Ren smiled into the steam. The tension of the past week hadn’t vanished—but it had loosened its grip. Just a little. Enough to laugh again. Breathe again.

  A water bomb suddenly plopped over the wall and exploded right in Jiro’s face.

  “AGHH—SABOTAGE!” he yelled, flailing blindly.

  “Saki!” Hana shouted through the mist. “That was not a tactical drop!”

  “Incorrect,” Saki shouted back. “That was comedic relief. Critical to morale.”

  Another splash. Rin groaned. “If she’s got more of those—”

  “Too late!” Saki crowed.

  Three more bombs arced over the divider.

  Ren ducked instinctively, but one still clipped his hair, splashing warm water down the back of his neck. “Okay,” he said, slicking his bangs back, “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

  Jiro, now soaked and sulking, slumped deeper into the spring like a defeated sea sponge. “I’m gonna short-circuit in here.”

  Then—

  Quiet.

  Not total silence. The wind still rustled through the trees, lanterns bobbed gently along their wires, and water trickled from the rock walls.

  But the chaos simmered down.

  Rin’s voice, softer now: “This is nice.”

  Hana, almost shyly: “Yeah. It… it is.”

  Ren leaned his head back and let the warmth sink deep.

  They were bruised. Burned. Exhausted. But they were still here. Together. That counted for something.

  A faint clink. Mei’s voice, quiet and unexpected: “One more day. We hold it together for one more day.”

  That silence again—solid. Earnest.

  Ren opened one eye and looked up toward the stars.

  They didn’t blink. Didn’t judge. Just shimmered, distant and steady.

  For one more day… he’d hold the sky.

  Scene 7: “Final Fit: The Reforged Dart”

  —-: Ren

  Ren stood at the threshold of Hangar 3, boots echoing on the cool metal floor.

  The smell hit him first—engine oil, scorched copper, crystal residue. And something new: ozone, faint and sharp. Like the air itself had been rewired.

  The lights clicked on overhead one by one with a metallic CHUNK… CHUNK… CHUNK, illuminating the Dart.

  No, not the Dart.

  Not anymore.

  This was something else.

  Something reborn.

  Gone was the patchwork fuselage of mismatched panels and desperate welds. Now, the frame had been reshaped with reinforced spinal plating and a leaner profile, polished black and silver. Twin stabilizers curved like talons off the rear—sleek, aggressive. The undercarriage bristled with the new gear-housing Jiro had exploded three times before getting right.

  And mounted just beneath the forward helm, half-buried in the nose, was the gleaming feather emblem Ren had found weeks ago. Now burnished smooth, etched with a phrase Mei had added in tiny script:

  Fall if you must. Fly anyway.

  He stepped forward, fingers ghosting along the newly fitted starboard prop shaft. “She’s not a patchwork mess anymore,” he whispered.

  “She’s ours,” Hana said behind him, voice low, reverent.

  She, Mei, Jiro, Taiga, even Rin were all there, arrayed in the flickering light. No cheering. No speeches.

  Just breath.

  Just the sound of the Dart humming—not from the engine, not from the crystals—but from somewhere deeper. A tension in the air. Like a string pulled taut. A beast waiting to be loosed.

  Rin stepped forward and ran a hand along the stabilizer fin. “We made something dangerous,” she said. Then she looked at Ren. “Let’s not waste it.”

  “No solo runs,” Mei added, arms folded, eyes unreadable. “From now on, we fly smart. Or not at all.”

  Jiro pulled off his goggles, which still smelled faintly of burnt rubber. “I’d cry but I sweat out all my tears two hours ago.”

  “Same,” Taiga muttered. Then perked up. “Also, I may have written ‘We ride at dawn’ on the tail fin in glow-ink. Don’t worry—it’s tasteful.”

  Rin groaned. Hana actually smiled.

  And Ren?

  He stepped up to the cockpit ladder and placed his hand on the hatch.

  The metal was still warm from welding. Still raw.

  Still theirs.

  He didn’t say anything.

  He didn’t need to.

  Because this wasn’t just a ship anymore.

  It was a declaration.

  A challenge.

  A promise.

  They were ready.

  Ready for Kyokuto.

  Ready for the storm.