BT - Chapter 8

My lungs burned as I sprinted beneath the warm

Amber Krowe moonlight.

Sun Jin Kaisara was just ahead, both of us clad in light gear. Each thunderous thud of my boots on concrete rattled through my bones. Behind us trailed a detachment of

Systems Alliance soldiers, fellow

Amber Krowen.

We reached a handleless emergency exit. In one fluid motion, Kaisara drew her

Varunium Steel katana from across her back and sliced the door vertically, splitting it in two. We slipped into the stairwell as the motion sensors flickered the lights on.

Inside, radios erupted in overlapping chatter—too many teams scrambling to relay updates, talking over one another. A mess. Typical Alliance command, decentralized and chaotic. It was an all-hands-on-deck frenzy because, at long last, they’d found him.

Kukri

Tanuki was cornered. The streets below were sealed off by military vehicles at every intersection. All he could do was leap from rooftop to rooftop, graceful bounds, rapid climbs, crashing through office windows—and keep running. Helicopters and hovering patrol craft swept spotlights across buildings and alleyways, hunting every shadow. If their comms were half-decent, they’d know he was on this very roof we were scaling.

The chase had dragged on for over an hour by the time Kaisara and I arrived. Hopefully we were the only two Shrike operatives here; any more might tip the balance in the Alliance’s favor.

This was him, Kaisara’s father, the quarry driving us into Amber Krowe’s bleeding heart. Years ago she’d strapped into Shrike and confessed her true mission to me, to worm her way into the Systems Alliance’s intelligence grid, map every whispered rumor of his whereabouts. The Alliance had its own obsession: Tanuki, one of the eldest of Templars, a roiling font of unimaginable power. They feared him because they barely grasped what a Templar was, only that his love for the Amber Krowen people ran deeper than oceans. But they craved the mythic force that had birthed countless bedtime tales of magic and awe. Kaisara tried to outpace the Alliance, trace the hidden leads to Tanuki before the military brass even sniffed his aura. Now that thread was snapping, somehow they’d beaten us to him. How remains beyond my comprehension. There was nothing left but to plunge headlong into the hunt ourselves.

We tore through the city’s veins in undercropped hoodies and scuffed cargo pants, our only armor the fire in our lungs, swords at our backs, and determination. Kaisara’s green hair, tipped in frost-white, whipped behind her like a banshee’s veil. I was glued to her heels, pulse slamming blood into my ears so hard I could barely hear my own footfalls, every sense tasting adrenaline and sweat. Her brow was knotted with fury; her breath came in jagged gasps. Her purple scarf trailed close, snagging on concrete, but she tore it free with a growl. This was her fight. I was merely the shadow at her back.

The four of us stormed the tower stairwell in a thundering rhythm—one floor, then the next—each step a drumbeat driving us forward. Through the crackle of radio static a someone’s voice slithered along the echoing walls: “Confirmed, he’s on the helipad.

Tisiphone Tower.” Kaisara froze mid-ascent, boot hovering above the next tread. Her body stilled as though struck by ice. She whipped her head back, locking onto the soldiers bounding up behind us, the radio comm came from one of their radios. Her mouth parted for oxygen, a predator sizing its prey.

“Ma’am?” The soldier’s voice trembled, clinging to the railing.

Time snagged. Then her dark-green eyebrow flicked like a drawn blade. In one fluid motion her hand flicked out, summoning twin flashes of molten orange: her swords. Steel sang from the sheaths. Her posture shifted; the air around her snapped taut. A few steps down, I caught her in my sights, panting, blades spread wide, stance unshakable, bodies already down around her. Crimson splatters streaked the concrete.

She turned her head back to and stared into my eyes and in that instant I understood her crossroad: no retreat, no mercy. She would stop the Alliance and their prize at any cost. I nodded. My grip tightened on my own blade—silently telling her we were in this together.

With deliberate calm she snapped the radio free from its clip and fastened it to her belt. Still gripping her blood-streaked swords, she strode past me, face carved from obsidian. We didn’t exchange a glance. Her war had begun, and I followed her into the storm.

A hovercraft crawled up alongside the tower, its searchlight sweeping the glass face of the building in slow, predatory arcs. Two knives left Kaisara's hands before I'd even registered the motion, twin silver streaks that punched through the cockpit glass. The craft shuddered, tipped sideways, and rolled over like a horse taking a fatal shot before it dropped from the sky without a sound we could hear over the wind. Kaisara had already turned away before it hit.

We cut through the vacant office floor, past rows of dark monitors and overturned chairs, to the stairwell on the far side. The sign above the door read "Stair 1, P10 to Roof." Her boot caved it open. The Alliance squad was mid-climb, flashlight beams swinging up toward us, rifle muzzles following a half-second behind. They found Kaisara standing at the top of the stairs, chest heaving, blades already drawn, staring down at them the way a cliff stares down at water. Their weapons dipped, barely. An inch, maybe less. It was enough. The swords moved, the dance began again. Gunfire cracked off the concrete walls and meant nothing. Bodies tumbled and folded down the steps. She was already climbing before the last one settled, a raw sound tearing out of her throat that was less a yell than something escaping. I took a long inhale through my snout, and began following my mentor.

She didn’t seem to be listening to the radio anymore, oblivious to the crackling orders demanding retreat, the urgent bark of an unfamiliar voice calling for fallback, perimeter pulls, and damage control. At last, they reached the roof access door. A flimsy sheet of paper taped to it read: “Contact security for all roof access.” Before I could protest, Kaisara slammed her boot into the door. The paper ripped, the door groaned, and a rush of wind flooded the stairwell. She shielded her eyes and heaved herself onto the roof. It wasn’t the main access point but a narrow side door leading to the helipad platform. Up there, the city sprawled beneath a veil of low clouds, distant lights haloing the mist. Landing strobes blinked in gentle rhythm around the pad’s edge.

Kaisara stepped forward, her blades clattering onto the concrete. Her mouth hung open. I followed, wary, I had been with her through every drill, every training cycle, but something felt off. All around us, retreating craft climbed away in chaotic trajectories. Hundreds of them scattered like startled birds, each scrambling for open sky. She moved again toward the lone figure at the pad’s center. Then I saw it: a tiny azure glow dancing in the air, like a firefly flitting between cloud and light. It vanished. Then another. A dozen. Dozens. Blue sparks appeared and faded in an impossible blink. I glanced at Kaisara and then at him.

He stood only a few paces from her: tall, slender, unassuming. His short white hair fell just like mine, mottled light-brown and silvery-gray fur tracing a familiar pattern: pale along his jawline, down his chest beneath a black shirt, slipping into the waist of an open red hoodie. Not a noble in shining armor, but a simple Amber Krowen, just as I had been told to expect. Yet I had been warned otherwise.

For years, I had heard the legends: Kukri Tanuki, a Templar elder older than memory, the first of our kind. A mythic demigod who forged Amber Krowe from dust, tempered our people against every calamity, guided us into light. He was supposed to tower like a statue of living bronze, voice booming with ancient power, eyes aglow with centuries of knowledge. But here he was. Ordinary. No fanfare. No gleaming aura. Just him.

He turned three-quarters toward Kaisara, adjusted his red-rimmed, orange-tinted glasses, and offered her the gentlest of smiles. His voice drifted across the pad, “Hey, kiddo.” Kaisara’s knees buckled. Tears flooded her face. She stumbled forward, and he met her halfway, arms open. They collapsed together, her wails echoing over the empty rooftop. This was what she had lived for, centuries of longing, the unbreakable vow to find him again after hundreds of years. Month after month, she drilled, mentored me, taught me every legend and prayer she knew, so I could be there at her side when this moment came.

As they knelt clasped together, the blue motes flickered once more around Tanuki before drifting into the cloud deck. For a moment, I tasted something bitter—pride for her joy, and unease that everything I believed might be as fragile as that paper sign we tore down. Yet I stood back, watching father and daughter reunited at last beneath a sky of blinking lights and mist, understanding now—some legends were real, and some truths were stranger still.

Still kneeling side by side, he glanced my way over her shoulder, cheek to cheek, and murmured something so low I couldn’t catch a word. She nodded once, and he offered me a gentle smile, and I returned it, tension coiled in my stance. This moment was theirs—I wouldn’t let anything intrude. But I felt the tremor in the air, the growing disturbance I couldn’t stop.

Kaisara sprang to her feet, panic in her eyes as the ribbons of blue light pierced the sky, each streak burning longer, brighter. “No, no, no!” she groaned, clinging to Tanuki’s wrist. “It can’t be happening.”

He kept his eyes on hers, exhaling softly but trying to offer her a smile to calm her. “It is.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “No,” she mouthed, turning back, stared back him as though she’d been stabbed in the heart.

He lifted his hands, cupped her cheeks, and drew her close. His muzzle brushed her brow as his thumbs traced warm paths across her cheeks. “By Varuna, you are the most beautiful…” He closed his eyes; a single tear glimmered on his cheek-fur. “I am so proud of you.”

She wrapped slender fingers around his wrists, trembling. “They wouldn’t do this. They’d never…”

“They would,” he whispered, voice raw. “Amber Krowen, it happened so fast. Once they reached maturity their fear bloomed far too quickly, reached past every boundary I had tried to shield it from.” He pushed his cheek against her forehead, still clasping her cheeks. “They crave something, anything to shield them from the unknown. It happened so fast.”

A low hum rose, the lights everywhere intensifying. My heart pounded. Was this…

Longinus?

“I couldn’t stem their fear,” he said quietly. “I tried, Varuna knows I tried. But now it drives them toward destruction.” He pressed his palms to her shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he gulped. “ I tried. I really tried.”

She shook her head. “No. It’s not your fault. They’re a beautiful people frightened of what they don’t understand. They’re afraid of the night, and-”

“-it’s dark out there,” they whispered together.

They clung to each other until at last he straightened, voice catching. “A

Redken of the

Nightfall Templar… Tell me, did

Flarion treat you well?” He managed a shaking laugh.

Kaisara let out a hiccupping breath, half-laugh, half-cry. “Yeah… he did.

Majora had to help him. Fatherhood was a struggle for him,” she snorted, wiping tears from her face.

He smiled, sadly. “I wish we had more time.” He kissed the back of her hand, then stroked her cheek. “I’m so sorry.”

Her knees gave way and she sank to the ground, alone. “Please,”

He took a step back, biting his lip. For the first time I saw his tears. “The choice has been made,” he said. “I have to do this.”

“Father!” she screamed, arms reaching for him. He paused at the edge of the helipad, silhouetted against the storm of lights.

“I don’t blame you,” she whispered, eyes shut tight. “It wasn’t your fault that we didn’t get to,” she choked, she couldn’t finish.

“I know,” he said softly. “Remember who you are. You’re my daughter. Forgive them.”

He stepped off the edge. For a breath, there was only the whistle of wind and the distant city below. Then the red light came. Not a flash but a detonation, a wall of heat and sound that buckled my knees and blew every window on the block inward in a single simultaneous crack as reality itself paused. The air itself seemed to fold. Then he rose. He kept rising. A coil of blazing crimson scales the width of a freeway emerged from the smoke, then another, then another, and still he rose, sinuous and endless, a wyrm so vast that my mind refused to hold the whole of him at once, only pieces: the sweep of a wing blotting out a district of lights, the curl of a tail vanishing into low cloud, a horned head turning slowly toward orbit. This was Tanuki—not the elder, not the demigod, but the dragon from the old stories, the one coiled around the edges of every legend and bedtime story I had ever been told.

Kaisara’s cry tore through the chaos. I scrambled to her side as the dragon’s scales began to pulse—a deep arterial red at first, then climbing toward something beyond color, beyond light, until the whole of him was a second sun burning above the city. The air pressure dropped. My ears popped. Then the energy released all at once, not outward but upward, a column of red force that punched through the cloud deck and kept going. It became silent. He was gone. The humming of the lights crescendoed into a single deafening tone, and then nothing. Absolute silence, the kind that rings. The azure lights winked out. Silence fell, heavy and absolute.

Above us, a single flash of light. Just for a moment before it faded.

Kaisara’s scream tore through the night. I had heard people cry before—weeping, wailing, the broken sounds of loss—but nothing like this. Nothing that made my chest cave in on itself. At that moment, the daughter longing for her father became something else entirely: a vengeful force, eyes alight with fury.

That night with Tanuki. I could recite every motion that occurred, relive it vividly on command. The cold wind on the rooftop. Her face buried in his chest. I had stood at the entrance and watched, not sure whether I had the right to be there. Tisiphone Tower, named after a spirit of vengeance in Krowen folklore, even the name felt like a warning I hadn’t understood at the time.

Then the memory twisted, and Kaisara emerged from the abyss of the past. The sight of her stoked a familiar, bitter fire in my chest. I willed myself to hate her, but she was looking at me the way she used to, before the lies, before the pain and that old warmth made the present coldness so much worse.

“Calm yourself, Forza,” she said softly, hands open, approaching the way you approach something dangerous. “I gave you so much. You can trust me.”

“You took away more than you gave.” The words came out ragged. The scars across my body burned, the way they always did when I thought about what had been done to me. What she had allowed. “You ruined my life.”

“But if it weren’t for me, you’d be dead.”

I knew she wasn’t wrong. I hated that she wasn’t wrong. “And I should thank you for that? For this life?”

“She was quiet for a moment before she took a steady gulp. “Remember when my father died?”

A bedside light clicked on, its pull chain swinging with a soft metal twang. The void dissolved. I was on my knees in her room, her actual room, the one I remembered, and she was right in front of me on the bed, coming apart at the seams. I had held her that night. I had meant it.

“They butchered him!” Kaisara’s scream tore through the room, raw agony and fury entwined in every syllable.

I felt her claws dig into my back as she trembled against me. “Sun… I know,” I whispered, voice breaking. “I know.”

She buried her face in my chest, sobs rattling her frame. “He sacrificed himself to shield us.” Her words were a blade twisting in my heart. “They killed the greatest guardian this world has ever known,” she whimpered, voice cracking. “Why? Why him?”

I swallowed hard. “Tanuki saved thousands,” a head shake, “…millions, of people. If they had fired Longinus…”

Her panic-dark eyes flashed with manic determination. “If we hadn’t joined that chase… he would’ve outrun them all. They could never have caught him if he was truly fleeing.” Kaisara’s claws raked my back anew, her rage a living thing with an echoing long deep guttural growl. “I will kill them, Forza. By Varuna, I swear I will make them pay in blood.” The vow roared from her throat, equal parts grief and wrath.

I put my hand under her chin and lifted her face toward mine. She let me. Her eyes were still wet, still wild with it.

“Everything he was, he gave to you. And you gave it to me.” I felt her jaw tighten under my fingers. “I’m not asking you to grieve quietly. I’m not asking you to stop.” I let go of her chin, holding her by the shoulders. “I’m telling you I’m coming with you. Wherever this goes next.”

Her eyes opened. Green, shot through with white like cracked ice, and behind them something that couldn’t decide between grief and rage. Her hair fell across her face and she didn’t push it away. “No, Forza.” Her voice held, barely. “You’ll stay here.”

“Why not? We’re partners. I’m your apprentice.”

A long breath. She settled back against the bed, and I could see it in the set of her jaw. The crying was over, but the weight of it wasn’t. “You were. Not anymore.”

My eyes opened, but the dream didn’t end. It kept going, the way old memories do.

“We were always there for each other, Forza…” Kaisara’ s voice trembled through the shifting gloom of the dreamscape. She advanced slowly, each step swallowed by the endless void. “Remember that night on the rooftop? And later, in that bedroom?”

She halted before me, eyes hard with resolve and yet quivering with some hidden doubt. A phantom wind tossed her dark hair across her face.

I swallowed. My chest tightened. “That was the night you died, Sun.” I let the words hover, heavy with grief. “Then you were gone.”

With a fluid motion, she drew her twin swords in reverse grip, just as she’d taught me when I was her apprentice. My heart thudded: this was the woman who had shaped me into a killer.

“It wasn’t the end, Forza,” she said, voice low, edged with determination. “It was the start of something new.”

I shook my head, bitterness rising like bile. “It ended us. You vanished, and I never saw you again.”

Her jaw clenched. “My father, Forza… They murdered him. The System’s Alliance crushed my family, annihilated one of the greatest ancients of the Templar. Everything I did with the Nightfall Templar, everything with Flarion, was for him. I rose to lead the Nightfall Tribe as a Redken, two hundred years of work taming those ruthless savages to a new age of enlightenment, all in his name - the daughter of Tanuki. That night… they stole my next chapter, my only chance to protect Amber Krowe by his side for the rest of my life.”

“A life built on revenge? Is that your excuse?” The words came out before I could stop them. “Look at what you did to me. Look at what your war cost me. You let them strip everything from me and rebuild me as a weapon. For this.”

Something shifted in the air. The void around us thickened, dark muscle and sinew threading out from the black like roots finding soil. I felt it in my chest before I understood it. The dream was turning.

“I made you a dancer,” Kaisara said. “Blades that moved through injustice like water. You wanted to protect people—I saw that in you. I wasn’t ready to have you beside me then. I am now.” Her voice dropped. “Your armor came from my father’s bones. Your swords came from his hands. I put everything I had into keeping you alive. We were killers together, Forza. I want that again. I want you back.”

I wanted to loathe her, to fuel my fury with every bitter syllable, yet a stubborn ember of love and admiration still pulsed beneath the wreckage of my heart.

Jethro was stirring inside me. I felt his tug, but this time he couldn’t break through. This was anger, frustration, but it was mine. Not his. That cruel sliver at the edge of my consciousness whispered its venom, fanning my wrath and confusion into a raging inferno. Across my vision, his blackened, rotting muscle fibers slithered forward, slick with fresh blood, as if the very earth continued bleeding itself toward me.

Kaisara, even then I couldn’t believe she’d so easily wound me so deeply. There had to be a reason. Some diabolical purpose beyond my understanding.

In anger I turned, faced away, and behind me nothing but more cold darkness, but another figure was there. Kaisara, but untainted: pristine, proud, concern softening her eyes. She wore her familiar black-and-gray zip-up hoodie, cargo pants, that signature purple scarf fluttering like a banner around her neck. I froze, shoulders hunched, hands falling to my sides.

“Forza,” she murmured, voice laced with something gentler than remorse, “did it ever occur to you that, maybe, I wasn’t the one who hurt you?”

My lips parted, but no words came.

“

Caisteal. The drugs, the mind control, the butchery. Does that, in any universe, sound like my work? Like the way I taught you to fight?”

My lower lip trembled. A storm of doubt and rage waged war inside me.

“Plans within plans. Moves within moves. You and I are just pieces on a board far greater than you know.”

I stepped forward, just a single foot, and the image shattered. Before me stood a twisted reflection: myself in that infamous black Gotanenks Armor, Varunium blades dripping in Caistealian blood. My inescapable dark self. The Forza Jethro had created. Every nightmare I’d ever buried poured from that armored shell, a crimson river of my own doing. My anger was my own. I growled, shaking in rage, and took a swing with my bare hands at him.

A gasp, my mouth seeking air - Hot tears carved molten tracks down my cheeks as guilt slammed into me like a battering ram. Pain, sharp, white-hot ripped through my chest. The once gleaming orange blade, the weapon that had ended countless lives, now thrust itself through me. Darkness pooled at the edges of my vision as my life’s fragments flickered past: the red wyrm on the city rooftop, Sun Jin Kaisara’s hollow sorrow, Shiinx’s soft unwavering smile, Kaira’s cold blade falling on Rafaya, the proud bump of fists with my best friend

Dare from the

Shrike Program, a smirk from the snow-patterned feline Silver Krowen,

Ukatan,

Rio Narro’s arms around me on Caisteal, and finally the twisted visage of the alter ego I had forged and its jagged feathered crest bathed in a single passing ray of light.

A fast breath hissed into my lungs. My eyelids flew open to a clean blue cloudless sky, bleeding light across the clearing. The taste of Tierian tree sap on my lips hot and alive. This was the real world - I had to repeat it again in my mind. I blinked repeatedly, struggling to dismiss the phantom faces of my past: lovers pulled into shadows, friends swallowed by oblivion. All of them faded, except one. I crawled up a bit, face upright into the morning sky. The silhouette of his flying body, born of something utterly alien, beyond mortal time and space, surged back to my mind’s eye in a single impossible moment. A recollection of a moment so surreal I had dismissed it as another dream. Still staring upward, I hauled myself to my feet, boot‐heels sinking into cold grass just beyond the rusting perimeter of the Asuya Co. station. Above me, the sky spun like a wounded god. A relentless drumming pounded in my temples.

That cataclysmic cry struck me like a physical blow. My ribcage trembled, my bones rattled. The air around me contracted, thick with terror and unholy exhilaration. The sound wasn’t just noise, it was a living thing, coiling around my throat, dragging me into a realm of exquisite chaos where dream and nightmare bled together. Deep within me I could feel the Bloodtiger stirring, shivered awake again. It writhed, exultant, feeding on the griffin’s howl, twisting into a wild and jubilant hunger that danced beneath my skin.

I did not step back. The griffin’s scream still rang in my bones, the shockwave still settling in the dirt around my boots, but I did not step back. I did not cower, nor bow. I knew those eyes. Burning, merciless, ancient. I had looked into them before, in some place between sleeping and waking, and I was still standing then too. The darkness and beast inside me cheering excitedly like seeing an old friend, on fire, hot beneath my ribs, not in fear but in recognition. My fists tightened at my sides. My brow furled in frustration. My heart missed a beat. I… I felt as if this had already happened, and I welcomed seeing it again.

They were always his black feathers.

He’s here. Jethro.