After her talk with the Storm Queen, Akari left the camp and opened a portal back to Yutakai. Oshira’s capital was more than five hundred miles from Corel City, but that was no problem for a Master spacetime artist. Now that she’d been to Yutakai once, she could get back with a single portal. The same was true for Clan Zell’s camp, and anywhere else in the Oshira Province.

  The portal snapped shut with a whoosh of air, and Akari found herself standing on a crowded sidewalk near the financial district. Glass towers reflected the last of the evening sun, bathing the crowded streets with golden light. She stretched out her arms and breathed in a deep lungful of the warm city air.

  It felt good to be back in civilization.

  She found a hotel room for the night, then spent the next few days buying supplies for her trip into the Storm Garden.

  First, she replaced her father’s old backpack with a more advanced storage solution. This looked like a simple black ring to the naked eye, but it let her access three separate pocket spaces.

  Normally, only Grandmasters and Mystics could use items this advanced. A spatial delivery network powered the spaces themselves, but the ring didn’t hold enough mana to open the portals. For most people, that meant astronomical conversion costs. But Akari bypassed these costs by cycling spacetime mana directly into the sigils.

  Each pocket space held roughly a hundred cubic feet—basically the size of a small bedroom closet. She filled the first two spaces with several months’ worth of food, liquid mana, and fresh water. Then she stocked up on the other essentials. Sleeping bags and pillows with built-in heating sigils. Dozens of Master-level healing potions and flesh-restoring wraps. She packed clothing, a dozen extra pairs of glasses, multiple sources of fire mana, and every sort of hygiene item she could think of.

  Then she bought a second ring and repeated the whole process from the start. That seemed excessive at first, but the Storm Garden only had one rule: anyone who left its borders could never return for a Veilcord. Supposedly, the blades knew the truth, and they passed their own judgement.

  With all the basics covered, Akari stopped by a combat goods, similar to Palamins back in Espiria. The shop occupied three floors of a converted warehouse, lined with weapons and armor that cost more than most homes. Here, she bought several sets of storm-resistant armor, complete with pants, jackets, gloves, boots, and helmets. Each piece had special counter sigils to negate the effects of the storm.

  The whole set would drain a sizable portion of her mana, but that was worth it. Akari would waste even more mana if she relied on her Cloak techniques this whole time. She might even run out of mana entirely.

  Talek only knew how her poor cousins planned to survive out there.

  But what if her grandmother was right? Were her cousins stronger because they didn’t rely on modern equipment?

  . Akari’s mother had rejected Clan Zell’s dogma and became a Mystic in her thirties. Akari trusted her mother more than some half-senile old woman who wore animal skins and prayed to the storms.

  Then again, her mother had never earned a Veilcord or bonded a kyrin. Was that a deliberate choice? Or had she attempted the Storm Garden and failed?

  , Akari reminded herself. She’d learned mana arts on the Archipelago, when everyone told her it couldn’t be done. She’d entered the Artegium as a sixteen-year-old Novice, rose through the ranks twice as fast, and beaten at least two of her teachers.

  “,” a memory of Kalden’s voice echoed in her head.

  Now, the truth of those words strung harder than ever. Akari had never made any friends in the Artegium. Even her teammates didn’t count. Kalden had recruited Arturo and Zukan, and Relia had recruited Elise.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Akari would have failed a long time ago if not for them. Now, her own family wanted nothing to do with her.

  “Wow.” Glim appeared beside her on the busy sidewalk. “You sure argue with yourself a lot. I’m starting to feel like a third wheel in here.”

  “Sorry,” Akari muttered as she wove through the crowd. Master brains were supposed to be quick and efficient. So why did she feel more indecisive than before? It made no sense.

  Akari turned to Glim, who floated several inches above the sidewalk. “You think I’m doing the right thing?

  “Definitely,” Glim said. Your grandma wants you to enter Storm Garden unarmed, naked, and blind. That’s crazy!”

  “Yeah,” Akari said. “Screw that.” When the time came, she would use every tool at her disposal.

  ~~~

  The next morning, Akari stood with her cousins on a rocky island in the Inner Sea, less than a mile from the Storm Garden’s border.

  “This world cowers in fear,” her grandmother declared from the top of a rocky ridge. She cut a dramatic figure, with her white hair thrashing in the wind, and the tides crashing against her back. “They hide behind their walls and suits of armor. They fear the cold, the rain, and the wind.”

  She spoke the words in Shokenese, but Akari had spent the past few days listening to lessons nonstop on her media player. She knew enough to follow along and fill in the blanks.

  “They think these walls are free,” Kira shouted over the thunder. “They don’t realize the price they pay. They think they are wealthy, but that wealth cannot buy happiness or meaning. They think they are strong, but even their Mystics fear the storms.”

  Zell Kaito stood proudly in front of the group, with one hand resting on the back of his blue mount. Most clan members didn’t bond a kyrin until after they’d entered the Storm Garden, but Kaito was special. Apparently, the creature had approached him while he was hunting in the Inner Sea, and they’d figured it out from there.

  Kaito’s wife, Zell Sholan, stood beside him. Instead of animal skins, she wore a black combat bra and a pair of matching shorts. That was a good sign. Sholan was clearly an outsider, but the clan still accepted her as an equal. That proved they could accept Akari, too.

  Zell Nari stood a few paces away from the others, clad in a white fur vest a skirt of dark leather. Akari thought she was Kaito’s sister, but she couldn’t be sure. No one had bothered to explain the family tree.

  In addition to Akari’s three cousins, more than a dozen of Clan Zell’s retainers lined up to join them in the Storm Garden. These weren’t part of the main family, but they could still earn Veilcords, assuming they came from the right bloodlines.

  Most of the retainers wore animal skins like Kaito and Nari, while others wore modern clothing like Sholan. Some looked visibly afraid, with shaking hands and muscles tensed against the wind.

  “We carry the mana of our ancestors,” her grandmother said. “This power lies dormant in the modern world. But not here.” She struck her chest with a fist, loud enough to echo over the wind. The thunder grew quiet, as if the storm itself were listening. She fixed them all with a hard look, dark eyes lingering on each face. "Who are we?"

  “!” the others shouted

  That last phrase wasn’t entirely Shokenese. The first two words sounded more like Old Koreldon.

  ‘Glim translated in her head.

  Akari furrowed her brow. ‘’

  ‘,’ Glim said. ‘’

  They chanted again. Their fear washed away in the same moment, leaving nothing but hard resolve in its place.

  Akari suppressed a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. These people might live in tents, but their power was clear to anyone with eyes and ears. Together, they became far more than the sum of their parts.

  “No,” Kira silenced them all with a single word. “Not yet. You might be Masters, but you are still children—coddled on this dry shore, hiding behind your parents and grandparents. You do not know cold or pain. But you will.”

  Storm clouds rolled in as she spoke, darkening the horizon in shades of blue and black. The tides loomed higher than Yutakai's skyline, walls of water held back by willpower alone. A web of white lightning filled the horizon.

  Kira gestured back to the beach, behind the crowd. “Ascension cannot happen on land. It happens out there, at the center of the Sea. But you can’t fight the storm. You can only embrace it. Let it break you down and remake you from the inside.”

  Kaito climbed on the back of his mount, while the others cycled their mana and tensed their muscles.

  “Go, sons and daughters of Clan Zell.” The tides parted into a long corridor, and Kira gestured them forward. “Become one with the storm, or die trying.”

  Kaito’s mount stretched out its blue wings, catching the wind with a sound like thunder. It launched forward, leading the charge into the storm with a high-pitched battle cry. Sholan and Nari followed him with bursts of wind mana, while others ran across the water’s surface, bending the waves to their will.

  Akari activated the zoom function on her glasses and fixed her crosshairs on the nearest floating island.

  Finally, she opened a portal and stepped into the storm.