The air here is the most pure in all of Nefriet. The Domain of the Celestial Preistess. It is here where she must live and receive orders from the divine. She acts like a God forced to watch everything that happens to her people and the ascended humans. She can only speak to 5 people the main one being Raphatta. On this day is when she receives a message from the Goddess Lilth the godess of oracles.
The air in the Domain of the Celestial Priestess remained perfectly still, the most pure air in all of Nefriet. Chitose sat in her forced isolation, the watcher of both her people and the ascended humans. To any observer, she was a statue of divine grace, but her mind was currently a conduit for a power far greater than her own.
A silver shimmer broke the surface of her sacred pool. The reflection of the sky was replaced by a swirling, starlit nebula. Lilith, the Goddess of Oracles, was speaking.
"Chitose," the voice echoed, resonating through the priestess's very bones. "The path of the two brothers must shift. They have the strength of warriors, but they lack the heart of protectors. They are fighting with blind eyes, driven only by the shadows of what they have lost."
Chitose watched the water, seeing the flickering images of Oni and Rain. They looked like jagged glass against the purity of the world.
"They must enter Shinra Academy," Lilith commanded. "They must walk among the people they are destined to lead or destroy. They need to build connections—to find a reason to fight that isn't rooted in blood. If they do not learn what they are fighting for, they will become no better than the calamity that took their mother."
The message faded, the silver light retreating into the depths of the pool. Chitose felt the weight of the order. She was the bridge between the divine and the messengers.
Closing her eyes, she focused her intent on the one person she spoke to most.
"Raphatta," she whispered into the wind, her voice carrying the divine authority of the oracle. "The Goddess has decreed a new path. The boys are not to go to the front lines. They are to go to Shinra. Prepare them."
Chitose's voice rippled through the celestial tether, finding Raphatta exactly where he stood.
Despite the distance between the High Domain and the lower reaches of Nefriet, they were linked. As the words of the Goddess Lilith left Chitose's lips, Raphatta felt the vibration of the divine mandate in his own mind. He stood tall, his presence commanding even in silence, processing the shift in the boys' fate.
"Shinra Academy," Raphatta's voice mirrored hers, a low rumble that carried both skepticism and a strange sense of duty.
"It is the only way," Chitose replied, her eyes fixed on the horizon of her pure domain. "They have mastered the strength to kill, but they have no anchor. If we let them reach Sephina now, they will only see the machine Takitsu has made of her. They will break, Raphatta. And a broken Revenant is a danger to the very world we are trying to preserve."
Raphatta looked toward the boys, who remained in his sight from their last encounter. They were still tense, the air around them thick with the residual heat of their training and the heavy, jagged energy they carried. They looked like creatures out of place in the light—wild, scarred, and driven by a single, dark purpose.
"You want to put them in a cage of etiquette and academics?" Raphatta asked, his gaze narrowing as he watched Oni's restless movements. "They aren't students, Chitose. They are survivors. Putting them in Shinra is like dropping two wolves into a stable of prize horses."
"Then let the horses learn to run with wolves," Chitose countered calmly. "They need to see the people of Nefriet. They need to make connections that aren't forged in blood. They need to understand that the world is worth saving, not just a place to seek revenge."
Raphatta let out a heavy breath, the weight of the Goddess's order settling. He knew Chitose was right, even if the transition would be violent. Oni and Rain were fighting for a memory of a mother, but they had forgotten what it meant to live among the living.
"I will tell them," Raphatta said. "But don't expect them to go quietly. They want Takitsu's head. Telling them to pick up a book instead of a blade... it won't go over well."
Chitose watched a single petal fall into her pool, the water absorbing the impact without a sound. "They don't have to like it. They just have to survive it. If they can find a reason to fight beyond their own pain, they might actually stand a chance against what's coming."
Raphatta turned his gaze from the horizon toward the two brothers. The air around Oni and Rain was still heavy with the scent of ozone and the raw, jagged energy of their recent battles. They didn't stand like students; they stood like predators momentarily paused, their bodies mapped with scars that told a story of survival, not academia.
"The path ahead has shifted," Raphatta said, his voice cutting through the silence like a blade.
Oni, whose eyes still held that restless, crimson flicker, tightened his grip on the air as if looking for something to crush. "Shifted? We know where the generals are. We know what Takitsu is doing to her. Why are we still standing here talking?"
"Because you are fighting like blind men," Raphatta countered, stepping into their space. His presence was a mountain they couldn't move. "You have the power to destroy, but you have no reason to protect. If you find your mother now, you will only see the horror of what she has become. You will lose your minds to the rage, and Takitsu will win without even drawing a sword."
Rain narrowed his eyes, his posture shifting into a defensive crouch. "So what? You want us to just wait while he hollows her out?"
"I want you to become more than the monsters he expects you to be," Raphatta said. "By the decree of the Priestess and the mandate of the Divine, you are being sent to Shinra Academy."
The silence that followed was thick with disbelief. Oni actually recoiled, a harsh, guttural laugh escaping his throat.
"A school?" Oni's voice was dangerously low. "You want us to sit in a classroom with the 'celestial' elites? To wear their uniforms and listen to their lectures while our mother is being used as a battery for a god?"
"You will go to Shinra to build the connections you lack," Raphatta stated, unfazed by the heat radiating off the boy. "You will learn who the people of Nefriet actually are. You will find allies. If you want to take down a system as deep as Takitsu's, you cannot do it as two lone ghosts. You need to understand the world you are trying to save, or you are just two more calamities for the world to fear."
Rain looked at his brother, then back at the Celestial. "They'll hate us. We don't belong in a place like that. We smell like the dirt we crawled out of."
"Then let them hate you," Raphatta replied. "But learn from them. Use the academy to sharpen your minds the way you sharpened your blades. The 'Feral Kings' need to learn to lead, not just kill."
Oni stepped forward until he was inches from Raphatta's chest, the ground beneath his feet beginning to crack from the sheer pressure of his frustration. "And if we refuse?"
"Then you remain weapons," Raphatta said coldly. "And weapons are easily broken by those who know how to use them. This is the path to Sephina. It runs through the halls of Shinra. Take it, or stay in the mud."
Oni's breathing was heavy, the heat radiating off his skin clashing with the sterile, cool air of the upper reaches. For a moment, it looked as though he might strike Raphatta just to prove he could, but the mention of their mother acted like a tether, pulling him back from the edge of a mindless rage.
"Three days," Raphatta stated, his voice brooks no room for further argument. "In three days, the new term begins. You have seventy-two hours to shed the skin of the battlefield."
The preparation was not a period of rest; it was a forced evolution. In a world 100x more advanced than the Earth they had once walked, "school supplies" were not paper and pens. They were brought to a containment chamber where the air hummed with the sound of thousands of invisible servers.
Waiting for them were their Interface Suits.
Oni stared at the sleek, charcoal-grey material laid out on a levitating rack. It looked like liquid shadow, woven with a microscopic Aether-Mesh. "You expect me to wear this?" he spat. "It looks like something a corpse would be buried in."
"It's a second skin," Raphatta replied, pulling a small, obsidian-like Data-Cube from a console. "That suit is a neuro-conductive dampener. It monitors your soul's output. Since you two haven't learned to calibrate your own energy, the suit will do it for you. It will stabilize your heart rate, refine your ki, and ensure you don't vaporize your classmates during a lecture."
He handed the black cube to Rain. "And these are your modules. No more scrolls. These cubes contain the collective history of Nefriet, the physics of advanced Aether-warfare, and the societal structures of the Ascended. You don't read them; you slot them into your neural-port, and the information is downloaded directly into your consciousness."
The next three days were a blur of high-tech integration. The brothers were subjected to "Sync-Calibration," where machines measured the jagged edges of their souls—souls that had once been human on Earth but were now reborn as volatile Celestials. They were scrubbed clean of the mud and blood of their journey, their hair trimmed, their scars mapped by scanners.
The morning of the first day arrived with a clinical, white light.
Oni stood before a mirror in their pod, looking at a version of himself he didn't recognize. The charcoal suit was skin-tight, vibrating with a dull orange pulse near his heart—the "Suppressor" working overtime to catch his spikes of anger. He looked refined, lethal, and trapped.
"I feel like a dog in a cage," Oni growled, his fingers hooking under the high, pressurized collar of the suit as if to rip it open.
"It's not a cage," Raphatta said, checking a floating holographic display that tracked the Academy's opening gates. "It's a stabilizer. Your energy is a mess. If you don't learn to use this tech, you'll burn out before you ever reach the inner sanctum where Takitsu is hiding."
The transfer was instantaneous. A gravitational lift pulled them from the staging area and deposited them onto a platform of translucent glass hovering miles above the ground.
Below them, Shinra Academy sprawled out like a living circuit board—a network of towering white spires and neon-blue energy conduits that defied gravity.
The brothers weren't alone. Around them, hundreds of other students—reincarnated geniuses, leaders, and warriors from Earth's history now evolved into Celestials—floated toward the main terminal. Their suits were white and silver, glowing with perfect, steady resonances. They moved with a grace that felt alien to the brothers.
As Oni and Rain stepped forward, the whispers started. The other students didn't see heroes or "Feral Kings." They saw two uncalibrated anomalies whose raw, flickering energy looked like a dying lightbulb in a room full of precision lasers.
"Look at the sync-rate on those two," a student whispered, his voice projected through a small, floating comm-link. "The orange one's suppressor is red-lining already. Did they pull them out of a junk heap?"
Oni's eyes flared crimson, the ground beneath his boots spider-webbing as his suit hummed a violent warning.
"Don't," Rain muttered, his own blue-veined suit tightening around his arms to steady his grip. "We're here for the information. We're here for her."
"The clock is running," Raphatta said, stepping between them and the crowd. "Six years. Start walking."
The transition from the open platform to the interior of the Central Spire was like stepping inside a massive, sapphire-veined diamond. The walls were made of a smart-glass that displayed real-time data on the weather patterns of Nefriet and the status of the "Lower Cycles" where the non-ascended humans lived. As Oni and Rain marched through the hall, their heavy, unrefined footfalls echoed against the silent, gliding movements of the other Celestials.
The crowd parted as a student moved toward them, his white-and-gold interface suit glowing with a frequency so stable it was almost blinding. This was Kaito, a soul who had been high-ranking aristocracy in his past life on Earth and had spent decades in Nefriet perfecting his "Soul-Sync." He stopped directly in Oni's path, his eyes scanning the flickering orange light of the boy's suppressor with blatant elitism.
"The system is chirping," Kaito said, his voice smooth and amplified by a small floating drone near his shoulder. "It's crying out because your presence is a 'noise' in a room full of music. You are the Revenant sons, aren't you? The ones who grew up in the dirt. You'll be lucky to be placed in the worker tier."
Oni's jaw tightened, his charcoal suit vibrating. "Get out of the way, Gold-Boy, before I break your frequency."
Kaito didn't flinch, merely offering a cold smirk as he moved along. As he left, a girl with short-cropped neon hair and a suit covered in additional sensor-pads leaned against a crystalline pillar, watching the interaction with a hungry look in her eyes. "Ignore him. Kaito thinks the universe is a spreadsheet," she said, tapping a holographic interface on her wrist. "I'm Mina. I study Soul-Mapping. Your energy signatures are... non-linear. Most curious."
Before Rain could respond, a boy about their age in a basic silver suit stumbled into step beside them, looking nervous. "Hey! I'm Taku," he whispered. "I just got here from Earth recently. Everyone here acts like they're already gods. You guys look like you actually want to punch something. It's refreshing."
The three encounters ended as they entered the Great Hall, a massive amphitheater where the atmosphere shifted from curiosity to heavy judgment. At the front, standing on a raised dais of liquid metal, were the first-year faculty: Professor Ryker, a man of iron and scars; Mistress Hana, the cold voice of Aether-Sociology; and Master Sato, whose digital monocle scrolled with the secrets of the Sages.
"The mapping begins," Master Sato announced.
The tension reached a silent peak as the Soul-Mapper—a massive, floating sphere of liquid crystalline data—pulsed with a deep, rhythmic hum. The students stood in neat, shimmering rows, sorted into the Houses of the Silver Owl and the Azure Serpent. Kaito stood at the very front of the line, expecting to see the brothers relegated to the low-tier barracks.
But as the sphere hovered over Oni and Rain, the hall went dark. The sphere didn't glow red for the Vanguard or blue for the Tacticians. It began to draw energy from the room, turning a deep, predatory violet before exploding into a blinding, Gold-Platinum light.
"Rank... S-0," Master Sato whispered, his monocle beginning to smoke from the data overload. "They aren't just in the Golden Dragon House. They are in the Imperial Tier."
The silence was absolute. Kaito's face went pale, his "perfectly calibrated" white suit flickering as it struggled to maintain its own frequency against the brothers' massive, sovereign output. He had spent lifetimes trying to reach the Golden Dragon tier, and these two had shattered the scale on day one.
Professor Ryker stepped forward, a grim smile on his face. "Imperial Rank means you'll be training with me four hours more than the others. I don't care about your gold light; if you can't control that output, you're just a very expensive bomb."
Oni looked at Kaito, who was still staring in disbelief. Oni didn't smile; he just adjusted his tight collar, the orange glow of his suppressor now mixing with the golden aura of his new rank. "Still think we're 'noise'?" Oni asked, his voice low and vibrating.
The golden light of the Imperial Tier faded, leaving a thick, buzzing tension in the Great Hall. While the rest of the students were ushered to their respective wings, Oni and Rain were led by a silent, floating drone toward the high-altitude bridge of the Imperial Wing.
They weren't alone. Waiting at the entrance were the other five students who shared the S-0 rank. They stood in a loose semi-circle, their suits pulsing with a steady, rhythmic light that made the brothers' chaotic energy look even more violent.
"So, these are the wild cards," a tall student with a suit that seemed to shift between solid and translucent said. This was Vance, a former military strategist from Earth's 22nd century. He didn't use his voice; his thoughts vibrated directly into Oni's mind. "Your resonance is leaking, Revenant. The dampeners in this wing are rated for God-tier output, yet I can still feel your heartbeat against the floor. Calm yourself, or you'll be a distraction to our synchronization."
Oni bristled, the orange suppressor at his chest flaring. "Keep your voice out of my head, Echo. I didn't ask for a roommate, let alone a telepath."
A massive Celestial named Jax, who had been a deep-sea miner on Earth, let out a low rumble of a laugh. He was tinkering with a heavy gravitational gauntlet. "Leave 'em be, Vance. They've got that 'First-Life' fire. Most of us have been through the cycle so many times we've forgotten what it feels like to actually be angry." He nodded at the brothers. "Welcome to the top. Just so you know, the teachers here aren't like the ones downstairs. They don't teach; they break."
Lyra, a woman whose suit glittered like a star-chart, stepped forward. She was a legendary composer on Earth, and she viewed power as a frequency. "Jax is right. You saw Professor Ryker. He's the one who's going to put you in 'The Crucible.' He doesn't believe in the advanced tech; he believes in the raw soul. He'll push your sync-rate until your heart stops, just to see if your soul has the 'will' to restart it."
"And then there's Mistress Hana," added Sera, the Architect, as she manipulated a 3D light-map of the academy with her fingers. "She was a world-class engineer, and she handles Aether-Sociology. She's the one who will force you to psychically link with the billions of souls on Earth. It's called 'The Burden.' If you can't handle their collective trauma, you fail. And if an S-0 fails, you don't just get kicked out—you get 'recycled.'"
The last of the five, Kage, remained in the shadows. He had been an assassin on Earth and was the only one who seemed to share the brothers' predatory stillness. "And Master Sato," Kage whispered, his voice like dry leaves. "He's the keeper of the 'Master Cubes.' He'll feed you data until your brain bleeds. He doesn't care about your combat skills. He cares if you can see the truth behind the Sages."
The drone led them past the common area to their Neural-Sanctuaries. The technology here was a century ahead of the rest of the school.
"Insert your ID-Shards," Sera commanded. "The rooms are empty white boxes until they read your subconscious. They build themselves based on your needs."
Oni stepped into his room. The walls shivered as the SHINRA-OS AI spoke through the floor. "Identity Confirmed: Subject Oni. Commencing Environment Synthesis."
In seconds, the white void transformed. The floor shifted into jagged, volcanic rock. The ceiling became a swirling, blood-red aether storm. In the corner sat a Regeneration Bath—a pool of silver liquid Nano-Aether designed to repair cellular damage and clean the "static" off his soul while he slept.
Rain's room, just across the hall, had become a calm, neon-blue bamboo forest where the air smelled of rain and ozone.
Oni sat on the edge of his stone bed, looking at the floating Neural-Desk where his schedule was already being projected in glowing gold letters. The orange light of his suit dimmed slightly as he stared at the two gold-rimmed Master Cubes Sato had given them.
"Six years," Oni whispered into the red storm of his room. "Six years of this cage."
"It's not a cage yet," Rain's voice came from the doorway, his blue-veined suit glowing steadily. "The others said it. We're targets now. We aren't just students; we're the only ones who can see what the 'Master Cubes' hold. We have to learn faster than they can break us."