The sky over Lavinsk displayed a fluid blend of gold and lilac, dotted with translucent clouds that seemed woven by divine hands.
The morning air carried the scent of celestial flowers and dew-kissed earth, painting an atmosphere of almost surreal peace.
Suki and Tsukumo walked side by side along a stone pathway in Silver's garden.
A steady breeze blew past, tugging at Tsukumo's simple garments and swaying Suki's longer hair.
A thick silence stretched between them.
It wasn't the tense quiet of a fragile truce about to shatter, nor the awkwardness of two strangers forced to share the same space.
It was the heavy calm before a storm, a silent preparation for the inevitable.
Suki kept his hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on the endless horizon.
His mind kept returning to the shattered remnants of Ruitan, to Silver's voice, and to the void left by Laura's absence.
Tsukumo, at his side, maintained an upright posture, but his shoulders lacked that suffocating, imperial rigidity he used to exude.
His golden eyes, now deep like aged gold, watched the swaying grass.
It took nearly ten minutes of walking before either dared to break the barrier of silence.
"You know..." Tsukumo began, without turning his face toward Suki, his raspy voice courted by the wind. "I've never felt as alive as I did the moment we traded those blows."
Suki didn't stop walking, but the rhythm of his footsteps slowed slightly.
"Even when the ground was crumbling beneath our feet..." the son of Vangor continued, swallowing hard, "...inside, for the first time in my life, I felt complete."
Suki glanced at Tsukumo's profile.
There was a naked honesty there, a vulnerability that the once-arrogant heir of the Force would never have allowed to slip.
"I know," Suki replied, staring at the path ahead.
"That fight was pure hell. But there was something clean about it."
Tsukumo let out a faint laugh, heavy with melancholic bitterness.
"I spent my entire life pretending to be untouchable."
Suki closed his eyes for a fleeting moment.
Images of Ruitan's purple clouds, the scent of blood, and the event horizon tearing through reality flashed in his mind.
"Ruitan was a field of destruction, Tsukumo. But it was also a mirror," Suki said, his tone low and hard, yet stripped of unnecessary malice.
"Every punch you threw at me... it felt like you were screaming for help with your own fists."
Tsukumo's throat caught.
The boy swallowed hard, his knuckles clenching at his sides.
"I didn't want things to go that far," Tsukumo murmured, his voice wavering slightly before he regained control.
"But... knowing that doesn't change anything I did. The destruction... the innocent lives... Laura..."
"It really doesn't," Suki cut him off, his voice dropping like a cold, sharp blade.
Tsukumo stopped in the middle of the path.
Suki took two more steps and stopped as well, slowly turning his body to face his former enemy head-on.
Tsukumo stared at Suki for several long seconds, his chest rising and falling with a deep breath.
The air around them seemed to soften.
"You're far more mature than your age suggests," Tsukumo commented, his tone steeped in a newfound respect.
Suki managed a tired smile, a mere ghost of one that barely reached his eyes.
"War exacts a heavy toll, and it collects it far too early."
They resumed their walk.
There was no sealed friendship here; the ghosts of the past were still very much alive and aware.
"This is the place," Suki said, stopping in the center of the vast garden.
Tsukumo looked around, eyeing the delicate petals and the pristine lawn with a raised brow.
"We're going to fight amidst the flowers?" he asked, a hint of suspicion in his voice.
"Look up, emperor."
Before Tsukumo could reply, Suki bent his knees and shot toward the sky.
The liftoff was so violent that the air pressure exploded into a shockwave, bending the trees below and cleaving the clouds with a trail of furious wind.
He soared in a straight line toward the floating platform, the colossal stone arena suspended high above where Silver usually pushed their training to the limit.
Tsukumo gave a half-smile, his golden eyes sparking.
Without hesitation, he cleaved through the air and blasted off right behind him, turning into a blur against the sky.
Still in the air, Tsukumo pulled up side by side with Suki and spoke, forcing him to reduce his speed.
"Fighting by your side against Silver is going to be... interesting," Tsukumo said, allowing a subtle, defiant gleam to return to his gaze.
Suki let out a scoff, teasing him.
"I don't think you know him well enough to be saying that."
Tsukumo let out a short laugh, a rare, genuine sound completely devoid of royal affectation.
When they arrived, they landed flawlessly on the edge of the platform. Atop an elevated structure nearby, Kania stood waiting.
Her blonde hair floated gently in the morning breeze, and her brown eyes followed the two young men with a blend of maternal concern and silent pride.
She knew what this training session meant.
In the exact center of the floating platform, Silver was waiting for them.
The Silver God stood with his arms crossed, his posture deceptively relaxed. Suki and Tsukumo halted ten meters away from him.
Silver flashed a light smile, adjusting his stance just enough to uncross his arms.
"Two against me," Silver said, his voice echoing with an authority that seemed to come from every direction at once.
"I'll warn you right now: if you come up here thinking like apprentices trying to impress your master, you'll fall like dust before the first minute is up."
Tsukumo planted his feet on the ground, bending his knees and letting his energy begin to circulate, the purple light of his bloodline sparking around his arms.
"That was exactly what I wanted to hear," Tsukumo declared.
Suki brought his hand to the hilt of the sword at his waist, his face adopting a cold serenity.
Silver's smile widened, growing dangerous.
"Excellent."
And then, he simply vanished.
His speed wasn't accompanied by a sound or any noticeable displacement of air until it was already too late.
Silver appeared instantly behind Tsukumo, unleashing a descending kick that warped the air around it.
Tsukumo barely had time to raise his gravity-reinforced forearm.
The impact was devastating, and the son of Vangor was launched through the air like a projectile, tearing up the stone floor for dozens of meters before managing to stabilize his footing.
Before Silver could retract his leg, Suki was already in motion.
Without hesitation, he used the momentum of the wind, spinning his body and delivering a horizontal slash with his sheathed sword straight at Silver's flank.
The clash of the blade against Silver's aura generated a soundwave so violent that the plains down below in their garden split cleanly in half.
Seeing the sword approach, Silver merely tilted his head to the side, blocking the strike with his bare palm.
"Nice try, Suki," Silver said.
In a fraction of a second, Silver grabbed Suki's wrist and spun him through the air, hurling him with colossal force against the rocky cliff face at the far edge outside the arena.
Suki's body slammed into the mountain, causing the entire structure to collapse in a cloud of dust and rubble.
However, before the dust could settle, the gravity around Silver shifted drastically.
Tsukumo had returned.
His eyes glowed in intense shades of gold and purple.
He extended both hands forward, his teeth biting into his lower lip as he focused the entire weight of the atmosphere directly onto the Silver God's head.
The ground beneath Silver caved in several meters.
The air around the arena swirled into a viscous vortex, and the sky itself seemed to bow under Tsukumo's gravitational pull.
Silver felt the tangible pressure crushing his shoulders.
His knees didn't even buckle, but the dust surrounding him was vaporized instantly.
Silver bent his legs and leapt against the crushing force of gravity with such raw defiance of physics that the pressure created by his launch pierced right through Tsukumo's gravitational barrier.
A flash of silver light tore through the sky as Silver shot upward.
From amidst the rubble of the destroyed mountain, Suki emerged like a red and blue comet.
Suki streaked across the sky toward the exact spot where Silver was ascending.
The luminous markings of his Force Transformation ignited along his arms and neck, living circuits in magma-red and glacial-blue pulsing in perfect sync.
Silver raised his bare forearm mid-air to block Suki's frontal assault.
The collision of their two powers in the middle of nowhere produced a deafening crack, fracturing the very texture of the air as if the sky were made of fragile glass.
"Excellent!" Silver exclaimed, keeping Suki's blade pinned against his arm.
In that exact millisecond, Tsukumo didn't try to attack Silver directly from afar.
Instead, he focused all his energy on creating a cage of compressed gravity around Silver himself, paralyzing the Silver God's mobility for a fraction of a second.
Suki jumped back on pure reflex.
"Suki! Now!" Tsukumo shouted, his arms trembling from the sheer effort of binding a god.
"Don't fight the field! Let it push you!"
Still airborne, Suki didn't question it.
Instead of resisting the spatial distortion Tsukumo had created, he relaxed his muscles and allowed the gravitational force to propel him forward.
Tsukumo molded the space, creating a literal acceleration slingshot, an invisible gravitational corridor that launched Suki straight into Silver's open guard at a speed three times his normal limit.
The combination was perfect.
Suki channeled all the heat, the pain, and the latent energy of his transformation into the tip of his sword, while Tsukumo's gravity acted as the slingshot.
The combined spiral of power crashed head-on into Silver's chest.
An explosion of golden, red, and purple light flooded the training grounds.
The impact made the distant mountains tremble, and the floor of the platforms gave way in cascades of shattered stone.
The force of the blow threw Silver backward.
He skidded through the air for over a hundred meters, his feet touching the ground only to carve a deep trench into the rock before he finally came to a halt.
In the center of the arena, Suki and Tsukumo fell to their knees, panting heavily.
Sweat mixed with the dust on their faces, the marks of Suki's transformation slowly faded, and the bulging veins on Tsukumo's neck returned to normal.
Silver walked back slowly through the mist of dust rising from the ground.
His attire was slightly torn near the shoulder, and a small patch of soot covered his chest.
His green eyes glowed with a burning intensity.
He stopped a few steps away from the pair.
"Impressive," Silver said, his voice deep and genuinely satisfied.
"You didn't fight as two individuals trying to steal each other's glory."
"You worked as a single unit."
"You actually made this old man have to think for half a second."
Tsukumo, still struggling to draw air into his lungs, looked up.
"Does that mean... we won?"
Suki let out a short, sideways laugh.
"No, the master isn't fighting seriously."
"If I had been fighting to kill, the two of you would have lasted less than ten seconds."
Tsukumo lowered his gaze for a moment, but Silver took two more steps and firmly touched both of their shoulders.
"But you managed to hit me," the Silver God continued, his tone shifting to that of a true master envisioning the future of his pupils.
"And that proves that, one day... you truly will be able to defeat anything that stands in your way."
Kania, from above, began to clap softly.
A radiant smile illuminated her face.
She wasn't celebrating the impact of the blow or the raw strength displayed, but rather the fact that two boys who had nearly destroyed each other weeks ago were now trusting their very lives in one another's hands.
Silver looked into Suki's eyes, and then into Tsukumo's.
"You are finally ready for the next level."
"No, we aren't," I replied almost immediately, cutting the master off.
Silver raised an eyebrow.
I stood up slowly, still catching my breath.
My eyes remained fixed on the Silver God; there was a dead seriousness in them.
"I'm sorry, Master, but I don't see this as such a massive leap in progress."
Tsukumo turned his face toward me in surprise.
"Those two we saw in Ruitan... that presence that made all of us feel insignificant." My hand slowly tightened around the hilt of my sword.
"We are still entirely too far from that level."
Silver remained silent.
"Today, we managed to land a hit on you because we fought together. We managed to synchronize our powers and exploit an opening."
I took a deep breath.
"But that doesn't mean we are strong."
The wind swept through the arena.
"If something on that level shows up again, this combination won't be enough."
Tsukumo lowered his eyes for a moment; he knew I was right.
Silver's expression lost its smile.
"So what is it you want?"
"I want you to stop fighting us like we're just training."
Silence.
"I want you to fight us as if our lives depended on it."
"If I'm not strong enough, I'll never be able to rescue Laura."
For a few seconds, no one said a word, then Silver slowly cracked a smile.
It wasn't the laid-back grin from earlier.
It was the smile of someone who had finally heard exactly what they wanted to hear.
"Understood."
Silver uncrossed his arms.
"So you want me to stop holding back?"
"Yes."
Tsukumo stood up right beside me.
"Yes."
Kania, watching from afar, lost her smile; she understood that this Suki would never be the same until Laura returned home.