Chapter 446: Quarrelsome Trowel

Raizen had been sitting on the shaded bench for forty minutes by the time the bickering reached its peak. The bench sat against the back wall of the house, under the low overhang of the kitchen window, in a square of shadow the morning sun wouldn’t reach for another two hours from beyond the still-colored blanket of clouds. His arms were crossed and his feet extended, he had just refilled Keahi’s empty water glass on the boards beside him - who was working the right edge of the garden.

Three years of unchecked growth had turned the rear plot into a tiny forest of weeds, the original grass barely visible beneath waist-high stalks of weeds and things that had no business being there. Arashi worked the middle with a trowel and a level of complaint that had been escalating since they’d started. Keahi ignored him with her default setting - do not engage in any of this nonsense, but it was a bit obvious that it was starting to get to her, too. Hikari was somewhere on Raizen’s left side, kneeling between two old garden beds, mostly hidden by the height of the weeds around her.

Arashi straightened up and pointed his trowel across the garden.

"You know what’s not fair, Raizen."

"Yeah?"

"You. Sitting there. Pretending you can’t help."

"Kori said -"

"Kori said to me that I had to dig with grace. She said to you that you didn’t have to work. These are not equivalent commands."

"They are if she gave them. You know how Kori can turn into a dictato-"

"No, they are not." Arashi flung dirt off the trowel with a dramatic gesture and almost hit his own shorts. "That’s between you and her, Raizen."

"It is not between him and her. It’s between you and the principles of fairness in this household." Keahi interrupted.

From inside the kitchen, through the open window above Raizen’s head, Kori’s voice cut in. "Raizen stays put until I say otherwise!"

Arashi flinched and glanced toward the window. Kori wasn’t visible - the angle of the sill blocked the view - but the white edge of a pauldron reflected the light just behind the glass, and Arashi’s face made another really dramatic expression as he was being reminded that the woman inside was in full ceremonial plate and could, if pressed, come out here in it.

"That’s not fair," he said weakly.

"Pull weeds, Arashi."

"...Yes, Kori." He went back to his trowel with a long sigh.

A few feet away, Keahi picked up a small clod of dirt and tossed it sideways at his shoulder without looking up.

"Keahi."

"What."

"Did you just throw dirt at me?"

"I didn’t see anything."

"You were looking at me."

"I was looking past you, actually. There’s an interesting crack in the wall over there."

Arashi stared at her. She kept pulling weeds, pretending she hadn’t just done what she’d just done - though Raizen, who’d been watching the exchange, caught the small upward twitch at the corner of her mouth that gave the little lie away. Arashi picked up his own clod and weighed it speculatively. Keahi still didn’t look up. She drew her arm back, hesitated, drew it back further, and she tossed a second clod sideways without looking that way this time. It hit Arashi in the side of the face.

"KEAHI."

"Sorry. My aim wasn’t too great that time."

From the middle of the garden, Hikari’s voice drifted out from behind a stand of weeds - calm, dry, finished with the situation before it had fully developed. "If you two could refrain from killing each other, that would be appreciated."

"She started it."

"I don’t care who started it. I want to finish this by noon. You wouldn’t want Kori putting you out here tomorrow, do you?"

Arashi muttered something inaudible and went back to digging.

On the bench, Raizen let his gaze drift toward Hikari’s section.

She was hidden by the height of the weeds, only the top of her head visible from his angle - the light blonde hair tied back, her shoulders occasionally rising into view as she shifted. She hadn’t stood up once since the work had begun, but the pile of pulled weeds in her area was, by any reasonable measure, the largest in the garden. Which made no sense, because she’d been kneeling in roughly the same square metre the entire time.

He narrowed his eyes and watched the air above her row.

Thirty seconds passed before he caught it - a small flicker of pale blue light just above the weeds, lasting less than half a second. A spinning shape, finger-length, blurred by its own velocity into a disc of light, vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared. Then another, on the other side of her body. A third hovered for a moment over a tall stalk, dropped a centimetre to its base, and the stalk fell sideways. Her gloved hand reached down a second later and pulled the cut weed up in a fluid motion clearly meant to look like she’d yanked it out by the roots.

He suppressed a smile.

She was running tiny precision blades – somehow with no staff, no Luminite amplification - constructs small enough to fit in her palm, doing the work of a much larger tool at velocities a normal garden cutter couldn’t approach. The blades stayed low, dispelled themselves between cuts to avoid leaving a visible trail, and Hikari was using her body to block sight lines from Arashi and Keahi.

Raizen scratched his head. He knew that Eon usage outside of the Academy was forbidden without any other permission, but he wasn’t expecting Hikari to be this daring.

She glanced up, eyes finding his across the garden, and caught him staring. She made a very small "don’t." face. He made a very small "I won’t" face, and they both went back to looking at separate things at the same time.

Behind him, the back door clicked open and Kori stepped out onto the porch.

She was in full plate. The white pearl finish reflected the garden’s morning light in a way that made the entire backyard briefly seem like the kind of place royalty took photographs. Chest piece, waist guard, skirted plates, high collar, all of it assembled and locked together, all of it making her shoulders look ten centimetres broader than they actually were. She leaned more lightly on the souvenir spoon as she crossed the porch, the wooden bowl thudding softly against the stone. She was visibly letting more weight onto her waist, letting the armor hold most of her weight up.

The cohort stopped what they were doing. Arashi’s trowel paused mid-air, Keahi’s hands stilled, and Hikari rose slowly to her knees from the left side to stare.

Kori limped over to the bench and lowered herself down next to Raizen. The armour creaked once as she settled, propped the spoon against her knee, folded her good hand in her lap, and let out a small comfortable sigh.

"Now we wait."

"We wait... For what?" Raizen asked.

"You’ll see."

Arashi found his voice from across the garden. "Kori. Why are you wearing - is that armour?"

"Hip support."

"That’s - Kori, that’s not -"

"Shut up, Arashi."

"You’re wearing armour to sit on a bench."

"I’m wearing it because my hip is busted and I needed something to hold me upright. End of discussion."

Three minutes passed in the soft sounds of weeding before the noise from above started, faint at first - a low mechanical sound suggesting a propulsion system somewhere in the upper atmosphere. It grew louder over the next thirty seconds. The cohort looked up one by one. Even Raizen looked up. Kori did not.

A clean, slightly tinny voice came through speakers somewhere above the house.

"Clear landing zone. Clear landing zone."

The drone resolved into shape above the garden - nearly two metres across, a four-rotor heavy-lift configuration painted dull industrial grey, a large cube of brushed metal clamped beneath its frame. On top of the drone’s central housing, sitting cross-legged with the easy balance of someone who’d clearly done this before, was a person. A woman. Raven-black hair flowing out from beneath a sleek dark helmet.

Arashi yelled something incoherent about the begonias as the drone descended.

The metal cube touched the grass with a soft thud and the clamps released. The cube had small screens, switches and metal lids and tiny trapdoors all over, like some kind of complicated mechanism. The drone lifted its empty frame upward, hovering two meters above them in idle while the rider rose to a standing position, then the drone dipped one more metre so she could step off cleanly.

Once on the ground, she crossed the lawn toward the bench and stopped three steps in front of Kori and Raizen, the cube sitting on the grass behind her, the drone idling somewhere above

Reaching up, she pulled the helmet off.

Raizen took one look at her face, lifted his hand, and pressed his palm flat against his own forehead.

His day had, in his estimation, just gone irretrievably sideways.