Victor was someone who, despite his life choices, had very few scars. In fact, he only had one; a tidy thin line across his throat that his mother had gifted him two years prior.

But on June 19, 2022, he would incur many more. The boy was being thrown around by an entity that could barely be identified as Soji. Smoke obscured the half-bloom’s face, only his illuminated red eyes shining through. He lunged at Victor, gnashing bloodied white teeth. His nails had stretched into obsidian claws that dug into his opponent’s stomach. He contracted his fingers, trying to pull out the screaming boy’s innards.

Victor tried to push Soji’s claws out with just his atma reinforcement, but couldn’t even get the boy’s arm to budge as he was slowly walked to a blackened tree trunk.

“He’s even stronger?!” Victor thought gleefully, “And this body of his…even with reinforcement, it’s like trying to move a brick wall!” This was a level of durability and resistance that took rigorous training to achieve with atma reinforcement.

“Looks like you want to live after all!” He coughed the words out. The white-haired maestro transmuted his atma into lightning and elbowed the top of Soji’s head with electricity-covered arms. The bloom boy retracted, allowing Victor to painfully cauterize his wounds with his technique. The electricity held the beast shivering in place.

“So lightning still works, but fire makes him stronger. This must be because of the type of bloom that Daisy tried to create that day. Either way…it’s a bad matchup for me…” The boy sighed.

The transformed Soji approached Victor who defensively tossed a chain of lightning at him, paralyzing him once more.

“Now I’ve seen it… you're on the path. Make sure you think of me every step of the way. And you better get stronger. Because next time…” Soji dashed at him mid farewell.

“Omen.” Victor burst into a cloud of black mist and disappeared. Soji was left standing there, still transformed into the entity whose memories of incinerating his parents plagued his thoughts. His head moved in a jerky and animalistic manner, as though listening for prey. The half-bloom felt faint atma signatures prick its skin, then chased after it like a wild hound.

The green and brown blurs of the forest were further smeared with black as Soji jumped from branch to branch. He paid no attention to the smoldering trees, racing along until he came across two figures lying against a tree with a cracked trunk. Atma furled off their unconscious bodies. The creature jumped down, towering over a knocked out Kuro, held by Monika.

The overwhelming sound of emptiness kickstarted Monika awake. Her heart kicked into gear upon seeing the monstrous half-bloom standing over her. Its smoking head was a jarring first sight.

“Soji?” She whispered. The thing seemed to respond to the name. “Any chance we skip this part?” The creature growled, leaning in closer, right over Kuro.

A figure from the corner of its vision caught its attention.

Franklin and Farah stood side-by-side, blood and bite marks marring their young faces. There was no life in their eyes, and no movement from their lips, and yet they screamed.

The transformed Soji extended a clawed hand, then stumbled back. Slowly, the soot-like substance fell off his skin. The smoke dissipated as his horns and elongated nails retracted. Soji coughed and gasped for air.

“Geez, that smoke!” He wiped his bloodied hands on his chest, clearing his throat. He would mention nothing about the apparitions still staring at him several feet away.

The falling debris woke up Kuro.

“Why is there a dick in my face?” He asked with great annoyance. Soji looked down at his burnt underwear then to Kuro with a shrug.

“Would you prefer…” He partially bloomed, smoke pouring from his pores, “THIS!?” The boy held the transformation for just a second before reverting back to his normal self. Kuro jumped.

“Shit!”

“You can actually control it,” Monika stated, as though trying to convince herself.

And she was right to be shocked. Given her experience with countless blooms, the feat that Soji so casually displayed was a perversion of the natural order. It would have been easier to believe that bears could speak, or that the Earth was flat.

“In a way. Turning it on and off, whatever it is, is like swimming. When I started changing, at first it felt like I was co-piloting my body with someone else. I wasn't quite sure if it was a person or a thing, but it felt like it was trying to drag me deeper. But right now, it's just me.” Sort of. He couldn’t stop himself from flicking his eyes back to the ghosts of his friends lurking behind the trees.

“Interesting,” It was at that moment that Tamara appeared behind Soji, startling him, “Are you guys okay? Any missing limbs or gaping holes in your chests I should know about?”

The kids shook their heads ‘no’.

“What happened to those M.I.I. assholes? Did you beat them?”

“How do you know about that?” Monika asked.

She shoved Kuro off of her and stood up.

“They’re predictable. But, I used that to our advantage, so I cut a deal. You guys will get a chance to participate in the Orchestra.” Monika gasped while Soji and Kuro stared blankly, waiting for the translation.

“It’s a private tournament of sorts that serves as an entrance exam into the real M.I.I.,” Tamara explained.

“Why would we join the M.I.I. ? Shouldn’t we be avoiding them?” Soji asked. Kuro thought for a moment before responding.

“To get closer to the…targets…right?”

Tamara nodded with a smile, pleased by his intuition.

“Not only that, but if you’re an active maestro with them, then they can’t go after you. You’d be safe for a while.”

Soji’s eyes softened with relief.

“At least until they think of something…” She finished silently.

“That’s good. But if we have to fight guys like that all the time, I’m gonna lose it,” he said.

Tamara chuckled.

“Don’t worry. There are very few people worse than Victor.”

“Huh? How do you know about that? Is he M.I.I. too?” Kuro asked, perplexed.

“No, not anymore. But maestros leave behind unique atma signatures when they use it. His is all over the place. And that boy in particular, is notorious.”

“Notorious? For what?” Soji asked. Tamara shrugged.

“Let’s just say, if you weren’t here…I would have had to intervene,” the woman clapped her hands, “Alright, come along now, we haven’t time to waste.”

~

June 19, 2022 3.56pm

Unknown, Abuja, Nigeria

Tamara and her little ducklings sat in a lavish doctor’s office with no other patients present. Though they sat together, their minds sailed separate seas, a calm quiet filling the room.

“I couldn’t even react to someone like that…and yet… we’re supposed to kill the leaders of the M.I.I. ? Why can’t Coach do it herself? She seems strong…” Kuro combed over the day’s events in his mind, “And what she supposedly told Soji about the M.I.I.'s protocol being responsible for our situation doesn’t add up. Why would they be concerned with a ‘half-bloom’ like Soji and not with someone that can make them? I don’t know anything about this world so it’ll be hard to figure this out. But I do know this for sure: this woman is a liar.” He side eyed Tamara chuckling to herself over videos on her phone.

Her demeanor was starkly different from when they’d first met. She almost seemed human.

“You told me that I’m the third maestro with white hair. Victor is one of them…who is the third?” He began probing for information. Tamara looked up from her screen with a smile.

“Ah, you’re wondering if they’re…” she twirled her index finger around her temple. Kuro nodded.

“Well she definitely is. Hasn’t been around in a while, but you definitely don’t want to meet her.”

“Are all ‘white-hairs’ like that?”

“I mean…I’m not saying you’re going to become uncontrollably homicidal, but it’s not unlikely. And the word you’re looking for is ‘anomaly’.”

“Anomaly…Victor told me that I’m ‘not supposed to be here’. Is it because we’re anomalies?” Kuro spoke the word as though he’d never heard it before, his tongue stumbling clumsily along its consonants.

“Well, like I said, there’s only supposed to be one anomaly at a time; they’re meant to be rare. Yet he’s the second. So for you to exist as well…it’s unexpected, to say the least.”

“But what’s the big deal? Is it just the atma from birth?” Kuro was genuinely curious, his distrust abated for now. He decided to take a page out of Soji’s book, and ignore the more pressing matter of the fact that Coach had pretty much marked him as a ticking time bomb.

“It has to do with the techniques. Remember, I told you that atma is science. It obeys hard rules. Techniques and abilities formed from it also follow those rules. However, the techniques that anomalies possess are the only exception. In fact, they spit in the face of the laws of atma.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“I think I get it, but what exactly forms a technique? What rules do they have to follow?”

“You’re not really ready for the specifics, but basically, a technique is determined by the shape of your soul. And that is determined by your Illusion,” she paused to let the boy digest before continuing when he opened his mouth to ask more questions, “In the context of atma, an Illusion is the belief — physical, mental, ideological, whatever— you have about yourself.”

Kuro stared at Tamara with eyebrows raised in confusion before his face broke into a sudden realization.

“An expression of the soul…”

“Exactly, a technique is an expression of the soul. Where did you hear that?” She affirmed.

“It’s something my mom used to say when I was younger. It’s what she’d call my little art projects. But how can you call atma science when you start talking about souls?”

“Atma is its own science. It’s an energy form sensitive to thoughts and emotion. Souls are simply a part of that science, just as gravity is a part of physics.”

“Hmmm…” Kuro paused to think. He never was one who believed in souls or the afterlife, but given his week, it would’ve been foolish to outright deny that the former existed.

Soji and Monika paid no attention to the conversation, engrossed in a heated match of air hockey on the girl’s phone.

“What’s my Illusion?”

Just then, a stocky Japanese man wearing a wrinkled lab coat entered the room, clipboard in hand. Despite his disheveled garments, his hair was neatly tied in a bun, save for a few strands of hair twisting around his black wayfare glasses. He was clean-shaven, giving the impression who was usually very neat, but had been caught off guard.

The man took one look at Tamara, then at Soji, then back at Tamara. His tired eyes drooped even lower, unimpressed.

“A devil and a saint walk into the doctor’s office…” He mumbled unenthusiastically with a deep and raspy voice.

Tamara grinned mischievously.

“Sounds like a really bad joke.” The man walked slowly to where a now attentive Soji was sitting. The warm white light of the room reflected off his glasses as he inspected the boy.

“Uh…hi?” Soji averted his gaze, nervous.

Without warning, a dozen large sewing needles materialized just over the doctor’s shoulder. One of the pencil-sized needles shot into Soji’s arm, resulting in a yowl.

“What’s that fo—” The man shushed Soji, pressing his index against the boy’s lip to stop him from talking.

“Mhmmm…hmmmm…mhmm.” The needle twisted around for a moment, causing the boy severe discomfort. It eventually withdrew from the boy’s arm, and as it did so, a string of thin blue atma sprang from its tip, closing up the hole it made.

“Looks like you were right, T.”

“Right about what?” Soji asked.

“You can control the process of blighting, the stage of bloom that you’re at. However, the baseline has supposedly increased from when you were first cursed, er, infected.”

“Uh…what?”

“It means,” Tamara answered, “When in your ‘normal’ state, your body’s composition should be 5-6% bloom. And most of that has to do with things like senses, and changes in certain parts of the brain and body. But after you transformed again, your baseline increased. Now in your ’normal’ form, your composition is roughly 11%.”

“Eleven percent? So what’s changed now?”

The doctor answered.

“The change is more soul than body, I’d guess. I theorize that if you reach 100%, you’ll be a full bloom, in body and in soul.” Monika and Kuro softly gasped. Tamara stayed stoic.

“What!? How do I slow it down? And how can you tell all that from a needle?”

“My needles are part of a…complicated…technique. As for slowing it down, you’ll need to avoid transforming unnecessarily. I could probably make an Instrument to help with that, but it’ll take some time.” Soji was silent.

“Damn… this’ll be a problem if I can’t reach that woman in time…”

“You’ll be fine,” Tamara comforted him, “Doc here is real good at what he does.”

“I already agreed to help you out, you don’t need to butter me up.” Doc procured a cigarette box from the left breast pocket of his coat, sighing when he flicked it open to see it empty.

“The door is where you left it. Bye now.” The doctor slipped back through the door he emerged from, moving much quicker than Soji expected from a man with his build. What an odd fellow he was.

“Huh? Kicking me out so soon? You kids order something to eat, I gotta chat with Doc for a moment.” She tossed her phone at Monika and rushed after her friend, phasing through the door.

“Her phone! Now’s my chance to try and get more information!” Kuro thought to himself.

“Did that guy just call me a devil? Why does everyone keep calling me that?”

“Who’s everyone, you’ve met like two people?” Monika replied.

“Don’t you remember? That guy with the mask? He said I was using devil power.”

“Oh yeahhhh…I mean, you are made of sin, technically.”

Soji’s hand slapped his forehead, eyes widening in shock at the realization.

“Kai! So you’re telling me I’m actually a demon!” The boy cringed as remembered how he’d readily and proudly accepted Angelo’s accusation.

“Well…not a demon, per se…but all that sinful emotional energy I told you about is somewhere inside you.”

“And it’s turning me into a demon. Oh, my God!” Soji wailed, “I’m finished!”

“Are you religious or something?” Monika asked, amused.

“Religious,” Kuro replied, “but hardly pious. He’s just being dramatic.”

“Not being super devout doesn’t mean I’m happy about being a literal devil.” Soji spat out the last word like it was poison. It might as well have been poison, with how heavily soured it was by his parents’ murders.

Both Kuro and Monika shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Nothing they could say would be close enough to an antidote. A painful silence washed over the room as Kuro slapped himself mentally.

“What is wrong with me?” He lamented, “Why can’t I say the right thing? Why can’t I help you, Soji?”

Soji’s grumbling stomach broke the quiet.

“So what are we eating?” He asked.

“How do we feel about McDonald’s?” Monika suggested.

Soji shook his head.

“MoMo’s Chicken?”

“Ooh good one!” The girl licked her lips.

“Yeah, I’m down for that. You go first,” Kuro said. Soji frowned.

“You never go last. You always know what you want from MoMo’s and you hate waiting for me to decide.” He squinted at Kuro before he came to a realization.

“You wanna go through her phone!”

Kuro averted his gaze, embarrassed.

“I forget about Soji’s intuition sometimes. He’s hotheaded and obstinate but he’s got an incredibly annoying sense for what people want. He may just be right about Coach, considering that.”

Monika glared at him.

“Why do you wanna go through Big Sis’s phone?” Cornered, he sighed. There would be nothing but awkward conversations tonight, it seemed.

“And all of them are my fault,” Kuro sighed.

“I don’t trust you guys. Coach’s story about the M.I.I. being responsible for what happened to us doesn’t add up. And she’s clearly strong. Why is she making us kill people? Why do we have to be roped into this plan?”

“Okay first of all, you killed someone today, ya know…”

“That wasn’t my fault!?”

“Sure, whatever,” Monika rolled her eyes, “Secondly, Tamara can’t directly wage war against the Elders because of a Contract. With maestros, breaking Contracts has serious consequences.”

“Tamara. So that’s her name.”

“Okay, and? That still doesn’t clear you guys. How do we know we’re not helping out a couple of terrorists? You paint the Institute and these Elders as some big evil organization, but what do we really know about them?”

“Ahem,” Soji interrupted with irritation, “did you forget they sent people to kill me?”

“They’re dealing with the unknown. And maybe if we can show them that you can control your blooming, then they’ll leave you alone. We don’t have to get involved in their conflict!”

“You’re right, let’s just smile and wave,” Soji replied sarcastically.

“Yeah. That will not go the way you think it will. Also, whether you trust us or not, Kuro, and regardless of the path you choose, joining the Institute is the first step. Either way, this seems like a problem for us in the future. Right now, let’s tackle this MoMo’s and deal with it ’til tomorrow.” Monika deescalated the conversation, calming a creeping explosion.

She handed the phone to Kuro. The boy stared at the food options for what seemed like forever. It’s not like he could have gone through the phone now. Yet ordering food like he was just having a night out with friends felt wrong. It felt gross. Still, he had no other options.

“Alright. You’re right.” He chose his usual meal. “I can’t say I agree with any of this. But at the end of the day, I’ll always choose my loved ones. So I choose you, Soji.” He handed the phone to his friend, and the two finally shared a smile.

“You think you’re flattering me with the last pick?” He laughed, turning to Monika.

“Tamara’s paying, right?”

Monika nodded, and the boy proceeded to select an array of options. Monika did the same.

“Alright, ordered,” she paused, “I know you guys are new to this, but Big Sis got us. Even today. Victor was scary, sure, but as long as Tamara’s around, nothing truly bad can happen.”

“Well then let’s make a promise,” Soji said, “If it’s just us, we always got each other’s back. No matter what.” He put his hand forward, balled in a fist, and glanced at Kuro who gingerly bumped his own fist against his.

“What are you waiting for?” Kuro asked Monika. The girl was taken aback at the invitation.

“I-I didn’t think you meant me. I mean, we just met…”

“And we’ve got like two near-death experiences already.”

Monika sheepishly returned the smile.

“I’ve never done anything like this before…come to think of it, when was the last time I had friends my age?” She reached over Soji’s head, drawing protest from the boy, and bumped them up, finalizing the oath.

Tamara popped her head through the wall.

“You guys ready to go?”

The kids nodded. They all stood up, and hustled towards the exit. The woman’s hidden gaze bore into Soji as she completely stepped through the wall.

“Just who are you, Soji?” She thought, briefly remembering the conversation she just had with Doc.

~

“About that other thing you asked me to check on, T…” He shuffled through papers on a neat desk. “There’s nothing special about his parents.”

“Hm…” She crossed her arms.

“But what’s really interesting,” he continued, “Is that he’s not related to either of them.”

“So they’re not his biological parents…” Tamara finished.

~

She started the engine of her expensive white SUV, glancing at the boy through the rear-view mirror. Where did you come from?