Subterfuge: A Cultivation Academy Series (Bastion Academy Book 3)

by J D Astra

  “If I’m assessing this correctly...” Mae was far away in my head, as if she was speaking through a brick wall meters thick. “You may be able to communicate—”

  I opened my eyes to a vast, black plain covered in curling white mist. It stretched on and on, with no light, no trees or grass, nothing. I looked down at myself and found a hazy image of me in Bastion garb. I moved my hand side to side, and my fingers blurred together, moving out of sync with my commands.

  “It’ll pass,” said the familiar voice of my master.

  I spun around to see the near perfect vision of Woong-ji standing before me. The white mist pulsed with a gentle thrum around her in a calm heartbeat pattern, swirling and curling around her legs. I couldn’t see her feet or mine, and wiggled my toes to confirm their presence. The ground was squishy, like warm mud in the garden on a hot summer day. It was soothing.

  “We control this place,” she said, trying to assuage my confusion.

  “Is this real?” I asked, breathless.

  She shrugged. “Define real.”

  A blue shimmer started beside me, then Mae’s classic digitization distortion filled the space. Mae appeared next to me, life-sized and in full color. Her hair was shiny black, eyes a bright orange topaz, and her skin was almond. Her skirt was blue, and her blouse a silky cream.

  I reached out and touched the vision of Mae. Her skin was cold and felt solid, but slippery, like ice in the sun. “Am I dreaming this?”

  “We all are.” Sung-ki’s voice surprised me, and I turned again. “Genta said Alchemy was weak.”

  “For the weak,” Cho corrected as he materialized next to me.

  Sung-ki tutted. “If only he knew the power of li.”

  Hana blurred into existence a moment later and reached out for my hand. I took hers and marveled at how smooth it was. I knew her hands were soft, but this was like gossamer spiderweave. Her purple eyes were locked on our joined hands, a similarly confused expression on her face.

  Sung-ki cleared his throat, and we jumped back from one another. “Before we waste too much time, this is real. Our minds are connected in a trance-like sleep, but the duration will be limited.”

  “Let me get to the point, then.” Woong-ji turned to the void and drew in long sweeping motions in the fog. It took shape as Ena, then Kotomi, Genta, Ko-nah, and many other students and people I had not met. “This is a splinter cell of Ribatasan rebels who specifically seek the execution of King Hisachi and to supplant him with Dokun Yamamotto. We knew before we left that the unrest was growing, and Dokun was seeding the Ribatasan with his operatives, but we had no idea how wide his reach was.

  “We must assume that any Ribatasan member could be part of the splinter cell, and therefore will directly oppose our attempts to collect information on Dokun or his company. The rendezvous that was supposed to take place in Heiko would’ve shed light on the rebellion situation here, but given that our contact never showed...” she trailed off, sadness in her eyes.

  Whispers filled the void around us in Woong-ji’s voice, some younger than how she sounded now and some old.

  The fog across the empty plain swirled into a giant face, that of Woong-ji a few decades younger, with tears in her eyes. It’s my fault, Woong-ji’s younger voice said mournfully.

  The fog morphed to Woong-ji as I knew her now, eyebrows pinched and forehead furrowed. I should have trained him better, the older voice replied, angrily.

  I could have protected him, came a gentle, motherly tone, and the white mist shifted again, ever in flux.

  I shouldn’t have activated him, said a cold, disappointed voice.

  “Silence!” Woong-ji declared, and the fog collapsed to the ground under an unseen weight.

  She collected herself and wiped clean the fog to start again. The three towers at the center of Kokyu took shape, then the Enjiho, and Dokun himself. My blood boiled at the sight of him so close—so real. I controlled my baser urge to attack and focused my attention on Woong-ji. “Ena is going to want our plan for assassinating the king. We need to have one that will serve as a guise for carrying out the original mission.”

  “And what is the original mission, exactly?” Hana asked heatedly. “I feel like I’m missing a fair amount of information regarding our wellbeing—like for example, did you know Ko-nah was going to be at this school?”

  “We were aware of the possibility,” Sung-ki replied.

  Hana growled, and heat radiated off her skin. “And you didn’t think that should’ve been mentioned to us?”

  “We weren’t at liberty to disclose certain elements that wouldn’t critically impact the outcome,” Woong-ji said, her eyes pained with forced silence.

  “What you mean to say is, you lied to us because we’re children,” Yuri remarked nonchalantly.

  “No,” I said, my anger bubbling. “What she means to say is that she and Sung-ki took another Silent Pact for a different mission than us. What was it? To kill Dokun?”

  “We—” Woong-ji sucked in a pained breath, and the bodiless voices around us hushed her. My body felt light and my vision hazed. The fog went green and wild, wrapping me in a suffocating bubble. Pain shot up my spine and pulled me to my knees. I pinched my eyes shut against it and gritted my teeth. Around me I could hear my friends groaning in agony.

  Then the pain stopped. I shook my head to clear the distraction away. When I opened my eyes, our strange world had returned to normal. Everyone except Woong-ji was on their knees or the ground, having just roused from the same intense pain.

  “So, it’s true,” Cho whispered as he climbed to his feet. “We’re really in Woong-ji’s mind, hearing her thoughts, and feeling her pain. Pain from another Silent Pact.”

  I looked to Sung-ki. “I thought you said lies on the battlefield take lives, Instructor?”

  His head hung, eyes not meeting mine. “I stand by that statement. Our forced silence may yet get someone killed. But the truth can also kill. We must keep moving forward now, or we are all dead.”

  “But if we had known the whole truth from the beginning, we might not have come,” Hana said, seething.

  I stood, making myself larger as I stared down my master. “And then we wouldn’t be here to cause whatever distraction you needed to accomplish your mission.”

  Woong-ji grew in size by at least a meter, with a menacing glower. “I know how this seems. We cannot fall apart and lose faith in each other. That path will surely lead to our untimely demise.”

  I knew she was right, but I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. She was my master, but hadn’t advocated for me, or any of the others, to be aware of the secondary mission. But it may have had nothing at all to do with trust. She could’ve been forced into the agreement. Maybe she didn’t want to let me go on this mission without her guidance, her protection, and so she agreed to something else to that end. I recalled the giant face of smoke as it argued over the disappearance of the informant. “I shouldn’t have activated him,” she had thought.

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “What’s our plan, master?”

  Woong-ji shrunk to her normal size and turned to shape the fog. The massive machina came to life, marching in place. “The Enjiho. They have access to most of the city. A special sect of them have unrestricted access to the palace and King’s Towers at ground level.”

  “Which is all I would need to get access to the whole building,” I said, thinking of my new bot, hidden in the frame. She was slender and flexible enough to hide flat against the Enjiho’s back. With a careful ry glimmer, no one would notice. I scowled. “But why do we need access to the King’s Towers?”

  Sung-ki grimaced. “The splinter cell expects our help with their rebellion, which hadn’t been part of our original agreement.”

  From all we’d been told last year, Kokyu’s king—Hisachi—had blamed the Busa-nan poisoning on Ribatasan. This had been enough evidence for the king to justify executing any rebel he found, and must’ve been enough of a push to make Ribatasan want to fight ba
ck.

  “What was the original agreement?” Hana asked, flustered.

  Woong-ji sighed. “That Ribatasan would help us in tracking down the true perpetrator of the attack. We knew the source was Dokun, and withheld that information from them for fear of alerting his informants and losing our opportunity. With the executions, terror attacks, and increased restrictions, some members of Ribatasan allied themselves with anyone who could help them accomplish more... drastic results.”

  Woong-ji’s older voice whispered from above, We waited too long to create allies and made ourselves enemies.

  Her younger voice chimed in next. We should’ve turned back when Chul-kang didn’t meet us.

  Woong-ji cut a hand through the air to silence the voices, and the mist went still.

  Sung-ki placed a hand on her shoulder. “We needed this information to complete our mission, and turning back could’ve been just as dangerous with no reward.”

  I cut them off. “We get it. You had to make a choice without us and did what you thought was right. We’re here now, and we just want to get home alive, mission complete. After I get into the King’s Tower, then what?”

  “Take your bot up to the king’s level and put an end to him,” Sung-ki said.

  The thought of murdering a king—no matter if he was a decent one or not—turned my stomach.

  “What will he really be doing?” Yuri asked.

  “The same plan we made in Busa-nan. Get access to Yamato Corp and scour it for information,” Woong-ji said.

  “And what will you be doing?” Yuri posed.

  Sung-ki sighed. “We’ll be doing what we need to do to ensure you all get home safely.”

  I didn’t like that our instructors had ulterior motives, but from what they had been able to tell us, it seemed we were in deeper than we’d thought. We knew coming to Kokyu meant putting ourselves within the enemy’s grasp, but we thought surely we’d have a few allies to aid our work. Now we had only each other, and too many secrets between us.

  Woong-ji waved her hand, and the image of the Yamato Corp building cut out from the mist. The details were sparse, but I’d successfully infiltrated Wong’s facilities with less information. Dokun was sure to have better protection, but Mae was getting better and faster at her own digital infiltrations.

  Mae cleared her throat. “Jiyong and I could uncover a lot with just fifteen minutes of access to the main facility.”

  I nodded. “On the prototype tests we were getting about an hour of use with efficient conservation. Fifteen minutes would be doable, but we’d have to be close by for retrieval. The weight of the secondary device is a big munje drain.”

  “We’ll have to use every second we have. Even the smallest insight could tip the scale in the coming struggle,” Woong-ji said gravely.

  I looked to Hana, Cho, and then Yuri. “Let’s do what we came to do.”

  Chapter 19

  I AWOKE ON REST DAY with an uneasy sickness to my stomach. Through several sessions, we had memorized our fake plan to the finest detail and practiced carefully communicating it to avoid setting off Ena’s floors. Still, I was worried.

  What if Ena asked a question we hadn’t prepared for? What if Woong-ji asked me to execute the plan to murder the king? We’d talked about it like it was truth so many times over the last few evenings, I wasn’t sure what the real plan was anymore.

  I wiped my hand over my face and rubbed my eyes.

  “Sleep well?” Ko-nah asked as he opened the slats of the window, revealing pre-dawn sunlight outside.

  “Well enough,” I said, though it didn’t feel true.

  “The students of Moon Shadow will go into the community and spent their time performing chores to help the locals today while you engage in cultural immersion—visiting local historic sites and the like,” Ko-nah said as he changed into less prestigious looking work clothes.

  I nodded. “Enjoy your community service.”

  He turned to me, then looked at the other boys who slept. I could see the desire to say something he thought was important, and I held up my hand to stop him. “It’s not worth my time, so save it.”

  Ko-nah shrugged, then smiled. “I was going to wish you a pleasant trip.”

  I could see in the way his fingers twitched and he wouldn’t meet my gaze that his behavior was all fake, though very convincing to someone who didn’t know him. Perhaps that was how he’d survived so long as an outcast—though he’d made himself one of his own accord.

  I sighed. “What is it?”

  Ko-nah dropped the façade, then moved his mouth in the shape of Busaneo words. Mae translated and repeated in my head: “You will be intercepted.”

  I mouthed back, exaggeratedly, “By who?”

  “Morning, squirts,” Genta groaned, and Ko-nah turned away, pretending to do something else. “What’s going on here?”

  “Staring contest,” I said, deadpan.

  Genta laughed. “Well, look while you can. Aki and I might not be back tonight.”

  “Oh?” I asked while I dressed.

  “That business you want us to attend could take us a few days,” Genta said with resentment.

  I hummed and nodded. “Important business.”

  Genta gripped my shoulder from behind. “It’d better be worth it,” he whispered.

  I resisted the urge to grab his arm and flip him over my back. “It will be,” I said, jerking myself free from his grasp. And it would be. Every plan we’d made required it.

  We ate breakfast without Shin-soo, who was silently sulking at a table full of strangers. Still acting on his emotions, thinking only of himself. We desperately needed to fill Shin-soo in before he blundered. I wished he’d not been a stubborn ass last night and taken Sung-ki’s potion, but such was life. Just another loose thread that needed to be folded back into the weave of our plot.

  I worried none of us could conjure a ry deception bubble strong enough to obscure us from Ena’s watch, but perhaps the trip would offer that opportunity. My mind returned to what Ko-nah had tried to communicate this morning. Dokun would intercept us. How could I tell this to the others without catching Ena’s attention?

  “I hope the cultural excursion goes as planned today. I’m excited to see the Shrine of Osaka,” I said with a too-wide smile.

  Hana eyed me suspiciously, then recognition filled her face. “Yes, I understand your meaning. I want to see the shrine, too.”

  Yuri shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, it’s not the rare creatures zoo or the city center, but the shrine will be cool.”

  Cho shook his head with a sigh. “I understand your excitement too, Jiyong. We should tell the instructors how excited we are in hoping that nothing interrupts the day’s plan.”

  Yuri scowled. “What am I missing about this shrine? Does it shoot beams of pure munje at the moons or something?”

  Hana patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Yuri.”

  She sighed. “I guess I’ll see when we get there.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle, despite the severity of our situation. Yuri took so much at face value. We’d have to work on her detection of subtle—in this case, not-so-subtle—cues. Hana’s lips cracked into a smile when I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “What now?” Yuri asked, brow furrowed.

  I cleared my throat and grabbed my tea. “It’s nothing.”

  Yuri twirled her fingers and a burst of en munje held the tea back in my cup as I tilted it to drink. I put my cup down pressing my lips together tightly to keep from smiling or laughing.

  Yuri squinted at me. “If this isn’t the coolest shrine I’ve ever seen, you’re going to regret it.”

  Cho meandered over to Woong-ji’s table to express his great excitement to visit the shrine today, then returned and carefully relayed that Woong-ji had understood his meaning. This game of pass-along-information was dangerous. I hoped that Cho had understood what I meant—that our plans could be interrupted or thrown entirely—but I couldn’t be sure. Still, having Woong-ji aware th
at something was out of the ordinary would be better than both instructors being surprised. I was sure they were always on guard, but they would be especially watchful on our trip.

  As the Moon Shadow students gathered in the front yard to group up for community engagement, the Bastion students lingered in the entrance hall for instruction. Ena appeared after a few moments and guided us down the hill, back to the road.

  “The Shrine of Osaka is twenty kilometers to the south east,” Ena said as we walked. “It used to be a four-hour journey on foot for every student as part of training, but now, with Yamato Corp’s machina, we can be there in a matter of minutes. A train is waiting especially for us at the Sonma Station.”

  She took us down the street to where a larger ground machina could take us in batches to the train station. Students wearing crests and colors of their schools were everywhere! They were sweeping sidewalks and cleaning storefronts, restocking popup stands or serving fresh noodles to smiling grandparents. They grinned as they worked, truly grateful for the ability to serve their community.

  I stared at one girl who looked like Minjee in size and age as she picked up a stray animal whose fur was matted. The creature was the size of a small dog, but had a round face and ears. Long whiskers that shimmered with dark ryzo munje protruded from beside its wide nose. The thing twitched the whiskers, releasing a burst of munje that the girl waved away with a swish of her fingers.

  To have deflected a double munje spell at her age, she must’ve been well ahead of the Primary students in Kokyu! She would’ve had to have built her core the right way since birth to have completed a second band before reaching Secondary. I marveled for a moment at the severity of that idea.

  That was why Min-hwan had trained us so hard. Tungpah! Min-hwan said we weren’t ready, but he didn’t mean to face Dokun. He meant we weren’t even ready to fight a Kokyun student!

  I swallowed to quell the queasiness in my stomach. How could we have been so blind? Sung-ki and Woong-ji had another Silent Pact for the real mission. We were sent to provide support, a distraction that wouldn’t cause us too much harm. The picture frame idea was proposed as the safest and least traceable plan to retrieve information—and it would work. I had designed many prototypes proving that.