Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign-Chapter 333: Eon Masteries

Kenzo laughed for a solid ten seconds.

It wasn't mean - there was no mockery in it, no condescension. It was the genuine, full-bodied laugh of a man who'd been asked something so wrong that the only honest response was amusement. He bent forward slightly, one hand on his knee, the other waving vaguely in Raizen's direction as if to say give me a moment, I need to get through this.

Raizen waited. Arms crossed. The sky lantern disc still in one hand.

Kenzo straightened up, wiping his eye with the heel of his palm, and took a long breath to collect himself.

"Alright" he said. "Alright. I'm sorry. But no. You can't learn Eon Suppression."

Raizen frowned. "Why?"

"Because Eon Suppression isn't just a technique you pick up and add to your toolbox" Kenzo said, rolling his shoulder again as they walked. The market district opened up around them, vendors calling out to passersby, the drizzle barely there anymore. "It's a compromise. A trade. You get something, but you give up everything else in return. Just like most Eon Masteries"

"Eon masteries?" Raizen asked.

Kenzo looked at him with a confused face. "What? Didn't you learn at school?"

"They… Didn't mention anything like it" Raizen scratched his head.

"Oh well." Kenzo said. "Basically, and Eon Mastery is the highest known form of a specific skill."

Raizen raised a brow. He had no idea what he just heard.

"Think about it this way: Eon is like a tree. You learn the basics, the ones that then branch themselves into hundreds of different forms. And Eon masteries… They're like the apples. They only hang on the tallest and thinnest branches. So unless you climbed that tree, even trying that technique is useless."

He held up his hammer hand - the right one, thick-fingered, calloused across the palm.

"When I use Eon Suppression, every single bit of ambient Eon in my surroundings gets pulled into my body. All of it. Everything that's floating in the air, radiating off other people, drifting through the environment - it comes to me, and it goes straight into reinforcing my physical structure. Bones, muscle, skin, tendons. Everything gets denser, harder, way more durable."

He lowered his hand.

"But that's all it does. While Suppression is active, I can't use a single Eon-based attack with my hammer. I can't channel Eon externally at all - no projections, no techniques, no constructs. The flow only goes one direction: inward. My body becomes a sponge, and the sponge doesn't want to share."

Raizen's frown deepened. "So you just... Tank hits?"

"I absorb them, yeah. I endure. I walk through things that would kill other people, because while Suppression is running, my body is operating at a level of physical resilience that Eon reinforcement alone can't match." Kenzo glanced at him. "But I can't fight back with Eon. I can swing my hammer - the physical weight of it, the momentum with the physical reinforcement - but nothing else. No Eon edge, no charged strikes, no ranged attacks."

"As if you aren't strong enough without your Eon already" Atman rolled his eyes. He paused to let a cart filled with another kind of warm orange lanterns pass on the bridge ahead, the vendor pulling it along with both hands and a look of exhausted determination.

"It gets worse" Kenzo continued. "Because it applies to everything Eon-related, not just combat. If you tried to use a dash - like the one you do, with the spatial displacement - you couldn't. If you tried to heal, even if you had no idea how, you just physically couldn't do it. The suppression locks every external channel shut. Your body drinks everything, and nothing gets out."

He looked at Raizen with an expression that sat somewhere between amusement and genuine warning.

"And if you truly took your time to master it, in combat you'd actually be dead within a few minutes."

"Dead?"

"Dead. Because you'd be standing there, almost indestructible, unable to fight back with anything except your arms and your weapon's base weight, while everyone around you used Eon freely." The corner of his mouth twitched. "You're not built for that, Raizen. You're fast. You're sharp. You adapt mid-fight, you read your opponent, you exploit openings. Suppression would take all of that away and give you one thing in return: the ability to stand still and not die. That's my game, not yours."

He said it without ego, without pride. Just a fact - the way someone describes the shape of their own hand. Kenzo knew what he was. A wall. An immovable thing that endured until the other side ran out of energy. It worked because he had the mass, the patience, and the discipline to stand in one place while the chaos around tried to move him. Raizen had none of those qualities, and they both knew it.

Raizen huffed through his nose. The explanation made sense - he could feel it clicking together, the logic of a system that demanded everything in exchange for one thing. But giving up wasn't a reflex he'd ever developed, so instead of accepting it, he pivoted.

"What about that physical reinforcement thing, the one you were using?"

Kenzo was looking at something across the bridge - a vendor selling carved wooden animals, each one painted in bright colours. He didn't turn.

"Hm?"

"On the battlefield" Raizen pressed. "You were moving unnaturally fast. Your steps covered more ground than they should have, and your reactions were ahead of everything happening around you. That wasn't Suppression - it was something else."

Kenzo's attention came back, eyes focused on Raizen.

"Oh, yes. That's just physical reinforcement." He nodded slowly. "And yes, every vanguard will have to learn it at some point. It's foundational - you channel Eon into specific muscle groups and skeletal structures to temporarily enhance their output. Speed, strength, reaction time, durability. Not the all-or-nothing commitment of Suppression, but targeted enhancement. You choose what to amplify and when."

He flexed his hand as if demonstrating something invisible. "Want to move faster? Channel into your legs and core. Want to hit harder? Channel into your arms and shoulders. Want to take a hit you shouldn't survive? Channel into wherever the impact is about to land. It's precise, it's flexible, and it stacks with everything else - you can still use techniques, still use your dash, still fight normally. You're just doing it all with a body that's temporarily operating above its natural limits."

"Can you teach me?" The words came out of Raizen's mouth fast and direct, which was how Raizen asked for things he actually wanted.

Kenzo looked at him. Really looked - the full assessment, top to bottom, the veteran measuring the student against an internal standard that only decades of experience could calibrate.

"Right now?"

Raizen opened his mouth to answer, but Kenzo was already nodding to himself, a decision made before the question finished landing. The look on his face shifted from assessment to something warmer and more dangerous - the look of a teacher who'd been waiting for a student to ask the right question.

"Sure, why not?" Kenzo said. "Let's go!"