• • The Royal Bastards of Galagan
• September 21, 2025

The Royal Bastards of Galagan (Chapter 5)

The Royal Movement

“Live by this motto. You could if you weren’t a fucking coward.”

Calcutta Sha, Fist of Kita Khan

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Calcutta Sha

Bam!

That made for the… fourth time Poppy went headfirst into the wall? She struggled to get the hang of the teleportation technique and having Koki repeat the process to her over and over wasn’t helping. 

I watched Lemon get ready on one side of the terrace, as I did too. It was almost nightfall now, with Drota’s sky turning a nice shade of orange as the sun set. It was beautiful, and it highlighted Lemon’s green tips as he flew at the wall placed between us and the other side of the terrace.

Koki repeated the process again, though his words bounced off of Lemon, who only got frustrated, much like Poppy, hearing the small creature speak again.

“You need your cakra to become one with your body, not just flowing through it, but out of it even!”

“I know!” Lemon yelled as he flew head-on. He managed to avoid banging his head, stopping himself with his hands against the wall, but a few times was enough to get completely frustrated.

Koki didn’t bother to finish his lesson as Lemon managed to conjure up the cakra cloak, letting his green energy flow from him, leaving a big trail behind him. He thought that was a sign that he was doing it right, but he was just releasing cakra. Neither he nor Poppy truly understood what Koki was trying to teach us.

Lemon proved it as he nearly found himself going through the wall again, barely managed to stop himself, slowing down just enough to—

Bam!

  —bang his head on it…  

As Lemon growled to himself and punched at the ground, it was clear to me what the problem was. Koki’s style of teaching didn’t seem to be working for them, it’s a style we’ve experienced before. 

He’s not a drill sergeant but he is a simple worker. He sticks to the same tenants, and plays on repeat. He wanted to drill into our heads how to get the job done so we would keep at it, and figure it out through successive failure.

I managed to get through a lot of that training when I was younger, but Lemon and Poppy always struggled. There had to be something else for us for them to do.

“Your turn, Calcutta,” Koki said, and I stepped in line as Lemon and Poppy sat in a pretzel on the sideline.

I could already see them losing hope, and I could hear it too. “What are we gonna do if we can’t get this? If Cutta doesn’t even have it yet, what hope do we have?” Poppy muttered to Lemon.

He leaned back on his arms, and let his hair drape over the harrowed expression on his face. “Well, our stay could just last a lot longer than we thought, it’s not like we had an end date anyway.”

She slumped and rested her chin in her hands. “I know what you mean, but I don’t really want to be here trying to learn how to teleport for months on end.”

“Maybe we’ll at least see Calcutta hit her head at least once today,” Lemon suggested, which earned him a strong glare from me. He looked away and whistled to avoid looking at it.

“Waiting for something?” Koki asked as I still stood at the starting point.

I looked down at him, pausing for a moment. It was my first instinct to confirm what I’m going to say so nothing gets misconstrued. Most people tended to think I was trying to intimidate, but that was just an added bonus… a bonus I was not seeing with Koki.

“Repeat the process for me,” I told him.

“No please?” 

I arched my brow and crossed my arms. “I should say please for you to do your job?”  

Koki shook his head with a little laugh. “You are what Drota’s visitors call… ‘a piece of work.’” 

If he was waiting for me to laugh, he was wasting his time.

“Well alright, this is at least a nice change of pace from your siblings who ignore me,” he said while glaring back at the two of them. 

He turned back to me, still waiting, and arched his brow right back at me. “To start again, you want your cakra to flow through you, to meld with your body’s rhythm so that you become like your cakra, particles. You don’t want to charge or let it flow out, that’s the exact opposite. 

“If you do that, your cakra isn’t melding or flowing, it’s just leaving, and that’s not what you want… yet.”

He had explained this before, but each time I felt like I had a better understanding of it. Teleportation was no technique to wave off, but it was the basis of the others based on what Koki and the Pyrie mentors were telling us.

We needed to learn to meld with our cakra in ways we hadn’t before. Once our cakra became like the very flesh it flowed through, our flesh would have become like it.

If I did it right, for a moment, my body would turn into invisible particles, unlike a flash step which is just using high speeds to appear like you’re teleporting. Once it was like particles, I would be flying beyond light speed, just like a well-powered cakra beam. And also like a particle, I’d be attracted to the spot I’m aiming for, drawn right to its cakra.

I nodded to Koki and planted my feet then and readied myself to launch.

Lemon and Poppy were barely paying attention at that point, but that’s okay, they were never going to learn from watching me anyway.

I started flying forward, my foot-dragging just above the ground as I did.

I didn’t charge my cakra during the flight as Lemon did. I tried calling to it, opening valves, and cracking open hatches to let cakra through. My cakra wasn’t trying to leave or expel itself in my body as it normally would. It flowed all through me in seconds.

Earlier, Koki said, “As the cakra flows through you it melds on its own, naturally wanting to hold the same space as your cells. As that happens, focus on the cakra of whatever you want to go to. Aim for one of the plants behind the wall, on the other side of the courtyard.”

As the cakra melded, I didn’t try to resist as Lemon did. Rather than consciously control, I let go, which was the hardest thing to do. Letting go only becomes easier for someone once they get used to doing it.

So, I was focusing on the plant, sensing its distinct cakra on the other side of the wall. I tried not to panic during the nanoseconds I experienced as minutes. The feeling of becoming one with the particles was nerve-wracking, terrifying even.

It felt like I was giving up a part of myself, my whole self even, everything that made me who I am. The worst part was that as I gave up everything, I felt nothing being returned to me. That made me break each and every time and have to stop before I hit the wall.

Everyone who wanted to learn needed to know this, but this felt like a challenge made for me, and no one else would feel as I did as I attempted to learn teleportation. I had spent my whole life gaining and keeping control of my body. I always had to rein in my strength and my temper to keep from threatening people with my mere presence.

Control defined my life, it made me stronger than everyone else and allowed me to put more into each attack than either of my siblings. 

And here I was, giving up all that control to the power inside me. 

Hmmm, as I thought about it, a second before hitting the wall, it was hard not to realize I was giving up myself, to myself.

Whoosh.

There was no bam.

“Where… where did she go?!” Lemon said as he missed that crashing sound he was expecting. 

By the time Lemon and Poppy were on their feet, looking for me with their eyes, I had already plucked the flower from the ground.

It had this beautiful green color, the same one hospital crafts used back on the Galagan to distinguish themselves from the troopers. It had dozens of spiral petals that seemed to hide the last petal’s lower side with its growth. I raised it to my nose to learn from what victory smelled like.

“Well done,” Howl congratulated me, him and Atolli both clapping now that I had joined them on the other side of the wall. 

My siblings quickly hopped over it to see me standing there, having learned the basic teleportation technique. 

“I can’t believe you did it!” Poppy yelled, ecstatic for me.

Lemon was it more relieved in the face. “Huh, I was starting to think none of us would manage it, and… here you are.” He looked nevrous before he got this little smirk on his face. “Bet you can’t do it again.”

Oh, that poor boy.

The second time is easy, almost second nature.

He barely had time to react as I must have separated into a bunch of thin lines in the manner of a nanosecond, leaving nothing but the push and sound of the wind whistling in his face.

At least until I covered his eyes with my hands from behind.

He and Poppy both screamed at the top of their lungs. “I can do it more than once, I promise you.”

As the two of them tried to calm down their beating hearts, Koki approached me and complimented me. “You caught on well, you should see the distance you can cross grow exponentially as you grow used to it. You should be able to teleport between planets you know in a few months, maybe even weeks.”

“Wow, that fast?!” Lemon said. Everything they told us about these techniques seemed to excite him. It was… nice.

“She should be ready to learn a specialization now,” Atolli told him, and he seemed to nod in agreement.

He looked up at me, and asked, “Do you know what you need to learn?”

The way he phrased it made it clear he wasn’t dropping all that fate bullshit, but I knew I was making choice, I knew it was the right way to go.

“I’ll learn healing.”

“Huh?!”

“What?!”

My siblings were in agreement on being shocked.

Lemon walked up to me, shaking his fists in frustration. “But Cal, with your power level, the ability to expand or multiply would make your power skyrocket!”  

I shook my head at my little brother, telling him, “I can learn to hit faster and harder anytime, I’m sure.”

“But don’t you think healing is a waste of your talent? You’re a fighter! You don’t stand in the back!” Poppy reasoned next.

“And I have no plans to change that,” I assured her as I crossed my arms, and closed my eyes, trying to lessen the odds of getting a headache.

“But that’s what medics are supposed to do!” I heard her say.

“I’m already the strongest, the only thing that makes me turn my back is watching out for one of you two. If I have healing, I’ll keep you up to speed with me.”

I creaked my eye open, expecting to see them angry with what I said, but they seemed more defeated than anything. At least they knew it was true. It probably helped — or didn’t help in their case — that our fight with our stepmother was only a few days ago. It should still be on their minds how it came down to me and her after she took the two of them out.

She nearly killed me after I shoved Poppy out of the way of her cakra blast. If one of us gets like that again, I needed a way for us to recover rather than just pure rage and adrenaline. 

But healing alone won’t cut it. They need to get stronger too.

Koki watched silently as I explained to them my reasoning, and he dropped his smile the moment I leaned down next to him.

I whispered into his ear, “Your style of teaching isn’t working for them, we need to split off, now.”

“Hmm,” the old Pyrie hummed as if he hadn’t thought of it already, “I agree, it would be better for their progress.”

“What’s better for our progress?” Lemon asked, his hands still clenched at his sides. 

Poppy never took things as hard as Lemon, she accepted them far too easy. Lemon needed to make sure that he was ahead. It was almost as if he wasn’t first, he was last, or something even worse than that…

I stood back up. I probably shouldn’t have bothered asking Koki in front of them, but I had to be sure. Then I told them, “I think we should train separately.”

“Wait, what?!” Poppy immediately yelled. She balled her fists as she looked up at me. She immediately tried to give me the sad puppy eyes. I hated that. “What do you mean?! I thought we were gonna be together as we learned everything!” 

I looked away, trying to avoid looking at her as I tried to explain myself. “We were always going to split up, maybe it’s better that it happen sooner rather than later.” It was strange, Poppy yelled about it first, but Lemon was the one who got an attitude about it.

He crossed his arms and shot me a look that was all too familiar. “Well, that sounds rather convenient.”

I couldn’t help but arch my brow. “Convenient how?”

My little brother swiped his head away, and it was like looking in a mirror almost. It’s weird how someone so different could remind you of yourself now and then. 

“The sooner you drop us, the sooner you get stronger.”

I was little more than shocked to learn that this was what he thought… but then I realized. “Oh… yes, that’s exactly it.”

“I-!” Lemon dropped the attitude, shocked that I admitted it.

The way Poppy said my name hurt a little though, but hey, tough love. “Cutta…”

Even Koki thought to say, “Is that really how you want to phrase it?”

I shrugged, why mince words? It’s not like getting stronger wasn’t the goal. 

“Hey, look, I’m stronger than the two of you, okay?” I told them straight. “That’s a fact, it’s been a fact for a long time, and it does none of us any good to train together while the gap is this far apart. It doesn’t make me stronger, or you.”

Poppy looked down at the ground, holding one of her biceps in her hand. God, she was really just trying to make me feel bad, wasn’t she? She even said, “You’re finally sick of us aren’t you?” 

“Oh for fuck’s sakes.” It always took so long for them to see the bigger picture.

And then Lemon jumped in only to make it worse too! “Of course it is, it was only a matter of time before you’d want to drop us. You were always the feared Calcutta Sha, fist of the Khan! And we…! We were always just your lackeys.”

I was pretty done with their tantrum after he said that. I reached over and place both of my hands on their heads. They stopped, expecting me to ruffle their hair.

Nope.

I gripped and pulled them in closer even as they whined and griped about the pain. “Listen to me, you two stupid idiots,” I told them, “if I thought we could get stronger by being together every day and every night, I would. There’s no one else in this whole big world that I care about, there’s only ever been you two, there’s only ever been us. That’s never changed, and it isn’t going to. I want to get stronger for you, can’t you do the same for me?”

They stopped whining to look up at me. I hoped that my mean mug was enough to convince them that I was telling the truth. I was never — and would never — get sick of them. I don’t like people… anyone really… it was only ever them.

I loosened my grip on their heads and brought my hands to their cheeks. “Can you do this for me?”

“I…” Lemon started, but stopped and looked towards his feet again. “Yeah, we can do that, I can do that.”

“We’ll do you one better,” Poppy started, which made Lemon and me both turn our heads. “I bet by the end of this training, with our new abilities we’ll have closed the gap! Together, Lemon and I will be stronger than you!”

Lemon tried to stop her, he really did. “Wait, I’m not going that far—”

But the motivational prospect was too good. “Oh really? Then let’s say once we’re able to use our newfound techniques without instruction, we’ll have a little sparring match then.” Watching the growing and devious excitement on Poppy’s face perfectly contrasted with the growing horror on Lemon’s. “Surely, this planet has a few empty deserts where you can put your money where your mouth is.”

“Yeah!” Poppy said as I pulled back, already pumping her fist with excitement.

“Wait, what? No!” Lemon started yelling, before letting his arms droop at his sides. “Why am I being ignored?”

Howl hopped onto his shoulder and told him, “It’s funnier, go with it.”

“Why go to a desert?” Koki interrupted us. “We have an abandoned city nearby. Its infrastructure is too old to use as anything other than training grounds for warriors like you. You can have your little contest there.”

Wow, the Pyrie people really were accommodating. The training was a shock, but this is pushing it. Maybe they want us to bulldoze the city? A fight between us could do it for free.

Or maybe they were just bored. I didn’t know.

Atolli came and asked Koki “Will such a place really be enough to hold them?”

Koki’s mouth twisted in disbelief. “Well, I know we’re good at our jobs, but that good? It’ll be fine.”

Me and my siblings stared when he said that.