yootie

2.19 Patreon Release

I was caught off guard by how sudden and intense my desire was to leap out of bed and go to Hina. I was possessed of the urge, for just a moment, to flood my muscles with Flame enough to stand under my own power in spite of the egregious harm I’d already inflicted on them, to rip the intravenous needle from my arm heedless of the pain it would bring. She was hurting, and she needed me. I wanted to feel her touch, press my forehead against hers until she felt better, tangle our limbs together until our heartbeats matched—

Logic caught the urge by the scruff. What an absurd emotional response; pushing my body past its currently much-reduced limits was a terrible idea, especially because Hina definitely did not need me there that urgently. I did have to talk to her, but in the sense that we should talk, not the primal need I had just experienced. What a drug she was. But she could wait; I was in the middle of something here.

“It’s…fine,” I told the room, glaring slightly at Ebi in particular for apparently snooping on my text messages. “As for—what did you call it? Inscrutable egg mania? That has nothing to do with undoing whatever the fuck Sugawara did. It’s just the right thing to do.” Ebi’s perfectly controlled digital face betrayed nothing, so I shifted my gaze to Takagiri. “Say more. He only has access to what your mantle experiences? But we destroyed that, didn’t we? Before you even, uh, betrayed him. So even if he can still get that info from you next time you sleep, as far as he’s concerned, the last thing you were doing was trying to kill us, so all’s good—no betrayal, no need for blackmail or explosion. Right?”

Takagiri made a soft, choked sound, and I realized my mistake in casually bringing up the destruction of her mantle like that. In all practical senses, the construct was her proper body, her ideal form, and without it, she was trapped in the flesh of a balding samurai. My own dysphoria—which I was still coming to terms with labeling as such—must have paled in comparison. Regret and awkwardness made my stomach twist as I watched her take a breath and blink away the trauma we’d inflicted on her, straightening up to meet my eyes.

“It is not just my experiences. It is also knowledge, thoughts, feelings. He will know what I have done. It is all—his.”

Her voice broke in that horrible way, the sound of violation and despair and terror. It tore at my heart. I had to help her, to free her from this—while my mind raced, Yuuka stood from her chair and crossed the room toward her. Despite Takagiri’s currently masculine body, the misandrist Heliotrope Radiance showed no revulsion, and instead, gently touched the woman’s arm, speaking more softly than I’d ever heard her. I couldn’t understand the Japanese, but from the tender tone and steady voice I knew she was talking down her former enemy from the verge of a panic attack.

If only I could be half as helpful. My bedside manner was shit; I was not equipped for this the way Yuuka was. For all her abrasiveness, she was also Amane’s best friend, fiercely loyal, and so knew how to gently guide somebody out of the long shadows of cruelty and abuse. I couldn’t do the same; my job was to fix the larger magical crisis. But Ai had already been working Takagiri’s no-sleep problem for two days straight—and was probably therefore running on fumes herself by now—and I doubted there was anything I could come up with in these next few moments that she hadn’t already ruled out with all her genius and software and instrumentation.

So that left me stuck. Maybe I actually was better off just trusting that the Radiances would see Takagiri through this nightmare, and my time would be better spent having the dreaded talk with Hina? I ran through what Takagiri had said, the particular nature of how she was trapped. We weren’t in a position to defuse the literal bomb attached to her Flame, or the metaphorical one that was the blackmail, so all we had to do for now was just find a way to let her get some sleep without letting Sugawara into her head. And with her mantle destroyed, that might already be the case—the issue was that we couldn’t take that risk.

And when I thought of it like that, I had it.

“Yuuka.”

She turned back to me. “Ezza.”

“Taking risks is stupid. Can’t we just check the future? See whether any information transfer would actually take place if she went to sleep?”

Yuuka froze. Her mouth worked, as though she were searching for words and discarding everything she found, until eventually her shoulders slumped. “You dipshit.”

“What? Does it not work?”

“Fuck,” Ebi groaned. “You said that in front of a data conduit straight to Sugawara.”

The beeping of my heart monitor accelerated again. “Oh. Oh shit. Fuck, right, opsec, sorry—”

“It’s…whatever,” Yuuka decided. “The whole point is to make sure he can’t get in her head anyway. Stop shaking. Actually—Ebi?”

“Yeah, on it.” The android snapped her slender, carbon-fiber fingers, and the beeping went silent.

I took a deep breath. “Sorry. I should know better.”

“You should, but it’s fine.” Yuuka shrugged. “I mean, she already knows about Ebi, and that’s a hell of a cat to be letting out of the bag.”

“And we already suspected that your power was yochi,” Takagiri put in.

“There ya have it,” Yuuka sighed. “As for the idea—yeah, let’s do it. I’m not getting any good signal about how it’d turn out right now, but if you do the Statue of Liberty thing, I bet it’ll work.”

I resisted the urge to ask why she couldn’t go down the chain of events to see the hypothetical silver ripple exposed by my Flame’s illumination via the silver she could see now—probably just too noisy, I guessed. It’d be decoherent mush rather than anything resembling useful information. That was an obvious candidate to improve upon, though; if we were to reverse engineer exactly how her eye worked and give it some proper testing—

While the magic-enjoying part of my mind was chewing on that, Ebi was yelling.

“No open Flame! Not when we’ve got Amethyst on critical alert down the hall. I can’t believe I have to tell you of all people that’s a shit fucking idea, miss best friend.”

Yuuka made an annoyed sound. “I know exactly how bad of an idea it is—it’s not, and it’s worth it. She’ll agree. She’d say so herself if she were up.”

“And she is not here to consent to it, bitchface.”

“Go wake her up and ask her yourself, then.”

“Uh,” I broke in. “If it’s that much of a concern, can’t we just take this somewhere a bit further from her? Down to the…”

I trailed off before I could blurt out “the ripple-shielded room in the basement.” I wasn’t sure it was classified per se, but I had set myself on edge with my previous fuckup. Takagiri raised her eyebrows anyway as Yuuka shook her head.

“Nah, moving you or her is a pain in the arse. Ebi, if you’re that worried, go on over to her and have the TXA ready. It’ll only take a sec.”

“Don’t fucking tell me how to do my job,” Ebi spat, but to my surprise, she stomped out the door rather than argue further—insofar as an android without real feet could stomp, anyway. It was more like angry clicking that receded down the hall.

Takagiri looked guilty. “That is also my shame. That Ishikawa-chan must be cared for. I knew and did nothing.”

“Nah, it’s not. Sugawara’s a cunt, and we’ll kill him. Ezza?”

I thought for a moment. “I mean, part of what we agreed was that I wouldn’t be obligated to participate in murder, justified or otherwise. But in principle, yeah, I think everyone’s better off if he’s—”

“Flame.” She looked like she wanted to hit me, which was warranted. She was in the process of taking off her eyepatch entirely, shaking out her hair as she did. She fixed me with a glare of crimson crystal, and I flinched involuntarily under the baleful magi-organ.

“Uh—yeah, on it.”

I tried to call forth my Flame. Heatcold trickled out of my chest and down my arm—but the feeling just pooled in the scars on my forearm, no ignition into the blinding white fire. I didn’t have any pain of my own to feed it, too swaddled in the comfortable coziness of whatever painkiller regimen I was on. I also didn’t have the frustration I’d felt with Hina, or the desperation of when I’d saved Yuuka.

But I did have anger on Takagiri’s behalf, far more than I expected.

My hand burst into a swirl of fire, painting the room in white glare splashed by ultra-black shadows everywhere the light could not reach as well as a few places it ought to have been able. I gasped at my first trickle of real pain, strong enough to reach me even through the medicated numbness. Takagiri flinched at the burst of raw magic, which made me feel unaccountably guilty. Was I unknowingly following in the footsteps of something Sugawara had done to her? Or was that just because the last time we’d done this had been when we’d beaten the shit out of her?

But she met my eyes, and I saw that my anger at what had been done to her was a shallow reflection of the ocean of her own rage. She’d been abused beyond belief by Sugawara’s violation of her Flame, his intrusion into her mind and soul—the invasion of sleep was a realm of horror I’d hoped to never directly encounter.

We would set it right. It was in that shared fury that I found the energy to feed my Flame and keep my arm aloft for Yuuka. My arm shook slightly from even that simple exertion, a sign of how badly I’d overworked my muscles, growing worse with each second. But all I had to do was keep my arm where Yuuka could see it as she alternated between staring into the blinding cascade and looking at Takagiri.

After ten or twenty very long seconds of turning her head to and fro, a frown crossed Yuuka’s face, then a wince. She hurriedly waved for me to put my arm down. I extinguished my flame, and the unnatural light evaporated off the walls, the spots of abyssal shadow re-normalizing as the overhead LEDs reasserted their neutral, medical glow. I opted to bring in my other hand to gently lower my trembling, exhausted arm and give it a little nerve-stimulating shake, rather than let it flop haphazardly.

“Well?”

“Transmission would still take place. And it’s…” she shifted her weight, rubbing her head. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“Uh. Is that a prophecy?” I sort of hoped it was.

“I’ll make it one.” The anger was in her, as well, which I found oddly relieving. She put the eyepatch back on. “But as for what I saw…yeah, no, we gotta stop this. I think we can, is the good news.” She put a hand on Takagiri’s shoulder. “We’re gonna go talk to Ai. I’ve got an idea.”

Before Yuuka could lead her out of the room, Takagiri bowed to me. “Thank you.”

“It’s…fine? It’s the right thing to do. It’s what the Vaetna would do,” I decided. “Monsters die. And I was just, uh, the torch.” I gestured at Yuuka. “She did the hard stuff.”

Takagiri came up out of the bow. “Torch? There is a better word, I think.”

“…Lantern?”

“Lighthouse.”

—

I have no idea if Takagiri intended to set my thoughts so awhirl with that, but it stuck in my brain as they left, sending me teetering along a precarious tightrope of thoughts pertaining to the circumstances of my arrival at Todai, the fact that I was seemingly starting to fit in, and, of course, the “gender shit,” as I’d put it. I’d actually been intending to ask Takagiri about that, hadn’t I? Before I’d gotten sidetracked by her much more pressing issue, of course.

Latching onto that thought, thinking of my handful of interactions with “Kimura,” I realized I probably already knew where she stood—she had already been under the impression I was some flavor of not-cis at the BBQ. The way she’d repeatedly complimented my hair, her hesitant probing as to my pronouns, and most tellingly, what she’d spat at me right before Alice had revealed they were of a kind:

They won’t understand you. They will use it against you. It will end like this for you as well.

Grim. But she’d said all that under the misapprehension that none of the Radiances were trans themselves, that they would be so coldhearted as to hold my gender over me as Sugawara had done to her, and she seemed to have changed her mind in the sleepless days between then and now. Actually—had that been why she’d first sought me out, back when she’d simply been “my stalker?” To scope me out to see whether I was slipping into the same situation she’d been in for years?

I’d get a chance to talk to her more about it later, once we were both in better places…hopefully. I was glad that my combo trick with Yuuka seemed to have made a difference; moving the needle was both satisfying to my problem-solving brain and a salve for my justice-seeking brain.

Unfortunately, without that cognitive chew toy as a means of self-distraction, I was left staring at the text Hina had sent.

It felt plaintive and desperate, and I was no longer able to pretend I felt she deserved to be so miserable—censured, perhaps, and some guilt behooved her, but I could no longer deny the presence of that urge to go to her, to comfort her. Stupid, irrational animal-brain. We needed to have a serious talk about the pretenses under which she’d brought me to Todai, her own morality, the ethics of our relationship; instead, I was growing increasingly worried that, once we were face to face, I’d just…not do any of that and simply snuggle up against her and pretend everything was alright between us so that I could keep enjoying the animal comforts of her company. I liked having a girlfriend, and I liked even more that she was so…well, more. I didn’t want to give her up, so I was possessed of the desire to avoid the talk we needed to have.

I sent a message before I could give in to those feelings.

Ezzen: Hey, yeah, we should talk. 

Where? Doing it over text would minimize the temptations and desires that came with being face-to-face with her, but…no. She needed my physical presence. Did I want her to come here to the 18th floor and sit on that chair Alice and then Yuuka had used, continue the parade of magical girls? That didn’t feel right, though it was certainly logistically simplest if I was still bedridden. My body still felt too weak to get up, and I didn’t want to try before consulting a medical professional. That would just be a mundane version of overloading my muscles with magic.

“Ebi?” I called out.

“Yeah,” came a voice from—I wasn’t really sure where. I looked around, then realized it was an intercom mounted into the wall next to my bed. I felt kind of stupid talking to it—I remembered the video feed of Amane she’d shown and looked up at the ceiling. Sure enough, there was a little black dome in the corner. I made eye contact with that; easier than with a human.

“What’s my, uh, status? Can I get up and walk around?”

“Not gonna ask how Amane is?”

“Uh. How’s Amane?”

“She’s alright, no thanks to you guys.”

“Oh. Yeah, that tracks. Sorry.” I resisted the urge to derail into arguing about the necessity of it. “So. Can I get up?”

“To go exchange fluids with your female?”

I bristled. “Dude, what’s with you?”

“Messing with you,” replied the voice from the terminal. “I think you can probably make the trip. On two conditions.”

I sighed. “No green to juice up my limbs, got it. And we will not be doing anything…untoward, relax, not a drop of red in sight. I’m sorry about Amane, really. Give her my apologies when she’s up.”

“Uh huh. Well, I’m tied up with her right now—literally, arm in her stomach—so you’re on your own. You know how to take out an IV?”

“Yeah.” Old memories. “I can manage, I think. Can I get, uh, crutches?”

“Cabinet to your left. Haven’t adjusted them since last time you used them.”

There was a click as the intercom disconnected. I went back to my phone.

Ezzen: Okay, coming to you, I think. Give me a few minutes.

Removing the intravenous needle was simple, just pressing some gauze over it and pulling it out carefully so as not to damage the vein too much. I’d done it a hundred times before, and the technology hadn’t advanced much in the past few years. As I reached for the roll of medical tape conveniently attached to the IV unit, I was pleased to find my arms were approaching something I could call regular function; though they still had that day-after-workout weakness, and would surely have the associated soreness once the medication left my system, they weren’t shaking. Slow movements were manageable.

After binding down the gauze with the tape, I gave the rest of my body an experimental stretch, quietly hoping that some of the superhuman speed and lightness had stuck around after my self-enhancement. No luck—I just felt weak all over, my core and my legs sharing my arms’ recalcitrance to exert themselves any further. But as I sat up a little more and extracted myself from the blanket, something did feel different: despite having slept for two full days, I didn’t feel stiff in the slightest. My muscles were mush, but the tendons were loose and relaxed. I tentatively put my legs in the butterfly position and tried to stretch my back. My forehead could now touch the mattress without effort.

That was new—and exciting. I tried a few more stretches of that sort and found the same, easily pushing all my joints to their maximum from a cold start. That seemed to be the whole of the changes, though—my foot had not magically grown back, my hand’s burn scars were the same as they’d always been, and I’d already established that my hair was still the new, mysteriously vibrant orange. Still, this one minor change was enough to set me abuzz with nerves as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed; proof undeniable that I’d been permanently altered by the ripple I’d commanded.

With a shimmy and a lean, I reached for the cabinet Ebi had indicated and pulled the door open. I found the crutches—plus, between them, my prosthetic foot sitting atop a new stabilizer module disc.

I grabbed the prosthetic first and gave it a look. It was the same one I’d been using, judging by the minor scuff marks on the underside of the toes. I’d broken the {AFFIX} lattice when I’d rewoven it to launch myself at Takagiri by anchoring it to the floor of Hina’s room instead of to my foot; it’d been useless after that, hanging loose in my sock for the remainder of the incident. It seemed Ai had repaired it, though, as the prosthetic attached to my amputation without issue.

The stabilizer module was entirely new, by the looks of it. The old one had been ruined beyond repair from Hina’s meteoric pounce upon the barbecue—and she’d made the old one, which meant this one was also her handiwork, put together while I was unconscious. Alice had said Hina hadn’t left her room at all, but her guilt evidently wasn’t just making her mope; she was already trying to atone, at least when it came to me specifically. The first stabilizer module had been much the same, an apology for feeling like she’d hurt me. She did her best work when she felt guilty.

That would make this conversation even more difficult.

—

The penthouse was vacant. With Ai in her workshop, Alice packed with meetings, and Amane and Yuuka in the medical ward under Ebi’s supervision, there was nobody around, and the common living space was showing its disuse. The midday sun shone through the panel of windows onto empty bean bag chairs and the empty easel. The dish rack next to the sink was empty, but the island was littered with takeout containers and empty bowls of instant ramen; Hina was the primary cook for the household, and with her staying exclusively in her room since our collective return from the disastrous barbecue, I suspected nobody had had the time or energy to cook real meals.

I’d only been able to distract myself for a few minutes by aimlessly wandering around the penthouse before my feet had dragged me inexorably to the threshold of Hina’s room to face the silly clip-art sapphire that dangled from the door by a lone piece of tape. I was a little nervous to once again enter this den of coziness and clove incense and candlelight; I feared it would suck me right in, such that I would be unwilling to have the conversation we both needed. But we’d managed to do it last time, after our crimes at the oil rig. I put my hand to the wooden door and knocked.

Nothing. I frowned.

“Hina?”

Still nothing. My frown deepened as I reached for my phone.

Ezzen: Hey, I’m outside. Can I come in?

Hina: always

I tested the doorknob and found the room unlocked. Swinging the door open revealed darkness; her flight simulator at the far end of the foyer sat inert, and no glow of candles shone from the archway into her bedroom. I gingerly stepped in, hobbling to where the rooms met and looking into her den. It was dark, blackout curtains drawn to repel the sun, and I debated whether I should leave the door open behind me just so I wouldn’t be drowned in darkness. But this conversation deserved due privacy, even with the penthouse as empty as it was; it was the principle of the thing. I closed the door behind me and called out.

“Uh. Hina?”

Still nothing. I scanned the darkness, looking suspiciously at the various lumpy blankets. Was she burrowed under one of those, nesting as deep as she could to shut out the world?

“Is this all just a prank? Are you about to pounce on me? Because I’m really not up for it.”

No movement and no reply. I went to my phone again.

Ezzen: ???? I’m in your room. Where are you?

I stared at the screen, the only source of light in here, waiting for a reply. It took a solid fifteen seconds.

Hina: the other room

Oh. That made sense. For something like her, that was the ultimate refuge, entirely inaccessible to anyone but her fellow flamebearers. But I wasn’t going back out there; even if she’d sealed the room back up after its catastrophic breach—not a guarantee, knowing her—the idea of going back out there filled me with dread. Besides, I physically couldn’t. Did she expect me to just dive up and out of reality and swim right to her? I couldn’t recreate whatever I’d done to reunite with my spear; it was right here in my tattoo binding.

Ezzen: I can’t go back out there. If you and I are going to talk, it’s going to be right here, in your room in the building. Please?

“Okay,” she whispered.

I jumped at the lump on the floor that hadn’t been there a moment ago. I’d been expecting her to put up more of a fight, and the fact that she hadn’t was, frankly, worrying. And my intuition was right; she had bundled herself up, mummified in blankets and darkness.

“Hina? You…alright?”

“No.”

Well, it had been a stupid question. I carefully lowered myself down to the floor, setting the crutches beside me, and folded my legs. We sat in silence for what must have been two full minutes as I waited for her to say more. In that time, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and I saw that the room was a bit of a mess, wrappers and other trash scattered all across the floor. Next to Hina’s lump sat a fist-sized box. It was hard to tell the color in the darkness. Red? Maybe green?

When Hina did speak up, her voice sounded like crushed gravel.

“I hate this.”

My heart hurt, but I tried to keep stable, hear her out. “Which part?”

“I hate fucking up like this. I hate making Alice and Ai and Amane and Yuuka and Ebi and you all mad at me. You’re way too nice and forgiving to the…the fucking hazard I am. I hurt a lot of humans—a lot of people, and I didn’t care. All I could think about was that he—she—was going to hurt you, and I went so far beyond overkill. It happens every fucking time, because I’m just…broken. And I can’t stop myself, I don’t want to stop myself until it’s too late. And now you’re gonna break up with me and I deserve that.”

That was a pretty accurate assessment of the situation, and she’d reached the same conclusion I had: this was heading for a breakup. But as I’d feared, the depths of her remorse cut me and made it difficult to just come out and agree with her. I didn’t want to hurt her more than she was already hurting herself.

“I…I’d like to think we can make this work,” I muttered. “Keep going with this. With us. And there’s a…” I wanted to broach the gender stuff, the pretense, but I couldn’t, not yet. It wouldn’t matter anyway unless she was able to control herself better, to respect the wishes of her teammates and me before she caused disasters and hurt people. So that’s where this had to start. “You want to be better, yeah?”

“So fucking much. But I can’t. I can’t,” the lump cried. “It’s not—there’s no control over it at all.” She was quiet for a few moments. “Yuuka’s right. She’s always right. I’m a fucking monster who can’t do anything but hurt people and you’re insane to want anything to do with me. They’re fucking stuck with me now, but you can leave. You should.”

Perhaps I should. But I didn’t want to.

“I can’t—how many people did you kill?”

The Hina-lump was quiet for a few seconds.

“None.”

“Really?”

“That’s what Ai said, but she’s just trying to make me feel better. Waste of her fucking time.”

“I don’t think she would lie to you about that,” I reasoned, trying to keep my voice soft. “I mean…we did act fast, and Miyoko supposedly performed at least one miracle, to save the food. I’d be surprised if she did that before doing everything in her power to save her, uh, flock. I…can believe she and Hongo managed to keep anybody from dying. Begrudgingly. Ai definitely wouldn’t lie about that,” I repeated. It was so weird for me to be defending Hikanome’s decency and capabilities like this; this storm brought strange bedfellows indeed.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Sure. I believe you,” she lied, voice dead.

“Hina,” I sighed. I had to switch tracks. “Just…so you want to be better, yeah?”

“Right now, sure. But it never lasts. I’ll just…run away again, find something to hunt until I feel better, and then it’s back to crazy kemono bitch. It’s just what I am. Not—not transcendent, not more, not a fairy. Just a really fucked up girl who’s better off staying right here where she can’t start hurting people again.”

I thought back to the ebb and flow of our encounters, how she’d fled from me on that first night, and more recently, how she had freaked out and run away to hunt Takagiri, the thing that had kicked off this whole debacle.

“That’s what happened after I, uh, hit you?”

“Mhm,” said the lump.

“Okay, uh…therapy?” That was the first thing that came to mind.

“Therapy is for humans.”

“Hina,” I groaned.

“I…” Her voice collapsed into a throaty whine that made my throat tighten. “Sorry. Sorry. I mean that literally, though. I’m just—yeah, I got a diagnosis from a psych. Borderline, bipolar. But I feel stuff so much stronger than a human does, so I can’t just…I can’t think my way out of it like you’re supposed to. Drugs don’t do shit either.”

“You’re not beyond help. Nobody is.”

—is what I was supposed to say, but I could recognize that would get nowhere with her. Instead, I was quiet, trying to think through what I knew of her, all the weird inhumanity and screwed-up priorities. I wanted her to be better. I needed her to be better; so did her teammates. What could make her be better? What did she care about?

So what I actually said was:

“Leverage.”

The lump shifted wordlessly, and I sighed a little, crawling toward her over the rolling pillow-and-blanket landscape. My limbs were weak, but this was the most forgiving terrain imaginable, and I eventually laid down next to the lump, on my back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Leverage,” I repeated. “Lesson one. You were trying to teach me that because you thought it was important for me as a flamebearer. It’s your…philosophy, I guess, or something like it. And that means it works for you, right? Even when you were manic—and you sure as hell were that night—you recognized it, valued it. So…I think you can be better, if we have the right leverage over you. And we do, I think. Because you love us—all of us. Right?”

The lump moved slightly closer to me, blanket rustling in the quiet, until her back—at least I was pretty sure it was her back—pressed against my arm. I found myself smiling and took that as a sign to continue.

“Thought so. It’s sort of…all you care about, isn’t it? And that’s not good, but it gives us a lot of leverage over you. I’m sure that…Alice, probably, has tried this before, and it sounds like it hasn’t worked. But as for me…I’ve got some idea of what you want from me, and I think—I hope—that you want it badly enough to stop you from acting on your worst impulses. And I know that’s not really a viable long term solution. Hell, it’s not even a healthy one, but we have to start somewhere, and I do mean we. You brought me here, after all. And I think you’ve felt guilty about it the whole time.”

She whined again, loudly. She knew where this was going. I rolled over a little so that my chest was against her back and hugged her with one arm.

“Hina, why did you bring me here? To Todai, instead of the Spire? What’s the real reason?”

“We could help you here. That’s what Jason said. I shouldn’t have fucking listened. I knew I’d get hooked and push you too far, and—and…”

I rubbed her shoulder through the blanket. “Help me with being an egg, you mean.”

“Oh,” she choked out, “they talked to you.”

“Yeah. And—you didn’t,” I said sadly. “I…I wish you had. I think.”

The lump jerked away from me. “No. No you don’t. I woulda fucked it all up. I am fucking it all up. So fucking stupid to think I could have actually had anything with you without talking about it, but I was so scared you’d run off, and…I’m so fucking selfish,” she whimpered. “I mean, fuck, that first night? How—why the fuck did I think that was okay?”

“Hey.” I squeezed her shoulder, trying to stop the spiral. “I’m…you didn’t force anything on me. Not then and not since. You were the one who stopped, because you knew you’d go too far—hold on, didn’t we have this exact talk like a week ago?”

“Mm.”

“Huh. Yeah, we totally did. But it’s different now, isn’t it? Because—fuck,” I groaned, remembering something. “On the date, when we were at…the clothing place. Uniqlo?” That sounded right. “I was so nervous you’d fuckin’. Force me into a skirt. And not because of anything you said or did! That was all me. And there’s been…Christ, probably so many other little things I just forgot about because I thought they were normal to think.” I facepalmed with my free hand. “Hina, if you’re really scared of being overbearing with me, or of ruining me, you shouldn’t be.”

“Okay.”

I squeezed her closer. “You listening?”

“Yeah,” she muttered, more genuine. “Just…do I even like you because of who you are? Or do I just see…Alice in you? Or Jason? Do I just fucking chase trans people because they want to be something else like I do?”

I hesitated. That was a scary prospect, and one I’d been avoiding thinking about since Alice had gotten through to me. Of course I wanted Hina to want me—to love me—for me, not for a label she’d assigned me all by herself. That was the core of the problem, really, the thing that had been silently hanging over our relationship without my knowing: she’d been assuming what I wanted, that me being some flavor of not-cisgender was a foregone conclusion and conflating it with my desire to be more than human. That she had been right was immaterial; the communication was the problem.

Also, had she just confirmed to me that Jason was trans? I mentally pocketed that one for later, forcing my indolent arms and abs to help me sit up.

“I think…that’s for you to decide. But either way, it sounds like I have just…so much leverage over you. An amount that frightens me, honestly. So here’s…here’s what I’m thinking. I’ve already given you a second chance, back after what we did at Thunder Horse.” The stumbling corpse, that handful of pixels of guilt, flashed through my mind. “But that was…all under a pretense of how I thought our relationship worked, what you wanted from me. I had been under the impression you just wanted to make me ‘like you’ in the sense of being, well, violent and powerful and manic, and you were happy to play into that. But that’s not what you were really after. So—do you want to make me a girl? Is that your endgame? I…entertained some ideas that you did, but dismissed them for reasons that I’m now kicking myself for.”

Hina whimpered again, then shifted around and rolled over to face me, though she was still a lump under the knot of blankets. I heard her take a deep breath.

“I just want you to be happy. Not…miserable, stuck. Same thing I wanted for Alice I don’t—fuck,” she sobbed. “But I don’t care whether that’s a boy shape or a girl shape or something else. I swear. And I…cutie, this is so fucking stupid. I’m fucking stupid.”

“I think we’re both really dumb,” I sighed, relief pushing away nerves and tension. I don’t know what I’d have done had she said that, yes, her endgame was simply to make me a girl. But this I could work with—I wanted to make it work. “Okay, okay,” I breathed, “let’s establish a new baseline. Last time, we said boundaries. And that—honestly, I think that worked?” I took lump-Hina’s lack of response as depressed affirmation and continued. I felt like I was about to drive a knife into her chest, but it had to be said. “But this time, about what you did at Hikanome’s barbecue…I want to give you a third chance, make us work. I really do. But.”

This time, I waited until she responded.

“What,” she rasped, tears in her voice.

“But we’re done if you fuck up like that again, make a mistake so big that your failure to control yourself is measured in human lives, lives I know you care about deep down. You—we—got so fucking lucky this time that nobody actually died, but there’s no way that’ll happen again. That’s my leverage. You can fuck up in smaller ways, even overstep with me personally, now that we’re on the same page with what you want from me. But you’ll lose me forever if you can’t rein in your mania when it counts most.”

It was harsh, and it hurt to say, but I got it out there without so much as a stumble. The words poured from somewhere inside me, really, rather than being consciously thought out; it was just the only way she and I could still work.

A sound split the following silence, an ugly, sniffling sob. Then another. Hina began to bawl under her protective layer of blankets. I desperately wanted to lie back down and hug her close, or better yet, squirm my way under the bedding myself and wipe away the tears, but I held my ground, blinking away my own tears. She needed me to say it. The sobs turned to a hoarse whine that split me open, and I just had to sit through it and wait for her to either cry it all out or run away again.

After a very long minute, one of the longest of my life, the heart-rending sounds settled into quiet sniffles, and she gave her reply.

“Fuck, I’m so dumb,” she sobbed, “I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve me, you deserve so much better. What—” she sniffled, seeming to compose herself. Her voice was a little clearer when she continued. “Cutie, yes, of course. Be something for me to lose, please, please, please. That’s all I need. I won’t fuck up again, I won’t disappoint you. Please don’t leave me.”

At last, that was enough to get me to start crying as well. I laid back down with her, cradling the lump of her form with my body so that we were facing each other. It would have been vaguely lewd if we were face to face, some kind of sixty-nine arrangement, but the veil of separation between us kept the emotional intimacy with none of the absurd horniness that could spoil the moment. I wept more quietly than she did, and I certainly didn’t whine, but they were tears all the same. We could work—she was at least willing to try, for my sake. That meant so much.

She eventually spoke again.

“Cutie?”

“Yeah?”

“I should have asked. What do you want to be?”

“A Vaetna.” The response was automatic, but it wasn’t the whole thing, and she waited for me to find the words to continue. “I mean…gender-wise, I have no idea. I’m like an hour or two into thinking about this. I talked to Yuuka and Ebi about what they thought of me, and…does ‘exotic cave lesbian’ sound like me?”

She didn’t giggle at that, but I did hear a smile in her voice, the first since…since I’d crushed her ribcage, a solid week ago, somehow. Was our relationship that fraught?

“Mm. Sorta? But I thought…you didn’t want me to define this for you.”

“I still value your advice. I mean, this would be, what, your third time?” I was putting the pieces together. “I mean, Alice explained her whole history with this, and it’s sounding like Jason is also trans. Trans man, specifically, yeah?”

“Mhm…”

“Which means you do not have a history of turning people to girls specifically. That’s a relief.”

“So…no girl?”

“I don’t know yet. Something in the middle, maybe,” I mused, “or something else altogether? I’m just throwing darts at the wall here.”

“I’ll help you with whatever it is. You deserve to be happy.” Her voice fell. “You don’t deserve me,” she repeated.

“Remains to be seen,” I countered. “Do you honestly think you can never be better, long-term, without the, uh, Sword of Damocles we just set up? Will it just be leverage forever? What if—hold on,” I said, an idea germinating. “You blamed your Flame for making you like this.”

“Yeah. It makes me worse, pushes me too far,” she sighed, despondent. “Makes the mania like…a brain fog, or something, where I only have to care about one thing. I hate it, but not while it’s happening. It feels awesome while it’s happening.”

“So you want to be…normal? Or at least less extreme?”

“I guess. You’re going somewhere with this?”

“Well, if your Flame changed you to be like this, maybe it can change you back?”

I heard her breath catch. “No. No, no nono. Cutie, I can’t give up being what I am, I can’t go back to being just a human, it’d—”

“No, no,” I soothed. “I love your…physicality, the power, the way you just flit around like it’s nothing. I mean mentally. You’re more meshed into your Flame than…any flamebearer I know of, though I really still don’t have as good of a grasp on that as I’d like,” I griped. “Point is, being a flamebearer is to be changed. You’re practically the embodiment of that. If you want to become less…extreme, if you really want it badly enough, wouldn’t your Flame hear that?”

Hina was quiet for a moment, considering this. “Alice’s tail,” she sighed. “Sometimes the Flame just…does shit. Dramatic irony, Yuuka likes to call it. I might be the same.”

“Maybe,” I hedged. “But maybe not. Don’t you want to find out? Don’t you want to try?”

“So much,” she sobbed, voice breaking again. “Please. Why are you putting up with me? The others all just…you remembered lesson one.” 

I gave this a moment’s proper thought. “…Because I like you,” I decided. “Despite everything. Because of everything? Ugh. Hold on.”

I sat up once more and crawled my way across the blankets once more, toward the blackout curtains. There was a little pulley, and I tugged with what little strength I could muster. Bit by bit, sunlight spilled into the room, playing over the peaks and valleys of bedding and scattering through the crumpled-up tissues. It felt a little cheesy, but I was tired of darkness, especially after my brief jaunt outside reality. I blinked repeatedly to help my eyes adjust as I ambled back toward the Hina lump, trying to find the seam of her little blanket pod. She didn’t resist as I raised it, and finally came face to face with those blue, blue eyes. They were bloodshot, and the entire mask around her eyes was red from crying.

“Hey. Sunlight’s good for you.” Hypocritical, honestly, given my history of indoorsmanship, but it was still correct.

Hina nodded, looking nervous, and shimmied out from under the blankets shyly, sapphire eyes glimmering in the sunshine. The moment I dropped the hem, she pounced forward, tackling me down onto the pillow I’d found myself on top of, and nuzzled my neck.

“Love you. Love you love you love you love you!”

I stroked her hair, taking in the scent—not a particularly good one, as she clearly hadn’t bathed, and whatever no-body-odor thing Alice had going on obviously didn’t extend to my feral girlfriend. That was okay. Her hand mirrored mine, flowing through my obnoxiously orange tresses, then rubbed around my chin and neck as a giggle fluttered through her.

“No beard, wow. Very cis. Soooo cis.”

“I…yeah.”

I found myself smiling—how could I not, really? She pressed something into my other hand, and I leaned away from her a little to get a look at it. It was a little red box—Valentine’s chocolate.

“You already gave me one of these.”

“That was Yuuka’s. I never gave you yours, and you soooo deserve it.”

I tried to force the stupid grin off my face for a moment of seriousness. “Hina, this will still be a process. It has to be. If this is you swinging back into mania…”

The mask of joy cracked on her face. Her shoulders hunched. “I know. I know, I know. Not yet. Just…I was ready for you to break up with me. I wanted you to. It feels kind of unfair that you didn’t, and I’m feeling good. Do…should we stop?”

“Maybe,” I thought. “I…I think you have to fix a bit more of what you broke, first, before we can go back into the swing of things. My libido hates me for saying that, by the way.”

“Okaaaay.” She was giving me the puppy eyes. “How can I help?”

“Uh. I’m sure Alice has an entire file folder about Hikanome and the government and all that. But on my end of things…you want to hunt? Together?”

From what she’d said, hunting was an isolation tactic, a punishment by way of depriving herself of the people she loved, giving herself something to fixate on until the mania kicked in again. But it didn’t have to be that; it could be something we shared, a way for me to be there with her, to indulge our mutual desire to be more, to destroy evil together.

As I'd hoped, she lit up. “Keep going,” she whispered gleefully.

“Sugawara’s alive, and he’s even more of a monster than we thought. He’s got Takagiri in a…I don’t know what to call it. Psychic stranglehold, horrible shit. Let’s stop the problem at the source.”

---

And that's it for the main chapters of arc 2! Interlude and big author's note next week.

Upcoming Rewards Changes (More Stuff For Everyone!)

Hi! This is for both current and prospective supporters of Sunspot. I'll be changing the Patreon rewards starting with Arc 3; everybody will be getting more stuff per dollar!

TLDR:

• Side stories are becoming available for members of all tiers, including free memberships.

• Advance chapter backlog is increasing from 1 to 3.

• Radiance tier: After May 1, new memberships will be $10/month. Current members or new members who sign up before then will keep paying $5/month.

• Vaetna tier: Price is increasing to $20/month, and there will be no additional benefits beyond what Radiance tier offers. This will become fully a "support yootie more for the same benefits" tier.

• There's been interest in a tier for people who want to throw money at me without the temptation of having advance chapters, so I'm making a tip jar tier.

In more detail:

I want to give you guys more Sunspot.

For one, I want everybody to be able to read the side stories; they're generally noncanon but I work hard on them, and I figure More Sunspot for anybody willing to venture off Shub/RR and come to the Patreon or the website is a good move.

For two, I want to increase advance chapter backlog; this is the best way for me to give paying patrons more rewards without increasing my week-by-week workload, since I can build the backlog during the hiatus and then maintain posting 1 chapter a week.

For three, I'd like to make a living writing Sunspot eventually, and a few patrons have expressed interest in a higher tier to throw more money at me, for which I'm very grateful.

So, what are we doing and when?

• Side stories will become available for all members, including free members. Currently there's only one side story (Alice And Hina Go To The Pet Store, which will become available here on April 4), but I'd like to write another during the hiatus and then make it an every-few-months sort of thing that steadily increases the value of becoming a member. I haven't decided yet whether these will be Patreon-only for a little before going public, but the intent is to make them public releases by default.

• Advance chapters are going from 1 ahead of public to 3. This is the biggest change; that's roughly 15-25k words of backlog (depending on the lengths of the particular chapters) which is equivalent to 10ish shorter, RR-standard chapters. Advance chapter tiers will be getting 3.01-3 through the hiatus, and then they'll get 3.04 when 01 releases publicly. It'll still only be 1 update a week on both the public and patron sides after that; any further backlog I might build will be "true" un-posted backlog for my own sanity.

• If you're already a Radiance tier patron or become one before May 1, rejoice, you'll get the most from these changes; you'll get to keep paying $5 while getting triple the backlog AND access to side stories. For members who sign up after May 1, the price will be $10/month -- still better value than what this tier offers currently.

• Vaetna tier is going to $20, and will have no extra benefits beyond Radiance tier (for now). This is purely a way for generous patrons to support me more. In the future, I might do some fun stuff for this tier to show my thanks, but this is not a tier where you pay more in expectation of more rewards, other than the reward of me, the author, being able to buy food to stay alive and stuff. (This will take effect April 4).

• With the Patreon backlog increasing by so many weeks, I've had a few people over in the Discord request a way to support me without access to advance chapters, so that they don't feel separated from the main community and can keep up with the discourse of the public releases. Your wish is granted! I'm tentatively calling this tier "Yeen Beans" and it'll be base $5, though people are welcome to manually increase that pledge by however much they feel comfortable. (This will take effect April 4).

I'd love to write full-time someday; right now that's not in the cards due to visa shenanigans, but your support still substantially improves my quality of life in this hell world and allows me to spend more time on Sunspot, as well as commission art (I have some really cool stuff cooking), maintain the website, buy RR ads, and so on. So let me extend a sincere thank you to everyone who supports the story with Patreon memberships; you guys rock, and I couldn't do this without you.

Enjoy the extra rewards! If you have feedback on these changes or suggestions for other rewards you'd be interested in, let me know!

2.18 Patreon Release

“She hasn’t come out of her room since we got back.”

My stomach twisted. Last time that had happened, Hina had been stewing in remorse. This time, it served her right, but even so…

“Oh. That’s…bad, yeah.”

Alice sighed. “Very, very bad. Normally she just runs away when she gets like this, so the fact that she’s not…I’ve said what I can to try to cheer her up, but she’s a mess. She thinks you’re mad at her.”

“…I am.” I couldn’t entirely suppress the guilt that lurched through me. She was in deep shit and deserved to be—but I couldn’t help but feel bad. “And it falls to me to fix her?”

Alice winced, as did I a moment later; I could have phrased that better. Her tail thumped unhappily. “No. She’s…intractable when she’s like this, and that’s not your problem to solve. Or anybody’s, really. You feel the need to talk to her about your relationship?”

I avoided Alice’s gaze, looking out the narrow window on the far side of the wall to my right. “I…yeah. Both about yesterday and about…about pretense, I guess.”

“Yeah. Well—going to her won’t work, I’m sorry to say. I suggest you wait for her to come to you, because she will, eventually. She’s been waiting for you to be up, so probably in a few hours, but don’t try to force it, yeah?”

I nodded at that, trying to decide how relieved I was to be able to put off the conversation. As much as I needed to talk to her, I feared it was doomed to be an ugly, rocky thing, and I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for another heavy conversation quite yet. In light of that, I was alright with letting Hina decide when she was ready. In the meantime, I wanted to see how Amane and Yuuka were doing. Though I wasn’t exactly in a position to get up—I still felt very weak, and the painkillers made it hard to gauge how messed up my body was.

I gestured at the bed. “Could you ask Ebi how much more of…this, there’ll be?”

Alice stood from her chair, stretching her back with a pop and twisting to tug the base of her tail this way and that. “Being bedridden sucks, doesn’t it?”

I gaped. “Are you rubbing it in?”

“No, I’m trying to express sympathy—” She paused her stretching and seemed to realize what she was doing. The room got a degree hotter as she flushed. “Oh. No, sorry, just stretching because my tail really hurts if I stay sitting too long and you reminded me of that—augh,” she groaned, face red. “Insensitive of me, my apologies.”

“It’s fine,” I assured her, sharing somewhat in the embarrassment. That one had been my bad. “That’s a…normal ache, I hope? Not new?”

“Think so.” She looked uncomfortable with that topic and shook herself, then spoke to the empty air. “Ebi? Prognosis on Ezzen’s condition, please?”

The android obligingly appeared from nowhere. She was holding a platter like a waitress, and a meaty aroma wafted into the air. I blinked.

“Um?”

“You’ll be cleared to get up and walk around a bit, but not until you’ve eaten,” the android explained. “Hungry?”

My stomach was already gurgling at the smell of hot protein. I was urgently aware that I was starving, and I very much agreed with Ebi—nothing else could happen until that was resolved. This was a problem Alice understood well, and a grin actually flitted across her face when she heard my body’s complaint. The bed-mounted tray table swung over to my lap with a motorized whirr. Ebi set the platter down in front of me. The hunger was muted slightly as I saw what it held; I eyed the spread, deeply distrustful.

“Surely this is contaminated. Or just old.”

“Wrong on both counts. It has my seal of approval,” Ebi declared.

Piled before me were leftovers from Hikanome’s barbecue. There were roasted chicken-and-vegetable skewers, tandoor-baked buns stuffed full of kebab meat, and a plate of roasted corn ribs with some kind of mayo dip. It all looked and smelled suspiciously fresh for food that should have been three days old and rescued from the epicenter of an inferno.

“Miyoko did…something to save most of the food after she woke up, and Hikanome is distributing it to attendees who were injured,” Alice explained. “That includes you. She sends her apologies for the clusterfuck.”

“Not even slightly her fault, is it? All Hina’s,” I muttered, delicately holding up a skewer and staring at it. How had Miyoko done this? Some kind of state-lock in orange to keep it from having gone bad as it sat out in the weather, maybe, but cleansing it of any ripple contamination was an order of magnitude more complex. A miracle, in short, and a classic one—food for the sick. How noble.

I still couldn’t help but be suspicious. Even if the food did pass muster from Ebi in terms of food safety, if it was primarily intended for the cult’s own injured, then who was to say that preservation was the only thing Miyoko had done? I squinted.

“This isn’t ‘blessed’, is it? Something in green to aid regeneration? Is that a thing she can do?”

Ebi rolled her digital eyes. “There’s nothing off about it. We wouldn’t feed you something with unknown magical effects when your body’s still recovering from whatever the hell you did to it. It’s good food, or so I hear,” the machine grinned. “Eat up.”

She plopped a familiar milkshake onto the tray as well, the same nutritionally fortified type I’d been given for my first meal at Todai. I trusted that more than the cult leader’s supposedly-not-imbued-with-anything offering and took a few sips while I waited for my hunger to inevitably overcome my reservations. I tugged a piece of chicken off the end of its skewer with my teeth, chewed, and found it as fresh and tender as if it had just come off the grill.

I ate the rest of the skewer before even thinking, and then the feast began. Bite, chew, swallow, grab, dip, bite, chew—both of my hands were fully occupied with the task of replenishing my body’s nutritional stock. Grease dripped down my chin, and rather than reach for a napkin, I just wiped it off with a piece of pita and promptly ate that as well. I was aware my table manners were horrific, positively animalistic, but the food had to get in me. Was this how Hina had felt when she’d eaten that piece of fried chicken? Voracious and uninhibited?

As I ate, I rationalized that this was to be expected of anybody who’d gone through what I had and then slept for two full days; my body was naturally ravenous for energy and material to…do whatever all that green ripple had set me up for. And hunger truly was the best spice—everything was positively delicious, even though I only had moments to appreciate the flavor of any given bite and the culinary skill involved before my body demanded I swallow it to send it on its way to the stomach.

It was only when Alice cleared her throat that I somewhat came back to myself. I looked up at her and Ebi, my face invaded by a wave of flushed embarrassment as I remembered the women hovering over me. Alice had edged toward the door, apparently intent on taking her leave.

“Got to get back to it,” she explained. “Really, I get it. Glad to see you’re doing alright. Don’t, uh, choke?”

An eminently reasonable concern—a little undercut by the entire leg of chicken that had somehow appeared in her hand as she shouldered the door open. Hunger was contagious for us green-ripple-affected folk, apparently. With my mouth too full of food to reply verbally, I opted for a thumbs up, trying to transmit a wish for her good luck on whatever ordeals awaited. Her tail disappeared around the threshold a moment after she did.

Ebi was still right there, but she wasn’t looking at me directly. I got the sense she was somewhat disgusted by my organic, masticatory processes of fuel intake. That wasn’t enough to stop me from continuing to devour my meal, though. After a long half minute of trying not to watch my jaw unhinge, she emitted a ping sound and made a show of checking her wrist like she was wearing a watch.

“I gotta go too. Amethyst’s conspiring against me.”

I failed to swallow my mouthful of corn correctly, hacked an ugly cough, took a swig of iced tea, then rasped, “…What?”

But Ebi was already out the door, leaving me alone with my food. At least that meant there was nobody to watch me—aside from Hina’s specter encouraging me to eat with voracious abandon. That was far more shameful than being actually watched, so with more than two-thirds of the food now vanished into me, I eased back a little on the scarfing. I decided the best move was to distract myself and occupy one hand by checking my phone. I used the sole napkin I’d been provided to wipe off my hands and navigate to the chatroom.

I had a lot of worried DMs. I was also days behind on a lot of very intense discussion about the “BBQ Inferno”—temporary name, I hoped, too glib by half—but the running theme of the messages directed at me was much more mundane.

Photos of the fight between the Radiances and Takagiri had flooded social media, which was fine—but I was also in many of those photos, and had been correctly identified. This was…a little uncomfortable, and was probably going to happen eventually, but what everybody seemed to be talking about was my hair, the long curtain of freakish neon-orange that was easy to spot in all but the most chaotic footage of when I’d been with Yuuka and, later, Amane.

Disbelieving, I tugged a few strands into my field of view to make sure the hair was still there and hadn’t faded with time or been bleached by my brief excursion outside reality. What an absurd color; had I really gone through a life-or-death combat situation looking like that? But at least it was long, and that was far better than if all this footage had instead captured me in my horribly shorn state after the disastrous haircut—shit, that was a gender thing, wasn’t it? Was the satisfaction I felt from the curtain of hair actually gender euphoria?

That warranted more introspection, but I also had to say something. I opted for a minimal check-in to confirm that I was, in fact, alive and relatively unscathed despite being at the center of it all. Doing remarkably well, in fact, no need to worry about me, no matter how bad things had looked during the inferno. I couldn’t provide too many details; I myself didn’t really know what exactly had happened, and didn’t want to accidentally spread misinformation, you see. And yes, the hair was new.

My closer friends deserved a slightly more honest update, and I waffled a bit about what to include. I’d never actually told them of the blood magic I’d worked to epilate away all my body hair. Hell, I hadn’t even told them about the intermediary step that was the wig, not even Sky, who’d helped me navigate the haircut crisis. I should have mentioned it on the way to the barbecue; I felt guilty to have let my friends slip through the cracks like that. Both he and Star deserved a more complete rundown of the magical details…

As well as my own tentative intentions to foray into the world of gender, I supposed. But that part had practical complications: how much could I really share about the recent gender developments? Of course, telling people that Alice or Takagiri were trans was right out, for reasons of both opsec and general decency. I couldn’t even reveal to Star that Alice had seemingly found the proverbial philosopher’s stone, a magical way to transition. That would utterly rock her world—but I could also easily envision it sending her into a horrible spiral of despair when she learned it was restricted to only flamebearers, and I didn’t want to do that to her.

But the cat was still out of the bag regarding my makeover, and Star was certainly the one I trusted most about gender stuff, so I took a deep breath, typed out a message in between bites of corn, and hit send before I could lose my nerve.

ezzen: Hey, sorry about not replying to stuff, been a little out cold like I mentioned in genchat. The hair was an attempt to fix a really bad haircut - actually a side effect of a panicky full body epilation. And I’ve been thinking about why I did that and yeah it’s kind of the Vaetna dysphoria smoothness thing we’ve talked about before with shaving my face but it could also be a not-cis thing and I’m not sure?

I found myself hyperventilating a little. The pulse monitor, until now a steady beep I’d been tuning out, had accelerated into a frenetic rhythm that matched the pounding in my chest.

Ebi’s head peeked through the door.

“Dude, you alright?”

“Uh—uh.” My panic increased as I realized I’d pulled her away from helping the injured Radiances to check on me. She strode over, and I pulled my phone toward my chest so she wouldn’t see the screen. “I’m okay, it’s nothing, I’m just overreacting and—”

“No shit,” came Yuuka’s voice from the doorway. “You’ll be fine, chill out.”

The Heliotrope Radiance was wearing a green medical gown rather than her usual arrangement of dark straps and corsets, but she made it look good. No bruises, and she was standing upright. Her hair was up in the usual twintails, and her bangs were bound back to show that her cursed eye was covered with a gauze eyepatch. Seeing her up and about distracted me from my anxiety.

“Hi.”

“Heya.”

Ebi made a staticky noise at her. “Tch. Stick with Amethyst, don’t come running after me. He’s fine.” She looked at me. “You’re fine.”

“I’m fine,” I repeated, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly through my mouth, trying to force the tension to leave my shoulders. “You’re fine?” I asked Heliotrope.

“I’m fine! Well, fine enough to be walking around.” She accompanied that with another step into the room and an annoyed glare at Ebi. “And Amane is fine too.”

That was a relief, though I’d feel better seeing her safe and sound with my own eyes. The way her mantle had melted had been very upsetting. “Can I say hi to her?”

“She’s asleep,” Ebi clarified. Her face shut off for a moment, then reactivated as…a live feed of a camera watching Amane’s sleeping body, hooked up to various IVs and monitoring equipment in a bed that looked significantly fancier than mine. “See?”

“That’s incredibly weird. But thanks.” It did legitimately make me feel better, though, and the slowing beeps of the heart monitor confirmed that.

“No prob.” Her face went back to normal.

“Don’t do that,” Yuuka sighed, turning away from the android. She was distracted by the food on my plate—or what remained of it, which at this point was mostly chicken bones, bare skewers, and smears of sauce. “Lookin’ like Alice over there. You about to grow a tail?”

“I hope not,” I joked. “Ideally just…uh…” I realized I didn’t really have a clear sense of what I wanted from any potential mutations. “More muscles? Er—not bigger muscles, just stronger ones, like Hina’s got…oh shit,” I muttered. That wasn’t very cisgender of me, was it? Or was my conversation with Alice just making me read gender into things that were on the Vaetna-aspiration side of my self-image?

Yuuka gave me a funny look. “Like Hina. Seriously? Haven’t fuckin’ gotten over her?”

“I—I’m working on it,” I deflected. “Alice said she’d talk when she’s ready.”

She snorted. “Yeah, let her stew. She knows she fucked up.”

“…Yeah, I guess she did,” I admitted. “We all came out of it in one piece, though. Er, Amane aside. I mean, she’s fine, but not in one piece because she’s…” I stopped talking before I could shove my foot all the way into my mouth, and searched around for a better topic. I pointed at the remains of my food. “You have any of this yet?”

Yuuka shook her head incredulously at my catastrophic faux pas, which was warranted, but didn’t seem offended on her teammate’s behalf. “Nah, I don’t eat meat.”

I blinked, trying to recall the handful of times we’d eaten together. I hadn’t really been looking at her plate at the barbecue, too busy trying not to fuck up opsec and arguing about the Omelas allegory, so it was entirely possible she’d had a plate full of vegetarian options and I’d just missed it. “Oh. Because, uh, your eye does something horrible when you eat once-alive animals?”

“What? Fuck no, that’d suck. It’s just unethical and bad for the waistline. Don’t know what all the fuss is about, anyway.” She put a hand on her waist for emphasis. “Doesn’t even taste that good.”

“Don’t get what all the deal with food is,” Ebi remarked from where she was fiddling with my IV.

I stared at the two women. Ebi got a pass, of course, she’d never get it. And Yuuka’s first two points were reasonable, and ones I could respect in principle, but I vehemently disagreed on the third. My childhood had given me a wide palette, so I was hardly an obligate carnivore, but it had also caused me to consider a well-cooked piece of meat to be the centerpiece of most any real meal until you reached the absurd molecular gastronomy Dad had resented so much.

“But have you tried actually good—”

“—meat that isn’t just a steak cooked to death at a cheap steakhouse, and instead something different like an iberico?” Yuuka interrupted. “Hina’s tried, believe me. Didn’t work.”

“…Okay, fine,” I conceded. Maybe it wasn’t a problem with the quality of her experiences with meat. Weirdo. “Wait—is your eye back online?”

She grinned. “Kinda. Still spotty.”

That gave me an idea. I mentally checked to see if my Flame would abide an ignition. “Could you…check something for me? I’ll light it up.”

Ebi reached over and flicked my temple.

“Ow.”

“No active Flame,” she said, indicating a readout panel under the heart monitor with a bar graph of the familiar spectrum of ripple colors. “Amane.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

Yuuka still looked interested, though. “Doesn’t mean you can’t ask. What’s up?”

“Uh.” I realized I didn’t know how to phrase it, but my conviction was growing. I was reflecting on the caustic, hurtful vitriol Yuuka had thrown at me in our first real conversation, and how much of it had been predicated on me being “just another fucking boy.” But since she could literally see the future, did that mean that I would wind up male? Could Alice be wrong about my gender?

Waffling in front of a precog is a bad idea. Yuuka squinted at me, briefly tugged away her eyepatch to reveal a mangled mess of dark crystal and raw, still-healing red flesh, and squinted harder.

“Dude.”

“…I’m a dude?”

She straightened, putting the eyepatch back. “That’s not my fuckin’ call to make. Even if I could see that far ahead—and I can’t, especially not right now—I wouldn’t tell you. But we’re chill already, if that’s what you’re twisted up about.”

“Responsibility of prophecy,” Ebi put in. “Especially for problems of identity.”

I twisted to look at her. “Uh. How do you know what I was going to ask?”

Ebi leaned in real close to me. Uncomfortably close, really, until her screen-face was practically all I could see. Then, like a PowerPoint slide transition, the image of her face dissolved into pixels and was replaced with a stock photo of an egg. I groaned.

“Jesus, could everybody see it but me?”

“Yep,” said both the woman and the android. I winced, uncomfortably seen.

“Okay, then…foresight notwithstanding, what do you think?” I looked between the two of them. “Who…what do I seem like to you?”

Yuuka shrugged. “I’d poison the well.”

Ebi mimicked the gesture, a perfect imitation minus the boobs. “Do I look like I know what a gender is? You’re meat, and you perform as meat, and that’s all a mystery to me. I could collate hundreds of thousands of testimonials of trans experiences and behaviors to map against all the data I have on you, but that’s not much better than just reading the future. Figure it out yourself, meatbag.”

That was a hell of a pejorative, but her tone was light and accompanied by the egg image doing another, even lamer slide transition to display a thumbs-up emoji.

“Fuck you,” I exclaimed, frustration papering over the envy I felt that she could just do that. “Are you fucking with me?”

“Yeah.” Ebi’s face returned to a human grin. “I mean, you really want my honest opinion?”

“Please.”

“You’re some species of exotic cave lesbian.”

I gaped at her, trying to decipher how that made me feel. “…Are you still fucking with me?”

“I’m running diagnostics. How’s it make you feel?”

I frowned, annoyed at the tactic, but gave it a moment’s earnest thought. I found it made me angry; I didn’t want to be slotted into either side of the gender binary. “Don’t like it.”

“There you go. Data point!” the android declared smugly, smirking.

“Huh. Thanks,” I muttered. Then I registered the expression on Yuuka’s face; she was looking at me with something between doubt and amusement. I sat up a little bit more. “Don’t say you can’t weigh in and then make faces at me. If you honestly think Ebi’s right, that I am in fact some kind of cave lesbian, then say something, gimme something to go on.” The expression was already revelatory enough for where her opinions lay, but it got worse when I cross-referenced it with something else. “Hold on, you’ve called me Ezza, haven’t you?”

She crossed her arms defiantly. “Strayanism, not a girl thing.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

That was a relief. I was surprised by the grin that forced its way onto my face, how much it pleased me to not have been slotted into the other half of the gender binary, either. I reflexively raised my hand to cover the expression, but it was far too late, and Yuuka hummed.

“Mmm…okay, that being said. Foresight aside,” she covered her eyepatch with her palm, which was probably purely symbolic. “I’m sorry I was such a shit to you earlier. Really, I am,” she insisted in response to my dubious stare. “And the fact that I am sorry about that should say a lot about how masculine I think you are, ‘cause the fact remains that I hate blokes. And I don’t have a good sense for this stuff, so, like, grain of salt on that, but I do gotta agree with Ebi-tan here: whatever you’ve got going on with Hina is really, really gay. Which would be fine with me if not for the fact that it’s her.”

I redirected my stare to Ebi, whose poker face was superb, then brought it back to Yuuka. “I…uh. So you’re apologizing, but I’m still a monsterfucker?”

She nodded.

I sat back against the bed’s inclined backrest. “You know what, I’ll take it.” I told myself I was planning to break up with Hina anyway, and if Yuuka didn’t hate me for something intrinsic about what I was, that was a win in my book.

The implications about “what I was” were very concerning, though. Had all of Todai immediately pegged me as a trans woman? I was becoming increasingly sure Hina had, which was a primary reason why I was dreading talking to her. It was clear she had particular proclivities whereas the others didn’t—so it was a lot more damning if all of them agreed with her anyway. Still, if it meant they were more comfortable around me, instead of seeing me how I’d feared at first—as a guy intruding in a space full of women—that was good.

Overall, I wasn’t sure where I landed on it, other than that the probably-not-a-guy gauge was steadily rising.

“Can I get a third opinion? Ai? Or Amane?” I rubbed my face with my hands; they were still slightly greasy from my meal. “Alice has already said her bit, and…I nominally trust the six of you more than pretty much anyone else for this,” I admitted, a little surprised to feel that way. “Like, you have a better window into it than my online friends, even the trans ones.” I grabbed a few strands of my hair for emphasis. “Like, with this. I should have thought it was weird how helpful and non-judgmental Alice was about this.”

“It looks nice,” Yuuka said, and I couldn’t help but smile. It was weird to feel good about my appearance, but kind of addictive—which was part of why I’d been dragged along so easily by Hina.

“As third opinions go, there’s another trans flamebearer in the building,” Ebi said, grinning once more. “On this very floor, even. And she wants to talk to you.”

Yuuka shifted, side-eyeing the android. “I don’t know,” she mumbled, uncharacteristically nervous. “Sounds like a great way to have Alice tear my head off if it goes badly.”

“You’re a precog, there’s no ‘if’ involved. I’ll bring her in so you can forgive her. Alice already did—you really gonna let her be more mahou shoujo than you?”

As Yuuka frowned at that, looking conflicted, I sat up a little further, bristling. “Not Takagiri.”

Ebi tutted. “Hey, you too. You both need to get over your shit with her, and this is the fastest way to do it. She wants to apologize, and she needs your help. Let her.”

Yuuka considered this, then took a deep breath. She flipped up her eyepatch and turned around, looking out at the doorway, toward the rest of the building and whichever room Takagiri was in. She was quiet as she inspected the eddies of silver only she could see.

I wasn’t convinced. “It’s one thing for me to go ‘hey, it’s okay that you attacked me, apology accepted’, and another for me to ask her for advice about my identity. I don’t even know her.”

“Better than Hina,” Ebi pointed out. “I mean, they both tried to abduct you, but at least she feels bad about it. And I don’t just mean ‘needs your help’ about her general situation. Heliotrope gets it.”

On cue, Yuuka made a sound, a sharp intake of breath that sounded like a strangled cry. She turned back to me, face serious. “We—yeah, fuck, Ebi’s right, she needs our help.”

“Wait, what? That makes it sound like she’s being attacked.”

“No, but—we should hear her out.”

—

And so it was that Yuuka, Ebi, and I spoke with the person who’d attacked us; when a precog had that kind of urgency in her voice, it was sensible to listen. She couldn’t explain what Takagiri would tell us, but insisted that it was important enough that we ought not to delay with more waffling.

Takagiri wound up coming to us; I was still too bedridden to easily make the journey down the hall except by mobile bed delivery. Ebi walked her over and announced her arrival with a knock on the door. I took a deep breath and exchanged a glance with Yuuka, who’d taken Alice’s seat and moved it so that she and I were both facing the doorway, presenting a unified front. There was nothing to fear, I told myself. We held all the cards. When I felt ready, I called out.

“Come in.”

The door swung open, and there was—not Takagiri, not in body. We’d destroyed her mantle, after all, so the physical body that actually entered the room was that of Kimura, the middle-aged man who’d given the impression of being a samurai. But despite being in the wrong body, this was clearly Takagiri; there was just a little bit of a hunch to her posture rather than straight-backed formality, and the impassive placidity I’d seen in Kimura had been replaced by an alert, almost paranoid energy, brown eyes darting around the room. And she looked haggard, more exhausted than even Alice, with bags under her eyes and a weight to how she stood. She had a patch on her forearm—a pain-blocker like the one I’d used, perhaps.

Her frantic eyes came to a rest on Yuuka, and her expression twisted into something a little painful. It was easy to see why; Takagiri wore the same kind of nominally androgynous medical gown as Yuuka, but it fit very differently on the taller male figure than the busty Radiance, not nearly as curvaceous. The envy passed quickly, and her gaze moved to me instead.

“Hello, Ezzen.” Her voice was softer than it had been before; still deeper than that of her mantle—though that had mostly been yelling—but modulated quieter and higher. More feminine.

“Hi.” I tried to sit up a bit more to look intimidating.

Takagiri stepped a bit further into the room, then bowed deeply. “I apologize for my actions three days ago. I was weak and desperate, and I take full responsibility for the harm I caused to you all and to the flock. Thank you for granting me mercy, despite my failures.”

I blinked. I’d been expecting contrition, but taking the blame to this extent felt like self-flagellation. “Uh. Hina caused the inferno. That one’s not on you.”

She held the bow. “I should have stood up to Sugawara and refused to harm you. Instead, I was a coward and believed I had no choice but to attack you. I believed I was alone. I underestimated your kindness, and I beg your forgiveness.”

My kindness? It had been Alice’s decision to spare her and take her in, not mine. I glanced uncomfortably at Yuuka, who bit her lip, and said something softly to Takagiri in Japanese. She rose out of the bow, replying uncertainly, to which Yuuka shook her head.

“Forgiven, as far as I’m concerned. Ezza?”

I frowned. “I mean—I feel like I’m still missing a bunch of the pieces of the puzzle, here. I…I want to forgive you, I think, because it sounds like you’re under a horrific amount of duress, but you still tried to kill Yuuka. What’s with that?”

Yuuka blinked at me, surprised that I was prioritizing her. “Eh, that’s water under the bridge; she had orders,” she explained hurriedly, before Takagiri could. “We fought…a lot, back when this shit was all going down. There were plenty of times one of us might not have walked away from that, I get it.” She narrowed her eyes at the ex-assassin. “But…I remember one time you just walked away. You could have stopped me from getting into that office, but you didn’t.”

Takagiri met her gaze. “I was hoping you would find what you needed. For Ishikawa-chan. I thought I could turn a blind eye and lie to Sugawara that you had avoided me.” She looked at the floor and clenched her fists.” But he sees everything.”

“Everything?” I asked, suddenly wary. She’d said he was in her dreams, hadn’t she? “Even here?” When she didn’t respond, I growled a little, which made Yuuka raise her eyebrows at me. “Stop being cryptic. What’s got you so far under his thumb, and why turn away from him now?”

Takagiri took a slow breath.

“He helped build my mantle. And in doing so, tied part of his Light to mine. I am—was—not only his assassin, but his spy. Everything Takagiri Izumi saw, he would learn when I slept. Even now, even when he is in a coma, every night he flays me open and takes it.” There was bile in her voice. “To be in my proper body is to give him his only connection to the world the next night. So I have not slept since I betrayed him, because until I do, he will not know.”

Horror rose up my spine like damp floodwater, seeping into the base of my skull. I stared at Takagiri and saw how she was swaying slightly, how dark the circles under her eyes truly were. My eyes dropped to the patch on her arm. “That’s keeping you awake?”

“Yes. And online shogi.” Her face split into shattered mimicry of a grin. “I don’t know for how much longer. You destroyed my body, and I have been praying that that may be enough for me to finally be free, for the connection between me and him to be broken enough that I can rest. But I cannot take that risk.”

“Why not? What’s he got over you? I mean, there’s the blackmail, but Alice seemed confident she’d be able to turn that around, and people keep saying he’s in a coma. What can he do to you?”

“Turn her Flame into a bomb,” Yuuka whispered. My heart dropped into my stomach as she continued. “He’s done it before, though only with parceled Flame, not an entire other flamebearer.” She shifted. “Hard for me to see if they’re not about to explode, though, so it’s just a guess. I thought you were loyal, didn’t need that kind of thing.”

Takagiri hesitated. “I was, once. He was kind, at first. I told him my secret and he accepted me, told me we would build a world that would accept me, helped me build the person I wished to be, until he had a door into my soul and I could never leave.” Rage flashed in her eyes, though not directed at us. “I thought I would be free when you finally won.”

“We should have fucking killed him,” Yuuka snarled. “Shouldn’t have fucking handed him over to the cops. Mahou shoujo destroys evil.”

I agreed. This was much more along the lines of what I expected when I’d heard that Hikanome was a Flame cult, coercion and abuse far beyond what even the most horrible of mundane cults could commit. The Vaetna destroyed a few cults like that every year and took in the survivors or at least paid to help them rebuild their lives. That they hadn’t with Hikanome was…well, they couldn’t be everywhere at once. There were only ten of them, and the world was soaked in evil.

I was absolutely ready to drop all charges against Takagiri, now, and was entering problem-solving mode, fueled by anger. A person could only go for maybe a week at most without sleep and degraded very rapidly after the first few days. She’d been essentially sentenced to insanity and then death if we didn’t do something about it.

I looked past Takagiri, at Ebi, who was standing behind her in the doorway, a threshold guardian. “Ebi? It’s already been three days. Why the hell haven’t we fixed this?”

Ebi glared back at me. “We’ve been fucking trying. Ai hasn’t slept either.”

“Then why isn’t this the first thing you told me about when I woke up? Why bring in Alice to talk about the gender shit first?”

“Gender shit?” Takagiri asked.

“Because we were pretty sure that once you heard, you’d try to blood-magic your liver into glass if you thought it’d help,” Ebi retorted. “And we wanted you to at least get a meal in you before that, and Alice was nervous as hell about you having this talk while driven by inscrutable egg mania.”

Then my phone buzzed.

“And so we could get ahead of that,” Ebi added.

Her tone told me who it was. I lifted my phone from where it had been lying face-down in my lap, turning it on with all the finality of an inmate approaching the electric chair. It was a single text, and it broke my heart in half.

Hina: im sorry i love you i need you can we talk

2.17 Patreon Release

If I dreamt after passing out in the grass, I don’t remember it. Perhaps I would have spoken with Holton again, or drawn the parallels between how I’d broken out of our shared dream and how I’d escaped back into reality from the abyss, or connected the gargantuan hunk of driftwood to the towering forest beyond the beach.

But instead, I just slept. I slept through finally being extracted from the inferno and taken back to Lighthouse Tower, through the remainder of the evacuation, through whatever the leaders of Todai and Hikanome had to say to one another in the immediate wake of the disaster. I slept through the inferno’s collapse and cleanup and through the initial news cycle for the biggest magical event since last week’s incident at Thunder Horse. I slept as Todai set me up in Ebi’s medical ward on the eighteenth floor, cleaned the awful dust-bunny-gunk off me, and scanned my flesh and bones for the changes my Flame had effected.

All told, I rested unconscious for three days—and that meant actually three days of healing this time, no bio-accelerant fields for me like I’d been provided when Hina had first brought me here. Ebi and Ai had been wary of kickstarting more substantial mutations in my body, and given that I had actually been mostly unharmed outside of the self-inflicted overexertion, they just hooked me up to an IV drip and let me sleep until my body decided I’d recovered enough to wake.

Thus I awoke to a familiar sight, the same as my first moments of consciousness in Japan hardly two weeks prior: a hospital room. Not quite the same one as last time, but perhaps adjacent. As I blinked blearily and rubbed the gunk out of my eyes, I was pleased to see my phone on the little tray table next to the bed, and my spear leaning against it. I reached out to feel the haft, reassuring myself that it was still there. We’d need to redo my tattoo.

“Don’t try anything funny.”

Ebi had been standing very still on the other side of my bed, and my still-booting-up brain had skipped right over her as I’d taken in my surroundings. I would have jumped a little in surprise if I was more awake and less pumped full of drugs.

“…Hi, Ebi. What—” I yawned. “What constitutes funny?”

“Pumping yourself so full of green ripple you turn into an avocado?”

I glanced down at my arms. Still human skin down there, even noticeably healthier-looking, less red and raw than the mangled results of my magical epilation. Vaguely disappointing, though not because I dreamt of becoming a pitted fruit. “Think I’m good on that front.”

“Time will tell.” She stood attentively over me, arms crossed, galloping her delicate fingers on the carbon-fiber shell of her upper arm. “How’s your pain?”

“Zero,” I confirmed happily. I was incredibly comfortable, no aching pain in my foot, none of the frostbite I’d inflicted on my hands, not even the ghosts of aches from whatever I had done to my muscles in those bursts of superhuman speed. “You’re giving me the good stuff.”

“Oh, yeah. Dipping into Amane’s supply.”

“I take it she’s alright?”

“Eh.” Ebi’s digital face twisted in annoyance. “She’s fine. Awake. Mobile and healthy as she can get. There was a spooky moment when we were getting her set up in here, but weather's been clear enough outside of that. She’s a few rooms down from you.”

“But?”

“But her prostheses and mantle are fucked for the time being. Self-inflicted, I’m told.”

“Something like that,” I winced, feeling guilty even though Amane had made it quite clear that she knew the risk. “Glad to hear she’s alright, though. Yuuka?”

“Damn, you actually give a shit?”

I mustered the energy to glare at the robot.

She sighed, which sounded suspiciously like an audio clip recorded directly from Alice. It was a little weird that I could identify the origin. “She’s the most messed up of the three of you, but she’s alright. Some broken ribs, a lot of bruising, a really messed-up bunch of hemorrhages around her eye, and right now, we’ve got her on the same red sensitivity alert as Amane, but nothing that won’t heal. I’ve had her on eightfold.”

I looked up at the ceiling, processing this information. I let myself be relieved she was fine, mostly past the point of bad blood after the life-or-death circumstances we’d shared—but the same sentiment did not extend to the person who’d roughed her up so badly. The last thing I’d seen of my stalker had been Alice embracing her and calling her sister. Was it all water under the bridge now, despite the fact that I’d traded blows with Takagiri to stop her from killing Yuuka? I frowned.

“Where’s Takagiri? Uh, Kimura? You know what I mean.”

“Too many questions for somebody on morphine,” Ebi deflected breezily, waving her hand.

My frown deepened at the evasion. I was still feeling sluggish, but the comfortable kind, and I wasn’t exhausted or distracted by pain, so I had the wherewithal to briefly run through the information revealed to me before I’d passed out.

Alice was trans. So was Takagiri. Both were surprising. Alice had seemed forgiving, and it was easy to imagine Hikanome would be much less so, given that they’d already labeled Kimura a traitor, and from Ebi’s response…

“Ebi, by any chance, is she here? On this very floor? You’d tell me if she were, right? Because we’re such good friends?”

“…Noooo,” Ebi lied, clasping her hands behind her back. “Did you know that we’re footing the bill for the damage to the park? It’s over three billion—hey, no, stoppit—”

She rushed forward to hold me down as I tried to sit up. That turned out to be mostly unnecessary; pain-free though I was, my muscles still felt like jelly, and I only really managed a sideways half-flop. I wiggled back into a more dignified position to address her seriously.

“Ebi.”

“Ezzen.”

“She attacked me. All this?” I waved weakly to indicate my state and the Radiances somewhere down the hall. “Her fault. She was trying to kidnap me! And you just have her posted up the next room over, like she won’t do it again?”

“She won’t,” came Alice’s voice from the door.

I looked to see her leaning into the doorway. She was wearing one of Amane’s hoodies and a ragged, irritated expression on her face…and not much else. Probably some very short shorts hidden under the hem, but it was clear she was not dressed to go out or look pretty. She was pressing an ice pack against her forehead.

My pique softened slightly. “You okay? Uh—”

“Fine. Takagiri isn’t a threat to you anymore.”

That sounded a little morbid. “…You didn’t kill her, did you?”

“We’re not killing her, Ezzen.”

I winced. “Not what I meant. Uh—I’m glad she’s alive, really. But does she have to be here?”

Alice hesitated, glancing briefly down the hall, before sighing. “Ebi, clear out, and soundproofing on, please.”

“You got it.” The robot walked out of the room. I noticed she didn’t have feet at the end of her shins; the leg just tapered to a point. Were those new?

Once she left and closed the door behind her, Alice grabbed the visitor’s chair from the corner of the room and hauled it to my bedside. She dropped herself in the seat sideways and leaned against the back, rubbing her head and wincing.

“We’re holding onto her while she recovers and things simmer down a little. It’s a mess out there.”

“And you know she’s not going to attack me again…how, exactly?”

“Because she’s on our side against Sugawara—ow, fuck,” she groaned, shifting the ice pack around.

My worry and anger about Takagiri were derailed by Alice’s pain. She’d been mantled up for nearly the entire fight, which meant it probably wasn’t a battle wound. More likely, given her magical expenditure, it was her body itself.

“Dragon-ka?” I hazarded.

“…Some.”

“Say more.” I sat up a little. This was something I could solve, maybe, make myself useful.

“It’s…my tail’s growing,” she sighed. “And I’ve got a killer headache, though I don’t know how much of that to attribute to some new mutation versus just…all this. The Ministry’s been breathing down our necks about damages and the fucking cleanup and Miyoko’s been very suggestive that they’ll sell us out to the Peacies if we don’t, which I can only hope she’ll turn around on once we explain Takagiri’s situation—” The air on her side of the bed was starting to heat up. “—plus the press wants Hina to make a statement—which I’m absolutely not letting her do—and we have to delay all the ‘make a splash’ summer merch because Christ that would not go over well and the guys I sent to see what the hell’s going on with Sugawara have gone missing and it’s all…sorry,” she muttered, tamping down the warmth before it could flare any higher. “I’m overworked.”

“Uh. You’re fine.” She was very much not fine in the more general sense, but to be honest, I’d only been half-paying attention to most of the rant; I was much more comfortable trying to figure out what her headache might entail mutations-wise than grappling with the political quagmire Todai now found itself in. “Horns?”

“Fuck me, I hope not.” She rubbed her face with her free hand, trying to regain her composure. “That’s what you’re stuck on? Not the public relations debacle?”

“Trying to stay in my lane,” I shrugged. It beat talking about Takagiri’s presence…or Hina. “I wanna…help with what I can.”

“Yes, fair enough, that does sound more your speed. Er—I appreciate it. And sorry for the language, really, it’s just all such a mess.” She looked at me more seriously, a little more of her public face reconstituting. “Don’t feel obligated to help us clean this up—I wouldn’t blame you for having had enough of this by now, honestly. I understand if you just want out.”

I eyed her. “Are…you saying I should leave?”

Did they want me out of their hair entirely now, after being essentially the trigger for the entire event? Had I finally crossed the line from asset to liability, and now Alice was subtly trying to hint at me that I should take my leave and head off for the Spire before the political situation disintegrated further?

She shook her head hurriedly, then flinched and moved the ice pack to the other side of her head. “Ow—no, absolutely not! You’re welcome here, always.” A curious look came into her eyes as she met mine. “Do…you understand why?”

I looked at her blankly.

She sighed. “Okay, no, I guess not.” She shifted in the seat. “Let’s start from the beginning. Where I probably should have, honestly, instead of giving it the walkabout for two weeks.” She cleared her throat. “Ahem. I’m trans.”

“Right.” We stared at each other for a moment as I searched for something else to say. This was a harrowing, precarious topic, and regardless of how this factored into Todai harboring somebody who’d attacked me, I felt obligated to be respectful. Star would have taken my head off otherwise. “Um. Since when?”

So much for being respectful. I would have to bury myself somewhere far from civilization.

“Um,” she fumbled, also caught off guard by my inability to hold a conversation. “Since…since two years before the firestorms. A few months after I met Hina,” she clarified. “But it starts before that, back when I was just a gross little larva of a person, barely sentient and stuck on the wrong side of a thick eggshell. You know?” She cringed, then raised a hand to forestall my idiotic reply. “It’s just…okay. Once upon a time, I was a boy who didn’t like mahou shoujo.”

My brow furrowed. “You’re literally on the Wikipedia page.”

“Yes.” She managed a smirk at that, some pride shining through. “But until I was fourteen, I thought it was stupid girl shite. To be clear, I was always a total nerd, but I was way into all the boy manga, for boys.”

“Ah. That, uh, didn’t last.”

“It did not,” she agreed. “I started to develop a…private fascination with magical girl media—er, no, that sounds much more pornographic than it was. It wasn’t like that—but of course I was afraid my peers—again, remember, secondary school boys—would make fun of me for it, so I…never told anybody, for fear of being labeled a weirdo and a pervert. I was ashamed of it. Parents didn’t help,” she groused. “And of course it was Hina who found out about it,” she grinned.

“Ha.” I didn’t particularly want to be reminded of Hina’s antics right now, but I tried not to let that show.

“Quite. Showed up at our door complaining I was way overdue to invite her over—nevermind that I’d never told her my address—and the first thing she did upon entering my One Piece-plastered room was dive for my laptop and check the search history. And because she’s Hina, there was no judgment whatsoever, and suddenly I had a friend to talk about this stuff with, and the floodgates opened pretty soon after. I figured out that the shame I was feeling was repressed envy for those girls, that I didn’t actually like being a boy. Hated it, in fact.”

“Huh.”

I am a little ashamed at past-me for being so reserved, so timid. Perhaps if I’d been more involved, asked more questions, I wouldn’t have needed Alice to spell it out for me so completely, as she was about to.

“—So by the time the firestorms happened, I knew I was a girl, but hadn’t…done anything about it. I mean, I was a sixteen-year-old boy-apparent in Japan, at a school with gendered uniforms and strict parents. All I could do was try on Hina’s clothes and feel my body hair grow in, feel my voice get deeper, week after week, dreading it. I stank, too, eurgh, glad to be rid of that.” She grinned.

“Um. Girls can smell.” Truly an incredible point at which to start being the peanut gallery, out of the wealth of details she’d just given me.

The grin rotted to an awkward smile. “Sure. True, yes, fair point. Girls can smell. But not me, because I transitioned with magic.” She raised a hand, curling and uncurling her fist in the same way I’d seen Hina do a few times. “This body wasn’t human-standard even before the dragon reared its head.”

I gaped, realizing the implications. Alice was saying she’d solved the problem that Star and I and countless others, plus real researchers, had met only dead ends on. “But—how? Even the cutting-edge stuff was nowhere near parity with traditional methods before the crackdown, and—”

“Oh, Ezzen,” she sighed. “Here’s where I start being a hypocrite. This body? These?” She reached down and tugged on her hoodie to emphasize her boobs. “Blood magic.”

“Still impossible,” I protested, trying to maintain eye contact. “People have tried.” I thought of everything I’d gone through with Star, long nights collating existing research and trying to extrapolate from it. We’d always come out the other end despairing—though her for a different reason than me. Right? “Tried quite desperately,” I added.

Alice stared at me as though I were an idiot. “With borrowed Flame. Sanguimancy, especially the mutagenic sort, is a totally different game for proper flamebearers. You know that firsthand.”

“…Okay.” I had to concede that much, given the changes presumably racing through my body as we spoke, even if I couldn’t really feel them right now. “Then what did you give up?”

“Nothing…I thought,” she clarified, again getting ahead of my interjection. “I transitioned on the 2nd of March, 2016, and it took three days of…have you ever seen Event Horizon?”

“I don’t watch anime.”

“It’s a movie, not an anime. What I mean is that it was impressively, disturbingly gory, and unbelievably painful, and then I was reborn anew, exactly as I wanted to be. Everything as it should have been, beyond what hormones or surgery could ever do, at least with the current tech, as you pointed out. Well, I still had to do some voice training, and there was learning makeup and fashion and all that—I’m getting off track. Since this was less than a year after the firestorms, we still didn’t really understand how blood magic worked, so I’d just thought that losing the, er, block and tackle, was enough of a price, given how much it had hurt. Besides, gender euphoria is a very novel emotion to feed the Flame—this was when Hina was really starting to explore her own options also, mind you, and she was having a great time with euphoria as a catalyst, so we really figured that I’d paid my price in full.”

“…But?” I prompted, before realizing where this was going. “Oh. But dragon.”

“But dragon,” she agreed with a sigh. “It’s wasted on me. Being a dragon-girl is—pardon my language—objectively kickass, and I’m sure there are lots of other trans people out there who would have been delighted for the Flame to do this to them—but for me, it’s a step in the wrong direction, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“I’ll help—”

“I know, I know, and I’m so extremely grateful, truly,” she said hurriedly. “Let me finish. You know what would be worse than getting my ideal form and then having it slowly morphed into something else?”

“Dying?”

I was fortunate she didn’t punch me for that one. Instead, she leaned back in the chair and laughed dryly. “You’re really something, Ezzen. Worse than dying, depending on who you ask: having the power to undertake the kind of transition I did, but being trapped by circumstance so that you can’t. That was where Izumi Takagiri found herself. That is why I will give her whatever support and sanctuary I can. That’s non-negotiable.”

I glared at her for a long second while I tried to figure out how I felt about that. In the abstract world of ethics, I felt Alice was doing the right thing—and I could admit that my heart hurt for Takagiri, or at least for the abstracted idea of the horrible situation she was describing. It was eminently noble to help. But the actual reality of my situation, the things that had taken place the other day, made it hard for me to scrounge up sympathy.

“She attacked me. And Yuuka. Really didn’t seem very remorseful at all, frankly.”

“She was under massive duress. And we have a common enemy. Sugawara is active, somehow, and we know that thanks to her. Finding him is our absolute top priority right now, after keeping both of you safe. A flamebearer alone is a flamebearer who’ll get snapped up. You know that!”

I sighed. I couldn’t avoid talking about the politics any longer, apparently. “Hikanome’s not going to cover for her? Don’t they hate Sugawara too?”

“We…didn’t tell them about her situation yet. I think we will—Takagiri wants to, at least, but on her terms, once we’ve dealt with Sugawara. She’s tired of hiding. And…I want to believe that Miyoko and Hongo will ultimately be supportive of her, both for her sake and ours. It’d be best for her, and for Todai, because the situation is…well. The government isn’t happy, and neither are the Peacies. Hell, the Vaetna themselves might show up.” Before I could perk up too much at that, she reached out to put a hand on my leg through the blanket and gave me an earnest expression. “Listen, Ezzen—I’m not asking you to forgive what she tried to do. But you have to accept that she’s not evil, she was coerced, and we are not in the business of denying help to potential allies out of spite.” She sighed. “She’s not going to try to hurt you again.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.” It took me a long moment to swallow my personal sense of victimization, in part because—well, if Takagiri wasn’t the enemy I’d thought she was, then the far more unrepentant instigator of the whole debacle was Hina. And I still really didn’t want to think about Hina right now. “I’ll…try to get along. Is she going to be…sticking around? Long term?”

“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “If Hikanome want nothing to do with her even after we clear things up…yes, I guess so. Would you like to talk to her?”

“…Why would I?”

Alice blinked at me. She opened her mouth, closed it again, opened it again, and closed it again. Fish-like. She put down her ice pack and sagged against her chair. “Forget it.”

She’d rallied her energy to explain all this to me, I deduced; now she was clearly approaching the end of her rope, and I didn’t want to impose.

“You can go,” I insisted. “Don’t let me take up your time. Thanks, for, uh—telling me about you.”

She nodded, glanced at the door, then back to me, and lastly down at the chair she was melting into. It didn’t look terribly comfortable, but at least the seat was padded.

“Actually, I’m good here for a little while,” she decided. “I’ve needed a break to just…process it all, you know? It’s been an insane few days. I mean…even all the politics aside, we knew Kimura. Talked with him plenty at dinners and such. And Takagiri too,” she rambled. “I mean, her really only in a combat and espionage capacity, and we sort of presumed her dead, but she was a known quantity. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that she’s him, that she’s been him this whole time.”

She was mostly talking to herself, offgassing what sounded like some serious mental dissonance. I didn’t have to shift my understanding in the same way she did; I’d only met Kimura only a few hours ago from my perspective, and technically Takagiri, very briefly, hardly a week before that. While they did seem like very different people, vicious assassin versus reserved samurai—to say nothing of the fact that Takagiri seemed a solid twenty years younger than her male body—it was easy enough to just think of it like Takagiri using Kimura as a mask for the public. Ironic, given that she was the magical construct.

“Really advanced mantle,” I mumbled, then realized something. “Hold on. All your research into mantles, proxying LM for your real bodies—was that for the same thing she’s doing now? Like, before the blood magic, was the mantle the way you were going to have a female body? Why the switch?”

Alice blushed, gaze fixed on the floor. “…Yes, that was the plan. After the Vaetna released the glyph lexicon, Hina and I tried really hard to figure out how to give me a girl body. The LM-facsimile-and-neural-link trick came from Ai-chan, who was exploring that side of things for our transformation sequence and ways we’d be able to fight like magical girls. The ideas dovetailed. Blood magic just wound up being…better. More complete. And it makes sense that if Takagiri wasn’t able to make that transition due to all the fucked up societal norms and Sugawara holding it over her, she’d have picked up where we left off with the mantles. Somebody was going to, eventually.”

“You’re not worried she stole the designs? Or that they were leaked?” I shifted awkwardly. “Something something, opsec?”

She chuckled. “I don’t think that’s the case. The fact is that she’s been doing this for at least five years; I think she made some educated guesses the first few times we were seen in public, copied the basic principles, and has mostly developed in parallel to us. There’s a lot of open-source research into LM constructs, after all.” She ended that with a meaningful look at me.

I rubbed my neck bashfully and avoided the look. “I’m really not that big of an influence. It’s all collaborative, and we’re always ultimately working in the Spire’s shadow, so—”

“You’re a genius on par with Ai. And that’s…” she faltered, biting her lip, and took a deep breath, steeling herself to push through my deflection and self-effacing. “Ezzen, the heights and depth of your research into LM and magic in general is literally unrivaled among your non-academic peers. That’s why everyone wants you so badly. And you always deflect that it’s about the Spire and the Vaetna, but—is there really nothing more to it?”

I froze, a deer in the headlights. “I mean—uh…no? Not really,” I blabbered, then started to get an inkling of where she was going with this, in light of the previous conversation. “I’m…some of my friends have called me ‘dysphoric’ about the Vaetna, and emotionally…I don’t know,” I faltered. “I don’t hate my body that way.”

“Dysphoria is a lot of things. If you ask me, you’re quite clearly uncomfortable in your skin, and you want to be something else than what you are. Would it be inaccurate to say you yearn for it?”

“I’m ‘uncomfortable’ because I don’t talk about this stuff…ever, not out loud,” I jabbed. “It’s not a gender thing, if that’s what you’re trying to say. It’s, um, transhumanist, I guess?”

This offended Opal. A pulse of hot air rolled through the room as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Genius in some ways, so very oblivious in others. Alright: do you know why Yuuka started being nice to you on Friday? Before your haircut?”

I hesitated, remembering how they’d quieted her with a few stern words and the threat of Amethyst’s massive claw holding her head. At the time, I’d just assumed they’d convinced her to be nice to me with some mixture of cajoling, threats, and attestations as to my character—but given Alice’s current line of insinuations, a different theory came to mind, one that even I wasn’t so oblivious as to miss.

“You told her I was trans?” I gaped. “Despite the fact that I’m not. What the fuck’s wrong with you? That’s massively—”

I was interrupted by the clack of the tip of Alice’s tail striking the floor. She held up a finger.

“Ezzen, you freaked out so badly at a haircut that you did last-minute blood magic to undo it, and took off all your body hair in the process. That’s not ever a cis thing.”

“I—I did that after that conversation! That doesn’t mean I’m—”

Jesus Christ, past me.

Alice held up a second finger. “You dress like I used to, like you’re ashamed of your body and feel the need to hide it, like you can’t fathom a version of yourself that other people would want to see.”

I winced. “I’m not ashamed! It’s just…” I floundered. “Armor. Carapace. Like—like the Vaetna, damn it, you know this about me.”

“Uh huh.” She held up a third finger. “You’re already they/them on the forums, and you ditched your masculine given name within hours of arriving here. We had a whole talk about legally changing your name at Tochou.”

“That’s an anonymity thing.”

“You’re not online anymore.” She gestured around us. “Your anonymity died the moment you were flametouched, Ezzen. Just—if being called ‘Dalton’ upsets you that much, that’s a data point.”

My automatic flinch at the name was incredibly damning. She winced as well.

“Sorry. Do you see what I mean?”

“…I just want to be called Ezzen because it sounds right,” I sighed. “Because it’s the name everybody already knows me by.”

“That can be true without your deadname—and I’m going to call it that, if you don’t mind—causing a flinch response.” She sighed, looking tired. “Ezzen, I’m asking you to engage in introspection that you’ve been avoiding for…I don’t know how long, all alone in that room of yours. You have trans friends online, and I know you actually talk to them about gender stuff, from how you’ve been treating me and Takagiri. Have none of them ever brought this up with you?”

Star had, in fact, and a few others I trusted to that level. But the conversation had always ended with how I dreamt of going higher than that. Any kind of human wouldn’t be enough for me; I wanted to be more, to go beyond.

“Transhuman,” I muttered. “Not transgender, that’s what we decided. I want to be a Vaetna.” Why was I choking up? “Doesn’t that answer all of this…interrogation, to your satisfaction? Can’t that be that enough for you?”

“Is it enough for you?” Her tail tapped the floor again. “I’m not saying you’re like me, that your discomfort with your body has to mean you want to be a girl. There’s so much room for things in between or things that are neither, and transhumanism is far, far from being mutually exclusive with gender. I’d bet the reality is somewhere in the middle. Is that so farfetched that you’d simply dismiss it out of hand? Do you trust us—hell, I understand not trusting Hina about this, but do you trust me—that little?”

I stared her down, trying to quell the emotions churning in my chest—defensive anger at her directness, juvenile rebelliousness at the idea of trusting somebody with this. Logically, I could admit that she was right, these things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. But something in my heart was endlessly frustrated with the idea of aiming lower. Maybe, just maybe, in a world without magic or the Vaetna, I’d consider myself nonbinary, but that felt like it’d be giving up on my dream. I didn’t want to be a different type of human, I wanted to be more.

But being more meant going down Hina’s path, it seemed, and I resented that, too.

A crumb of self-awareness loosened from the knot in my chest. Maybe, even if just as a temporary measure, a stepping stone, I could be a little more adventurous with what kind of human I was. Maybe it’d help everything hurt less.

“…Maybe I’m due for a little introspection,” I sighed.

Alice smiled. It was a warm, gentle thing, and it only grew wider as she heaved herself to her feet, strong legs fighting gravity to lift her girthy tail. She stretched her back, which raised the hem of her hoodie just enough for me to see that she was indeed wearing shorts. I quickly averted my eyes, like I was seeing something I shouldn’t—then caught that thought, examined it in a new light. I still didn’t want to ogle the woman providing my room and board, but the sheer panic that arose when I perceived the female body was…something worth examining.

Unfortunately, examining it led me back to the same thing I’d been trying to avoid since I woke up. I met Alice’s eyes again with some difficulty and a tiny bit of foreboding.

“I need to talk to Hina about this, don’t I? She’s…thought I was trans since the start, hasn’t she?”

Alice confirmed that with a nod, but her smile faltered. “I—yes, but it’s more complicated than that. And you do need to talk to her about it…but I’m not sure now is the time.”

I eyed her. “Why not?” I’d expected her to egg me on—heh—and encourage me to follow the momentum of my tiny breakthrough. “She being…especially Hina? If we have to have this talk, I feel as ready for it as I’m going to get.”

That felt good to say…until Alice’s smile dropped off her face completely, replaced by something sad and pained.

“Yeah, but she’s not ready. She’s doing…bad.”

“Bad?”

“Bad.”

---

A/N:

The egg crack is here!

I'm always nervous writing these one-on-one, dialogue-driven chapters, but I think this one landed where it had to. There were a lot of ways for me to go about finally making Ez confront all his egginess, but I felt it was most honest for it to come from a direct conversation, as these things so often do in the real world. Let me know how I did!

2.16 Patreon Release

Sorry this is late! I really wanted to make sure I got it right. You'll hopefully understand why by the end.

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If only getting back to reality were as easy as letting gravity drag me there. Even though we were supposedly ‘above’ the three-dimensional slice of the universe humanity calls home, the physics of the space beyond was a complex balance of countless other forces that overrode Earth’s familiar homeward pull. I was instead sent plummeting through the kaleidoscopic abyss.

I screamed for the first few seconds as Hina’s room fell out of view above me, pitch black from the outside. It was when my lungs ran dry and I gasped in a fresh breath that I realized that there was, improbably, still some air out here, though freezing cold and distinctly oily. At least I wasn’t going to die by asphyxiation after everything else I’d been through in the past few hours.

Aside from that, though, the abyss was a thoroughly hostile place, not at all meant for three-dimensional meat-creatures like me.

I call it the abyss, and it’s true that it was darker than even the emptiest voids of the night sky, the same kind of unnatural shadow that my Flame cast when I let it burn—but it was not truly empty, and I was not truly blind. I could see vast objects—the equivalent of asteroids, perhaps—and stranger shapes, some sinuous like Jormungandr or branching like the roots of Yggdrasil, others jagged arcs so vast and distant they could pass for confused horizons. I fell past shapes that did not seem to obey the visual laws of perspective and parallax, rippling in form as my view of them changed, distending, twisting, sometimes simply blinking in and out of existence in an instant or flickering between two different shapes.

The greatest wrongness lay below me, in the direction I fell. The shapes there were distorted in a way I can only describe as poisoned. There lay the only true colors in this place—an entire rainbow so scattered as to be random noise, the ruined and crushed-apart edges of the inferno in realspace being washed out here by the tides of ripple. So in a sense, I was still falling Earthward, but striking that border would probably be a worse way to die than impacting any of the mammoth objects blinking into and out of existence around me.

So, looking down as I hurtled ever closer to the chaos was a bad idea.

Unfortunately, so was looking anywhere else. The sights of this out-place inspired a nausea wholly unrelated to my acrophobia, and I understood why Hina had told me to close my eyes the first time she had brought me into her extradimensional hideaway. I needed to shut out the sickening view of the beyond—but when I tried, a whole different kind of terror burst forth in my subconscious. There was an unaccountable urge to peel my eyes wide open, to keep my head on a swivel, to be on my guard; a prey-animal instinct, a hundred million-year-old inheritance from some prehistoric rodent that found itself suddenly stripped of protective underbrush and left exposed to predators.

Of course, neither keeping my eyes peeled for monsters—that weren’t there—nor squeezing them shut in a vain attempt to deny my situation would have made my chances of survival any better. And the screaming didn’t help, but could you blame me? My composure was at an all-time low. I spent maybe thirty seconds falling through the space beyond space.

A new mass of darkness flickered into existence directly in my path, and I had all of one second to brace to be turned into a wet smear, not even enough time for one last attempt to spark my Flame that might avert the impact. But instead of becoming Ezzen paste when I struck the object, I instead dove into the universe’s largest dust bunny at speeds no human body was ever designed to go.

This felt as awful as it sounds. I couldn’t tell you what kind of stringy particulate made up the accumulated mass, only that it was dry and unbelievably filthy, and it rubbed excruciatingly against my exposed skin as my momentum carried me through the cloud, gradually converting the speed of my fall into friction burns. At least my clothes somewhat shielded me, though a poor excuse for armor. Bits of the filth stuck to me as I went, awful little cobwebs that threatened to invade my mouth. I was terrified that I would come to a tangled stop while still inside, and then I would suffocate, or otherwise simply be stuck here for who knew how long, lost in the void.

Thankfully, I punched through the other end of the disgusting mass. My fall turned to a lazier drift, and then at last, I came upon a real object upon which I could land, something bizarrely familiar and maybe even more displaced than I was: a chunk of bona-fide driftwood out here in the abyssal sea. I thought it was a mostly intact fragment of one of the trees that had been caught in the inferno’s edge, but that was impossible; it was far, far too large, easily twice the size of the largest trees on Earth, practically a skyscraper of wood. Maybe it wasn’t an Earthly tree at all, which raised questions I was in absolutely no condition to consider at the time.

Regardless of its origin, I will be eternally grateful to fate or whatever other serendipity brought me to it. I half-landed, half-impacted the piece of wood, scrambling to grab hold of the crags in the bark before realizing that wasn’t really necessary.

I laid on the uncomfortable bark, suddenly too tired to even pick out the remaining clumps of filth from my hair and clothes and wanting to just rest here a while—I didn’t know how long I had until this new surface would abandon me, but my body didn’t care. My muscles had had enough action and pain for one day, burning in protest from how I’d pushed them so far with the Flame. Surely, I could just stay here for a few minutes and rest, wait for Hina or one of the others to swim-fly out to me and retrieve me after they’d won, which would be soon. We’d hopefully taken Kimura out of the fight, after all, and I’d struck Takagiri with a blow very similar to the one that had taken Yuuka’s mantle out of commission. I was in no condition to rejoin the skirmishing.

But, my rational mind argued, I still had to get out of here. As much of a boon as the gargantuan driftwood had felt like it was in the moment, an island of distorted familiarity and something that at least passed for solid ground, simply lying atop it didn’t actually change my situation. I was no more protected from the freezing cold or the almost-too-thin air, and every moment we continued drifting out here still increased the odds I would die by some incomprehensible interaction with one of the other vast, dark objects overhead. I needed to get back to Earth.

How?

The problem was that I had no idea where I was. I could still sort of see the edge of the inferno, that most-fucked up of horizons and the only splashes of color visible. It lay in all directions, since I was still technically on the inside of the bubble. Those edges, that chaotic storm of ripple, remained the most dangerous places of all, not a way out or even a useful landmark.

Pain and exhaustion warred in my body as I tried to think my way through it, crunching through everything I knew about my situation and the more general principles of fourspace navigation. It was cold comfort that this “side” of the outside was actually the less dangerous of the two, compared to going “down” from realspace. I stared up into the darkness with its churning shapes, feeling very small and starting to get overwhelmed.

For one, I didn’t even know how to maneuver across the fourth dimension; I fundamentally lacked the intuition for it as a simple three-dimensional creature. For two, even if I could move in that direction, re-intersecting with the main area of reality was not something to be done lightly. That Hina could do so with abandon was a sign of how far her anatomy had diverged from a typical, three-dimensional human body. I’d probably explode from a kind of dimensional depressurization even if I didn’t just pulp myself on impact. For three, there were more hazards to navigation than the simple risk of messy collision. Portions of outside-space were known to be curved in strange ways, and if I stumbled into one of those, I could wind up going in completely the opposite direction and not even know it.

And all that was to say nothing of the lingering feeling that I was exposed to things adapted for this environment that would view me as a snack—like Hina, noted some cynical part of my mind unhelpfully.

What about landmarks? I knew—in theory—how to use magic to calculate my location relative to a known reference point, and that would at least solve the problem of being lost; it was actually a fairly straightforward calculation, an almost idiomatic operation with {LOCATE}. But that wouldn’t work for me, because unlike every other flamebearer in the world, I didn’t have even a single persistent lattice of my Flame sitting somewhere in realspace to use as a reference point for that equation. My wig was made of my Flame, but that was right here with me, merged onto my head. When I’d been tugged out of reality in the first place, it had been via my hair, which probably meant something of significance, but I lacked both the energy and the analytical toolkit I’d have liked.

Just to cover my bases, I brought my aching arm to my head to spin a few strands of the oddly bright hair between my fingers. It felt…like hair, no great revelation there.

“Don’t suppose you have any hidden secrets to get me out of this?”

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the hair didn’t answer. At least the extreme isolation meant there was nobody around to catch me talking to inanimate objects. Did my hair even qualify as an inanimate object, now that it was apparently merged with me? That made it more like talking to myself, really. At least my spear would have solidly qualified as a separate companion and would have made me feel a little safer from the instinctual feeling of being exposed, but it was back in the grass on—

On Earth.

A jolt of adrenaline accompanied the realization, and my Flame shifted in my chest as it felt hope electrify my system. My hand reflexively went to my left forearm, where my tattoo conspicuously wasn’t. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I attempted to recall my spear to me at such a distance, in this space outside reality, but there was still an inherent link to the lattice embedded in my arm, and that gave me options. I just had to shift some parts around, re-weave the magic in place like I’d done in that moment I’d anchored myself with my prosthetic, so that it would point the way home.

Easier said than done. I didn’t dare try this with blood magic, not out here; reopening the old cut on my arm in this unnatural cold and strange atmosphere felt like it’d be gambling with my life even more than it already was—and my instincts were warning me against it, too, saying that whatever was out here would be able to smell my blood in the water. Irrational, of course, especially given that lighting up my Flame to do it manually would be the equivalent of a beacon around here anyway, and moreover there was nothing alive out here to hunt me anyway.

That’s what I kept telling myself as I tried to ignore the shapes moving in the darkness. They were just debris.

Manual re-weaving it was, but the conditions were abysmal. My Flame was infuriatingly sluggish to ignite, seemingly out of energy after my stunt to strike Takagiri, and the act of forming it into thread in the abyssal cold stung my fingers with frostbite, making my already poor dexterity even more stiff and cumbersome. I was starting to shiver, too, and that made it even worse. Why was my Flame so cold now, when it had been searingly hot when I’d been pushing it through my body? But I couldn’t split my attention between a simple heat-generating lattice and my attempt to find my way home.

It felt like it took minutes to simply spin my Flame into usable thread. Then I had to feel around for the weave in my arm, an awkward process halfway between feeling with my fingers and trying to pay attention to the not-quite-pressure my Flame exerted as it responded to the space in my arm where the thread lived. After that, I had to partially unwind and loosen the lattice so that I could stitch in more of my thread, but not too much or the whole binding would decohere and then I’d be stuck.

It was slow, delicate work, and now I really did feel like I was torturing my Flame with how it was being crudely contorted. I whispered apologies as I wove, which rapidly devolved into a kind of prayer for survival, a mantra I could focus on to stave off the pain and cold and just keep going.

Unfortunately, my body failed before my willpower did.

My fingers turned blue, eaten through by the cold. The shivering became worse and worse until attempting to work the thread with the necessary precision became hopeless, fingers pathetically twitching against my forearm, so very cold. Yet simultaneously, I could feel myself getting hot—the final stage of hypothermia. I was going to die of exposure, not be eaten by some monster of the void. Salvation did not lie in more useless fiddling with my tattoo.

The cold brought a dream-like haze as I began to die.

In that fugue state, on my way to the final sleep, a memory bubbled to the surface of my mind. An action, divorced from context. I let the thread in my fingers decohere back into Flame and engulf my hand, and then reached out toward nothing in particular, as I’d done once before, in another space beyond space, in a dream. And as I had then, I touched…something. Resistance, a barrier I could not see or even truly feel. With my muscles failing in the deathly cold, sweat freezing on my brow and in my armpits, I reached out as far as I could, pushing, desperate for survival.

Take me home, I pleaded with my Flame.

And my hand brushed something else, something solid, something rough and round and cylindrical. I grabbed the haft of my spear—and something grabbed my wrist. I was yanked forward, through, out—or perhaps back in.

Then there were arms around me, something wonderfully warm and soft against me and rumbling deeply. Something warm moved through my chest as Hina’s Flame chased away the deathly cold. She hugged me close.

“Hey, hey, hey, I’m here. You’re okay. I couldn’t find you and I don’t know how you did that but you’re here now and I’m here and you’re okay—”

“Nngh,” I groaned in reply, sinking into her arms, high on the feeling of grass under my knees. The ground was cold, but it was a familiar cold, a natural one, not the abyss, and the air was clean and breathable and not oily and Hina was so warm. I snuggled as close to her as I could go, all our drama temporarily wiped away by the animal desire to seek the warmth of life. I didn’t let go of my spear, though. “Mm. Hi. Home.”

“Home,” she agreed happily, stroking my back.

As the worst of the cold began to ebb away, I regained some higher brain function.

“Is Yuuka okay?”

“Hospital. And you—”

“I’m here,” I groaned. “So it’s over? Please tell me it’s over.” I didn’t even have the energy to open my eyes at this point.

My reply came as an earth-shaking thud—which the Ezzen of a few hours ago might have panicked at, but at this point, I was just too tired to give a fuck from my dwindling supply. I sighed and forced one eye open to see that Amethyst had landed next to us. I blinked a few times, trying to get my vision to focus properly as I looked up at her glittering form looming over me.

She was untouched—not a scratch. She warbled what sounded like a greeting, but hadn’t turned to face me. Instead, she had her enormous arm-cannon raised, pointing at something away from us. Her spindly, digitigrade legs were set in a wide stance and dug into the dirt, acting as enormous stabilizing piles for the walking artillery. The chilly air momentarily dropped to the abyss-cold again as her cannon flashed, loosing a lance of purple light at something in the sky a few hundred meters away—where Takagiri was still brawling mid-air with Alice.

“…You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” I slurred, wincing at the blast of fresh life-sucking cold caused by the weapon’s discharge and automatically huddling closer to Hina again. Frustration blossomed in my chest; I had really been hoping my blow against Takagiri would have taken her out of the fight, like she had done to Yuuka, but everything I’d done, the haze of exhaustion and pain I was feeling, hadn’t even been enough to stop her.

Hina sighed. “God, you look great.” Her hands groped over my body, and I winced in pain as fingers felt my abused muscles. Her hands were so wonderfully warm, but the pressure was unwelcome. I pulled away from her, frustration mounting.

“The fuck? We’re still in a warzone.”

The hands stopped. “Sorry.”

“Why are you with me and not stopping that?”

“Um. I can. Aren’t you cold?”

“…Hina.”

She winced. “Yep, sorry, on it.”

She disengaged her limbs from mine, stood, and catapulted away from me, bounding toward the fight. I groaned and sat back on the grass, still struggling for function but trying to refocus on the danger at hand. I squinted as Amethyst fired again, another flare of light and cold snap, and this time, I saw the shot make contact with Takagiri—but deflect off her wards. That jogged my memory, the last thing I’d been thinking about before falling into the abyss. I rubbed my head, trying to drill into the chaos and remember despite the way my brain felt like jelly. What had it been? We’d taken out Kimura, and then Takagiri had showed up and hurt Yuuka, and I’d grabbed the sword and lunged at her, and—

Right. No blood when I’d cut her.

“She’s a mantle!” I called out to Amane, realizing that I should have told Hina before sending her back in. “Um. Fuck. Tell the others that. Do you have, uh…anti-LM munitions?”

Amane’s spike-snouted head turned to look at me, and even though it completely lacked facial expressions, I could tell from how she slightly lowered her cannon that she was asking if I was sure.

“Yeah. Cut her with her own sword. Looked like…uh, what happened to Yuuka. I don’t know if you saw that. Pink ripple disruptors in…in the blades,” I rambled, vision getting wobbly again as I went through the events in my head. I gasped for air to keep talking. “Thought it would cut her connection with Kimura, but that’s not…” I gave up on trying to explain the full thread of logic in detail. “…point is, anti-LM.”

The mech-girl’s massive shoulders shifted in what looked like a sigh, then she projected a hologram of light at me. Translated text, like a blown-up version of what she usually did with her phone to talk to me.

Don’t have it.

“What do you mean you don’t—” I caught myself. “Why’re you using beams instead of the void munitions thing we did last week?”

I didn’t like invoking our collective sins at the oil rig, but I had to admit the situation was getting uncomfortably similar. But we were trying to destroy a construct, not kill a person—and besides, I had a plethora of bones to pick with my stalker at this point, even disregarding the fact that I was so very exhausted.

Because of the inferno.

“Oh. Right.” Of course using the highest-power options in her arsenal would be dangerous in this ripple-amplifying zone, so relatively close to squishy civilians. And me, but I was finding it hard to care about that part. “So that’s the best you’ve got.”

She shot another beam at Takagiri by way of confirmation, rather than nod or say something else in reply. It lanced past Hina, who’d leapt up several dozen meters and was now slashing at the assassin with oversized claws of a familiar, painfully bright blue. It was hard to make out much more detail at this distance, other than the periodic flashes of light as the flamebearers flew around and traded attacks, sword against claws against lasers, a properly spellsword-y battle. So anime. I might have it appreciated more if I were watching from the comfort of my chair, curled up in front of my computer screen with a warm mug of hot chocolate in hand.

That was the exhaustion and lingering wooziness talking. This wasn’t a livestream or a TV show—this was still life and death combat, and I was right there with them.

I squeezed my eyes shut once more, focusing, trying to picture the general diagram for the Radiances’ mantles, the basic template of commonalities from which each of theirs were customized. From what we’d seen of how well Takagiri and Kimura had dealt with the Radiances, it stood to reason that the former’s LM body was at least based on the same core principles, likely somehow copied or stolen—though seemingly upgraded, given that she was still fully functional despite taking a similar blow to the one that had taken Yuuka out. The idea that she was advanced beyond the Radiances themselves was a distressing prospect, but I had to trust that she wasn’t too far beyond, that the same chinks in the armor would apply if I could find any.

No luck. I was too scattered, and didn’t know the intricacies well enough off the top of my head anyway. But Amane surely would, as the one who had most extensively customized her own mantle and spent the most time in it.

“Amane—”

I was interrupted by a warbling, ringing noise, and opened my eyes to see that Amane was way ahead of me. Her gun had begun to change, and even through my exhaustion, I managed to extract a little interest at watching the massive arm-cannon reconfigure. The concentric focusing rings shifted around, their mounting spines rotating in place and producing those strange, unearthly sounds as the gemstones flowed. A piece underneath the barrel slid further back, up to her elbow, and more lumps of crystal emerged to mirror it. The result hardly looked like a gun. I eyed it warily; even without knowing exactly what she had done at a glyph level, the improvised, hacked-together nature of the design was obvious.

“That’s…not gonna blow up in your face, is it?”

It might.

“And if it does?”

Only me.

She dropped to one knee and aimed down the sights again. Well, the weapon didn’t have sights per se, but the message was still clear. Despite that brisk assurance, I edged away from her a little, scooting on the cold grass as though another meter of space between me and the jury-rigged weapon would make a difference if things went wrong.

The Radiances engaged with Takagiri got clear, signalled by some radio communication I wasn’t privy to. Hina peeled away by propelling herself straight down, and Alice jetted sideways. Takagiri seemed to understand what was happening, but instead of going to ground, she launched herself directly toward me and Amane, covering hundreds of meters in moments—

Amane fired with little fanfare. Unlike the clean beams of light previously cast from the tip of the barrel, there was no flash of light, no clear line of energy reaching from cause to effect. The first signal that anything had happened at all was a crack from next to me. Amethyst’s body fractured. Pieces of gemstone began to melt and slough off her titanic figure as the backlash of her weapon catastrophically damaged her mantle.

But Takagiri’s destruction was far more complete. Her body fractured mid-dive, and she screamed—a horrible noise, the same kind of broken, glitching screech that Yuuka had made after being stabbed. Then she shattered into a million shards. 

Shards that were still flying directly toward us. She was weaponizing her destruction as a plume of twinkling death, a final blast of glassy shrapnel. It happened too quickly for me to do anything but cower uselessly, but Amane was faster. She lurched forward, putting herself in front of me, a disorienting purple blur that moved far too quickly for something so big and so heavily damaged. The shards struck her with hissing vengeance, like a storm of hail striking a glass roof, interspersed with more ear-splitting cracks as the impacts took their toll on her already damaged body. Then it was over, and silence reigned for a few moments

“Amane!”

Alice skidded to a landing next to me, white-hot jets of flame arresting her momentum, scorching the grass in front of her. She looked terrible, parts of her mantle cracked and warped with fuzzy distortion—but that was superficial compared to the horror show that was her girlfriend’s ruined body. She knelt by the inert mound of half-melted gemstone.

“Is—is it supposed to disengage?” I asked, heart pounding.

“Yes!” Her voice was distraught. “Amane, no, you can’t have—”

There was a snap as Hina appeared next to us. She was gently propping up Amane’s true body—sans prosthetics, eyepatch dark and inert—in one arm. Alice abandoned the destroyed mantle and rushed over to her. She shed her own transformation and wrapped Amane in a hug, babbling something full of relief.

Hina’s other hand was holding Kimura by the throat. He made no attempt to escape her grip, stoic and sullen.

Alice turned to him, still hugging Amane close, and said something in Japanese before switching to English.

“—explain.”

“I have nothing to say to you.” He sounded defeated, as exhausted as I was.

“Bullshit,” Hina snarled. “Why the fuck are you after cutie?”

“Sugawara wants him.”

“Sugawara’s in a fucking coma. You’re the one who helped put him there!”

“And you should have killed him,” he growled.

Hina exchanged a confused look with Alice. “…Okay? Then why the hell are you working with him?”

“He is in my dreams. I had no choice.”

Alice held Amane tighter. “Why not?”

He didn’t respond, looking down at the ground, avoiding all of our eyes. Hina brandished her free hand, blue sparks playing off her claws. “Talk.”

“Fine,” Alice sighed, waving her off, but there was something dangerous in her voice. “We’ll cover for you if you give us the names of everybody who’s working with him. Where’s Takagiri?”

Where indeed? My brain still felt like soup, but the well-worn grooves of magic were still functional. The mantle couldn’t have been remotely operated across the inferno’s boundaries. And according to Hina’s nose…something finally clicked in my head.

“I think we’re looking at her,” I muttered.

Kimura raised his head and glared at me.

Alice looked at me, frowning. “Ezzen?”

“She’s his mantle. You’re my stalker,” I declared, staring back at him, too tired to be afraid. “The same weapons. The same tricks. Bailing each other out at the last moment every time. Hina says you smell the same, and she only named you two when she first showed up. Nobody else could have been operating the mantle from inside the inferno. More advanced, too. Both bodies at once?”

Alice had gone very stiff, looking from me to him. After a long moment, Kimura’s expression broke into a vicious smile, and instantly, my suspicions were confirmed. That was the same expression I’d seen Takagiri make. The anger, the loathing. He turned the hateful countenance on Alice.

“He’s smart. And I did it better than you,” he spat.

Alice met his eyes. I expected her to snap back at him, for the air to heat up in a display of imperious anger, but she looked—so sad. She said something softly in Japanese. He laughed dryly and spat something back at her. She made a sound, a strangled yelp of shock and horror. Hina whined and dropped him.

“No,” she breathed.

Kimura knelt in the grass, coughing, then sat, resigned and angry, with none of the poise he’d had before.

“They won’t understand you,” he told me. “They will use it against you. It will end like this for you as well.”

I was lagging way behind the conversation. “Use what against me?”

“He blackmailed you,” Alice interrupted shakily, horror in her voice. “Sugawara. That fucker. God, no, you should have—”

“You do not understand—”

“You could have told us!” She was…crying? Her voice was hoarse, and she looked terribly shaken, and I still didn’t get why. Stupid. “You didn’t…this didn’t have to happen. We would have helped you.”

Confusion flitted across Kimura’s face, before being covered again by anger. “How could you?” he challenged. “You don’t know what it’s like to live like this. You perfect fucking mahou shoujo.”

“Oh my God,” Hina groaned. “He doesn’t fucking know. Alice—”

“Mm.” She shakily separated from Amane and stood. Hina hopped over and took her place, settling between me and Amane. I sagged against her, muttering into her neck. “I’m lost.”

“Cutie,” Hina sighed. “Don’t you get it? Seriously? She literally said it straight to you.”

“Uh.”

She shifted. I felt her poke my forehead. “How are you so—okay. Cutie. Ez. If Takagiri is his mantle, why’s she a girl?”

“Because…the design is copied from you guys, and changing the—”

“No! Fuck, you’re even denser than she was. We gotta talk about that later,” she muttered. “Just—look.”

Baffled, I watched as Alice approached Kimura. He let her do so, no more fight left in him, just simmering resentment. His expression turned to complete confusion when she knelt and hugged him tightly.

“We will help you. I promise.”

“…Doushite?” He sounded lost.

“Because—I do know what it’s like to live like this. You’re not alone, sister.”

Hina pointed at them. “That’s her. This is what Sugawara was holding over Takagiri to make her do his dirty work. She’s trans. They both are. Get it now?”

Oh.

Oh, of course.

I looked at the two women hugging each other. Takagiri looked back through the eyes of the old man she was trapped inside. She was sobbing as Alice held her—I had the unaccountable urge to cry with them. Something tight had grabbed my heart.

Trying to process the cocktail of emotions and implications overtaxed the last dregs of my energy. I fainted with tears running down my cheeks.

2.15 Patreon Release

Of all the Radiances, Yuuka seemed the most universally useful. She was nearly impossible to catch by surprise. Even though she hadn’t foreseen Takagiri escaping the first trap, she’d still been able to avert the magical backlash and gotten it right the second time. I didn’t know much about strategy, but it was clear as day that foresight—precognition, divination, whatever you wanted to call it—was a game changer, the furthest thing from a liability.

At least, when it worked.

“Didn’t fucking see him. That’s all I’m supposed to do, and I didn’t fucking see him. I didn’t see him and now I went down and we’re going to lose and it’s my fucking fault.”

“Hey, Yuuka, no,” Hina urged, scooting closer toward her. “C’mon, we’ve talked about this. Stuff goes wrong! It’s never just your fault.”

“Fuck you. You want to take some of the blame? Sure: this wouldn’t have even happened if you hadn’t fucked everything up! We could have figured this out, gone straight to Sugawara, cut his fucking throat and put all this back in the dirt. But you had to put fifty thousand people in a fucking inferno and you didn’t even get them, you stupid bitch. Why? For him?” She jabbed a finger at me. “And now you’re just gonna stay here and chew on his fucking cock instead of fixing the mess you made?” 

She had returned to the vitriol that had characterized our first face-to-face interactions out of anger—and she had a right to feel bad. She even had a right to blame Hina for this whole situation. But that last part? I’d hoped she had come to think a little more than that of me over the past few hours. That got me mad enough to raise my voice in return, speaking over the growl rising in Hina’s throat.

“Chewing on my—no, absolutely the fuck not,” I blurted, then found an actual counterargument. “You’re right, this has gotten to be a total shitshow, and we’re going to fix it. It’s one flamebearer and an…assassin? Whatever she is, there’s four of you, even if your eye isn’t working.”

“It’s not just about the fuckin’ eye,” she grumbled. “They’re ready for us. Those swords cut right through my mantle. And they’re maneuvering well enough to avoid her—” She indicated Hina with a sneer “—she can’t even tell them apart! They’ve been planning this for who-fuckin’-knows how long, and we’re not ready, and innocent people are going to die even if we win, and Alice’s gonna overdo it—”

“Yuuka,” Hina pleaded. “It’s all gonna be fine! They have it under control, you know they do.”

“Do they?” I asked, growing more unsure at the fear and desperation in Yuuka’s voice. “It was looking bad. I, um, don’t really know how this is supposed to go, but…”

“They can’t get you,” Hina soothed. “That’s what matters.”

“He’s not all that matters,” Yuuka snarled. “Fucking Christ, Hina, how can you give so few fucks about everybody else?”

Hina didn’t have an answer for that. I hesitated, then found my voice, trying to meet Hina’s blue eyes.

“I—she’s right. There’s more at stake than just me. There are people in the crossfire and…” As she met my gaze blankly, my heart sank. This wasn’t the right angle to take with her. “You don’t care about that, do you. Not about the humans.”

“You matter more, cutie.” Her voice was soft, earnest. She reached out to me, trying to gently hold my scarred hand.

I pulled away. “No, I don’t. How can—how can you say something like that?”

“Just how it is.”

The thing sitting next to me no longer carried empathy for humans. Her entrance had shown that, but it was far more damning to hear it straight from her lips. Those same lips I’d kissed—a wave of disgust passed through me.

“So you’ll just sit here and do nothing.”

“I’m sitting here and protecting you.”

“That doesn’t make sense!”

“Ezza, there’s no point,” Yuuka sighed. “She doesn’t know how to change her mind.”

“No, there is a point. Hina, this is—you promised to make me more. And I agreed because being more means more ability to help people, to make a difference where it matters. That’s what I want, and you…don’t. You just care about power for power’s sake, because it…feels good, not for something important.” My voice fell to a tired, frustrated groan. “I thought you’d be better.”

That got through to her. She flinched, hunching her shoulders, looking chastised. “Sorry.”

Even through my anger, part of me hated making her so obviously upset. But the point had to be made. “If you’re sorry, then be better. Yuuka and I are—well, we’re liabilities right now. But you’re not. Go help.”

“Okay.” The hyena rose to her feet, ever-light. 

“Okay?” Yuuka raged. “That’s all it fucking takes? Years of arguing and screaming at you to clean up your act and he just has to ask once and—” She made an angry noise, punching the nearest pillow. “Fuck you, Hina!”

I winced, but my girlfriend ignored her. “Stay right here, cutie, okay? Don’t—don’t be a hero and get yourself hurt, okay?”

“I won’t,” I replied, privately agreeing with Yuuka’s frustration but not wanting to let it show.

“Love you.”

She waited for me to say it back. Seconds dragged on as I tried to force the words out of my mouth, if only to get her to leave, to do her duty as mahou shoujo. Eventually, I did.

“Love you too.”

They tasted like ash, and I think she could tell I didn’t mean it. She smiled at me anyway. The space around her twisted, and she vanished.

Had I just broken up with my girlfriend?

Don’t think about it.

—

With Hina back in the fray, I should have felt a lot better about just staying here and resting. The room was warm and dimly lit; ostensibly safe. But an awkward atmosphere persisted. That final exchange with Hina had left us both too sullen to be interested in making conversation, and we were both, to put it plainly, rather beaten up from the last few hours of action. Yuuka was obviously mad at how little it had ultimately taken for me to convince Hina to get back out there, and in all honesty, so was I. The whole exchange sat wrong with me, and the acidic Bloodstone Radiance was absolutely the wrong person to talk about it with.

To avoid stewing in the knowledge that Hina and I might now be done for, I instead pondered magic. And there was a lot of magic to think about: Miyoko’s now-ruined bubble, my conversation with Hikanome’s three leaders, the general catastrophe Hina had wrought, and perhaps most significantly, the glimpse I had caught of Yuuka’s silver-sight. Her precognition was such that she could even protect herself from magical backlash. Absurd.

But without it, she thought of herself as useless, a liability, despite having the full suite of other magic all flamebearers could call upon and a decent ability to snapweave. The way she’d spiraled into despair was tragic—and painfully familiar. I understood feeling useless, feeling like a burden; that was my dominant emotional key since arriving in Tokyo. But I could still point out times I’d been useful: I’d saved Holton—though that was another moral nightmare—and helped set up the exit from this inferno, which hopefully people were using even now. And I’d maybe saved Yuuka herself from Takagiri’s follow-up blow. So I could acknowledge my own usefulness, brief and messy as it was—why couldn’t she?

Of course, I wasn’t nearly confident enough to just ask her that directly, especially not when she’d been so prickly just minutes before.

“How’s your eye doing?”

“Fine.”

A better response than the “fuck off” I’d braced for.

“Is it…functional, at all?”

“Why do you wanna fuckin’ know?”

That was more like it.

“Because…it’s unique? Because it’s the most powerful tool in Todai’s box of tricks.”

“Yeah? ‘S that why? Or are you trying to figure out when you can take my spot?”

“Huh?”

Yuuka looked at me angrily, then her face fell. “You saw what I saw. With my arm. You’re stealing my thing.”

“I wouldn’t put it—”

“I fucking bled for this! You can’t just get it for free because you’re so fucking special. No. Not the moment I become useless. It’s not fair.” Her voice was breaking. “It’s not fair.”

For a moment, anger overtook practicality. “That’s not what’s happening! I’m not trying to fuckin’…antagonize you over this. Christ.”

“…I know,” she sighed, her own anger boiling off as she shifted and sat up. “You just make me mad.”

“Well, that’s hardly fair, is it?”

“Nah,” she agreed. “Considering it looks like you just took my side over that thing’s. So I guess we’re just…cool now.”

I really didn’t want to think about Hina, so I ignored that comment.

“I’m not stealing your thing. I promise.”

“Okay. Eye’s…not actually doing that bad,” she admitted. “I know the gauze makes it look fucked, but it’s not really any worse than it was once we got the tunnel open. Just…can’t fuckin’ trust it anymore.”

“Because they can avoid it?”

“Yeah. And it’s been…” she waved a hand in my general direction. “Weird around you. I was thinking it over, y’know, stewing in my shit, and I was realizing that most of when it’s been on the fritz this week was when you were around.”

“Huh.” I collated that with the other stuff I knew as I looked around the dimly lit room, letting my eyes wander. “That…tracks. Your sight and my Flame interact…weirdly, yeah, that’s a good word for it. Hikanome said something along those lines, that I burn bright—like the Vaetna, even, that was the comparison they made. And yeah,” I preempted her scowl, “I know I’m not one—I thought they were bullshitting me, trying to exploit what I care about to con me into trusting them, but—they’re actually true believers, far as I can tell. So I think they’re right in some way.”

“Cool, so you make me even more useless, even if you’re not trying to steal my job. That supposed to make me feel better?”

I gave her a tired look. “Just talking it through, no need to snark at me.”

She didn’t apologize, but did cross her arms below her chest and look away with a petulant hmpf. I took that as a cue to continue talking.

“I don’t think I have your power, Yuuka. That’d be…really fucking unfair, yeah. The Flame wouldn’t just hand me something like that. So I think what I saw was just from…piggybacking on your ability. And I don’t know how that works, but neither do they. Even if they have contingencies for everything else you guys can do, that’s something they’re not prepared for. That’s our edge, if we can figure out how to use it.”

She side-eyed me. “Huh. What happened to not being a hero?”

I glared at her. “Do you want to help or not? Sure sounded to me like you did.”

“Course I do. Don’t talk to me like Alice. None of the fuckin’ ‘you’re a smart girl, Yuuka’ talking down to me shit.”

I avoided her eyes. I hadn’t intended to channel that sort of energy, but it was easy for me to slip into talking down to people—I blame years of interacting with others mostly via explaining magic.

“Sorry. I’ll treat you like an adult, if you do the same and help me with this.”

She was quiet for a moment, then shifted, raising her hand to the white bandages wrapped around her head. A little blade of magic sparked at her fingertip, and she sheared through the gauze, pulling it off. Her hair had been matted to her forehead and temple by sweat and the dried blood that had crusted around the socket of her eye. She wiped at it gently with some clean gauze, excavating her cursed eye from the messy biological damage surrounding it. Once revealed, the red-and-green gemstone glimmered dully, the low lights of the room catching the raised edges of cracks running along the surface, where the magical organ had fissured under the ripple shockwave of Hina’s initial impact.

“…Depends on what ‘this’ is. You got a plan?”

Despite the bloody mess dominating the right side of her face and the unsettling appearance of her cursed eye, I found it easier now to meet her gaze and actually found myself grinning. The expression soon fled my face after it became clear that she wasn’t quite willing to return it. I coughed.

“Maybe. The eye works?”

“Sorta.”

“…Yes or no?”

“Let’s go with no.”

Aha. “So when you said we were going to lose, was that foresight or just, uh, despair-spiraling?”

“Second. You got me.” She was surprisingly prompt about that; no guilty, embarrassed admission as she reflected on her brief meltdown. I envied her forthrightness. “Can’t see much of anything right now. Which is why I’m fuckin’—”

“Useless, yes, I got it,” I sighed. “Okay, then step one is: let’s fix that.”

I clenched my right fist and tugged on my Flame, letting it ignite into its natural, blindingly white burn that cast a kaleidoscope of too-deep, inky shadows around the room. It hurt, as usual, but there was something—else. I felt a little lighter as the fire ran through me. The consequences of what I’d done to save Yuuka, perhaps. It was secondary to the task at hand, though.

“How about now?”

Yuuka had flinched at the appearance of my Flame, squinting at it with her human eye and reflexively moving her hand to shield the lidless gemstone. She lowered the hand hurriedly, staring at the Flame intently, leaning forward. I’m ashamed to say that after hours of surviving the inferno and our adversaries, my libido was still operational enough to take note of how her boobs shifted with the motion.

“What the fuck,” she declared. “Easily.”

“Then—”

“—we’re not useless.” She took the words out of my mouth. I didn’t yet know her well enough to pick up on the subtleties of her expression, but the ghost of a smile was tugging at her lips as she extracted herself from the blanket and slowly, gingerly rose to her feet, stretching an arm out to the wall for support as she rolled her shoulders. This also moved her boobs, and I wondered if I could use my Flame to shut off the boob-noticing part of my brain somehow—at any rate, she looked fine. The catastrophic damage her mantle had taken seemed to not have bled over to her physical body, though she was moving slowly and gingerly as she finished stretching. “Nerd. You know what, fine. I don’t get what the fuck is going on with you or your Flame, but you’ve got one thing right: I can see. That’s enough. What are we gonna do with this?”

—

What did we know about our adversaries? I’d collated a number of observations from the skirmishing.

Concerningly, they were prepared to fight the Radiances. They both had swords that were able to damage and disable mantles; the mechanism wasn’t clear, but I felt pretty confident that it was some kind of pink disruption effect embedded in the blades themselves. Takagiri seemed able to at least partially avoid Yuuka’s sight, and both of them had displayed significant teleportation abilities, on par with Hina’s. With those abilities together, they’d already demonstrated they could take Radiances off the field. That was bad.

But they wanted to grab me. Alive, even.

“That’s good news for us, isn’t it? Even if they have me, they wouldn’t be able to abscond except through the tunnel, so they’d have to get past us anyway.”

“Silver lining for Hina’s mess,” Yuuka agreed. “It’d make more sense for them to cut their losses and ditch. Then we could focus on evac and all that. But they’re sticking around.”

Even though I’d helped rekindle her confidence, Yuuka’s eye still wasn’t giving us much tactical information. The inferno was still muddying things, and our distance from the actual site of combat—some twenty meters ‘up’ in the fourth dimension from realspace—had reduced her foresight to the broadest strokes and the very short term. We knew our adversaries weren’t going to quit the field in the next few minutes and not much else.

“If we were closer, actually in the shit, I’d be able to see the details,” she sighed. “But you said you’ve already got a plan, so let’s hear it.” She gestured for me to speak as she squatted in front of the mini-fridge. Like Alice’s constant hunger, it seemed that making heavy use of her eye incurred its own cost in metabolic demand.

“Uh. Right. Well, I was thinking about what Hina said. About how the two of them, er, ‘smell the same’. I don’t really know what she means by that, but…” I trailed off as I watched Yuuka extract an energy drink, punch open a hole in the side of the can with another fingertip-blade, and shotgun it. “That can’t be good for you.”

She waved for me to continue. I shrugged. I was hardly one to talk about diet.

“Fine. Based on that and everything else we know, I’m reasonably sure Takagiri’s enhancements are powered by Kimura’s Flame.”

Yuuka launched the empty can across the room and into the rubbish. They hadn’t been here last time, on my date with Hina; she must have added it for me. That made me feel guiltier about our last conversation—don’t think about it.

“Yeah, I’d believe it. Makes sense why she’d be lurking around, waiting for ya, if he’s the primary.”

I nodded. “So we cut the link, however it’s set up. They’ve got pink swords—I figure we can do better than that, some kinda tripwire setup. More like cheese wire, I guess.”

Traps came naturally to Yuuka’s skillset, after all. From what I’d seen of how she fought, it seemed like it’d be easy enough for her to put such a Flame-severing implement in a place she knew Takagiri would be. She grinned. “Taste of their own medicine. And once she’s out, it’s four on one.”

“Not three?” I attempted to raise an eyebrow, failed, and glanced away, reddening. “I mean you’re counting yourself back in it.”

“Yeah. I can do it, but I’ll have to be pretty close to set it up right, and that’s assuming I can even see her.” She scowled. “Any ideas on what that’s about, veeb?”

I groaned at the pejorative—if accurate—term. “Just call me a Vaetna fan. And—no. Silver suppression is solely a Spire thing, not some fuckin’ cult’s. I’ve seen a lot of new magic today, but I’m not gonna give them that much—”

I was thrown sideways mid-sentence. I hadn’t been struck; gravity was betraying the whole room, pillows and blankets and that empty can all flying to my right. Only Yuuka had stayed fixed in place, having {AFFIXED} herself in place on the floor that had become a wall. A jagged, snarled grin had spread over her face. “Guess we won’t have to go anywhere.”

I rolled onto my back and sat up again, raising my still-blazing arm into the air to light the room, hoping it would help Yuuka foresee the attack. It hurt, ice in my veins and fire on my skin, but that was all in my head, so I gritted my teeth and tried to push it further, to grow the Flame to cast as much light—literal or otherwise—as possible. It was all I could really do; with no spear and barely able to stand, it was between this or weaving, and I had much more confidence in Yuuka’s ability to snapweave than my own. Indeed, she’d already summoned her own Flame, globules of it floating out of her eye and coalescing into thread. I was starting to sweat from both the exertion and stress, which made all my raw skin hurt—though not as much as the Flame scorching my hand.

“Know who it is?”

“Kimura,” she muttered. “Was hoping it’d be the other one, but…move left. Edge of the room.”

“My left or yours?”

“Yours.”

I shifted hastily, scooting awkwardly until I was against the wall—formerly floor—adjacent to Yuuka’s. I put my non-flaming hand against it to steady myself and shakily rose to my feet; this was the wrong hand to optimally support my mangled right foot, but it was better than nothing. My repositioning had changed the shadows cast by my hand’s firelight, which Yuuka was watching rather than observing either my Flame or her own.

“Making any difference?”

Before Yuuka could answer, the room shook. Gravity didn’t change this time, but it felt as though something was striking Hina’s little pocket dimension from the outside, and I nearly fell again before digging my good heel into the wall-floor and stabilizing back to a reasonably upright position.

“Yeah,” she declared as the shaking subsided. “I got him.”

“That was you?”

“Uh, no. I mean—eh, fuck it, you’ll see.”

That boded—well or ill, I couldn't say, but it sure did bode.

There was a screeching noise like the scraping grind of a catastrophically crashed car skidding to a halt. It sounded far-off and muted by the walls of the room. The ceiling—now the opposite wall from mine in our new orientation—began to bulge inward. My heart started to race as the sound increased in volume and the bulge grew, swelling with pressure from without. The magic-obsessed part of my brain considered this an ineffective way of breaching the presumably LM boundaries of Hina’s box compared to drilling or a more decisive blast of force—that would have been preferable to watching the pressure inexorably build and build as the sound grew closer, louder, clearer.

I glanced at Yuuka one more time, wordlessly asking for reassurance. She nodded, pointed at the bulge, and gave it a thumbs-down with her silver gauntlet. As if on cue, the grinding suddenly went silent, and the bulge stopped growing.

“Was that you?”

“Wait for it.”

The ceiling burst open. The screeching sound returned in an ear-splitting howl of noise as the temperature plummeted. On the other side of the wound was a kaleidoscopic darkness, distance and direction an incoherent jumble of non-shapes that my brain wasn’t equipped to process. I was looking down, down, down. Vertigo gripped me once again. Without any other way of defending myself from the void, I cowered against the wall and held my blazing hand out in front of me. Its light caught no shape in the darkness, only smoke billowing inward—

Something sparkled across the room. Glittering ruby dust scattered into the smoke, dispersing through it. The granules then burst into crimson Flame, banishing the darkness in a blood-red dazzle that blinded me for a moment. As I blinked away the too-red light, I beheld in my green-dyed vision a figure in robes stumbling backward toward the void from which he’d emerged. Kimura’s re-coalesced form found his footing after a few steps.

Yuuka stepped off the wall to stand between him and me, barking something in Japanese. She was unarmed, but her stance wasn’t that of a martial artist ready to throw down; rather, she held her hand out in front of her like I was doing, a ward to dispel evil—or a gun aimed at an old man. He raised his sword, undeterred, and called out to her in reply as they faced off, samurai versus gunslinger. Framed like that, it was easy enough to imagine the contents of their verbal exchange as cool one-liners: “No further” countered by “stand aside,” or something of the sort…undercut by how sad and tired Kimura looked as he shifted his grip on his sword, like he didn’t want to be here.

Nevertheless, he was the one to strike first. He stepped forward, low—I was surprised to see no sign of Takagiri’s devastating physicality, nor even the jarring, hard-to-follow speed I’d become accustomed to from the mantles. He moved like a human swordsman, stepping closer to Yuuka with grace and slashing at her. Yuuka didn’t have the overwhelming speed of a mantle either, but her precognition was more than enough for a fight like this. She stepped forward and backhanded the flat of the blade away with her gauntlet almost contemptuously while her other fist drove at his gut. One of his hands came off the hilt of his sword to push her fist aside, but he couldn’t fully step out of her reach, backed up against the edge of the torn-open bubble of realspace. He compensated by grabbing her wrist and jerking her even closer, trying to reverse their positions so that she would be the one stuck on the precipice—

Yuuka snapped her silver-clad fingers with a glassy, ringing noise. Kimura’s sword clattered onto the wall-floor, forced out of his grasp by a blood-red spike of LM that had punched straight through his wrist. Then she punched him in the face, and the fight was over.

To his credit, he didn’t just stagger backward off our little island of realspace, maintaining his footing despite the shock of the hole in his arm, but Yuuka’s shove did the trick. Kimura fell through the hole and vanished from view. I breathed a sigh of relief, releasing my Flame and slumping against the wall, breathing on my bone-chilled hand in an attempt to instill some fresh warmth in it. Yuuka scooped up the dropped sword and held it up to her eye.

“Pink?” I managed to ask, magical curiosity barely enough to overcome the systemic discomfort all over my body as the adrenaline ebbed away; the pain and the cold of the outside-space were sapping my strength.

“Think so.” She glanced over the edge, which was too much for me; I squeezed my eyes shut so I didn’t have to keep looking into the abyss. “Hopefully that’s the end of it. I’d be surprised if he can do the smoke bullshit again after the Embers of Ruby. The others will be here soon.”

“Good,” I gasped. I didn’t have the energy to ask about the name she’d given her move. “Can we—close this up?”

“Probably not—”

A whoosh made my heart rate spike again. I snapped my eyes open—and there was Takagiri, hovering just over the edge in front of Yuuka. She’d been seriously roughed up by the other Radiances since last I’d seen her, with one of her forearms sort of…blurry, like something had damaged her wards there. And she looked mad.

“Aw, fuck. Ez—”

“Yeah!” I was already reigniting my hand, yanking the imaginary lever to kickstart my Flame once more. I strangled a whimper in my throat as fresh pain lanced through my nerves. Takagiri launched herself at Yuuka, which was the worst possible moment for my body to finally start deciding it had enough. My vision began to wobble,and I sat back and tried to tune everything out and focus on keeping the fire lit—Yuuka didn’t have a chance otherwise, not without her mantle. Just keep the Flame aloft.

But Yuuka was losing anyway. She was no swordswoman. I heard the sound of blades clashing together once, twice, three times—then the sound of Yuuka grunting and her sword clattering to the ground as a blow landed true. She retaliated with a blast of crimson fire that shone blindingly even through my blurred vision. Takagiri stepped through the magical flame as it sparked against her wards and swung a fist at Yuuka, and time slowed down, as it had before.

My Flame sputtered, and the moment passed without giving Yuuka a chance to avert fate. The blow caught her in the chest and threw her against the wall with a thump. Her impact was only mildly cushioned by the pillows and blankets piled in the corner, and she slumped there, insensate—and probably with shattered ribs, if that blow was anything like how I’d struck Hina. Where was Hina?

Not here yet. We’d already taken Kimura out of the fight, and hopefully the other Radiances were already on their way through fourspace, and then it would be three on one. I just had to survive until then—but as before, Takagiri didn’t go directly for me. She lunged at Yuuka’s crumpled body with a shout, intent on finishing her off this time.

And once again, it fell to me to stop her.

I snuffed my Flame’s external manifestation so the world would stop spinning, and instead channeled it through my body. My muscles were electrified by magic, my vision cleared, and I felt strong as I lurched to my feet. As my mind raced and my senses came alive, some part of me recalled the strategy we’d discussed. I didn’t have to kill Takagiri; I just had to cut off her source of magic from Kimura. We’d speculated that was possible with an information-disrupting pink ripple attack.

Like the sword currently lying on the ground.

The world around me became a blur as I dove for the blade. I felt so fast as I scooped it up—and overshot, skidding toward the open hole. Oops. In that moment of desperation, something in my brain clicked. My flame rushed down my right leg, to my stump, and into the prosthetic. I rearranged the {AFFIX} that bound the mechanism to my foot, binding it to the floor, yanking me to a stop hard enough to have dislocated my hip if magic wasn’t reinforcing my body. It still jarred me for a moment—but only a moment. Then my other foot, the good one, regained its grip, and I used it to launch myself at Takagiri. She’d only just begun to react, still turning to me. None of the blurred speed from before; we were at the same pace now.

Of course, I didn’t really know how to use a sword; even at the same speed, she’d take me apart. So I pushed more of my Flame into my muscles and went faster. I had no idea how much of this my body could take, or for how long—but for a moment I was the lightning. I thrusted with the sword, center mass, my best impression of how I would with a spear. The blade pierced her wards, then her flesh, sinking into her belly and tearing out the side.

And in that long moment, I saw no blood follow the blade out of the wound.

Takagiri wasn’t an enhanced human. She was a construct. A mantle.

The moment passed. I slammed into the wall past Takagiri shoulder-first, not unlike how Yuuka had—but the impact was far lighter than it should have been. I thought that maybe I just didn’t feel the pain when juiced up on Flame like this—then realized I was being pulled away from the wall. My in-the-moment {AFFIX} had knocked loose whatever magic had been maintaining the room’s orientation. Everything tilted until ‘down’ became the abyss.

And we all fell.

2.14 Patreon Release - 2000 Reader Milestone Edition!

Hi everybody! Thank you so much for 2000 readers across shub+rr+the main site. To celebrate, this chapter is available to free members in addition to the usual patron tiers. Enjoy!

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Rather than dive into the crowd to go after Takagiri directly, Yuuka simply summoned her Flame once more, weaving quickly and carefully, never taking her eyes off the spot in the crowd where she had “seen” my stalker. I wasn’t having any luck seeing her myself, but that wasn’t a surprise.

“She’s not actually here yet, is she?”

“Nah. I’m thinking…four to six minutes.”

“You don’t know where she is between now and then,” I deduced. “But you don’t need to go after her if you know where she will be.”

“She doesn’t need to be as direct as Hina.” Alice answered from behind us.

I suddenly remembered my worry about her dragon transformation; it had been momentarily overridden by Yuuka’s callout of the threat. I turned toward her and got to my feet—foot—hurriedly, leaning on my makeshift crutch and scanning her up and down, looking anxiously for new mutations.

Radiance Opal was in her mantle, what I understood to be its default outfit: a short, pleated skirt that wrapped high enough around her waist to sit above the base of her tail, a corset that seemed practically moulded to her midriff, and a low-cut blouse held up by straps that crisscrossed over her chest before wrapping around her neck. She wore long, elbow-length gloves; those and her knee-high boots conformed to her limbs so tightly they seemed vacuum-sealed, like Vaetna carapace or similar low-profile armor, an impression aided by the engraved polygonal plating over her knees and elbows and the chunky earpiece riding over one ear. But any militarized aspect to the outfit was undermined by the lacy, yellow trim that appeared all over the outfit and the bejeweled, girly staff she carried.

Maybe it was just my personal sensibilities, but the ornate outfit made it difficult to think of her as a powerful VNT, a walking superweapon. I thought the businesswoman look fit her better; it was embarrassing to be standing next to her decorative getup in front of this crowd. But maybe that was the point? Hikanome’s people seemed to like it, judging by the renewed cheering coming from the crowd.

More importantly—since this was merely a decorative LM construct and not her actual body, what did that mean for her dragon-ka? At a glance, her slit-pupil eyes looked the same as they had before, and she hadn’t sprouted a snout or claws or any other draconic features. She still had her tail, even in this LM facsimile of her body; was that a sign of how immutable the magical limb was, or just an aesthetic choice?

“Ezzen?” She shifted her weight from foot to foot. “You’re looking at me the way Hina does.”

I blinked, blushed, and abandoned the inspection; she must have mistaken the way I was peeking between her legs at her tail for ogling. I’d overstepped the appropriate amount of looking at her body. Embarrassment triggered sweating, despite the chilly air.

“Um—dragon,” I blurted. “Dragon transformation. Dragon-ka. You took a minute.”

Alice shook her head hastily. Her white hair was longer than normal, but only the strands next to her cheeks were free to follow the motion; the back was done up in a very complicated bun clasped by yet more gemstones. I wondered whether the mantle calculated the hair’s physics in real-time with reverse kinematics or if it was some kind of pre-loaded animation. Maybe the latter, since she was oddly still outside of that; when she moved, it seemed deliberate, though not unnatural.

“Oh! No, nothing like that, I’m fine. I was just being careful and taking my time.”

“Oh. Good. Sorry.” After a moment of awkward silence, academic interest won out. “So, that wasn’t the threshold for changes? Do any changes cascade to your mantle? You still have your tail, does that have its own controls or—”

“Ezza,” Yuuka groaned. “Shut up. Trying to concentrate here.”

“And it’s classified,” Alice reminded me, eyes flicking toward the crowd. “Opsec.”

I winced, falling silent and sneaking a glance at how Yuuka’s work was coming along. The thread in her hand was coalescing into a…container, essentially, the schematics to create a box of contained space that would snap shut at a particular moment. Her eyes were still fixed on the crowd; the crystalline one on the right was bleeding more globs of Flame, which were flowing and arranging themselves into concentric floating rings. Lenses, I realized, in the same vein as how Amethyst’s arm cannon deployed.

“Your eye’s got some signal again?” Alice asked.

“Good enough. T minus three for Takagiri. I’ll grab her.”

“Wonderful. Word from Hina?” Alice directed that at me.

“No.” I bit my lip nervously, not wanting to fumble the conversation again. “We saw her getting, uh, tossed around a bit. I know she’s tough,” I clarified, forestalling Alice’s reassuring reply, “just…worried.”

Alice pursed her lips, which led me to deduce that at least the facial expressions were real-time recreations of their real bodies somehow, too diverse and subtle to come from a set of pre-animated options. In their shoes, I’d honestly have preferred to just display emotions with the push of a button, like how Ebi did—though my ideal would be essentially faceless, fully enclosed in carapace and emoting through body language and the tone inflections encoded in Vaetna-chatter. Alice was looking more confused by the second.

“Wait, she’s having trouble? Who was she fighting?”

“Um…didn’t see.”

“Then…it might have been Takagiri she was fighting, not Kimura. She’s the dangerous one of the two; Hina wouldn’t have issues dealing with him. Yuuka, you’re sure that Takagiri will show up here without being in the middle of grappling with Hina, or something?”

“I’d see that,” Yuuka confirmed. “Just her. Two minutes.”

I blinked. “Wait, Takagiri’s human and Kimura’s a flamebearer, right? How’s she the more dangerous one?”

“Kimura’s magic is mostly…well, administrative. He parcels out his magic to the high-level members so they can perform the standard Hikanome miracles. So he’s relatively weak and not a fighter. Takagiri, on the other hand, was one of Sugawara’s elite muscle. Nasty stuff—she was armed to the teeth with magitech and enhanced enough to fight on our level. And now that we know she’s alive, who knows what kind of stuff she’s gotten her hands on in the past few years.”

My anxiety was starting to spike again. That sounded—very bad. It was equal parts upsetting and validating to know that my instinctual danger response when I’d first met her had been accurate. “Then…should we be having this conversation on—the other side of the tunnel, maybe?”

“If it’d make ya feel better. I have her, though. One minute, Alice.”

There was a smile in Yuuka’s voice. She sounded so rock-solid, so certain, that for a moment Takagiri’s capture felt as sure as the rising sun. I blinked at the feeling—leftover white ripple?—and decided not to trust it on its own, glancing at Alice instead for reassurance. She shared Yuuka’s smile and gave me a nod, standing at ease.

“None of that should matter, not against Yuuka. Foresight is overpowered. But confirmation is good too.” She raised a finger to her earpiece and started speaking in Japanese. A chirping warble replied, barely audible to me from right in front of her. I was a little surprised I could hear it, actually—I’d have assumed the Radiances’ mantles were networked to one each other through ways you couldn’t casually eavesdrop on like that. Alice’s brow furrowed.

“Amane’s saying—Yuuka, matte, shimekona—”

She was cut off by the rasp of a sound like tearing paper. Yuuka clutched the lattice of magic in her hand, activating her trap around somebody in the crowd. A cocoon of light spiraled into existence, swirling up and around them and binding their limbs as she manipulated the thread to smother and restrain, yanking them forward out of the crowd and forcing them to their knees. Alice leapt forward into a glide, hovering over the bound figure, yelling at the crowd to back away. The binding threads mummified Takagiri’s body completely, and it seemed like the catch had gone off without a hitch.

Then the bindings tightened further. For a moment, it looked like the tension was too extreme, slicing into the bound figure. I only understood what had really happened in the moments after: the body within had vanished. The cords of light fell in on themselves, collapsing to a single point as the force was no longer resisted, compressing down on itself—just like Hina’s cast-off shards when she’d dove into the bubble. I barely had enough time to realize what was about to happen and throw my arms over my face before the detonation.

But instead of a blinding, deafening, reality-sundering explosion of ripple, all I heard was a grinding pop. Confused, I lowered my hands to peek—just in time to witness Yuuka’s hand burst apart in a fountain of gore.

The backlash had gone directly through the lattice she was holding, the glyphs in her hands shattering with too-pretty sparkles of light as the woven thread overloaded. The backflow overwhelmed the structure and decohered into free ripple directly within her hand—and was then amplified by the inferno. The end of her arm was blown apart from within, disintegrating into a spray of red horror. Time felt like it crawled to give me ample time to witness the catastrophic failure, a twisted warning from the Flame.

But as the moments dragged on and torn-off chunks of flesh glided lazily through the air, I realized it didn’t just feel like slow-motion. Time had gone…wrong. Sparks of free ripple hopped between the flecks of blood and shards of bone like little lightning bolts meandering toward the stump of her arm to ground themselves. Millisecond by millisecond, her fluid gauntlet of raw Flame flickered back to life, a silvery facsimile of how her hand had looked a moment before. It blasted open as well, little shards of silver meeting gore, and then they fell together back toward her stump like asteroids falling dirtward. The gauntlet slammed shut around the ruined meat, and I saw her fingers twitch.

Distantly, I understood that what my eyes were seeing wasn’t reality—somehow, I’d tapped into the same silver possibilities she saw. That gauntlet of her Flame had likely emerged before her hand could burst, not after. Aversion, not reversion.

The period of distorted time ended abruptly and painfully. There was still a shockwave, it had just taken its sweet time to reach me, waiting politely for Yuuka to correct the timeline. The moment I saw those silver fingers begin to move again, the pressure wave struck me like a hammer, knocking the air from my lungs and slamming me to the ground. I gasped and retched, trying to suck in a breath and scramble back to my feet, but for a terrifying two or three seconds, I felt like I was drowning. When I did manage to force a gasp of air, it was labored and ragged as I summoned my spear and wobbled to my foot-and-a-half.

Yuuka had stayed standing. Her body had been rendered whole—or rather never been touched in the first place, as I was still working to comprehend—and she’d promptly stowed it, switching back to her mantle, that overwrought assemblage of dark fabrics and faux-leathers layered together like chocolate pastry dough. While I’d been on the ground, she’d moved to stand in front of me, between me and—

My stalker.

I pieced together Takagiri’s image in motion-blurred glimpses and snippets half-obscured by Yuuka’s body as she rushed toward us. I only really collated these visual snippets after the chaos:

She’d ditched the goth fashion, which was especially apparent against the superfluous complexity of Yuuka’s outfit. This time, she was dressed to kill: combat boots, lightweight and form-fitting segmented khaki body armor—magically reinforced, judging by how she shrugged off something Yuuka shot at her as she approached in a dead sprint—pouches and holsters all along her thighs and torso, and most prominently a sword, a long Japanese katana she carried one-handed.

She dashed across torn-up earth with unnatural speed and force, each footstep sending a spray of dirt behind her. It was like Hina’s movements without any of the weightlessness, bound by Newton’s third law—meaning she demolished her surroundings with the force of her steps. Definitely augmented; the terror I’d felt the first time I’d run into her was validated tenfold seeing her in motion, spiced with a little jealousy. She accelerated into a blur and slashed at Yuuka.

The precog dodged the swing with a lazy step sideways and snapped her fingers, yelling something in Japanese. A beam lanced toward Takagiri from the other side, pale pink and glittery and powerful enough to punch through a regular human. Four more followed it from the center of Alice’s staff. Takagiri twisted and went low so the shots caught her wards shallowly and deflected off rather than making solid connection. A snarl had taken over her face, and she yelled something angrily at the Radiances as she skidded on the dirt to change her trajectory. She turned toward me instead, trying to take advantage of how Yuuka had partially moved out of the way to dodge her first strike, heedless of the subsequent shots from Alice.

I tried to heft my spear without my right leg collapsing under me. I was still struggling to regain a normal rhythm of breathing, heart pounding a million times a second; adrenaline somehow kept me standing upright as I brought my spear into the ready position, scorched wooden tip between me and the charging assassin. If she slashed, I’d parry; that was all I could do. No paranatural acrobatics for me.

But Takagiri made it only two more steps before an explosion of crimson blossomed around her, hissing against her wards and distorting her silhouette like fuzzy TV static. It hardened around her, bloody sap turning to ruby, freezing her in place in the middle of her lunge, a mask of fury on her face.

“Tsukamaeta,” Yuuka crooned.

“Good work, Bloodstone.”

“Knew she’d go for him.”

I eyed the now-solid crimson block, not willing to lower my spear quite yet. “She’s not gonna—slip out this time?”

As if on cue, Takagiri’s body splintered from within and started to dissolve into smoke. I swore, but Yuuka didn’t react. As the seconds wore on and the dissolution took its course, I realized that this time her encasement in the crystal was so complete that her incorporeal form had nowhere to go; we’d trapped her. The smoke swirled and contracted in odd ways, signs that it was trying to slip out through the fourth dimension—but evidently, it couldn’t escape even along that extraplanar axis.

“Ha!” Yuuka exclaimed.

“Christ.”

“What I’d like t’know is how the hell she’s doing that. Never did it before.”

“At least now we know why we didn’t find a body,” Alice put in.

She was referencing the team’s history with the woman cartoonishly frozen inside the chunk of crystal, but I didn’t care much for that. I was thinking more about what Yuuka had said. “Doesn’t Kimura impart pieces of his Flame?”

That was among the primary functions of the cult’s leaders, to my understanding; part of the draw in becoming a member was the promise that the most faithful and committed could wield their very own sliver of divinity. I could empathize with wanting that, but personally, such a meager scrap would never have satisfied my aspirations toward the Vaetna. Not worth selling my soul.

Anyway, such an arrangement of gifted Flame would make sense for one of Hikanome’s former…assassins? Agents? I still wasn’t entirely clear on what Takagiri’s role had been during Sugawara’s reign, other than that she had apparently been an enemy of Todai. Depending on those details, and how depraved things had gotten within the cult during that period—and the top end of that scale was nausea inducing—other mechanisms for the cloud of trapped smoke in front of us were also possible.

“Could also be a really nasty product of sanguimancy, and that smoke’s her real body,” I continued, more to myself at this point than the others.

Yuuka heard me anyway. “Gross.”

“Hold on. Sapphire lost Kimura,” Opal informed us, finger to her earpiece. “She’ll find him, but we’re staying around here until we have both of them. Amethyst is inbound for overwatch. Heliotrope, Ezzen: keep an eye on our icecube. I’m going to go coordinate evac with…Hongo,” she groaned, lifting a little off the ground into the air on jets of pink fire and looking out at the mass of shivering festivalgoers waiting for the demigods to stop blocking their evacuation route.

Yuuka snickered, which made Alice frown, tail lashing more aggressively now that it could swing freely. “Okay, Yuuka, how about you be the one to—”

A sharp snap split the air. Hairline fissures raced across the block of red gemstone, radiating out from a sword buried halfway deep, stabbed cleanly in. Kimura twisted the hilt of his blade, and the container holding his ally shattered. Alice reacted fastest and sent a bolt of energy directly at him, center-mass—it failed to connect as he shattered into the teleporter trick they kept using, as swiftly as he’d arrived. Smoke-Takagiri rushed out of the cracks and dissipated as well. Yuuka swore. Alice was yelling into her earpiece—and under both of those voices, adrenaline-heightened instinct picked up on the rustling of grass behind me.

I twisted, panic igniting the Flame in my chest. We’d somehow been caught wrong-footed despite Yuuka’s foresight. Potential magical explanations for how our opponents could have suppressed the splash of silver ripple raced through my mind—precious moments wasted on theory when death was just over my shoulder.

But Takagiri’s surprise reengagement wasn’t targeting me. Her sword sank into Yuuka’s upper back and tore downward. The Bloodstone Radiance screamed, her voice distorted and skipping like glitchy autotune as she was hewn open. Takagiri raised a foot and kicked her off the end of the blade—no blood, because the mantle was not true flesh, but the dying-machinery noise of Yuuka’s screams and the awful way she twitched on the grass was proof enough that the blow had done something awful.

I struck Takagiri. It was a shitty jab of my spear, terrible form, basically just flailing; against her wards, it should have been about as effective as trying to pierce a marble with a toothpick. But my muscles blazed with a jolt of Flame-enhanced strength, and the charred tip of my spear was a blur, a lance of desperate, angry force. For just a moment, I felt like Heung, my onyx-tipped spear striking true in vicious retribution.

I wasn’t Heung, of course. The thrust was only able to shove Takagiri off balance for a moment as her wards stopped the blow. But that was long enough for Alice to tackle her.

“Tackle” is just my best after-the-fact approximation; it was more like a white-hot fireball struck Takagiri so hard she vanished from my field of view, leaving me instinctively wincing at the wave of heat and blinking away the retina-burning afterimage of Alice’s incandescent form. I suddenly understood why one of her nicknames on Wikipedia was “Lighthouse’s Beacon.” I’d felt her burn hot before, but now she was blindingly incandescent.

After a long second of processing what had just happened, my eyes followed the twenty-meter-long trench of scorched dirt. At the end was a figure—too bright to look at directly—grappling the assassin, whose wards had reduced her figure to a blurry, noisy mess in their efforts to keep Alice’s aura from roasting her alive.

Yuuka screamed again, more of a garbled groan, and I tore my eyes away from the struggle. Alice would be fine; two more Radiances were on the way, and I couldn’t help with the fighting anyway. But maybe I could help Yuuka. She lay there motionless, helpless, her strings cut. My mind raced as I knelt shakily by her, trying to call up my understanding of the mantle’s core mechanisms, to guess where and how the underlying weave had been damaged, to intuit the precise way to patch the damage and at least stabilize her. No brilliant flash of insight appeared before me.

“I’m—gonna give it my best shot,” I promised her as I laid down my spear and gathered my thread, voice shaking with the realization that I should have practiced snapweaving {MANIFEST}; with the Radiances, it qualified as basic field medicine, and I wasn’t even prepared for that. But I still had to try to help her. She was staring at me out of the corner of her human eye as she lay face-down in the dirt and groaned something. It just came out as random noises, not even human-sounding—but I knew an agonized plea for help when I heard it. I took a deep breath, steeled myself in the feeble ways I knew how, and reached out to her to perform a miracle—

I never got the chance to try.

A hand grabbed my hair and tugged hard enough to make my eyes fill with tears. I was yanked away—not horizontally, not up, not even down into the ground. Out, across an axis that should not exist. The world around me jerked and twisted and shriveled, Yuuka’s prone body and the grass and everything moving further away, becoming flatter and smaller as my feet left the ground. She groaned again, and this time, I heard the word she’d been trying to say, robotic and out of tune but comprehensible as I was pulled into the icy void outside reality.

“Ki—mu—ra.” She had tried to warn me.

Everything was the sky and the sky was the abyss. Too high, my instincts said—the direction I was being pulled wasn’t something my body understood, but vertigo arrived anyway. Nausea rushed up my gullet, made into panic by the fact that nothing was happening when my body tried to breathe in. I reached for my spear, my source of safety—it had been left next to Yuuka’s body. Stupid. I thrashed with my Flame instead, trying to burn the man dragging me through the cosmic ocean by my scalp.

A muffled thump all around me, and the grip vanished, and I saw some kind of shadow pass over the distance-flattened image of reality in front of me—then the world rushed toward me again, shifting and slanting as I was moved in four dimensions at once.

I crashed out of the water, back into what my body understood as three-space, landing in a heap. The hard arrival jarred me; I rolled onto my side on instinct, clutching the back of my head in response to the throbbing pain and retching as my body tried to cough up water that didn’t exist. I thrashed at something touching my chest and face.

“Cutie! Hey, no, it’s okay—”

Something ice-cold sparked against my chest, and thrumming energy surged outward from my core into my limbs. I coughed one last time as the sensation of water in my lungs finally disappeared. Everything hurt, inside and out, but a warm breath on my cheek got me to at least open my eyes and take in the environment around me.

Hina was kneeling over me, hand on my chest, forehead against mine. I coughed out of embarrassment rather than somatic necessity.

“Fuck. Ow.”

“Hey. Hey,” she repeated. “You’re okay.”

“Am—that was the void. The outside.” The space beyond space, the rest of the hypercube of reality beyond our little three-dimensional world.

“He tried to grab you. But I got in front of him.”

“Thanks.” I took a deep breath. Having solid ground beneath me never felt so good. “Wait—Yuuka. She’s hurt. She’s—”

“She’s okay. So are you. Shhh.”

I finally registered where we were. I hadn’t been dumped out on the grass; Hina had dragged me into her pocketspace, her little enclosed lounge floating in the void. Safe, warm, dry, dimly lit.

“Can—can they get in here?”

“No.”

I let myself believe her.

A groan came from behind me. I twisted, whimpering at the aches the movement generated, and saw Yuuka curled up under a blanket on the far side of the room, glaring at us through one good eye. Her crystalline eye was fully hidden under fresh layers of gauze wrapped around her head. Had the wound to her mantle harmed her real body, too?

“You’re—okay?”

“Didn’t even see him. Shouldn’t be fucking possible.”

Not really an answer to my question, but if she was feeling good enough to spit invectives, I figured that boded well.

“Not your fault,” Hina soothed, which made Yuuka’s lips curl.

“Your—your mantle,” I whispered. Yuuka frowned impressively.

“It is. Bitch got me. Emergency disengage got stuck.” Her good eye flickered from me to Hina, then back to me. “You tried.”

“I…don’t think I’d have been able,” I admitted. I’d been at a loss, overwhelmed by the task of saving a life with magic. “Should’ve—been more prepared. Should’ve known what to do.”

That got a humorless, angry chortle from her. “That’s two of us.”

Hina gently pushed me back down onto the spread of blankets and ran her fingers through my hair.

“You did fine, cutie. Nice stab.”

Oh. I’d done that, hadn’t I? Supercharged my body with magic again. I reflexively opened my mouth to justify the use of blood magic—then realized I didn’t need to, not with Hina. I settled a bit further down into the nest of blankets and allowed her hand in my hair to soothe the adrenaline-tinted chaos of what had just happened.

“It’s so pretty.”

I looked up at her, some dry amusement managing to unburrow from the fresh load of trauma it had been buried under. “That’s where your head’s at?”

“I’m not leaving you alone again,” she murmured.

I frowned. My body was starting to recognize I was safe here with her, and a sudden surge of exhaustion washed over me, amplified by the warmth of the room after the cold of the park and then the frigid abyss. I wanted to just leave the rest of this to the Radiances. But that moment of power when I’d struck Takagiri lingered in my mind. I had made a difference. I wanted to do so again.

“They’re fighting out there, yeah? We have to help.”

“I shoulda just put you in here to begin with but I didn’t and you got hurt and it’s just better if you stay out of the way until we finish this,” Hina rambled. Apparently, everybody was ignoring my questions right now.  “I really just thought I’d get him on the way in and this wouldn’t turn into…yeah. He’s way slipperier than he should be.”

Silence fell for a few seconds until I groaned, blinking and rubbing my scalp. It had felt like Kimura was trying to tear my hair out. Couldn’t he have grabbed me anywhere else? Hina’s blue eyes followed my hand.

“They both are,” Yuuka muttered eventually, sounding angry. “Her getting out of the bindings, sure, but the shit with Kimura?”

“You did the shibari thing?” Hina asked.

“…Ugh. But…yeah, and she just—poof. Musta been an actual blink, not a hop. I got her the second time with a full encasement, but then the old guy showed up and just…” she trailed off into a frustrated growl.

“They’re as mobile as you are,” I told Hina. “But…that shouldn’t be possible, not really. Him, sure, but her? She shouldn’t be able to blink like that, not as a human. We were thinking it might have been some really nasty blood magic.”

Hina shook her head. “Nope. I’d be able to tell. She’s augmented, but it’s just gear, not like me or something messier. But you know what’s weird?”

I waited for her to continue the thought, but she didn’t, just stared expectantly at me with those big, blue eyes. I sighed. “…What’s weird?”

“She smells exactly like him.”

I nodded; that explained some of it. “So he did impart some of his Flame to her. Which means there’s a link we can sever to cut off her abilities,” I deduced, proud of the admittedly basic strategy. “And maybe stop them from blinking around like that. If nothing else, it’d at least turn the fight from a…two versus three to one versus three. I think. If you’re staying here with me.”

“There’s no third,” Hina clarified. “Yuuka’s out of it too.”

“Why? Even without her mantle, her eye is—practically unfair. Shouldn’t—”

“It’s fucked too,” Yuuka interjected. I frowned and waited for a clarification, but none came; the fresh bandages on her head spoke for themselves. I thought for a minute, then found the moment in the chaos that was bugging me.

“Maybe…that’s not a problem. Your arm. I saw you—avert it?”

Yuuka stared at me. “What the fuck?”

“I did, I swear. Silver.”

“What? No. Fuck off,” she spat, and rolled onto her side, evidently unwilling to entertain what I was saying.

“Huh?” Hina leaned in toward me, curious. “You saw her stuff?”

I winced. “Don’t…say it like that. I got some…bleed-over from her precognition? I don’t know what to call it, but I did see it. Hold on—you’re not going to help?”

“I want to finish what I started,” she muttered, avoiding my eyes as a bit of a growl entered her voice. “But I’m not leaving you. You could get hurt. They’re not allowed to do that.”

“Do—can Amane and Alice actually beat them, two-on-two?”

“Yeah,” said both of the girls, but Hina was still not meeting my eyes, and Yuuka’s heart didn’t sound in it.

“While assisting with the evacuation? What happens if Alice gets hurt and the tunnel collapses. Or—” my stomach lurched. “Yuuka, the tunnel is based on your LM. Which Takagiri fucked up pretty bad. Is it even still open?”

“…I don’t know.”

“It is,” Hina confirmed. “Humans are on their way out.”

“That’s a relief. But even so—Alice’s magic is what’s holding it open, and she turned into a fireball after Yuuka got hit. I—she’s going to trigger her dragon-ka, if she hasn’t already.”

Both of the Radiances reacted in subtle ways. Hina whimpered; Yuuka inhaled. The room was so unnaturally silent that I caught both; I wouldn’t have normally. My heart sank; if they agreed with me, then the risk was very real. But that made what I was saying all the more important. I pressed on.

“And…Takagiri and Kimura. They’ve both been way exceeding your expectations, yeah? From what I’m understanding. Capabilities we didn’t expect. They got past your sight, Yuuka.”

“Fuck you. Amane can handle it,” Yuuka insisted, something dangerous in her voice.

I winced. “…Not made of glass. I know. But—neither are we. We should help. We have to help.”

That set her off.

“You’re trying to be the hero?” She snapped. “Trying to be the Vaetna, solving our problems for us? If those cunts are too much for us, they’re way too much for you. You’re not a Vaetna. You’re not even one of us. The only reason you’re still alive is because they want you alive, for whatever reason, not because you can keep up.”

“I hit her! I’m not made of glass either.”

“Only because she went for me. You weren’t fast enough for her. If you go back out there, you’re a liability—”

I bristled. “Don’t fucking call—”

“—and so am I.”

--

(extended authors notes for this chapter discussing the milestone etc can be found on its post at sunspot's site: https://sunspot.gay/?p=909)

2.13 Patreon REVISION

This is a REVISION of 2.13 with one major change that cascaded down across the chapter. The change is informational, not plot-related. The original chapter is still available here on Patreon.

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Have you ever seen one of those ultra-slow-motion videos of a bullet passing through ballistic gel? The projectile leaves a series of overlapping voids expanding behind it, the nominally solid gel encouraged by the extreme forces to bubble like a liquid. Milliseconds later, the forces that formed those bubbles have dissipated through the gel, so the cavity no longer has anything to hold it open and begins to collapse back in on itself. But the bullet drags outside air in behind it, and as the bubble collapses, that air is crushed and compressed, pressurized so rapidly that it ignites into a little explosion, a flare of light and heat that momentarily grants a second life to each bubble, glowing like fireworks before finally being snuffed for good.

The same thing happened when Hina struck the white-ripple field surrounding Yoyogi Park. The blazing blue comet pierced the field, and light exploded across the sky, a sapphire aurora both spilling outward beyond the barrier and following her in like leaking ink. Even though her mantle was barely visible as more than a pinpoint, I could see it was flaking apart, shards of LM trailing off of her and decohering into more ripple like the tail of a comet.

For a moment, there was equilibrium, the insane force of her arrival balanced against the field’s self-correcting shape. Then, like the ballistic gel, the field buckled and fell inward where she struck it, closing behind her and isolating pockets of the blue, compressing them inward, squeezing and concentrating the bubbles of ripple until they were a trail of blinding pinpoints suspended behind Hina’s dive.

Watching this collapse over a fraction of a second, I remember thinking how strange it was that there was no physical shockwave, no wind. As if responding to me, the colored guide-braziers flickered, and then their flames were being sucked inward too, an incandescent rainbow caught aswirl in the implosion of the ripple compressing Hina’s constellation of the Frozen Flame. The compression reached a peak, and like that hyper-pressurized air, the pinpoints detonated, tearing open Miyoko’s field. It curdled and peeled back, whips of white and yellow sparks dancing and igniting at the seam before they were overtaken by the tide of sapphire light. For a brief and blinding moment, Hina outshone the sun and dyed the whole world blue.

The sound reached my ears moments later, and everybody, flamebearers included, flinched and ducked for cover at the deafening, roaring rumble that was felt as much as heard, rattling my entire body, terrifying in a primal sense like a peal of thunder or erupting volcano; something early man would have worshiped out of fear. I remember that feeling more clearly than any other part, how my legs trembled and I hunched on pure instinct, how everybody was screaming, including me.

That was all before the ripple reached us.

I cried out as the lattice of my prosthetic flickered, red ripple hijacking my nerves and sending lancing pain from foot to brain stem while my stabilizer unit in my jacket pocket tried and failed to compensate. I fell to one knee, then on my arse, gasping and gritting my teeth as the pain overwhelmed my other senses. The device in my pocket was turning hot—an acrid smell hit my nose, and I tried to squirm out of the jacket even while phantom cramps made it feel like my foot was about to fold itself in half. Somebody helped pull the jacket off of me, and I immediately curled up on the pillow I’d been sitting on, cowering under the collapsing sky and trying not to scream at the venom in my nerves.

Over long, agonizing seconds, the pain ebbed downward from its peak. Gasping, ragged breaths became shallower and more even—and colder, as nature reasserted itself. The temperature was plummeting; with the barrier between hot and cold air destroyed, the former drove upward, and the cold air surrounding the park rushed inward, frigid, howling wind kicking up grit and shearing at my sensitive skin through the gossamer protection of my shirt. Familiar aches invaded my fingers, and soon I found myself curled up not in a futile attempt to escape pain but as a way of preserving precious body heat as winter announced its return.

I gritted my teeth; my fragile meat-body wanted to stay where it was and huddle for warmth, but I couldn’t afford to. Even without looking, I knew that this was an apocalyptically dangerous situation for the hundreds of thousands of average humans in the park. There was commotion around me, voices and shuffling, and I could hear yelling and screaming and sirens in the distance. The real flamebearers, the Radiances and Hikanome’s damn cultists, were probably already mobile and trying to help people, not fetal and blubbering. I had to get up and join them—it was pathetic to have been knocked flat on my ass.

“C’mon,” I murmured to myself, somewhere between a whisper and subvocalization. “The Spire stands, so can you.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Up we go. One, two—”

I sat up and cracked my eyes open.

Everything was dyed yellow. In that second or two of the detonation, the wash of blue light had indoctrinated my eyes to its overwhelming hue, so the natural sunlight seemed all wrong—all the colors were out of balance. The sky, actually a thin blue, appeared to be sickly orange. The remnants of brightest blue ink in the sky looked paler by the moment, thinning and dissipating into the aether. Distantly, I was relieved; that was a good sign as far as inferno intensity was concerned—no self-sustaining engine of magical tides, nor a wound in the world. Tokyo’s sky would not gain a second scar like the one over its harbor.

But the park still looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. It was an absurd relief to my social anxiety that I was not the only one who’d been cowering on the ground, bowled over by the sheer scale of forces—the entire park had. The spindly trees had remained standing, but I could see the big tents laying half-collapsed, smaller ones uprooted and tossed around. The tall braziers of colored flame that were supposed to mark districts of the festival stood dead and askew.

As for my immediate surroundings, I was surrounded by commotion. A cluster of people stood and knelt on the other side of the table from me, where Miyoko had been sitting. I spotted her at the center of the press of people, lying propped up on a hastily constructed stack of the pillows we’d been sitting on. The high priestess must have been the one maintaining the field, and thus took the full backlash of Hina’s arrival. But she wasn’t my highest priority anyway. I turned, rubbing my hands together rapidly to stave off the chill. I’d only been in the false warmth for an hour, tops—was the natural temperature supposed to feel this cold?

“Amane?”

A distorted, warbling ring came from behind me by way of reply. The Amethyst Radiance had mantled, standing tall, a purple statue unscathed by the devastation surrounding her. Once I made eye contact with her—or close enough—she acknowledged me with a nod, then her spike-snout swung back toward the chaos in the festival’s main section. Todai’s people stood clustered around her legs, barely coming up to her waist, like children against her stature. Heliotrope sat unmantled on her shoulder, leaning against her head. She was on the phone with her left hand while she dabbed something off her face with a napkin scrounged from the table—blood, I realized, trickling from under her bangs. I winced.

“You alright?”

She lowered the phone momentarily to curse at me. That was probably fair; I didn’t have better words for the destruction my girlfriend had wrought. Had her first rescue of me also been so explosive, when she’d saved me from the Peacies and that buried car? Or did the apocalyptic suddenness of her arrival mean she thought I was in even more danger now? It certainly displayed a stunning disregard for collateral damage; even if nobody had died in that initial flashbang of contact, the ripple churning overhead would have already begun to seep into people’s flesh. I needed to help contain it, or evacuate civilians, or both. What about Kimura?

I started to get to my feet and start making myself useful, but didn’t get all the way up before my ankle wobbled beneath me and I remembered that my stabilizer had been rendered useless. I reached for my cast-off suit jacket—it was warm, which I tried to savor while gingerly feeling toward the pocket. The stabilizer unit itself was cooked, too hot to touch; the component meant to convert interfering ripple to harmless heat had been overfed by the extreme conditions and amplified by the white surrounding it. The cocktail of ripple had gone to town on the disc, partially crushing it into more of a V-shape. It was fucked. I carefully shook the useless puck of ruined magitech out of the pocket, and it crumbled when it hit the plastic tarp; {ASH} residue. Don’t breathe that stuff.

I shrugged my jacket back on, grateful that at least the device’s failure had left me with a warm outer layer. Then I tried to kneel again, putting my bad foot under me to see if the prosthetic itself had also been fried. It seemed like the stabilizer had taken the brunt of it—so no walking for me, but at least the basic analgomantics in the prosthetic were working. I sat back down, trying to stay huddled up for warmth. There wasn’t much point in standing; it wasn’t like I’d be much use in the pursuit even if I was fully mobile—

A sound like tearing metal erupted next to me. Adrenaline surged. I flinched away, scrambling backward from—

“Cutie! Hi! Love the hair!”

Hina looked untouched by her meteoric arrival—but she wasn’t in her mantle. I suspected it had been sacrificed as ablative shielding.

“Hina? Christ, are you okay? What the fuck was that? A fucking inferno—”

She flowed forward, standing over me and bending over at the waist with feline flexibility, putting her hands on my shoulders and nuzzling the top of my head.

“Shh. Can’t stick around; I gotta get him. Listen—he’s not working alone.”

I automatically reached up and put my hands over hers. Most of me was still shaken and terrified by the forces she’d just unleashed, but her touch was soothing in a small way.

“Kimura? I don’t—he’s working with the stalker, right?”

“Yeah. Haven’t found her, but it was his Flame. But—there’s others. Here.”

“Hina, clarify, please. Other stalkers? Other flamebearers?”

By now, the others were taking notice of her presence. The Hikanome and Todai entourages had turned toward us. Yuuka was disembarking from Amane’s shoulder, and Hongo stepped to the front of the crowd surrounding Miyoko. Hina straightened and raised her voice, addressing us all, but didn’t abandon her protective position over me.

“Other Sugawara loyalists,” she growled.

A cacophony of confused, overlapping Japanese exploded from both groups. I could hear Amane’s wind-chime voice over the group, but she wasn’t the one who reestablished order. That was Hongo, speaking in a resonant voice amplified and tinged by magic. He barked something out that made everybody quiet down, then pointed at Hina.

“Fox. That’s a severe accusation.”

“Don’t trust my nose, Nacchan?”

“Miyoko did,” Yuuka cut in, typing one-handed on her phone. “Called him a traitor right before he vanished. You got a trail?”

Hina nodded, idly running her fingers through my long hair. She spoke in a rush. “He’s shifting and hopping all over, but still in the park for now, ‘cause crossing the seams after what I just did to Shiny’s bubble would be suicide. I’m gonna find him, you guys find the other: Takagiri Izumi. Ring a bell?”

Hongo’s eyes narrowed, and murmurs erupted from his people behind him. Yuuka pulled the blood-stained napkin away from her head and inspected it, not quite able to snarl through her wince.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Hina agreed. “So that’s why I’m in a bit of a rush.”

Yuuka shook her head slowly and deliberately, in spite of her injury, and gestured around. “Yeah, she’s a loose end, bad fuckin’ news. And we’ll get her this time. We will. But—look around, Hina. Innocents first. Clean up your fuckin’ mess.”

“C’mon, Yuuka, I thought you’d be totally—”

Hongo shook out his robe. “Ghost or not, the flock is terrified and in danger because of what you just did, fox. I would not call it very mahou shoujo to put civilians in the crossfire like this, and you’re interfering with our internal affairs in doing so.”

“Bite me, Nacchan. Didn’t you hear the name? She’s after cutie—and working with Kimura to make it happen. They were probably working together back then, too.” She looked down at me, determination shining in the blue of her eyes. “She’s the stalker, I think.”

Yuuka frowned. “The what?”

My blood ran cold. “You—”

A new voice interrupted, crackling through distorted cell signal from Yuuka’s phone. “Hina, I take it we can’t convince you to clean up your mess instead?”

A relieved smile broke across Hongo’s face. He gave Alice’s speakerphone voice a courtier’s bow, deep and flourished with hand gestures. Many of Hikanome’s people bowed as well.

“Lady Dragon, it is—”

“You, shut up,” came the curt reply. “Hina?”

“Sorry, babe. I gotta.”

“Figures,” Alice sighed, staticy. “Then I’m authorizing you to give them hell and keep them off the rest of us while we stabilize this situation. Don’t kill them, though; I’ve got a lot of questions.”

“You got it.”

“As for you, Hongo-san: Leave discipline to us.”

He bowed to the phone again. “I would not dream of it, Lady Dragon, my apologies. As I was saying, it’s a relief to hear your voice in this time of crisis. Will you be gracing us with your presence in person?”

“The inferno’s cut the park off from the rest of the city. I’m going to see if we can open up a stable passage for emergency services.”

My skin crawled for a different reason than what Hina had just told me. I whispered up at her. “We’re trapped?”

Hina shrugged. “So’re they.” She knelt to nuzzle my face. “I’ll get them both. Promise.”

Another staticy sigh came through the speakerphone. “—Human life comes first. Yuuka, Amane—help Hikanome tend to their people, stabilize this—this clusterfuck. Once we find an entry point, I’m going to need your help to punch through, but that’ll be a few hours.”

I tried to push aside the revelation of my stalker—Takagiri, apparently—and focused on what Alice was saying about our situation. The top priority of responsible flamebearers during inferno response and cleanup was to shield the humans, but “a few hours” would mean enough ripple exposure that we’d have dead or dying civilians by the time the evac route was open. Even with five active flamebearers, we’d be hard pressed to shield everybody completely; the park was huge, and therefore so was the inferno. That was far more important than a few people being after me personally, especially if Hina was dealing with them anyway.

“Hina can’t chase two people at once,” Yuuka pointed out. “She’ll have her hands full with Kimura if that shatter move is as slippery as I think it is. What about Takagiri? Bitch disappeared completely after last time, and my eye’s munted right now on top of that. I can’t fuckin’ track her.” She sounded angry.

“She’s not a flamebearer. If she is after Ezzen, we don’t need to know where she is as long as one of us is with him. And once we have a tunnel open, they’ll have to go through us. Hina, you started this, I need you to at least tell me where the rift’s weakest so we can anchor the—”

“Mou kiechatta,” Yuuka groaned.

My girlfriend had vanished when Alice had begun to give orders, leaving no trace but the ghost of a kiss on my forehead. Was catching my stalker more important to her than human lives?

“Fine. That can keep—is Ezzen there?”

“Yeah,” I called out.

“Give him the phone,” she instructed Yuuka. The Heliotrope Radiance reluctantly passed it over, turning off the speaker as she did. I raised the phone to my ear, huddling under my thin jacket.

“Ezzen,” Alice sighed. “What kind of mess have you gotten into?”

“Uh, ripple shockwave toasted my stabilizer, so I’m not exactly mobile.”

“That’s—fine, you’re staying right there anyway. But, er, that’s not really what I meant; Hina only gave me very piecemeal information, and she said you’d fill in the rest. So please explain to me: what the hell is ‘the stalker?’”

I swallowed.

“I—um—I don’t really know? It’s…a person I saw.” My voice was shaking.

“A person you saw,” Alice repeated, deadpan.

“Yeah.”

“And why’s this person got Hina disappearing for days on end, and when she finally does reappear, it’s to tell me one of Sugawara’s old ghosts is back and then immediately cause an inferno in the middle of the city?”

“Because—she thought it was Hikanome related. Guess—she was right?”

“Ezzen, you sound terrified. I’m not going to yell at you for her mess, I promise! Just walk me through it from the start. When did this happen?”

“Um. Sorry. When you took me to the paperwork place, once you left.”

“Wait, last week? Why didn’t you say—agh, Hina told you not to, didn’t she?”

I tried to affirm, admit that this was all because of a stupid omission that had gotten out of hand, but my voice didn’t work; I was too afraid. It came out as more of a choking rasp.

“Ezzen? Oh, that’s it, wasn’t it? You were—”

“I was scared,” I blubbered. “And she didn’t want you to worry! We were going to go shopping and if we told you then you would have told us to come right home and that made her really upset and she promised I’d be safe. And then after, when we did go back because of all the Thunder Horse stuff, that took priority, and then it was all a mess and she told me not to worry and she’d look into it on her own! I—I knew that was a bad idea at the time, but she really thought you shouldn’t worry about it on top of all the other ways I’ve been causing problems for you and—sorry. Sorry.”

I was making a scene with my confession, but I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to shut out the people around me.

“That’s—okay, shh, it’s okay,” she soothed. I felt even worse that she needed to calm me down because of this, not the magical disaster I was standing at the epicenter of. “Tell me what actually happened.”

“I was—I was at a crosswalk and I saw a…a girl. At first, I thought it was Hina, but it wasn’t, and something about her seemed dangerous, and she was surprised I saw her, and then she vanished right before Hina arrived. Like—like a breaking illusion, like the {MANIFEST}-{TRANSMIT} thing we did when—for Amethyst’s mantle, that’s where I got the idea. It’s—”

“Breathe, Ezzen. I understand, thank you. Deep breaths.”

I did as I was told, trying to steady my nerves. It felt good to get it off my chest, but some guilt still remained.

“…Sorry. Hina’s a…bad influence.”

“Trying to win points back with me? I’m not upset, really. Not at you, at any rate. Just remember that opsec applies to external leakage, not internal. The team should tell each other stuff, yeah?”

“Yeah…Is she fired?”

“Hina? No. There’ll have to be…consequences, but if we can pin this to Kimura, it’ll all work out, I think. Know anything about that?”

“No. Should I?” I winced and was grateful Alice couldn’t see it. “Hina’s—got me pretty much entirely in the dark about this. Did it all herself.”

“So you don’t know why she accused one of Hikanome’s top flamebearers of working with the person he carried out a coup against?”

“No.” When she put it like that, I felt very much in over my head and out of my element. “I don’t know anything about the politics or history here. Um…Kimura disappeared in the same way as the stalker. And you said Katagiri’s—”

“Takagiri. Ta-ka.”

“—T—Takagiri’s not a flamebearer, which means it would make sense if he’s the one providing the magic, so…hold on.” A dark thought had sprang up in that brief moment of interruption, one I was afraid to voice. “Did…did Hina plan this? Did she not tell me or you so that I could be bait today? Because they’re trapped now, right? Is that something she’d do?”

“No,” Alice countered immediately. “I…resent that you feel the need for that much suspicion, especially of Hina. She loves you too much to play it like that. This was just…bad timing, I expect. For all the…mess that this is, I can tell you with certainty that she wouldn’t have put you in the crossfire if she could have avoided it.”

“And everyone else?” I was getting more upset. “There are thousands and thousands of people here! I’m not worth that much more than them.”

“…She’s…listen, Ezzen, she’s more selective about how she values human life than I’d like, but we don’t have time to debate the morality of it—just know that I’m not happy about it either.”

“Fine, okay. Can I help?”

“Yes, with information first. When it comes to Sugawara…we thought the book was closed on that. He’s supposed to be in a medically induced coma in a prison in Yokohama, and everybody loyal to him should also be in prison or dead. Takagiri just…vanished. If she’s back, and Kimura is back under his thumb…” She took a deep breath. “Was Kimura being…suspicious? Anything that could back up Hina’s hearsay?”

“They’re all suspicious,” I muttered quietly enough that Hongo wouldn’t be able to hear. “Their ‘welcoming ceremony’ was suspicious as hell—they isolated me into a reality bubble thing—but…I don’t know. He wasn’t setting off any more alarm bells than the others were.”

“Isolated you?” There was alarm in her voice.

“Um—pulled me into a pocket dimension, alone. They babbled about my Flame and offered to do a whole medium ritual with Dad’s ghost. I couldn’t really tell if it was grift or if they genuinely believe in their own magic.”

“Later, Ezzen. God knows we have enough to bolt down already—wait, his ghost?”

“I said no. It was just bullshit, right?”

“…Right, yes. You said your stabilizer was ruined?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not thinking of resolving that with more blood magic to help Hina chase down Kimura, I hope?”

“No!” Christ, was that my reputation? Jumping at every opportunity to use blood magic to get myself into more trouble? “I—do you think Hina needs the help?”

“I…hope not,” she hedged. I didn’t like the uncertainty; in my mind, Hina’s physical capabilities were superior to all but the Vaetna. Alice explained. “Kimura was never a fighter, but Takagiri is dangerous, an unknown quantity, especially if they link up. Just—trust Hina has it under control, and we’ll keep another Radiance right by your side until we have you out of there. I don’t want to hear later that you were limping around covered in gore, sticking your spear where it doesn’t belong. Got it?”

“I wasn’t going to! But…I want to help with inferno control if I can.”

“Do you have inferno response training I don’t know about?”

“I don’t mean medical or crowd control. But—the park’s cut off by tidal shove, right? I can find the thinnest seam for you to punch through.”

Alice said something away from the phone, then picked it back up. “We don’t have readings yet, the crews are still setting up. Without Hina’s nose or Yuuka’s eye, Ai’s saying it’ll take hours and a whole server bank to chew through the data.”

I thought about this. This wasn’t a problem the Vaetna had to deal with; a vaet could literally cut through the storm. But we lesser flamebearers had to make do.

“Put Ai on, please.”

There was a rough, crackling noise as the phone changed hands. “Moshi moshi. Alice woke me up. Did you do something to your hair?”

“Later.” I was surprised at the grin that spread across my face at her voice. Finally, we were collaborating on something that mattered—saving people, not murder. “How many detection nodes are they setting up around the perimeter?”

It was good to hear her voice, but I was suddenly feeling the hurry; statistically, every minute we spent not evacuating civilians was taking weeks off the lifespans of at least a few of them, and I could potentially speed up the process of setting up a safe evacuation route by hours. I lowered the phone briefly and waved toward the group of Todai people, gesturing that I needed a pencil and paper.

“Sixty? Sixty-two. We’re pooling with Hikanome and the kanrikyoku—the Bureau.”

I had my phone in my lap and had pulled up the map of the park I had downloaded. I was facing east, and we were on the west side of the park, which meant—I glanced up at the sky, where the blue stain still remained in traces. The natural sky was otherwise visible overhead, but as I looked further down toward the horizon, the ripple at the borders of the park was combining in tides strong enough to distort the passage of light, let alone matter. I turned the map; Hina had come in from the northeast, so the backsplash and collapse of her cavitation trail would be concentrated on the west side of the park. That was making some assumptions about how Miyoko had set up her field—and how it even worked—but as far as I could tell, she still wasn’t conscious to ask about it.

“Any of them full-spectrum, 4-way flow?”

“Yes, ours. That’s only twelve. We don’t have many; usually Hina and Yuuka can do most of this without technology.”

“Well—” I glanced over at Yuuka, who was on her feet and talking to Amane, but still holding gauze over her magical eye. “That’s fine, I only need…eight of those on the southwest side bordering the VIP area, and three at points that superscribe a triangle around the park. Uh—” Clipboard came with my materials and helped me clear a spot on the table, and I scribbled out a rough blob of the park’s shape. “Thanks. Uh, Ai, I’m sending a picture of the layout on my phone.”

“Hai. I can picture it, I think—ah, there’s your photo. Alice—sou, acchi—” There was off-mic discussion for a moment. “She’s going to fly out the far ones. What are you planning, Ezzen?”

I had moved on to scribbling glyph notation onto the paper—where had Clipboard managed to procure graph paper in a situation like this? I drew lines, scribbled tension and offset and other notes, connecting shapes together. I didn’t need GWalk to know this would work.

“Gimme a few minutes. It’ll make more sense when I send the diagram.”

—

The chain of glyphs I drew was a bespoke data processing algorithm specifically adapted for the position and type of inputs the ripple sensors would give it. Generally, doing that kind of processing via glyphcraft wasn’t faster or easier than with a mundane computer, but this specific situation, simulating and guessing the behavior of ripple in a bounded space, was an exception.

I was banking on the fact that the field’s border nearest us, closest to Miyoko, would have formed one epicenter of the distortion effect; the other was obviously the stain in the sky, which marked the cluster of implosion points where Hina had first contacted the field. By using the ripple readings around those areas and the overall gradient of ripple tides picked up by the larger triangle of sensors that enclosed the whole park, it was possible to perform some clever reductions and triangulate the point where the effect separating inside from outside was weakest.

I lacked the skill to actually implement the glyph diagram with Flame—but that was the same as it had always been. Theory was my strong suit, not execution, and there was no reason for me to try to force it to work with blood magic. I had Ai implement the lattice instead, and once she understood what she was looking at, she found ways to streamline the process further, get even more computing power out of a relatively short chain of pink-oriented glyphs.

Eight minutes after I sent the diagram, we had the location of the best point of access around the perimeter of the park. It was closer to the south side than I’d have guessed, near where the map said there was a group of large theater tents. Amane and Hongo were occupied corralling and pacifying the bulk of the crowd in the northern section of the park, snuffing the worst areas of ripple, and coordinating what limited first aid we had; that left me and Yuuka to link with Alice from our side of the barrier.

It was determined that I was probably safest with Yuuka, even with her eye crippled. Alice didn’t want me around Hikanome’s people, in case there were more Sugawara loyalists, and I very much shared the feeling; plus, once we did get the tunnel open, I could get out immediately, and then we could completely deny Kimura and Takagiri access to me with them still inside the inferno. Clipboard helped me limp to one of the cars, and we set off toward the chosen site, with a scout car screening the off-road route before us.

“Today was supposed to be fun,” Yuuka groused from the seat in front of me. Clipboard and I were where we’d been on the way in, which put me diagonally behind Yuuka, unable to see most of her face past her bangs. Periodically, though, a trickle of blood would appear below the curtain of black hair, and she’d hurriedly wipe it away. “Stupid fuckin’ animal, had to turn it into a fight.”

We’d actually seen Hina again, very briefly. She’d blinked into existence in front of the car, ragdolled off the road, struck a tree so hard its trunk swayed with a crack, then vanished again as she rose to her feet. Evidently, she was fighting one of the two somewhere in the fourth-dimensional spaces outside reality—maybe even explicitly trying to cover me. I tried not to think about the possibility of an ambush as I looked out the window, toward the devastation caused by her explosive entrance.

The car wound its way around destroyed tents and signs of abandoned festivities. Some had been conventionally crushed by the hurricane-force winds caused by the pressure differential, but others were damaged in more esoteric ways, melted or overgrown or fractured as though reflected in a smashed mirror—signs of how lingering ripple had fragmented and distorted reality in those places. Some of them would return to normality as the larger inferno died down, but others would need to be stitched back together with magic to repair the local fabric of reality. For now, all that could be done was avoid them.

There were people, too. The tide of civilians—I tried not to think of them as the ‘survivors’, too morbid—flowed toward the park’s center and away from the most violently affected edges. Hongo and Amane’s efforts to herd them toward the safest regions of the park seemed to be mostly successful, but maybe every one in three were visibly sick or injured. Burns abounded, and a number of them seemed partially blinded by the immense flash of Hina’s impact, led by their fellows toward safety. Many of them were shivering, too sparsely dressed for the cold, and were using picnic blankets and stage costumes as makeshift outerwear to make up the difference.

While I’d been working on the glyphs, Hongo had reassured me that the human suffering on display wasn’t as bad as it looked; one of Hikanome’s premier miracles was curing ripple sickness, so most of “the flock” would make a full recovery from the magical effects. But even if I were to disregard my doubts about the veracity of said miracles, people’s symptoms would only increase in severity the longer they were trapped in here, so time was of the essence. The sooner we could get a tunnel established, the sooner we could evacuate the area of effect and get people proper medical care. That took precedent over my own desire to be away from the renewed threat of my stalker.

I’d have felt better if Yuuka’s eye was working. But the more I thought about it, wasn’t it weird that she’d been caught off guard even before Hina had caused the inferno? Shouldn’t she of all people have been prepared, have seen the whole incident coming through silver ghosts of the insane quantities of red and blue Hina would create? Curiosity nipped at me. The extent to which she had been caught off guard felt like it contradicted her foresight.

Prodding at her ego about it seemed like a bad idea, though.

“Is your eye okay?” I hazarded.

“Will be.”

“Will it…heal normally?”

“Normally? Sure, and pretty quick. But in the middle of an inferno zone? Might heal fine in here and then be munted when we get out.”

“Because of the white ripple,” I explained to nobody. “How does…looking through it work?”

She twisted in her seat to glare at me with her normal eye. “What’s with the questions?”

“Uh. I’ve been seeing a lot of magic I don’t understand lately. Like, I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the cult’s people claim to be able to do. So I’m trying to have an open mind, because understanding is better than not understanding.” I fumbled, unable to leave the statement there. “And if I can understand your eye better, I might be able to fix it now.”

“Ah, yeah, glyph genius, gonna solve all our problems for us. Because we’re not smart enough to do it ourselves.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It is.”

“Is this about me being a guy, again? I’m not—I don’t mean to ‘mansplain’ your own tech to you, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

Yuuka frowned. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No! I’m very confused right now!”

“Ugh. No, that’s not what I was insinuating. I’ve been told I don’t have to worry about that with you, anyway.”

Amane or Ai must have vouched for my character; I should thank them later. “Then what’s your problem with me? I mean—other than everything with Hina. I want to learn so I can help you; why’s that a bad thing?”

“She is the problem.”

“Alright, fine, fuck off, I guess,” I riposted, not quite able to disagree. “Just trying not to be dead weight.”

“Don’t start with the self-deprecating shit. ‘S not what I meant, and you’re not dead weight. At least you want to help, better than…” she gestured out the window, at the destroyed tents and refugees. “Her. That.”

“…Yeah. Not a very proportional response, is it? I mean, she’s here to protect me, and even I think this is overkill.”

“All this for your fuckin’…what did you call it? Stalker?”

“Takagiri, apparently. It was a…thing.” It was sort of a relief to at least have a name to the face, and an approximate location—even if I now knew that it was more than a one-off encounter. “But it doesn’t warrant this.”

“Wow, we agree on something.” She looked out the window, dabbing blood off her face again. “Yeah. She’s too focused on keeping them off of you when she coulda just…told us ‘n trusted us to do it. If it’s a problem for the whole team, we should handle it as a team.”

“Did she…I don’t know, expect you to see it coming?”

She must have seen something before or during the impact; the persistent blood on her cheek suggested she’d been affected intensely enough to overload the magitech organ, which made sense given the amplifying effect of the white ripple that surrounded us.

“Maybe. Don’t know if she was thinking that far ahead.”

“Alice said something similar.”

“Yeah. And—” she grunted with pained frustration, grabbing another piece of gauze. “Fuck. Like I said yesterday, eye was already on the fritz all week, but this is so big that I shouldn’t have been able to miss it. This is my fuckup too.”

—

We made it to the edge of the park a few minutes later. The inferno’s border wasn’t a solid wall separating us from the outside world; it was more like looking down into a body of water, gradually becoming denser and murkier the deeper you looked. There were flickers of motion within, a chaotic churn of magic that would corrupt and destroy any matter that dared enter it. Even going near it was a bad idea for unaugmented humans, so Clipboard and our driver were hanging back a healthy distance; Yuuka and I were afforded some protection by our Flames, which I could feel as a tingling across my body. Or maybe that was just the cold—either way, it was frightening to consider that the storm in front of us was the mildest point on the whole perimeter, according to the math.

We did have a few other human spectators: A crowd of Hikanome’s most die-hard believers, intent on seeing some of their divine lightbearers deliver them unto salvation. Many of them were praying. They at least had enough sense to not get in our way, but I wasn’t sure what they were so excited to see; Yuuka and I didn’t cut particularly heroic figures as we sat before the roiling storm of magic. That’s right, sat; I’d found a piece of shattered tent strut to use as a makeshift crutch, but when Yuuka’s complaints of a headache had turned into something akin to a migraine, she’d taken a seat on the grass rather than stand. I’d opted to join her. And we were both struggling with the elements; we’d thrown on extra layers to fight the chill, but huddled under them awkwardly. The ground was cold under me as we confirmed our position relative to Alice.

“Ten meters in front of us. You see her?”

“No. Should I?”

Another side effect of the ripple was severe radio interference, so we didn’t actually have contact with Alice. Supposedly, she was just on the other side of the storm.

“Nah, but I can hardly open my eyes to see for myself,” Yuuka admitted. “Hurts like a motherfucker. Let’s just get this done.”

“I’m, uh, following your lead here. Never done this before,” I reminded her, unreasonably ashamed of that fact. “Are we punching an actual tunnel, or just nullifying an area of the storm, or what?”

“Both. We’re locking down, Alice is punching through. You know how {ASH} residue is ripple-inert?”

“Ripple-invisible,” I clarified. “Not exactly going to block anything, is it?”

“The point is that we can make LM that does the same thing, a big block of it that the storm won’t fuck with, right through to the other side. Then Alice can punch a stabilizer lattice using that as a substrate. It’s just a fancy ward, but she has to do it from her side, because of, uh, relative reality baseline bullshit or something—you’re the math cunt, not me.”

“Yeah, I get it. Substrate is relative to our ripple-distorted space, lattice is relative to her baseline, bridges any desync. It’s really just LM?”

She shrugged. “We can’t just stab a spear right through it.”

“I—wasn’t thinking of doing it like Heung,” I lied. “Anyway, I can’t do {MANIFEST}.”

“That’s fine, just gimme your thread, I’ll stitch it in.”

It was kind of a relief to summon my Flame; as uncomfortable as the blazing-white fire was, I welcomed the heat in my numb fingers. There was no need to hurt it, either; I had more than enough pain to offer it right now—and it seemed eager to spring forth. I was distantly relieved that it only erupted from my hand’s scars, as usual; I’d been a little worried that all my raw, altered skin might serve as an ignition point and I’d go up in a self-inflicted magical fireball. The clump of pale, living magic coalesced into a spool of thread around my forearm and hand; that part had become familiar, though the quality of the thread still left a lot to be desired.

“Sorry about how rough it is—what the fuck?”

Yuuka’s Flame wasn’t white like mine, and it didn’t come from her hand. Her bangs were being pushed out of her face by wind that wasn’t there, exposing her damaged eye. It poured thick droplets of grey Flame tinged with dark red, oozing out from the gemstone eyeball like blood in zero-gravity. She snapped her hand outward, and the Flame-blobs followed, swirling around her arm and coating it like a grey gauntlet. She grinned at me wildly, eye bleeding magic, then beckoned for my thread. I held my forearm toward her, and she plucked the tip of my thread in her gauntlet and tugged.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. She closed her fist, then opened it slowly, and now a lattice of thread was spun between her fingers. She drew her hand back slowly, glyphs spinning themselves into existence in her hand’s wake, my thread woven through hers in a way that felt uncomfortably intimate. Then she clenched her fist again, and lattice…manifested.

It was a simple geometry, just a box the shape and size of an eighteen-wheeler’s trailer, lying on the grass and stretching from right in front of us into the storm until it faded from view. The light caught it wrong—it was a neutral grey, but it looked unshaded, and if I couldn’t see its silhouette, I wouldn’t have known where the front met the sides.

A cheer erupted from the cultists behind us, even though it was just a featureless block. For them, it must have been a miracle—I was just glad we’d done our part.

“That’s it?”

“For us, yeah.” Yuuka’s bangs had fallen back over the cursed eye, but did nothing to hide the self-satisfied look on her face. “Alice should be doing her part any second now.”

“And then we can start evac?”

“Yeah.”

Compared to the size of the park, this box would be one hell of a bottleneck, but that also worked to our advantage; Sugawara’s people wouldn’t be able to slip out undetected. Yuuka flicked her wrist, banishing her Flame and relinquishing mine, which hissed back toward me and returned to its spool, sending pinpricks through the bones of my arm. I let my Flame go and shook out my hand, wincing.

We waited. First a few seconds, then half a minute, then a full minute. She frowned.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Is that code for we’re about to be attacked, or more magical in nature?”

“Second.” She got to her feet, brushing the dirt off her butt. “I don’t—aw, fuck.”

“What?”

She sat back down, swearing. “Hina’s fucked it up worse than I thought.”

“Meaning?”

“This was a giant field of white ripple. So the storm’s bad, but more importantly…”

“…It’s amplified—more desync between inside and outside than there normally should be,” I finished, and she nodded. “So it won’t work?”

“It will, ‘cause Alice is strong, but she’ll—wait, do you know about that?”

“Uh. About what?”

“What happens when she uses too much magic.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. “Oh no. It’s going to push her…” I blanked on the word. “Dragon transformation?”

Yuuka nodded, lips pursed. “Dragon-ka.”

“We should stop her. There’s—there’s got to be another way.”

“Nope, not unless you want to wait for the storm to die off. Ai isn’t strong enough, and Hikanome’s other couple of flamebearers outside don’t—”

The featureless block of LM imploded with an awful whistling sound. The front end facing us crinkled inward like paper caught in a vacuum cleaner. We both flinched at the noise, covering our ears as the interior of the rectangular prism was devoured from within until it vanished, leaving only the edges of the box—and a stable tunnel to the outside world. There were familiar colors at the far end of the tunnel, the red-and-blue flashes of emergency lights silhouetting an unmistakable figure, one whose tail hung between her legs. I couldn’t make out how the magic had changed her body at this distance.

The people watching behind us cheered even louder. I was glad I didn’t know what they were saying, singing our praises or praying or just celebrating—but cultish worship aside, it was sort of a dream come true. I’d saved people with magic. It felt good. I turned to face them—

“I see her,” Yuuka said, urgency in her voice.

“What? Who? Alice?”

“Takagiri. My eye’s, uh, unclogging a bit now,” she explained. “She’s in the crowd, or will be soon. Was probably waiting for the tunnel to open so she could slip out after you.”

My tattoo itched as I scanned the crowd, looking for the face I remembered. No luck. “Fuck. So what do we do?”

“You? Stay out of my way.” There was something odd in her tone—I looked over and saw that the grin was crawling back over her face as she stared into the crowd. “I can see her. The rest doesn’t matter.”

2.13 Patreon Release

Have you ever seen one of those ultra-slow-motion videos of a bullet passing through ballistic gel? The projectile leaves a series of overlapping voids expanding behind it, the nominally solid gel encouraged by the extreme forces to bubble like a liquid. Milliseconds later, the forces that formed those bubbles have dissipated through the gel, so the cavity no longer has anything to hold it open and begins to collapse back in on itself. But the bullet drags outside air in behind it, and as the bubble collapses, that air is crushed and compressed, pressurized so rapidly that it ignites into a little explosion, a flare of light and heat that momentarily grants a second life to each bubble, glowing like fireworks before finally being snuffed for good.

The same thing happened when Hina struck the white-ripple field surrounding Yoyogi Park. The blazing blue comet pierced the field, and light exploded across the sky, a sapphire aurora both spilling outward beyond the barrier and following her in like leaking ink. Even though her mantle was barely visible as more than a pinpoint, I could see it was flaking apart, shards of LM trailing off of her and decohering into more ripple like the tail of a comet.

For a moment, there was equilibrium, the insane force of her arrival balanced against the field’s self-correcting shape. Then, like the ballistic gel, the field buckled and fell inward where she struck it, closing behind her and isolating pockets of the blue, compressing them inward, squeezing and concentrating the bubbles of ripple until they were a trail of blinding pinpoints suspended behind Hina’s dive.

Watching this collapse over a fraction of a second, I remember thinking how strange it was that there was no physical shockwave, no wind. As if responding to me, the colored guide-braziers flickered, and then their flames were being sucked inward too, an incandescent rainbow caught aswirl in the implosion of the ripple compressing Hina’s constellation of the Frozen Flame. The compression reached a peak, and like that hyper-pressurized air, the pinpoints detonated, tearing open Miyoko’s field. It curdled and peeled back, whips of white and yellow sparks dancing and igniting at the seam before they were overtaken by the tide of sapphire light. For a brief and blinding moment, Hina outshone the sun and dyed the whole world blue.

The sound reached my ears moments later, and everybody, flamebearers included, instinctively flinched and ducked for cover at the deafening, roaring rumble that I felt as much as heard, rattling my entire body, terrifying in a primal sense like a peal of thunder or erupting volcano; something early man would have worshiped out of fear. I remember that feeling more clearly than any other part, how my legs trembled and I hunched on pure instinct, how everybody was screaming, including me.

That was all before the ripple reached us.

I cried out as the lattice of my prosthetic flickered, red ripple hijacking my nerves and sending lancing pain from foot to brain stem while my stabilizer unit in my jacket pocket tried and failed to compensate. I fell to one knee, then on my arse, gasping and gritting my teeth as the pain overwhelmed my other senses. The device in my pocket was turning hot—an acrid smell hit my nose, and I tried to squirm out of the jacket even while phantom cramps made it feel like my foot was about to fold itself in half. Somebody helped pull the jacket off of me, and I immediately curled up on the pillow I’d been sitting on, cowering under the collapsing sky and trying not to scream at the venom in my nerves.

Over long, agonizing seconds, the pain ebbed downward from its peak. Gasping, ragged breaths became shallower and more even—and colder, as nature reasserted itself. The temperature was plummeting; with the barrier between hot and cold air destroyed, the former drove upward, and the cold air surrounding the park rushed inward, frigid, howling wind kicking up grit and shearing at my sensitive skin through the gossamer protection of my shirt. Familiar aches invaded my fingers, and soon I found myself curled up not in a futile attempt to escape pain but as a way of preserving precious body heat as winter announced its return.

I gritted my teeth; my fragile meat-body wanted to stay where it was and huddle for warmth, but I couldn’t afford to. Even without looking, I knew that this was an apocalyptically dangerous situation for the hundreds of thousands of average humans in the park. There was commotion around me, voices and shuffling, and I could hear yelling and screaming and sirens in the distance. The real flamebearers, the Radiances and Hikanome’s damn cultists, were probably already mobile and trying to help people, not fetal and blubbering. I had to get up and join them—it was pathetic to have been knocked flat on my ass.

“C’mon,” I murmured to myself, somewhere between a whisper and subvocalization. “The Spire stands, so can you.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Up we go. One, two—”

I sat up and cracked my eyes open.

Everything was dyed yellow. In that second or two of the detonation, the wash of blue light had indoctrinated my eyes to its overwhelming hue, so the natural sunlight seemed all wrong—all the colors were out of balance. The sky, actually a thin blue, appeared to be sickly orange. The remnants of brightest blue ink in the sky looked paler by the moment, thinning and dissipating into the aether. Distantly, I was relieved; that was a good sign as far as inferno intensity was concerned—no self-sustaining engine of magical tides, nor a wound in the world. Tokyo’s sky would not gain a second scar like the one over its harbor.

But the park still looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. It was an absurd relief to my social anxiety that I was not the only one who’d been cowering on the ground, bowled over by the sheer scale of forces—the entire park had. The spindly trees had remained standing, but I could see the big tents laying half-collapsed, smaller ones uprooted and tossed around. The tall braziers of colored flame that were supposed to mark districts of the festival stood dead and askew.

As for my immediate surroundings, I was surrounded by commotion. A cluster of people stood and knelt on the other side of the table from me, where Miyoko had been sitting. I spotted her at the center of the press of people, lying propped up on a hastily-constructed stack of the pillows we’d been sitting on. The high priestess must have been the one maintaining the field, and thus took the full backlash of Hina’s arrival. But she wasn’t my highest priority anyway. I turned, rubbing my hands together rapidly to stave off the chill. I’d only been in the false warmth for an hour, tops—was the natural temperature supposed to feel this cold?

“Amane?”

A distorted, warbling ring came from behind me by way of reply. The Amethyst Radiance had mantled, standing tall, a purple statue unscathed by the devastation surrounding her. Once I made eye contact with her—or close enough—she acknowledged me with a nod, then her spike-snout swung back toward the chaos in the festival’s main section. Todai’s people stood clustered around her legs, barely coming up to her waist, like children against her stature. Heliotrope sat unmantled on her shoulder, leaning against her head. She was on the phone with her left hand while she dabbed something off her face with a napkin scrounged from the table—blood, I realized, trickling from under her bangs. I winced.

“You alright?”

She lowered the phone momentarily to curse at me. That was probably fair; I didn’t have better words for the destruction my girlfriend had wrought. Had her first rescue of me also been so explosive, when she’d saved me from the Peacies and that buried car? Or did the apocalyptic suddenness of her arrival mean she thought I was in even more danger now? It certainly displayed a stunning disregard for collateral damage; even if nobody had died in that initial flashbang of contact, the ripple churning overhead would have already begun to seep into people’s flesh. I needed to help contain it, or evacuate civilians, or both. What about Kimura?

I started to get to my feet and start making myself useful, but didn’t get all the way up before my ankle wobbled beneath me and I remembered that my stabilizer had been rendered useless. I reached for my cast-off suit jacket—it was warm, which I tried to savor while gingerly feeling toward the pocket. The stabilizer unit itself was cooked, too hot to touch; the component meant to convert interfering ripple to harmless heat had been overfed by the extreme conditions and amplified by the white surrounding it. The cocktail of ripple had gone to town on the disc, partially crushing it into more of a V-shape. It was fucked. I carefully shook the useless puck of ruined magitech out of the pocket, and it crumbled when it hit the plastic tarp; {ASH} residue. Don’t breathe that stuff.

I shrugged my jacket back on, grateful that at least the device’s failure had left me with a warm outer layer. Then I tried to kneel again, putting my bad foot under me to see if the prosthetic itself had also been fried. It seemed like the stabilizer had taken the brunt of it—so no walking for me, but at least the basic analgomantics in the prosthetic were working. I sat back down, trying to stay huddled up for warmth. There wasn’t much point in standing; it wasn’t like I’d be much use in the pursuit even if I was fully mobile—

A sound like tearing metal erupted next to me. Adrenaline surged. I flinched away, scrambling backward from—

“Cutie! Hi! Love the hair!”

Hina looked untouched by her meteoric arrival—but she wasn’t in her mantle. I suspected it had been sacrificed as ablative shielding.

“Hina? Christ, are you okay? What the fuck was that? A fucking inferno—”

She flowed forward, standing over me and bending over at the waist with feline flexibility, putting her hands on my shoulders and nuzzling the top of my head.

“Shh. Can’t stick around; I gotta get him. Listen—he’s not working alone.”

I automatically reached up and put my hands over hers. Most of me was still shaken and terrified by the forces she’d just unleashed, but her touch was soothing in a small way.

“Kimura? I don’t—he’s working with the stalker, right?”

“Yeah. Haven’t found her, but it was his Flame. But—there’s others. Here.”

“Hina, clarify, please. Other stalkers? Other flamebearers?”

By now, the others were taking notice of her presence. The Hikanome and Todai entourages had turned toward us. Yuuka was disembarking from Amane’s shoulder, and Hongo stepped to the front of the crowd surrounding Miyoko. Hina straightened and raised her voice, addressing us all, but didn’t abandon her protective position over me.

“Other Sugawara loyalists,” she growled.

A cacophony of confused, overlapping Japanese exploded from both groups. I could hear Amane’s wind-chime voice over the group, but she wasn’t the one who reestablished order. That was Hongo, speaking in a resonant voice amplified and tinged by magic. He barked something out that made everybody quiet down, then pointed at Hina.

“Fox. That’s a severe accusation.”

“Don’t trust my nose, Nacchan?”

“Miyoko did,” Yuuka cut in, typing one-handed on her phone. “Called him a traitor right before he vanished. You got a trail?”

Hina nodded, idly running her fingers through my long hair. She spoke in a rush. “He’s shifting and hopping all over, but still in the park for now, ‘cause crossing the seams after what I just did to Shiny’s bubble would be suicide. I’m gonna find him, you guys find the other. The name is Takagiri Izumi. Ring a bell?”

Hongo didn’t visibly respond to the name, but a few of Hikanome’s people behind him did. Yuuka pulled the blood-stained napkin away from her head and inspected it, not quite able to snarl through her wince.

“I know her, yeah. But—” she gestured around. “Look around, Hina. Innocents first. Clean up your fuckin’ mess.”

“C’mon, Yuuka, I thought you’d be totally—”

Hongo shook out his robe. “The flock is terrified and in danger because of what you just did, fox. I would not call it very mahou shoujo to put civilians in the crossfire like this, and you’re interfering with our internal affairs in doing so.”

“Bite me, Nacchan. They’re after cutie, and I’m not letting that happen.”

A new voice interrupted, crackling through distorted cell signal from Yuuka’s phone. “Leave disciplining her to us, Hongo-san.”

A smile broke across Hongo’s face. He gave Alice’s speakerphone voice a courtier’s bow, deep and flourished with hand gestures. Many of Hikanome’s people bowed as well.

“I would not dream of it, Lady Dragon, my apologies. It’s a relief to hear your voice in this time of crisis. Will you be gracing us with your presence in person?”

“The inferno’s cut the park off from the rest of the city. I’m going to see if we can open up a stable passage for emergency services.”

My skin crawled. I whispered up at Hina. “We’re trapped?”

Hina shrugged. “So’s he.” She knelt to nuzzle my face. “We’ll get him, cutie, and whoever else is after you. Promise.”

A staticy sigh came through the speakerphone. “—It is what it is. Yuuka, Amane—help Hikanome tend to their people, stabilize this—this clusterfuck. Once we find an entry point, I’m going to need your help to punch through, but that’ll be a few hours.”

What went unsaid was those few hours would mean enough ripple exposure that we’d have dead or dying civilians by the time the evac route was open. The top priority of flamebearers—decent ones, at least—during inferno response and cleanup was to shield the humans, but even with five active flamebearers we’d be hard pressed to shield everybody completely. The park was huge, and therefore so was the inferno.

“What about the other one?” Yuuka asked. “Takagiri? Find her after?”

“I can’t confirm Hina’s information yet, and even if they are Sugawara’s people, they’re not going anywhere until we have a tunnel open, and then they’ll have to go through me. Hina, I need you to find where the rift’s weakest and help me anchor the—”

“Mou kiechatta,” Yuuka groaned.

My girlfriend had vanished when Alice had begun to give orders, leaving no trace but the ghost of a kiss on my forehead. Was catching Kimura more important to her than human lives?

“Fine. That can keep—is Ezzen there?”

“Yeah,” I called out.

“Give him the phone,” she instructed Yuuka. The Heliotrope Radiance reluctantly passed it over, turning off the speaker as she did. I raised the phone to my ear, huddling under my thin jacket.

“Ezzen,” Alice sighed. “What kind of mess have you gotten into?”

“Uh, ripple shockwave toasted my stabilizer, so I’m not exactly mobile.”

“That’s—fine, you’re staying right there anyway. But, er, that’s not really what I meant; Hina only gave me very piecemeal information, and she said you’d fill in the rest. So please explain to me: what the hell is ‘the stalker?’”

I swallowed.

“I—um—I don’t really know? It’s…a person I saw.” My voice was shaking.

“A person you saw,” Alice repeated, deadpan.

“Yeah.”

“And why’s this person got Hina disappearing for days on end, and when she finally does reappear, it’s to cause an inferno in the middle of the city?”

“Because—she thought it was Hikanome related.”

“Ezzen, you sound terrified. I’m not going to yell at you for her mess, I promise! Just walk me through it from the start. When did this happen?”

“Um. Sorry. When you took me to the paperwork place, once you left.”

“Wait, last week? Why didn’t you say—agh, Hina told you not to, didn’t she?”

I tried to affirm, admit that this was all because of a stupid omission that had gotten out of hand, but my voice didn’t work; I was too afraid. It came out as more of a choking rasp.

“Ezzen? Oh, that’s it, wasn’t it? You were—”

“I was scared,” I blubbered. “And she didn’t want you to worry! We were going to go shopping and if we told you then you would have told us to come right home and that made her really upset and she promised I’d be safe. And then after, when we did go back because of all the Thunder Horse stuff, that took priority, and then it was all a mess and she told me not to worry and she’d look into it on her own! I—I knew that was a bad idea at the time, but she really thought you shouldn’t worry about it on top of all the other ways I’ve been causing problems for you and—sorry. Sorry.”

I was making a scene with my confession, but I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to shut out the people around me.

“That’s—okay, shh, it’s okay,” she soothed. I felt even worse that she needed to calm me down because of this, not the magical disaster I was standing at the epicenter of. “Tell me what actually happened.”

“I was—I was at a crosswalk and I saw a…a girl. At first, I thought it was Hina, but it wasn’t, and something about her seemed dangerous, and she was surprised I saw her, and then she vanished right before Hina arrived. Like—like a breaking illusion, like the {MANIFEST}-{TRANSMIT} thing we did when—for Amethyst’s mantle, that’s where I got the idea. It’s—”

“Breathe, Ezzen. I understand, thank you. Deep breaths.”

I did as I was told, trying to steady my nerves. It felt good to get it off my chest, but some guilt still remained.

“…Sorry. Hina’s a…bad influence.”

“Trying to win points back with me? I’m not upset, really. Not at you, at any rate. Just remember that opsec applies to external leakage, not internal. The team should tell each other stuff, yeah?”

“Yeah…Is she fired?”

“Hina? No. There’ll have to be…consequences, but a lot of it depends on whether her accusation about this being connected to Sugawara holds any water. Know anything about that?”

“No. Should I?” I winced and was grateful Alice couldn’t see it. “Hina’s—got me pretty much entirely in the dark about this. Did it all herself.”

“So you don’t know why she accused one of Hikanome’s top flamebearers of working with the person he carried out a coup against?”

“No.” When she put it like that, I felt very much in over my head and out of my element. “I don’t know anything about the politics here, but Kimura disappeared in the same way the stalker did when Hina showed up just now, so…hold on.” I was having a dark thought, one I was afraid to voice. “Did…did she plan this? Did she not tell me or you so that I could be bait today? Because he’s trapped now, right? Is that something she’d do?”

“No,” Alice countered immediately. “I…resent that you feel the need for that much suspicion, especially of Hina. She loves you too much to play it like that. This was just bad timing, I expect. For all the…mess that this is, I can tell you with certainty that she wouldn’t have put you in the crossfire if she could have avoided it.”

“And everyone else?” I was getting more upset. “There are thousands and thousands of people here! I’m not worth that much more than them.”

“…She’s…listen, Ezzen, she’s more selective about how she values human life than I’d like, but we don’t have time to debate the morality of it—just know that I’m not happy about it either.”

“Fine, okay. Can I help?”

“Yes, with information first. When it comes to Sugawara…we thought the book was closed on that. He’s supposed to be in a medically-induced coma in a prison in Yokohama, and everybody loyal to him should also be in prison or dead. If there are people actually working for him and going after you…” She took a deep breath. “Was Kimura being…suspicious? Anything that could back up the theory?”

“They’re all suspicious,” I muttered quietly enough that Hongo wouldn’t be able to hear. “Their ‘welcoming ceremony’ was suspicious as hell—they isolated me into a reality bubble thing—but…I don’t know. He wasn’t setting off any more alarm bells than the others were.”

“Isolated you?” There was alarm in her voice.

“Um—pulled me into a pocket dimension, alone. They babbled about my Flame and offered to do a whole medium ritual with Dad’s ghost. I couldn’t really tell if it was grift or if they genuinely believe in their own magic.”

“Later, Ezzen. God knows we have enough to bolt down already—wait, his ghost?”

“I said no. It was just bullshit, right?”

“…Right, yes. You said your stabilizer was ruined?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not thinking of resolving that with more blood magic to help Hina chase down Kimura, I hope?”

“No!” Christ, was that my reputation? Jumping at every opportunity to use blood magic to get myself into more trouble? “I—do you think Hina needs the help?”

“I…hope not,” she hedged. I didn’t like the uncertainty; in my mind, Hina’s physical capabilities were superior to all but the Vaetna. Alice explained. “Kimura was never a fighter, but if he’s actually been working for Sugawara, who knows what else we don’t know about him. But either way, I don’t want to hear later that you were limping around covered in gore, sticking your spear where it doesn’t belong. Got it?”

“I wasn’t going to! I want to help with inferno control if I can.”

“Do you have inferno response training I don’t know about?”

“I don’t mean medical or crowd control. But—the park’s cut off by tidal shove, right? I can find the thinnest seam for you to punch through.”

Alice said something away from the phone, then picked it back up. “We don’t have readings yet, the crews are still setting up. Even if we did, Ai’s saying it’ll take hours and a whole server bank to chew through the data, and I’m pretty sure all you’ve got is your phone.”

“Put Ai on.”

There was a rough, crackling noise as the phone changed hands. “Moshi moshi. Alice woke me up. Did you do something to your hair?”

“Later.” I was surprised at the grin that spread across my face at her voice. Finally, we were collaborating on something that mattered—saving people, not murder. “How many detection nodes are they setting up around the perimeter?”

It was good to hear her voice, but I was suddenly feeling the hurry; statistically, every minute we spent not evacuating civilians was taking weeks off the lifespans of at least a few of them, and I could potentially speed up the process of setting up a safe evacuation route by hours. I lowered the phone briefly and waved toward the group of Todai people, gesturing that I needed a pencil and paper.

“Sixty? Sixty-two. We’re pooling with Hikanome and the kanrikyoku—the Bureau.”

I had my phone in my lap and had pulled up the map of the park I had downloaded. I was facing east, and we were on the west side of the park, which meant—I glanced up at the sky, where the blue stain still remained in traces. The natural sky was otherwise visible overhead, but as I looked further down toward the horizon, the ripple at the borders of the park was combining in tides strong enough to distort the passage of light, let alone matter. I turned the map; Hina had come in from the northeast, so the backsplash and collapse of her cavitation trail would be concentrated on the west side of the park. That was making some assumptions about how Miyoko had set up her field—and how it even worked—but as far as I could tell, she still wasn’t conscious to ask about it.

“Any of them full spectrum, 4-way flow?”

“Yes, ours. That’s only twelve. Usually Hina and Yuuka can do most of this without technology.”

“Well—” I glanced over at Yuuka, who was on her feet and talking to Amane, but still holding gauze over her magical eye. “Yuuka’s got a problem of some kind, and Hina’s busy, but that’s fine, I only need…eight of those on the southwest side bordering the VIP area, and three at points that superscribe a triangle around the park. Uh—” Clipboard came with my materials and helped me clear a spot on the table, and I scribbled out a rough blob of the park’s shape. “Thanks. Uh, Ai, I’m sending a picture of the layout on my phone.”

“Hai. I can picture it, I think—ah, there’s your photo. Alice—sou, acchi—” There was off-mic discussion for a moment. “She’s going to fly out the far ones. What are you planning, Ezzen?”

I had moved on to scribbling glyph notation onto the paper—where had Clipboard managed to procure graph paper in a situation like this? I drew lines, scribbled tension and offset and other notes, connecting shapes together. I didn’t need GWalk to know this would work.

“Gimme a few minutes. It’ll make more sense when I send the diagram.”

—

The chain of glyphs I drew was a bespoke data processing algorithm specifically adapted for the position and type of inputs the ripple sensors would give it. Generally, doing that kind of processing via glyphcraft wasn’t faster or easier than with a mundane computer, but this specific situation, simulating and guessing the behavior of ripple in a bounded space, was an exception.

I was banking on the fact that the field’s border nearest us, closest to Miyoko, would have formed one epicenter of the distortion effect; the other was obviously the stain in the sky, which marked the cluster of implosion points where Hina had first contacted the field. By using the ripple readings around those areas and the overall gradient of ripple tides picked up by the larger triangle of sensors that enclosed the whole park, it was possible to perform some clever reductions and triangulate the point where the effect separating inside from outside was weakest.

I lacked the skill to actually implement the glyph diagram with Flame—but that was the same as it had always been. Theory was my strong suit, not execution, and there was no reason for me to try to force it to work with blood magic. I had Ai implement the lattice instead, and once she understood what she was looking at, she found ways to streamline the process further, get even more computing power out of a relatively short chain of pink-oriented glyphs.

Eight minutes after I sent the diagram, we had the location of the best point of access around the perimeter of the park. It was closer to the south side than I’d have guessed, near where the map said there was a group of large theater tents. Amane and Hongo were occupied corralling the bulk of the crowd in the northern section of the park, snuffing the worst areas of ripple, and coordinating what limited first aid we had; that left me and Yuuka to link with Alice from our side of the barrier. Clipboard helped me limp to one of the cars, and we set off toward the chosen site. I was really only coming along for moral support and because Alice didn’t like the idea of leaving me solely with Hikanome’s people under the circumstances. Compared to them, Yuuka was at least slightly more tolerable to be around. Slightly.

“Today was supposed to be fun,” she groused from the seat in front of me. Clipboard and I were where we’d been on the way in, which put me diagonally behind Yuuka, unable to see most of her face past her bangs. Periodically, though, a trickle of blood would appear below the curtain of black hair, and she’d hurriedly wipe it away. “Stupid fuckin’ animal, had to turn it into a fight.”

We’d actually seen Hina again, very briefly. She’d blinked into existence in front of the car, ragdolled off the road, struck a tree so hard its trunk swayed with a crack, then vanished again as she rose to her feet. Evidently she was fighting Kimura, or somebody helping him, somewhere in the fourth-dimensional spaces outside reality. At least that was away from the civilians—but that didn’t make up for the devastation caused by her explosive entrance.

The car wound its way around destroyed tents and signs of abandoned festivities. Some had been conventionally crushed by the hurricane-force winds caused by the pressure differential, but others were damaged in more esoteric ways, melted or overgrown or fractured as though reflected in a smashed mirror—signs of how lingering ripple had fragmented and distorted reality in those places. Some of them would return to normality as the larger inferno died down, but others would need to be stitched back together with magic to repair the local fabric of reality. For now, all that could be done was avoid them.

There were people, too. The tide of civilians—I tried not to think of them as the ‘survivors’, too morbid— flowed toward the park’s center and away from the most violently affected edges. Hongo and Amane’s efforts to herd them toward the safest regions of the park seemed to be mostly successful, but maybe every one in three were visibly sick or injured. Burns abounded, and a number of them seemed partially blinded by the immense flash of Hina’s impact, led by their fellows toward safety. Many of them were shivering, too sparsely dressed for the cold, and were using picnic blankets and stage costumes as makeshift outerwear to make up the difference.

Hongo had reassured me that it wasn’t as bad as it looked; one of Hikanome’s premier miracles was curing ripple sickness, so most of “the flock” would make a full recovery from the magical effects. But even if I were to disregard my doubts about the veracity of said miracles—people’s symptoms would only increase in severity the longer they were trapped in here, so time was of the essence. The sooner we could get a tunnel established, the sooner we could evacuate the area of effect and get people proper medical care. I hoped the blinded victims could make a full recovery, by miracle or otherwise.

Blindness. Yuuka had been partially blinded, too, though just in her magical eye. But wasn’t that weird? Shouldn’t she of all people have been prepared, have seen the whole incident coming through silver ghosts of the insane quantities of red and blue Hina would create? Curiosity nipped at me. Obviously she’d seen something; the persistent blood on her cheek suggested she’d been affected intensely enough to overload the magitech organ. The overload wasn’t surprising, given the amplifying effect of the white ripple that surrounded us, but the extent to which she had been caught off guard felt like it contradicted her foresight.

Prodding at her ego about it seemed like a bad idea, though.

“Is your eye okay?” I hazarded.

“Will be.”

“Will it…heal normally?”

“Normally? Sure, and pretty quick. But in the middle of an inferno zone? Might heal fine in here and then be munted when we get out.”

“Because of the white ripple,” I explained to nobody. “How does…looking through it work?”

She twisted in her seat to glare at me with her normal eye. “What’s with the questions?”

“Uh. I’ve been seeing a lot of magic I don’t understand lately. Like, I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the cult’s people claim to be able to do. So I’m trying to have an open mind, because understanding is better than not understanding.” I fumbled, unable to leave the statement there. “And if I can understand your eye better, I might be able to fix it now.”

“Ah, yeah, glyph genius, gonna solve all our problems for us. Because we’re not smart enough to do it ourselves.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It is.”

“Is this about me being a guy, again? I’m not—I don’t mean to ‘mansplain’ your own tech to you, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

Yuuka frowned. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No! I’m very confused right now!”

“Ugh. No, that’s not what I was insinuating. I’ve been told I don’t have to worry about that with you, anyway.”

Amane or Ai must have vouched for my character; I should thank them later. “Then what’s your problem with me? I mean—other than everything with Hina. I want to learn so I can help you; why’s that a bad thing?”

“She is the problem.”

“Alright, fine, fuck off, I guess,” I riposted, not quite able to disagree. “Just trying not to be dead weight.”

“Don’t start with the self-deprecating shit. ‘S not what I meant, and you’re not dead weight. At least you want to help, better than…” she gestured out the window, at the destroyed tents and refugees. “Her. That.”

“…Yeah. Not a very proportional response, is it?”

“If it’s to get Sugawara’s people, I get it.” She looked out the window, dabbing blood off her face again. “But that’s not what it was about for her. She’s too focused on keeping them off of you when she coulda just…told us ‘n trusted us to do it. If it’s a problem for the whole team, we should handle it as a team.”

“Did she…I don’t know, expect you to see it coming?” That seemed like a reasonable explanation.

“Maybe. Don’t know if she was thinking that far ahead.”

“Alice said something similar.”

“Yeah. And—” she grunted with pained frustration, grabbing another piece of gauze. “Fuck. Like I said yesterday, eye was already on the fritz all week, but this is so big that I shouldn’t have been able to miss it. This is my fuckup too.”

—

We made it to the edge of the park a few minutes later. The inferno’s border wasn’t a solid wall separating us from the outside world; it was more like looking down into a body of water, gradually becoming denser and murkier the deeper you looked. There were flickers of motion within, a chaotic churn of magic that would corrupt and destroy any matter that dared enter it. Even going near it was a bad idea for unaugmented humans, so Clipboard and our driver were hanging back a healthy distance; Yuuka and I were afforded some protection by our Flames, which I could feel as a tingling across my body. Or maybe that was just the cold—either way, it was frightening to consider that the storm in front of us was the mildest point on the whole perimeter, according to the math.

We did have a few other human spectators: A crowd of Hikanome’s most die-hard believers, intent on seeing some of their divine lightbearers deliver them unto salvation. Many of them were praying. They at least had enough sense to not get in our way, but I wasn’t sure what they were so excited to see; Yuuka and I didn’t cut particularly heroic figures as we sat before the roiling storm of magic. That’s right, sat; I’d found a piece of shattered tent strut to use as a makeshift crutch, but when Yuuka’s complaints of a headache had turned into something akin to a migraine, she’d taken a seat on the grass rather than stand. I’d opted to join her. And we were both struggling with the elements; we’d thrown on extra layers to fight the chill, but huddled under them awkwardly. The ground was cold under me.

“Ten meters in front of us. You see her?”

“No. Should I?”

Another side effect of the ripple was severe radio interference, so we didn’t actually have contact with Alice. Supposedly, she was just on the other side of the storm.

“Nah, but I can hardly open my eyes to see for myself,” Yuuka admitted. “Hurts like a motherfucker. Let’s just get this done.”

“I’m, uh, following your lead here. Never done this before,” I reminded her, unreasonably ashamed of that fact. “Are we punching an actual tunnel, or just nullifying an area of the storm, or what?”

“Both. We’re locking down, Alice is punching through. You know how {ASH} residue is ripple-inert?”

“Ripple-invisible,” I clarified. “Not exactly going to block anything, is it?”

“The point is that we can make LM that does the same thing, a big block of it that the storm won’t fuck with, right through to the other side. Then Alice can punch a stabilizer lattice using that as a substrate. It’s just a fancy ward, but she has to do it from her side, because of, uh, relative reality baseline bullshit or something—you’re the math cunt, not me.”

“Yeah, I get it. Substrate is relative to our ripple-distorted space, lattice is relative to her baseline, bridges any desync. It’s really just LM?”

She shrugged. “We can’t just stab a spear right through it.”

“I—wasn’t thinking of doing it like Heung,” I lied. “Anyway, I can’t do {MANIFEST}.”

“That’s fine, just gimme your thread, I’ll stitch it in.”

It was kind of a relief to summon my Flame; as uncomfortable as the blazing-white fire was, I welcomed the heat in my numb fingers. There was no need to hurt it, either; I had more than enough pain to offer it right now—and it seemed eager to spring forth. I was distantly relieved that it only erupted from my hand’s scars, as usual; I’d been a little worried that all my raw, altered skin might serve as an ignition point and I’d go up in a self-inflicted magical fireball. The clump of pale, living magic coalesced into a spool of thread around my forearm and hand; that part had become familiar, though the quality of the thread still left a lot to be desired.

“Sorry about how rough it is—what the fuck?”

Yuuka’s Flame wasn’t white like mine, and it didn’t come from her hand. Her bangs were being pushed out of her face by wind that wasn’t there, exposing her damaged eye. It poured thick droplets of grey Flame tinged with dark red, oozing out from the gemstone eyeball like blood in zero-gravity. She snapped her hand outward, and the Flame-blobs followed, swirling around her arm and coating it like a grey gauntlet. She grinned at me wildly, eye bleeding magic, then beckoned for my thread. I held my forearm toward her, and she plucked the tip of my thread in her gauntlet and tugged.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. She closed her fist, then opened it slowly, and now a lattice of thread was spun between her fingers. She drew her hand back slowly, glyphs spinning themselves into existence in her hand’s wake, my thread woven through hers in a way that felt uncomfortably intimate. Then she clenched her fist again, and lattice…manifested.

It was a simple geometry, just a box the shape and size of an eighteen-wheeler’s trailer, lying on the grass and stretching from right in front of us into the storm until it faded from view. The light caught it wrong—it was a neutral grey, but it looked unshaded, and if I couldn’t see its silhouette, I wouldn’t have known where the front met the sides.

A cheer erupted from the cultists behind us, even though it was just a featureless block. For them, it must have been a miracle—I was just glad we’d done our part.

“That’s it?”

“For us, yeah.” Yuuka’s bangs had fallen back over the cursed eye, but did nothing to hide the self-satisfied look on her face. “Alice should be doing her part any second now.”

“And then we can start evac?”

“Yeah.”

Of course, that would also create an escape route for Kimura and the other Sugawara loyalist, but compared to the size of the park, this box would be one hell of a bottleneck; they wouldn’t be able to slip out undetected. Yuuka flicked her wrist, banishing her Flame and relinquishing mine, which hissed back toward me and returned to its spool, sending pinpricks through the bones of my arm. I let my Flame go and shook out my hand, wincing.

We waited. First a few seconds, then half a minute, then a full minute. She frowned.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Is that code for we’re about to be attacked, or more magical in nature?”

“Second.” She got to her feet, brushing the dirt off her butt. “I don’t—aw, fuck.”

“What?”

She sat back down, swearing. “Hina’s fucked it up worse than I thought.”

“Meaning?”

“This was a giant field of white ripple. So the storm’s bad, but more importantly…”

“…It’s amplified—more desync between inside and outside than there normally should be,” I finished, and she nodded. “So it won’t work?”

“It will, ‘cause Alice is strong, but she’ll—wait, do you know about that?”

“Uh. About what?”

“What happens when she uses too much magic.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. “Oh no. It’s going to push her…” I blanked on the word. “Dragon transformation?”

Yuuka nodded, lips pursed. “Dragon-ka.”

“We should stop her. There’s—there’s got to be another way.”

“Nope, not unless you want to wait for the storm to die off. Ai isn’t strong enough, and Hikanome’s other couple of flamebearers outside don’t—”

The featureless block of LM imploded with an awful whistling sound. The front end facing us crinkled inward like paper caught in a vacuum cleaner. We both flinched at the noise, covering our ears as the interior of the rectangular prism was devoured from within until it vanished, leaving only the edges of the box—and a stable tunnel to the outside world. There were familiar colors at the far end of the tunnel, the red and blue flashes of emergency lights silhouetting an unmistakable figure, one whose tail hung between her legs. I couldn’t make out how the magic had changed her body at this distance.

The people watching behind us cheered even louder. I was glad I didn’t know what they were saying, singing our praises or praying or just celebrating—but cultish worship aside, it was sort of a dream come true. I’d saved people with magic. It felt good. I turned to face them—

“I see her,” Yuuka said, urgency in her voice.

“What? Who? Alice?”

“Takagiri. The other Sugawara loyalist Hina mentioned. My eye’s, uh, unclogging a bit now,” she explained. “She’s in the crowd, or will be soon. Was probably waiting for the tunnel to open so she could slip out.”

“What’s she look like? Not a flamebearer, right?”

“No, but she’s armed, and everyone around her are effectively hostages.”

My tattoo itched. She could well be the actual stalker, the person I’d seen on the street. Hina hadn’t outright said so, but she’d named her alongside Kimura. “Fuck. So what do we do?”

“You? Stay out of my way.” There was something odd in her tone—I looked over and saw that the grin was crawling back over her face as she stared into the crowd. “I can see her. The rest doesn’t matter.”

No Side Story 1/31 + Rewards Discussion

No side story on this break week! Sorry, Vaetna-tier patrons; I'll be trying to get arc 2 done during that week!

Also, during the longer break after arc 2 finishes, I'm thinking about shuffling around the Patreon rewards. I'll probably make side stories available to all patron levels, but give Vaetna-tier patrons a longer backlog of advance chapters to compensate (3 weeks?). The goal is to give patrons of all levels more rewards than currently. This is still mostly in the brainstorming phase, so no promises, but I figured I'd put it out there.

2.12 Patreon Release

I cannot talk about Dad’s death without discussing infernos, and it is difficult to discuss infernos, especially those of the firestorms, without first explaining free ripple, or ambient ripple. That’s the stuff that brings uncontrolled magical effects, be it from natural sources or as the runoff of flamebearer magic. Though the exact effects are myriad, on the whole, there is an obvious analogy to radiation.

In nature, both can be found in relatively trace quantities, and indeed, there is strong evidence of a link between the two: like how Earth’s magnetosphere shields us from the majority of the sun’s constant barrage of radiation, ambient free ripple also flows from the earth’s geomagnetic North Pole. This is believed to be why flamefall generally travel from north to south—though it’s not known why all colors of ripple seem to obey this law instead of just blue, the color typically associated with such physical phenomena. This northward gradient of ambient ripple had also been speculated to be the reason—or at least a reason—for the Spire’s location in the North Atlantic.

The resemblance to radiation continues into the effects on the human animal. The body can cope with the quantities found in nature in the short term, and even adapt in the long term; just as the skin will produce melanin in response to UV, prolonged exposure to ripple causes the bone marrow to produce ripple-reactive agents, microscopic-scale natural glyphs that convert ambient ripple to green and thereby cause the mild mutations that are common at the higher latitudes and other regions that happen to be hotspots of free ripple. This marvelous phenomenon of biology was one of a precious few glimpses at the natural principles underlying glyphcraft that had yet been observed, back when I was meeting with Hikanome in that mirage of Yoyogi Park.

As with radiation, when we step from the natural world to the works of man, things get far nastier. High intensities of free ripple or radiation will rapidly degrade tissue; past a certain threshold, both will kill you in minutes, if not seconds. Near an inferno—the flamefall or magical disaster kind, not the politicized VNT kind—reality begins to break down. If you’re lucky, you die quickly from having your pieces rearranged and split as space and matter lose cohesion. If you’re not, you die slowly and painfully from a mix of spatial, mutagenic, and matter-altering effects while the qualia and basic information of your existence get shredded and put back together in a ransom-note collage of suffering that may extend far beyond where reason would normally dictate you are entitled to the sweet release of death.

In this, the chaos of ripple, magic run amok, far outstrips even the wildest comic book notions of radiation. It is a worse way to die than anything that existed before the Frozen Flame arrived.

It’s what happens to a flametouched who goes infernal. It’s what happened to Dad.

—

“No.”

“Ezzen,” Hongo began, spreading his hands reasonably, “this is not an attempt to make you relive your trauma. We both want to better understand what happened on the first day of the firestorms.”

“What’s in it for you? Your interest isn’t scientific,” I spat. “What are you even hoping to find? He was killed by a force of nature, and he suffered. I suffered.” I raised my burned hand, blinking away the tears threatening to well in my eyes. I couldn’t show weakness in front of these jackals. “If you have as much respect for me as this whole reception implies, then how could you even suggest putting me through that again? And if you can bring back some fragment of the dead—” I gestured at the too-empty facsimile of the park that surrounded us. The branches overhead might have been covered with leaves now, but that didn’t mask the feeling of being caught in a net “—which I can’t possibly verify is anything more than a parlor trick when you’ve got me isolated like this—then you’d be putting him through that too. It’s sick.”

My anxiety had boiled over into defiant frustration. In a way, this was worse than outright hostility or a physical attack; it was an insult to Dad’s memory. My interest in magic had begun in an attempt to understand, scientifically speaking, what had happened to Dad. I wasn’t going to let these charlatans convince me that his death had been for some “higher purpose.”

I searched their faces for any sign of contrition. Kimura avoided eye contact, looking down, lips pressed together in a thin line. Hongo seemed frustrated, almost imperious—good. Miyoko met my eyes, face level. Her voice was still soft, but not gentle.

“We know why the dragon sent you. We know what she wants from us. This is what we ask in exchange: a chance to learn truths about the Light from you.”

Hongo picked up after her before I could rebut. “Suppose we’re right, little Heron. If the Flame you carry now is connected to both that day and to the Spire—think about what that would mean. Think about the leverage that could give you in going there, in escaping the PCTF. The Vaetna are avoiding you and the others who carry your blessing, when they should have been the ones to save you. Don’t you want to know why?”

“Escaping the PCTF,” I repeated. “You sold Amane to them.”

That at last got a rise out of Miyoko. Those creepy eyes with the space behind them began to glow, flickering pink. I was glad to have gotten under her skin with that—now we were talking about something other than the worst day of my life. Hongo also bristled, but Kimura raised his hand to stay them both. 

“We did not hand over one of our own to those butchers. Sugawara did, and that is why we helped Toudai destroy him.”

His voice was angry in a distant way, disinterring memories of a dark time. Served him right. “They said you helped him,” I countered.

“Coercion. He was going to hurt somebody I loved.”

“And that stopped you? Some gods you are.”

Something flashed in his eyes, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “It was too dangerous to oust him. Too costly. The only reason we survived was because we only faced his supporters, not the military men he paid. That was Takehara-san’s job.”

“Mahou shoujo don’t fight wars,” I quoted, but I couldn’t put any acrid bite into it; I knew it was hollow. My stomach dropped as I remembered how the girls had gone along with my plan, aided and abetted the idea of an artillery strike while carefully dodging the facts of what we had been going to do to the human beings aboard Thunder Horse. The person I’d watched melt—I had inflicted on him the same degree of horrible death that the wild Flame had done to my dad, because I had thought it was the right thing to do. And so had the team of magical girls I now called roommates. “O—okay, yeah, I hear it. That’s bullshit,” I admitted, sobering, guilt tempering my anger. “But I still trust them more than you.”

“Hm.” Hongo was examining me in a way that made my tattoo itch. “So you’ve seen something of what they do.”

“They want us to face the PCTF directly,” Kimura continued, “and Takehara-san knows that will be far more costly. That is why she’s offering you. It is a fair trade.”

“She didn’t know you were going to pull this stunt.”

“You really believe that?” said Hongo, smirking. “Arranging for you to meet us separately from Miss Ishikawa and Miss Hirai? The dragon knew we would know your history, the things that make you unusual and exceptional. She knew we would do this, and trusted us enough to allow it to happen. So you can keep thinking we’re monsters and wonder why she would allow it, or you could trust her and us, but you cannot mistrust us without also mistrusting her judgment.”

I swallowed, remembering how Alice had been so pushy about me attending, how I’d been kept relatively in the dark about what to expect from this meeting. “My—my answer is no.”

Hongo’s smirk shifted into a more genuine smile and an approving nod. “Backbone is important for our kind.”

“As you wish,” Miyoko affirmed, impassive once more. She rose to her feet, robes draping around her, though they still fell below her shoulders and chest. I found that I was already pretty numb to the nudity. “We will not ask again, not today. We only ask you to spare it some thought as you enjoy the festival. We will not give Toudai our full support without understanding the circumstances that brought you here, from the beginning. It could inform much about what is to come.”

Hongo stood as well. “They say the Peacies are going to make their first moves soon. I don’t suppose Miss Hirai gave you a timeline?”

I bit my lip. I’d overheard the three-week number Yuuka had given, and it had been four days since then. I wasn’t supposed to leak information—but they obviously already knew about Yuuka’s foresight, and it was mutually beneficial for me and Todai if Hikanome knew how long we had, right?

“…two weeks, give or take.”

“Then we’ll ask again on the first of March.” Ten days from now. He checked his watch. “The ladies are about to wrap up their entrance. Thank you for your time, little Heron. Miyoko-san?”

Miyoko nodded. The space around us began to glow. I smelled woodsmoke as the bubble of private reality began to fizzle away and the true space of Yoyogi Park began to bleed in. Kimura stood as well.

“We are not the cult you think we are, Ezzen. This festival is a celebration of light and warmth, not a show of power. You are welcome to walk the grounds and see the way we live. But first, come eat with us. There are many things we would like to discuss with you, things that are not so dark.”

—

It was a palpable relief to see Amane. Yuuka too, begrudgingly, but it was especially reassuring to see Radiance Amethyst’s towering form raise a crystalline arm to wave at me as she approached the true VIP section.

When Miyoko’s illusion or pocket dimension or whatever it had been had fully dissipated, the priests’ handmaids and staff had quickly moved in to upgrade our seating arrangement. Bamboo mats had been laid over the tarp and more sitting pillows had been procured, and a long, low table made of beautiful, wine-dark red wood had been placed in the center. Despite the grander displays of wealth, I definitely preferred this to being three on one on their turf. The bare branches and pale winter sky also helped dispel that feeling of being in somebody else’s territory—proof that whatever the cult might claim, reality would ultimately win out. And now it was three on three.

Amane and Yuuka dropped their mantles as they made their way to the table. The glimmering mecha was replaced by the straight-backed, raven-haired girl with piercing green eyes, wearing a polite smile and a purple sundress; Yuuka’s impractically layered outfit of dark belts and laces was replaced by a slightly more reasonable corset, blouse, and skirt, long bangs shrouding her eye. The five flamebearers exchanged a long series of greetings in Japanese, including stiff bowing from all parties. The conversation sounded friendly enough, or at least polite, though there was a moment where Kimura and Yuuka glared at each other in a way that suggested a lot of history.

Waitstaff appeared around us as the introductions concluded and people took their seats. We flamebearers sat three on three at the head of the table; myself, Amane, and Yuuka facing Kimura, Miyoko and Hongo. To our left, down the remaining twelve seats of the table, was an assortment of both groups’ staff, as well as people who looked like representatives of other organizations involved in the event. Todai’s people and the third parties were fully dressed; Hikanome’s people were not. I was distantly relieved that Yuuka didn’t subscribe to their nudism; Like Miyoko, Amane was slender enough that I could have mostly filtered the exposed breasts from my peripheral vision, but Yuuka would have been intolerably distracting.

“Hey, Ezzen.”

“Hi.”

Amane had her phone out, already typing into her translation app.

How did it go?

“Well enough,” I muttered. “They made me an offer. Not to join, but they have conditions for helping us with the…stuff.” I didn’t particularly want to discuss the details of it in front of them, and the three had said they wouldn’t bring it up again today. “I didn’t realize they’d isolate me. Felt a little ambushed.”

Amane winced.

I was hoping they wouldn’t. You’re alright?

“I’m good.” I was actually pretty proud of how I’d handled myself; no big secrets given away, as far as I could tell.

“Yeah, you’re good,” Yuuka verified. “We told ya they wouldn’t hurt ya, no matter how bad you fucked it up.”

“We would never,” Hongo cut in. “And so far, he’s exceeded expectations when it comes to propriety.”

“Nah, really?”

Hongo winced theatrically. “He must have set a truly awful first impression with you if your prediction was so far off the mark.”

To my surprise, Yuuka laughed. “I mean, he’s fucking Hina, ‘course my expectations were low.”

Amane elbowed her teammate, hard, with her mechanical arm. It didn’t make contact; Yuuka’s hand had already been moving to catch the blow, and Miyoko exhaled a rather unladylike snort at the roughhousing. “He does look somewhat like her, no?”

“Mhm,” Yuuka replied, twisting to flag down a waiter.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. I certainly didn’t look like Hina—wrong sex, wrong race, wrong height, wrong hair. They must have meant in a more magical sense; was there a connection between Yuuka’s eye and Miyoko’s? Perhaps Miyoko’s too-deep irises were pink- or white-ripple equivalents of Yuuka’s, though they were obviously structurally different. Yuuka’s looked almost prosthetic, like an intrusion or growth, whereas Miyoko’s seemed more supernatural.

“You’ve paid in blood quite a few times for someone blessed only eight days ago,” Hongo pointed out, and I frowned.

“That’s not…”

But it was definitely true at this point. Between my spear, my foot, when I’d struck Hina, and of course last night’s impulsive, full-body epilation, I really did seem to be developing a troubling propensity for blood magic. “My abilities to design complex lattices are much stronger than my practical ability to weave them, for now,” I hedged. “And done carefully, sanguimancy is still safer than fully unbound magic.”

Hongo gestured at me as though presenting me to Yuuka. “See? He can make decent excuses! Though I do take some issue with the idea that glyphcraft is the only way to safely utilize magic, and I contest that you’ve been particularly careful. Removing all the hair from your body the night before an event like this is bold. Some would call it reckless, or pain-seeking.”

I was annoyed and a little alarmed that he’d identified exactly what I’d done, but stood my ground. “It was worth it.”

“Your hair really is beautiful,” Kimura said quietly, sipping from a tall glass of beer. A waiter offered me a slightly different glass which I accepted hesitantly. “I’ve never seen something like it.”

I gave the drink an investigatory sniff and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was ginger ale rather than beer. Amane nudged me. I looked back at her. “What?”

She mouthed something. I frowned, not sure what she meant. Yuuka groaned. “Ezzen, say thank you for the compliment.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I reddened, shrinking into myself, feeling too exposed and unable to hide from Yuuka’s counter-gesture indicating my fuck-up to Hongo. This thin shirt provided no protection, no armor; a hoodie might have been sweltering to wear in the magically adjusted temperate weather, but it would have given some security, helped hide that I didn’t know what to do with my hunched shoulders. The weight of my hair draped over my back helped a little, sort of emulating the feeling of a hood hanging behind my neck, and I tried to focus on that; at least my back was covered.

Should I say something more in response? He’d already complimented my hair earlier; I wasn’t sure why he was bringing it up again. Normally, I’d talk about the interesting magical implications of my possibly cyborg nature, but Hikanome had expressed enough distaste with that topic that I wasn’t sure if it would make me look more like a fool. Better to just say nothing at all?

Amane rescued me by raising her glass and calling down the table. The toast was in Japanese, so I don’t know exactly what was said, but whatever it was, it was cheerful and confident, delivered in her bright, strong voice. Something she said got a laugh from the table, then everybody raised their mugs, and the first plates of food began to hit the table.

“Thanks,” I whispered to Amane as a plate of chicken skewers was placed before me, charcoal-smoky and glazed in soy sauce.

“No problem.”

—

The food was exceptional. The theme was flame-cooking, and sure, that meant skewers and steaks, hot dogs and burgers—but it also meant brick oven pizzas and flatbreads, raclette and octopus all sharing the table. There was an entire row of grills, griddles, and ovens set up parallel to the table, which constantly brought new delicacies and interesting twists on more familiar foods. I crunched down on a piece of duxelles that had been broiled to a crispy, chip-like consistency on extremely hot cast iron and washed it down with ginger ale. The drink was arguably the highlight; it had an intense, spiced edge to it without tasting of alcohol, and it was nice and cool to refresh my palate after eating food that had come off of open flame moments prior.

We didn’t make much conversation for the first few minutes, mostly consumed in the universally human act of savoring really good food. Normal human or flamebearer, we all could take some enjoyment from it. To my right, I was happy to see that Amane was enthusiastically digging in; it would have been a shame if her stomach condition had prevented her from partaking.

Conversation began to resume around the third course. I twirled a fork in my small bowl of assassin’s spaghetti while Amane and Hongo discussed something in Japanese. Foreign policy, if I had to guess; my Japanese was still awful, but I was definitely picking up “America” here and there. Yuuka cut in in English—for my benefit? That didn’t seem like her.

“They keep making offers to Ai. They can’t buy her out, but they’re trying. Nervous about the new patterns we saw last month in Taiwan, feel like they’re losing the arms race with China. ‘s stupid, she’d never help make exos.”

Hongo nodded. “It’s the principle of it. If they offer and she refuses, they have it on paper where she stands. They’re not going to make an offensive in the South China Sea, though, not with the situation with the Spire.”

“Situation?” Yuuka bit down on a slice of mayo pizza, one of the few things on the table I wasn’t willing to try. “It’s the same shit as ever. Vaetna make a clusterfuck in some other country, don’t clean it up properly, the big boys reach for their guns, and then when they’ve fully pivoted to face the Spire, they get stabbed in the back by one of the others.”

Finally, a conversation I actually felt qualified to participate in. I took another swig of ginger ale, then spoke up. “I think that’s uncharitable. Er, to the Vaetna’s interventions.”

“Oh, do ya? Really. ‘Course you would gobble their knobs.”

“They do clean up their messes.”

“Only when the big guys actually get scared and don’t try to escalate, and that’s happening less and less. So more escalation, more messes.”

Here we go. I braced; I’d heard this line of argument before, and it always ended back at Dubai.

“Sometimes—”

“—you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Shut the fuck up.”

That earned her another elbow from Amane. Miyoko spoke up, leaning forward as she twirled a chicken skewer in her fingers.

“Ezzen, you believe the Spire’s humanitarian efforts outweigh the consequences of their interventions?”

“Yes.” The response was automatic.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a net good. Toppling petty warlords, clearing droughts, pre-empting superhurricanes and taking point on infernos—those directly save lives! And that’s not even counting the Spire itself; there’s a reason their quality of life is the highest in the world, and it has everything to do with their medicine and hydroponics.”

“Quality of life,” Hongo repeated approvingly. “For the average person. That’s what communities should do.”

“Says the cult leader,” I noted dryly.

“I’m agreeing with you! We believe the same things the Spire does. Magic should be used to create a better world for everyone living in it, not hoarded for one’s own interests.”

I blinked. “Clarify? You think the Vaetna should rule the world?”

“You think they should not?”

I sighed. “That’s—it’s complicated. In a world where the average person knew what was good for them, yeah. In practice…I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m uncomfortable with anybody ruling the world, Vaetna or not. And when it comes to them specifically, so many people don’t trust the Vaetna. For faulty reasons, you know?”

Hongo smiled. “Please go on.”

“Well…alright,” I said, mentally gearing up. “Do you know the story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas?” I got some nods, but Kimura shook his head. “It’s—almost fifty years old now, so pre-firestorms, pre-Raising, pre-magic. It’s about a utopia that runs on the torture of a single child, basically, and whether that trade-off is worth it. I think we can all see the parallels to the real world these days, yeah?” More nods. “My problem with it is that…well, people assume that any utopia, any place where people are happy, has to have a catch, a dark side. It’s why people accuse the Vaetna of blood magic or ruling the Spire with an iron fist, all that bosh. They refuse to believe that people with that much power can create a society that’s unambiguously good, no catch. And I just think that’s—such a backwards, 20th-century way of looking at the world.”

“I would say the same argument applies to Hikanome.”

I snarled; how could they say that when Amane was sitting literally right here? “What? No, you demonstrably based your success on child slavery—”

“And we destroyed that side of us,” Kimura interrupted. “No more, never again. Now we heal the sick and shelter the homeless without keeping bodies in the basement.”

“And more than that,” Hongo picked up once he swallowed a bite of his overloaded hot dog, “we put our thumb on the scales of policy to end those problems at the source. We fund housing and lobby to keep rent down rather than merely sweeping homeless people out of sight.” He gestured at Yuuka. “Miss Hirai is here today because we are lending our blessings to environmental groups to help reduce pollution. Make no mistake—we could rule Japan if we wanted to, but that is not what we were given these blessings to do. How are we different from the Vaetna, Little Heron?”

“I’m not interested in arguing what you do for your tax write-offs.”

“Fuckin’ oath, ‘Little Heron’, do you not see your hypocrisy here?” Yuuka sneered. “It’s the same shit. And the Vaetna didn’t help me find Amane. Get off your high fuckin’ horse.”

I deflated, looking guiltily at the cyborg girl between us. She was clearly having trouble keeping up with the conversation, but when her name came up, she seemed to understand what it meant. She sighed something at Yuuka, who shook her head angrily. 

“It seems to me,” Miyoko said, looking between the three of us, “That you see something divine in the Vaetna, Ezzen. You may not worship them, but you recognize their higher calling.”

“Well—they’re not omnipotent,” I begrudgingly admitted, shamefaced. I had no rebuttal for Yuuka.

“But you wish they were. That is faith.”

“Everyone believes in something,” Kimura added. “You think we are not deserving of the same trust you extend to them, because you believe that they are ordained to do good and we are not.”

I felt I had to push back on that—then my skin crawled. The hair on my neck would have stood on end if I still had any. Instinct had me look straight up, guided by some perception of my Flame. I realized all five other Flamebearers had done the same. Yuuka swore.

“What?” I couldn’t pin down exactly what I was sensing.

Amane pointed, and I saw it. An ultramarine dot was moving across the pale-blue sky, vivid and aglow, brighter each moment. My heart leapt. My phone buzzed, and I scrambled to get it out.

Hina: I FIGURED IT OUT

Ezzen: figured what out?

Hina: the stalker. she’s with hikanome i can smell her somewhere down there with you

My blood ran cold, eyes darting around before they locked on Miyoko. Amane and Yuuka both put fingers to their ears, then a change passed over them. They both tensed, looking at the Hikanome flamebearers with the same suspicion I had, but with warriors’ poise rather than my prey-animal panic.

Ezzen: What do we do? We’re literally sitting across from the leaders right now.

Hina: sit tight cutie

Hina: the girls have your back

“Ezzen,” Yuuka said slowly, injecting casual friendliness into her voice. “Wanna walk around the park? There’s plenty of stuff to do.”

“Y—yeah, that sounds good.”

Ezzen: and you?

Hina: what do you think

Hina: im going hunting

Ezzen: Uh. Maybe this should wait until after?

The blue dot in the sky was getting bigger.

Ezzen: Hina?

“Ah,” breathed Hongo. “I don’t suppose any of you can stop her?”

“Stop her from what?”

“She’s gonna break open the whole white ripple bubble,” Yuuka explained, alarm in her voice. “What the fuck is this—ittatata—fuck!” She clutched the side of her head, sucking in a breath through clenched teeth, then whipped around to stare at—Kimura, who had risen to his feet, looking up at the approaching sapphire fireball. She growled. “What the fuck?”

The middle-aged businessman met Yuuka’s eye, then looked at me. Was he—but he couldn’t be, right? I frantically went back to my phone.

Ezzen: DONT

Ezzen: youll amke an inferno. its not worth it, im not in danger

Ezzen: just come down normally and we can talk

Hina: yuuka will get it

Hina: stay safe, love you

The others at the table, the humans, had taken notice, and gasping turned to yelling as it became clear Hina wasn’t going to stop. Hongo and Miyoko were asking Kimura frantic-sounding questions, but he just shook his head. He looked at me one last time, then shattered into glass, splintered fragments that burned away into smoke. Like before.

Certainty took root in my stomach. He’d been the one providing the magic for my stalker, whomever she’d been. That was why Hina was here—but her response was still wildly disproportionate. Why did she seem ready to go to war? I turned to Amane and Yuuka, who were both staring at where Kimura had been. Rage was written on their faces. What was I missing?

“What the fuck is going on?”

Yuuka barked something at Miyoko. The high priestess scowled at the place where Kimura had been, pristine and delicate features twisting with fury.

“Traitor.”

Then the sky split open as Radiance Sapphire cracked Hikanome’s eggshell of false summer.

2.11 Patreon Release

There were a lot of things that sucked about the morning of Hikanome’s event.

First and foremost was the pain. I could feel what I had done to my body last night as a low-level burning, scratchy sensation, not unlike a rash. Every place where a hair follicle had been removed and backfilled by new flesh was its own pixel of discomfort which together formed a high-resolution screen of itching and irritation, lighting up wherever my clothes pressed against my body.

That brought me to the second thing that sucked: Ebi had rinsed my bloody afterbirth off of me and taken me back to my room after I’d passed out, for which I was grateful, but overnight, my new skin had oozed more fluids, disgusting side-effects of the adjustment process as the polyps of replacement flesh made themselves at home in my meat-suit. I’d woken to find my sheets thoroughly soiled by bio-gunk of all sorts, sticky all over from a mixture of sweat and pus. The smell had been the worst part, so rank and oily that despite my inflamed skin’s sensitivity I had beelined for the shower to rinse all the horrible slime off my body, still only half-awake.

It was only when I stepped under the shower’s water that I remembered what my Flame had given me in exchange for my body hair. My wig was fused with my head and had changed color to a truly bizarre shade, a color between yellow blond and bright- orange ginger but somehow distinctly unnatural, too bright to appear on a regular human head. I’d had to reach out of the shower and fumble for the light switch to verify that it was merely a very bright color and not literally aglow. My scalp was actually one of the few places of my body that didn’t hurt from the aftermath of the blood magic. 

Clothes sucked as well. No hoodie for me, not today—Alice had forced me into a button-down and slacks, plus a long coat that insulated from the cold well enough but still left me feeling overly exposed. A silver lining of our hurry to get me dressed and out the door was that I was spared the full lecture from Alice about the stupidity of what I’d done; she seemed relieved that my skin was merely red and inflamed rather than one giant burn scar, and I was subjected to only small mutterings about the shock of orange hair. She’d warned me that we had to talk about it later, but she needn’t have; I was already mulling it over by myself, silently gnawing on the ramifications as I was ushered into the waiting limo separately from the other two attending Radiances.

What exactly had happened, physiologically and magically speaking? Had my old hair under the wig gone poof, annihilated entirely? Had the Flame that had manifested the LM been permanently integrated into my body? The texture felt like real hair, as far as I could tell. Was it alive and growing? Was it magical in some way, other than the color?

We didn’t have time to test those things, but at least these weren’t entirely uncharted waters. Alice, too, had hair changed by her Flame. Then again, her shimmering, opalescent off-white was comparatively natural, some ways removed from how my body had incorporated a piece of magitech hardware. By some estimates, including Amane’s, that made me a cyborg. Ai, the resident authority on cybernetics, couldn’t be reached for comment, and her absence was another thing that sucked. She was still fast asleep by the time we were out the door, forbidden from being roused on Ebi’s orders. I was a little peeved that she got to sleep in and I still had to attend despite the fact that I was the one recovering from a full-body application of sanguimancy.

Amane: Think about it this way: you have little confidence in your appearance, but nobody will pay attention to your appearance other than the hair.

Ezzen: I guess, yeah.

Ezzen: Changes the first impression somewhat

Amane: For the better, I think.

Ezzen: I’m still nervous.

Amane: That’s normal!

I cringed a little at the non-sequitur detour into talking about my own feelings, but far less than I would have if this conversation were happening face to face. I hoped she wouldn’t mind.

Amane: What are you nervous about?

There was a lot—general social anxiety, the specific fear of screwing up etiquette, getting lost in the more benign cases or outright attacked or kidnapped in the more extreme ways things could go, fretting over my appearance. But vis-a-vis Amane…

Ezzen: It seems crazy that we’re splitting up.

Amane: We’re right in front of you.

Amane: And the bodyguards are good.

We were traveling in a little three-car motorcade, with Yuuka and Amane in the first, me—and Clipboard, who looked as nervous as I felt—in the second, and two more senior Todai staff in the rear, plus a driver and bodyguard in each car. The latter made me especially uncomfortable.

Ezzen: As meatshields?

That was a bit of a blunt way to say it, but accurately grim. If hostile flamebearers decided to attack our convoy, regular humans might as well be ants, and the cars around us effectively made of tissue paper.

Amane: They’re not that delicate. They have the same ward devices you do.

I was wearing a compression sleeve on my right arm, which manifested strong enough repulsion fields to turn away a blade or keep me from getting crushed if the car were to be rammed. More importantly, it also projected a sort of stability matrix across my body so that somebody couldn’t just pulp my insides remotely with magic. The armband itched incessantly against my still-raw skin. I couldn’t even scratch it properly, hidden under my shirt’s long sleeves, and it just made me feel more uncomfortable rather than safer. The Radiances had proper wards, high-power burst shields that made them near-invulnerable long enough to transition into their mantles. I had no such safety; most of my protection came in their assurances that there was nobody out to get us today.

This was supposed to be safe, diplomatic—even fun, from how I’d heard it described. Before the debacle with my hair, Alice had called it a mix of a traditional Japanese matsuri festival and a cookout. Yuuka had corroborated by calling it a “barbie;” I still didn’t know why her lingo was so Australian and had been dissuaded from asking by her demeanor—on that note, I also didn’t understand the sudden shift in her behavior at dinner yesterday. It had continued into this morning; she’d given me a begrudging compliment on the way down to the garage, when it had just been us three flamebearers in the elevator:

“You lost the stubble.”

“Huh? Yeah.”

“Was the right call. Tell me you didn’t choose that dye job, though.”

“I didn’t.”

“Good.”

I hadn’t known how to respond to that. It was an improvement from her outright hostility, but being in the dark about whatever had passed between the team was doing my anxiety no favors. Maybe it had something to do with Hina’s prolonged absence, but that itself sucked too. I could have used her confidence and energy today, and her sheer physicality would have gone a long way to settle my unease and feeling of nakedness. Also, some shameful part of me hoped she’d like the new hair—though it occurred to me that she might be disappointed that we’d not have another session of zapping away body hair.

I made an effort to steer my thoughts away from my girlfriend. Alice had assured me she was fine, and that was good enough. Regardless of the state of our relationship, I had bigger fish to fry today.

—

We felt Hikanome’s influence well before Yoyogi Park came into view. I’d been avoiding looking out the window, instead mulling over what little I knew of the cult and internally rehearsing the greetings we’d drilled, but a chance glance to the side of the road contained something amiss. The sidewalk was crowded with people walking the same direction we were driving; that wasn’t surprising given that the estimated attendance was to be at least three hundred thousand over the course of the day, but the attire seemed off. Some people were dressed in what I could identify as traditional Japanese garb, robes with thick belts and awkward-looking sandals, but many others seemed underdressed for the weather. T-shirts and crop tops abounded, and the longer I examined the crowd as we drove past, I began to pick out people who were entirely shirtless in the February cold, men and women alike. I averted my eyes before they could wander nippleward.

Ezzen: People are naked on the sidewalk.

Amane: They are!

Ezzen: A little cold for that, isn’t it?

Amane: In about thirty seconds, you’ll feel the air change.

Amane: Don’t panic and don’t worry about me.

As I read those messages, there was a burst of radio chatter between the drivers, and then I felt it. A sunny, suffusing warmth blossomed in my chest and spread outward, like the first rays of dawn on a summer morning except felt all the way through my body. What residual chill had crept into my limbs was chased away, melted and evaporated. Some of the pain across my skin lessened, too, the inflammation soothed by the warmth.

We’d just entered a field of red ripple the size of an entire neighborhood. At least, I assumed it was red; a magical effect stimulating the body’s thermoreceptive nerves to trick us into feeling warm seemed far more magically efficient than a blue-based effect that could actually warm the air at such a scale. More culty, too, a parlor trick to demonstrate their power while also dosing you with something that naturally felt good. I was naturally suspicious, and furthermore, if it was red ripple—

Ezzen: You okay?

Amane: 大丈夫

Amane: I told you not to worry.

Ezzen: …You did, didn’t you.

Ezzen: This is “good weather?”

Amane: It’s not red, so yes.

Ezzen: ??

Amane: Check the temperature on the dashboard.

I leaned sideways, trying to get around the driver’s seat in front of me, squinting.

“20 degrees,” Clipboard said, intuiting what I was trying to do.

“Thanks.”

The outdoor air temperature had gone from a proper wintry chill to a balmy, comfortable spring day in moments.

Ezzen: That’s impossible.

Amane: That’s Hikanome’s magic.

Ezzen: But it’s absurd.

I’d switched from the weather app to a calculator, trying to guess at some numbers in my head. Google said the park was 133 acres—538,000 square meters—and if the effect extended from ground level to, say, three meters in the air, that was far too high of a volume of air to heat by over ten degrees Celsius. It wasn’t just a matter of simple energy requirements; the blue ripple would compound into other physical effects, little ruptures and slips, bursts of kinematic irregularities that could rupture organs if they happened inside a person. And that was to say nothing of the challenge of keeping the intended effect equally distributed and not accidentally heating small sections to dangerous temperatures.

I relayed these findings to Amane.

Ezzen: They literally cannot be that powerful. The numbers don’t track.

Ezzen: There are only three flamebearers attending, right?

Amane: Yes. But your math is making a faulty assumption.

Amane: It’s white ripple, not blue.

I’m ashamed to say how badly that threw me for a loop. It presented an entirely different class of impossibility.

White ripple, like silver ripple, is special in that there are no glyphs that affect it; it is not a color that threads of Flame can be tuned to. It still occurs in nature, of course, and has always been closely associated with the Vaetna. That association led to a misconception that white ripple’s effect was “reality manipulation”, or “imposing one’s will on the world”, but I’d always considered that an unhelpful description. All colors of ripple did those things, defied what had formerly been understood about reality and replaced it with volition made manifest.

In reality, white ripple was better described as “multiplicative” ripple, an X factor that boosted the influence of the other colors of ripple further than they ought to go in the quantities detected. This explanation made sense mathematically and was consistent with its detection around especially great happenings of magic, like infernos, flamefall, and some of the Vaetna’s most extreme acts.

All this was to say that:

Ezzen: An effect can’t solely be white ripple.

Amane: “And Yuuka can’t see silver,” I think you said.

Amane: Have an open mind. Don’t be like Ai.

Ezzen: Working on it.

Really, what unsettled me wasn’t that this flew in the face of my understanding of how magical effects were categorized. No, what bothered me was the idea that this cult was performing magic that I considered the Vaetna’s domain, something above the rest of our station, forces we shouldn’t mettle in. Whatever Hikanome were doing to create this effect flew in the face of the natural order, challenged the Spire’s supremacy in magic.

I didn’t like it at all.

—

I liked it even less when our convoy split. The Radiances had an actual entrance planned, one that I was sure I’d see Star posting about later. It involved them descending from the sky in full mantle, followed by a meet-and-greet. I wondered how Yuuka participated in such things. I could see Amane pulling it off, being smiley and personable, but if there was one thing I had in common with Yuuka, it was that we weren’t extroverts. Granted, for me, it was less about misanthropy and more about how imagining myself as the focus of attention in front of that many people made my stomach do acrobatics.

The point was that Todai had stipulated in the terms of my attendance that I did not have to engage in those celebrity theatrics, and that meant that I was going to enter the park separately from the Radiances. I and the important Todai people in the car behind me were going through the VIP entrance via a closed-off road, barriers and armed guards blocking passage behind us. Once the girls made their flashy entrance, they’d rejoin me, but seeing their car turn away from ours left me feeling very alone.

As the park came into view, my anxiety redoubled. I was entering the belly of the beast.

Yoyogi Park did not feel inviting. For all Hikanome’s impossible aura of pleasant temperatures could mimic the warmth of spring, the mostly barren trees weren’t so easily fooled. They stood dark against the hazy blue of the sky, a reminder of the chilly reality beyond the illusion. That should have been grounding and comforting, but there was a spindly quality to their branches overhead that felt like I was peeking out of a net.

The barriers and guards continued on our right as our reduced group drove further inward. On the other side of the dividing line, the veritable sea of people came back into view. They clustered around canopied tents. Pillars of smoke or steam wafted upward from every other tent, billowing past signs advertising flame-grilled skewers, fish, and even less stereotypically Japanese dishes like kebab and pizza. Food cooked with open flame was the traditional fare for special occasions for Hikanome and many cults like it. If it hadn’t been for the rain of the past few days, the entire event must have constituted a massive fire hazard, given the park’s wintry lack of lush greenery.

Tall braziers burning with magically colored flames designated different areas of the event and imposed some order on the chaotic press of underdressed people. These nearby tents with food were the green section; further away, near the larger pavilions and tents hosting the event’s main attractions and gathering spaces, I could see pink and blue. I had a map of the layout on my phone that explained the color coding, but I doubted I’d use it. As a VIP, there was no need for me to wriggle through sardine-packed crowds just for a few slices of overpriced kebab—we would get a proper reception lunch, possibly the only upside of the entire event.

I had high expectations. My childhood meals had often been the leftovers from truly lavish galas and balls, whatever remained of the thirteen-course meals Dad orchestrated for the rich and famous the previous weekend. It depended on the kind of event, of course. Sometimes, if he was serving art critics or gourmands or particularly picky tech moguls, it would be all jellies and purees, molecular gastronomy advertised not as food but as an experience; those didn’t usually make it to our fridge, either because they were hilariously small portions or became basically inedible ten minutes after serving. But when Dad catered larger events with more conventional fare, he’d bring home things that had made kid-Ezzen’s eyes shine: pieces of a whole spit-roasted pig, rich and creamy vegetable soups, five-cheese mac and cheese with crispy breadcrumbs on top—gourmet versions of kid food, essentially, and in such quantities that I could eat them all week long.

Of such things was childhood made. Pulling open the fridge to discover what delicious secrets it would hold this week was magical every time. Sometimes, on days when he was in the kitchen on the weekend, he’d show me the fancy ways to reheat everything for service—so it had been crushing to realize I’d never eat like that again. It had been a slow kind of grief, waking up in my grandparents’ house and checking the fridge to see shitty Tesco ready meals in place of portioned-out bins of roasted meats and vegetables and grandpa’s beers rather than soup. So, too, after I’d left that horrible, tiny house and moved into my apartment. Leftovers didn’t just make themselves, and I’d had neither the money nor the emotional strength to pick up where Dad had left off.

All this to say that even in the worst-case scenario for today, where we would be treated to some truly bizarre molecular gastronomy—unlikely given Hikanome’s propensity for flame-grilled food—I found myself excited to revisit some small, nostalgic fragment of my childhood, especially since I was dining on the dime of the same type of cult that had stolen my inheritance. There was a nice symmetry to it.

It was this tentative hope that gave me the courage to sit up straight and internally rehearse my greetings one last time as the car rolled to a stop. I’d been lost in thought for the final few minutes of our journey, but now we were here, parked on the grass under the spindly trees. All I had to do was respond when greeted and then shut up; Todai’s higher-ups in the other car were going to do the vast majority of the talking. After that, I could busy myself with eating. Hell, talking about the food was maybe the one line of conversation I felt prepared for. Easy enough. I turned from where I’d been idly staring out the window, looking at my pants and trying to get my unfamiliar cascade of red-gold hair to behave, wincing at the state of my skin. I rolled my right ankle experimentally, making sure the field of white ripple surrounding me wasn’t disrupting the stabilizer module’s function. Everything seemed in order.

“Um, are we getting out first?”

Clipboard didn’t respond. I looked over at him—

He was gone. My heart thudded in my chest as I realized that the driver and bodyguard in the front seat were also absent, and there was no second car behind mine. How had I not noticed them all vanish? Had it just happened moments ago or minutes? My tattoo itched, joined in chorus by the rest of my crawling skin as I realized I was alone in hostile territory. For once, I didn’t reject the impulse, summoning it onto my lap, the tip resting in the opposite corner of the footwell. I checked my phone—no signal. I was alone. I undid my seatbelt and scooted into the middle of the car, further from the doors, and looked out the windshield.

That answered one question—wherever I was, it wasn’t Yoyogi Park. Or rather, it still looked like the park, with the same trees in the same places, but it looked as though it was the middle of summer; the trees were covered in vibrant leaves and no skyscrapers rose above them in the distance. No throngs of people, either—indeed, nobody at all, except the three sitting on a simple plastic tarp in front of me. I was still awful at names and faces, but I’d bothered to commit these ones to memory. All three wore long, flowing white robes with fire-red trim. Hikanome’s flamebearers, the three I’d been expecting to meet.

A single empty pillow sat in front of them. An invitation.

This glade must have been the epicenter of the air-warming effect. Perhaps this was the true effect, and the warm air beyond was merely a byproduct, leakage from this bubble of contained reality where Hikanome’s leaders had spirited me away for a private audience. Or worse. They weren’t armed, but they didn’t need to be.

Leftmost was Kimura. He bore little resemblance to the picture the Radiances had shown me. There, he’d been a businessman with a receding hairline and a creased face, easily confused for millions of others in Japan. Before me, he looked more like a retired samurai, lounging in stately repose. He was a co-founder of the cult and complicit in what had happened to Amane. His robe was tightly closed.

Rightmost was Hongo. He was older than me by a few years, perhaps in his early thirties. He sat cross-legged, with his back straight, and had a big grin on his face that instantly reminded me of Hina. He was Hikanome’s diplomat and supposedly had a massive crush on Alice—or maybe specifically her tail. His robe was partially undone, slipping down below his shoulders.

Between them, a woman the same age as the Radiances sat with her legs folded below her. Miyoko, the cult’s high priestess. She wore a knowing smile, and her eyes were too piercing. Her robe was entirely undone, leaving her front bare—

I averted my eyes. Seriously, what was it with the toplessness? That hadn’t been in the notes on etiquette they’d given me.

That aside, I was now in a predicament. The three were talking, but all watching me, and I had no doubt they could see me as well as I could see them. Stay in the car? That hadn’t gone so well last time. And I was better prepared, this time. I took a deep breath and reached for my Flame, trying to find the strength it had given me when I’d struck Hina. But no dice—my Flame didn’t respond to the tug. As stressed as I was, I wasn’t angry as I’d been then, and besides, now was not the time to experiment with magical amping effects.

Nothing else to do. I swung open the left door and disembarked spear-first, wincing at how the motion chafed my raw skin, and watched the three warily. They watched me back. Hongo snorted.

“There’s no need for panic.”

I raised my spear. “I’m getting pretty tired of abductions.”

Kimura shook his head at that as though disappointed.

“Abducted?” Hongo scoffed. He spoke English fluently; I’d been told the others were also conversational. “This is a grand welcome! Who do you take us for? The PCTF? Todai’s rabid fox? We’re giving you a greeting worthy of your status and you draw a blade. Put that away and let us speak together.” He spread his arms.

I didn’t move. “What happened to the people I was traveling with?”

“They’re meeting with their equals,” Kimura replied. He had the voice of a smoker, gravelly, but also softer than I had expected, as though speaking to a frightened animal. “So are you.”

“My equals.” Flamebearers above humans, a near-universal belief among these cults. “I’m free to leave?”

“Yes.”

Hongo rolled his eyes. “Or you could come over here so we can get a good look at you. We don’t bite.”

They had a point; if they wanted to hurt me, it would have already happened. I begrudgingly banished my spear and took a hesitant step toward them, then found my gait and closed the distance, still trying not to look at Miyoko’s chest. I sat awkwardly on the empty pillow, calling up the greetings I’d learned. I bowed my head.

“Um—hajimemashite. Watashi wa—”

All three of them sighed. “Don’t bother.”

“Er. Alright?”

“English is fine. Give us your name,” Hongo urged.

I squinted at him, remembering Ebi’s joke toward Hina about cold iron. They’d already demonstrated that their magic operated outside the rules I knew; it was possible they operated on fae logic and could steal my name if I gave it. This isolated glade was adding to that impression, and I glanced around, wondering if perhaps we were encircled by mushrooms. Why hadn’t I been briefed on this? As for my name, just to be safe—

“Ezzen. Ezzen Colliot. An honor to meet you all.” I bowed my head again, surprised at my own comfort with the courtly affect. “I apologize for drawing my weapon. I had not been informed of this exclusive reception.” I raised my head, attempting to shift my eye contact between the three. “I greet you, priests of the Light.”

Hongo nodded approvingly. “Greetings.”

Kimura nodded more carefully. “Welcome.”

At last, Miyoko spoke as well. Her voice was soft and delicate. “Hello, Ezzen of the Spire.”

That made me stumble. “Huh?”

Hongo nodded again. “I didn’t take you for a believer.”

“Wait, no, go back to the other thing.” I pointed at Miyoko, momentarily emboldened to ignore the nipples. “Of the Spire?”

“That was a Vaetna’s greeting you gave.”

I frowned, then reddened as realization dawned. I had felt comfortable saying it like that because I had been quoting—specifically Heung’s first appearance before the UN.

“And you carry a black-tipped spear,” Hongo continued. “Well met, little Heron.”

“I—no, I’m just a fan—” I felt like I was going to implode, yet I couldn’t help but glow at the comparison. “Thanks, but I’m not the real thing.”

“You’re blessed,” Kimura said surprisingly softly. “The real thing is the real thing. Your hair is beautiful.”

“…Thanks?” The use of the word blessed reminded me that I was dealing with a Flame cult. “It was an accident, not a blessing, and I’m not a believer.”

“Ah, the skeptic engineer type,” Hongo sighed, shifting where he sat. “Like Miss Matsumoto, putting divinity in boxes. What do you think of her? Brainy, isn’t she?”

“Ai is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met,” I shot back, a little wrong-footed by the question.

“Ah.” Kimura’s voice was still soft. “He doesn’t know. You are a he, yes?”

I blinked, even more off-kilter now. “I…yes. What do I not know, exactly?”

“If the lovely dragon didn’t see fit to tell you,” Hongo said, “Then neither will we. Has she been good to you?”

I couldn’t see an angle behind this line of questioning, so I hedged. “They did what anybody with the means should have done. I’m grateful.”

“And yet it was them, not the Vaetna. We’ve been wondering why. Haven’t you?”

Ah. I saw the angle. “Whatever their reasoning, I’m sure it was—and is—sound.”

“Of course, of course.” He dismissed the topic with a wave of his hand. “The Spireborn are always justified. But I’d still like to know the reason they abandoned you.”

I gritted my teeth.

“They didn’t abandon me.”

“Don’t torment him,” Miyoko breathed. She leaned forward, spreading her hands slowly on the tarp, watching the plastic crinkle under her palms. The sound made me realize how silent and still this place was; no animals, not even the wind. Against the silence, her quiet voice suddenly seemed loud. “Hongo-san is being uncivil, but there is truth in his words. Strangeness surrounds your Flame, things that do not fit. Twice-touched, being left for the fox instead of taken, the yari kara no kaminari. I did not call you of the Spire for your weapon—you glow like the Vaetna do. Do you not feel it?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you were chosen,” Kimura said. “We are all chosen by the Light, but you were chosen by the Vaetna.”

That was exciting to hear, but something about this felt off. I reminded myself to be suspicious of any kind of “chosen one” narrative when it came from a trio of fey cult leaders. Alice had told me it was in their interest to make me feel special so they could search for information.

But there were things I couldn’t explain, questions I had no way of answering. Maybe this was connected to why my Flame had a voice—not that I’d tell them that part, if I could avoid it.

“Why would they choose me and then actively avoid me?”

“Maybe you were meant to be taken by the PCTF, as a trojan horse, and the fox’s interference was unforeseen,” Hongo pointed out. “But, as we established, the Vaetna don’t make mistakes.” He grinned.

“They might have,” I admitted. It felt wrong to be the one searching for fault in the Vaetna’s actions. “If that were true.”

“Enough speculation,” Miyoko interrupted, still looking down at her hands. “What is true is that your father was the first to ever join with the Flame.”

“I don’t know about first ever,” I hedged.

“But he was among the first. In an…inferno. What a terrible word.”

“He died. Horribly,” I added, my good humor evaporating. “My grandparents were convinced to give up my inheritance by people like you saying it was a good thing that he burned to death. I’ve long since run out of patience for it.” I bristled, reaching for the formal patterns of speech again. “Respectfully, I find these questions invasive and insensitive.”

Miyoko’s head jerked upward. Her eyes pierced me. Now that I was closer, I saw what was wrong about them; as her head moved, the hazel of her eyes stayed fixed, as though I were peeking through her irises at something behind. I shuddered.

“I do not bring it up lightly, Ezzen of the Spire. We are no pretenders.” She spat the word, straining her voice with disdain. “My Light can reach even the dead.”

“Bullshit. Every supposed ‘necromancer’ in the past seven years has been proven to be a fraud,” I countered. “Even your Blue Spark person.”

Both of the men bristled, but were spoken over by Miyoko’s quiet tones.

“Not necromancy. I cannot bring them back. I cannot even give them a voice. But I can show you.” She leaned further forward, bowing to me. “You are twice-touched, alone of your kind. The first may inform the second. I would ask your father’s spirit to show us what happened to him.”

Side Story: Christmas Shopping

It’s Christmas. Alice and Hina go shopping.

CANONICITY: Canon until contradicted by main story.

DATE: 2021 December 25 (two months before the Thunder Horse Inferno)

The last six years had brought some rather seismic changes to how Alice Takehara experienced Christmas.

The Christmas of 2015 had been somber at best for everyone everywhere. The Firestorms, as they were then starting to be called, had ended hardly four months earlier, and it seemed that everybody had an empty chair at their Yuletide feast. But Alice, then in her first year of high school, had survived one of Japan’s worst train crashes in history that summer, and so her family’s Christmas gathering had celebrated her continued existence and her bonus of awesome new magical powers.

Or at least, that’s what she’d been told. She’d been out fighting crime that night.

She managed to attend the next year, barely, slipping in right as the turkey came out of the oven and hiding her bruised knuckles as they said grace. With Hina in the US for the holidays and Ai visiting her mom, Alice couldn’t ditch the festivities to continue their investigation into the new Flame cult that had been rising in influence all year. By then, her family knew one of her secret identities, but not the other. Only her fellow Radiances knew both, and she’d missed them terribly.

2017 had been their first Christmas as five. Alice hadn’t been on speaking terms with her parents, so Hina had invited her and the others down to her grandparents’ place in Nagasaki, where the newly blue-eyed girl had insisted the warmer weather would be more tolerable for Amane’s shattered body. The real reason, the one that went unspoken, was that they’d needed to put some space between them and the cult. None of them would say it out loud until Amane broke down sobbing from Ai’s gift. Alice wept too, and then they all shared cathartic tears, and things were better after that.

2018 had been their first Christmas as celebrities. The world was still reeling from the Vaetna’s apocalyptic intervention in the Middle East, but consumerism marched on, which meant they’d been unbelievably busy. Ai had a seasonal album, Amane was finally well enough to handle the spotlight for short periods, Hina was juggling photoshoots between hunting down the last of Sugawara’s loyalists, and Yuuka was coming into a passion for ecology to fill the void left by the all-consuming search for her friend.

Alice mostly remembered it as her first Christmas with the tail. She’d eaten so much sponsored KFC that it had caused one of the hosts to puke on air, and that had been before she inhaled an entire turkey in front of the Prime Minister at the ritzy reception dinner for Japan’s elite. Humiliating.

The following year had seen them much better prepared for the onslaught of lucrative sponsors and TV appearances. She didn’t make anybody throw up, which was an improvement, and she’d shared a very uninhibited rebound-relief-revelry night with Hina and a bottle of champagne in a phenomenally expensive hotel in Osaka. The grueling churn of commercial stardom had its perks.

By last year, they’d become sufficiently used to and worn down by their new lifestyle that they’d elected to take the night off. Ai had finally managed to burn herself out; Yuuka was especially crabby from exams and had gone with Hina to blow off steam by wrecking a private flamebearer black-bagging operation in Korea. That had left Alice with Amane for a quiet night of binging Mobile Suit Gundam 00—with running commentary from Ebi. They’d been interrupted by a visitor of Christmas past.

Six Christmases gone since fire fell from the sky. Five since she’d donned the mantle. Four Christmases since they’d gone to war with the largest magical military in the world and won. Three since she’d embarrassed herself on national television, and two since the last time she’d shared a bed with her best friend. One Christmas since she’d come face-to-face with one of the Vaetna.

Thanks to the immutable arrow of time—Yuuka’s unique and impossible ability notwithstanding—Christmas had come every December for quite a few years before this point and, barring a disaster much bigger than the ones the world had recently weathered or a significant shift in the global metaculture, would continue to arrive regularly for quite a few years hence.

Today was Christmas day, and Alice was full of dread. You see, Hina had been very good this year, and Alice had wanted to reward her adorably, obnoxiously touchy-feely teammate-slash-best friend, so her Christmas gift had been a guarantee of some quality time together today, away from work, just the two of them—unless Ai wanted to join, which she didn’t and never had. Hina got to pick the activity, and Alice had breathed a sigh of relief that the first word out of her mouth had been “shopping!” rather than a request to be beaten within an inch of her life. The “activities” that followed the latter were pretty amazing, Alice could at least admit that, but she had resolved to put those days behind her. Thankfully, Hina seemed to have gotten the memo, so shopping it was, and shopping was better.

But shopping at the pet store was arguably worse.

—

“Alice, Alice, check it out!”

Hina held up the collar. It was cheap, low-grade pink polyester with that rough, ribbed pattern that rose and fell under your finger as it circumnavigated the loop. The buckle was similarly cheap, a squeeze-to-separate black plastic that came together with a satisfying click in Hina’s hands.

“It’s…a collar. Lower your voice.”

Alice was very aware of the eyes on them. A young woman carrying some type of small, fluffy terrier in one arm had been browsing at the end of the aisle and trying to ignore the two superhumans; she’d hurried elsewhere when Hina’s voice had hit the familiar peak of raspy joy that showed up whenever she was at play. Similarly, Alice kept noticing the shop attendant in the center of the store glancing at them. You couldn’t just tune these things out, unless you were Hina.

“Of course it’s a collar!” Hina’s slender hands danced around the circumference. She undid the clasp and raised the collar to her neck, looking at Alice with genuine curiosity. “Do y’think it’d look…good?”

She had complied with the request to lower her voice by adjusting down to a throaty purr. Alice rolled her eyes. That worked on some people, not her.

“Pink has never been your color.”

Hina blinked her big, blue eyes at Alice, who was entirely right; Hina’s current outfit—a black turtleneck and fishnets covered by denim overall shorts—contained no shades of red at all. It was ironic, really; for all Hina liked being splattered in blood, reds and pinks had just never quite worked for her. Hina frowned at the collar.

“Hm, yeah.” 

She put it back on the rack, grabbed an adjacent one that was black in color and identical in all other respects, and held it up suggestively, as one might a piece of lingerie or an especially expensive cut of wagyu A5. Alice didn’t even attempt to match the energy.

“Too fragile for you. You’d crush the buckle if you got too excited with the squeeze.” She waved her hand down the whole rainbow of collars. “Same goes for all of these. You need a good, steel buckle.”

Hina danced down the aisle, following the gesture. She’d already put back the black collar and was almost pirouetting as she spun to look at the shelves on opposite sides. Always weightless, always reveling. The jingle of the shop’s front door caused her to slam to a halt mid-spin, aborting out of the maneuver by blatantly violating conservation of momentum. Alice tutted.

“Hina! Mind your ripple! You know better—”

“Ferret!”

“—you know what, not worth it.”

Alice exhaled a long-suffering sigh, shaking her head at the way her teammate had leapt clean over the aisle and disappeared toward the front of the store in a jubilant frenzy. She walked to the end of the aisle and confirmed that Hina was indeed off to harass the would-be customer, a young man with a beautiful white ferret on his shoulder. He was looking both overwhelmed at Hina’s sudden appearance and—no blame on him, in Alice’s estimation—a little enraptured at her feral beauty. She had that effect on people, with the lustrous reddish tones of her hair and the face of a model. But her stunning good looks were, as always, waylaid by her nature; she had eyes not for the human, but for his shoulder-jockeying pet, whose albino-red eyes were locked in a staring contest with the sapphires, a silent war waged just above the rim of her sunglasses. Alice swore that if her teammate was about to fight for dominance with a fucking ferret—

Hina’s hand flickered forward and booped it on the nose; she burst out laughing at the ferret’s look of pure indignance. Alice’s temper vented off the heat it had been building in a relieved snort as she relaxed and let her awareness widen out again. A mix of combat training and celebrity instinct prompted her to half-turn and check behind her, where the woman with the terrier was standing at a comfortable distance and warily staring at the thick, heavy third limb coming out of her backside. Alice threw on her normal, friendly smile—not the “I just spent an hour in the makeup chair and need to get returns on that time” smile, her “ignore the giant tail and the fact that I could flatten this entire city, I’m friendly” smile—turning to hide the silhouette of its bulk behind her legs and skirt.

“Hello!”

In Japanese, of course. The woman flinched slightly, hefting her dog as though trying to shield it with her body.

“G—greetings.”

Alice winced internally and tried to turn up her smile’s brightness by a notch.

“Is something the matter?”

The woman shook her head.

“No, not at all, I—I’m so sorry, my friend is just such a huge fan, and I was wondering if…”

Alice sighed internally. Just a fan by proxy who had been wondering how to approach and been thrown off by the tail. Happened literally every day.

Literally every day.

—

“That was one of the nicer places in Ginza, to my knowledge. None of those were what you were looking for?”

“Nope!”

“Then what are you looking for?”

“I’ll know it when I see it!”

Alice sort of hated shopping with Hina for this precise reason. The girl just didn’t have an organized bone in her body, happily setting out on quests of purchase with no basic criteria or timetable.

“So how am I supposed to help you find ‘the perfect collar’ if I don’t know what you’re looking for?”

“Be eye candy? Keep the press off me, y’know.”

This banter was taking place at their second store of the outing. The first, Hina had played with the ferret for a few minutes, snapped a selfie with the terrier-girl while the dog growled at her, and then declared they needed to widen the scope of their search. This place was just next door.

Hina’s comment about the press was partially in jest, but also a matter of genuine practicality, the sort that shone through when she truly wanted to get something done, which made Alice feel better about being an accomplice to an otherwise very stupid quest. Be eye candy? Sure, Alice could do that; she attracted attention with her…distinctive appearance no matter what. Her tail was simply too massive to cover believably—today’s skirt, a long and slitted, ankle-length item in stylish grey, was stitched in such a way to accommodate its bulk, with an additional looping strap added over the top of the tail’s base to make up for the lack of a typical waist belt. That was the compromise all her clothes had to make, because the unsightly appendage could not be conveniently shunted “elsewhere,” into the spaces adjacent to reality; the risk was unacceptable.

Hina’s eyes, on the other hand, were manageable. Though immutable by magic and unmaskable even by the most sophisticated contact lenses Ai could craft, they could be dimmed by sunglasses, so Hina had accumulated a whole collection in the years since the hazel had been usurped by ultramarine. She passed for human at a glance, and though it only took the barest hop of logic to discern her identity based on her easygoing banter with the unmistakable lizard-tailed woman, it meant she was always the second to be noticed and was therefore mostly free to shop unharried for a short while. A time-tested strategy, at least until Hina acted out as she had in the last store.

By Alice’s estimation, they had maybe ten minutes before the first of the paparazzi would catch up to them—so doing pretty well, all things considered. Things were looking dire for Hina’s search here as well; she touched every collar, rubbing her fingers on the material and feeling the flex, and shook her head each time. She huffed as she put down the last, looking peeved. Alice snorted.

“So what happens now? We keep going from store to store until we find ‘the one?’”

“Mmm…yeah! Good plan, Alice.”

“Did you not have a plan before?”

But the hyenic girl was already sauntering back toward the front of the store. Alice followed in long, brisk steps, power-walking rather than jogging; her legs had gained a lot of muscle to compensate for the weight of the tail, but that didn’t cushion the impacts on her joints, so running hurt. Walking was more dignified anyway. She didn’t need Hina’s bouncy, explosive freedom of movement to communicate the power they both carried.

Case in point—as she pushed out the door and returned to the streets of Ginza, heads turned. Hina was already gathering attention due to how she was leaning against nothing—buried in her phone to search for the next stage of their quest, uncaring of the humans—but Alice’s confident stride and unique figure made some people outright stop walking and stare.

Hina didn’t give her the chance to address the crowd. She tossed her phone back into pocketspace, surveyed the people around them, tensed her legs, and jumped. It sent her fifteen meters almost straight up, barely horizontal enough to contact the facade at the apex of her trajectory, landing horizontally on the glass as though coming to a jogging stop—just on the wrong axis. Then she jumped again, propelling herself toward the skyline with far too much momentum for how little windup she had and the lack of counter-impact on the window she’d used as a launch pad. The third jump was even more bizarre, launching off of nothing at all.

Alice watched her go, leapfrogging over the city. So did the crowd, nearly all of whom had drawn their phones to record the sight; the locals around Lighthouse Tower were used to Hina’s hopping, but it was unusual in this part of town. It also wasn’t particularly mahou shoujo, so it fell to Alice to live up to type. She tugged a few invisible control threads in her mantle’s weave, picking out a good melange of settings: a low-impact traversal configuration, an outfit that didn’t show too much skin in the cold (purely cosmetic), and the medium-length transformation sequence animation, eight seconds. Radiance Opal allowed herself a small, quiet grin while the crowd was still focused on Hina, then tugged the initializer.

Glimmering lights and gemstone refractions filled the air, and then all eyes were on her. She shouted the familiar words.

“Houseki hikare!”

Shine like gemstones.

—

Hina still beat her there, of course. Alice touched down at the end of the block and dropped her mantle, hurrying down the street and into the store. She’d wanted to make a flashy exit, but it wouldn’t do to get swarmed with paparazzi at their new location. She found Hina staring into a fishtank.

“Woah.”

“You’re drooling.”

Hina wiped her mouth. “No.”

“Don’t eat the store’s fish, Hina.”

“But they have so many!” She pointed at the hundreds of small goldfish in the tank. “They won’t miss a couple. I mean, you’re hungry too, right? Riiiiiiight?”

For a terrible moment, Alice’s stomach agreed with Hina. She was hungry—she was always hungry—and the fish were perfectly bite-sized, and there were so many that a simple displacement right from the tank to her mouth would go unnoticed—that was how long it took her to master the impulse and start dragging her friend away from the fish tank.

With her other hand, she reached into her personal pocketspace and rooted around. This kind of situation was why she kept a lot of food in here; she felt past the mixed nuts and dried fruits, realized she was too far to the left when her hand grazed the instant noodles. At last, her hand brushed what she was looking for, and she pulled it into normal space, interrupting Hina’s theatrical keening by presenting the bag of jerky.

“No pet store fish. Dried fish.”

Hina’s eyes lit up at the convenience store delicacy. She freed herself from Alice’s grip and snatched the bag in the same blur of motion, and tore it open. This was tuna jerky, the pungent stuff Amane couldn’t stand but Alice and Hina both loved. Hina was already grabbing a handful of the salted meat to raise it to her mouth, but stopped before taking a bite. Blue eyes flicked to Alice’s face, then down at the fistful of flesh.

“You first.”

“I’m not hungry.” Alice waved at Hina’s greedy handful. “Go ahead.”

Hina shook her head. “I’m not eating if you don’t.”

“Weren’t you just about to steal some fish?” Alice lowered her voice; she really didn’t want to explain that to the old lady at the counter.

“‘S not about that.” Hina held out the ball of jerky to Alice. “You first. I know you’re hungry.”

“I’m fine, we only had breakfast an hour—”

Alice’s stomach betrayed her with a gurgle that needed no Hina-tier senses to pick up. Hina’s expression broke into a worried pout.

“Babe, you gotta eat.”

“I’m eating fine.”

“You don’t need to count the calories, ‘s not gonna make the tail any bigger. It hasn’t grown in four months.”

“It’s not about the tail.”

Hina let off on the puppy eyes, but Alice disliked the doubting, frustrated look even more.

“Uh huh. Like how Amane keeps ‘forgetting’ her stabilizer module? Or more like how Yuuka doesn’t have a grudge against the Vaetna. Or Ebi’s whole—”

“Enough,” Alice hissed, hackles rising. “Way too far, Hina.”

The sardonic worry vanished from Hina’s face, replaced by contrition, but the fistful of jerky didn’t move.

“Oh. Sorry. You should still eat.”

“…Fine.”

Alice reached out and reluctantly picked a shred of dried tuna from the ball and put it in her mouth, chewing with purpose. She swallowed. The ball still didn’t move.

“More.”

“Hina, this is ridiculous.” Even as she protested, she was becoming aware of how hungry she actually was. Stupid tail. “You eat the jerky. I’ve got plenty of other food.”

At last, that got Hina to retract the accusatory ball of dried meat, but she didn’t begin eating. She stowed it in her pocketspace.

“Meh, not hungry.”

“Seriously?”

“I think I’m feeling more…toothy. Bitey. Wanna gnaw. Y’know?”

“I…wish I didn’t?”

—

Hina was still happily gnawing on her rawhide stick when they arrived at the next store. She’d bought a round for the house, as it were—that meant a chew toy for everyone in the store, human and canine alike. Hers was a personable and even familiar brand of inhumanity, a man’s-best-friend enthusiasm and vivacity that made it easy to look at the fangs and impossible hue in her eyes and label them mere eccentricity. Alice knew better, but at least it left a positive impression.

Unfortunately, Hina still hadn’t found “the one,” and things weren’t looking much better here.

“Nope.”

“I rather think it fits you.” Alice munched on a granola bar, her concession to Hina’s increasingly loud insistence, as she held up the huge, spiked collar. “And heavier-duty than you’d find at a whips-and-chains sort of place.”

She wasn’t sure if the market even existed for dogs that big in Tokyo; most of the dogs she saw on the street were more…rat-like. Alice had a fondness for big, loyal dogs, like the one looking at her through the collar. Hina pouted.

“It’s fake leather.”

“Would this be the one if it were real leather? I still don’t understand your scoring system.”

“No, but it’s not adding points.” Hina surveyed the selection of other available colors. “And this is the best of what they have.”

“So we’re moving on?”

By now, the actual paparazzi had caught wind of their adventure. There had already been cameras out—real cameras, not just phones—when they’d touched down in front of this place, and while the store hadn’t yet been breached, Alice figured they’d need to leave through the back or blink away entirely so as to not get mobbed by the growing crowd at the front entrance.

“Not just yet. Didja read the sign when we came in?”

“Not in detail.”

“Then right this way.”

Bemused, Alice let Hina lead her toward the back of the store, where shelving gave way to terrariums. A lizard lay in the largest, sunning itself under a heat lamp. It was big, and white, and from the girth of its tail, Alice knew and resented where Hina was going with this.

“I see. Is this supposed to be me?”

“Yes, her name is Alice, and she’s the best…blue tegu? In all of Japan.”

Alice hadn’t missed Hina’s eyes darting to the sticker on the terrarium’s exterior. She shook her head, already running out of patience for this.

“Its name is Kei.”

“Whatever! She’s still the best!”

Hina blurred. Before Alice understood what was happening, she was holding the lizard in her arms. Her temper sparked.

“Hina, you can’t just—”

The air heated up around her—Kei snuggled against her in exactly the same way a cat would, seeking the warmth she emanated.

“See! She likes you!”

Her tail twitched in consternation; she resented being compared to an animal, especially when the similar traits were actively deleterious to her body image. As usual, Hina didn’t seem to understand that what she liked wasn’t what everybody liked. She tried again, more carefully this time.

“I don’t like being compared to a lizard.”

“You don’t like being compared to the cutest thing in the whole wide world? You are very cute, you know.”

The compliment did little to soothe the sting of the false comparison.

“Stop it.”

“Ally, I know you’re not taking care of yourself. When’s the last time you washed it?”

“I wash it in the bath; you know that, what with how you keep barging in. And that doesn’t even matter; it’s antimicrobial just because of how hot I run. Reptiles are vulnerable to fungal infections because they’re cold-blooded, and I am not a reptile.”

For demonstration, she allowed her rising indignance to manifest as heat. Kei snuggled closer into her chest, using her boobs as pillows. Alice was distantly proud of that, somewhere under the exasperation and resentment. Hina was a freak in all meanings of the word, so she didn’t yelp or flinch at the surge of localized heat.

“It still needs more than just soap! I keep telling you to see an actual vet, babe.”

“Magical girls shouldn’t need vets,” Alice angrily muttered as the heat faded. She knew she was in the wrong, and feeling like a petulant teen again hit her hard enough in the pride that it was taking the wind out of her sails. “Does this conversation have to happen here? In public? On Christmas?”

“The greatest gift is good health.”

Alice hated Hina’s ad-libbed proverbs and lessons. They were always delivered in impressions of some nonspecific mountaintop sage, and as somebody with relatives who actually spoke like that, she really didn’t need more of it in her life. “Can we shut up about this? Please?”

“Nope, we’re solving the problem. What ails you, babe? You keep twitching it.”

“I’m twitching it because you’re making me upset.” Alice contemplated releasing her aura again; Kei was starting to get squirmy without it. “There’s nothing wrong with it. Drop it.”

“There’s totally something wrong with it.” Suddenly Hina was next to her, leaning over and inspecting the scales. Fucking teleporters. “Lemme know if this hurts.”

Hina ran her hand down the underside of the tail, and Alice nearly jumped out of her skin. A tingling, itchy sensation sprawled over a particular area where Hina’s hand had passed, so weird and unpleasant that she lost control of her aura and emanated a pulse of heat. She caught it before it went to dangerous levels for Kei, then glared at Hina.

“What was that?”

“Something wrong.” Hina’s voice was smug. “It’s dry. Are you washing the underside?”

“Yes!” The odd sensation was still lingering, bouncing around her nerves under the scales, and panic was starting to set in. “That’s—tingly. In a bad way, like—” She twisted around, trying to get a look even though she knew it was impossible. She wasn’t flexible enough for that; Hina probably wasn’t flexible enough for that. “Don’t touch it again.”

“Don’t need to. My job here is done!”

“How do you mean? You’ve succeeded in harassing me about my bathing habits and convincing me I have some kind of nerve issue, was that your goal?”

“Babe, we’re at a pet store. One specializing in reptiles, if you haven’t noticed. In fact, I hear the ol’ shopkeep is a reptile vet.” Hina gently hoisted Kei out of Alice’s arms and slung the lizard under one arm. “You have a problem. Let’s solve it.”

Alice realized that she’d been caught in Hina’s trap and flinched, just barely, because she knew what her friend wanted her to do. She’d always hated bothering people on the job—and these days, her mere presence was enough of an ambient disruption for her to feel awkward, especially once the parade of cameras inevitably showed up. But she was a big girl, and Hina was right: there was a problem, and this was the right place to solve it, disregarding how Hina had led her here. So she raised her hand and called out.

“Shopkeeper!”

—

Alice’s problem, as it turned out, was indeed a lizard problem, and not a severe one or even a problem with her nerves at all. In fact, it was the kind of problem that could be solved with a soak in what were essentially just bath salts for reptiles. Twice a week for six weeks, the shopkeeper—ex-vet, as it turned out—recommended, and the skin underneath the scales would become less dry and the irritation would go away. He was fascinated by Alice’s description of the sensation; nobody’d ever been able to ask a lizard how it felt.

Of course, Alice was not a dragon. Her tail was more massive than those of even the largest lizards, more akin to a crocodile or enormous snake, so it was a hideously expensive thing to buy the appropriate bath salts in sufficient quantity for the full treatment. But money at the scale of most conventional storefronts was of no object to the Radiances, and pocketspaces made transporting a few jugs of liquid a breeze. Alice peeled off the big sticker with a picture of a lizard from the front first, though.

Hina didn’t find a collar that met her standards, in the end. She insisted that the whole expedition had not just been a ruse to get Alice in front of a vet and that she was indeed still on the hunt; to prove it, they’d continued the search for another three hours, combing through pet stores all around the city. They’d even let the paparazzi catch up at one point and acquiesced to some photos and some random questions about their opinions on current events; Alice had done the talking. Funny how she was more comfortable with twenty cameras in her face than she was asking for assistance in a store.

Then they’d escaped the cameras, heading straight up and alighting on a high rooftop.

“…Thanks.” The admission of gratitude was awkward and muttered; unbefitting of a Radiance. Alice tried again. “Thank you for helping me, Hina.”

Predictably, Hina sprang forward and wrapped her in a big hug, nuzzling her neck, pure love. It tickled.

“Love you too! I just want you to take care of yourself. Don’t be like Ai.”

“I won’t.” Alice returned the hug. Her best friend’s dogged persistence could be frustrating, but it was also her most constant expression of affection; besides, Alice knew Hina was right about Ai. “You know, she could just make you a collar.”

“She hates Christmas. And you know that’s not the point, babe.” Hina purred against her chest; that was a mutation Alice had no complaints about. “I wanted to spend time with you.”

“Mm.” Alice was happy with that. “Your day-with-Alice-pass is almost up. Anything else you want to do?”

“Well, if we’d found the perfect collar, I would have wanted you to put it on me.”

“…Maybe the real collar is the friends we made along the way?”

Hina frowned against her neck. “Doesn’t quite have a Christmasy ring to it. But sure, you’re my collar. My leash. Thanks.” Alice wasn’t sure how to feel about the label, but as with everything that came from Hina, it was wrapped up in so much adoration that she wouldn’t contest it, not up here where it was just the two of them. One of Hina’s hands wandered down from Alice’s back to the base of her tail, scratching the scales with her claws, eliciting a twitch. “Can I help in the bath?”

“…You know what, sure.” Alice savored Hina’s purred response, then finally let the hug go. Hina separated from her with some reluctance, paused, and stole a kiss on the way out, smirking at the automatic blush and smile that invaded Alice’s face.

“I’m hungry,” The Sapphire Radiance declared.

The smile widened into a grin.

“I’m hungry, too. Have something in mind?”

“Feeling…festive. Remember that Chinese place we got takeout from last year? After Yuuka and I got back?”

“Sounds good. Shall we?”

“In a bit.” Hina looked out over the skyline, into the distance, where Tokyo’s endless sprawl faded against the purple mountains. “Wanna stay up here a little longer.”

“Fine by me.”

Neither of them were bothered by the cold December air, nor the winds howling above the city. Despite all the ways they weren’t “real” mahou shoujo, the Flame had at least given them that much. And besides—up here was where mahou shoujo should be, looking down on the lights of Tokyo from a rooftop.

“Merry Christmas, Hina.”

“Merry Christmas, babe.”

“…Don’t talk about our bathing habits in public.”

“I said I was sorry!”

—

Christmas is not a significant day to everybody, of course. For some, like Radiance Emerald or a certain person in a certain apartment in Bristol, Christmas is just another day of the year. For others, they may celebrate another festival of lights: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Diwali—and of course Hikanome have their own, as does the Spire. But regardless of one’s denomination, belief in a God or the Flame or nothing at all, those darkest days of the year carry an energy, some amorphous and hard-to-pin-down festive spirit. It is a time to commemorate friendship and togetherness, to huddle together around the fire and eat and drink and defy the cold. It is a near-universal human phenomenon in those final months of the year.

So it should come as little surprise that in this age of magic, especially where people gather and celebrate in great masses, the festive spirit leaves its mark. Presents appear under trees; oil lamps burn days longer than they ought to; reindeer become restless, and there are reports that they may even luminesce. The jingling of bells heralds strange figures clad in red and white, the same colors that paranatural research labs across the world observe in higher quantities than usual. Things move in the snow.

One can only assume the Frozen Flame enjoys the season as much as humanity does.

Happy holidays and a bright new year.

2.10 Patreon Release

Also available on Sunspot's new website!

Mild content warnings for dysphoria and blood magic.

---------

Who hosts an outdoor event in February?

The Saturday of Hikanome’s festival had seen the rain finally wise up and realize it was unseasonable for this time of year in Tokyo, so it had retreated and left streaky greys across a clear, blue sky which you could tell was chilly just from its hue. The blue was more like a hazy purple from where I rested my head against the limo’s tinted window. Honestly, it was more like a fancy cab, not one of those long limousines Dad and I used to ride sometimes. I winced as we rounded a bend and the centrifugal—centripetal, whatever—force pushed my bad foot against the car door. It was still sensitive.

I caught the reflection of the car’s interior in the window. To my left, on the far side of the limo, the aide Alice had assigned me for the brief journey was dragging a pen up and down his clipboard. He counted the items, double-, triple-, quadruple-checking them. I didn’t know exactly what was written, but I knew they were the safety procedures to get me there in one piece and un-kidnapped, since I wasn’t arriving with the two attending Radiances. They had a more spectacular entrance planned, but had stipulated that if I was to attend, I wouldn’t be held to the same standard of showmanship. I wondered how the man—Clipboard, I was calling him, since I’d instantly forgotten his actual name—saw me. Was I a different kind of entity from the Radiances, in his mind? Then a lock of my new hair slipped off my shoulder and blocked my view of his nervous tic.

Right, my new hair. Hard-earned; harder-earned than it had needed to be.

—

The barber’s shears left me numb. Kamihata was beyond apologetic, but didn’t understand the problem, and had no recourse other than to lead me back to the waiting room couch next to Amane. I stared at my phone and the messages I had sent Sky. The act of sending the messages had helped, barely—the panicked frenzy had ebbed away, replaced by a new kind of stress. The last time I’d sent Sky a DM, it had been to confess my stress about maintaining opsec over Todai’s involvement in the Thunder Horse inferno, the people we’d killed. He hadn’t even responded to that one. Perhaps his silence was itself a message; between that and what I’d sent just now, I might have been putting too many of my problems on his plate.

I reminded myself that I wouldn’t have ended up here without him. He had been the one to put me here with the Radiances instead of at the Spire, so it was his responsibility to help me with the fallout of that life-changing decision he’d made. And more to the point, he knew something that could fix my hair—Ai had mentioned that he’d grown his own with magic. So I waited, and to my relief, he responded.

skychicken: jesus christ ez how bad is the haircut

I started to type a response, but he was faster.

skychicken: okay holy shit actually im putting that on hold for a moment

skychicken: you CANNOT message me about lighthouse’s classified operations

skychicken: thats a huge security risk for you and them and me

ezzen: sorry

ezzen: They already told me.

ezzen: Wait, so you can admit to being a flamebearer, but I can’t talk about VNT activities? Are these chats secure or not?

skychicken: assume theyre not

skychicken: that specific fact about me is something that any listener worth their salt would already know, it doesnt count

Fair enough. I deleted the old message and averted my eyes from the screen, chastised, until a new message popped up in my peripheral vision.

skychicken: okay anyway

skychicken: im assuming those panicky messages are about a bad haircut

I ran my hand through my hair again. The lightness was alien.

ezzen: It’s not even a bad haircut, tbh

ezzen: But it’s way shorter and it feels all wrong and Ai mentioned you knew how to use magic to grow more

ezzen: For context, I performed some glyphless biomodding on myself the other day which I assume is similar to whatever you did since they equated mine to yours via having Hina as a mentor.

skychicken: ez, what did i JUST SAY

ezzen: fuck

I deleted that message, too.

ezzen: Okay without any more details, can you help me or not?

skychicken: i cant, not from here. the radiances CAN, but first

skychicken: is it WORTH using magic for this

skychicken: because itll be blood magic. it will hurt, it will spit red all over, and youre virtually guaranteed other residuals

I hesitated. He was right about the technical details: I did not know how to do this with glyphs. Biomancy was best accomplished through as little biomancy as possible, as the adage went—the green section of the glyph lexicon was the least-developed of any color of ripple other than white and silver. Setting a fractured bone was the kind of problem you could treat as a matter of telekinetics, but accelerating the cellular machinery for hair growth? I lacked both the glyph toolbox and the biology knowledge for that, and I knew better than to just stick my head in a bioacceleration field like the ones on Todai’s medical beds. That was glorified suicide, and I wasn’t that desperate.

I was, however, desperate enough for blood magic. I didn’t understand why, but the gut-deep wrongness and exposed feeling was enough to drive me back to panic or tears if I focused on it. I was only distracting myself by thinking about how I could work the problem.

ezzen: I’ll do it.

I’m grateful Sky didn’t question my conviction. If he had, I might have lost my nerve.

skychicken: okay. ask alice

skychicken: you are REALLY going to want to use the spell circle in the basement

ezzen: Okay, thanks.

With a goal in mind, I became aware of the world around me again. Amane had scooted to my left side and was peering over my shoulder, reading our chat. She shoved her phone between mine and my face.

Are you alright?

I looked at her, at those emerald eyes. One real, one fake. She had lost far more of her body than me—hair grew back, limbs didn’t. I didn’t have the right to be so upset when she’d suffered worse. I instinctively retracted my phone from her gaze.

“It’s—fine. Good enough for the event. Alice wanted me presentable, yeah?”

Amane gave me a look I didn’t know how to interpret and typed something else into her phone.

They shaved my head.

Oh. She ran her hand through the long, glossy strands of black hair.

“And you grew it back.”

It’s a challenge.

“Did—did you use magic?”

No. It took years.

Her face fell, and my hopes followed. If her million-dollar prosthetics and magic weren’t enough, what could Sky have had in mind? She brightened, squaring her shoulders, and called something out to Kamihata as her mechanical fingers danced along the screen.

But in your case, it might only take a few minutes.

—

That’s how it should have gone. Amane’s big plan for me had been to try hair extensions—the kind that fused to your hair with a little heat. I’d always known in theory that hair extensions existed, but like so many other cosmetic products, I’d never had a reason to interact with them. The problem was that even though Kamihata—or rather, Ms. Kamihata, since it was her last name, as I learned through hesitant, stop-and-go small talk—had a small collection of extensions, none matched both the wavy texture of my hair and the near-black brown. She had light browns and jet blacks, as well as a rich reddish brown that I was almost certain was specifically Hina’s and a strange, opalescent white that was definitely Alice’s, but nothing for me.

Amane and I were both frustrated by such a simple obstacle. My hair wasn’t outside the realm of types common in Japan; this actually made it worse, because at least if I was blond then it’d feel less absurd that Ms. Kamihata didn’t have a match. As it was, though, all she could do was shrug apologetically and offer me the next-closest match, which was the right curliness but in a jet-black like Amane’s, too dark for my head. It didn’t look right when she held up the swatch against hair. I would have gone for it anyway, just to alleviate the discomfort—but Amane waved her phone in my face. She had been waiting patiently for me to resolve my ridiculous issue before her own trim could begin.

Alice can help you.

“It’s fine, this works.”

She crossed her arms disapprovingly, flesh over carbon fiber.

“What? Nobody would know at a glance.”

She uncrossed her arms to type some more into the translation app.

Don’t cut corners.

She tapped her false-yet-indistinguishable eye for emphasis. I looked away, shamefaced. I was so used to just—bearing it, dealing with it, settling for “good enough.” That was why I was wearing a hoodie worth twenty quid and not eighty. Anything better made me feel guilty, even more of a burden, ever more indebted to their generosity.

You should go home and fix it with magic.

“No, it’s—it’s fine, I’ll deal.” When she looked at me blankly, I clarified, speaking louder and slower. “I’m okay. This is good enough.”

Amane replied to that with a tilt of her head and a deadpan glare. She understood me, alright, she just disagreed.

Talk to Alice.

“You mean a magical solution?” I lowered my voice, conscious of maintaining opsec—even though Ms. Kamihata was probably trustworthy if she had matching swatches of the Radiances’ hair, and she was the only other person in the room. Maybe it was policy to only have her in the shop when her special clients were in. “Like, sanguimancy? Regrow my hair with blood magic?”

Amane flicked my forehead with a carbon fiber finger. I flinched, out of surprise more than pain.

Alternatively, make a wig out of LM.

“Oh. That’s a thing? With magic?”

Amane full-on stared at me for a moment. I deserved it, really; even as the words left my mouth, I was already piecing together how such a thing could be accomplished. My habit of settling for less still tried to have the last word, though.

“But—I’m not sure this is worth interrupting her for. She was practically breathing fire when we left this morning.”

She’ll help, because she doesn’t want you to have ugly hair.

“And…what do I ask her? ‘Sorry, can you drop everything and help me throw away this perfectly fine haircut you told me to get?’”

Amane rolled her eyes.

I’ll text her. Go fix your hair, dude.

—

“Oh my God, yes, of course I’ll help.”

Alice and I stood where we had been standing three days ago, next to the spell circle with its halo of tentacle-arms in the basement, once again discussing body modification. This time, we were minus Ai; she was still working on the same aerospace project from before, and that work had taken her to JAXA headquarters elsewhere in the city. 

“Really? Nothing about how this is an irresponsible use of magic that will put Hikanome on my scent?” Or how I was wasting her time? She certainly seemed impatient, tapping away at the keyboard and monitor that controlled the assembly.

“Don’t be snippy at somebody trying to help you, Ezzen.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s hair. Hair is important,” she declared. “It defines how we look, you know, more than almost anything else.” I tried not to look at her tail when she said that. She ran a hand through her own hair, white and opalescent. “If I had known that Kamihata-san was going to do that to you…well, it’s nobody’s fault. If it’s anybody’s, it’s mine for not specifying to keep it long.”

“What do you mean?” It seemed unreasonable to blame herself, given that not even I had known how upsetting the short hairstyle would be for me. I began to run my hand through the short hair before jerking it away in discomfort. “Is it really that bad?”

“The haircut? It’s fine, it just doesn’t…suit you. We agree on that, I think.”

“…Yeah.” I scratched the base of my skull, once again uncomfortable with the lightness and the way it was exposed to the air currents. As always, magic was my distraction. “So, how’s this work?”

“Same way everything else works: LM. Get in the circle, would you?”

I hesitantly stepped closer to the glowing circle of green glyphs on the floor, remembering how Ebi had been wary of putting any part of her chassis inside. I glanced back at her.

“Should I be expecting…?”

“Analgomancy’s off, just step in.”

I did so, gingerly, and was relieved to experience no sudden, horrible transition between my prosthetic foot’s pain-nullifiers and those of the circle. I had a thought.

“Hey, why isn’t this a problem for my tattoo? Or Ai’s? Shouldn’t it damage the weave?”

“You’re fine. In, all the way in. Feet on the markers, stand up straight…straighter…good. You mean why Ebi can’t come in?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re hunching again. Up straight, c’mon…okay, stay there, don’t move.” Satisfied with my posture, she typed into the keyboard, and I heard something above me whirring. “The circle has a bunch of third-order components, some of them up to a meter ana of realspace. That’s also where Ebi keeps a lot of her auxiliary parts. Your spear is stored kata, isn’t it?”

I thought about it for a moment, resisting the urge to prod at my tattoo while Alice did whatever she was doing. The circle was even more complex than I had thought, then, if it had as many four-dimensional components as she was implying.

“Um, yeah, at least the original {COMPOSE} tuning I used was, but I actually don’t know whether Ai changed it. Must not have, if she didn’t see the need to warn me.”

“Stands to reason. Okay…done.”

“Done with what?”

“The scan. And now we apply the template, confirm, confirm, check the box, confirm…it’s going to need a few minutes to bake.”

A pop-up covered the terminal’s screen with an empty loading bar, an interface I recognized as belonging to a sibling program to GWalk.

“You’re making a glyph template.”

“Yes, so you can weave an LM version of a nice, full head of hair onto one of these.” She opened a drawer and pulled out a strip of fabric. “Wig base. We used to make these for Amane.”

“When she was regrowing her hair after…”

“Yes. I assume she told you.”

“She did.” To fill the silence that followed, I gestured for the cap, and she tossed it across the circle to me. I held it up, trying to figure out the orientation. “Are…I don’t know how wigs work,” I admitted. “Will I have to shave what I’ve already got?”

The prospect made me faintly nauseous. Bald Ezzen was—no, just no. Thankfully, Alice shook her head.

“No. Even a non-magical wig can get away with having a lot of hair underneath, and these caps include more than enough space-folding for what you’ve got. So you can just put it right on.”

I released a sigh I hadn’t known I was holding.

“Thanks. I…sort of thought you’d be mad at me.”

“For wanting long hair? Never.”

“Well—like, I thought—” I blushed, embarrassed at how I had been catastrophizing this conversation—then I realized why I had assumed we’d be doing this with blood magic. “Wait. I talked to Sky—Jason—first, and he made it sound like I was going to have to grow it back with sanguimancy. He said he’d done it before.”

Alice’s tail stopped moving, and she turned to me fully, reaching for the swiveling office chair and sitting sideways on it.

“He did. But there was no reason to do that here, yeah?”

“I…suppose not? This works. But he…” I dug out my phone, rereading the messages. “Definitely seemed pretty set on the solution being blood magic, not an LM wig.”

Silence as the loading bar on the screen crept forward. Alice looked up at the nest of soft-robotic tentacles stowed above me, and I hastily stepped out from beneath them and out of the circle. I was sure those had a gentler touch than I was envisioning, but I still wasn’t comfortable standing beneath them longer than necessary. Alice sighed.

“He thinks like Hina,” she sighed. “Why build a perfect fake when you can bleed for the real thing and hurt like hell while doing so?”

“Oh. Okay, yeah, fair. And this is a perfect fake?”

She gestured at the interface, where the progress bar had reached the two-thirds mark. “You tell me, self-made glyph genius.”

“You tell me, self-made LM expert,” I shot back with a smile, but I was already stepping toward the keyboard to click past the progress bar and look at the glyph diagram the program had generated. It had a number of telltale connections that you generally only saw in software-optimized designs, things that made it harder for most people to read but performed better. “Ai’s programming?”

“Yep.”

The diagram itself confirmed that the hair was generated using exact structural copies of the scan she’d just made of my hair. There were a number of sliders for different variables like hair thickness and length; currently greyed-out and unalterable while the current operation was in progress. The program was trying to calculate a template for the glyphs that would be 3D printed so I could easily follow it to weave the lattice.

“So this is how the mantles are made? Scan your body, tell the program to make the chains for an LM duplicate, then add on top of it for whatever features you want?”

“Yep. So all the design is in the diagrams, then we just print a template substrate and weave from that. Obviously that basic stuff isn’t Ai’s custom work, it’s the same full-stack that even a stock install of GWalk could…hm. I guess you’ve never done glyphcraft for production, have you?”

“No? I suppose not. Ai—” I stumbled on the homophonic name. “Ms. Ai—” No, that wasn’t better. What was her last name? I was embarrassed I couldn’t remember. “Ai-san had me manually editing the lattices for Amethyst’s prostheses.”

Alice covered a snort, betrayed by a twitch of her tail. “Drop the honorific, I know who you mean.”

“Sorry,” I replied, resenting the blush creeping up my neck.

“We don’t usually edit manually like that. What I was getting to was that Ai has automated away a lot of that, at least for the specialized tasks of mantles and prostheses. As a bespoke glyph craftsperson, I assume you object?”

“To programmatic glyph generation?” I scoffed. “As if. I love seeing what insane hacks the computer tries to do. It’s good stuff. Clever, inspirational. Especially when I know somebody as smart as her is behind it. There’s a lot of templating, right? Some of the motive and projection chains are pretty similar across all your diagrams.”

She nodded, checking her phone, idly typing on it even as she sat with me. I felt bad for wasting her time, but I was also really enjoying this conversation. “Our versioning’s gone to crap, a little, if you look closely. Nobody’s got exactly the same thing. But yes, being able to design one flight unit or what-have-you and then put it on all the mantles is convenient.”

“More convenient than altering your actual bodies, I’d wager.”

I realized as the words left my mouth that this was bringing us back to a sensitive topic.

“I mean…” she shrugged. “Design flexibility is the main thing, don’t get me wrong. But yes, the rest of us felt that this was much more true to the mahou shoujo transformation sequence than…bloody apotheosis.” In her London accent, it was unclear whether “bloody” was intended as a swear or in a more literal sense; probably both. “That went double after we got Amane back.”

“Apotheosis.” I rolled the word around my mouth. People sometimes used it for the Vaetna; I wondered if Alice was intentionally likening Hina to them. The hyena clearly liked to do so herself, but I wasn’t sure if that was just to push my buttons specifically. I decided to cut off this line of conversation before I managed to blurt something that would betray my incriminating desire to experience more of what Hina had shown me. “We’re, um, talking about a lot of classified stuff.”

“We are. Don’t worry; this room is off-limits to everyone but us, you know.”

“Is it? I’ve just been…coming and going as I pleased,” I admitted.

“Well, Ebi manages security and surveillance. Don’t need a keycard or anything when she knows it’s us.”

“I…see.” I supposed that was sensible, since she never left the building. I’d been a little worried when Amane and I had set out without her.

The progress bar popped back up to declare its completion, blocking me off from exploring more of the diagram.

“Done.” I squinted at the dialog box, but it was all in Japanese. “Was that the optimization step?”

“No, that was the printing.”

“Already?”

“Right? Ai never shuts up about the new printers. Come see for yourself.”

—

The glyph substrate was more complex in form than merely an outline of the sequence of glyphs. It followed the same path I’d ultimately pull the thread through, but the cross-section was more like a channel, a groove inset into the plastic to guide my hand through the various maneuvers. It also featured many more twists and turns than the glyphs themselves did, curves and edges where you could pull the thread taut so proper tension could be applied at the appropriate points. The resulting shape was a self-intersecting, coiled mess of dark polymer maybe forty centimeters in overall length but many times that if you were to stretch it all out end-to-end.

Because the LM was to be affixed to the wig cap, there was also a curved fixture for that, where it was held taut and in place by some clever grabbers. Even those bits were all the same part; like with my chopsticks, it seemed Ai had a soft spot for compliant mechanisms in her designs. Between those features and the overall shape, the substrate would be a nightmare to machine out of metal; even the monstrous, cutting-edge assembly in the workshop with its space-defying mechanisms would struggle, at least printed at this scale.

Alice had to leave me for more pressing obligations as soon as we’d freed the substrate from its embryonic bath of polymer goop and she’d shown me how to fix the cap in place, which left me a little nervous to do the weaving by myself. Each little loop was only barely large enough for me to keep track of the glowing thread as I pulled it through the groove, back and forth and around and over—word after word of the spell, for those inclined to think of it as such, although the translation for a chain of glyphs never sounded remotely grammatical in any language.

It turned out I had nothing to fear—the substrate made it dead simple to weave the design, even for an embarrassingly sloppy novice like me. Not all LM lattices are activatable and deactivatable, and this one was of the always-on variety, so it began to stitch in and grow the hair even as I was weaving. It was sort of unsettling to watch the matter manifest out of nothing, especially something as fine as human hair. The satisfaction of performing real magic outweighed the ick factor, though, and I was sad to see the process come to an end.

I was left staring down a full head’s worth of luscious, dark, shiny hair—my hair—hanging off the end of the twisting substrate. It was like the demented funhouse mirror of a mop, or the rebellious goth spawn of a Cambrian cephalopod and a curly straw. I disabused myself of the similes by removing the wig from its holder and trying to figure out which way was forward—I got there eventually. I ran my fingers through the hair and took a deep breath. My tattoo itched slightly.

“Again, not a problem you can solve, buddy.”

Just trying to help, I imagined my spear’s reply.

Before I could procrastinate any longer, I pulled the wig over my head. As promised, my existing hair was magically folded in under the cap, effectively removed from this slice of reality, hidden around a corner that shouldn’t exist—a process which would have thoroughly killed me if applied to the grey matter on just the other side of my skull. The wig sealed over my scalp, and for a moment I had a very strange feeling of disorientation and panic at the thing stuck on my head, get it off get it OFF—

And then I was fine. Better than fine, even, as I felt the weight on my neck and shoulders down to where the hair draped halfway down my back; not quite as unbroken and smooth of a glossy sable curtain as Amane’s hair, nor as long, but better nonetheless. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Ezzen Colliot: All good now.

Amane Ishikawa: ദ്ദി´ ˘ `)✧

—

Trouble arrived in paradise that evening.

Amane had gushed about my new hair on her return, her joy evident as she circled me and ran her hands through it even though I couldn’t understand a word. She showed me how to put it up in a ponytail and did the same with her own hair, which had only received a minor trim, then went off with Ebi for whatever medical procedures filled their time behind closed doors—I tried very hard to ignore the easy innuendo there. Amane’s condition was serious.

Jokes in poor taste aside, the rest of that afternoon was spent on final prep for tomorrow’s big day. Alice eventually freed herself from meetings and gave my new hair—as I was thinking of it, rather than as a wig—the go-ahead. Hina was still absent without leave, which had me a little upset but not particularly worried for her; I was much more upset that Yuuka had deigned to grace us with her presence for dinner. It was one particular remark that set everything in motion.

“Doesn’t match the stubble, mate.”

The air on Alice’s side of the table heated up so quickly I didn’t have time to process the comment. I just flinched and scooted backward.

“Yuuka, we need to talk. Right now.”

“I meant he should grow out the beard! Have you seen Keanu? Beards with long hair are really in, and I think Ezza’s bone structure could totally—”

She shut up as a shadow fell over the table. Amane had been munching quietly—now she was a silent purple monolith, with one enormous hand gently cradling Yuuka’s cranium. She rumbled something at Yuuka, who flinched, looked confused, glanced at me, then at Alice, then back at me, and finally looked even more confused.

“I was trying to help!”

There was a flurry of Japanese back-and-forth between the three until she fell silent sullenly. I began to grow uncomfortable as an expectant silence took over the table, until finally—

“Sorry, Ezzen,” she blurted. Amethyst’s hand retracted, and she turned back into a girl, looking satisfied.

“Um. Forgiven?” I wasn’t even sure what had just happened, only that I’d never seen Yuuka look that contrite before in the short time I’d known her. She batted her temple with the heel of her hand, as though trying to dislodge something in her head. Troubleshooting her eye? Alice, for her part, still looked only marginally short of ready to skin Yuuka alive. At least the heat had died down, saving my poor pad thai.

At last, what she’d actually said caught up to me, and I reflexively reached up to brush my stubble. At some level, I’d recognized the need for a shave before the event, one to match my haircut, but since that had been thoroughly derailed by the circus with the extensions and the wig, I hadn’t—I didn’t like its texture under my fingers. I jerked my hand away and refocused on Yuuka, genuinely curious.

“You think I could…rock a beard? As it were?”

She didn’t respond until she’d made some sort of meaningful eye contact with Alice.

“With another…two or three weeks of growth? Yeah, I think so. Not like that, though. Should probably shave it.”

“Your foresight telling you that?”

“I don’t know what it’s been telling me, lately,” she groused, tapping her temple again. “Been a little on the fritz all week. Feel—” she glanced at Alice again, who was finally sitting back down, “feel like I should tell ya that, since you’re stickin’ around.”

—

That bizarrely non-confrontational encounter left me feeling a bit more cautiously positive about Saturday—but much worse about my appearance. I excused myself from dinner quickly and almost ran up the stairs, fast as my foot would allow, to shave off my stubble with the razor Alice had lent me. Now that I was aware of it, it felt almost…sticky, like a coating over my face and throat, nearly as intrusive as the wig had been in the first moments after putting it on. I ran the razor across my face, scrubbed off, and touched the skin again. Not smooth. 

I tried again, finding a few spots I had missed the first time in the crevasses where my neck met the corners of my jaw. Rinsed off again—still not smooth. The mirror claimed it was a clean shave at a distance, but up close, I could still clearly see the microdots of each follicle for the thick hairs of my beard. Maybe it was the razor: a dull blade or just the wrong type for this. Either way, I’d already imposed so much on the girls for my hair-related woes today, I couldn’t bring myself to ask if they had any others that might do a better job.

Dissatisfied with the shave, I tried to lose myself in random videos about magic and the Spire, old favorites and new releases I’d missed in all my newfound excitement. Once I’d handed over my answers to Overload’s questions, he’d finalized the video shockingly quickly, though there was precious little information about my flamefall that was new to me anymore. I still wondered where Holton was, who’d bailed him out—but whenever my thoughts strayed too far, my fingers would find my chin, and the tight dissatisfaction in my chest would return.

It got worse the later the night dragged on. Conscious of the fact that I’d have to be up early tomorrow—or at least early by my standards, out of bed by 8 AM—I tossed and turned in bed, still seeking refuge in distraction but unable to find it for long. I’d taken the wig off when I went to bed, nervous of some vague and ridiculous death by hair-strangulation in the night, but that just made the discomfort more gnawing, so I quickly re-donned the almost-real hair and occupied my hands by running my fingers through it instead. That helped, a bit, but still no sleep.

At half past two, I decided something had to be done.

—

Lighthouse Tower was different at night. The penthouse was still navigable, thanks to a mix of the city lights through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the main lights over the kitchen island, which remained on but dim. Familiar furniture was recast as alien, tenebrous shapes in my peripheral vision, a shadowy version of the space I’d just begun to call home. These failed to spook me as I crept my way down the stairs to the elevator. For all that the list of my various hangups and phobias was ever-expanding and had several recent additions, the dark didn’t make the cut. It would have been cozy, even tranquil—I was entirely too uncomfortable with the sensation on my chin and throat to relax. I hit the button and waited impatiently.

I knew from experience that there was an annoying chime to mark the elevator’s arrival at the upper, but not lower, of the penthouse’s two floors. The lower one had probably been disabled precisely for late-night comings-and-goings like mine. Why not the upper as well, I had no idea.

From there, it was a straight descent to B1F, where the lights remained on even at this late hour. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, given Ai’s propensity to pull late nights, but I hadn’t really thought it through until now. I felt out of place walking down these halls in my nightclothes—just a T-shirt and shorts, hardly an incriminating onesie, and there was nobody around to pass judgment anyway, but still. The narrow windows on the various closed doors to the workshop showed the vast ex-garage illuminated but motionless, the huge industrial machines powered down for the night. I didn’t want to linger; my actual destination was just across the hall.

The prosthetic fitting room with the spell circle was also closed for the night. Like the workshop, I could see its lights were still on through the sole window in the metal door. I bit my lip, debating whether it was even necessary to be here—but what I was planning to do would hurt, and hopefully sixty more meters of distance would limit how much red ripple would reach Amane. I felt safer hiding my crimes down here in this basement, assuming I could get in. Fretting that I was about to set off some sort of alarm, I tested the unassuming handle—nope. No blaring klaxons, which was good, but definitely locked up. I wondered how to bypass it with magic—

“Evening.”

I yelped and twisted away from the door, nearly overbalancing before my stabilizer kicked in and my prosthetic foot came down behind me. I held Ebi at spear-point. She was wearing…an actual polka-dotted nightgown, right out of a movie, nightcap and all. She yawned with her digital face and stretched sleepily, exaggerating the motions of her neck and shoulders to a degree that straddled the line between cartoonish and grotesque, then abandoned the act and crossed her arms.

“I said, evening.”

I sighed, banishing my spear and testing the handle once more for good measure. “Evening. Given you found me and haven’t raised an alarm, I assume you already have an inkling of what I’m up to at this hour. Accomplice or snitch?”

“Still deciding. Spell it out for me.”

I rubbed my jaw, wincing and impatient. It occurred to me that of everyone in the Radiances’ weird pseudo-family, Ebi might be the most sympathetic to this particular goal. She’d expressed her disdain for hair in all its forms before; it really came down to how much of a prick she felt like being. “Stubble. I want it gone.”

“Big oof. Totally get where you’re coming from. And you were gonna do blood magic about it?”

“Can we call it biomancy?”

“It’s meat.” She made a show of glancing through the small window. “Figure anybody’s in there?”

“Are you going to help me or not? I know you can unlock this door.”

“You were just debating semantics; can’t be in that much of a hurry. Y’know, we have sub-basements below this one, if you wanted to get further from the girls.”

“Do they have configurable analgomatic spell circles?” I’d take that option if there wasn’t some weird catch.

“No.”

There it was.

“Then I’m not interested. Let me in.”

She tutted. “That’s no way to talk to your doctor.”

“Let me in, please.”

“With feeling.”

“What’s the point of this, Ebi?”

“The point is that you do not fuck around with blood magic.” Something in the robot’s voice changed. Not the sonic, autotuned quality, something deeper, like the feeling in your sinuses before a storm. “Do you know exactly what you’re doing? Do you? Or are you playing with forces you don’t understand for vanity?”

“Vanity? I can’t sleep,” I shot back, trying and failing to keep my voice down. “Because of this. There’s something wrong with me, and I’m trying to fix it. Help me.”

“Quiet. You’re meat. You’re fragile. You’re not going to fix anything fucking about in the dark.” Her voice was icy. “Not when you’re so easy to break by accident.”

The door clicked. Ebi’s digital face twisted into a grin.

“Would be cool to see you try, though. Just one problem.”

My heart thudded. “Yeah?”

“Take a look. And really, be quiet. The soundproofing turns off when the door is open.”

I very gently tested the handle once more, slowly pushing the door inward. I looked through the crack and saw Ai, head down on the desk, surrounded by paper. Spent energy drinks were neatly stacked on the corner of the desk. Somebody—Ebi—had put a blanket over her.

I dropped my voice to a whisper, and gently closed the door, looking back at Ebi. “Ah.”

“Yeah. Be glad you didn’t come down sixteen minutes sooner.”

“What do I do?” My determination was starting to curdle into anxiety. “I can’t do this with her right there.”

“Maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it at all. I don’t want to wake her up either, for what it’s worth. This is the first real sleep she’s gotten in…” the robot mimed checking a wristwatch, “sixty-one hours. She hides it well, but I’m not letting anything wake her up until she’s gotten a nice, full nine hours.”

“We have to be out the door in…” I thought for a moment, not equipped with the same precision timekeeping. “Eight!”

“Sucks for Hikanome. She’ll still make the reception dinner, I think. But yeah, if you want to use the circle, we’re going to have to be real quiet. So I guess it bears asking: does it have to be blood magic?”

“Well…” To deal with the stubble, probably not. But Sky had planted an idea in my head, given me a stone that I was aiming at a second bird. “Yes. It does. And it’s not for vanity.”

“I know. Was just making sure you knew that.” She put a hand on the doorknob. “Ready?”

“I guess. Couldn’t you just, er, dose her? Give her something to make sure she gets her full night’s sleep even with us crashing around?”

“If I had something like that on-hand, I’d just have jabbed you in the neck before you noticed me.”

I shuddered. “…Right. In that case…”

—

The preparation was easy enough. Scrawl the most basic soundproofing glyph chain on a piece of paper, wince as I wove it shoddily, place the resulting lattice near Ai’s head. It was a poor solution even before my own sloppy implementation, but it was the least we could do, and it meant I didn’t have to literally be on my tiptoes. Still, just to be safe, Ebi and I were conversing by instant message even though we were standing right next to each other—me in the circle, her a safe way outside at the control panel. I’d had the good sense to take the heavy stabilizer module out of my pocket and place it outside the circle—I didn’t want to bring it in and ruin it or the circle or both.

ebi-furai: okay, how do you want it?

I waved in her general direction.

ezzen: Whatever the regular analgomantic configuration is, I guess?

ebi-furai: sure thing

She held up three fingers, more slender and angular than a human’s.

ebi-furai: counting you in for changeover

ebi-furai: 3

ebi-furai: 2

Wait. I had forgotten about that part.

ebi-furai: 1

“Fuck!” I covered my mouth to strangle the yelp as the low-power painkiller effect vanished from my prosthetic foot and I felt the full force of my still-healing amputation and burn. The pain had been steadily going down, but cutting off the analgesic effect cold turkey was still a shock to the system. Ebi glared at my outburst.

ebi-furai: cmon, man

Still, the moment was brief as could be, and then the circle’s full analgomancy kicked in, the relevant glyphs around the perimeter luminescing green.

ezzen: Uh.

ezzen: It occurs to me that this is Ai’s weave, isn’t it?

ezzen: This won’t wake her up or something?

ebi-furai: no backlash because shes actually good at her job

Alright, damn. I rolled my eyes at her petulantly as I sat slowly in the middle of the circle, glad to have confirmation that the painkiller magic was doing its job. It didn’t do much for the discomfort of sitting on the floor, though. I supposed that normally there would be some kind of seat or bed, like how Ebi had rolled my whole medical bed in the first time I’d been in here; as it was, only hard floor for me. I wasn’t actually sure what the floor material was, but it was tough and smooth. At this closer-to-the-ground inspection, there was a faint but definite slope to the floor, leading to—

A drain in the corner, outside the circle. For blood, one had to assume, although it looked like it was kept clean and sanitary. I hoped what I was about to do wouldn’t literally live up to the name, but I appreciated the thought given to ease of cleanup just in case. I’d probably ruined the backseat of that cab.

ebi-furai: oh. theres some fine print you might be interested in

ebi-furai: the red-dampening mode we have on right now is really fragile to green

I glanced down at the illuminated glyphs on the floor, eyes tracing around the circle, and I realized the problem. The painkilling effect basically took the red ripple produced in the circle and dissipated it as heat—but if fed green ripple, the mutagenic frequency I expected my Flame would radiate alongside the red, things could get chaotic. It was hard to say without GWalk in front of me, but it could easily spit out enough kinetic blue to shake the whole building; was that what had happened my first night here? Worse, it could burn out the lattice, and then anything could happen. I could turn to glass.

ezzen: Shit.

ezzen: Is there a mode that doesn’t do that?

I already knew the answer as I looked around the circle. There were only so many configurations of the glyphs available, and it was hard for most of what was available to tolerate both red and green. Ripple color didn’t exactly follow color theory, but by lucky coincidence, those two colors often paired off.

ebi-furai: theres a low power high stability mode for, as amethyst puts it, bad weather

ebi-furai: gonna be another changeover. want something to bite down on?

ezzen: Fucking hell.

ezzen: Yeah, I guess.

Ebi pulled off her nightcap and tossed it to me. I twisted it, shoved it in my mouth, and bit down. She held up three fingers again, and I nodded in reply.

ebi-furai: 3

ebi-furai: 2

ebi-furai: 1

The circle switched modes. Some glyphs flickered off while others flickered on, and—I groaned into the gag—a loud clunk noise.

“Mh?”

Ebi and I both went very still as Ai shifted in her sleep. Compared to the other mode, I did not appreciate at all how little pain this was killing. It would still protect Amane sleeping up above, but this was now going to hurt. A lot.

ebi-furai: thats all i can do from here i think

ebi-furai: youre up

ebi-furai: no, wait, hold on

She pulled something out of her pocketspace and tossed it to me. I caught it hastily, frowning at how it could have gone clattering across the floor, then figured out how to unfold it.

ezzen: Makeup mirror?

ebi-furai: so you can see what youre doing

ebi-furai: NOW thats all i can do

She accompanied that by replacing her face with a big thumbs-up emoji. I took a deep breath around the gag. Now or never—and with the limited painkilling effect, I was starting to think never sounded pretty nice. There were ways this could go very wrong magically, not to mention waking Ai up and getting caught—ruining her sleep in the process—and even in the best-case scenario, I was going to have a pretty bad time.

But the discomfort on my throat was somehow worse than that; a sufficiently sharp razor or even an epilator wasn’t enough. I wanted to attack the problem at the source, make more of myself, like Hina had said. Sky had seemed confident suggesting this, although I wasn’t sure if it was what he had in mind. And I figured that, at least in this small way, I would become a little more like the Vaetna—smooth—my own tiny apotheosis through magic. Not hurting anybody else.

I met Ebi’s eyes one last time, then focused on the little mirror, on the rough patches on my face. I reached for my Flame, and it was there, waiting. I told it I wanted the hair gone, picturing it, trying to will it into happening through sheer want rather than glyphs. Specifically the hair from my philtrum downward, I told it, not my eyelashes or brows or the tiny hairs in my ears and nose. Those were important, but my beard was just a nuisance.

I connected that to the idea of wanting the long hair that had been taken from me. I wanted the LM wig to become real, for that hair to become my own, for there to be no need for the wig. I deserved to be whole, as I saw it.

Maybe it was vanity, just a little.

My Flame understood, in its primitive, emotional way. It surged through me, icy and ablaze, up from my chest and through my throat like acid reflux from hell, seeping out through my veins into every pore, every follicle. It rushed and destroyed and combined and—it kept going, down and down and out and through and all around me, everywhere philtrum-down, arms and chest and legs and I was burning and burning and screaming into the gag all the while—

Blood oozed from my arms, legs, chest, belly, back, neck—all flowing down the gentle slope into the drain. Every follicle had been torn open, the very machinery of my cells removed. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was trying to escape my chest, each thud bringing another wave of oozing pain across my body. I was practically a fountain of blood—

Then fire, once more. Searing micro–cauterizations prickled across my body to seal every rupture in my flesh—not literal cauterization, as I’d find later, but we were past the limits of what my fragile nerves were designed to experience. Rather, new flesh grew where old had been removed, tiny polyps to plug the gaps. Some small pity so I wouldn’t have to do it myself once more.

As the Flame ebbed away, its work done, I slumped sideways. Everything fell into darkness—well, almost everything. Between the pain a tiny spark of annoyance bubbled up from somewhere inside me, at what I saw between the splatters of blood on the little hand mirror.

Had it made me blond?

—

My reflection in the limo’s tinted window said not quite blond. My new hair was more of an ochre; ginger but in the sense of the vegetable. The Flame’s hilarious punchline after it had upcharged me by taking all my body hair. In between Alice’s fretting over the ramifications of this decision, Amane had asked whether the new hair was LM incorporated from the wig, which had possibly merged with or replaced my scalp. It certainly hurt like it did, but we hadn’t had the time to check. It was still doing better than most of my body.

Every inch of my skin from the neck down hurt, red and irritated and so terribly dry. It wasn’t completely smooth; each torn-out follicle had left a tiny goosebump where the Flame had sealed the hole, so miniscule it was invisible even at close inspection and only faintly detectable by touch. It stung everywhere my clothes touched my skin, especially around the waistband of my pants, and that was after Ebi had loaded me up on a truly frightening amount of painkillers. Part of Clipboard’s job was to make sure I took more in a few hours. 

I’d put the clothes on nonetheless and gotten in the limo, a smile on my face despite knowing the cold and dry February air would make the pain worse. Everything hurt, I had a full head of truly odd-colored and likely magical hair, and my skin was not perfectly smooth as I had willed it to be, but it was worth it. The gnawing incorrectness on my skin had been rinsed off by blood and scoured away by flame. The long hair on my back and shoulders felt right, even if I had some serious questions about the Flame’s choices in color coordination. I’d insisted to the girls that I hadn’t picked that part. Maybe I’d dye it back.

Did any of this make me more ready to face Hikanome?

Absolutely not.

Still worth it, though.

---

This one was a lot of fun to write.

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----

“I’m—mutating? Like Hina?” Yes, Ezzen, that’s what she just said, don’t ask stupid questions. I tried for something more cogent. “Related to what I did with the punch, I assume?”

Ai nodded, prodding the hologram of my arm. She had highlighted the tricep, deltoid and pectoral—the punching muscles.

“Maybe four percent higher muscle density.”

The electric excitement deflated slightly. Four percent didn’t sound all that significant, not enough to warrant the giddiness or the quiet horror.

“Density, not mass? Er, you know what I mean by that…obviously higher density would also increase the mass. What I mean is that it’d look the same from the outside, yeah? Like how Hina doesn’t look strong at all.” I eyed Ai’s biceps, still bare from when we’d sparred. She was muscular and made it look good; honest gains from honest exercise, not Hina’s brand of magical transcendence which left her looking slender and petite until she pulled her shirt off and revealed how heart-flutteringly toned she was, the steely muscle under her soft skin.

“Yes. For contrast, she is closer to three hundred percent, and the way her muscles anchor is different from ours. I would assume you will also probably have changes in the bone, but nothing external.”

For some reason, I was relieved that I wouldn’t become any bulkier. Four percent more mass wouldn’t have turned me into a hypertrophic roid-monster anyway, and arguably would have pushed me into a more conventionally attractive zone of built-ness than where I was now, but wider shoulders would just mean more to hide under a hoodie. I realized my sleeve was still rolled up from when Ai had scanned me and hastily pulled it back down. No shade on Ai’s physique; I just found it uncomfortable to imagine myself looking more like her.

“Cool, cool, that’s—good. And, um, spitballing here—it’ll only continue if I put more magic into it? Keep aggravating the Flame? Like with Opal’s tail.”

Ai’s expression darkened. “That’s right. But it’s important to understand that, like her tail, this is not a controlled process.” She half-turned to pull up her top slightly and point at where it exposed her tattoo on her lower back. “This is calibrated. It’s enhancement, but also shock absorption and safety limits. Right now, your only mutations are only in your arm, so…let’s say it progresses to fifty percent higher density. Your arm would be much stronger, but the rest of your chest muscles and joints will still be regular strength. You could hurt yourself badly. Hina-san has changed enough now that she can take it, but for years, she just…”

“Let herself get hurt.” I sighed. “We talked about that. Well, not the history, but that attitude.”

“Yes. It’s horrifying.”

An awkward silence stretched between us.

“She’s not a bad person, Ai.”

Ai shook her head, deactivating the hologram and flopping into the chair at her desk.

“You have a bias.”

“I—sure, I guess I do. But the way she described it, she’s not being cruel. That’s your hangup, isn’t it?”

“It was yours, too, until a few days ago.” She spun the chair lazily, looking up at the assemblage of robotic tentacles over the bed. “I thought you understood why.”

“I do,” I protested. “She did make me uncomfortable with all the…masochistic moaning from having her bones broken. But that’s not externalized cruelty. I didn’t even harm my Flame for this.” I held up my arm. It felt basically the same; maybe a bit of an ache, but neither damaged nor noticeably stronger.

“You will, if she wants you to. Now that you’ve had a taste.”

“No, I won’t. She offered, after you left, and I pushed her away. Specifically because we had promised you, mind, and I didn’t want to betray that. Why are you treating this like such a slippery slope? Alice and Heliotrope have been doing that too.”

“Because that’s what happened with Jason. Her ex-boyfriend.”

“Sky? He got way too into the pain stuff?”

“He wanted power, she gave it to him.”

“Less cryptically?”

Ai sat back in her chair, counting on her fingers.

“More muscle, new senses, he got taller, hair in different places…”

“New senses. Like Heliotrope’s eye?”

And hair? That felt…mundane, but the rest was interesting. I pulled out my phone on reflex to ask him myself—was interrupted by a knock on the door and a shimmering white dome of hair peeking into the doorway.

“Ojamashimasu. There you are, Ezzen. I was wondering where you’d gone.”

“Oh. Hi, sorry.”

“No worries,” Alice hastily assured me, stepping further in and closing the door behind her. “I’m glad to see you’re here with Ai. What’s all this? Door was ajar, so I assumed nothing too sensitive…”

I exchanged a nervous glance with Ai—I could see Alice getting mad to learn what I had done with Hina. Given Ai’s own judgment toward Hina on the topic, would she even cover for me? Plus, Alice was also being transformed by her magic, which Amane had indicated was a less-than-euphoric process for her, so I could see this going poorly. I opted for a distraction, reaching over to the desk for my mikan. I lobbed it to her. Alice caught it and looked at me curiously.

“Thanks?”

“Not that hungry anyway.”

Alice shrugged and got to work puncturing the skin with her long nails. Ai looked at her own mikan, as though registering her own hunger, and hesitantly began to peel it, but Alice tapped her shoulder.

“Normally I’d be delighted to see you eating real food, but I had actually been intending to ask if you wanted dinner.”

Ai blinked, glanced at the clock, then scrambled out of her chair and toward the door. She yanked it open and started calling across the hall and into her workshop. Alice chuckled.

“Mm-hm.”

Ai turned back to us, signaled with her hands that she’d be right back, and slipped out the door.

“She showed me her tattoo,” I informed Alice. It wasn’t like me to start conversations like that, but I thought I remembered Alice telling me to ask about it at some point. If nothing else, it kept us off the topic of my arm. She swallowed a slice of fruit.

“What did you think?”

“It’s impressive. Um…really quiet for the output, and the ward integration is neat. I thought the kinetic dampening could use some work, but I’d need to look at the diagram, I’m not great at organics. Of course that’d be different from how it’s done in the mantles, but the rest is fairly similar.”

“It’s different when it’s a basic human body being enhanced, isn’t it? More magical, I suppose.”

“Completely,” I agreed. “That was my first time seeing it in person, really, aside from a few times Hina’s been Hina, and it’s a lot more visceral in person. The gap is much more apparent, but there’s something more relatable in it, too, I think, kind of easier to self-insert into it and imagine what it’s like to move like that…” I trailed off. “Um. Hina was there, too.”

“Did she demonstrate?”

“Yeah.”

Alice shifted her weight, tail sliding on the tiled floor. I braced myself for more bile or judgment about Hina’s disposition, but Alice was smiling.

“She really loves the freedom of movement. That’s actually how we got to talking, back when we first met. We both loved how physical the action in a lot of the more modern mahou shoujo anime is.”

“Um. She really seems to love it,” I risked. This conversation could still blow up in my face, so I was trying to take it stage-wise before we got to the part where I had used my Flame.

Alice gave me a knowing look. “Gave you the parachute talk, did she?”

“That’s a specific thing?”

“She’s tried every metaphor there is. I still only half-get it, to be honest, but as long as she’s happy and not doing it on camera…”

Ai stepped back into the room, looking relieved.

“They just finished, no problems.”

“You don’t trust your best engineers?” Alice’s tone was dry.

“Of course I trust them, touzen. But we’re already behind, and…” Ai visibly shook off whatever grip the project had on her. “I said I was giving you this afternoon, Ezzen, and especially now that your arm is beginning to mutate, I want to make sure you have the support—”

Alice’s tail thudded heavily on the tile.

“It’s what?”

Ai re-activated the hologram in answer. “It’s very minor, low-red, just muscle density enhancements like we saw with Hina that summer. As mild as it gets.” Nervousness crept into her voice as the air temperature began to rise; Alice was gripping the mikan so hard it was leaking juice onto the tiles. “I didn’t expect Hina-san to provoke his Flame that quickly, I shouldn’t have let them spar. I’m sorry.” Ai bowed.

“They were sparring?”

“Hina was…being Hina,” I explained, guilty for having been baited in by my girlfriend’s antics no matter how authentic her neediness had been. “We—we stopped quickly.”

“Why did you bother at all? You don’t need combat training right now, you need public relations coaching and a haircut.” Alice pinched the bridge of her nose. “Ai, I thought you said you were going to brief him today? On the political situation?”

“I showed him mantle schematics and some of our interviews because—kanyuu no jouken dakara.” Ai glanced at me, wincing at her slip out of a language I spoke. “Ezzen agreed to stay because of his interest in our mantles, not for the politics.”

“We are on a time budget until Saturday. Until such a time as the PCTF stops hanging over our heads, politics are actually the highest priority.” She took a deep breath, stilling her tail. Her slitted pupils moved to me. “Not to say your comfort and interests don’t matter, Ezzen, it’s just—these mutations make the situation more complicated.”

“Um—fairly minor, isn’t it?”

“Not to everyone. On Saturday, Miyoko will see that, and she’ll make a big deal out of it and that will change the PR calculus for your whole presence at the event. It’s one thing to be a flametouched magical engineer, but mutagenic residuals elevate you further in Hikanome’s belief structure, even the smallest ones.”

I looked at Ai, wondering why she hadn’t mentioned this if it was such a big deal. Neither had Hina, but that seemed at least par for the course with her—the dour look that had taken over Ai’s face when Alice had mentioned Hikanome’s beliefs was the missing piece of the puzzle.

“Takehara-san.” The Emerald Radiance looked and sounded tired. “Calm down. We knew Miyoko-san will care about his scars, I don’t think a few muscles being less than five percent more dense will change anything.”

Alice’s tail thumped.

“She will care, because it’s extra leverage.” The two Radiances glared at each other for a long moment, and Ai was the first to avert her eyes. Alice’s tail twitched. “Why are you even pushing back on me about this? We both know this is Hina’s fuckup for doing that to him. You ought to be angry, too.”

Ai’s eyes flashed.

“I am angry, but I am trying to direct it somewhere useful.” She looked at me. “Ezzen already knows to stop the mutations. No more channeling emotion with glyphless Flame.”

I blinked. “Um, yeah, I already had a bit of a fight with Hina about it.”

Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth; she’d actually largely talked me around on the appeal, and it was really only her behavior that we’d clashed on. But I didn’t want to piss off either of them further right now, so I was more than happy to kick that can down the road.

Alice sighed in relief. “Okay, that’s—better than nothing, I suppose. Then—shit, this is just a wake-up call, really. We’ve been slacking on prep to begin with, it’s already Tuesday and we haven’t even briefed you on manners, let alone the talk track or—God damn it,” she fumed. “Three more days sounds like a lot, but it’s not.”

I swallowed. Alice seemed unable to fully smother her anxieties, and they were fanning the flames of my own. I felt unaccountably guilty for having been mostly lazing around and snuggling with Hina since our interference in the Thunder Horse Inferno; logically, I knew that it was Todai’s job to prepare me, but I still felt like I’d somehow been procrastinating. And it didn’t help that my girlfriend seemed to be persona non grata, even if her teammates were gracious enough to not extend that to me by association. I took a deep breath.

“Um, okay. I’m with Ai, for whatever it counts: solutions first, yeah? What do I need to do in the next three days?”

—

Two days later, I was now seriously regretting that question.

First, they’d given me homework. Todai’s PR department had scraped together a list of YouTube videos covering both basic Japanese formal etiquette for foreigners and some more specific information on Hikanome’s particular practices and beliefs—the latter including, ironically, a video co-authored by Star. Watching those had taken me deep into the night; it should have only taken an hour and a half, or half that at 2x speed, but I kept getting distracted.

The rain had returned, and I found myself missing the warmth of Hina’s body against mine. My bed was just too big for one person. I at least had enough experience with ennui to recognize that a hot shower would help, but it was still rather lonely. I kept glancing at the balcony, hoping to see her tapping on the glass, or catch a hint of purest blue. No such luck.

I entertained the idea of talking to Sky, asking about the kinds of mutations Hina had given him—or he had given himself—but there were two problems. First, I knew I didn’t need the temptation; that was also why I told myself that Hina’s absence was for the best. Second, now that it was apparently connected to the Hikanome event, poking Sky about it almost felt like work. So I avoided it and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Yesterday had begun with me being woken up too soon given my 2 AM bedtime. My mission: hands-on practice of what the videos had covered. This had taken the form of a deeply embarrassing series of repeat-after-me’s with Alice until she’d had to rush off to other duties—including more yelling at Hina, I’d find out later—leaving me to continue with one of her bilingual subordinates whose name I instantly forgot. Slowly and excruciatingly, I achieved passable delivery of basic greetings and simple phrases which would mildly impress the average Hikanome member and give the impression I really was intending to stick around long-term.

The good news was that I wasn’t expected to do almost any of the talking, not with three of the Radiances at hand to field questions.

“In fact,” Amane had explained via Ebi at lunch, “the less you talk, the less chance you have of leaking something extremely confidential. It’s not that we don’t trust you, but many of Hikanome’s higher-level people, and especially the flamebearers, will be trying to extract useful information from you, and if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s pretty obvious you don’t have the experience or skills to gracefully deflect away from sensitive topics in that kind of social piranha tank.”

“I—yeah,” I sighed. “I don’t.” It stung to admit that I didn’t have a public face befitting a VNT; I’d always envisioned a Vaetna version of myself as being outgoing and loquacious like Heung. I resolved to try to channel that energy in a less high-stakes setting than what we were doing on Saturday; there, I’d just be doing the social equivalent of huddling inside my shell. “Will you be mantled up the whole time?”

The black-haired girl shook her head. “Not in private. We’ll be having a flamebearer-only dinner, and I’ll be human for that.”

“Isn’t that the most dangerous time? Surrounded by other flamebearers?”

Amane shook her head stiffly as Ebi translated what I’d said.

“They’re not that hostile. The show of trust matters anyway, and Yuuka would stop any danger before it happens.”

Her level of trust in her former kidnappers amazed and baffled me, even with the security afforded by precognition, but it wasn’t my place to prod further. I just nodded and kept working through my katsu sandwich. Ebi had me eating a lot, both because my foot was still healing and because it would take my arm another day or two to fully integrate the mutations, and that was apparently calorically-intensive. At least the food was good—but it was takeout, not home-cooked. I’d still seen neither hide nor hair of Hina since she’d vanished on me.

Yesterday afternoon had been a lesson on what the Radiances called “opsec,” the control of sensitive information. Overload had mentioned in the chatroom that I would be answering some questions for his next video, which Ebi had seen, and so I had wound up with Ai, Amane and Ebi all hanging over my shoulder as I drafted my responses to avoid any leakage.

Q: What was it like being flametouched?

A: Disorienting. I heard voices.

Even as I turned to give a tentative, questioning thumbs-up to the other girls, I realized my mistake. Ai was blinking at me. Ebi crossed her arms.

“Say what?”

“It…talked to me. When I was first flametouched.”

The three women shared an uneasy glance. Ebi tapped her chestplate.

“I’m the only talking Flame I’ve ever heard of, and I’m a really special case. This isn’t the kind of thing you just don’t mention.”

“It—I kind of forgot,” I muttered shamefully. “There was a lot going on at the time. And it hasn’t really…done anything since then.”

“What did it say?”

“Um—I don’t really remember what it said the first time. No, really, I don’t, it’s all kind of a…haze. The only other time was in…the car, right before I was rescued. It wanted me to trust it.”

A tingle ran down my spine as I recalled the firelight dancing in the pitch darkness. I still didn’t understand what it had meant—was it trying to push me down the same path as Hina, seeking pain? But in that case, it felt odd that I hadn’t heard it when I had channeled it into my arm yesterday. And there had also been the time both I and Hina had heard it, when she’d cleared the patch of hair from my skin the other night—but I definitely couldn’t tell them that. It was deeply private, for one, but I also really didn’t need them more on my case about Hina-induced Flame misuse.

“Trust, huh. Just words? Not a vision?”

“No. Is that how it is for Heliotrope?”

Amane nodded. Instead of translating for her, Ebi let out an autotuned sigh.

“I can’t believe you’re only bringing that up now. It’s been, like, five days, and you didn’t tell us.”

Ai poked my bad arm gently. Perhaps it was my good arm now, in a sense.

“Better that he didn’t. If Hikanome found out, they’d be much more interested in you.”

I was confused. “Isn’t that what we want? I didn’t really get Alice’s problem.”

“It benefits us to a certain point,” Amane clarified via Ebi. “We want them to be interested enough to work with us, but not enough that they want to poach you. This would be too much, with the arm. They’d think you’re some kind of prophet.”

Prophet. An interesting word, considering Heliotrope’s eye. I didn’t really want to think about her, either, though.

“So…delete it?”

“Yes, delete it.” Ai had her phone out, taking notes. “I’d like to test you more, but…I honestly wouldn’t know where to start,” she admitted. “It’s probably related to all the other strange things with your Flame. The second contact, how it came through the camera. But I don’t know what to do with that information.” She frowned. “We don’t have time for a serious investigation right now, anyway.”

Of course, cutting that part left my answer too sparse, so we back-filled with talk of my elation, framing it as a dream come true, mostly leaving out the parts tinged with nightmare.

Q: How did you end up at Lighthouse?

“Oh, God.” This was the exact kind of question I had been most nervous about answering—not only because I wasn’t sure of the policy surrounding discussing the PCTF’s actions, but also because nobody had actually told me what had happened between me burying the car and Hina whisking me away. Somehow, in our murky night whisperings, I had never thought to ask. And now she wasn’t around to give the answer.

Todai was one step ahead, though. Ebi practically pulled the keyboard from my grip and wrote out a response.

A: My flamefall had badly injured me with residuals (mainly the injury to my foot) and with the Spire already scrambling to respond to the other fragments of my flamefall and the immediate aftermath, they were not in a position to accept me. Radiance Sapphire was local for an unrelated event, and was first on the scene, and she made the executive decision to bring me to Lighthouse instead where I could receive the best possible post-amputation care and prostheses.

“Is that really how it went down?”

“Well, we’re obviously trying to omit the part about you getting hurt trying to escape the PCTF, but yeah.” 

That made me angry. I understood the need for some level of secrecy and diplomacy, but—

“We really can’t even say that much? Why does everything they do stay rumor when there’s people like me and Amane as living proof? Why can’t we accuse them of their crimes?”

It fundamentally didn’t sit right with me. Amane sighed quietly. Ebi translated.

“First, they’d disavow the actual force who came after you as an independent third party unsanctioned by the PCTF. Plausible deniability. That’s why they kill the cameras. Then they’d declare an investigation, find that the kidnappers and all their materiel had mysteriously vanished, and that would be the end of it. Everybody knows what they do, but accusing them wouldn’t make them admit it.”

“Opal told me that telling Hikanome what they did to you would be our diplomatic trump card.”

“Alice is an idealist.” Amane shut her eyes and shifted in her seat, gripping the armrest with her prosthetic hand. “She’s talking about a world where if the average Hikanome member could be persuaded to believe our claim, the church’s money and influence would be enough to hold the PCTF accountable. But it’s not.”

“Then…?”

“Violence is the only language monsters can understand.”

“You mean going to war with the PCTF?” My heart sank. “More of what we did to that oil rig? That’s not—”

“Stop,” Ai broke in. “This isn’t related to what we’re doing now. Regardless of our long-term plans, this particular statement accomplishes all we need it to. People can infer as much as they want, but if the PCTF takes issue with this, they would need to admit that they went after you in the first place. That’s the goal. It validates your presence here.”

“Okay,” I sighed. I had to admit these kinds of political moves weren’t my strong suit—hell, that was why the Radiances were helping me with this, why this paragraph had been decided on without my input. But as I reread what Ebi had written, a different gap began to grow: What about the Spire? By now I had a pretty good picture of the various reasons Todai wanted me here, and obviously it was still far better than ending up in the PCTF’s clutches, but why had the Vaetna allowed Hina to take me when I was unconscious? That wasn’t like them at all, not when I had obviously been on the way to the Gate. With three of them there, there should have been nothing in the world that could stop them from taking me off her hands—taking me where I belonged.

Something was still missing. I thought about how Brianna had left the oil rig and abandoned Holton to his fate, averted only by our intervention. Could the Vaetna have done the same in my case? The idea of being abandoned like that was just horrible—I had to ask Hina what exactly had happened. Over text?

“Ezzen?”

“Huh? Oh.”

Q: What kinds of projects do you intend to participate in at Todai?

Texting was too insecure; calling her didn’t seem much better. But I hadn’t seen her in person since the day before. I supposed I’d talk to her about it tonight, next time she was in my bed and it was just us. I didn’t want to confront the possibilities in daylight. It was far easier to shove those thoughts to the side and talk about magic instead. Far safer waters.

We finished the questions and I sent them off to Overload. I think he could probably tell that Todai had a hand in their writing, but that was to be expected.

Hina did not materialize on my balcony that night. I stayed up late, watching videos and holding out hope that she’d show up so we could make up and cuddle and I could ask my questions. But there was no sign of her. Around midnight, I texted her.

Ezzen: Hey, you okay?

I didn’t get a reply.

—

Now it was Friday morning, and I had been allowed to sleep in. I was again disappointed to find no hyena-like girlfriend pressed up against me—which was a little dumb, wasn’t it? I’d been sleeping alone for the better part of a decade, and I’d only shared my bed with Hina three, maybe four times, depending on how you counted. So it was stupid to miss her.

Even once awake, I didn’t properly get up for over an hour, not until I got a message from Ebi telling me to wash up. When I asked why, all she said was:

ebi-furai: haircut.

That one word sent shivers up my spine. I didn’t like haircuts. I averaged less than one a year, and those were always just to police the split ends and knots rather than take any real length off, so over the years the hair that had been cropped short at the time of dad’s death had developed into a shaggy, unkempt mane. I had made occasional attempts to brush it after the hairdresser had cleaned it up, but those never stuck, and it always returned to a chaotic mess, especially in the dry winter air. The hair itself wasn’t gross enough to be called matted, and the more frequent washings with better shampoo at least kept it from being greasy these days. Without the grease, though, the frizziness got worse, and I had to admit that Ebi had a point. So I threw on my clothes and trudged out to the upper common area, where Amethyst was waiting.

“Haircut,” I declared grimly, running a hand through my locks in a last-minute effort to defeat a few more knots.

In reply, she pulled out her phone—tiny against the crystalline frame—and showed me a map. Most of it was in Japanese, but in theory the hairdresser was just around the corner, easily within walking distance.

“Oh, you don’t have an in-house stylist? Or cosmetologist or whatever?” I looked around. “Where’s Ebi, anyway? I’d have expected her to do this.”

“Just us today,” Amethyst replied. Between her accent and the natural glassy, vibrato tones of her mantle’s voice, it was hard to make out the words. She tapped on her phone again with those too-long purple claws and showed it to me.

Text is easier. This is a hairstylist we trust. Her name is Kamihata.

“Okay, lead the way.”

Thus marked the first time I saw the front entrance of Lighthouse Tower. It was an odd mix of a standard office building lobby and a themed entrance. The centerpiece of the lobby was a floating assortment of oversize gemstones representing the Radiances, suspended in midair and floating gently with magic. We didn’t stop to gawk—and in return, only a handful of people did a double take at the three-meter crystalline mech striding out to the front door. The main doors were big enough for her, and I trailed behind as we made our way out onto the street.

Cold, as usual. At least it wasn’t raining this morning, but the sky was definitely thinking about it, with dark, heavy clouds softening every shadow below. The indirect lighting changed how Amethyst looked, muting the brightest facets of reflection in her body into a more suffusive, translucent purple glow. People paid more attention to us on the street, but as with Opal at Tochou, I was mostly a footnote to her distinctiveness, huddled in my hoodie and trying to ease the pit of anxiety fermenting in my stomach from being out in public.

We went down the street, skyscrapers looming all around, and turned the corner. I followest Amethyst into a nondescript building—nondescript by this city’s standards still meant eight floors, but compared to the titans of glass and steel to either side of it, the building looked downright cozy. Once we were inside, Amethyst dropped her mantle. The crystal folded and collapsed downward out of reality, leaving a thin girl in its place, warmly dressed in a sweater and long skirt. Amane leaned against the wall, supported by her prosthetic arm, taking deep breaths.

“You alright?”

As she looked at me with a smile and a nod, her eyepatch lit up, projecting her eye-facsimile. This was the fancier version I had assumed existed, one which seamlessly projected a three-dimensional LM copy of her other eye, the vivid sea-green indistinguishable from the real thing after a moment. She pushed herself off the wall, found her balance, and pointed down the hall.

“Elevators.”

My foot agreed; stairs seemed draconian. As we walked, she summoned her phone from pocketspace and showed it to me.

Nice to be out of the crowds.

“Yeah. And the cold.”

“Mhm.”

The weather is nice today.

“You think so?”

The elevator took us to the third floor, which had a perfectly normal-looking barbershop by my standards. Jazzy Japanese hip-hop played from hidden speakers. It was deserted except for us, probably bought out for the duration of our appointments, and also seemed to be devoid of staff until a head poked out of the back room and called out in Japanese. Amane called back and dropped herself on the plush waiting sofa—a little too forcefully for it to have looked entirely voluntary. I winced; I was having some misgivings about being the only person to come along. What if she had some kind of medical emergency?

But she seemed fine; the “weather”, by which she meant the local ripple, seemed to be treating her well enough. After a minute, the hairdresser came rushing to the front of the shop with a half-bow.

Kamihata—presumably her last name—was short, with angular features and a narrow face. She was older than the Radiances, maybe in her mid-30s, and had faint smile lines around her mouth. Her hair was dyed blonde, wavy and kept in a side ponytail bound by a decorated metal clasp. I could definitely see why this place played the kind of music it did; something about the funky beat just fit her aesthetic. Her brown eyes rarely moved as she exchanged greetings with Amane, remaining fixed on the other woman’s face until they were done speaking, and only then moved to me.

“Regular haircut?”

Her accent was thicker than Amane’s, but intelligible. I nodded uneasily. Kamihata glanced at Amane and asked her something, who grinned while shaking her head. I received no explanation on what the joke was as I was led inward and guided to the nearest chair, where I encountered my least favorite part of getting a haircut: the mirror.

My pale face and sunken eyes were framed in twisting shadows. Outcroppings of frizz shot in odd directions at the top of my head, and the ends around my shoulders were so split and unkempt it seemed almost like ocean foam—but dark and heavy, as though somebody had dumped the Thunder Horse’s pipeline out over my head. I really didn’t understand why Hina insisted on calling me cute; from eyes to nose to lips, to the way they were all framed by the shaggy mess on my head, I was not a pretty person.

But that was why we were here. A haircut would make me more presentable, clean me up enough for polite society, make me seem like I wasn’t a rubbish rat who had been dragged out of its den and into the blazing spotlight of fame by unlucky fate. As Kamihata got set up, I glanced back at Amane—her hair was glossy, smooth, a nearly impeccable curtain. If she felt like she needed a haircut, how bad was my state? Humiliation swept through me, made worse by confusion as I was coaxed out of my chair and over to a corner of the room. Hadn’t I just sat down? The confusion deepened as my chair was reclined, and I leaned back to suspend my head over a basin—then it made sense.

I’d never had my hair professionally washed before. My annual-ish barber appointments were bare minimum trims, about twelve pounds—this was far more full-service, and I let my eyes slide shut as the hairstylist’s hands did their magic. The hot water felt fantastic after our brief stint in the cold, and was gone too soon, leaving me with a soaked mop of hair sitting heavy on the towel wrapped around my shoulders. That problem was solved with copious application of a blow-dryer and brush, working in tandem to defeat knots. The dryer was loud enough to drown out the music, and although I wasn’t particularly fond of loud sounds, it at least filled the air with enough white noise that I didn’t feel awkward being silent. The blow-drying felt nice—I had an absurd moment where I wondered how I could scrounge together the money to buy one, before remembering that Todai was rich.

Once I was dry, I was led back to my seat and the work began in earnest. I didn’t pick a style; between my shyness, the language barrier, and Todai’s probable particularities about the look we were going for, I just trusted that wherever I was being taken was better than my current disaster of a mane. I shouldn’t have. In my defense, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate what I wanted—but what I got definitely wasn’t it. As it was, to avoid looking straight in the mirror, and feeling too awkward to pull out my phone, I just closed my eyes and let Kamihata do her thing.

Everything went wrong when I felt the shears close above my ear. My blood ran cold as a huge fluff of hair fell off my head and landed on my shoulder, where my hairstylist’s hands swiftly brushed it down to the floor. In my naivete, I had thought I was just getting a trim—in fact, I was being shorn. 

I kept my eyes closed and didn’t say a word, too afraid to face what had just been done. Snip by snip, my head got lighter as bundles of hair were severed. Eventually, Kamikata stepped away from me.

“Open, please.”

I complied, wincing open one eye to witness the damage—and it didn’t look like me at all.

It wasn’t a bad haircut; indeed it was perfectly serviceable, an entirely average haircut I knew was in fashion among boys my age. It wasn’t even as short as it could have been, still leaving a fair amount of fluff on my temples, but the hair that had previously gone down to my shoulders was gone, and with it, my silhouette had changed completely. My neck felt exposed to the air as I reached up to touch the new style, disbelieving.

“Are—are we done?”

“No. Do you want it shorter before the fine trim?”

“N—no.” My chest was tight and I didn’t understand why. “Keep it long.”

Kamihata met my eyes in the mirror, scanning my face. I was obviously distraught. “Did you not want it this short?”

“It’s fine. Too late now anyway.”

It was not fine. The growth of years spent in my apartment had been removed  in minutes. It was horrible, sickening, as unpleasant as having part of my flesh pared away—and it was too late. The damage was done. I shook my head a few more times, feeling the lightness, the distinct absence of a weight I’d become accustomed to for years. More than the loss of that signifier of time, I just looked—wrong. Maybe this haircut would have looked good on another person, but on me, everything about it felt awful now that the shapes of my face were no longer being framed by the hair. And I felt so exposed, unprotected; my hair had been part of my armor and I hadn’t even realized it. I pulled my hoodie higher up around my neck.

Kamihata looked grave, calling over to Amane. But she didn’t understand why I was grieving; neither of them did. It was a perfectly fine haircut, I’d look fine on Saturday. So why did it hurt so much? Why did it feel so wrong? The wrongness, the incompleteness, who could possibly understand how—

I scrambled to pull out my phone, typing with shaky fingers.

[Direct Message] ezzen: how do you grow yoir hair back

ezzen: with magic. what are the glyphs

ezzen: sky

ezzen: tell me you know how

2.08 Patreon Release

Hi guys! Sorry for delay; see the Discord or 2.07 public authors notes on Shub/RR for info about my absence. I'm back!

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“Hit me!”

Hina was in a mood. A giant, gleeful grin of pointed teeth covered her face, and the blue of her eyes held a fervor, a mania.

“Uh.”

“Punch me!”

“Um, we were doing spear exercises earlier—”

“No. Shut up and hit me, cutie. With your fist! Make it fucking hurt,” she panted.

My reservations were obvious. Even though my intellect and instincts agreed that there was absolutely no way I could meaningfully injure her with a simple punch, common sense had me hesitant to throw a punch at a girl who was almost a full head shorter than me and weighed easily 20 kilos less—no matter how disturbingly enthusiastic she was.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

“Hina-san,” Ai chided. The Emerald Radiance was sitting on the sidelines, cross-legged on the dojo’s padded floor. “Maybe it would be better if you let me—”

“Ai, baby, don’t ruin this for me.”

As Ai repeated the pet name to herself incredulously, Hina eyed me with what I could only describe as need. The blue of her eyes was being rapidly swallowed from within by the black of hugely dilated pupils, and she was clenching and unclenching her hands.

“Um, Hina, you’re freaking me out just a little. Can you…?”

That got through to her. She took a deep breath that exploded outward as a plea.

“Cutie, please, I’m just—I really need this, and I promise it’ll be fun and this is real training because you gotta at least be able to throw a punch and also we’re never gonna be able to have the good kind of sex without at least starting here and I’m trying really really hard to not unload onto you first and—and Ai’s here to stop me if I lose control.”

Damn her puppy eyes, and damn my desire to find out what “the good kind of sex” meant.

“…Okay.” I balled a fist, and Hina’s eyes lit up. “Uh…where?”

“Anywhere’s good,” she purred, before shame flickered across her face. She blinked away the haze a bit. “Um. Boob?”

“Boob.”

“Yeah.”

The open vulnerability of her neediness emboldened me to ask. “Any particular…reason?”

“I like it when you touch them.”

“I’m right here,” Ai reminded us. “This is not becoming…sex. I shouldn’t need to say that. Real training, Hina-san.”

Hina bounced on the balls of her feet, only loosely interested in gravity. “Real training!”

“Hina and I talked about this,” I informed Ai. “Um—with boundaries and everything.” Though Hina’s own admission that she needed Ai’s presence as a failsafe was undermining the strength of those boundaries more than I liked. “So, um, with that in mind, Hina, what’s the…goal, here, exactly?”

“We make sure you know how to throw a real punch.”

“With you as the punching bag because you’re into that,” I finished.

“Yep! Win-win, yeah?”

“Okay, sure, yeah.” I drew back my fist and changed my stance slightly, feeling a little lame; I’d never done a hand-to-hand martial art. At least I knew to put my thumb over my fingers.

Hina presented her chest for the strike in a distinctly sexual display, despite the fact that the tank top she’d changed into was fairly tame and unprovocative. Ai groused something at her in Japanese, and she sighed, standing more normally instead.

“Killjoy. C’mon, cutie.”

I punched her. My scarred knuckles squished into the fabric, and then her breast, stopping as they cushioned against her ribs. In that moment of contact, feeling my fist strike the meat of her body, the absurdity of this situation caught up to me. A pretty girl was begging me to punch her in the boob as a thin-veiled excuse to get off. And evidently, I was such an easily-strung-along submissive that there had never really been any question I was going to do it. What a ridiculous situation.

The moment passed as I withdrew my hand. Hina looked at me blankly, unsatisfied.

“Harder, cutie. Like you mean it.”

I reddened. I had meant it, but apparently my form was too bad to get that across, or I was just too weak.

“Um—okay.”

“Again.”

I complied, opting for the other boob this time, feeling even more absurd. But it still wasn’t enough to even move the needle on whatever criteria Hina cared about. Pain, presumably. She frowned.

“I know you’re not that weak. Stop holding back.”

“I’m not!”

“He is baseline,” Ai pointed out from the sidelines. “No augmentations, no mutations. You know he can’t hit as hard as we can. And it’s very normal to unconsciously pull your punches when your first time practicing a punch is doing it on a person, Hina-san,” she chastised.

“But he knows I can take it!” Hina stepped into my reach, leaning close. “Cutie.”

“Hi?” Subconscious pattern recognition observed that most times she had gotten this close, we were usually about to—

She yanked me forward by the collar of my shirt. Ai shouted. Hina’s lips—

Did not find mine. She growled in my ear, sending goosebumps rippling down my back and arms.

“Stop fucking disappointing me and hurt me already.”

She let go and casually dropped back to where she had been standing in the blink of an eye. The motion was fluid and weightless in that way that suggested she was more, that way which evoked the Vaetna. That alone was enough to send a spike of white-hot, jealous anger straight through my chest—but combined with her words?

The cocktail of envious frustration ignited sparks of my Flame, a tearing sensation in my chest like I’d pulled a muscle I hadn’t known was there, jolted to life from a cold start. Raw magic followed the path of least resistance from my soul to where it had first touched me all those years ago, into the seams of my scars, illuminating ice-cold magmatic flows of ivory Flame. She wanted me to hurt her, to hit her as hard as a flamebearer should be able—and in that moment of frustration, the third time I swung at Hina was with more than just the meat and bone of my fist.

Things slowed down around us. Maybe that was the adrenaline, maybe white or pink ripple from my Flame manifesting my emotions, but in any case, for that fraction of a second, I was moving and thinking and feeling at her pace. Those blue eyes caught the white firelight as they narrowed in satisfaction. She responded not by attempting to dodge, but instead by leaning into the blow, and I struck her square in the chest.

This time, when fist compressed skin and fat, it didn’t stop. I felt something crunch, bone failing. The force passed through her entire body in a shockwave as she crumpled around the blow. Then the energy ran out of ways to dissipate, and she was thrown down and backward, skidding to a stop in a heap on the mat a few meters away.

I stood there, panting, fire streaming from my clenched fist. It hurt, as the Flame always did, those channels of white light like frozen metal pressed against my skin, quickly turning numb in a way sure to leave criss-crossed lines of frostnip on my hand. And inside my arm, pushing my musculature past its physical limits had already begun to presage its consequences, a tattered cold front of soreness and aches. But I felt incredible, high on the surge of power, the blink-and-you’d-miss-it apotheosis. I was beyond the sluggish limitations that had weighed me down all these years, whole at last, the emptiness sated for just a moment—

Hina gasped, coughing flecks of blood onto the mat, a visceral, mortal sound that dragged me back to reality. I had tried to hurt her—to kill, really, because like when Ai had dispatched the dummy a few hours ago, a regular human would not have survived what I had just done to Hina. And while I knew my girlfriend was far more than human, able to take it, her wet coughs and the blood oozing from the corner of her mouth filled me with icy fear and doused my Flame with ashy guilt.

“H—Hina?”

She gurgled, coughed, and rolled onto her back. Fuck. I felt a hand on my arm—Ai was at my side, inspecting what I’d just done to my hand. I pulled away, pointing at Hina lying supine.

“I’m fine. What are you doing? Help her.”

“You’re not fine. Arm, please. I need to make sure you didn’t break your hand or that the residuals aren’t about to turn your muscles to marble.”

“I’m—” I winced as she ran her thumb along the back of my hand, checking the bones. “Okay, maybe I’m not completely fine, but she’s less fine.” Why was I the one receiving medical attention when I’d been the one to throw the damn punch? “I can deal with this myself, as opposed to my girlfriend, who is coughing up blood.”

“You’re not built for those forces or ripple exposure. She is.”

As if on cue, Hina sat up, wiping her mouth with her hand. She tried to say something—it came out as a cough. She tried again.

“Hehehe—hrngh—hiehehehehe. That was so good.”

“Uh. Are you alright? Ai, please give her first aid, not me. That cough can’t be good, and I definitely felt some ribs break, and that landing looked…bad.”

Ai shook her head as Hina babbled.

“I knew you could—” she hacked some more blood into her palm, “—could do it! Gosh, fuck, that was so good,” she repeated giddily, rolling her shoulders with a bloody smile. “I love you.”

I exchanged a look with Ai, pulling my arm away. “She hit her head.”

“She’s just like this. Do you see why we try not to enable it?”

Hina rose and staggered toward us, a crazy-eyed zombie. “I love you too,” she giggled to Ai. “So sweet, so thoughtful, so pretty.”

I was weirdly grateful that Ai avoided eye contact with her pain-drunk teammate. Hina had expressed similar affection for Alice before, and I was starting to suspect it applied to all her teammates. I tried not to be jealous.

“Hina, are you…alright?”

“I’m great. And I have you to thank for it, cutie, you cutie.”

Her giddiness was going from offputting to concerning.

“I—no, I hurt you. I feel like shit about it,” I added for Ai’s benefit. “I don’t—”

“Cutie. Ezzen. Ezzie!” She rolled her tongue over the new pet name, and I blushed despite the circumstances. “I’m already mostly better. Give me another five minutes and it’ll be like it never happened.”

“Are—you’re sure? That’s a relief.”

Hina stared at me hungrily, pupils huge. “Yeah! It means you can hit me again!”

“Hina-san,” Ai interjected, warning in her voice.

“Ai-chan!”

“No more.”

“I can take more! You know I can!”

“It’s not about you. Stop being selfish for once and think.”

“His arm’s fine,” she protested. “And we’re under the red threshold for Amane because of the wards in here, so we can go as hard as we want.” She licked the blood off her palm. “So c’mon, fuck me up, show me more of what you can be. C’mon, cutie, don’t you want it?”

Ai answered before I could. “I don’t want to be here for this. It makes me feel dirty.”

“Then don’t! It’s kind of weird for you to stick around and not join in. Just let us have our fun and go work on your stuff.”

“Your ‘fun’ could get Ezzen hurt. He can’t stop you from going…fight-crazy, and you can’t stop yourself.”

“I totally can stop myself! Ezzie and I had a whole talk about this! He’s keeping me responsible!”

“Not a huge fan of ‘Ezzie’,” I interjected quietly. There was more at stake here, but that part was the only bit I really had the bandwidth for at the moment. I was still reeling from the emotional whiplash of my momentary ascension.

“Sorry. Point is, I’m not gonna hurt him, okay? Walk away and we’ll prove it!”

Ai pointed at Hina’s chest, which the hyena was rubbing absentmindedly—whether to soothe or inflame, I couldn’t say. “What just happened is not ‘keeping you responsible’.”

That, along with Hina’s “don’t you want it,” made something click into place for me. I spoke up.

“Ai, I think we’re done.”

“Hey!” Hina pouted. “Don’t blueball me like that!”

“Hina, please. I need to talk to you. Alone.”

“Aw.” Suddenly, she looked nervous. “Did I fuck up?”

“No, I just…” I glanced at Ai, hoping she’d trust my judgment.

“Yes, you fucked up.”

“Ai!”

“There was no reason for you to do any of it like this. If you want to show him how to fight like you do, then show him how to fight, not how to enable your selfishness.”

Hina looked hurt. “I did! Look at his arm!”

“Unmanaged, anger-driven ripple catalysis is not a safe way to fight. You know that; it’s why you do it. But he is still recovering from an amputation! What if it had been transmutative instead of augmentative? He could have—” She caught herself, taking a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll leave, Ezzen. I have papers to grade anyway. Ebi will check on you later.”

As she stormed off, my rapidly regenerating girlfriend called after her.

“I’ll be good! Promise!”

—

I sat down on the dojo’s padded floor, catching my breath, taking inventory of the lancing pain on my skin and in my muscles. Hina did the same and stretched her shoulders, riding up her shirt to expose her belly—a normally tantalizing view, somewhat undercut by the crunch of bone healing in real time. That rather summarized the problem.

Guilt fought desire. I did want to feel that rush of power again, and part of me, perhaps a larger part than I dared admit, wanted to get swept up in Hina’s giddy high, let this mood of hers take us from fighting to fucking and maybe blur the line between those entirely. We had the room to ourselves now, after all. But at the same time, I just felt…gross. I opened with that.

“This feels like too much.”

“Cold feet, you mean.”

“What I mean is that this is…extreme. Insane. If I hit a human like that, they’d be dead.”

“I’m not human! And neither are you, cutie. I saw that look on your face when you hit me, y’know. It makes you so happy. Like it should!” She scooted closer to me. “Lap?”

“Um—not right now.”

“Aw. Why not?”

“Because—adrenaline. You,” I clarified, finding one of the things I wouldn’t have been able to say with Ai in the room. “You’re adrenaline, and I don’t know how to feel about it.”

“Violence, yep, love it.”

“Why?”

“It’s how I am!”

“What’s in it for you? What’s the—point? Fun? Kink? I don’t even really know what I’m trying to ask.”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t. You were—I mean, I know masochism is a thing, and you’ve been open enough about that. But I had been thinking, like, whips and chains at most…” I trailed off, realizing I was ostensibly open to that level of fucked-up-torture-fun. I’d have to unpack that later. For now, it was overshadowed by the uniquely extreme case that was my girlfriend. “Not—not injuries that would send somebody to the hospital. That was way too far.”

“Mm. Okay, so…yeah, I’m a masochist, no news there, but the pain itself isn’t really the big thing. Y’know how adrenaline junkies, like skydivers and stuff, don’t actually want to die?”

“Sure.” Wait, was she implying—“Holy shit, Hina, are you—”

“No! No, no, not what I meant. I loooove being alive, that’s exactly the thing. When a human jumps out of that plane, the thrill is in the fall. Those thirty or forty seconds of letting gravity win, that’s where the fun is at. The danger, the fear of a messy end, just enough to get the heart rate up and get that thrill of survival when they open the parachute and land nice and safe. And like, it’s a good high, it scratches that itch. For humans.” My stomach turned over at the imagery of skydiving. She looked at me with those blue eyes, tilting her head curiously. “Oh, right, acrophobia.”

I nodded, pale. “Yeah, heights, not a great topic for me.”

“Nah. Perfect topic! Imagine how much of a rush that feeling of survival is when it comes after you actually hit the ground. The power when you see earth rushing toward you and know you’ll win. Imagine not being afraid of heights anymore, not being afraid of anything anymore, because you know you’ll survive.” Her voice was dreamy. “I don’t need a parachute.”

Because I was me, there was only one place for my brain to go from that: the Vaetna didn’t need parachutes either. They had enough pride in that bit of trivia that it came up fairly often—hell, Heung had said it almost verbatim minutes before I had been flametouched. I hadn’t put the pieces together until right now, but—could that bone-deep envy I felt toward the Vaetna be related to my acrophobia? Or perhaps both were just symptoms of the same frustration at being so…human. Either way, when Hina framed it like that, about being more and being powerful rather than simply about being in pain, the appeal came into focus. I hated needing a parachute.

But the parallel between her and my idols broke down from there. I couldn’t imagine any of the Vaetna being so enthusiastic about pain, nor so willing to revel in their superiority. Sure, the Heron liked to joke, but the Vaetna were ultimately practical; they wouldn’t seek out excuses to push their limits like that. Hina, on the other hand, was gratuitous, entirely self-interested. Flaunting it like she did felt wrong on some moral level, and that was before factoring in my personal, gnawing envy.

She grinned as she watched the gears turn in my head. “Yeah, I knew you’d get it.”

“I…I do, I think. That’s what you promised me, right? Power. But—the high-minded ideas about invincibility and power? Sure. But the way you were acting, the…mania…that still puts me off.”

“Sorry. The rush makes me a little loopy, but only because it feels so good.” She rubbed her breast as though reminiscing.

“Um, good as in the high you were talking about, or are we back to the masochist ‘pain equals pleasure’ thing?”

“Both. My wires are definitely more than a little crossed. And now that you know all that—don’t you want to do it more? Power up with your Flame and get me all pain-happy at the same time? The sex after is god-tier, I promise.”

It was tempting, put like that. Very, very tempting. I tried to reach for some sanity to stave off how appealing that sounded.

“It—that feels like going too far. I feel it crosses the boundaries we set.”

“Hey, you agreed to all of this. You wanted to do that to me. That’s how the Flame works, y’know. You got mad, wanted to hurt me, it helped you. Didn’t it feel so good?”

And that was the problem. It had—or at least, part of it had. “That’s a trap.”

“Hm? Cutie, I just mean we should do things that feel good. The Flame helps you with that, if you let it.”

“The power felt good,” I admitted. “Hurting you…no. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be cruel.”

“Who’re you hurting?”

“You. I just said.”

“No, you’re not!” She sat up, fixing me with glimmering sapphire. “I know it looks bad. I know it does. But it’s so fun for me. It feels incredible, I almost came.” For once, she showed something like shame, averting her eyes. “So, uh, yeah, you did a good job. You know by now you’re not putting me in actual danger, and you’re making me feel exactly how I want to feel. Where’s the cruelty there, cutie?”

“I don’t know! I mean, you’re smaller than me, and I know that doesn’t really matter because you’re you, but I still feel gross for doing it, and—it just doesn’t feel like something I should be doing.”

“But didn’t you feel like a Vaetna, for that moment?”

“…Unfair to play that card again, isn’t it?”

She ignored me. “And compared to that, right now you’re all…slow. Bound. Mortal. And, cutie—now that you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to not need a parachute, what it’s like to be like them, like me, you’re going to want to feel like that again, chase that high.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t—”

“I want you to have that.”

“Why?” The question slipped out almost automatically, the uncertainty at the core of everything that had happened to me in the last week. It echoed in every moment I spent with the Radiances, but Hina especially. I didn’t deserve this. “Why me?”

“Because you’re hurting like I was, how I used to be. And I can make it better, make you more, with the power of love and magic and punching. That’s mahou shoujo, right there in the dictionary next to a picture of Alice.”

“Still makes me sound like your charity case,” I grumbled.

“Cutie, shut the fuck up.”

She moved, fluid and weightless, closing the gap between us. On hands and knees, she leaned forward to me, and this time the kiss happened. Her mouth tasted metallic, and despite all my protests and misgivings, I welcomed it, leaning into the flavor, shuddering at the way her purrs rolled through my chest. By the time we separated, my brain had thoroughly short-circuited, and the affection in her sapphire eyes banished any notion of this being purely a matter of selfishness or duty for her.

“I said you were disappointing me. That wasn’t just to rile you up, it’s because it makes me sad when I see you reaching for the parachute instead of growing beyond it. Use your Flame, cutie, like this.”

She put her hand on my chest, tugged for my Flame—

I pulled away, holding her wrist with both hands.

“Stop. No, Hina. We promised Ai no more magic, no more pain, right?”

“There’s—c’mon! I’m still all worked up.”

“Okay, but—not like that.” I looked at her seriously. “We promised.”

“Sorry, cutie, it’s just—I—I love you,” she whimpered, hurt.

“Do you love me, or do you love what you want to make me into?”

She snarled, and my heart dropped into my stomach, prey instincts rearing their head.

“It’s both! I just want you to be happy! Weren’t you happy?”

My tattoo itched, and the ache in my hand grew—unlike previous times she’d inspired this animal terror in me, this time I’d just proven I could fight back. But that wasn’t how we had agreed to do this. I took a deep breath and stood my ground against those impulses, pulling my eyes away from the bared teeth, meeting her eyes.

“Fucking hell, Hina.” She wavered, and my voice softened. “Stop—yes, spending time with you does make me happy. Yes, I felt powerful, and that felt…good. I want more of that,” I admitted, realizing that my desire for that outweighed my misgivings. “But…you’re really pushing it on me.”

The snarl disintegrated into remorse, shoulders hunching. She swallowed, sapphire eyes swimming in welling tears, and pulled her hand out of my grip.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Space twisted, and she vanished.

—

I snuck into Ai’s workshop half an hour later, clutching oranges in both hands. A spur-of-the-moment decision that she’d probably appreciate a snack had led me to pilfer them from their basket in the penthouse’s kitchen, and I’d awkwardly carried them all the way down the elevator and through the halls, attracting a few stares from passing employees. Fortunately, it seemed that the average person here was accustomed to far weirder flamebearer shenanigans, so nobody’s eyes lingered on me too long.

Ebi had given my arm a once-over shortly after I’d left the dojo. She’d confirmed that nothing was meaningfully damaged; her only instructions were to not exert it for the rest of the day, which was the plan anyway.

“We didn’t…aggravate Amane, did we?”

“No. Dojo’s warded. You peaked high enough that you would have, though. Mostly Sapphire.”

I averted my eyes shamefully, looking out my room’s window at the setting sun.

“Makes sense. Sorry.”

“No harm done. I mean, plenty of harm to you and her, but Sapphire knows what she’s doing. It’s why she only ever does that in the dojo.”

“Really? I’d have figured it’d be a great return on investment to also ward up her room, or Amane’s. Or just put buffers between every room in the penthouse. One-color wards are pretty cheap.”

Ebi shrugged.

“Bring it up with Ai; I’m sure she has a reason. Anyway, you’re all clear, and I need to get back to kicking Amethyst’s ass in Mario Kart.”

“What?”

“You think we spend our days with her just lying in bed and me standing over her attentively like some maid?”

“I—huh.” That actually had sort of been my image of it. “Okay, uh, have fun?”

“I will.” She turned and strode toward the door, but stopped at the threshold of my bedroom. “Sapphire was crying. Post-nut clarity?”

“Something like that,” I admitted, a little too guilty and tired of the drama to be bothered by her needling. “It’s fucked, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Ha,” she chuckled in autotune. “You should probably deal with that before Heliotrope gets back tonight. She’s at her worst when her insufferability gets validated. See ya.”

“Bye.”

I decided that if Heliotrope wanted to bully me for having a girlfriend who just loved me too much, then that was her problem, not mine. Maybe it was the newfound sense of empowerment, but I found myself caring slightly less if the Bloodstone Radiance wanted to be a shit. It could also have been emotional fatigue.

I was a little angry at Hina. I also felt bad for being angry at Hina, because if the way she’d exited that conversation was any indication, she was already kicking herself for forcing herself onto me like that. I felt bad for feeling bad for being angry, because she did deserve some anger. But empathy for her high, the desire to be more, the longing—and especially gratitude and joy that she wanted to share those things with me—they factored in too. But if we did continue, went further with this, would I be able to stay in control with her making every effort to coax me over the edge, her repeated promises to combine the euphoria with sex? To say nothing of how we’d obviously made Ai uncomfortable, or darker concerns about these parallels between Hina and the Vaetna—

It was all so complicated and tiresome, and I‘d just wanted to just not think about it for a little while. Thus, oranges. I didn’t even really intend to talk to Ai about it; working on glyphs was my usual escape, and I’d rather do that with her around than without, because Ai was smart and kind and often right about things. Plus, she’d said she’d be grading assignments, and I was sort of curious what that might entail. So I crossed the threshold into her domain—and was instantly derailed from my plans by the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

The massive construction matrix on the far wall was in full operation. It was much more intense and involved setup than Ai’s simple, educational display from yesterday. Hazard stripes and glowing caution symbols floated all around the workspace, warning all that the vast candelabra of whirring machine tooling was not to be messed with or approached by unauthorized personnel. Since I was one of those, I kept a wide berth from both the signage and the actual machinists at the control station, content to just watch.

Motive glyphs rotated a huge metal plate in midair before {AFFIXING} it in place for the next operation. The cutting head came in to remove a groove diagonally down the side, and I saw flecks of metal skim off several other places on the part simultaneously, identical features being mirrored off the main one by magic. As the tool head swapped to some kind of grinder wheel to clean up the grooves in a shower of sparks, the array of glyphs on the wall also reconfigured, different symbols illuminating and linking together in new ways. It took me a moment to piece together what this new configuration was for, and I got even more excited when it was confirmed by a fresh batch of even scarier warning messages appearing around the workspace, ribbons of English stitched with Japanese. Of course, I could only read the former.

DANGER: HARD VACUUM. DO NOT PUT ANYTHING YOU LOVE INSIDE THIS BOX.

A new part, barrel-shaped with a number of rods sticking out one end, seemed to emerge from nowhere, pulled up into our three dimensions from fourspace storage. The rods fit perfectly against the new grooves on the first part as they slid into place. A few glyphs on the wall changed, re-enabling certain laws of physics, and just like that, the two parts were fused together, no fasteners required—and not even held together by magic, either. Instead, they’d simply cold-welded together in the vacuum, no oxidizing layer on the surface to prevent it, a procedure that would be nearly impossible anywhere but the vacuum of space if not for this magical array’s ability to simply prohibit the presence of gas and tell the two parts to not merge until that {DIFFERENTIATE} had been removed from the chain.

Beautiful stuff. For a few more minutes, I just watched the process, marveling at the sophistication. I would have pulled out my phone to take a video to flaunt to the chatroom—fortunately, that leaker’s impulse was obstructed by oranges. Somebody tapped my shoulder.

“No new bruises. You stopped.”

“Hi, Ai. We did, yeah.” I blinked, then held up the fruit. “Orange?”

“This is a mikan.” She accepted it anyway. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I started to peel mine, but she stopped me.

“No food in the shop.”

“Oh.”

“Come to my office instead?”

“Uh.” I pointed at the awesome assembly of magical machine tooling. “I’m pretty good where I am.”

Ai grinned warmly. “I thought you’d like it. The undergrads don’t even get to use it.”

“What are they making?”

“This is…an artificial gravity module. Making it in one piece—or rather, cold-welding—means fewer fasteners and potential points of failure. Important in space.”

“So this is going on the ISS?”

“Different station, but yes. NASA contracted us for a few parts.”

“Not enough Peacie manufacturing capacity,” I guessed. “All their plants are busy making the new line of gunships and stuff, I hear.”

“Yes. I refuse to make weapons.”

Neither of us pointed out what we had done the other day, opting for silence instead. We watched the machine go for a few minutes. Ai frowned at me.

“That doesn’t hurt?”

“Hm?” I realized I had been tossing my mikan back and forth from hand to hand. “Not really? Ebi said not to do anything with it, but I feel fine.”

“You should still be in pain even without using the arm. Hm. Come with me.”

She led me across the hall to the prosthetic fitting room, away from the machine. But health was important, and if Ai had reason to believe something was amiss…

“Into the circle?”

“No, let me just—” she dug around in a cabinet until she found the tool she wanted, a medical-looking wand with a readout. “Internal red ripple gauge.”

She put the tip on the back of my hand, pressed a button, waited a moment, then frowned. She repeated the process at my wrist, then elbow, then shoulder.

“Your residuals are almost a quarter of what they should be after that.”

“How can you tell? That was all glyphless.”

“Experience. Sit there.” She directed me to a chair next to a machine that resembled an X-ray camera, but she didn’t offer me a lead vest or anything. “Arm on here, please.”

I complied. She worked a control panel, and then her eyebrows went up. Her lips tightened, not quite a frown.

“Wow. That explains it, then. Look at this.”

She turned on a hologram projector that projected a scan of my arm in the air between us. A few more keystrokes highlighted the muscles of my arm.

“It’s not free red ripple, it’s filtering into green.”

Goosebumps emerged on my skin, ridged and bumped like Spire dermis.

“Green? But that means—”

“Yes. Your trick with Hina has changed the musculature. You fed the Flame, and it’s…rewarding you, like with her.” She didn’t sound angry like she had with Hina, just disappointed, but it was still enough to completely take away the excitement I should have been feeling. “You’re mutating.”

2.07 Patreon Release

Pretty happy with this chapter overall. Let me know what you think!

---------------------------

VNT: Vaetna-type. An obnoxiously inaccurate term; for one, none were equal to the Vaetna, and for two, the term was haphazardly applied to essentially any group where a flamebearer held a major role, not just ones that shared the Vaetna’s philosophy of violence. The PCTF and Todai were definitely tier 2 VNT groups; Hikanome was more like tier 3, from what I understood, although all the cults fell under the label to different extents. By comparison, a university with a department of Ripple Studies or Glyph Engineering would by necessity be associated with at least one flamebearer, but were generally not considered VNT groups in themselves.

Really, geopolitical impact was the main metric, and in that regard, it was little wonder that the Spire’s knights were the namesake. For years, I’d gone out of my way to avoid using the term, because I felt it diminished the Vaetna by proxy when applied to even the tier 2 groups, but eventually I’d caved—mostly for lack of any other term with the same colloquial clarity. “Influential flamebearer” and other such substitute terms just had a lot more ambiguity in forum threads.

But Todai were definitely VNTs. In fact, I was begrudgingly starting to think that they were some of the most Vaetna-like of any group. The parallels between mantles and dermis went without saying, of course, but my first up-close-and-personal combat training brought it into much more visceral perspective.

“You’ve never used it against somebody else,” Ai deduced, gesturing at my spear lying forlornly next to me. She’d casually sidestepped a thrust and wrenched the haft out of my hand entirely before sending me onto the mat. I sat up, groaning.

“No. I, um, looked a little bit for classes, but HEMA is specifically swords, and the only spear things I could find were closer to London, which is too far.” I checked my foot to make sure our seconds-long bout hadn’t already damaged the amputation site. “Way too far, now.”

“Not too far,” Ai shone a sunny smile, which I could pretend was the reason my face was hot. She hadn’t even felt the need to take off her jacket before taking me on. “Actually, I think you’re right where you should be.”

“What, on the floor?”

She winced. “Oh, no, not what I meant.”

“I need practice,” I admitted. “But, um, if Hikanome is safe, or at least this event will be, why are we doing this now?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because…summoning my spear is already my first instinct in danger?”

“Mm, yes, that’s part of it. It’s actually a good thing that you can arm yourself without thinking, so you should be able to use it better. But that’s only part of it. I agree with Ishikawa-san: You need to feel like you can fight back if you’re in danger.”

“Wow, way to just cut me right open.”

She frowned.

“I’m unarmed. Do you want to go spear-on-spear?”

“Uh, not what I meant, but…kind of?” I recalled the spear to my hand. “Feel like I’d get thrashed even harder, though.” It didn’t bruise my ego to admit that, or at least not as much as I’d expected.

“True. Your biggest problem right now…you’re trying to be faster than me. Your footwork seems good, and you understand your reach advantage, but even if you were reacting to me in time, I just have a speed advantage.”

“Okay? Is that just an experience thing?”

“Not entirely. I’m cheating.”

She turned away from me and shrugged off the jacket, tossing it to the side, then began to pull up the hem of her tank top—

“What are you doing?”

The question was answered once she pulled the garment off, exposing the tattoo binding Amane had mentioned and I’d promptly forgotten about. Down Ai’s spine ran a complex, interlinked glyph, in vivid, fluorescent green. Or rather, a 2D shadow of a 3D chain of glyphs, like my {COMPOSE} tattoo on my arm. My curiosity warred with my embarrassment, eyes tracing up her back to where the tattoo ran under her sports bra before reappearing and continuing its gradients and symmetrical patterns until it terminated at the base of her neck. It covered most of her back, especially wide at the shoulders and hips where it was denser with additional arrangements of glyphs.

The glyphs that made up the tattoo were clearly based on the same principles she had pioneered for prosthesis animation, enhancing the motion of her limbs, but the longer I looked, the more I could tease out other functionality. Most notable was the set of smaller, more-intricate patterns spaced regularly along her spine: ward segments to disrupt offensive magic intended to pulp her soft, squishy insides or slice her in half. Each of the ward sections—overall sort of hourglass-shaped—also had another node on the end, {AFFIX}-{DISSIPATE}: kinetic dampening applied inward so she didn’t shatter her own bones by throwing an enhanced punch.

Of course, I would have already known the technical points in intimate detail had I looked at the file Ebi had sent me last night, but my work ethic had been rather low between then and now—I’d been free from responsibility and enjoying my new PC and not gotten a whit of real glyph work done. I felt a little guilty for having not done my reading, but then again, Ai hadn’t given me much notice to come work out; she’d just knocked on my door and told me it was time to do some light diagnostic training.

“Do I need to explain any part of it?”

I jumped, realizing I’d been staring at her exposed back for inappropriately long. I averted my gaze hurriedly, pretending to inspect the hexagonal, interlinked pads lining the lower part of the dojo’s walls.

“Um, I think I get it. Strength, speed, and durability? Wards, too…wait,” I recalled my spear into my arm, returning it to its tattoo form, a simple, dark line that shone with iridescence when it caught the dojo’s lights in just the right way. “Yours is an actual chain of glyphs, but mine is symbolic.”

“We’ve gotten better at it over time. If you look here—” she pointed at her lower back, seemingly unembarrassed at the exposure as she indicated a more roughly inked part of the chain “—this is the oldest part. Also, this is all kinetics, no {COMPOSED} matter, so if I make a mistake when I alter the weave…”

She mimed an implosion with her hands and made a hissing, gurgling noise like something wet being sucked through a tube. A messy way to go.

“Ah.”

“Yes. That, and I really like the design.”

I swallowed my embarrassment and looked intently again at the expanse of bare skin, but if she meant a specific element, I didn’t see it.

“Uh? I mean, it’s got clever propagation channeling, I suppose. Really good.” I squinted. “Oh, and the way you split the channels for {DEFLECT}, that’s—”

“Not the glyph design, the artwork.”

“Artwork?” I repeated dumbly.

Ai sighed and paced away from me. As she receded, my eyes stopped being able to make out the individual details of each viridian glyph, turning the tattoo into, well—a tattoo. Now I saw the design.

“Oh, wow.”

“Deshou? Ebi-tan did a great job.”

Ai had a pair of feathery wings folded on her back, each line of glyphs coalescing into the negative space of a shadow cast by the feathers. Some of the more geometric chains, too symmetrical and boxy to mimic the play of light over organic shapes, instead took on the look of pistons or lever arms, as though the feathers were attached to a mechanical frame mounted to her back. I followed the train of logic.

“Can you fly?” I hadn’t seen the type of anti-gravity lattices one would expect, the sort that were in Heliotrope’s jetbike.

“Not as well as the wings suggest,” she admitted. “Ah…right, Hina jumped you home the other day, didn’t she?”

The memory of falling out of the sky made my stomach churn.

“Yes?”

“It’s more controlled than that,” she assured with a smile. “Big jump, then glide. I can show you, but I don’t think it’d be very helpful for you right now.”

Not helpful, perhaps, but I was suddenly paying much closer attention. I’d written off her enhancements as what was often termed “human-plus,” but limited flight gave her three-dimensional maneuverability that put her in the realm of the Vaetna, to an extent.

“Um, if it’s not too much of a hassle…”

—

To my slight disappointment, Ai did not immediately leap into the air and begin bounding around the dojo. She gave a much more practical demonstration—one which included a spear. It was a simple training spear, plastic haft, foam tip, and on the short side by my standards. Mine was longer than I was tall; the one Ai had selected was roughly her height. She brought one of the wooden dummies to the middle of the room and began a simple training sequence.

Her movements were distinct from mine in a number of ways. My style was modeled on—inspired by, really—Heung’s moves, with a lot of powerful strikes to abuse range, as she’d noted, and I generally tried to emphasize control of my footwork, lacking the spearmaster’s ability to supernaturally correct out of overbalance and put force behind any blow no matter how improbable. In doing so, I achieved what I thought to be the closest imitation to his motions that one could approximate, accounting for the fact that I had to deal with things like momentum and gravity and the limited space of my old living situation. And Ai’s warm-up sequence was still—loosely—abiding by those basic rules of physics, but the way she was striking—

She barely used the spear tip. She switched freely between one-handed and two-handed stances, striking with the haft, more like a quarterstaff than a spear. Too, she fought with her body as much as the weapon, an up-close-and-personal style with knee strikes and dancing footwork; variations on the same moves she’d used to take me down in our brief bout of sparring. This time, though, she fully engaged her magical augmentations and wasn’t holding back anything; each blow was full-force, as far as I could tell. She’d go for the head, ribs, stomach, knees, groin. Cracking noises filled the air in a staccato rhythm of violence.

Then she began to speed up.

It’s difficult to express how exactly Ai’s movements changed. The closest example would be as though she were a video played fifty percent faster than normal, which captures the way her movements seemed to lose inertia as though the spear were practically weightless—but that comparison also gives the image of cartoonishly jerky motions. Instead, her motions took on a sort of grace. The dance went from the exertions of muscles and tendons fighting momentum and gravity to something else, destructive motion flowing through her body and depositing lethal energy into the dummy’s wooden frame. Each enhanced strike was loud enough to make me flinch and sent splinters flying.

I saw in her movements the barest shadow of the Vaetna’s aspect. Lesser—closer-in and more brutal, still half-tethered to the dojo’s floor. If the dummy were a real, unaugmented human, they’d already be dead from blunt force trauma—a far less clean death than by a vaet or LM dart, merely straddling the border of supernatural violence without transcending to the level of true, unfettered destruction. Ai swung the butt of the spear into the dummy’s shoulder and followed with a low leg sweep that was distinctly unlike anything a Vaetna would do—the first strike would have been with a blade and ended the fight there. As it was, the enhanced kick was forceful enough to defeat the dummy’s stabilized base and send it tumbling.

The next few moments were a blur of further-accelerated violence that I only parsed after the fact. Ai flipped, spun, and then there was a whistling noise, a crunch, and a bang. The sound echoed through the room as Ai doubled over, hands on her knees, glyph-woven wings aglow against her muscular back as she caught her breath. After a few measured breaths, she raised her head to join me in looking up at her grisly handiwork.

The dummy had struck the top edge of the padding on the far wall, impaled through the chest, some four or five meters up from the floor. It was split down the middle around the speartip. The spear’s plastic haft had been partially melted and distorted by friction as it had left Ai’s hand. That was a singular strike more suited to the Vaetna; a pang of jealous excitement ran through me at the thought, chased immediately by awful guilt for envying such a killing blow. The jealousy won.

“Um. Didn’t—didn’t it have a foam tip?”

“Yes. So don’t do that with yours.”

“I can’t. And you’re the weakest of them?”

She looked at me with some surprise at the bitterness in my tone, muscular arms glistening with sweat as she rolled her shoulders—but those weren’t where the real power lay. The intricate green lattice was what had enabled this. My mind was racing a mile a minute: with only that enhancement, Ai’s display of physicality just now had grazed the bottom edge of the zone of physical power that I considered solely the Vaetna’s domain. She nodded.

“Hina is faster than me and has more tricks.”

Hina’s elevated physiology was even more powerful, those changes she’d subtly promised me if only I was willing. Of course, I’d already seen little tastes of her power, but not simple, transcendental physical prowess, not really. No wonder her predatory aspect alarmed me deep in my bones—I made a conscious effort to stop biting my lip.

“And…mantles? I was under the impression that Amethyst’s g—gun,” I stumbled over the instrument of violence I’d enabled, “was fairly representative of the overall fighting style, ranged rather than melee combat, but that doesn’t look to be indicative of…”

“It’s quite physical. Kinetic. You haven’t seen many videos of us fighting, have you?”

“I was going to get around to it.”

“You weren’t,” she countered bluntly. There was no accusation in the tone; she was actually smiling. “I say that all the time and then never get around to it unless Ebi-tan or Takehara-san remind me. But I’ve set aside this whole afternoon anyway—let’s have lunch, and I’ll show you some combat footage. You’ll understand the lattice diagrams much better with practical examples.”

—

Ai’s idea of lunch was cup ramen. While the noodles rehydrated in hot water, she disappeared upstairs briefly, returning with a laptop and cables. She set up the laptop to feed into the big TV in the common area and started queuing up YouTube clips and opening up an instance of GWalk.

The noodles were honestly pretty good, at least relative to the miniscule amount of effort they had taken. Ai and I had different types; she’d given me what was supposedly the default, where the extra bits were little chunks of unidentifiable salty meat and tiny shrimp, but her own was a curry soup variation with a tempting aroma. I stirred the noodles with the training chopsticks she had made for me, which had apparently been living with the other silverware in the kitchen.

“I, uh, don’t think I ever thanked you for these.”

She smiled.

“You’re welcome.”

“I mean, they fit really well. Perfectly, in fact. Did you scan my hand or something?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.”

The first video we watched was, of all things, a TV interview with Alice from two years ago. The dragon-girl looked slightly different; her tail was only half as long as I was used to, and not as thick. It was awkwardly tucked behind her as she sat forward in an oversized, padded chair, shifting uncomfortably. It was easy to imagine why, with the limb squished behind her like that. I glanced over at Ai, who was wearing a sympathetic grimace. 

“Didn’t you say combat footage?”

“In a bit, but this is a really good interview. Very helpful.”

TV-Alice was soldiering through the pain, bantering with the trio of hosts. It was about a minute into the interview when I brought up the obvious issue.

“…This is in Japanese, Ai.”

“Oh.”

Ai physically flinched at her error, reaching over to the laptop to turn on subtitles, revealing that Alice was discussing mantle transformations. After a few more minutes of introductory discussions, consisting mostly of Alice introducing her team and being humble in the face of the interviewers—two of whom were obviously star-struck—some slides with graphs came on screen. I blinked at the numbers involved and the graphic of Alice’s mantle in flight next to a jet fighter.

“Seventy kilonewtons of thrust?”

“Yes!” Ai sounded so proud, pausing the video to tab over to GWalk, where she had Alice’s mantle diagram loaded. She moused over the propulsion section of the lattice. “Going fast is really easy when you don’t have to worry about holding the craft together, carrying fuel, any of that.”

I knew that, of course; I was already mentally comparing these numbers to the Vaetna’s. Between Gates and teleportation, it was actually somewhat uncommon for them to fly long distances, and they didn’t tend to use direct thrust in a way that was easily quantifiable as force—but I knew that when Heung wanted to go fast, he could output over two hundred kilonewtons to break the sound barrier in under a second. He’d done that sort of acceleration to intercept my flamefall. So at least for this metric, the Radiances still only measured up to a fraction of the Vaetna—but a significant fraction.

So it went with other statistics. Alice’s interview didn’t disclose things like armaments or exact quantity of magical power being used, for obvious reasons, but I had those numbers right in front of me in the lattice diagram, and every time it was the same story: not a direct match for the Vaetna, but close enough that they were in the ballpark…with one exception.

“We can’t compete on ripple leakage, of course. We’ve lowered FRR by almost ninety percent since the first prototypes, since of course that’s critical for Amane’s well-being, but compared to the Vaetna…” Ai trailed off.

The Vaetna famously produced zero free ripple—the extra uncontrolled stuff which had zany and often deleterious effects on its surroundings—when casting magic; the running theory was that the Spire itself modulated that as a byproduct of the fact that every Vaetna’s Flame was partially woven into it, but as usual, there was no official word on the subject. This dovetailed with their other environmental efforts, since magical pollution was a special kind of ugly. TV-Alice agreed, asserting that it was a completely unacceptable form of collateral damage for mahou shoujo.

We eventually moved on from the interview to the promised combat clips so that I could see these abstract numbers in action. And in action, they did look a lot like the Vaetna, enough that my jealousy for that unattainable form, cooled to bare embers by years of resignation, was starting to reignite. Refocus.

Maybe it wasn’t so unattainable.

—

At some point, Ai’s series of videos and data sheets tapered off, and we wound up just chatting about magic. The broth-stained plastic cups on the table had been joined by a bag of potato chips from which we both snacked freely while we curled up on the sofa. Soothed by Ai’s calm demeanor, I found it in me to open up somewhat about the Vaetna, my fascination for them, my desire to see the Spire with my own eyes—and my contradictory resolution to stick around in spite of all that and the forecasted danger. I shared with her what I had overheard from Yuuka.

“Three weeks.”

Ai seemed to think hard for a moment, running numbers in her head. When she refocused on me, she was confident, solid. I was grateful.

“We’ll be ready.”

“Ready for what, exactly?”

“It won’t be fighting right away, I think. They’ll try to buy you first. Etto…poach. Poach you. Every year, I get huge offers to work at one of the US research groups. Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon, General Dynamics…”

“The ones who develop directly for the PCTF,” I followed.

“Yes. And I never will, of course.”

“Neither will I,” I assured her. “I mean, if they wanted me, they had years to come pick me up. But I’ve rather…soured on them, of late.”

“Soured on them,” Ai repeated, trying out the expression. “I like that phrase. Suppakunatta. Doesn’t work as well in Japanese. Has she been better to you?”

I winced.

“Haven’t been face-to-face since then, so I don’t know, but…it wasn’t great, when she was talking to Alice.”

A burst of rent air interrupted us. Hina pranced her way into three-space, startling me and setting my thoughts awhirl as I registered the cozy, intimate situation Ai and I had spent the last two or three hours in—it can’t have looked good, if Hina were the type to care about such things. But she just happily flopped onto the sofa next to me, of course.

“Hey, cuties!”

“Hina-san. Oshigoto wa?”

“Bleh. Meetings! They don’t need me.” The puppy shimmied to snuggle up against me, and I tried very hard not to look down her blouse as she undid the top few buttons. “How’s it hangin’?”

“Good,” I spluttered, trying for nonchalance and failing. “The, um. Mantles. Yep.”

“Ooooh. Getting in that circuitry, huh?”

“You could say that.” Ai hummed. “Actually, we were just talking about Yuuka-chan. It seems like your shitsuke hasn’t worked.”

Hina pouted. “And I took away her chocolate and everything…”

That made Ai’s eyebrows go up. “Ara. I was talking about the violence, but that’s more serious for you. Did you give Ezzen some?”

“Of course! And it was good, right, cutie?” She snuggled closer against me.

“Um, yeah.”

“It’s very expensive,” Ai informed me, mock-stern. “She’ll bankrupt us.”

“‘S good though, right? Right?”

“It is,” the muscular girl admitted. Hina purred happily, then her expression soured.

“Man, Yuuka’s being such a jerk. She’d be way nicer if cutie here was a girl, too. That’s not fair at all!”

I recalled that Yuuka had implied something along those lines. Being the subject of such intense and directed misandry felt awful, so I distracted myself with a switch to more practical matters.

“Um, well, about that. She insisted on going on Saturday.”

“Ah. So, three of us?”

“I guess so. I don’t think she has a problem with you going; she just wanted something about her classes.”

Ai nodded. “That makes sense. The rally is in cooperation with environmentalist groups, and Yuuka-chan is a rather extreme…”

“Activist,” Hina supplied. “Eco-terrorist!” She sounded so proud of her teammate.

“Excuse me?”

Ai grimaced. “She thinks of herself as…a protector. Because of everything with Amane. And once we became stronger, a lot of what her eye tells her is…oil in the oceans, rainforests being cut down. She thinks that’s evil. And it is the duty of mahou shoujo to destroy evil.”

“That’s why she was in the Gulf! Because of the rig!”

“Oh.” I was reevaluating her, somewhat. The Vaetna were definitely also classifiable as ecological activists, and yes, sometimes…“Eco-terrorist?”

“Not publicly,” Ai glared slightly at Hina for revealing the information, and I could see why. Another thing to keep straight, to make sure I didn’t accidentally leak.

“Right, right,” the puppy agreed, immune to the judgment. “It’s more of a hobby for her.”

“Um. Got it. Okay. I can’t blame her,” I admitted.

Hina dug a claw into my arm and growled. Not loud enough for Ai to hear, but I could feel it radiate through her torso into mine. It still freaked me out that I found that so attractive.

“I smell sweat. You sparred. Three hours ago, maybe?”

“Y—yeah?”

She looked up at me with those sapphire eyes, pure hyena, pupils tiny—all predator. I shivered.

“I need a piece of that action. Make up for missing last night, and get you ready for Saturday.”

I tore my eyes from her, a monumental struggle, to look at Ai on my other side and ask a silent question with my eyes: from what she and Amane had said, such physical preparation wasn’t necessary, so was Hina just making excuses for her own desires? Not that the butterflies in my stomach cared about whether it was necessary. Ai returned the question with one of her own.

“Last night?”

“Oh, um, she was out—”

“Not sex,” Hina clarified for me. “Just fighting.”

“Not much difference with you,” Ai pointed out grumpily.

“Well, Yuuka’s always so unsatisfying, doesn’t fight back at all, just runs! Need to get some real hits.”

Ai shook her head. “She gets like this, sometimes. Alice would stop her, but…you did want to see how she moves, right?”

I swallowed, unable to deny my excitement to see firsthand how my girlfriend would compare to my idols in combat. I wanted to know just how far beyond me she was. And, in turn, how far I could go, what I might be able to become—a path toward their ilk.

“I do.”

2.06 Patreon Release

It’s cold.

That’s weird, because temperature isn’t the kind of thing one normally notices in a dream. Nonetheless, it is undeniably cold here. I can feel it on my skin, in my teeth, and especially from the ache in my hand.

Where is here, anyway? It is not the waters below the ice, nor is it the flat expanse above, nor the beach or great and incomprehensible forest beyond. Instead, I sit upon an outcropping, some vast block of hard and rough material that could be stone, or bone, or perhaps the Spire’s dermis. It’s large enough for me to sit comfortably in the middle without feeling worryingly close to the edge and thus in danger of falling off. The outcropping is somewhat uneven, with high and low points gently rising and falling until the sides slope worryingly downward. Perhaps this is the tip of some great, buried femur, protruding up from the mists shrouding whatever may be below. Always mist in these dreams. It’s cold.

More to the point, I’m not alone. Someone else sits next to me, a man, older by maybe ten or fifteen years, with a salt-worn face and grainy stubble. His skin is darker than my pallor, tanned by the sun and stretched taut over a muscular frame. No bodybuilder physique, rather the practical muscles of a man whose trade is contingent on a functional body. He is whole, unlike me.

I recognize him from the news; this is the pivotal figure around which the whole debacle in the Gulf of Mexico revolved. Noah Holton. Now something like my adoptive sibling, perhaps—being from the same creche of Flame as I, another fragment from when the Heron shattered fate. In theory, there were four of us—but one had turned inferno and been put down by the Vaetna, so now, only three, and only two right here on this strange outcropping surrounded by cold mist.

“You’re Ezzen.”

It is not a question. His voice is as weathered as his face, gravelly. Perhaps he smokes. His accent is of the American South.

“That’s me,” I confirm. “You’re…Noah? Mr. Holton?”

“Just Holton. You’re some kind of magic expert, they tell me. And just a kid. Have any idea where in God’s name we are?”

“Haven’t a clue, sorry.” I scrape a fingernail on the hard surface; it leaves no mark. “But this is a dream.”

“Figured as much. More weird flamebearer shit?”

“I…guess so. Haven’t heard of it, but this isn’t my first. Third, I think.”

With my full recollection available here, I realize I hadn’t dreamt the previous night, when I’d slept with Hina. Odd.

“Huh. Sure isn’t where I went to sleep, that’s for sure.”

“We won’t remember this when we wake up, either. At least, I don’t.”

“Huh. Then what’s the point?”

We fall into silence for a while.

“Where do you think the third guy is?”

“Probably not asleep. It’s morning back home.”

“Oh, right. So, then, why are you asleep?”

“Healing. Ripple fucked me up good, they say.”

“You look whole to me. Who’s ‘they’?”

“What are you, a cop?”

I blink.

“I’m just—trying to look out for you, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Because…” I thought about this. “I should?”

He grunts.

“Thanks. But I’m not telling you anything. I don’t even know if you’re real. You could be somebody from the Peacies trying to trick me into giving up my location, for all I know.”

“I’ve got no love for them,” I object. But he’s right; I have no way of knowing he’s real, either. I change the topic, hoping that if he is indeed real, he can answer this question. “Why did Brianna leave you?”

“Who? Oh, the Vaetna?”

“Yeah.”

“She said she couldn’t take me.”

I sit further up in alarm.

“What does that mean?”

“Beats me.” He says nothing more, looking out into the mist, rubbing his hands together as though to warm them up. It doesn’t work.

“Well—did she say anything else?” That couldn’t be right, but he just shrugs.

“Don’t remember exactly what she said, but yeah, that’s what it came out to. She couldn’t take me to the Spire. Couldn’t even stick around to bail me out. Didn’t give a real reason, I think. I didn’t beg her, either, so she just left.”

“That doesn’t happen.”

“No? ‘Cause that’s what happened.”

“It doesn’t. They don’t leave flamebearers out to dry like that. They didn’t, for me. I mean, I didn’t wind up going with them, but three of them showed up for me. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Eh. They didn’t really ‘leave me out to dry’, I guess. Helped clean up the guys I was fighting—scooped out the whole east side of the superstructure. Poor fucker right in front of me was caught at the edge, didn’t get him all the way.”

Guilt seeps through me like poison. That hadn’t been the Vaetna—should I tell him that, admit what I had done? Would that make anything about this better? He’d mentioned he was recovering from ripple exposure—I would feel guiltier if that was our doing. But it could well have been his, or just the ambient residuals from his Flamefall. I can’t risk it.

“Even—even so. They left you there. That doesn’t happen,” I repeat. “There has to be a reason.”

“Probably is. Doesn’t really matter to me.”

“Why not? It’s unprecedented, it means something.” I feel myself growing annoyed at his apathy. “And we’re from the same cluster, so even if you don’t care, I do.”

“Still can’t prove that.”

A fair point. But there has to be a way. I rack my brain, trying to picture glyphs, my ingrained expertise far more slow and sluggish to respond than usual, dampened by the swaddling other-ness of the dream.

“I can prove it somehow,” I promise. “I’ll find a way to remember this, contact you.”

“Cool.”

I frown. He just—doesn’t care? I don’t know what to say in the face of the brick wall of apathy. So I say nothing and stand, to better investigate this strange locale. Even with no prosthetic, this dream lets me walk without pain or difficulty. I move to the edge of the mostly level area of the outcropping, where it begins to slope downward, getting as close as I dare; as I thought, no surge of acrophobia rises to meet me as I peer down into the milky mist. But it is cold. Why does my hand hurt, but not my foot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere below, beyond my sight.

“Gonna jump?”

“What? No, just looking.”

“Why not?”

I turn to him, befuddled.

“Why would I?”

“Well. Assuming you are real, I’m just thinking…maybe this is some sort of test. Like we won’t wake up until we leave the platform, or something.”

“And your evidence for thinking that?”

He shrugs.

“Guess.”

I turn back toward the fog, trying to glean something, anything. But there are not even swirls of atmospheric motion. It is instead a heavy, impenetrable stillness. It occurs to me that perhaps we are high above that forest beyond the beach, and that somewhere within the fog lays a surface of treetops. That doesn’t answer the question of what we’re actually standing on. I hope it’s not bone; the implications of that would be dire. As I look, I speak.

“My last dreams didn’t have any kind of…test, or whatever. And this isn’t the same place. I did have somebody else there, but it was…just a manifestation of my Flame, somehow. And it was different from you. I think you’re real, but my gut says that we’re supposed to talk to each other. Our Flames, or somebody else, want us to communicate.”

“Huh. Well, kid, from where I’m sitting, the Frozen Flame isn’t our friend. Real bastard, even. I’d think real hard about what I assume it wants.”

“It’s not evil.”

“It runs on pain. I learned that from minute one. How much more evil can it get?” He shifts. “I don’t want to find out. I didn’t sign up for any of this shit. But I can’t even get away from it when I’m sleeping, seems like.”

For me, this has all been a dream come true, albeit a twisted one. But for somebody without my obsessive passion for magic, somebody who was trapped in the middle of a standoff between world powers rather than whisked away to relative safety?

“I don’t blame you,” I concede. “But we ought to make the most of the hand we’re dealt.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m not playing.”

“Meaning what? You—can’t go to the Spire.” The words are ash in my mouth for their implication. He has to have misunderstood somehow. “If that’s what Bri meant. And there’s no other safe haven, not really, other than…the Peacies, or their equivalents. Who you don’t seem keen on.”

“I’m not, nah. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. But I’m not gonna go to war with them or whatever else the fuckin—what’s the word—VNTs get up to. And especially whatever this shit—” he waves at the mist around us “—is. No thanks. I want out.”

This enkindles an unfamiliar emotion in me, one that sweeps away the sympathy. I glower.

“That’s not a choice we get to make.”

He shrugs again.

“It’s the choice I’m making. You gonna jump or what?”

“Why would I…?”

“No other way off this rock. You’re the type who needs answers, and they’re not up here, I can tell you that much.”

I glance down again; still no dizziness or primal terror, because there’s no sense of distance for the fall. A perfect chance to face my fear—assuming this is indeed just a dream, a normal one where I can’t get hurt. But there’s no guarantee of that, not in whatever strange Flame-derived non-space this is. So instead, I turn back to him, surveying the empty expanse around us.

“Not up here, no. But that doesn’t mean I need to jump to find out.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and pull the rip-cord dangling off my soul, tearing the stitches where it meets my Flame. It and I both tremble at the lance of agony, and my hand ignites. The cold does not dissipate, nor the ache, but instead coexists with the searing heat of fire, tongues of Flame in the same milk-white as the mist around us, because in my gut I know that they are one and the same. I raise my hand, reaching out to the edge, telling them to meet and merge, that my shard of the Flame may connect to whatever greater whole composes this ephemeral realm. I might not have access to glyphcraft, but I still have this most basic magic, the basis, its fundamental form.

My hand takes great effort to move toward the edges of the fog, as though I am pushing it through a viscous fluid. It grows denser the further I reach, until I am straining with my entire body for a single extra centimeter. I am close; it will give, with just a little more, and I will make contact. But before I can break through the barrier, stretch the elastic goop to its limit and shear it apart, I hear Holton move behind me.

“Stop,” he whispers, voice grave. “Something is here.”

“A bit—ngh—late for that, I think.” At this point, it would be as much effort to extract my arm, douse the Flame, as it would be to see it through. “What kind of something?”

“I don’t know! Something’s moving out there! Big, white, like a…tooth, or a fin. Cut through the mist. They got fucked up space whales in here?”

“Let’s not find out.”

I push through, and the dream tears.

—

Tap tap tap tap…

I awoke to the sound of rain. A retina-blast of light from my phone shattered the predawn veil of darkness as I confirmed the time—5:47, a truly ungodly hour, a time during which no sane person should be up. I squeezed my eyes tighter shut and rolled over in bed, hoping the pitter-patter of the rain outside would lull me back to oblivion. I’d just been having an interesting dream, though I couldn’t recall the details and had the sense that it had reached some kind of conclusion. I wanted to get back to it and see what else my subconscious could spin up while I rested a few hours more.

Tap tap tap tap…

If the Radiances wanted me up early to prepare for Saturday or paperwork or something else time-sensitive, well, they could just text me or knock on the door or something. Until then, I was going back to sleep. I might miss breakfast, but that was fine if it meant I could avoid another unpleasant run-in with Yuuka. 

Tap tap tap tap…

Just as I had snuggled further into my blanket and hooked my arm under the pillow, my hopes of returning to dream-land were sabotaged by the human brain’s propensity for pattern recognition; I realized that the sound of the rain contained an oddly rhythmic component. Of course, there was the generally random white noise of countless raindrops, but there was also a distinct sequence of tapping noises, four at a time.

Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap.

Curiosity got the better of me. I peeled one eye open, turned my head, craned my neck—

There was a silhouette on my balcony, visible only as a dark void, a humanoid shape where the lights of the skyscrapers beyond weren’t, half-obscured in the misty condensation.

Adrenaline flooded my system as I parsed the figure. I bolted upright and scrambled to disentangle myself from the blankets. With my prosthetic foot still on the nightstand, I was limited in how far I could move, but I managed to roll off the edge of the bed and land behind it in a crouch, then half-knelt, half-stood to direct the speartip over the top of the bed like a Roman soldier hiding behind a barricade. Emphatically not Heung-like, in hindsight.

Moments before filling my lungs to yell for backup, I looked at my balcony again and assessed the figure more carefully. During those few seconds of panic, my eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and I realized who this was. I caught the shine of rain-soaked hair matted down over shoulders, the silhouette of slender legs. And of course, when the light caught her face just right, an unmistakably brilliant blue shone from my girlfriend’s eyes. Perhaps obvious in hindsight. Hina glinted a toothy grin and waved enthusiastically at me. Her other palm was pressed against the glass; the rhythmic tapping sound had been her galloping her fingernails on the door.

My face turned hot as I realized how my maneuver across the bed must have looked. I averted my eyes from hers—always so difficult to look away from that beautiful sapphire—and hurriedly banished my spear. I knew rationally that I had probably done the right thing, but I couldn’t stop my body from repurposing the adrenal energy of my erroneous fight-or-flight response toward embarrassment. On the balcony, Hina seemed to giggle, shoulders shaking in mirth—or perhaps shivering from the cold, but that didn’t seem like her. While I tried to keep myself from cringing at my reaction, she pointed at the door handle and tilted her head, a wordless request for permission. She was drenched, so I did the decent thing and hurriedly waved assent. The open door brought the dull, distant roar of the rain into immediate clarity, making me flinch and move to cover my ears.

As Hina stepped in, closing the door behind her to re-establish the barrier between cozy interior and unpleasant outdoors, I had to wonder—

“Why the balcony?”

“It’s pretty nice out there!”

I gaped at her, glanced out the window to confirm we were seeing the same rainstorm, then back at her, soaked head to toe. She was already on the move, wringing out her hair with her hands.

“Mind if I dry off?”

If it were any other person, I would have insisted that she make full use of my towels. But because it was Hina, I instead had a terrible premonition that she was about to do something distinctly dog-like.

“I just built that,” I declared, pointing at my PC, hoping to head off the spattering. “Please don’t ruin it.”

“What? Wasn’t gonna. I mean, that sounds fun…” For a terrifying moment, she seemed to be genuinely considering it, ultramarine eyes scanning across my belongings, “But I’m not gonna ruin your room. You think I’d do that?”

“Uh…I guess not? In any case—” I pointed at the bathroom, relieved by the sanity, “Yeah, use what you need.”

“Oh, I was just gonna, uh, blow-dry. With magic. Can I?” In response to my suspicious look, she clarified, “Won’t make a mess, I promise! And I’ll be so warm after.” She batted her eyes at me, probably trying to look alluring—a little too wet-dog at that moment to pull it off, but the message was received.

“Uh, sure.”

“Yay!”

Then there was heat.

—

I woke up again as dawn began to break. This time, the puppygirl equivalent of a heating pad was entangled with me, radiating wonderful warmth across everywhere our bodies touched and our limbs wrapped around one another’s. My hazy return to consciousness brought a dim wonder to the post-coital embrace—before my brain came slightly more online and I remembered that nothing sexual had happened. She’d just stripped her most-soaked outer layers, blow-dried herself, and hopped into bed with me, and I’d fallen right back asleep in short order.

Now, shifting and readjusting slightly against her smaller form, I very much didn’t want to get up, even less so than before. I just wanted to stay here with her in my arms and be warm and safe forever. And I did feel safe, paradoxically—Hina was being very lovey, all snuggles.

“Making up for lost time,” she explained. “Sorry I was out last night.”

“Mm.” Her hair still smelled a bit rainy; tricky to identify, not wet-dog, more like earthy notes layered over the aroma of her shampoo. I felt unimaginably spoiled to have my face pressed into her mane like this. “Find anything?”

“No,” she muttered dejectedly into my chest while her hand idly ran up and down my flank. “I went to run some tests with a friend in Kyoto. Oh! You probably know them, maybe, they’re on the forums. On there, they’re…Gorogorosan?”

I blinked, pulling away from her slightly, enough to look down at her. In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising at all that she knew one of Japan’s premier experts in ripple propagation, but I hadn’t made the connection myself.

“Oh, yeah. So you were testing ripple?”

“Mhm. Trying to figure it out. What they did, where they went. But we didn’t really find anything. Sorry.”

“For what?”

“Not solving it!” She wiggled unhappily.

“‘S fine,” I murmured, letting my eyes slide back shut. “You really don’t have to go that far. How far away is Kyoto, again?”

“Mmmm…two-fifty miles? Sum’n’ like that. Sorry, yeah, I know I’m getting wound up about this, I just don’t want there to be something out there that can hurt you. Any of you,” she added hastily, squirming again. “I think it’s just nerves about the Peacies. I’d rather they just showed up so I can tear ‘em apart and we can be done with this. But that won’t be for a bit, says Yuuka.”

I grimaced a bit at the mention of her abrasive teammate.

“You…talked to her? I seem to recall you saying you were going to…enact violence.”

“Yeah. Took a few swings at her, but she’s always so slippery. Got my point across, though, I think.”

“That being?”

“Stay away from my cutie.” She injected a spine-tickling growl into the words. I shivered at the goosebumps that raced across my arms, heady with the surreality of our intimacy. She ran her hand down my arm possessively, approvingly, and dug her claws into the rough scar tissue. I winced, heart pounding. “Or at least, IDK, treat you with basic respect. That’d be good too.”

“Thanks,” I squeaked out. “Mmf. Ow.”

“Hm? Oh.” The claws retreated and she rubbed the stinging depressions contritely. “Sorry?”

Something giddy and vulnerable took control of me, urged on by the protectiveness on full display. She wouldn’t let anybody else hurt me—but cocooned here together, I was happy to let her do so.

“I didn’t say stop.”

—

Half an hour of ragged-edged gasping and delirious giggles and nibbling kisses later, Hina finally had to get up for work. My collection of hickeys had grown and my hand stung in all sorts of interesting ways, the result of clawing and gnawing and kneading. She seemed positively fixated on my flame-touched limb, seeming to prefer when I touched her with it over my other hand—and touch her I did, all the more reason for me to curse the tyranny of the clock and her presumably important responsibilities when she had to disentangle from me. Then again, an eyeful of mostly naked Hina was a lovely note to end on.

Some time later, I dragged myself out of bed as well and spent the morning enjoying my new PC setup. There was more work to be done, customizing and tuning increasingly miniscule settings, but mostly, I just relaxed with the chatroom on one monitor and YouTube on another, catching up properly on the few days I’d been out of the news cycle. It was good to be back. There were new glyphcraft papers, updates on the Vaetna—nothing pertaining to Bri at a glance—and continuing ripple effects of the non-magical sort from the Thunder Horse Inferno. And beyond my little bubble of awareness, the world kept turning as well, random new politics that I had little time for and banished from my feed as soon as they appeared.

The great invisible algorithms of the modern internet seemed to have picked up that I was now in Japan, and I chuckled dryly as I saw that my interest in magical studies had been correlated with my location and resulted in a slew of Todai videos dotted across my recommended page. I had a degree of academic interest in those, scrubbing through, looking for things to fill in the gaps in my understanding of what they did all day. The through-line across all five of them was that they did a lot of brand collaborations, but I was still a bit hazy on the day-to-day.

As it happened, though, I wound up getting mezzanine seats to exactly that subject in person. My hunger reached a tipping point and overcame inertia to send me creeping out of my room to the top of the stairs, intending to raid the kitchen for snacks and possibly a full meal if something in the fridge struck my fancy. I didn’t make it that far—I stopped short of the top of the stairs as I overheard a pair of raised voices, British and Australian. Fortunate, perhaps, that they were having this conversation—argument, really—in English.

“So you decided without me that I wasn’t going?”

“I’d have assumed you would be fine with it.”

“I would have been, if we’d decided this when it had first come up! But I’ve planned my whole day around it now, so I’m going.”

“This is a serious event, not an excuse for you to hang out with Amane all day.”

“That’s not what I mean. I was going to get some field advocacy work done!”

“Ah. For your research?”

“Yeah!” Yuuka sounded annoyed, as though this shouldn’t need explaining. “I was talking to Inoue-sensei and told him I was going, and he said I could count attendance instead of going to lecture next week because of the whole environmental focus of the fundraising. I was just going to take some pictures with the FOEI people there, y’know, we do that stuff all the time—”

“And were you going to tell me about this? Or PR?”

“Tch. Probably!”

“Probably isn’t enough, Yuuka,” Alice chided. “We’ve been over this. If you want to do a marketing campaign, collab, whatever, you have to run it by us first. And how were you going to juggle that with keeping an eye on Ezzen?”

“You’re sending Ai instead! Why does he have to be my problem? Now there’ll be three of us to keep an eye on the monsterfu—on him.” There was no contrition in the self-correction, but her resigned tone at least suggested that Amane had gotten through to her, even if Hina’s message perhaps hadn’t stuck. “Don’t know why you even fuckin’ bother—”

“Language. Can’t believe you got this vulgar after two years down there—”

“Piss off, it’s part of my brand. There’s a reason my merch sales are the highest—”

“Two reasons.” Alice retorted with uncharacteristic venom in her voice. I could picture her tail lashing angrily. “And they’re both attached to your chest.”

The bickering collapsed into very angry-sounding Japanese. I’d been crouching, a reflexive but pointless attempt to be stealthy as I eavesdropped from out of view up above them—now I sat down more carefully to relieve the stress on my foot, waiting to see if they’d return to English. I didn’t like to pry, but…I was already learning a lot. Yuuka was some kind of environmental sciences major, for one. For two, her relationship with Alice was a little…incendiary, not unlike a rebellious teen and her mother. Weren’t they only two years separated?

“Listen, Alice. Point is, cunt’s a problem.”

“He’s a victim. Like Amane! It’s almost the same situation.”

“He’s a guy, and he’s balls-deep in that thing. I thought after all the shit with Jason you’d be done letting her bring her chew toys back here!”

“Yuuka,” Alice’s voice went gentler. “Have they caused you any actual problems? I think you’re projecting some of your own experiences onto him; he’s been nothing but pleasant and polite. Help me understand where the problem is so we can solve it together. You’re a smart girl, you know—”

“Ugh. Sonna ni yaru na yo. Fine, here’s a reason: Having two of those things here is fucking terrible for Amane. Ai wants him to help with the hosougu for some fucking reason, but with how much red Hina’s gonna make because of him, it just winds up giving Amane a bunch more flare-ups.”

“Is that foresight, or an assumption?”

“I pinged for something this morning! They’re biting each other or some shit.”

I blushed—then my stomach lurched. Had we contributed to some “bad weather” for Amane in our selfish, giddy exchanges of passion?

“And yet Amane has been fine,” Alice retorted, and I sighed in relief. Yuuka’s silence was damning—her foresight was imperfect, it seemed. Alice sighed. “Amane wants him here too. She told you that this morning, so just…I’m not even asking you to get along with him. Avoid him, if you have to, just…right now, you’re being a bigger problem than he is.”

“Right now? You know what’s not right now, Alice? Three weeks from now, when the PCTF will start making offers to take him off our hands. Which we’ll refuse, of course, and then they’ll stop asking and start moving assets up from Okinawa. He is a mess waiting to happen. That’s foresight, and I’m not wrong.”

“Alright,” Alice allowed. “Thank you for the heads-up, it’s good to have some precision on that. Add it to the chart sometime today, please. I’ll inform Hikanome that you’ll also be attending on Saturday. Be nice to Ezzen, please.”

“Fine.” I heard furniture shift, a chair being pushed back. “Don’t know how you can be so calm about it, Ally. He’s going to fuck us all over just by being here. That’s my professional opinion.”

2.05 Patreon Release

This chapter was hard to write. Let me know what you think!

---------

Did I want to go to the Hikanome rally? Not particularly. But it was worth discussing.

“You should go,” Ebi opined. Her voice sounded quite distinct from when she was interpreting for Amane, drier and deeper in timbre. “We’ll be a little bit fucked if you don’t.”

“How fucked? Uh—no, stupid question, fucked enough that I should just go, right?”

Amane sipped her juice slowly and carefully through a metal straw, holding the cup in her prosthetic hand.

“Let’s walk it back a little bit.” Ebi’s real-time interpretation for Amane was much less stilted and more articulate than the texting. “Talk us through what you’re worried about. I don’t want you to feel like you’re being pushed into this, but I think you’re underestimating how much we can do to make this safe and painless for you.”

“Safe and painless…”

I looked around my room, at the bed and the skyline through the windows and the newly online computer. The water-cooling system which Amane had helped install buzzed dully, probably the pump—a different auditory character from what I was used to, but not unpleasant. Her assistance had cut down the difficulty of the build dramatically, smoothing over that most nerve-wrackingly unfamiliar part and saving me hours of time, and I was grateful. Despite the language barrier, she was quickly becoming among the most comfortable of them to be around—and more importantly, I believed her when she said they’d be able to keep me safe.

…If not for the uncertainty around my stalker. I had to admit that my recalcitrance about the rally heavily stemmed from that fact, and probably looked pretty unaccountable without being aware of it—it was solely by the team’s general graciousness that I wasn’t being pressed harder. Attempting to bring the encounter up to Yuuka had been a complete and total failure, and Alice was off the table as per Hina’s anxious insistence. But Amane had advocated for me—so she at least deserved to understand that I wasn’t just being generally agoraphobic and anxious. I sighed, avoiding eye contact.

“I do have another reason I don’t want to go. Can you…promise to not tell Alice? Hina doesn’t want her to know.” I knew that sounded unreasonable.

“I thought we already established that I don’t like hiding things from my teammates.” Ebi-Amane’s tone was light, though, and the Amethyst Radiance looked intrigued—then squinted in dramatic suspicion, muttering something to Ebi, who rolled her digital eyes and shook her head, replying in her own voice.

“She promises. So do I. Do tell.”

“Alright, uh. When I was out with Hina yesterday—well, rather, between after I left Tochou and before meeting with Hina, I saw…something.”

I recounted the event and my stalker’s description, the goth-ish woman who was apparently not Yuuka. Amane’s eyes widened, and she rubbed her robotic arm again—but shook her head with disappointment when she couldn’t provide an ID. Her green eyes flicked up to mine, then she leaned back and looked away from me, considering this. Ebi didn’t show any outward response until she translated for Amane once more.

“It’s not Hikanome, as far as the rally is concerned. It could be the Sugawara loyalists, the other Hikanome, but that’s not how they do things. The physical description doesn’t resemble any of the other flamebearers in Japan.” Ebi’s voice changed to give her own take. “And I’m running a general sweep of all flamebearers and not coming up with much that would click with that description. You said she sounded Japanese?”

“Or Korean, or Chinese,” I admitted. “Sorry, not very good with Asian, uh, phenotype—accents, faces—not a racism thing, I swear, just—”

“You’re good, man.” Ebi shrugged. “Not a Hikanome flamebearer, and I have no idea why one of Korea or China’s ops would be plainclothes and cloaked if they were scouting you. Well, cloaked or projected or whatever. Amane—” she conferred with the girl sitting between us, then looked up at me. “Obviously, we gotta figure out who this is. But it’s almost certainly not Hikanome, and it sounds recreational.”

“Recreational?”

“Well, like it wasn’t somebody out to find you, and it was dumb chance. Or they were investigating ‘Todai’s new flamebearer’ but didn’t know that would be you specifically. My point is that this doesn’t sound like a narrowly averted abduction attempt or anything.”

“Meaning…it won’t be a problem if I go to the rally.”

“Yeah.”

Ebi’s voice switched back to faux-Amane as the Radiance kept talking.

“We’d be able to confirm for sure if you went. If they are somehow affiliated with Hikanome, they’ll likely either show up there—and we’ll deal with it then—or it’ll be unrelated and you have nothing to fear. Hina’s nose didn’t give you any other clues?”

I was grateful to get back into the grit of the magic.

“She identified the vague ripple, red-white, and—well, remember yesterday’s thing? With the gun?” I needed a moment to calm myself with a sip of juice and a pistachio, annoyed at the way my heart rate jumped even thinking about it. Amane nodded, clearly following along as I explained. “The remote projection lattice we used is close to whatever the stalker was using, according to Hina.” Was “stalker” even the right term anymore? “Without actual scanning hardware, it’s hard to do ripple tracking or anything. Hina said Yuuka could do that too, so I tried to talk to her about it earlier, which…”

We all sighed. Yuuka’s dislike of me was tangling this. Amane thought on it for a few moments.

“We’ll work on Yuuka; she’d probably be willing to help if somebody other than you or Hina explained it. So, is that it? Any other things you want us to address about the rally? I know it’s a lot to ask, and if there’s anything we can do to make it feel less overwhelming…”

I resisted the urge to bring up how I didn’t trust cults. From how the Radiances had spoken about Hikanome, that seemed likely to turn into an argument with Amane especially. I’d ask Hina about it later, maybe. So other than that…

“Uh…” It was embarrassing to admit the emotional subtleties. “Yesterday, I discovered that crowds stress me out, apparently. But I’m not sure how much that’s my anxiety about the stalker specifically versus just general…inexperience? Being outside?” I winced. “But I know that’s not really enough reason not to go, and I don’t want to be even more of a burden when this is such a critical thing for the—” I cut off my own rambling. “It’s not important. I’ll go.”

Amane shook her head.

“Don’t be hasty. Let’s talk it through, this is why I brought it up. You mean you feel unsafe, even aside from the ‘stalker’?”

“…I guess so, yeah.”

She nodded knowingly.

“I get it. I never turn human when I’m outdoors.”

“What?” Her phrasing on that was weird. “Like, you stay mantled?”

“Feel exposed without it. I mean, I have all sorts of wards in this,” she brandished her arm, “but it still makes me nervous. We can get you some wards of your own, for sure. I’ll help you with it tomorrow, probably, if the weather holds.”

Somehow, despite the violent nature of the events that had brought me to Todai, I hadn’t even considered passive means of magical defense. In retrospect, it immediately felt irresponsible of Alice and Hina to have taken me out without even mentioning it. The two must have been sure of their abilities to defend me from abduction, but if somebody had actually wanted me dead and deployed quick-kill magic to make it happen?

The people I’d murdered were a perfect example of how utterly vulnerable a standard human was to magic. The human body is a terribly squishy, frail thing—and being a flamebearer didn’t inherently make me any better protected, just a juicier target. Hina and her ilk, if they existed, were the probable exception, but even she wouldn’t survive even something far lower-caliber than what we had used yesterday.

My spear—already demoted back to toy status, little better than a safety blanket—fell further in my estimation of its ability to seriously defend me. I wasn’t Heung, whose onyx blade could sever ripple to cut spells from the air and who could walk astride the lightning. I needed wards, passive defenses that would at least buy me enough time to snapweave or activate more serious countermeasures. I was almost certainly fine within Lighthouse Tower, but outside? Amane had pinpointed my anxiety exactly.

“I—yes, please, that’d be great. Um, do the others have their own projectors, or…?”

“It depends. Alice has a…” Amane conferred with Ebi for a moment. The teal robot shrugged. “She has a pretty standard personal ward kit. Sticks to the inside of whatever she’s wearing, on her back.”

All first-order, then, for a flat, ergonomic, two-dimensional form factor. Not as powerful as it could be with other choices of glyphs, but that was the sort of tradeoff you had to make. I ventured to guess at the others.

“Hina doesn’t strike me as the type to bother with those at all?”

Amane mustered an impressive scowl.

“Nope. She’ll smell or hear it coming, or however that works, and then not dodge completely, just let it graze her, because it’s fun.” I winced. She mastered her expression and continued. “And Yuuka has what Alice does, but if she’s ever in a position to get hit, shit’s gone sideways, so it’s a formality.” She stopped and glared at Ebi for that vulgar translation, and got a shit-eating digital grin in reply. The robot turned to me of her own accord to finish the set. “And Ai has her tattoo binding. Which—wait, we haven’t told you about that yet.”

“Her what?”

My phone buzzed; Ebi had sent me another zip file.

“Take a look at this once you’ve got your gamer cave all nice and set up.” She looked down at Amane questioningly, who nodded. “We’ll stop interrogating you until that’s done, I think. Ready to get back to it?”

—

Even with the PC itself ostensibly up and running, it still took another half hour to get the various peripherals and furniture set up. I was supplied with a worryingly expensive mechanical keyboard, paired with an ergonomic mouse; secondary and tertiary monitors, joining the primary one for a trio of swing-arm displays I could orient however I pleased; zip ties galore to contain the growing mess of cables. Ebi got under the desk to install those instead of making us frail, disabled humans do it. The warzone of spent packaging materials was tamed into neat piles organized by type, and what began to emerge in its place was an eye-wateringly expensive PC setup whose specs would probably give some of my friends a stroke.

We chatted through the process; for instance, Amane filled me in on some of the specifics of Yuuka’s cursed eye. Ebi had helped put her hair up in a ponytail as she had for Ai the other day. Amane’s hair was comparatively longer and straighter, well-cared-for and jet-black.

“So it’s more like one of Hina’s mutations?”

“More willingly chosen than that. It was a blood magic deal.”

“Was it…worth it?”

“She thinks so,” Ebi put in for herself.

I swallowed.

“Um—the fact that she doesn’t like me, could that be…not so baseless? Like, could I do something nasty in the future that she’s responding to now, and doesn’t care for the difference?”

Ebi shrugged, and Amane shook her head.

“It’s not that precise. Her clarity is proportional with the ripple generated by an event, so it’s minimal for mundane stuff and only really big for significant magical events. But yes, you’ve read her character right, that kind of lack of distinction between present and future does sound like her.”

“And,” I was still trying to wrap my head around this part while I fiddled with the swing arms of the monitors, “how does this not violate free will, exactly? If the silver ripple must always eventually be reflected in forward-facing standard-spectrum? Don’t those become fixed points in time? Otherwise you’re not accounting for time symmetry.”

“The fourth dimension doesn’t make sense either,” Amane pointed out. I grimaced; magic had indeed poked a variety of holes in our understanding of physics, and the addition—or discovery—of a fourth spatial dimension was probably the biggest of those. “I think they’re connected.”

“My will feels free enough,” Ebi countered. “And if I’m fine, so are you guys, probably. Not that anybody knows for sure.”

“Other than the Vaetna,” I replied on reflex. Amane tossed a spent piece of bubble wrap onto the plastic pile. The Radiance was favoring her prostheses, unsurprisingly.

“Says who?” Ebi waggled her eyebrows. “They don’t know everything, Ez.”

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” I needled.

“Oh, don’t be a dick.”

Amane giggled at that, picking up on the joking tone even without translation.

“Thanks for not pressing my beliefs about that,” I conceded, wary that this was a complicated subject, the sort of thing that routinely turned into huge arguments on the forums. “I, um, tend to default to the Spire for this stuff. I’m sort of…everything I’ve seen from you in the past few days, I’m just automatically referencing it against the Vaetna. No offense.”

“Completely understandable,” Amane replied through Ebi. I was surprised at how easily I’d acclimated to the strange interpretation setup, where both people’s voices were coming from the same mouth. Speaker, really, but whatever. “It’s pretty inevitable to compare. There’s a lot we have in common. Power. Ability to make a difference.” Amane said something else in Japanese, which Ebi crossed her arms and apparently refused to translate. They bickered for a moment, and then my phone buzzed.

ebi-furai: amethyst is making an effort to be nice right now, but she’s a bit touchy about the spire

ebi-furai: they didn’t rescue her, ya know?

That hadn’t occurred to me, but I really didn’t want to get into it and potentially ruin what had overall been an extremely pleasant evening with the worst possible intersection of our conflicting personal traumas and more broad-scale politics. I tried to change the topic.

“Um. I’m trying to change the topic.”

“Smooth.”

I shouldered past Ebi’s needling and circled back to a bit of magic-related curiosity, an inquisitive itch that needed scratching.

“Uh. So, mantles.”

“Go on.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” I muttered. “Right, yeah. And—well, I haven’t really taken the deep dive into your mantles’ diagrams yet, so I’m spitballing here—the ward bindings from earlier. The mantles themselves have those too, I assume? On top of being physically tough?”

“Yeah.” Ebi left the rest to Amane.

“Yes. Our transformations might be dermis-derived,” she said, catching on to my implicit comparison to the Vaetna, “but that doesn’t mean they’re invincible. It’s configurable, like everything else. So we can modulate power draw for wards, weapons, mobility, and sensory input; turn them up or down as we need to. It really is like piloting a mecha.”

“Thus your choice of…shape?” I ventured.

“Yes.”

“So—I’m trying to get a picture of, uh, power levels. ‘Not invincible’ implies your transformations have taken real damage in combat before.” The same could not be said for the real thing, proper Vaetna dermis.

She shrugged, rising from where she’d been sitting on the floor to return to the edge of the bed. Ebi remained standing, but moved slightly to still hover just outside arm’s reach of her charge. Amane carefully, gently, undid her ponytail, letting loose a wave of glossy black hair that cascaded down her shoulders.

“If we get hit hard enough, the mantle shuts down so the blue channels don’t overload and set the whole thing ablaze. So, no, the dermis itself has never broken, but there are effective upper limits. And bad weather can disrupt the LM, too, like the other night. That’s mostly just a problem for me, since I’m more sensitive to red, but in theory, it can happen to any of us. That’s why Yuuka is so valuable; she lets us know if we’re taking a bad fight.”

“Ah.” I mirrored Amane’s shift in posture, at last sitting in the office chair I’d been focused on setting up for the last ten minutes; I finally registered the soreness that had been building undetected in my lower back. Thankfully, the chair’s plushness was such that I could sink my hips into it for relief. I appreciated that it wasn’t one of those racing chairs; I wasn’t really in that gamer demographic. “So if I’m understanding right: your mantles can just…fail, if the ripple conditions are bad enough? That seems like a liability.”

“Bad and specific. Your average inferno won’t do it. And your average flamebearer wouldn’t be able to put together exactly the right frequencies to make it work.”

“Could…the Hikanome ones?” That was my anxiety talking, more than anything, but there was also an academic hunger for knowledge.

“Hikanome? None of them are as good at the technical side as you or me. Well, the two auxiliaries are, but they’re not fighters, it’s all distributed. The whole appeal of the cult is that you get a greater and greater sliver of Flame as you rise in the ranks. But they’re not dangerous anymore.”

“So this combat experience of yours is from…”

Amane waved her mechanical hand in an “I give up” motion.

“You want me to say ‘from fighting the PCTF’, which is somewhat true, but not as much as you’d think. We didn’t really start working on the mantles until after I came back and we got the flame donation. So a lot of that combat data is from the Blue Spark Incident, which was the first test run of the mantles, and then from some classified counterespionage stuff. Like I said, that’s the kind of thing you don’t have to touch, you don’t have any duty there.”

I digested that for a minute.

“Wait, so, if I have the timeline right: from the start, through the firestorms and the first few years, up through their, uh—rescue of you?” I side-eyed Ebi, wondering if that was an acceptable term. Her digital face momentarily flickered into a thumbs-up emoji. “All of that, you weren’t using mantles?”

“I’m not the right person to ask about that,” Amane pointed out. “I wasn’t there. But yes, in short. They used wards and other techniques.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense. You wouldn’t have been involved on account of the, uh…” I took a gamble on a joke. “Kidnapping.”

God, I was terrible at levity. I cringed. Amane didn’t seem to mind, thankfully—though Ebi spiced her interpretation with a deadpan look.

“Mhm.” Amane nodded. “Ask Ai. She’s the clever one, and she still uses the old methods.”

“Why’s that?”

Amane said something in Japanese which Ebi didn’t translate. The cyborg poked the android in annoyance, who returned the poke and released a distinctly digital imitation of a sigh, clearly more fabricated than her usually flawless imitation of human voices. Her own voice, not Amane’s, and especially autotuned, signaling…annoyance? Discomfort?

“Mantling really pushes Ai to her limits, magically speaking. The weave is sparser, because a lot of her Flame is tied up in…me. So if her mantle were to overload in the wrong way, and the lattice got shredded, it’d snap back across her whole Flame, and it’d be lights out for me.”

“Holy shit.” I hadn’t thought that through until now, but it made sense. “So your life is—contingent on hers? And…oh, Christ, there’s probably a range limit too, isn’t there?”

Ebi nodded slowly and seriously—then clapped her hands as if to banish the unsettling line of thought. She crossed all her fingers but the index ones and pointed at me in dual, spliced-together finger guns.

“So—you going on Saturday?”

I gave her a flat look, but the topic change was warranted.

“What happened to not being hasty?”

“Eh, Amethyst’s itching to talk you around, I can see it.”

Amane reached out and flicked Ebi’s waist plates with a tink, more reminiscent of ceramic than carbon fiber, and added a light verbal admonishment to go with it. Ebi raised her hands innocently.

“Hey, alright, yeesh. I’m just a bit antsy for what might happen if we have to fight the Peacies over you without Hikanome’s cover. Ai risks my life too when she goes out there.”

“That’s—a good point. Fuck.” Another reason I should just go and stop waffling.

Amane waved for interpretation, and Ebi’s vocal timbre shifted.

“I wanted you to know that part as well, from Ebi herself. The others sometimes—well, they don’t forget she’s there, but she and I don’t have as much…agency.”

Ebi switched to her own voice and continued. “So, that’s the cards on the table on my end. I—we know it’s a lot to lay on you, but that’s the reality.”

“So I should go.” I rubbed my hand contemplatively, not quite resigned, weighing my options. There was an obvious alternative. “Or—I get out of your hair entirely, go to the Gate, right? Then I’m safe from the PCTF, no fight to put you all at risk, they wouldn’t dare bring it to the Spire. Hell, I could even come back here in the future, or collaborate on those projects remotely, just—sit out the storm in the safest place, yeah? Until things move on and the Peacies get occupied with other stuff.”

It was the most elegant option, free of political bullshit, safest for all.

“Not to undercut Ebi’s concerns, but I think the danger isn’t as great as you think,” Amane countered. “Not yet.”

For reply, I sat up in my chair and squinted in confusion at her prostheses—almost certainly impolite, but at that moment, I was genuinely baffled.

“The PCTF are…plenty dangerous. They kidnapped both of us. They…” I gestured vaguely at her prostheses, then mine.

“They did,” Amane acknowledged. “But one thing at a time. The PCTF knows you’re valuable,” Amane practically spat the word; Ebi imitated the tone of disgust. “They’ll apply a lot of diplomatic pressure and that could escalate. But they move slowly for things outside their territory, and Japan qualifies as such. They know better than to rush into fucking with us. They’re not a problem yet.”

“What does ‘yet’ have to do with it? It’ll still be a problem eventually; I could still head it off entirely by going to the Spire.”

“Hear me out, please. By contrast, Hikanome are the ones pressuring us now, and I want to show you that they are not a threat in the same way, not any more. They can be opposed to us, but if you go on Saturday, you will not be in danger.”

“She’s saying that because all the dangerous parts are six feet under or comatose,” Ebi added cheerfully. Amane glared at her, but she didn’t shrink, returning the gaze insolently.

“Okay,” I began, trying to sort it out. “So—yes, alright, that does make me feel better, but if Hikanome don’t have teeth, why is Alice pushing so hard for me to make goodwill between you and them?”

“Not being dangerous isn’t the same as not being influential. The average Hikanome member likes Todai too much for the church itself to ever be real political enemies, but we won’t get their backing—and by extension stronger support from the government—when the PCTF do show up, unless we take steps to appease them right now. And you’re critical to that, unfortunately.”

“What’s your point? Still not really seeing why I should stay here instead of solving the whole issue by leaving.”

“I stayed.” She said that in English, in her own voice, before motioning for Ebi to continue interpreting. “And I’m glad I did. I could have gone to the Spire, run away, and I didn’t. I was afraid! But I stayed, and fought, and won. We took apart Hikanome, we forced the PCTF back, and we founded Todai as it is now.”

“So you want me to fight, after all?”

Amane rubbed her face with her organic hand.

“No. I want to show you that you can be less afraid. Don’t you want that? To feel safe when you go outside, instead of having to cower in the Spire for, what, the rest of your life? You’ve just gained the power to make a difference, out here, the kind of power people dream about. That shouldn’t be a reason to run and hide. That’s the evil of the PCTF.”

I couldn’t deny that she was winning me over. I’d wanted this power so desperately, and so far my main response to receiving it had been to run away, because it felt like that was all I could do—and I was planning to continue to do so. Was that what I had dreamed of? She went on.

“And if it really doesn’t work out, you can leave. At any time; the Gate will still always be there. And if you’re still here when the PCTF arrives—that won’t be your fight. It’s ours, and we’ll win. Is that enough safety nets for you?”

With her plea complete, she at last allowed herself to double over and lean onto her side, wincing and suffocating a groan—but didn’t break eye contact with me. She let Ebi help her sit back up and waited for my reply. I had an obvious objection.

“Going to the Spire is my dream. It’s not cowering.”

“Nah, it is.” Ebi replied while she shifted her hand to some device in a blur and interfaced with a slot in Amane’s mechanical arm. “I know that’s, like, your thing, being a Vaetnaboo. But if you go to the Spire, you don’t become a Vaetna. They’re around, sure, but you’d stay in their shadow for the rest of your life. The Spire doesn’t give a fuck about you, sorry.”

Ow. “Hey, the fuc—”

“But the girls? They care, man. They give several fucks, if you haven’t noticed. Trust me, they don’t want you around because you’re politically convenient. And I’m pretty sure you don’t just want to ditch them either. Do you want to be friends with them or not?”

That was so direct that I had to abandon my objection to her attack on my beliefs.

“What’s it to you, Ebi? You’re okay with the idea of me staying here, with what you said could happen to you if Ai has to fight? That feels contradictory, and you haven’t exactly been nice.” I immediately walked that back a little, muttering. “…although the standard of care has been respectable, and I’m very grateful.”

The robot shrugged carefully, arm still attached to Amane’s, and nodded to the cyborg girl.

“I trust her judgment. And you’re alright.”

That was definitely an understatement of Ebi’s feelings. Amane agreed.

“Tsundere,” she rasped, earning what was definitely a “stay still” from Ebi, clear and familiar even though I couldn’t understand the language.

“Um—fuck. This is a lot.” How had her asking about the Hikanome rally turned into a debate about the Spire? Ultimately, they were connected; it was now clear to me that my choices were either to stay and attend or just leave for the Gate now. And of those two…

“It’s the same things I had to think about, and yes, it’s a lot.” Ebi-Amane sighed, free of the pain in the woman’s real voice. “And I do want to make sure you have the time to decide, like you wanted. But it was important to me that you made an informed decision. I’m sorry if I upset you. And I’m sorry if Ebi upset you.”

Ebi switched to her own voice. “I’m not.”

“No—it’s fine. I think…you’re right. I should go on Saturday. It’s…being afraid sucks, you’re right. I do want to go outside. I’m in fuckin’ Tokyo, for fuck’s sake, might as well make something of it, even if it’s just for Star. The Gate will always be an option, right?”

“It will. If things get too hot, we’d still completely understand if you want out.”

“But you wouldn’t come with, would you? Even if this escalates to…all-out war with the PCTF. Which is sounding distressingly plausible.”

“No. We have unfinished business.”

Her tone was chilling.

“Alright, fuck. You’ve won me over,” I admitted. “We’ll…give it a shot on Saturday. I’ll go to the thing.”

It felt good to reach a resolution, even if I hadn’t taken anywhere near as much time as I’d expected. Amane’s reasoning resonated with me, even if both she and Ebi had mildly upset me with arguments I’d need some time to process. And I couldn’t quite believe the latter was willing to risk her own life and limb for that, not to mention the overall, larger-scale ramifications of what would happen if Japan’s premier VNTs went to war with the West—one thing at a time, I decided. I had an out at the Gate if I changed my mind. 

—

Amane had to adjourn to her room soon after, as the energy expenditure of the evening’s labors and her final plea caught up to her. She left in good spirits, Ebi closely in tow.

I was left alone once more, but for the first time since coming here, I had a big swivel chair to sink into and a PC to hop on, a far more natural state of being for me than struggling in bed with my laptop’s too-small screen. We’d almost entirely completed the physical setup of my new workspace, but the digital side, my usual suite of programs and settings, would take hours more to entirely set up—or at least that’s what I had thought. In reality, the penthouse had lightning-fast internet; what I had expected to be at least two hours of downloads alone was done in hardly ten minutes, and I was neck-deep in installation wizards and config settings when my phone buzzed again with a text from Amane.

Amane: Thanks for spending time with me (and hearing me out)!

Amane: Dinner’s ready if you’re hungry (っ˘ڡ˘ς)

Amane: I won’t be there (stupid stomach) but neither will Yuuka, so it should be nice ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

Amane: (written by ebi-TL)

I couldn’t help but smile at the little emoticons. Anxiety followed shortly after; what was the correct way to reply to a message like this? I gave it my best shot.

Ezzen: I had fun too. Are you feeling alright?

Amane: Good enough!

Ezzen: real

That got a dry chuckle out of me. It was almost inevitable that somebody in her position would develop a droll humor about it; there was just no other way to live. Even I, socially stunted as I was, was able to joke about my hand in the chatroom—and more recently, about my foot. The hours of work had left it aching a bit, and I knew that running it under some warm water would probably help…but this chair was so very comfortable.

My stomach broke the tie: out of the chair, Ez, there’s food. I pushed myself up, stiff and a little sore in my hips from all the leaning over, feeling rather like some kind of reptile leaving its den for a bit of sun and sustenance. Well, the sun was already down, but in this case it was more metaphorical, the wonderful and nerve-wracking warmth of social interaction—because Amane was right, I did like the Radiances.

To my surprise, dinner was not home-cooked. I’d sort of assumed that Hina would whip something up as we had done with lunch, but instead, I found Alice slumped over the low table next to a bag with familiar golden arches. Her face was buried in her crossed arms. Had she fallen asleep right there, still in her suit? I was already treading lightly to spare my foot, and she didn’t stir until I sat gingerly across from her and reached for the bag. She raised her head slowly, tousled hair falling messily over her face.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” I pointed at the bag questioningly.

“Yeah. There’s a plain one. Didn’t know what you liked.”

Her head flopped back down onto her arms.

There were things to discuss—but she clearly needed the rest. I helped myself to the bag, searching to find the hamburger and an associated baggie of fries. McDonald’s Japan was apparently indistinguishable from its English cousins. No drinks, so I got up and poured myself a glass of water and realized in the process that I had learned where they kept the cups: the cabinet directly opposite the dishwasher. A little more like home—a little bit harder to leave, if it eventually came to that.

As I sat back down and got to eating, I wondered where Hina was.

ezzen: Where’s Hina?

ebi-furai: need a blowjob already?

ezzen: wtf

ebi-furai: :3

ebi-furai: hunting your mysterious friend, maybe

ezzen: You don’t know?

ebi-furai: she likes to stay out at night, idfk what shes up to

ebi-furai: back before midnight probably

ezzen: Could you ask for me?

ebi-furai: you dont have your girlfriends number?

ezzen: No. And she’s not my girlfriend.

ebi-furai: im not engaging with this

ebi-furai: one sec

A few seconds later, my phone began to buzz. A jolt of surprise curdled into fear in my stomach—I hated phone calls. Fuck you, Ebi. The caller ID said it was unknown—but I knew what Ebi was playing at. Conscious of Alice apparently asleep across the table from me, I hesitantly stood and moved past her toward the rest of the sitting area, maybe twenty feet away, and cupped my mouth as I picked up.

“Hello—”

“Heyyy, cutie! Ebi gave me your number!”

There was a lot of background noise on her end. Driving, maybe?

“Um, hi, Hina,” I whispered. “Sorry, Alice is…asleep, I think? So I’m trying to stay quiet—”

“You busy?”

“Not really? I’m eating dinner, and then I was just gonna hang out and keep setting up my PC…”

“Cool, cool, uh—you wanna come out and spend some time together?”

“…No? Sorry,” I added hastily. “Just…not my comfort zone. Going out and partying.”

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant.” I heard a fuzzy slap noise that might have been a facepalm. “I’m chasing a lead on your stalker!”

My heart rate spiked.

“Did you find something?”

“Well, I’m in Kyoto right now, dropping in on a contact who I figured might be able to identify them, and they’re sending me on a bit of a chase into the mountains.”

“Wait, hold on—Kyoto? You wanted me to come to another city? How was I supposed to get there?”

“Uhhhhhh…”

Now it was my turn to facepalm, but a grin was infecting my face. What an adorable oversight.

“Hina.”

“Cutie!”

“Stay safe, yeah?”

“I will! Love you too! Mmmm—not gonna get home until pretty late. Like, three AM late, so…no fun Valentine’s stuff tonight. Sorry.”

“No—problem?” I was wrong-footed by the casual use of the word “love.” “I’ve got my hands full with computer stuff tonight anyway, I think.”

“Okay! I’ll let you know if I find anything! Texting okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Kay! Byebye!”

“Bye—”

I was cut off by the beep of the line going dead. Alice spoke behind me.

“That Hina staying out late?”

“Yeah.” I turned to look at the dragon-girl, hoping she wouldn’t ask about what exactly Hina was up to; she was still in the dark about my stalker. Maybe I should just tell her? But I wanted to discuss that with Hina first—realized I’d missed my chance on the phone. “Sorry if I woke you.”

“No problem, I wasn’t really asleep anyway. Just dozing.” She rubbed her eyes with one hand while fishing in the takeout bag with the other. “Have a nice time with Amane?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She extracted a wrapped burger with a wince, reaching back to rub where her lower back met the base of her tail. Her clothes were modified to make room. “Sore,” she explained.

I wondered if I ought to tell her that I knew about the situation with her dragon parts. Perhaps Amane should be present? I walked back over to the table to resume my own meal.

“Just from sitting down?”

“Yeah. It was meetings all day today, and after lunch, I didn’t get a chance to do my stretches.” She gestured at where she was sitting. “This didn’t help either, being folded over like this. If you catch me sleeping like that, poke me, please?”

“Um, sure.” Fuck it, easier one first. “Listen, uh—Amane told me what’s going on with you.” Alice went stiff, frozen mid-bite. A bad sign for sure, but I forged on, avoiding eye contact. Instead, I admired how the scales on her tail caught the light. “She—well, I get why you didn’t want to tell me, but I want…to help. If you’re open to it.”

“You want…to…help? How so?” Her voice was halting, uncomfortable. I felt bad for bringing up such a personal topic with so little overture, but I didn’t know how else to lead into it.

“Uh, well, I’m not really sure yet. It’s a pretty unique case, right?”

“Probably. There…could be more. I’d like to think there are.” She took a deep breath. “The only other cases I know used more mundane means.”

“Mundane? Like, surgery?”

“Yes?” She sounded confused, as though it were obvious.

“Then…well, okay, obviously we’re not going to hit on a solution right now, but the first place my mind goes is, I guess…have you tried just cutting it off?” I shuddered to think of how messy such an amputation would be as I eyed her tail. “The best biomancy is no biomancy, yeah?”

Alice unfroze, resuming her bite, and didn’t respond until she’d chewed, swallowed, and taken a drink. She twisted to look back at her tail as she thumped it and released a dry sigh, apparently warming up to the topic.

“Yes, when it was smaller. Damn thing grows back, gecko-style.”

“Really.” That was intriguing. “Over how long?”

“Maybe five months, and it’s all real flesh. If you think my appetite is bad now…argh, I’m grumbling. Sorry for not telling you about the dragon stuff.”

“It’s alright. Um—I’d like to know more, but it sounds like this…isn’t a great topic for dinner,” I conceded, eying the bite marks in my burger.

“It’s not,” she agreed, doing the same.

“Sorry for bringing it up.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

We fell into silence as we ate. Alice went through two chicken sandwiches, a bag of fries, a box of onion rings, and a milkshake in addition to her soft drink. It wasn’t the voracious rapidity with which I’d seen Hina eat yesterday, but she just didn’t stop. The laptop remained on the table, but it was pushed to the side, seeing as how both of her hands always had some kind of food or drink in them. After a few minutes, I was done with my own comparatively meager meal.

“Uh.”

Alice held up a finger to stop me, chewed, swallowed, and took a sip of her drink before replying.

“What’s up?”

“So I talked to Amane.”

“Yeah?”

“She…convinced me? I don’t know if that’s the right word, but—I want to go to the thing on Saturday.”

“Oh!” Alice perked up. “That was faster turnaround than you said.”

“Yes, well, uh…”

“No, that’s great, really! Can I RSVP now? You, Amane, Yuuka—ah, do you not want Yuuka there? I still need to talk to her, but even once I do, your comfort is paramount, and she’s, er, not great at that. So…”

She had already produced her laptop from pocketspace, eager to get this over with.

“Uh. I don’t know. Amane…she definitely wants to go, but she’d need at least one other Radiance there, right?” 

“Yeah. I appreciate you being considerate of her needs. Um—it’d probably be Ai, then. She’d have to reschedule, but it’s far enough out…”

“If Ai is alright with it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Uh, Amane and Ebi…told me about her issue too. Power draw concerns, if my understanding is accurate.”

“Ah, yeah, that was going to have to come up eventually.” Her face fell slightly. “Sorry again for not telling you these things. I just didn’t want you to feel pressured or—”

“I mean, of course I felt pressured, but I wouldn’t say that’s your fault—”

“Your circumstances are really quite messed up, and properly acknowledging that—”

“I’m not going to run off to the Gate,” I interrupted, and she shut her mouth, looking sheepish.

“Oh. Really? I, er, didn’t want to bring it up, because I was worried you wouldn’t consider any other option, and…” she admitted, shamefaced.

“It’s complicated. And I still want the option. But Amane said some things that really, um, hit me where it hurt, so to speak. In a…good way?” I was still working through that part; I forged on. “So I want to…try being a flamebearer before I go hide in the Spire, I guess. Because it’d be good for me, or something. That’s how she framed it.”

A smile broke through Alice’s hasty remorse.

“Yeah. It’s been good for her.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there in silent…camaraderie? It was a little too awkward to be called that, but it was nice. Whatever it was, it felt like she and I understood the same things about Amane. She broke the moment by returning to her laptop.

“Alright, then…Ai can be the second, I think. I’d have to ask her for some of the scheduling, but about the Flame issue…I really can’t picture the situation turning dangerous, let alone enough that she’d be at risk of overextending. And she’ll definitely want to go if the idea is to chaperone you.”

“If you say so,” I conceded. “Um, Amane insisted really hard earlier that it was safe, but…they’re really alright? Not…dangerous, or even just generally sinister in that way cults tend to be?”

“They’re legit. They’re…eccentric in some of their practices, and you remember how Ai was talking about them this morning. Some of our beliefs don’t mesh. But that all pales compared to how they used to be. If you’re really worried about danger…let’s say the worst-case scenario happens, and it’s all a trap by Sugawara’s remaining goons, somehow conspiring with a PCTF grab team. Which, for the record, is not a scenario that could actually happen in reality, for a whole host of reasons.”

“Okay…” I nodded along.

“Then, in that impossible hypothetical, things could get explosive. Violent. But even then, Amane could clean them all up herself, and honestly, push comes to shove, so could Ai. She’s far from useless in a fight, believe me. Plus, I’m sure that once Hina hears about this, she’ll want to be around, even though neither she nor I want her to be officially present. So that’s three Radiances, in effect. Feel good about that?”

“Good enough,” I admitted, feeling reassured. It was nice to get some confirmation of Amane’s confidence—but my apprehension wasn’t completely gone, and ultimately Amane was right that it wouldn’t dissipate without some exposure therapy.

“Good.” Alice nodded, stretching, looking less tired, more energized. I was reminded of when I’d first met Ai, the way she’d lit up and revitalized when working on my spear binding. This was similar, but in a different specialization. “I’ll ask them to be considerate about limiting how much you have to appear in front of the crowds, all that. Leave that stuff to me. Where’s the email—ah, there.”

I’d communicated my big important decision, and the weight on my chest was replaced by a different sort of pressure, a nervousness of having a scheduled social ordeal, a feeling I mostly associated with doctor and bank visits, given how rarely I had really spoken to people prior to now. What awaited me on Saturday was far more consequential: I would walk into the jaws of one of Todai’s foundational opponents, as the star of the whole event, and that was nerve-wracking to even consider—but I’d be in the pleasant company of Amane and Ai, so it’d be alright, hopefully. Hopefully.

Also hopefully, I hoped we’d be able to confirm a negative on my stalker, conclusively prove it wasn’t a Hikanome flamebearer so I could rest easy on that side of things. Fingers crossed that that wouldn’t even be a problem by then; maybe Hina’s investigation in Kyoto would lead us right to who it was, and then at least we’d be planning around a known quantity.

Alice told me that preparations would begin tomorrow. She did her best to assuage my anxiety, assured me it’d be alright, nothing too difficult or unpleasant, echoing the same things Amane had said. There was a lot to do, but I’d come to my decision early enough in the week that it wouldn’t be overwhelming, supposedly.

But that was tomorrow. I had tonight to myself, since Hina wouldn’t be around, and I had unfinished business with my PC. After finishing dinner and wishing Alice a good night, I returned to my room. I spent hours into the night tinkering with GWalk, getting everything just how I liked it; signing into the chatroom to the celebration of my friends; redownloading my meager collection of games. And for the last few hours, as my digital environment became more and more familiar, I could almost forget that I was on the other side of the world. Eventually, at two in the morning, I went to bed, truly comfortable for perhaps the first time since arriving here.

And I dreamed once more.

2.04 Patreon Release

Two days late on this, sorry. Pretty happy with how it turned out in the end but it was a struggle. Hope you enjoy!

-----------------------------

Valentine’s Day. A day I’d basically never had any reason to care about, and especially not one I’d expected to become relevant in the strange circumstances in which I found. My relationship with Hina was far too fresh for the day to really feel significant. We’d just established we didn’t love each other—not yet, as she’d said, so this felt like jumping the gun a bit, yet here we were.

The puppy proffered the box excitedly at me. I gingerly, hesitantly drew the heart-shaped chocolate from its foam cozy.

“Am I supposed to eat it now?”

“Go for it!”

I bit off half. It tasted…like chocolate. I didn’t have much in the way of a frame of reference; my culinary palette was generally diverse, but this was an exception. When was the last time I’d even eaten chocolate? Before Dad had died? Bereft of comparisons, I did my best to evaluate it on its own terms: smooth and creamy, rich and sweet without overpowering the natural bitterness of the cacao—I startled myself when I crunched into something at the core. Hazelnut, maybe? It went down well with the last of my iced tea.

“Thanks.”

“Mhm! I get some for everybody every year. The girls, the Hikanome folks, Ogawa…every one of us in Japan!”

“Wait, what? As in, every flamebearer?”

“Yep!”

“Oh.” So it wasn’t a romantic thing; more obligatory? Or just an idiosyncrasy of hers. Nuance aside, the point was that I wasn’t special for receiving this. “Hold on, so this was Heliotrope’s, not mine? Does she…accept them, normally?”

“Nope.”

Figures. That sort of made me feel worse, knowing I was getting a gift that the original recipient wouldn’t have accepted anyway. She saw how my face fell.

“Is it bad?”

“What? No, it’s good.”

“You sure? Do you want more? I still have to give you yours, and I was gonna save that for tonight but if you don’t like the hazelnut then I can just give you yours instead now.”

“It’s—that’s not the problem.” I swallowed, feeling ungrateful. “Every flamebearer.”

“Oh.” Her face fell too. “Cutie, it’s not like that. It’s just something I do for fun, I didn’t think it’d make you feel bad—aha.” Her expression shifted, the hyena flickering across her features, fangs glinting behind her grin. She leaned closer to me, injecting a little purr into her voice. “Want me to yourself, hm? Need me to make you feel special?”

That pushed my buttons, hackles rising in fear, deviously taboo attraction like lightning in my stomach. I stammered.

“You’re not—there’s no obligation for you to—I don’t know if exclusivity is fair to request,” I eventually landed. “You’re…of course I want you, but I don’t deserve—”

She shut me up by grabbing the front of my shirt and tugging me close, staring me down with those all-too-blue eyes.

“You’re doing it again,” she growled, playful reprimand masking genuine challenge. “You can have me to yourself, if that’s what you want. But you’ll have to prove it. Tonight.”

While I was still paralyzed by the flutter in my belly, she plucked the remaining half of the chocolate from my fingers, popped it into her mouth, and vanished.

—

The unfortunate side effect of Hina’s theatrics was that I was left alone with the remains of lunch, so it fell to me to clean up. Maybe that was some strange, oblique lesson from her, but it was more likely that she’d just gotten too excited with the opportunity to push my buttons. Besides, she was indisputably busier than me, so it was with a lingering thrill rippling across my body and a flutter of nervous excitement for what tonight might entail that I set about washing the dishes.

It didn’t take long; Alice had cleaned up most of the detritus from the cooking by the time we’d sat down to eat, and neither of us had left any gnocchi survivors. Rinsing the dishes revealed yet more conveniences and amenities compared to my old apartment, like the much larger sink and the faucet head that could be drawn out to direct the stream of water. Opulent by my standards; they probably gave it no thought.

While wiping down the countertop, I realized—I was being uncharacteristically industrious. Back home, I’d sometimes let slightly-dirty-but-not-dirty-enough-to-be-gross dishes sit in the sink for a week or longer, but here I found it easy to power through doing all the dishes and was even going the extra mile to clean additional surfaces. How domestic; another thing I hadn’t expected to be part of my fantasized life as a flamebearer.

It was just because I felt guilty, I reasoned. I wanted to pull my weight, not feel like a burden, and it wasn’t like I had anything better to do with my spare time compared to the busyness of the others. It did occur to me that such a massive living space and access to funds might warrant specialized cleaning staff, but surely one of the Radiances would have mentioned that by now. Maybe it was biweekly or something, or maybe they just used magic. As I worked, I thought about ways to magically automate the cleaning I was doing, more as a mental exercise than any real plan I intended to implement. It was a fun little exercise, one I’d done before with chores at home, but now I had a whole new space to apply it to.

With the kitchen eventually reclaimed from our culinary adventures, I was once again left with a lot of time and little to do with it. I could finish exploring the penthouse, or I could be brave and face the tell-tale heart beating within my laptop, the lattice diagram of the weapon we’d made, but—I didn’t want to confront it, and I didn’t actually have to. Avoidance was a valid strategy. So I went back to my room, popped open my laptop, squeezed my eyes shut, and killed the horrid thing with Alt+F4, a fittingly ignoble murder. With the demon vanquished, I plugged in the USB stick that Ai had given me and resumed my study of the magical cores of Amethyst’s prosthetic limbs.

This time, I focused less on the lattices themselves. I still didn’t have enough confidence in the mechanical engineering aspect to make major changes to the structural glyphcraft without Ai’s supervision, so I took a look at the other documents on the thumb drive. What leapt out to me most among various reference standards and previous versions was a PDF file: the classified report precisely detailing the actual nature and extent of Amane’s injuries. It felt invasive to have that kind of thing available to read; I consulted our mutual medical staff.

[Direct Message] ezzen: Ai gave me Amethyst’s prosthetic files, including the physical assessment.

ezzen: Is it fair to assume that she consented to that? Anything else I should know?

The robot responded instantly, of course.

ebi-furai: yeah, we sat down and talked about it when you came in

ebi-furai: im the one who actually put that usb together, so everything on there is fair game

ezzen: k good, thanks

ebi-furai: as long as i have you: foot check

ezzen: Nothing to report.

ebi-furai: sick

Ironically, getting permission to look at the file somewhat killed my work ethic for doing more Amane stuff at the moment. There’d be more time later, and I kind of wanted to go through this stuff with Amane herself or Ai.

For now, I returned to the main chatroom, rapidly scrolling through the conversations that had happened while I was asleep, feeling a bit glum as I saw how much I was missing out on. There was a silver lining—a lot of the conversation was still about the Thunder Horse Inferno, and I was glad I didn’t have to deflect the conversation and play dumb about my own horrific role in those events. They didn’t have the full story, and I was growing more and more uncomfortable about the idea of keeping up the charade with these sorts of things.

The discomfort persisted as I continued doing my rounds, trawling the top posts on the forums and refreshing YouTube. There was the new Overload video, uploaded barely ten minutes ago, a 28-minute timeline of the events of the inferno, from that first flamefall detection on the Vaetna’s stream to the latest news an hour ago. I didn’t need to watch it; I already knew what had really happened. That drop in air temperature, the stumbling corpse.

As if summoned by cruel divinity, I received a DM just as I was about to keep scrolling.

[Direct Message] OverloadTSS: hi ez sorry about the delay

OverloadTSS: was finalizing the thunder horse video because holy shit

Play it cool, Ez.

ezzen: Just saw it go up!

ezzen: “Holy shit” is right

ezzen: surprised you were able to get it out on time. long by your standards

ezzen: Does that mean the Thursday video will be about me?

OverloadTSS: yeah probably

OverloadTSS: ill send over an actual questions list soon

OverloadTSS: figure thats better for you than an AMA like we did in 2020 or whenever it was

OverloadTSS: so don’t feel obligated to answer anything, i wont include questions in the video that you dont answer

OverloadTSS: what happened to you was scary as shit plus i imagine you’ve got some kind of NDA going with lighthouse

Had an NDA been in the stack of paperwork I’d signed? I was already working under the assumption that much of what I’d learned about Todai in the past few days was classified—not least the monstrous act we’d committed yesterday—but I would need to ask Alice what exactly I was allowed to disclose about my research and general situation going forward. Which turned a friendly Q&A session—something I’d had fun with before—into work that required me to go ask somebody something before I could do it. For bonus stress, there were the potentially incredibly dire consequences of leaking the wrong information.

It all sucked, but I couldn’t risk talking about it.

ezzen: Thanks, OL.

ezzen: I’m doing okay, just a lot of paperwork and still healing ofc.

ezzen: I’ll figure out what I’m allowed to say once I’ve got those questions in front of me.

OverloadTSS: hell yeah

OverloadTSS: yeah you havent been on as much the last couple days obviously

OverloadTSS: so no rush, ill get those questions to you soon (tomorrow?) and you can answer them when youve got time

OverloadTSS: but for the short term, can you answer one question so i can do a three minute clickbait thing

ezzen: Sure!

Overload made his living on this kind of news, and I was usually happy to throw him a bone—but things were changing, and longer-reaching trepidation turned to faint but immediate panic as I read the question.

OverloadTSS: you’re on board with lighthouse? planning to stick around?

This may have made me begin to spiral a little bit.

I certainly wasn’t on board with the murder—their opportunistic, guerilla war with the PCTF—even if I agreed with their reasoning on paper. And what about Alice’s efforts to educate me in mahou shoujo, as though assuming I’d eventually become involved with the team as…a magical girl? To say nothing of Hina’s own promise, even kept at bay by our agreement as she currently was. I had yet to discover what exactly she meant that I wouldn’t be the first male Radiance.

So there was a lot I wasn’t on board with, yet they were the things I couldn’t actually share with my friends or the wider community of the forums. Even with the best of intentions, like keeping Amane’s history private, I’d already had to lie to them more than I ever had before. So far, it had mostly been omission—but if I stuck around, how much further would that go?

Which raised another question, one which kept being subsumed by more immediate worries: did I even have to stick around? Fleeing for the Gate still looked like a decent idea, especially with the additional mess Yuuka seemed intent on causing as long as I stuck around here. It was only a kilometer away, and the Spire was famously no-questions-asked…and it would reduce pressure on Todai by no longer having the PCTF set on coming for me. That was a terrifying prospect; for now, only in a surreal, dream-like way, but I was starting to wonder—how long did I have until that looming threat became tangible? Alice had said they’d do something in the next couple days—would that be a diplomatic overture or another entire abduction attempt? The rumors of what happened to noncompliant flamebearers in PCTF custody were horrifyingly true—the last few days had proven that beyond doubt—and I really didn’t want to find out how far either party was willing to escalate, if plausibly deniable artillery strikes from the other side of the planet were Todai’s baseline. I felt sick.

But Overload’s question needed some kind of answer.

ezzen: There’s a lot of research opportunities, for sure. I’m actually already collaborating with Emerald, and of course there’s still the matter of my foot.

ezzen: The chains that drive their mantles are fascinating, and while I’m fairly sure I can’t reveal any of the technical details, that alone is a strong incentive for me to work with them further.

OverloadTSS: cool cool

OverloadTSS: ok thanks

OverloadTSS: will draft up those questions, get back to me whenever

Having acquired his nugget of information, he bid me farewell. I was rattled, and went to the one person I knew who bridged the high-stakes world of flamebearers and the familiar box on my computer full of my friends. He might not be awake, but—

[Direct Message] ezzen: Sky, how the fuck do I not feel like I’m lying constantly to you all? Todai was more involved in the inferno than anybody publicly knows and I’m literally sick to my fucking stomach at trying to maintain the charade and play dumb given what we did. I’m going out on a limb here and assuming that you either already know or can guess what I’m talking about. Overload’s next video is going to be about my situation but there’s so much I can’t say. How do I handle this?

—

Sky didn’t reply. Maybe asleep, maybe not, but either way the result was that I was left to stew in those thoughts all afternoon, trying to distract myself with banter and less upsetting videos as the winter sun fell below the skyscrapers and cast its last few fingers of orange light through their gaps. In the middle of my descent down a YouTube rabbit hole about aerospace alloy manufacturing, Ebi notified me that my PC parts had arrived.

The receipt process was handled by others; I just watched it happen from the doorway to my room. A pair of Todai employees brought the various heavy boxes out of the 20th floor elevator, and Amane, in human form, intercepted them and signed for the delivery, sounding surprisingly bubbly as she chatted with the two. The moment they were gone, she mantled up with a snap, gathered up all the boxes into one giant pile in her massive arms, and carried them across the common space to me with no apparent effort. She set down the pile, pushed it through the doorway, dropped mantle with a warbling hiss so she herself could fit, then looked at me.

“May I come in?” She asked in slow, halting English. Ebi was there, but conspicuously remained off to the side.

“Um, yes.” I was grateful she’d asked. Hina never did, and Alice had something of a bad track record even if she obviously cared more, which had led to my room not feeling particularly private. I also wanted to thank her for handling the pick-up, but I wasn’t sure how much of that she’d get.

Amethyst nodded, re-mantled, and I got out of the way so she could haphazardly push the various boxes fully into my bedroom. Her mantle’s brute strength was a boon. I glanced at Ebi, who had stayed out in the common room.

“Um. Are you not coming in?”

“Nope. She wants this one-on-one. I’ll be out here if something happens.”

My anxiety spiked a little at that. I’d kind of assumed that Ebi would be providing interpretation, but without it—I imagined hours of sitting together awkwardly, unable to bring up any kind of idle conversation topic, let alone articulate the more specific questions I had about Yuuka.

For the moment, at least, we busied ourselves with the task of unboxing. Amethyst provided the various tools for the task, plucked from her pocketspace and proffered to me without a word: box cutter, screwdrivers, anti-static bracelets, and so on. She herself didn’t need any sort of blade to slice through tape and cardboard, though; a finger flowed into a razor blade and made short work of any packaging that wound up before it. Our cooperation was wordless and intuitive, breaking down boxes, piling up styrofoam, collecting disinterred computer components in front of the desk. I jumped as she pressed a sheet of bubble wrap between her gemstone hands, making the plastic cry out in a hail of pops. She giggled, and I mustered an awkward chuckle to go with it.

My awkwardness got worse as we cleared away the detritus and were left with just the parts. This was my first chance to actually take stock of what Ebi had purchased for me, and what I could see was almost embarrassingly high-end; no actual magitech, but the enormously beefy GPU next to what were definitely water cooling tubes had me on edge. I’d never built a liquid-cooled computer before, and my first time would be with such expensive components—a leak would be catastrophic! I had hoped that building my new PC would be a familiar activity that brought some stability back into my life, but now I was horribly stressed.

And I couldn’t communicate any of that to Amethyst. I drew my phone in what I hoped was a surreptitious way.

[Direct Message] ezzen: Please help me talk to her.

ebi-furai: just talk to her, dude

ezzen: HOW?

ebi-furai: her en comprehension is pretty good

ebi-furai: or just like use some translation apps, there are lots

Oh. I’d been hung up on the idea that we needed to have an out-loud, verbal conversation—but I was always more comfortable in text anyway, wasn’t I? I navigated to Google Translate, typed something in, and showed the mech-girl my phone, hoping the app hadn’t mangled it too much.

Ezzen: Could we talk like this?

The spike-faced girl didn’t lean in to look at the comparatively tiny phone screen. I was in the chair at the desk, and she was on the floor, but she was so tall that her head was still at the height of my shoulders, a decent height for me to show her the screen. She summoned her own phone, ensconced in its sticker-bombed case, and carefully but skillfully typed a response with her long, knife-like fingers. It was too small for her massive hands, but she evidently had practice. When she held it up to show me what she’d written, it was an app I didn’t recognize.

Amane: Use DeepL instead. The translation quality is a bit better.

Amane: You can say it out loud, though. I live with four English speakers.

“Do they speak English even when I’m not around?”

I hesitantly used my voice as she asked, going slow and doing my best to enunciate.

Amane: Hina and Alice.

Doing it this way was actually slower than just typing it in, so I went back to my phone.

Ezzen: It’s more comfortable for me this way, if that’s okay with you?

“Okay!”

I jumped, not expecting the verbal response in her chiming, sing-song tones.

Ezzen: Have you built a PC before?

Amane: I’m a gamer `⎚⩊⎚´ -✧

She looked at me expectantly, as though that were all the explanation that was necessary.

Ezzen: Cool!

I immediately kicked myself for the meaninglessness of the response, and the fact that the exclamation point wasn’t reflected in my actual facial expression. She didn’t seem to mind.

Amane: It looks like you’re also a gamer, judging by what the shrimp got for you.

Amane: shrimp = Ebi chan

Adorable.

Ezzen: Actually, not very much. My hand makes it hard to use a mouse quickly.

Ezzen: I spend most of my time on GWalk and YouTube.

Well, spent, since things had changed. But once this computer was put together, maybe there wouldn’t be much difference from how things used to be. That thought was comforting amid the tumult of the last few days, so I set the phone down and moved to get better access to the open case, then realized that it probably made more sense to start with the motherboard and hunted around for that. Amane seemed to read my thoughts and handed it to me. She was wearing a static bracelet on her crystalline wrist—I eyed it and she made a twinkling noise, a chuckle, and typed into her phone.

Amane: The bracelet doesn’t do anything.

I appreciated the thought, at least. I located the RAM sticks—a full set of four, each as powerful as the entire memory of my old PC at 16GB apiece—and carefully clicked them into their slots on the motherboard. Then it was onto the CPU, which I carefully removed from the remainder of its protective packaging while trying not to gag at the price tag, then placed gently into its grid of receiving holes and locked it down with the little lever. Those were the easy parts.

Things got harder from here as we encountered one of my old enemies: little, tiny screws. Beyond the exceptionally poor luck of being one of the first people to ever lose a loved one to the Flame, I’d also gotten the twisted bonus that the mobility in my right hand—that is to say, my dominant hand—had never fully recovered. So I used screwdrivers and other such implements with my left hand, and it was slow going. The PC’s external case screws were easy enough, but one look at the little screws for mounting the motherboard inside, nestled deep into crevasses between protruding heat sinks and I/O pin grids, had me dreading the whole procedure. The last time I had done this had been a slow, frustrating process where I’d repeatedly lost the little things inside the hollow spaces of the PC case.

On the bright side, the screwdriver Amane provided me had a magnetized tip. Was that a problem for computer parts? Probably not; she wouldn’t have given it to me otherwise, right? Also, what about the water cooling unit for the CPU? Did that go on now? It’d create more obstacles to getting those tiny screws in place—

I felt myself getting a little overwhelmed and glanced nervously at the Amethyst Radiance—she was pointing her phone at me.

Amane: If you have problems with your hands, try to use glyphs.

I hadn’t even thought of that as an option.

“But…isn’t high ripple bad for you?”

Amane: There’s no problem in small amounts, not while it’s transformed.

“It?”

She made a crackling noise of annoyance as she shook her massive, spike-snouted head and typed something else into her undersized phone.

Amane: While I am in my transformation form.

“Ah.”

I stood, weaving my way around piles of discarded packaging to reach the bookcase, and grabbed a notebook that I knew had spare pages. One somewhat-undignified shimmy across my bed later, I also had a pencil from my backpack. I flipped to a blank page and began to draw.

Two minutes later, I showed the chain to Amane. It was elementary, first-order, dealing entirely in simple physical operations; trivial, in the technical sense of the word, as it didn’t even need to double back on itself anywhere. She nodded in approval and made no comment, so I called forth my Flame, holding my arm well away from anything that might ignite. I whispered an apology to it that I was aggravating it and wondered briefly about how I could feed it something other than pain—a conversation I wasn’t sure I could have with Amane, even with the artificial bridge we’d constructed across the language barrier. So for now, I just poked and twisted it and formed it into my poor excuse for thread, and then fed the Flame along the lattice.

As weaving went, this was straightforward, no particular tricks necessary to ensure correct tension or manipulate the Flame at micro scales. When I was done, I was left with what was basically an invisible manipulator arm hooked up to a sensor, preprogrammed to apply a twisting motion to particular target areas. I placed the motherboard in its position inside the case, ensuring the screw holes lined up, and then dumped the little bag of appropriate screws onto the paper atop the {IDENTIFY}-{DIRECT} portion of the chain. The screws never hit the paper, instead stopping in the air, and I watched with excitement as they all aligned to face downward and floated over to the case, descending into their appropriate holes and turning themselves into place. So mundane, no flickers of light or confusing violations of one’s intuitions for space and motion, yet so magical all the same. I used my phone’s flashlight to confirm that the screws had properly fastened themselves into place.

Amane tapped my knee to get my attention.

Amane: It never gets boring, does it?

“I hope it never does.”

—

Between YouTube tutorials on my laptop and our combined magical ingenuity, we made steady progress. A simple chain to thread the cables of the power supply to the other components; a video elucidating the difference between open- and closed-loop water cooling systems; zip ties to keep everything neat and tidy. And I slowly broke the ice, first by simply coordinating our procedure for the building process, then hesitantly drifting toward the larger-scale worries looming over me.

Ezzen: So you have time for this even though it’s a weekday? All the others seem to be busy.

Amane: The expectations are lower for me than for my teammates.

Stupid Ez. Of course that’d be something of a touchy subject for her. I fretted about how to salvage the conversation while I wrestled with the tiny pins and wires connecting the motherboard to the case’s external buttons. I still didn’t want to intrude on her medical privacy—maybe moot now that Ebi had sent me the definitive report, but I’d had my own share of being seen as a medical case first and a person second. I couldn’t imagine how much worse that was for her.

Ezzen: Is that because of your injuries themselves or the pain?

Amane: Depends on the weather.

Ezzen: “Weather” = local ripple?

She nodded and hummed, a digital-sounding, too-pure piezoelectric tone.

Amane: Good days and bad days. Does your hand or foot hurt more when there’s red?

Ezzen: I don’t know. Using my Flame does hurt. Do you use pain for your magic? Ai singled out Hina and Heliotrope as the ones who use pain for their Flames, so I assume you don’t?

Amane: I don’t use it. Because it’s not right.

More like Alice than Hina, then. I wondered why Heliotrope also used pain if she was generally pro-Amane and anti-Hina.

Ezzen: Not mahou shoujo?

Amane: That’s right. I understand why the others use it, because it’s important to be powerful, but I am not only my pain.

She rubbed her right arm with her left, a shockingly familiar motion. In her real body, that would be her prosthetic, as opposed to my burns, but the sentiment was the same—was “real body” an offensive way of putting it, given how she seemed to prioritize this form instead? I’d have to ask at some point.

Ezzen: Not made of glass, right.

Ezzen: I don’t like magic based on pain either.

Amane: But you had sex with Hina.

Oh no. Yesterday, she’d expressed some fairly harsh disapproval of Hina’s lighthearted approach to pain—like Yuuka, would she assume the worst of me by association? But she was shaking her head.

Amane: That was supposed to be a joke. Text is difficult.

I gave her a sympathetic nod. Tone over text was tricky enough without the strange filtering effects of a translation program. At least in this odd, hybrid form of communication, I had facial expressions to back me up—but she didn’t. What was with that spike-face?

Ezzen: (I just want to clarify that it wasn’t sex)

Amane: Understood!

Amane: I don’t want to judge, but Yuuka is troubled.

Ezzen: “Troubled” is understating it a bit, don’t you think?

I mustered an awkward smile to accompany that, hoping the light tone came through. She gave me a thumbs up with one of her massive, gemstone hands.

Ezzen: Ai told me to ask you what to do about it.

Amane: I’ll tell her to be nice. As nice as Yuuka can be.

Now that second part was definitely a joke, but one attached to genuine goodwill.

Amane: I’m not surprised she’s being a problem. It’s not your fault. We’ll make her tolerate you for now, but I hope you two can become friends.

Ezzen: Friends? She’s so mean.

With the ice breaking a bit, that felt safe to say.

Amane: She’s basically a good person. And so are you.

Was that true? What could one say to that?

“…Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I blinked at the accented English.

Amane: Please give me the GPU and water cooler.

I obliged, now doubly off-kilter at the topic change. Then, to my shock and concern, she dropped out of her mantle, the towering mass of flowing purple gemstone squeezing itself before dissolving into the air in a fraction of a second, leaving just Amane’s real body. And her prosthetics, of course—the static bracelet dangled from her artificial wrist, now too large. She still had the eyepatch I’d seen when we’d first met, and like then, it took a few seconds to flicker to life and sync up with her true eye, mirroring the vivid green. Not supernaturally intense the way Hina’s eyes were, but pretty nonetheless. Her black hair fell in a straight, glossy curtain over her shoulders and down her back.

Amane: Your situation is bad.

Her mechanical hand worked swiftly and precisely to free the GPU’s pre-installed fans from its back plate as she cradled the device in her lap. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing, but I was still nervous; she was splitting her attention between the task and talking to me, and I felt that the thousand-dollar graphics card deserved a bit more reverence and care.

Her flesh hand had visible tremors as it continued typing on her phone, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the practiced ease and confidence in the motions. It helped that whatever keyboard she was using only seemed to have a few keys with Japanese characters, not a full QWERTY layout, so each key was bigger.

Ezzen: Yeah.

I was hesitant to add more of my own opinions until I knew where she was going with this. She stopped working the screwdriver for a moment and looked at me seriously as she presented the next message.

Amane: I think you shouldn’t have to fight the PCTF.

That didn’t mesh with her teammates’ vitriol.

Ezzen: I thought you hated them?

Amane: No. My teammates hate them for me. I think the PCTF are evil, and killing them is part of the duty of real magical girls. But it is not revenge, and we should not have made you help us. It’s not your duty because you’re not part of the team. I’m sorry.

Ezzen: Sorry it happened, or sorry that I’m not part of the team?

Amane: The first. I don’t understand why the others want you to join and help with our war.

Thank fuck. An incredible weight came off my chest—she didn’t want me to be an accomplice to further murder. And she didn’t want me to join up as a magical girl. Even aside from the others’ especially egregious expectations, it seemed like they all wanted things from me, be it my expertise or my Flame. Even Ai, for all her kindness, was very interested in what I could do for Amane—but Amane herself had no demands or quid pro quo for me at all, no interest in even subtle leverage; I was starting to see why she’d insisted that I be allowed to choose whether I was going to the Hikanome event, and I was grateful.

She did something strange with her prosthetic hand, a twist of her wrist and wiggle of her fingers that almost made the static bracelet fall off, and we both winced slightly as a pulse of pain blossomed in my foot. She laughed softly even though her voice was tight.

Amane: Bad weather, right?

She’d activated the {AFFIX} binding in her arm and locked the water cooler against the GPU’s back plate so she could keep them aligned as she put the screws in: one of the cutting-edge accessibility features of a LIPS-compliant prosthetic. I’d seen it in the lattice diagram, but it was quite another thing to witness in action. Magic was still magical. She continued typing with her other hand as she worked.

Amane: There are more reasons that the others want to have you here, and I’m annoyed that they’re not telling you. Alice especially.

“Alice? With what?”

Amane: Her tail. Her dragon transformation. Dragon化

“Dragon-ka,” she said out loud, answering my question before I had the chance to ask it. With the screws now in place, she set down the screwdriver and her phone to lean over the case and slot the modified GPU into place with a satisfying click. If her chronic pain was bothering her, she did a good job of hiding it. I waited until she was done to show her my phone.

Ezzen: Like, something to make her more comfortable? The tail does seem like it gets in the way.

Amane: Something to stop it.

Ezzen: It’s still going on?

Amane: Yes. It gets worse whenever she uses magic. Tail lengthens and eyes change. Maybe more if it continues.

Amane: She didn’t tell you because she pretends it isn’t happening, but it’s getting worse, and we don’t know how to stop it.

“Jesus.” That was dire enough—and interesting enough—that I immediately started speculating.

Ezzen: Any use of magic? How much ripple?

Amane: 20-silver-like or above. Yuuka knows when it will happen and stops her. But it’s only a delaying tactic.

We both grimaced—though that belied the full intensity of discomfort I was feeling from this revelation. Hadn’t Ai called Alice selfish? Was this why? I remembered what she’d said on the car ride to Tochou: I live with it. And I remembered the tightness in her voice. The familiar bottled-up frustration.

Amane: I don’t like that she’s keeping it a secret and pretending it’s not one of the reasons she’s trying to keep you here.

Ezzen: And she didn’t tell me because she’s worried about putting even more pressure on me?

Amane: Yes. It feels like putting even more pressure on you because your situation is so fucked up.

Ezzen: I’ll help. Thanks for telling me.

Amane: You don’t owe us.

Ezzen: I know! It’s not about debt, but a chance to do something good.

I understood Alice’s reasoning, because I was under a lot of pressure, but I agreed—I wished she’d opened with this when making her original pitch to me. At the time, she’d focused on the appeal of learning more about the Spire’s dermis via the Radiances’ mantles, and that had been enough to hook me, before I’d understood the nature of their war with the PCTF. Now I wasn’t so sure about that, since that same track of research would be open to me sans the looming conflict at the Spire—but this? I wanted to help her with this. It was exactly the sort of thing that called to me: directly improving somebody’s quality of life by solving unsolvable magical problems. Well, biomancy was famously difficult, as well as outside my typical wheelhouse, but that was now surmountable with actual Flame at my disposal.

Amane: Okay. Thank you.

I gave her a lame little thumbs-up.

Ezzen: I’m curious: what Japanese word translates to “fucked up?”

Amane: ヤバい I think. But I wrote it. Yuuka and Hina taught me lots of dirty words.

She grinned, a warm smile reminiscent of Ai’s, but with a little more impishness to it. It was broken by a wince, and she rubbed her arm again.

Amane: Rebound from red. I’m alright.

I thought that binding didn’t pass her threshold of ripple for pain; that was the impression I’d gotten from her file, at least. She shook it off quickly.

Ezzen: “Bad weather”?

“Yeah.” She checked the power supply’s cables, making sure all the components were hooked up, tracing across each thick bundle with a segmented finger. Her prosthetic arm was almost doll-like, with visible articulation at the joints and smooth paneling, a very different look from the flowing, glossy facets of her mantle, a seemingly intentional but distinct sort of artifice. I racked my brain to compare the arm to Ebi’s; I’d need to see them side-by-side to compare the details, but they were certainly both Ai’s handiwork. She caught me looking.

Amane: What do you think?

Ezzen: It’s incredible. Thank you for letting me work on it.

She nodded, and her eyes flicked over to my scarred forearm. Would I rather have lost my arm entirely, with a prosthetic of that quality in its place? Then again—I did have a prosthetic now, tucked under my crossed legs. I extracted my legs to half-bend it in front of me, looking at the block of false toes. She brought out her own leg from where it was tucked under her and pulled off the sock to compare. Of course, her leg was entirely replaced below the knee, where I’d only lost the front half of the foot itself, so hers was much fancier, but she seemed interested in mine.

Neither of us commented on it, though. In hindsight, I think we were both wary of bringing up the other’s traumatic experiences. We fell back into mostly silence and kept working in sync. While she put in the NVMe SSD, I got up and collected more packaging detritus from around us: broken-down cardboard boxes, plastic wrapping, and styrofoam padding were all sorted into piles at her direction. I didn’t know how recycling worked around here, but she was being fastidious about keeping everything separate, so I trusted her judgment.

The PC was coming together. The full setup was still far from complete, but all the essentials of the box itself were in, and as I hooked up the I/O pins for the power button itself, trepidation began to build. I didn’t know enough about water cooling to check Amane’s work, but she’d done this before, so I tried to trust her judgment and console myself by thinking it through. In the worst case scenario where a tube burst and irreversibly destroyed all the internals, what would really be lost? I’d be out three thousand dollars of parts, which was a mind-boggling amount of money for a PC by my standards—I had to repeatedly remind myself that Todai wouldn’t even blink at paying that out-of-pocket. And then it’d be another one-day delivery, or maybe two days, but either way, it wasn’t like I’d be stranded without a home base for another two weeks while waiting for a new power supply or something. It would be okay; I’d be okay. Only two more days at most of this room feeling alien and transitory rather than like home. Hopefully, only a few more minutes.

While Amane used her mechanical hand’s miraculous dexterity to hook up the final few hard-to-reach pins, I wrestled one of the displays out of its box and onto the desk. Todai had gotten me three, complete with swing-arm wall mounts if I so desired, but we only needed one for this, and for the moment I didn’t even bother with managing the cables as I plugged it into power and ran the HDMI cable to the computer’s graphics card. We left the case open and on its side, since the first boot was always a bit fraught, and there was no point in closing the whole thing up and putting it in position if we’d need to immediately take it apart again to troubleshoot. I didn’t even bother with the keyboard or mouse yet, either; I just wanted to see if the power button would get us to BIOS or UEFI or whatever initial startup interface would indicate we’d averted catastrophic failure.

I plugged in the power supply, hit the switch on the back, and got our first sign of life—a single white indicator light on the motherboard, shining out of the metal-and-silicon cave. A good start, but the real test lay with the power button. Amane gestured grandly at the box, wordlessly but clearly insisting I did the honors. I indulged her by reaching over and pressing the button—

And was rewarded by glorious light and motion. The external case fans spun to life, followed a moment later by the softer sound of the water cooling pumps. No leaks! I caught Amane’s fist-pump out of the corner of my eye, but my eyes were locked on the monitor as it sprang to life, displaying familiar startup symbols that transitioned into a simple menu for configuration. Good job, us. I flopped backward onto the bed, enjoying the feeling of success, even if the stakes were admittedly low. I was home. Even if I wasn’t staying here permanently, at least now I could operate from here as I used to.

We celebrated with a break, retreating from the hardwood onto the softness of my bed. Amane called Ebi to get us some snacks and drinks, which turned into some playful banter. When the robot arrived and handed off our refreshments—juice and nuts, rather health-conscious—she crouched down in front of the PC, her simpler cousin.

“Good work, little dude.”

She gave it an affectionate pat. Then she turned and subjected Amane to what I could tell was a familiar routine of questions like “how is your pain?” and some more direct inspections from which I averted my eyes. Satisfied with her charge’s health, she turned to leave, but was caught by the hand, prosthetic to android. Ebi hesitantly returned to sit at Amane’s other side from me. The two of them discussed something briefly, then Amane turned back to me, looking a little apologetic. Ebi spoke for her.

“Do you want to talk about going to the Hikanome rally?”

2.03 Patreon Release

Last week people didn't like linking to the Google Doc because of lag and brightness, so I'm just going to put these in the post body for now. Thanks for the feedback, and for supporting Sunspot! Enjoy!

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I did my best to enter Ai’s giant machine shop surreptitiously and not attract undue attention, which had gone well until I realized that her mobile workstation was not in the same spot it had been last time I’d been in here. So, feeling the whole time that I obviously didn’t belong and dreading the idea that somebody would walk up and ask for ID, I awkwardly skirted around the edge of the garage-turned-laboratory, trying to spot the Emerald Radiance. I gave a wide berth to the scariest-looking machines, especially those mid-operation like the massive waterjet cutter bringing forth dozens of identical parts from a sheet of metal at least three meters to a side.

I eventually found Ai in the most sensible place in the whole shop for her to be: set up with a group of students below the enormous magical manufacturing array on the workshop’s far wall. Sadly, they weren’t actually using the array; Ai wasn’t even touching the control panel and was instead indicating each glyph on the wall with a laser pointer, quizzing the students on identifying each one and what it did. I chuckled as one of them mistook {AFFIX} for {DIFFUSE}. Rookie mistake.

The multitude of wrong answers like that one were because today’s batch of students were younger than the ones I had met the other day. I’d gotten the sense that most of that group had been grad students, noticeably older than me, to say nothing of the grizzled full-fledged engineers and machinists; by contrast, these ones were around my age, in their third and fourth years of college. It was a similarly eclectic group of races and nationalities to last time, native Japanese intermingling with Americans and some who must have been from Taiwan or Hong Kong, since I doubted anybody from mainland China was here. Despite Todai’s professed abstinence from the intermittent conflict in the South China Sea, it still impacted the demographics here in Ai’s workshop.

Ai saw me coming, making eye contact with me in one of the convex mirrors as I approached the back of the cluster of students. A grin spread across her face as she flicked the laser pointer to an eye-hurting jumble of curved plastic that seemed to crawl under my gaze, a three-dimensional slice of one of the four-dimensional glyphs. My stomach lurched as she called out.

“You in the back: what’s this?”

“That,” I sighed, simultaneously put-upon and excited at being given a chance to strut my stuff, “would be the third, sixth, and seventh layers of {PROPAGATE}, sliced maybe twenty-five percent ana to give it a more orange propensity so it can link into things like {ASSIGN} more easily.”

“Correct!” Her voice rang like a polished bell. “Everyone, this is Todai’s newest employee. You might see him around from time to time. Colliot-san, would you like to introduce yourself?”

“Uh—not particularly. I was actually wondering if I could, um…” I trailed off lamely. Unfortunately for me, some of the students—most, probably—were denizens of the forums and were already putting the pieces together, whispers erupting within the group as eyes went round. No keeping this cat in the bag. “Fine. Yes, uh, hi, I’m Ezzen.”

I wasn’t prepared for how good that felt to say. Ai had gone out of her way to not refer to me as Dalton, so Ezzen was the only name any of these people would know me by. I loved that. What I loved less was the way eyes slid down to the burn scars on my hand and to the prosthetic replacement for my foot, known to them despite being hidden inside my shoe. I unconsciously slid the Flame-marked hand into my hoodie pocket to fidget with the stabilizer module, hunching my shoulders. My tattoo itched, which was absurd.

Ai, bless her, regained control of the group almost instantly, before they had a chance to start bombarding me with questions or mob me.

“I’m not canceling this lab just because he’s here! You’ll get the chance to meet him eventually. Ah—” She glanced at an indicator light on her desk that had just come on. “Good timing, the blanks are done. Every group gets one of each type; make sure they both came out to spec, then come up with one first-order chain for each that can do the next three steps we talked about. If the dimensions are off, add back material with the sedimenter and then refinish them on the mill. Go.”

The students’ gazes lingered on me as they shuffled off toward the waterjet cutter, but mercifully none of them dared defy their orders to talk to me, in too much of a hurry. Ai beckoned me over.

“Are you here for something?”

I appreciated how she was straight to the point, no inquiries after my foot or asking about my plans for the day. I scratched my neck nervously.

“Um, just was wondering if I could be helpful.”

“Ah. Is this about the gun?”

“Um. Is it alright for you to just—say that?”

“Yes.” For explanation, she pointed at a matching set of dark panels mounted to the edges of her workstation. A classic soundproofing weave splayed across them in neon green. “So, is that it? You want to feel like you’re doing good to make up for yesterday?”

“Um—sort of? I mean, yes, but…that’s not all of it. I had an…argument? With Heliotrope.”

Ai frowned sympathetically.

“That’s…I’m sorry. What did she say?”

I didn’t really want to talk about most of it—even recalling her demeanor was making my stomach lurch, let alone the actual, wildly hurtful things she had said to me.

“She insulted Hina, which—I know you’re not going to have much sympathy there, and—”

“Ezzen.” I flinched at her interjection. “I might not agree with Hina, and yes, I do think she’s a little monstrous, but of course I care if Yuuka is being a…bitch, to her.”

I blinked.

“Strong language for you, isn’t it?”

“She deserves it, sometimes,” she sighed. “What else?”

“She…said I didn’t deserve to be here.” I stared down at my shoes, ashamed even though I knew it mostly wasn’t true. “And compared me to Hina’s ex. Who’s a friend of mine, which I didn’t know,” I clarified.

“Ah. That…yes, I think I see the picture. I’m sorry, again, you didn’t deserve that at all. Of course you deserve to be here, and it would make me happy if you helped here.”

“Please. What’s there to do?”

“Well, what do you want to do?” She countered.

It was a good question. I raised my head to look around the workshop. This was far more hands-on than my comfort zone of GWalk diagrams, a step into the practicalities of the physical that I was used to eliding and leaving for the people who actually implemented things—like Ai. The exception, no more comfortable for me but at least something I felt driven to help with, was Amane’s prostheses—as well as probably my own, though I didn’t want to come off as selfish by mentioning my foot right now.

“I feel…I want to at least learn enough about the design and function of Amane’s prostheses to be helpful. Where would I start with that?”

She nodded, turning back to her keyboard and opening some new windows. I was unsurprised to find she was running Linux; Ubuntu, by the looks of it. I’d toyed with it in years past but never delved deeply enough into the technicals to find it easier than Windows. She eventually found a PDF and pulled it up on one of the vertical monitors.

“Are you familiar with LIPS-2?”

“The…Lattice-Integrated Prosthetics Standard, yeah? I read v1, but haven’t kept up with it.” That was mostly true; I had read the first version, but didn’t recall many of the specifics. It belonged to one of those tangential fields where I’d read the Wikipedia articles and skimmed the key documentation out of academic interest or to settle arguments on the forums, but my off-the-cuff knowledge was lacking. “You…helped write it, if I recall correctly?”

“Hai…” she confirmed, mostly to herself, as she jumped down the very, very long document. The scroll bar on the side of the window was barely a sliver. “Ah, here.”

I advanced a little to read the section header: Idiomatic Psychomotive Chain Bases: Designs Minimizing Free Red Ripple. As my eyes scanned between the dense blocks of text below it, I saw they were broken up by a few beautifully elegant lattice designs. I sight-read them, appreciating the thought given to optimizing everything down to second-order at most and creative workarounds and glyph choices to lower the free-band red ripple down to almost zero by the end of the chain—then breathed an incredulous chuckle. Recognition dawned and years-buried memories returned as I saw my name—Ezzen, not Dalton—below, cited for two of the designs. Both were modified slightly from what I remembered, but at a glance, I approved of the changes.

“Ha.”

“You’ve already been very, very helpful.” Ai explained, a smile in her voice. She pointed at the second one bearing my name. “For Ishikawa-chan—er, Amane—specifically, because so much of the damage was sanguimantic, this is the one we use, and the one that would be most helpful to optimize further, rather than the actual kinetic drivers or power integration or…you get the idea.” I did indeed, smiling as well. Ideas were already starting to germinate, ways to clean this up further. “Although you’re free to take a look at the whole design, of course,” she added.

So I got to work. There was a row of PCs along the wall, somewhat cordoned off from the main machine shop, and Ai helped me log in. They were running a slightly different version of GWalk, the enterprise distribution rather than the pro license, so I was missing a lot of my personal quality of life tweaks, but I knew all the shortcuts anyway. Ai handed me a USB with the lattice files for Amane’s arm and leg prostheses, telling me it was mine to keep so I could keep tweaking it on my own time; I saw it also contained the schematics for the physical design of her limbs. That was beyond the scope of right now’s work and my own expertise, though. I focused on the glyphwork.

Eventually, maybe twenty minutes in, a few of Ai’s students appeared and booted up other workstations. I became irrationally self-conscious; despite having full confidence in the actual contents of my work, it was another thing to see them stealing glances at my workflow out of the corner of my eye. The weight of observation imposed a bizarre pressure to get every little change right on the first try, rather than first checking whether an idea would actually go anywhere, and to avoid consulting the documentation I usually leaned on so heavily, for fear of looking like an amateur.

In fact, I did sort of feel like an amateur; many of the implementation details of this lattice were tuned for the unique case of Amane’s arm, with particular portions of the weave intended for different physical locations and mechanisms within the limb. This was not my area of expertise. GWalk actually had a whole suite of features for placing the weave in a schematic of physical parts, associating lattices with respective substrates, and so on, but my focus on theoretical problems and LM meant I’d almost always avoided it. Now I kept having to refer back to that window to double-check my work and was still unsure that I hadn’t broken anything. No error popups, at least, but that was only a matter of time, and encountering an error with a part of the design process I almost never partook in and therefore had no idea how to resolve, in front of an audience, was a nightmare scenario.

I tried to ignore that impulse to catastrophize and continue working as I usually did, but it became more and more difficult as the row of computers filled up. They gave me enough of a berth to leave the seats to my immediate left and right empty, but it was the barest buffer of protection; my physical shell, the bulky hoodie, provided little security when my direct stream of consciousness was playing out on the computer monitor. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable experience, exposed and vulnerable.

“Oh, that’s so smart!”

I jumped. I hadn’t realized somebody had invaded the bubble of personal space, watching from right over my shoulder. I twisted and saw one of the probably-not-Chinese students utterly enraptured by my monitor, a man with bleached-blond hair. He was older than me—wait, no he wasn’t; I was twenty.

“Thanks?” I muttered, uncomfortable with the proximity, turning back to the screen and wishing he’d leave. “You mean this part? The pair of {ASSIGNS}?”

“Yeah. Why are you looping them through each other like that?” He came around to my side to look more closely at the monitor. “How are you even getting GWalk to let you do that? It gives us an error.”

“Oh, it’s…” I copied the chunk and deleted the connections to demonstrate. “Control-D, drag the first connection, select the output of the second, C for chain mode, I for invert, click the input of the first one. If you just click and drag the two normally, it gives you two errors: one, because it doesn’t know where you want the mesh to take its output, and two, the tensions aren’t constrained to each other, so the ripple can’t resolve.”

“Ohhhhh. Oh, wait, then—” He called back to his friend, who hurried over. Before I knew it, three more students had joined the group, all pointing at the screen and talking excitedly in a mix of Chinese and English. A different one broke from the discussion to try to talk to me directly.

“So—you’re actually Ezzen? Seven years of being anonymous, and now you’re just…here at Lighthouse?”

“Well—being flametouched kind of changes things.”

“Lots of people thought you were already a flamebearer! I know you’ve said you’re not, but it’s crazy that you discovered all that—” he pointed at the screen again, “—without actually having any Flame yourself.”

“I didn’t…discover it. The Vaetna already know all this stuff, we’re just following them.” I floundered, compelled to downplay my own accomplishments and expertise. “Um, not to discredit Ai or the Consortium’s own accomplishments, labs all over—”

“Take some credit,” Ai sighed from my other side. I twisted to look at her.

“But it’s true! Yeah, I know a lot, but everything I’ve ‘figured out’ is stuff they already know. And you’re actually doing things with it!” I gestured around the cavernous room. “This is incredible!”

“So is that.” Ai countered, pointing at the glyphs on my screen. Then she put her hands on her hips, addressing the students who’d gathered near me. “Back to work. You’re not going to finish in the next forty minutes if you keep bothering Ezzen.”

They dispersed, grumbling but smiling. Ai dropped herself heavily into the seat next to mine, already looking tired again despite having seemed fine this morning. 

“Already making progress.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if this’ll actually work in the weave…uh, sorry for being a distraction, also.”

“You aren’t!” She glanced past me down the row of computers. “I think this will be really motivating for them. And it will work in the weave, I think; just make sure to run the substrate optimizer before porting it to the schematic.”

I‘d totally forgotten that step and needed a flustered moment to find the right button in the unfamiliar sub-panel. I also didn’t know how to verify that it had done its job and squished the glyph substrates down to minimal weavable size and found places for them within the structure of the arm. 

“Uh.” I hesitated.

“It’s here, then here.” She guided me through the process of confirming everything was as it should be, heedless of the fact that a few of her students were definitely watching her treat me like one of them, oh God. I tried to control my breathing, retreating into my hoodie slightly like a magic-obsessed turtle.

“…Thanks. Um. I should really know how to do that.”

She seemed to become aware that eyes had been on us while she’d helped me, the supposed expert, use a basic function of the program I probably had more than ten thousand hours on.

“…Would you rather work somewhere else, Ezzen?”

“No, it’s more…the work itself.”

“Ah. Not used to integration.”

“Not at all,” I admitted. “Your students are probably better at that than I am.”

She frowned. “You deserve to be here. Is this about what Hirai-san said?”

“Who?” I was sort of losing track of the names.

“Er, Yuuka. Heliotrope.”

“Oh. I guess? It’s just—I already said, I just don’t feel like I’m actually…doing anything with it. I’m just messing around. Yesterday was easy—and I know how fucked up that sounds—because it was pure magic, LM to LM. I felt like I understood all of it…which wasn’t true; I didn’t understand what we were really doing, but the task? Everything could be done in GWalk. With this—” I pointed at the screen, then spread the gesture to indicate the entire workshop, “—there’s literally more moving parts, stuff I haven’t touched before. I feel like I need to run all of this past you to make anything actually come of it.”

“So you’re saying you’re used to working alone?”

“…I guess, yeah.”

“Well, you’re not alone. You never were! You’ve shared so much of your work on the internet; of course we’ve used it. Not…not all of my colleagues respect you as much as they should, but they certainly all know your name. So do my students, for a reason.” She smiled at me, reaching out to gently touch my forearm. “Your focus is pure theory, not application, and that’s fine, because we’ve already been applying it here. Now you can actually work with us.” She took a breath, but before I could formulate a rebuttal, another complaint that I was out of my depth, she went on, passion rising. “Teamwork means letting other people do the parts you’re not good at. Yesterday, you were able to do almost all of it yourself, which…” her expression darkened. “Which is how we got away with not telling you until it was too late. I’m sorry for that. But for almost everything outside of our mantles, bungyou—division of labor—is important, even necessary, because nobody can do what we do alone. You can help us do so much! And you know that, I know you do. I’m really, truly excited to be working with you, and so is everybody in this room.”

For a moment, I was terrified that meant she was about to order her class to line up and encourage me, but she just rubbed my arm and looked at me. Unlike Hina, her silence carried no expectation of response. Tears were starting to well in my eyes at Ai’s pure, unguarded outpouring of belief. I didn’t want to cry here, under the eyes of her students, people who looked up to me—I swallowed in a vain attempt to keep my throat from getting tight. Seeing my response, Ai tensed up.

“Oh. Oh, ah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s—fine,” I pushed out, wiping my eyes before any tears could fall. Her honesty and kindness helped me admit why this was so hard. “No, I mean, thank you. Heliotrope sort of got under my skin. Thank you,” I repeated. Yuuka had brought my insecurities to the surface, asserted that I didn’t belong; a belief she had so boldly thrown in my face that it had further undermined my already shaky self-confidence. But Ai’s conviction that I could have a place here—that I already had a place here, long before I’d ever actually arrived, was just as potent as her teammate’s venom, perhaps more so. “Um…how long have you…known about me?”

“Me? Since before we had this building. I think we’ve actually emailed each other, back when I was in school, and so did my professor at the time. He’s the one who told me about—do…do you need a tissue?”

“…Yes.”

Ai jogged back to her desk and brought the entire box back to me. I dried my tears before they could spill onto my cheeks, thanked her, and spent the remainder of her class time continuing to tinker with and refine the weave of Amane’s arm.

Meanwhile, her students got back to work, under too much pressure from their assignment to keep bothering me. They ferried their parts around the workshop, refining those parts toward gradually more familiar shapes. Each time a group of students returned to one of the PCs, the sheets of metal had been further altered: intricately folded, slots milled out, more folding, small sections of metal ground away to thin out the shape, onward and onward until various second-order glyph substrates began to make themselves apparent in the aluminum. Even when different teams had the same glyph, there were a number of differences in the shape of the substrate, from overall proportions to the particular paths the metal took as it contorted around itself in mimicry of the Flame. Of course, there were idiomatic, semi-standard base layouts for substrates, but Ai had imposed additional restrictions on each team that meant the students had to improvise.

Even with that, the production process seemed an awful lot of effort. When I voiced this to Ai, she explained that this was entirely doable with CNC machining instead of the relatively manual processes to which she was subjecting her students, but that wasn’t the point. The goal of the exercise was to understand the common pitfalls in substrate design, like how one team had ground a branch point too thin; when Ai tried to weave along it, it snapped. That team still wound up passing, though.

Ai returned to sit with me again once she’d dismissed the students for the morning.

“What do you want to know about Yuuka?”

“I…wasn’t going to ask?”

“But you do want to know.”

“Yeah. How can you tell?”

“Because you like understanding things, and Yuuka is not easy to understand at a glance. I’m sorry she was so…her.” It sounded like she was talking about Hina, put like that.

“Alright, sure: Why’s she like that?”

“The eye, for one.”

“Precognitive self-assurance, yeah, figured as much. How’s it work?” I hadn’t even known it was possible until yesterday, so I wasn’t afraid to admit my ignorance.

“I…don’t know,” she admitted. “Silver ripple, of course, but I can’t even guess at the capture mechanism or how it translates to something she can parse. She’s…touchy about it, as well. If we could find out…”

Widespread precognition, even of a relatively limited sort based on whatever the local silver ripple happened to show, would be a game-changer; that went without saying. It was also the sort of cat that would be nearly impossible to put back in the bag. Ai understood that implicitly, I hoped—but then again, she was also the woman who had apparently invented a truly sentient AI in Ebi, so perhaps given the chance, she’d leap before looking. So might I, if it came to that, which troubled me. I switched back to the main topic.

“How do I get along with her?”

“Ah, well…your start was bad, being…with Hina. You are, ah, dating with her?”

There was a little bit of judgment in her voice. I hurried to correct her misconception.

“I’m…not sure, but I’m not doing her type of magic. No…mutation or transformation.” The seared patch of skin under my shirt and hoodie still stung faintly, a guiltily euphoric reminder to myself that we’d already taken steps in that direction—but cosmetic stuff didn’t really count. I ought to clarify that to Hina…if I could even convince myself of the loophole’s validity. “I made it really clear that I didn’t want to hurt my Flame or anybody else, so…”

Ai let out a breath she’d been holding, shoulders relaxing.

“Good. Good. That’s a relief, truly. I was worried, because…you two do have chemistry, and…”

“Christ, could everybody see it but me?” I immediately slapped my hand over my mouth. “Didn’t mean to say that.”

Ai burst out laughing, then covered her own mouth just as quickly. She needed a few moments for the giggle fit to subside.

“You’re not the first. She told me she’d tell you about her last boyfriend?”

“Skychicken. Jason. Flamebearer, friend of mine.” That part didn’t seem to surprise Ai. “Apparently, their relationship is why Yuuka doesn’t like her?”

“In simple terms, yes. Hina got…worse, more Hina-like, over the course of that relationship, and Yuuka blames him for that. And she doesn’t like men all that much, especially…she probably thinks you’re just here for Hina.” I didn’t quite flinch, but Ai still caught how I shifted and recoiled slightly. “Ah. I’m sorry, I know that’s not how it is at all, but…she’s had some bad experiences, and she jumps to conclusions. Alice thought she’d be alright with you being here, staying here, but maybe she miscalculated, or she just didn’t expect you to click with Hina in this particular way and make Yuuka mad.”

“I…she yelled at me for not thinking things through. But she’s the one who just immediately assumes the worst like that!” I almost growled. It was beyond frustrating and unfair, and Ai nodded in sympathy. I wondered if I could ask her to clear things up with the abrasive goth girl for me, to explain that I wasn’t at all like the caricature she’d assigned me, since trying to have that conversation myself would kill me and I doubted she’d even listen. But I also didn’t want to put Ai through that, not somebody who’d already been so kind to me and who frankly had better things to do. “What can I…do? To fix things with her? I don’t want this—mess. It’s ridiculous,” I groused. “A revolving door of drama. I just figured things out with Hina!”

That bordered on being too much outward complaining, and I cut myself off before I could run my mouth about how this was on top of the lingering worries about the PCTF and Hikanome. But it still felt good to say, and Ai nodded harder, then sat back and thought for a minute.

“I understand, it’s…yes, she can be exhausting,” she admitted. “And stubborn. She won’t listen to me or Alice for this, I think, and certainly not Hina. But Amane, she can help you with this.”

“Amane?”

“Yuuka has a soft spot for her, of course, after everything.”

“Um. I’m still not entirely clear on the timeline for that,” I admitted, glancing around the workshop, reflexively checking if the coast was clear despite knowing our conversation was magically secure. It was mostly deserted now that the students had gone; a few other engineers were working on their own projects at faraway machines, but nobody was close to being within earshot. “Amane was abducted, and the rest of you…rescued her. Alice said something about how you and her and Hina were a separate group first, though?”

It was a bit of a tangle, trying to piece together offhand comments and insinuations and tone from the past few days in between far more immediately important conversations. Not my strong suit. Ai bit her lip, and I hesitated, but then she jumped in her seat, clenching her right fist.

“Everything alright?”

“Yes.” Her tone said otherwise. “Your girlfriend is here. She can explain that to you.”

I jumped as well when I felt arms slither over my shoulders.

“Hey, cutie. I’m stealing you for lunch,” a husky voice muttered in my ear. “Hi, Ai! I’m stealing cutie for lunch!”

—

Ai was very, very unhappy with Hina traipsing through the fourth dimension in her workshop, and I got a front-row seat to a short but blistering lecture in Japanese. Hina did a remarkable job of staying still and enduring her teammate’s annoyance, chin resting atop my head. She didn’t seem particularly chastised, occasionally interjecting enthusiastic “Mhm!”s and unrepentant “Sorry!”s until Ai’s anger inevitably sputtered out and was replaced by an older-sister sense of exasperated disappointment. At that point, the Emerald Radiance switched back to English for my benefit, reminding Hina that “we’ve talked about this” and then attempting to cajole her out of the workshop. Stubborn mutt she was, Hina dug her heels in and insisted that she wasn’t leaving without me, so I bid a hasty farewell and thanks to Ai, taking the USB drive with me.

Hina took my hand and led me back through the hall toward the elevators, still full of energy.

“What’s for lunch?”

“Eggplant and pesto gnocchi!”

Yum. Apparently she wasn’t an obligate carnivore after all.

“…Homemade?”

“Not yet! How’s Ai?”

“Not yet?” But Hina didn’t answer the question as we entered the elevator, hitting me with that level, it’s-your-turn stare. “You just saw her.”

“Yeah, but she probably wasn’t yelling at you like she was with me. Unless she was?”

“Uh, no, she wasn’t. I was working on Amethyst’s arm. Or trying to, at least; I was really just messing with the weave.”

“Cool! Was it fun?”

“Yeah.”

Silence fell. I felt so awkward—but I’d already missed my window to ask how her own day was going. That was the correct, boyfriendly thing to do, right? It wasn’t that I didn’t have questions: was her voiceover work in English or Japanese? Was she done with her workday? Did she have any advice regarding making Heliotrope less of a bitch?

But I didn’t say anything, nor did she prompt me further with those sapphire eyes, content to just hold my hand and swing our arms back and forth a bit. At least she was in puppy-mode; my imagination lewdly suggested that the hyena might slam the emergency stop and press me against the wall, a scenario which would turn this mild social embarrassment into boiling-hot—

I politely told that part of my psyche to fuck off. I was still coming to terms with how much I wanted Hina to, in her own terms, “fuck me up,” and the awful things Heliotrope had insinuated about me were doing that process no favors.

We once again arrived at the nineteenth floor. The lights had been turned on in the kitchen, warm light pushing back the cool blue coming through the windows, and I smelled something roasting, probably the eggplant.

Stepping out of the elevator, I was surprised to find Alice laying on one of the sofas, face-down to accommodate her tail stretched out behind her, the tip just barely dangling over the armrest. As she pushed herself upright to greet us, I saw that she was wearing actual business attire—unlike at Tochou yesterday. Odd, or maybe normal; I didn’t have a good frame of reference, really.

It wasn’t much, just a button-down blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a long, loose skirt worn high on the waist. She glared at my hand connected to Hina’s—quickly covered the expression with a smile. I altered the script I was building in my head; her presence automatically struck down any chance of conversation about my strange, budding relationship with Hina, but hopefully helped the odds that I could learn something that would make existing around Heliotrope less intolerable.

“Hey. Lunch soon, please? I have to be back with Suzuki in half an hour.”

“Yep! Fifteen minutes, sit tight.”

“Fifteen minutes?” Pretty quick. “Frozen gnocchi?”

“Oh, nah, I made the dough this morning, so it’s just roll and cut. Do you wanna do that or make the pesto?”

“Oh, uh…” I hadn’t realized that I would be helping. When I was young, we’d made pastas of all kinds, really, so the activity of rolling and shaping dough was scattered all across my memories of Dad, but the pesto…I didn’t want to touch that memory. “The gnocchi.”

“Gotcha!”

She put me to work, directing me to the enormous, metal-topped kitchen island, evocative of a restaurant prep table, oddly comforting and nostalgic. I was provided with the dough, flour, and an old friend: my knife, Dad’s gift.

“Still haven’t sharpened it,” she apologized, “but should be fine for dividing dough.”

Gnocchi are exceptionally easy to make by hand, Dad instructed. Most pasta shapes require you to roll a flat and thin sheet, which is hard without a machine, but gnocchi dough is robust enough that you can just roll it into a snake and cut it into little cylinders to make your pastas.

I floured up my hands, sliced the big ball of dough into more manageable portions, and went through the steps. Make a snake, chop it up—I stopped and hunted around the kitchen for a moment. Hina noticed from her own station to my right, where she was grinding the pesto by hand in a large mortar and pestle.

“Cutie? What are you looking for?”

“A fork.”

“Why?”

“To shape the dough?”

I was surprised she didn’t seem to know what I meant, but she obligingly directed me to the silverware drawer. She watched curiously as I demonstrated the technique.

Then—and there are specialized boards for this, but you can also just use a fork—you press the piece of pasta down along the tines of the fork with your finger, like this.

Hina squealed with delight as I transformed the gnocchi from a lump of potato dough to a pleasing little rolled shape with ridges all around the edge.

“More surface area; catches more sauce.” I explained from memory.

“Ooh! That’s so cute! Alice, kocchi mite!”

Todai’s leader, who’d seamlessly slipped into a support role doing dishes, also approved of the shape, nodding appreciatively.

“Oh, that’s how it’s done! I’ve had it like that at restaurants before, but I thought it needed a machine or something.”

“Same!” Hina stopped grinding the pesto—no, bad brain, stop that—to prod the pasta with a finger. “Can I try?”

“Hina, no, you’ll bend the tines and make a mess and I’m hungry,” Alice whined. Then she caught herself and her eyes slid over to me as she bit her lip nervously, caught with her guard down. What little dignity she had left was erased by a rumble, and I dodged meeting those slitted pupils to glance at her belly. She stammered. “Um.”

The three of us stood there in silence for a moment. Hina looked between the two of us with her big, blue eyes, then barked a laugh.

“Understood, Captain!”

She picked the pestle back up and resumed grinding the green paste. Alice kept trying to produce sounds, perhaps intended to be apologies for her impatience or indignance at the possible sarcasm, but another undignified grumble from her belly made her give up and turn back to the sink in embarrassed defeat. I picked up my knife and resumed making dough snakes, but that wasn’t enough to dispel the lingering awkwardness. I reached for a random question based on what was in front of me.

“Where did you learn to cook?”

“Me? Teacher from school who thought I needed a hobby to stop getting into fights. Hey, Alice, you remember Asagi-sensei, right?”

“…Yes? Third year home ec in middle school. It didn’t work, as I recall.”

“Nope! But food’s fun. You’re pretty good with that knife, cutie, where’d you learn?”

“I’m just chopping gnocchi, hardly a chiffonade or julienne.”

“Oooooh. Okay, now I really gotta know.”

I hesitated for a moment. I’d talked about this with Alice briefly, but somehow it hadn’t come up with Hina.

“My dad.”

“Oh, right, the dead one.”

“Hina!”

“Oops. Um. Sorry, cutie.”

I put down the knife for a moment to take a deep, slow breath. She didn’t mean anything by it, I knew that, but I still needed a moment to suppress the sudden spike of anger and grief at her casual prodding of the event that had destroyed my life. Shame, too, which took longer to boil off than the others.

“It’s—fine,” I gritted out.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“Hina!” Alice accompanied that with a thump of her tail against the kitchen’s tiles. The puppy flinched.

“Sorry.”

“No, um—talking is good, maybe,” I interjected, fighting down the reflexive annoyance. If I was going to live alongside them, telling them this much had to happen eventually, and it was easier with them, fellow flamebearers. If I trusted the chatroom, I could trust them. “Dad was a chef, the kind who traveled a lot. Took me with him.”

“Ooh, you’re rich?”

“Hina…”

“Uh. He didn’t actually save that much, and…things went wrong with the inheritance. Most of the money went to my grandparents, and from there to one of the cults, so I didn’t really see much of it.”

“Oh, shit. That’s—super fucked up.” The sapphire eyes were full of pity. I winced.

“I was fourteen, still in and out of the hospital, didn’t know how any of that worked, and they…stole it, basically.” More shame. “I got some aid from the Peacies later, around the end of the Firestorms, and managed to hold on to enough of that to, um, support my lifestyle.” I clarified hastily. “Uh, they weren’t the PCTF yet.”

“Don’t worry, we get it, no hard feelings. We know a thing or two about making ends meet.” Alice chuckled dryly. “Billionaire money, remember?”

“Ah. Right.”

Dirty money all around. Hina frowned as she passed me a small bowl.

“Wait, so the Peacies or one of their precursors knew about you as a flamefall survivor, knew where you lived, probably knew you were Ezzen, and never, like, tried to hire you? You’re a fuckin’ catch, cutie.”

“I’m…because I didn’t matter, probably, not compared to the pros.” I regretted that immediately, imagining Ai’s gentle rebuke if I’d said that to her. Alice filled in for her.

“Don’t talk about yourself like that. Remember how your work helped Amane? You’ve already made a difference.”

I tried to get myself to believe that while I gathered a snake’s worth of shaped gnocchi and brought it to the pot of boiling water on the stovetop.

“Okay, no, I can admit I would have been…an asset, so…no, I don’t really know. I guess I sort of assumed it was Sky’s doing. Um—Jason?”

“Probably. Sounds like him,” Hina confirmed as she dug through a cabinet for appropriate serving bowls. Alice stiffened at the name, and I realized we’d managed to stumble close to one of the things I was meaning to ask about. I seized the chance.

“Um, on that note, Heliotrope compared me to him earlier.”

Not at all a smooth transition, but I figured it was the only chance I was going to get.

“Ah, fuck, that’s right, your message,” Alice groaned, turning to me as she dried her hands. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that she was nice about it?”

“…No. Er, yes, too much to ask. She was mean.” Alice’s face fell further; now I felt bad for piling this on top of what was probably already a very stressful time. “My bad for bringing it up. I’m fine, really.”

“Last time you said you were fine, Hina had just sexually assaulted you,” Alice pointed out, voice flat. Hina whimpered, and Alice shifted; she wasn’t made of stone. “Sorry, Hina. Uh—I guess before I find out what dreadful things Yuuka said, we should first…she told me you two slept together last night. That, plus…‘monsterfucker’, plus that comparison—it compels me to ask: what exactly is going on between you two? Are you…a couple?”

“We’re trying things out!”

I glanced at Hina, relieved that she seemed to already have an answer ready.

“Yeah. It’s—we’re being responsible. Boundaries and all.”

“And you’re not our mom!” Hina crossed her arms defiantly.

Alice spread her hands in an ‘I give up’ motion.

“Couldn’t stop you if I wanted. Use protection, mind the teeth, et cetera. Just wanted to stay up to date on what was happening under our roof.” The stiff lashing of her tail betrayed her true feelings, but she didn’t press the issue, instead looking at me as though facing the gallows. “So, lay it on me: what did Yuuka say?”

—

“She’s grounded,” the dragon growled.

Alice’s expression had soured, then curdled into a snarl, as I repeated the nasty things Yuuka had said to me. It hadn’t stopped her from slurping down bite after bite of ridged gnocchi coated in creamy, green sauce as she listened; her hunger at least bound her to the table and prevented her from stomping to the elevator and hunting down Yuuka herself, but the atmosphere was still a bit fraught. We were both exasperated; this felt a bit too much like a repeat of the song-and-dance I’d had with Hina, although this time didn’t seem bound for euphoric intimacy, which suited me fine.

Hina, for her part, was emitting a faint but bone-chilling growl that had my heart pounding. It was nice to feel protected by something as wildly dangerous as her—but I was also genuinely concerned she’d attempt to tear Yuuka limb from limb.

“Um, Hina?”

“Mm?” The way her voice sounded with the growl was worryingly attractive, arguably hotter than when she was purring. More investigation would be needed—later.

“You’re not going to, uh…kill her, are you?”

“Never! Just rough her up.”

“Hina, can it wait until after I talk to her?” Alice shoveled another bite into her mouth; I was learning it was possible to eat pasta angrily. “As in, after you do your job. Which you have to get back to in twenty-six minutes.”

“It’d only take ten!”

“Uh, you’re not actually calling her off?”

“No. What she said was really hurtful to her too. Hina, please, you’d just make things worse, you know that.”

“What? No, you guys, I love her to bits, she’s done that for years, I’m good! She just doesn’t get to corner Ez and be a bitch like that. Not if I’m not there.”

“So you’ll wait?”

“Depends. Cutie?”

I wasn’t entirely opposed to Hina dispensing some physical retribution, assuming it would be the same degree of roughhousing I’d seen the other day. Hadn’t Ebi said Yuuka wouldn’t have wanted to miss that? So maybe the violence was fine, but—

“It…won’t help. I don’t think she respects…us. You or me.” I winced as Alice’s aura of heat, until now suppressed for the sake of her bowl of pasta, momentarily flared in frustrated acknowledgement, and the creamy pesto dried up, desiccated to a powder on the gnocchi’s surface. She frowned at the bowl and got up to add a bit of water back in. “I just—I talked with Ai, and that helped brush off some of what Heliotrope said, but other parts…”

“Which parts?” The growl vanished from Hina’s voice. If she had dog ears, they would have perked up.

“The, um…last night, you said this was just a starting point. Is it? Or is…” I raised my scarred hand, hoping she’d understand what I meant. “Is it just this you care about?”

I couldn’t bring myself to ask directly, both for the embarrassment of asking and fear of the answer.

“What? Cutie, of course it’s a start point, there’s more to you than that. I don’t call you that for nothing. You’re cute! And hot.”

“…Really?”

“Do I lie? Alice, do I lie? Is that a thing I do?”

“I’m not engaging with this part.” The dragon sat back down with her rescued pasta and kept eating.

“Fine. Cutie, yes, really. Your Flame is hot—heh—your body’s hot, and you’re going to be so cool once you just…come out of your shell, get comfy around us, learn to use your Flame. And Yuuka’s making that hard, which is…” She growled. “She’s just being shitty because of some old stuff with Jason; that’s not really anything to do with you. Don’t let her get under your skin. That’s my job. I wanna open you up and bring out the best version of you I can, and that’s not just because of your Flame, okay?”

“Um.” I shivered. “Open me up?”

Alice slapped the table softly in concert with her tail thumping the floor, reminding us she was there.

“Alright, too much flirting in front of me. I’m glad you two are at least, er, talking, but keep it in the bedroom. I have to get to my next meeting. I’ll try to give Yuuka a talking-to tonight.”

She left her empty dishes where they were, hurrying toward the elevator, tail swaying behind her. As she left earshot, Hina looked at me mischievously.

“So you don’t want me to fight her?”

“I mean…if you must, it’s not like I can stop you.”

“You’ll be able to, eventually. I won’t beat her up, though, because I’d rather spend my energy convincing you I’m actually into you. How’s that sound, hm?” She leaned toward me, blinking those big blue eyes too innocently for the innuendo, then sighed. “No time now, though, not for any real fun. I, too, have meetings. Ugh. But we do have time for—” She reached into pocketspace, which made me have to squeeze my eyes shut and rub them. When I reopened them, she had a small red box, palm-sized and squat. “This was for her, but I decree that she’s lost the privilege this year for being mean. So you can have it!”

“Um. I’m not following.”

“What day is it, cutie?”

“Monday?”

She facepalmed, giggled, and then removed the box’s lid to reveal a single chocolate shaped like a heart.

“February 14th! Happy Valentine’s Day!”

2.02 Patreon Release

Okay, so this is a bit scuffed, but you can read 2.02 early via [this link]. This a publish-mode Google Doc, not a regular share, so your activity won't be seen or anything. I'm hoping to switch these previews to Sunspot's own website within the next few weeks, but for now, this is what we'll do, because I think the reading experience sucks if I just copy-paste the whole chapter directly into this post.

Extra Content

Hi everybody! First post. Thanks to everybody supporting.

Just clarifying that additional content (advance chapters, side stories) won't start being a thing until mainline updates resume on October 11th. So you're not getting 2.01 early (2.02 will be the first Patreon advance chapter, available October 11th), and no side stories until November. Feel free to ask questions here or in the Discord!