Unlike what I’d seen of Ai’s premier magitech—Amane’s bionics and Ebi’s chassis—the coffin was not a pretty thing: a mess of plywood, sheet metal, 3D-printed parts, and exposed wiring. It did resemble a coffin in shape and size, large enough only for a user to lay down inside it, but more like the skeleton of one, affording no privacy to the occupant if there were somebody else in the room. You’d have to rest in full view of all the mess Ai had made—not that that would pose an obstacle for Takagiri, I suspected.
Ai had first thrown it together four years ago as a temporary solution for Amane’s ripple sensitivity, which at the time, had been even more severe, and temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent. Amane had stopped needing it at some point, so the Radiances had banished the ugly reminder of pain to one of the multipurpose storage-slash-workshop rooms in the second sub-level basement. Now its day had come round once more, but it was in no condition for use. It was surrounded by spools of wiring of various types and thicknesses, wood and metal structural pieces, and various power tools that had been discarded in Ai’s haste.
The upside of this mess of innards was that nothing was hidden, which made it easy to visually identify which parts went where. The main functionality came from the set of inward-facing ward projectors, of which six were already installed and three were not; they were supposed to be arranged radially in three rows surrounding the occupant, not unlike the spikes of an iron maiden, but the third row seemed to have been abandoned before the mounting bar could be installed, presumably because Ai had been sidetracked by various other problems arising from integration hell.
My job was simple enough: get it working. But I was way out of my depth.
“…I’m not seeing a hole for the screw,” I admitted, gingerly comparing one of the fifty thousand-dollar ward emitters to the bar it was supposed to mount to. “There’s one on this bracket here, but there’s not another on the bar.”
“If you’re thinking of {AFFIXING} it, don’t,” Ebi warned from the sidelines.
“I wasn’t gonna!” I lied.
“Just clamp it.” She pointed at a pile of wood glue clamps on one of the fold-out tables. That did make more sense given the time pressure; I’d successfully woven {AFFIX} under duress before, but now was not a time to fumble with magic when mundane tools would do the trick, ugly as they were. I reluctantly grabbed a clamp that looked big enough. It took me a moment to figure out how to even open the jaws, then I slid it over where I was pressing the mounting bracket against the wood post. I squeezed the tightening trigger a few times, and then jiggled the expensive equipment experimentally to see if it was bound securely against the bar. To my relief, it didn’t budge.
The clamp was precisely the sort of ugly and awkward solution that characterized everything about this ramshackle project. Proper fasteners or magic would be far more elegant, but this didn’t have to look pretty; it just had to work. With the help of two more clamps, I at least had the ward emitters all on the same bar and facing the same direction.
That was the easy part. The real issue was that each of the three emitters had a bundle of unlabeled cables emerging from the back like a synthetic ponytail, and I had no idea what to attach them to, let alone how to make sure they were getting the right power and signals. At a ripple theory level, I understood that these wards were supposed to generate a fully enclosed field that absorbed and dissipated red and pink ripple, but the hardware was far beyond my ken.
“Uh…”
“Table to your right. See those three breadboards? You do know what a breadboard is?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped, “But I’m not really a…hardware person. Don’t know where to plug any of this in.”
“Use the schematics!” She pointed at my laptop, which was sitting in a cleared region of the nearest of the fold-out tables. The android had sent me all the necessary diagrams and schematics for each individual magical and electrical component, but there was no grand plan for how to put all of it together into a working machine; the closest it came was an absurdly messy whiteboard next to the laptop that bore a mixture of magical notation I understood and electronics diagrams I didn’t. Worst of all, the scribbled notes were all in Japanese, making it all even more impenetrable.
“Sure,” I muttered. “It’s—why aren’t you the one doing this, with your five degrees? Weren’t you here while Ai was working on it?”
In response, Ebi tilted her head meaningfully at the third person in the room.
“It might not look like it to you, but I have my hands full trying to keep her alive.”
Takagiri was looking really quite bad. Her flesh looked even more sickly than before, and she’d developed a distinct set of tremors. Her face was drooping in a way that made me concerned she was having a stroke; I guessed that sleep deprivation this extreme was probably having similar effects. She was having serious issues stringing words together, too, and I’d mostly given up on trying to communicate with her, even for encouragement.
She still insisted on pacing to and fro as a way to keep herself awake and was accompanied in stride by Ebi, who’d already caught her from hitting the floor twice. Those moments of lapsed consciousness were becoming more frequent, which only worried me more as I tried to wrap my head around the mess Ai had made. Supposedly, these moments of micro-sleep weren’t enough for Sugawara to invade her mind; this was a good thing, since it meant that he wouldn’t know that the Radiances were coming for him nor have a chance to set off the still-hypothetical bomb attached to her soul, but I was starting to wonder if that was a worthwhile tradeoff.
The Radiances were supposed to set out in a few minutes, and from there, it was a few minutes’ flight to the hospital-cum-prison where Sugawara hopefully was; even if he were warned right now—which itself made assumptions about how swift and easy his access to Takagiri’s recollections was—could he, as a comatose body in a hospital bed, even do anything? Aside from the bomb, again. And if he wasn’t there, moved by whatever remnants of his faction still clung to him, then maybe the advance warning would cause more of a problem for us. Maybe.
That was to say it really just seemed like a lot of ‘ifs’ and speculation between Takagiri and the sleep she absolutely needed. And given how infuriatingly slowly I was making progress on the coffin, I had half a mind to just make the call to let her sleep and deal with the consequences after the fact. Especially if Ebi wasn’t going to help me.
“Seriously? There’s nothing else you can do to help out?”
Ebi’s voice modulated down to a serious, dire tone. “You do not want me any nearer to this thing if you accidentally turn it on.”
I remembered something from earlier today, how Ai had mentioned offhandedly that the walls had pink and red in them. That’s just Ebi, she’d said.
“Fine,” I shrugged, annoyance building. “But it’s—it’s not going well, if you can’t tell,” I admitted as I hobbled over to the laptop to inspect the ward emitters’ pinout schematics. “If there’s anything you can do, then do it.”
“Overpromised and underdelivered, did ya?”
“If you’re not going to do it, somebody has to,” I snapped, picking up the laptop. My frustration was spilling over toward my low mobility; I was losing precious time ambling back and forth between the coffin and the laptop, with my foot still a little ginger.
At that moment, I heard the room’s doorknob click. I whirled to face it on reflex, tattoo itching with a surge of anticipation. There was no reason for anybody to be down here; it wasn’t that late at night, but Ai’s students and machinists had all cleared out for the day, and the Radiances were all up top, due to head out any minute now. The memory of creepy happenings elsewhere in this basement earlier today caused my tattoo to stir; what if Takagiri hadn’t been hallucinating? What if something was here? What if Sugawara had somehow gotten enough information in those moments of microsleep, and now he was making—
Ebi emitted a digital imitation of a snort. “Ha! The way you jumped!”
I glared at her. “You’re fucking pranking me now? Fuck off!”
“No,” she chuckled. “Somebody more qualified has arrived.”
The door swung open, and there stood Amane, wearing her soft nightclothes and a determined expression. I made it halfway through the first phoneme of objecting to her participation before realizing that she’d most certainly had enough of that. She walked into the room, head held high. A small hitch in her gait betrayed that she was most definitely feeling Takagiri’s radiated pain, but it didn’t slow her down, nor reach her face.
“Um,” I stammered, “I’m guessing the others don’t know you’re here?”
She replied in Japanese, which Ebi was happy to interpret in real time for me. “They’re up on the roof. Fuck knows I’m not going to stay all alone up in the penthouse when somebody needs help down here. I know these systems better than anyone, even Ai-chan.”
I raised an eyebrow in Ebi’s direction about the insertion of “fuck knows,” which didn’t sound very mahou shoujo at all. She met it with a virtual raised eyebrow of her own. Then the relief hit, and I decided I didn’t care about that. I looked back to Amane.
“Okay—um—alright—yes,” I landed. “Please.”
A few minutes later, Ebi displayed a video on the wall via the room’s overhead projector. It was a live feed of Alice’s perspective—essentially bodycam footage, which when combined with the cover of night blanketing this mission, left me feeling a little like we were doing something illegal. Which we were.
Alice, Hina and Yuuka were gathered on the rooftop as we were in the basement, making their final checks before setting out. All three were mantled, but they’d changed their costumes to something much less flashy and decorated; instead of whites and vibrant, saturated colors matching their gemstones, dark greys and blues predominated, and where there had previously been decorative brooches and tassels, now there was nothing. These versions of the mantles were lower-profile, stealthy, not for the public’s eyes. If the mantles could generally be thought of as fighter jets, these configurations were more like stealth bombers, complete with radar invisibility and currently inactive camouflage. The girls’ eyes still glimmered in the dark, though, Hina’s impossible blue and the angry crimson crags of Yuuka’s gemstone sharply visible through what we saw of Alice’s gaze.
They launched off the rooftop platform as one, a violent jerk of motion that sent my stomach spinning so badly that I had to avert my eyes from the wall and instead focus on the nest of electronics in my hands. My glimpse of their takeoff was still long enough to glean something of note: in this stripped-down mode, much of the usual artifice was gone, which meant that their flight produced no actual streams of energy in their wake, at least not at these speeds; it was more like rapid Superman-style floating than rocket-powered acceleration.
“Is this two-way?”
“Not in, like, a video call sense,” Ebi explained, reaching out to flick Takagiri’s nose, the latest in an increasingly-dubious set of tricks to help keep her awake for just a bit longer. “They’d freak out if they knew Amane was down here with us.”
I only snuck occasional glances at the screen as they flew; they were low enough that you could still somewhat make out the terrain below, which wasn’t nearly as high as—to pick a random example—a high-altitude Spire maintenance stream where it seemed like they were just floating in a misty void, and that was too low for my acrophobic sensibilities.
Amane’s assistance with the coffin had been transformative. Not only did she know exactly how all the little components fit together, the telekinetic modules in her arm were fantastically suited to the subtle dexterity required to fit the electronics together, just like the screws in my computer case last week. She inserted pins into breadboards and {AFFIXED} together electronics too delicate for clamps with a swiftness and precision that told me she knew exactly what she was doing, which was a huge relief—enough to paper over the envy I felt. Occasionally, my hand and foot would throb and her face would flicker into a mask of pain, but it didn’t slow her down.
The other Radiances were going fast too. The video stream of Alice’s vision included small diagnostic readouts, among which was a speed gauge currently registering well above the speed of sound as the trio of magical girls shot across the sky; an icon on the readout had flickered for a moment as her mantle suppressed the sonic boom to keep a low profile. There was a frankly dizzying amount of information crammed into the corners of what we were seeing, too much to reasonably keep track of; I had to remind myself that this was a sort of debug and diagnostic view, and that Alice herself was receiving much of this information more intuitively through the mantle’s pink ripple channels. She didn’t have to look to know her airspeed or orientation or position relative to her teammates or the ground. I was envious of that quasi-omniscience, the lack of a clunky interface, the data direct to the mind through infomancy. I’d have that with a mantle of my own.
“Ezzen,” Amane prodded me with a bionic finger. “Ugoite.”
I blinked, then flinched, then cringed at my own moment of distraction.
As I clumsily laid the bar of ward emitters into place on Amane’s direction, the away team began to slow and descend, the blob of light that made up Yokohama crystallized into a nighttime skyline twinkling in thousands of distinct lights from the buildings and cars. They descended further, far too rapidly for me to stomach, going away from the densest lights and toward the edge of the city.
They didn’t land all the way, instead slowing to a hover at what the readout said was two hundred meters above the ground. Below them lay Sugawara’s prison, semi-isolated from the rest of its neighborhood by a copse of trees. Acrophobia made my stomach jump a little bit as Alice’s view of the building zoomed in. Like Lighthouse Tower, it had once been a hospital and now served to house a flamebearer—but instead of a home base, it had become a prison. Nominally.
“Not liking this,” Alice muttered. “No guards.”
In reality, the Radiances were going in expecting it to be the final redoubt of Sugawara’s sect, a fortress inhabited by his most fanatic followers and fortified with whatever scraps of magitech they still had from before he had been deposed, like more weapons in the style of Takagiri’s swords or potentially more esoteric weaponry. The layout was also a dark mirror of Lighthouse Tower—where the Radiances’ base was vertical, the prison was no more than five or six floors and distributed much more horizontally, with distinct north and west wings.
Something like envy briefly stole my attention when I noticed Alice’s bust at the bottom of her vision, an entirely unwarranted emotion for this moment. I was spared from having to shove aside the feeling myself when Alice raised her head to look at her teammate.
“Yuuka? Close enough?”
The team’s precog nodded. She would have been hard to make out in the dark if not for the various sensors of Alice’s mantle amplifying the visibility and highlighting Yuuka in the heads-up display. She looked even more goth in this darker version of her outfit, with previously metal-looking fixtures retextured to dark plastics and much of her smooth, pale skin now covered by a dark, skintight bodysuit. My mind wandered somewhere it ought not have for a moment until Yuuka replied to her teammate’s prompt. She stared down at the hospital below.
“Yep. He’s—yeah, he’s down there. And still…konsui,” she muttered, switching back into Japanese for lack of vocabulary.
“Comatose,” Ebi supplied for me. I glared at her, having already figured it out myself from context.
Yuuka’s expression darkened. “But we’re in for a brawl. And…we’re not rescuing Ogawa-san or…oh. We’ll find Kiriya-san.”
“Alive?” Alice’s tone was pessimistic.
Yuuka was quiet for a beat too long. “…Yes.”
“They’re torturing her?” asked Hina, straight to the point. There was a note of contained, anticipatory energy in her voice.
Yuuka replied with only a hollow nod as she tore her eyes away from the prison, too rattled by whatever she was seeing to make a jab at Hina about sadomasochism. That made Hina’s shockingly blue eyes narrow, her fingerless gloves bunching into fists—what I’d interpreted as sadistic anticipation may have actually been rage.
Next to me, Amane’s hands paused on my laptop keyboard. My heart dropped into my stomach, idle fantasies of feminine bodies immediately banished by horror.
“Um,” I asked the room, “Kiriya-san isn’t a flamebearer, right? So there’s no…”
“No reason to do it,” Ebi confirmed. “Maybe blood magic, but more likely just to provoke us.”
Amane raised her wrist to her mouth and whispered something into it, voice tight. Her prosthetic was apparently linked into the mantle comms network, judging by how the Radiances on-screen visibly flinched.
“Go loud,” Ebi translated for my benefit. “Get her back.”
“What if it’s bait?” I asked. It felt awfully convenient for them to leave just one of the two Todai operatives alive.
“Could be. Won’t matter.”
On the screen, Hina nodded as though she’d heard me, though she was probably responding to Amane. “Well, it’s not like we were just gonna walk through the front door.”
“Do you know where exactly she is? Or Sugawara?” Alice asked Yuuka.
“He’s where we left him. She’s…up top, I think; I see a window. North side, I think.” She pointed at the appropriate spot, and a marker appeared in Alice’s HUD. “Start there?”
“Yes,” Alice confirmed, waving to Hina.
The Sapphire Radiance grinned. I recognized that as bloodlust, at least. “Right through the roof?”
“No, they have a hostage; if they have time to react, things could get messy. Blink in, find her, free her. I’ll get her to safety while you two go after him. Then you can go loud.”
“We killing?”
Surprisingly—or maybe not surprisingly at all—that came from Yuuka. Alice sighed.
“Aside from him? Try not to, alright?”
“No promises,” Yuuka muttered. She looked over to Hina. “Well, kemono. Fetch.”
Hina nodded and flipped midair so she was facing downward. Her legs tensed into a crouch, compressing against nothing—then she launched earthward, receding to a speck in an instant with a dull whoosh. I had just enough time for my breath to catch and to be confused, since it looked like she was about to crash straight through the building, the exact opposite of what Alice had said. But instead of a thunderous impact, she just…vanished, shifting into the fourth dimension.
Imagine a box drawn on a piece of paper. From the two-dimensional perspective of a flatlander living in the paper’s world, the box would be closed, the interior inaccessible from any of the possible directions they can move in their two dimensions. But if you, a human, were to put your finger right in the middle of the box from your lofty, transcendent position in the third dimension, you’d find those walls utterly irrelevant. You wouldn’t be phasing through them per se; you’d simply be approaching them from a direction in which they don’t exist.
This is what Hina did, only raised one dimension up, a four-dimensional intruder into the three-dimensional box that was the prison’s interior. She went around the roof of the prison, intersecting our slice of reality again once she was inside. We in the basement of Lighthouse Tower didn’t have a camera feed from her, only Alice, but it was easy to imagine her blinking and dashing through the halls in search of Ms. Kiriya.
Four long, quiet seconds passed, and then the north wall of the prison exploded outward in a sapphire flash. From our lofty perspective, it looked almost comical, a demolition in miniature. But the spark of blue that shot outward and upward back toward us was very real; she had left destruction in her wake and carried in her arms a limp, red body. Bile rose into my throat as I saw in closer detail what had been done to Kiriya; she didn’t have much skin left.
“She’s alive,” Hina confirmed as she flew up to her teammates. “Back home? Ebi?”
“No,” Ebi said, taking in the Todai operative’s grisly, defiled state in a flash and making the executive call. “Too far, and I’ve got my hands full here. I’m calling the next nearest hospital now. On your HUD…now. They’ll take care of her.”
“Agreed,” Alice confirmed urgently. “You take her there, Hina—”
Hina rocketed away before Alice could even finish her sentence, leaving just the team’s leader and precog. It had hardly been ten seconds since Alice had authorized Hina to go in, and that was already one mission objective done: rescue whoever had survived. One Radiance had taken seconds to storm through and rescue a captive and get out untouched.
“They’re not well-equipped,” observed Alice, putting my thoughts to words.
“They can’t stop us,” Yuuka agreed. Something glittered through the air around her as she looked down at the hospital, some sort of half-summoned weapon or preparation for further magic.
Down below, the flicker of flashlights was visible as a handful of cultists began to spill into the area surrounding the hole Hina had blown.
“Yuuka,” Alice said.
“Alice.”
“I know you’re angry. Don’t get stupid.”
Hina’s voice came through the comms. “But give ‘em the what-for anyway!”
“Damare,” Yuuka growled.
“Also, touching down at the hospital now, looks like they’ve already got a stretcher, and—hai, Radiance Sapphire desu—”
As Hina became embroiled in handing over Kiriya, the remaining two Radiances began to plan their own entry, and I forced myself to stop looking at the screen. I glanced at Amane, who seemed transfixed by what we had just seen.
“Amane?” I reached out to poke her, as she had done to me—she almost shrieked when my finger made contact, scrambling away, eyes wild. I retracted my hand hurriedly, cursing my stupidity. This was clearly a reprise of old trauma for Amane, and startling her was woefully insensitive of me. “Uh, shit, sorry. You okay?”
Amane took a deep breath, then glanced at Ebi and Takagiri. Ebi nodded reassuringly at her and said something in Japanese, which convinced Amane to take a deep breath, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Daijoubu.” She strode back over toward the coffin, a slight hitch in her step. We were getting close to being able to turn it on; the wiring was mostly in place, and now, we just had to double check that everything had been hooked up correctly before we turned it on for calibration; if we’d made a mistake, we risked frying Ebi.
I limped over to the whiteboard where we’d assorted the most relevant hardware connections, glancing again at Takagiri. At this point, she’d given up on pacing, and was standing slumped against Ebi, who had replaced one hand with a mechanism I couldn’t identify other than that it had a little electrical arc on the end. She was gently zapping Takagiri awake every ten or fifteen seconds.
“Just—just a few more minutes,” I assured her.
She didn’t respond verbally, but her eyes did flick to me briefly before unfocusing back to staring into empty space. Ebi gave me an encouraging thumbs up with her free hand. “I think you’ll make it at this rate.”
“Great,” I muttered, looking between one of the breadboards and the whiteboard’s notes. I wasn’t quite sure what this part did, to be perfectly honest, but I could at least make sure that everything connected how it was supposed to. “Looks good here,” I called to Amane.
She raised a prosthetic thumbs-up from where she was crouched next to the coffin’s head. It was looking slightly more coffin-like now; one of the big modifications Ai had wanted to make was the addition of some damping panels near the head, which she hadn’t gotten around to installing but Amane and I had managed to finagle into place. In theory, those would help distribute the load to the various wards lower down the body, and they filled out the skeletal structure somewhat, at least near the head.
As Amane rose back to her feet, motion in the corner of my eye made me turn; some part of me was still braced to see a ghost in the corner, but of course, it was just the stream on the wall. Alice and Yuuka were descending, down and down, until they were hovering just above the prison’s center. Alice touched down all the way, dark, slim boots making contact with the prison’s rooftop. She manifested her staff in her hand—again, with no flash or other decorative animation—and pressed the tip to the rooftop. Next to her, Yuuka held up four fingers, then three, then two, then one, then—
A thunderclap came from the stream’s audio, and the roof was no more. Without ceremony, the girls dropped into the last lair of Sugawara’s cult. A man in a sweater and slacks was the unfortunate first contact; he skidded to a stop in front of the sudden cloud of debris, then turned and began to run the other way, shouting furiously. Yuuka shot down the hall and collided with him in a flying kick, sending him to the floor and probably breaking at least a few bones. She was already moving past him, and Alice sprinted after her.
They moved through the corridors at a lightning pace. Nobody could stand in their way at first; all the cultists they encountered were unarmed and unaugmented humans and were either completely ignored or shoved to the side. The Radiances said nothing, moving in easy sync as they advanced.
The first real bit of resistance was when Yuuka held an arm out to signal a halt as they came to an intersection. A moment later, an orange beam of energy shot across the space they’d have run into. Yuuka strode around the corner, and then there was a scream. Alice followed a moment later, revealing that Yuuka had kicked the cultist in the groin and pried the ‘gun’ from his hand.
“Duct tape and hardware store parts,” Alice observed. “But they’ve got a Flame benefactor, at least.”
“Not a very good one,” Yuuka opined. “That wouldn’t have done anything anyway.”
“Still.”
Alice tossed the doohickey into her pocketspace, and they resumed their advance. They ducked into a random, vacant hospital room not unlike the ones on Lighthouse Tower’s eighteenth floor; Yuuka counted them in once again; Alice obliterated the floor, and they dropped down another level. It wasn’t entirely clear to me why they were taking this route, but it seemed like they were encountering relatively few cultists. Or maybe there just weren’t that many to begin with.
Another floor down, resistance became fiercer, and the cultists…weirder. More and more of them were in states of undress, dim mirrors to how so many people at the festival had been topless—some of Hikanome’s practices remained consistent between its iterations, it seemed. These members were more fanatic; one tried to charge Alice, which felt almost like he was underwater compared to how swift the Radiances moved. We viewers got a disgusting up-close shot of open wounds on his chest before she slammed him into a wall. He tried to scramble to his feet, so she hit him again. He tried to get up a third time, and she sighed and shot him in the knee with her staff.
“Yuuka. Sanguimancy.”
“Yep. Not for anything big, I think.”
The next person they encountered made Amane gasp. He was gangly, with close-shaved hair, and was bleeding openly from the stump of his left elbow. I thought her reaction was just because of the gore—but I put the pieces together when Yuuka roared. There was a blur of light and motion, and suddenly, the man was right in front of the Radiances, moving far too fast, laughing at us. The space where his arm should have been shimmered unnaturally as he reared back to swing—
Alice shot him in the head. We saw it so clearly through the stream that I jumped back involuntarily in shock. The beam removed the center of his cranium and he slumped over, dead. She prodded the corpse with the tip of her boot.
“What the fuck,” said Yuuka. “That’s Kazuha.”
I glanced at Amane, then Ebi. Clearly this was somebody from their history with the cult, but I had no idea who. “Who?”
“One of Sugawara’s old lieutenants,” Ebi supplied. “Trust me, he deserved that.”
Amane looked—not shaken. She was actually grinning at the image of the corpse, which was a little disturbing. Then she caught the look I was giving her and turned away from it hastily to keep testing the coffin; we were a handful more checks away from being able to power it on.
“So this is the last of them,” Alice said onscreen. “And they’re not attempting to run.”
At this point, Hina blinked into existence next to them. “Hey! Oh, hey, dead Kazuha!”
“Kiriya is stable?”
“They’re taking care of her! Also, there’s some funky netting in the out-space around here. I think it’s for me. Smells bloody.”
“I’m liking this less and less,” Alice said. “Yuuka, you’re sure this isn’t a trap?”
“Things are getting fuzzier,” she admitted, looking down the hall. “But it’s not a trap. He’s there. Hina, don’t jump any more. The ‘net’ is—”
She fell silent a second before a sword blade came through the wall. It would have struck Hina, but Yuuka shoved her to the side and grabbed the blade in a way that would have definitely cut her hand open if this were her real body. She snapped it off and yelled something at the wall. While Hina strolled through the adjacent doorway to put paid to whoever had just been stupid enough to ambush the precog, Yuuka and Alice inspected the broken-off blade.
“Was phenomenally stupid to grab it like that,” Alice chided.
“It’s like Takagiri’s,” Yuuka defended. “Which we’re specifically proofed against now. I knew it was fine.” She looked directly at the ‘camera,’ addressing me. “Nice one, Ezza.”
“Uh, thanks,” I replied, before remembering that I was the only one here who couldn’t directly speak back to them.
“As I was saying,” Yuuka resumed, “the net isn’t to catch you. I think breaking it will trigger something red or pink, so just don’t touch it, kemono.”
“Whatever you say, babe!”
The Radiances arrived at Sugawara’s room less than a minute after. There were four guards outside, big and burly and carrying what were definitely smuggled ripple rifles; Hina dispatched all four with trivial ease and blinding speed, literally throwing the first into the rest and disarming them in the chaos. These ones didn’t seem like fanatical cult members, more like hired guns, and they didn’t seem keen on spending their lives fighting flamebearers, electing to stay down.
After a quick nod of approval from Yuuka, Hina kicked in the door as well, and the Radiances came face to face with arguably their oldest nemesis.
At least what remained of him.
Author’s Note:
Finally back into the action. The Radiances sure do make quick work of regular humans, even ones using sanguimancy and ramshackle magitech. I wonder what Sugawara’s been up to!
As a reminder, you can read the next three chapters by supporting me on Patreon, as well as see art commissions before they become public. Thank you to everyone who’s supporting the story already!
This week’s art is a break from the posters, because I commissioned some art that I wanted to share before the end of pride month:
Art by Cloudya. I’m working on making a nice photo gallery for all the commissioned art now that we’ve started to accumulate a bunch. Also, the arc 3 cover is almost done, so hopefully you’ll see that replace the placeholder by next week.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna get very busy soon, but I’m hoping to be able to maintain regular updates at least until the end of the arc.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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