“An actual fucking ghost. Made of his Flame.” My head was buzzing with adrenaline from the last two minutes as I stared at the point in space where Sugawara had disappeared.
“Sure looks like it,” Ebi agreed. “Right back from the dead, a Flame facsimile of who they used to be. Who’d’ve thunk?”
“And he—and he went through the camera, like my Flamefall, and—holy fuck, my nose is bleeding,” I remembered. I wiped the back of my hand against my nose and was relieved to see less blood than there could have been. “This is just capillary blood, right? I’m not about to keel over from frying my frontal lobe and it’s just taking a while to catch up? Ebi?”
“You’re doing better than anybody else in the room, Ezzen.”
She was right: our shit was rocked.
Takagiri’s very soul had been put through the crucible, and though she was now finally getting some well-deserved sleep, it was impossible to say what kinds of effects the experience would have when paired with the extreme sleep deprivation she’d endured. I shuddered to think of the nightmares she might have been having; I expected that my own would feature twisting brambles and that hateful, incinerating desire to consume. I’d only made surface-level contact with what remained of Hikanome’s former cult leader compared to what Takagiri had gone through.
Amane had burned out and discarded her arm in the fighting, and now that we had a moment to breathe, the concentrated ripple we’d endured was leaving its mark on her. She had started coughing in the wet, phlegmy way that meant something was definitely wrong inside and had hurriedly sat down. Ebi immediately moved in to interface with her charge’s bionics.
As for me, the mania of combat and survival had me too jittery to focus on speculation as to the magical mechanics of what Sugawara had wrought; my senses were consumed by the real and present environment around me, still a little in fight-or-flight mode. In an effort to calm down, I sat down awkwardly next to the Radiance and her android doctor, far enough that I wouldn’t crowd them but close enough that I could feel like I was providing moral support with my presence, for whatever little that counted. I took a few deep, slow breaths in an effort to convince my body that the danger had passed—though I couldn’t prove it really had.
“She okay?”
“I’m fine,” Amane confirmed in thickly accented English, trying to sit up. She only made it halfway before she was consumed by another coughing fit. Ebi tutted at her and made her lie back down on the concrete floor.
“I’m keeping her stable,” Ebi answered for me.
I peeked shamefully at Amane’s exposed midriff, the area that had a bunch of silver ports and black plastic embedded in it, the bionics that were probably more important to her survival than her replacement limbs or eye. All five of Ebi’s fingers had found interfacing points, plunging into her abdomen. It wasn’t gory, but the edges of the implant were oozing blood, and even outside of that, it was distinctly skin-crawling for me to watch the maximally invasive medical hardware at work. I shifted my gaze to Ebi’s face instead; it was still scrambled into static.
“Are you good?” I asked.
“Hear that?”
“What? No? What am I listening for?” Then I realized I was hearing something distant, the very edge of a rising and falling wail. “Oh, shit. Sirens? Ripple alarms?”
“Yep. None in here, but they’re on every aboveground floor of the building. And I can’t turn them off.”
“And normally you can?” I inferred. Being so integrated into the systems of Lighthouse Tower, Ebi should have had seamless access to those systems, like how I’d been able to call for her earlier today. “Fuck. Shit. Should we clear out? Is it safe down here for…” I darted my eyes meaningfully in the direction of the not-quite-surgery she was performing.
“We’re already through the worst of it, and you’re all flamebearers. So it’s…fiiiiiiine, probably.” The vowel dragged out at a perfectly even pitch, like a program that had momentarily frozen, which was worrying.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“It’s a symptom of the bigger issue. I’m a little scrambled right now, pretty much stuck within this body until…well, until things settle down and/or Ai gets a chance to pop me open and fix me up. Also means I can’t turn off the sirens—remotely, anyway, and as you can see, I’m kinda occupied—or pull in some of my bigger tools, and, most importantly, I can’t get back in touch with the girls. Call them.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. Our own battle had been so intense I’d temporarily forgotten that the last we’d seen of them had been them springing a trap of unknown magic in the middle of hostile territory. And he’d jumped through Alice’s eye, or at least that of her mantle, to get here. I had an awful image of Alice writhing on the ground, being assaulted by the remnant briars of Sugawara’s malice while Hina and Yuuka were beset by secret assassins of Takagiri’s caliber, Yuuka’s eye failing her and Hina immobilized by the “net” they’d been talking about.
I rushed to pull my phone out of my pocket—my right pocket, which was a challenge when my right hand was in even worse condition than usual. The fingers were sluggish to respond, and my sense of touch was muted, the nerves’ limited capacity taken over by throbbing pain that came from the remaining red ripple floating around—and having absolutely roasted the skin of my arm with an extreme-intensity manifestation of my Flame. I’d kind of tuned that part out. It really should have been hurting more, and I silently thanked Ebi for the shot of painkillers she’d given me. I also suspected that my arm’s healing would involve some level of mutations; the pile of medical checkups that we’d already been meaning to do had grown to a rather ridiculous scale. I needed to stop getting into fights.
I gave up on using that arm to grab my phone and reached awkwardly across with my left, hurriedly scrolling through my phone. Suzuki Hina came up before Takehara Alice in alphabetical order, so she was the first one I called. The dial tone lasted only a tenth of a second before my girlfriend picked up.
“Cutie, holy shit, you’re okay?” Her voice was raspy, like she was winded from fighting hard. “When the call went dead after that fucker went through, we thought—oh, shit, are those the ripple sirens?”
“It’s—yeah, but we’re fine—how can you hear those through the phone? I can barely hear them here!” Next to me, Ebi made a little “get to the point”swatting motion with her free hand, the one not interfacing with Amane’s midsection. I coughed awkwardly. “Um, okay, no, we’re not completely fine. Sugawara came here when he went through the camera, but we got rid of him. Things are stable,” I assured them with confidence I didn’t quite feel. “Are you okay?”
“Chillin’! I was scared when he jumped through Alice but she’s fine, we’re fine, and we’re cleaning up now, lots of fun, everybody left is just humans so it’s—yeah, okay, Alice, fine.”
A few clicking noises heralded that the phone had been handed over, and Alice’s voice came through. “Ezzen, he came into the tower? Alive?”
“As—a Flame spirit or something, I don’t know what to call it. Does that mean we don’t have to have our, um, ‘honest debate about the existence of the soul,’ or…?”
“Is that a joke? A Flame spirit?”
“Um, yeah? I was sort of hoping you knew what that was, because I don’t.”
“Well—you’re burying the lede, Ezzen. Are you saying you killed him?”
I bit my lip, knowing they wouldn’t be happy about this part. “He got away. Blinked out.”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a few moments. Then I flinched as a yell came through the speaker. It was too muffled to make out the words, but from the tone, I could tell that it was a roar of frustration from…I presumed Yuuka. Alice spoke over her teammate’s rage, softly but urgently.
“Can you track him?”
“No! Things are a mess here, and we’re all too roughed up. Sorry,” I added, feeling genuinely ashamed.
Hina shouted out. “But you beat him! Yuuka, calm down, they still beat him. Babe, should I go back and look around?”
“He’s…I think he’s long gone,” I sighed. “Sorry, again.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Alice assured me, “This is way outside anything I could have imagined from this. Splitting himself out of his whole body…insane, but we can figure out what exactly he did and how to find him later. Let’s declare mission success for the night, in terms of getting our people back and eliminating the old Hikanome’s last stronghold. Ezzen, how bad is it over there, other than the sirens?”
“Uh…Takagiri’s safe, asleep in the coffin, and I don’t think he’ll be coming back to haunt her. No bomb, it turns out. He…tried to take control of her, but I did some stuff with my Flame and burned him out, and then he ran away when we tried to capture him in the coffin.”
There was a pregnant pause before Alice replied. “And by ‘stuff with your Flame,’ you mean…”
“No blood magic! I think. I mean, there’s blood, but I didn’t sacrifice anything, and, um—”
“Awww,” Hina interrupted, sounding terribly disappointed. “But you’re okay?”
“I think so. Um—I don’t want to take all the credit, it was a team effort between me and Takagiri. Ebi and Amane helped too, and, uh…fuck,” I blurted, realizing the mistake I made even as the other end of the call got very noisy. Amane wasn’t supposed to be down here. Yuuka and Alice, at least, had made it quite clear they wanted her as far as possible away from Takagiri, and that had been under circumstances far more mild than the combat I’d just described. I heard some scattered, staticky muttering from the other end, and then a new voice came on the line: Yuuka. Hina’s phone must have been on speaker. “What do you mean Amane helped?”
I cast a panicked glance over at Amane, who was squeezing her eyes shut as Ebi performed what seemed an awful lot like internal surgery. It briefly crossed my mind to lie, to tell them that she had been helping in some indirect way and any injury was because she’d been rocked by the ambient ripple that had set off the wailing sirens even way up in the penthouse—but realistically, that jig would be up as soon as they got back anyway. Honesty was the best policy.
“She was—she came down here to help with the coffin. And got caught up in the fighting. But she’s fine, really, I swear.” I briefly lowered the phone and hit mute to talk to Ebi. “She is fine, right?”
“Tell them she’s at a five.”
“Out of ten?” That honestly didn’t sound as bad as I had expected.
“Her scale is lower on both ends than yours.”
“…Oh.” I unmuted the phone. “Ebi says she’s at a five.”
Alice’s response was instant. “We’re coming back right now.”
“Fuck fuck fuck, I knew there had to be a catch.” Hina whined, a response that worried me more about the severity of the situation than the actual state of the room around me.
Yuuka growled. “You put her face to face with him and didn’t even fucking kill him?”
“Yuuka, no,” Alice cut in. “That’s not fair and you know it. Ezzen, we’re on our way back. Sit tight for a few minutes, yeah?”
“Um, yeah.” Then I noticed that Amane was making a grabbing gesture in my direction with her good arm. “Wait, hold on, I’m giving the phone to Amane.”
I passed it over. Amane raised the phone to her ear, hissed something at her teammates, and then jabbed the “End Call” button with her thumb, glaring at the phone. She handed it to Ebi, who gave it back to me.
I accepted the phone with a skeptical look at the grumpy Radiance. “…Not made of glass, I take it?”
She snorted and looked up at the ceiling, seeming more exasperated and exhausted than in pain. Ebi interpreted as she began to speak. “I wasn’t going to get into an argument over the phone. You saw upstairs how hard it is to get them to listen when the weather is good, and when it’s bad? I’d rather just do what has to be done and ask for forgiveness after.”
“Mm,” I replied sympathetically. My good hand picked at the singed skin on my other wrist. I realized what I was doing and stopped. “Yeah. That sounds…tedious.”
Amane nodded, tensed up for a moment as Ebi wriggled a finger in her midsection, then shifted a bit, raising her remaining hand to use it as a pillow against the concrete. “They’ll forgive me. It wasn’t even that bad.”
“This isn’t that bad?” I waved my burned hand in the general direction of the coffin.
“Building’s still standing,” Ebi pointed out in her own voice. “And not only did I not have to open either of you up, I think you’ll even get to sleep in your own beds tonight instead of in the medical ward. Compared to the barbie, I’d say that’s a solid success, even if we didn’t kill the fucker.” She had inserted “the barbie” as a soundbite of Yuuka’s voice.
Amane tilted her head to look at her kneeling caretaker with her one vivid green eye and said something Ebi didn’t translate. It sounded like a joke, but that would be sort of weird given what I understood of Amane’s history with Sugawara. I looked between the two of them. “Uh?”
Ebi replied to her in Japanese, then turned her head to look at me, which was a little unsettling when she didn’t have a face. “Nothing.” She retracted her fingers from the ports in Amane’s belly, the pinky and ring fingers telescoping back down to reasonable lengths while the others, far more wicked and invasive-looking, folded out of our plane to be replaced by regular digits. She patted her hands together with a soft clack. “Okay, let’s see if I can’t get you two cleaned up by the time the girls get home.”
We spent the next few minutes doing just that. Amane’s discarded arm would need repairs, but for now, her one-armed status was easily resolved by Ebi, who disappeared Hina-style and reappeared a moment later holding what looked like a slightly older version of the bionic limb and helped her fit it on. This version had an audible whirring to its movements as she tested its range of motion. Satisfied, she stood with Ebi’s help and went over to a panel on the wall. She hit a button, and her voice began to echo over the PA system, speaking surprisingly crisply and evenly, and soon, the sirens finally stopped wailing.
That was a mask all the Radiances were experienced in putting on in crisis situations, I imagined, and I felt some envy at their ability to enter that mode. I had fantasies of being able to entirely take command of a situation, like the Vaetna could, but in reality, I knew that I’d become a fumbling mess the moment I had to actually start giving orders.
“Is that the all-clear?”
“To use the weather metaphor, she’s saying it’s still overcast, but not actively raining anymore.”
“…You can use technical terminology with me.”
“I can,” she agreed. “Arm.”
By now, my face-holes had stopped bleeding, which was great, so my freezerburnt arm represented the bulk of the external damage I’d endured. I held it out dutifully, and she sprayed it with some kind of gel before wrapping it in gauze.
“All self-inflicted again,” she noted. “Could have probably made it work with the spear instead of frying your hand.”
I was too tired to contend that I hadn’t immediately passed out like the last few times, making this an improvement. “How long til it heals? Same recovery timeline as my foot?”
The android shrugged. “Hard to say. That was your own Flame doing that, so all bets are off. I’d give it 80-20 odds it heals way faster than it should.”
“You can’t tell how much green there is?”
“My gauges are fried, dawg, and you’ll probably get a full physical tomorrow anyway. Just take off the gauze before you go to bed, and we’ll see how it is in the morning.”
Before I could interrogate the fact that an android had just called me “dawg,” I heard a sticky buzzing sound to my right, like a zipper coated in fresh glue, and reflexively turned to face the sound, fearing it was somehow Sugawara returning. Instead, my sapphire-eyed girlfriend stepped out from behind nonexistent curtains.
“Cutie! Ebi! Amane! Uh, Izumi too, I guess!” Her nose crinkled. “Oh, fuck, yeah, I can smell him.”
A pump of adrenaline shot through my system. “Fuck, where—”
Hina waved her hands hurriedly. “No, I didn’t mean it like he’s still here. But he definitely was. Let me get his nastiness out of my nose real quick.”
She bounded over to us, kneeling behind me to hug me across the shoulders and bury her nose in my hair. Animal relief at her return spread through me; I felt her smile infect my face as well. Her joy was transmissible by touch, and it was so very welcome after the brief but harrowing experience I’d just been through. “Hey.”
Hina purred into my back by way of reply, then stood as quick as an arrow to move over and hug Ebi as well before darting across the room to greet Amane in a flurry of cheerful Japanese. She was back by my side a moment later, peering at my freshly wrapped arm.
“Barbecued,” she observed.
“Hey, no,” I snapped. Ebi’s reference earlier had already been in poor taste, but I had come to expect that sort of thing from her—especially with the soundboard she had for a mouth. I drew the line when it was coming from the person who’d been directly responsible for the disaster; I really felt Hina should know better.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t drool,” Ebi chided.
Hina wiped her mouth theatrically. “I’m so happy you guys are okay! The others are coming back the slow way, so they’re a couple of minutes behind.”
“You’re just leaving the cult?” I couldn’t help but wonder. “I mean, I know you didn’t go in intending to make arrests or something, but there’s still got to be a bunch of his loyalists there, yeah? You’re not gonna…clean them up?”
“Meh, I think they’re done for, cops were starting to come in when we left. The nice thing about cults that form around us is that they don’t do so good once they’re headless. Heh, headless. We got rid of the body just in case, but I’m pretty sure that was their one shot.” She looked over to the coffin. “And that one shot was…possession? Talk me through how it happened.”
“Tried to hijack her through their connection, I think. But we forced him out.” At that, Hina’s expression turned a little hungry; I sensed she wanted the gory details of flamebearer-on-flamebearer combat. I hated to disappoint. “I, um, don’t really feel up to recounting exactly how that went down right now, sorry. It was rough.”
The barest flicker of disappointment raced across Hina’s face, gone as quickly as it had arrived. I was relieved that she recognized the boundary I had set with that statement. She took my good hand in hers. “Okay. You okay? You have to at least tell me if you’re not okay, okay?”
“I’m okay, just…just tired.” That was true enough; I was very ready to wrap this up, go to bed, and deal with all of this tomorrow, and was starting to consider ways that I could turn the conversation toward what we had to do to reach that goal. “Um, how much of this can we leave for the morning?” I asked, gesturing at the room around us.
“Depends on whether he’s gone,” Hina sighed. “How badly did you beat him?”
“We did win…I think. It felt like he was beaten, not retreating and planning to counterattack.”
We’d driven him off, certainly, but for all we knew, he might loop back on us at any moment, diving right back into Takagiri’s body. Whatever sort of ghost, spirit, phantasm, or ghoul he had become, it was all outside the realm of scientific knowledge, and we had no idea what he was capable of. We had to confirm he wasn’t waiting in the wings for us to let our guard down.
Ebi tilted her head and attacked my confidence directly. “You don’t have the experience to say he’s gone.”
“Listen—it’s a vibe, alright? I was…okay, yeah, if I’m wrong and he does come back tonight, the coffin won’t protect her,” I admitted. “All those wards face inward, and the top ones are fried anyway.”
Hina thought about this for a moment; I could practically see the gears turning behind those beautiful blue eyes. “Hm. Sounds like I gotta go hunting. Know where he went?”
“No,” I sighed. I followed her gaze to the laptop acting as the coffin’s brains, feeling guilty. “I could have been looking at the activity graphs when he blinked out, tried to at least triangulate his direction from the relative ward pressures, but things were happening fast, and—”
Amane limped back over toward us, favoring her bionic leg, and said something curt to Hina, who frowned and began to bicker back. “Hey, we have to do something about him, I’m not letting him just float around out there—no, it’s not about you specifically, babe, iraira shinaide yo!” I glanced at Ebi in a wordless plea for translation and explanation; Hina caught the look and switched fully into English. “Just, uh, I don’t get why Amane doesn’t want me to go after Sugawara.”
Ebi cut to the chase. “Because he’s not coming back. Not tonight, at least.”
Amane wordlessly gestured at her caretaker in a “See? She gets it!” kind of way.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “I mean, I want to believe it, but I feel like I’m missing context. He seemed incredibly desperate to me.”
Ebi crossed her arms. “Yeah, he’s desperate, starving animal style, and desperation is hella dangerous, but he’s also a coward. Amane and I weren’t in his head like you, Ezzie, but we knew him, and he’s probably even more distilled down to his worst qualities now that he’s a Force ghost or whatever, and that means survival at any cost. Do you really think he’s stupid enough to think he could slink back here in the dead of night, hijack Takagiri again—if he even can anymore—and then make his escape without us catching up to him? What he cares about right now is survival, and he’s smart enough to know that his best odds of surviving involve staying far as hell away from us.”
This seemed sensible to me. I didn’t particularly want to replay everything I’d felt in his head; the corrosive touch of his soul was all thorns and sharp edges that I really didn’t feel like cutting myself on with detailed recollection. But looking at what I remembered of him at the most broad level, Ebi’s analysis did seem to track: survival was his primary concern, and while rage and consumptive greed were what animated him, he did seem the type who’d prefer to live to fight another day—insofar as “live” applied to his new state of existence.
“We still can’t just leave him out there!” Hina protested.
“We can for tonight,” said a new voice from the doorway. Alice stood there, looking rather windswept; her hair, usually carefully styled, was in complete disarray, with parts sticking in every direction like the spines of an indecisive silver hedgehog. She’d probably flown back here unmantled. Yuuka was with her, still in the even-darker variant of her mantle.
“Babe!” Hina pouted. “I thought we were gonna fuckin’ end this tonight, though? How am I the voice of reason here?”
Alice pinched the bridge of her nose and paced toward us, the tip of her tail scraping on the floor behind her with a hiss that made me hope her scales were harder than the concrete. Her movements didn’t suggest injury; whatever effects Sugawara’s imitation of my flamefall had had on her seemed limited entirely to her mantle. “Having heard the arguments—well put, Ebi, by the way—I think we’re good for tonight, and we could all use a full night’s rest. And besides, we’ve got Yuuka.”
“Who’s been unreliable as shit recently,” Hina pointed out, doing something with her body that looked like shifting her weight between her legs impatiently but which I suspected was closer to a cat’s butt-wiggles as it wound up for a pounce.
“Hey, kemono, I’m fine for this,” Yuuka riposted, scanning the room with her crystalline eye. “He’s not coming back tonight, and I’ll sign that in blood once we get Ezza out of here and I can take a better look.”
Hina brightened. “Hey, if your eye’s up to it, then we can do a classic Sapphire-and-Heliotrope murder date! We could probably find and kill him by morning!”
Alice drove the heels of her hands against her temples in frustration—and probably to alleviate the ache of budding horns, if I was being honest. “Hina. The last thing we need is another clusterfuck right now. We have no idea what he’s capable of, and the one thing we do know is that he does not have to be tonight’s problem.”
Hina looked around her team for support, seemingly at a loss.
“Hey,” I interrupted softly, tugging on my girlfriend’s shirt. “Listen to them. Can we be done for tonight?”
Hina turned and looked at me, then threw her hands up. “Fine, sure, yeah. Okay. Yeah! Sure. No hunting, just letting our worst enemy wander around Tokyo. Awesome. I’m cool with that. Cutie, we need a shower.”
“We?”
We did not make half as snappy of an exit as that line implied; no simply being whisked through fourspace directly to my bedroom. In fact, not only did Hina and I walk out of the coffin’s wrecked lab and down the hall to the elevator like normal people, we were actually accompanied by the rest of the team as we piled into the elevator, sans Yuuka, who stayed behind to see if she could glean any foresight from the tides of ripple our battle had wrought or might yet wreak. Awkward silence loomed throughout our ride to the top of the building; any collective desire to debrief the night’s events was overruled by exhaustion and simply being done with this shit. Alice had an arm wrapped around Amane, who neither reciprocated nor protested. Even Ebi didn’t seem in the mood to quip.
We dispersed on the 20th floor. Alice and Amane went to their shared room, Ebi to Ai’s with its digital readout that confirmed that she was in there and had slept through it all, and Hina followed me into my suite, through the still-mostly-unfurnished anteroom and into my bedroom.
“So…‘shower’, you said?” I hadn’t had the nerve to ask whether that was innuendo until it was just the two of us alone together, but now I was trying to rally the last dregs of courage from my depleted supply. “Because, um, not to turn you down or disappoint, but if you mean, er, copulation, I really don’t have the wherewithal tonight for—”
“Cutie. Babe. You’re limping, sweaty, and still have some dried blood on your face.”
“I thought pain was, like, your whole thing?” I twirled a finger in front of my face. “This isn’t doing it for you?”
“Oh, no, it totally is, but if we’re gonna fuck, we’re gonna fuck hard when you’re feeling your best. And that’s not you tonight. Shower means shower, let’s clean up and go to bed, for reals.”
And we did just that. Even in my exhausted state, it was still a little titillating to see Hina casually strip down, but she did it quickly and without ceremony, nary a shake of her hips nor sultry look as her underwear came off. She did smile at me, but it was just one of encouragement.
“Hey, it’s just me.”
“It is,” I agreed. “Sorry, just—not used to you being naked.” I looked down at myself, still yet to undress at all. “And, um, normally I want you to look at me when I’m naked, but right now…”
“No worries!” She hopped toward the bathroom. “Gonna get the shower warmed up. Come in when you’re ready.”
The white noise of the shower’s spray brought a welcome layer of insulation from everything.
Now given some measure of privacy, I set about undressing, pulling off my shirt—Hina was right about the sweat. The garment was positively soaked through, and I hadn’t even noticed. I sniffed my armpit hesitantly and crinkled my nose at the stench, suddenly very embarrassed that I had shared an elevator with three women who had absolutely been able to smell that. And Ebi, but she didn’t have a nose. Or maybe she did, but she regularly encountered far grosser stuff than my body odor anyway.
As I pulled the shirt’s sleeve over my gauze-ensnared hand, I realized I wasn’t sure what to do about the bandages. Ebi had seemed confident the skin on my arm would heal fast, and had told me to take off the gauze before bed; was I supposed to take it off now, hardly ten minutes after it had been applied? I reached for my phone and messaged her. Then waited. My concern deepened as five seconds dragged to ten. The android usually always replied instantly.
“Hey, Hina?”
“Yeah?” Her voice was muffled by the shower door as she called over the shower’s noise.
“I’m not sure what to do about my hand’s bandages, and Ebi’s a little weird after the fight, so I can’t text her. Gonna go ask her in person what to do really quick…if that’s okay,” I added awkwardly.
“No prob!”
I grabbed a fresh shirt and set off toward Ai’s room, but as I closed my room’s door behind me and looked down the row of the team’s rooms, I saw Yuuka standing there—and not in front of her own door, instead in front of Alice and Amane’s room, hand on the doorknob. She was looking in my direction, not surprised in the slightest. I nodded briefly at her, averted my eyes, and began to route around her through the central common space, hoping to avoid a conversation when I was just trying to get past.
“Don’t get it wet, scrub it, or pick at it,” she told me.
I paused, looking at her. “Are you relaying that for Ebi?”
“Don’t need to. It’ll get nasty if you take off the gauze and try to wash it, so just try to keep it dry and then take off the gauze when you get in bed.”
“…Thanks for the prophecy. Cool. Right.” I turned around to go back to my room; the chances that Yuuka was intentionally trying to sabotage my recovery for some reason were very low, and if I didn’t have to bother Ebi, awesome.
As I turned to go back to my room, Yuuka continued, “And as for this, yeah, I’m sleeping with them tonight. Amane’s safer that way. So what?”
I furrowed my brow, wondering why she’d bothered to bring it up. Surely, she could foresee that I didn’t really care, or at least had no interest in judging her for it. “Um—good for you? Not my business, your prerogative, et cetera. Good night?”
“Night,” she said, pushing her way into Amane and Alice’s room.
Confused by that interaction, I went back into my own room and got back to undressing. I took off my foot prosthetic and was relieved to see that, despite how my foot had hurt while fighting Sugawara, it didn’t seem visibly injured, no blood or other gross biomatter. I also realized that we were probably due to look at the prototype prosthetics Ai had ordered from her underlings the day I had woken up at Todai. Would any of them be waterproof?
Those sorts of thoughts kept my mind occupied enough to not think about how I was now fully naked and about to present myself to my girlfriend, who was still waiting in the shower. I resisted the urge to wrap a towel around my waist, given that it would be discarded immediately, and limped to the closed glass door separating the toilet and basin from the unit shower.
“Okay, um,” I called out. “Ready?”
“Yeah, yeah, just come in! Don’t gotta make an event out of it.”
I pulled open the door and saw Hina lying directly in the middle of the shower floor, spread-eagle and face up, the shower’s spray aimed directly at her chest. She raised her head and an arm to wave at me. I was at a loss for words for a moment; she had somehow managed to pick one of the only possible poses that would make someone as attractive as her seem unsexy in this situation. As that minor amazement passed, I was instead filled with mild disgust at the hygienics of the arrangement. “Hey, no. That cannot be clean; it’s a shower floor.”
Hina begrudgingly got up, reddish-brown hair matting against her shoulders like a rag under the water. Then she grinned at me. “You look great! So smooth!”
“Um.”
“Aw, no good?”
I tried to put the burst of discomfort into words. “Just—no, it’s good, but…I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just don’t know what to say to that. You…look good too, I guess? Am I allowed to say that?”
She put her hands on her hips, still grinning. “Hey, thanks! It’s fine if you don’t want to talk, we’re just getting cleaned up. Like I said, this doesn’t have to be an event.” Her arm snapped outward to pluck the showerhead from its mount and brandished it upward like a firearm. She stepped toward me in one graceful step and extended her other arm invitingly as support for my clumsy, disabled self. “Shall we?”
I took the hand, blushing hard despite my valiant attempts to be unembarrassed and not think of it as “an event.” Hina sat me down on the little fold-out seat and began to gently hose me down with hot water. She’d procured a very large, blue loofah from her own bathroom, which I used to scrub myself down, trying not to look directly at her nubile form. At some point, we traded loofah and showerhead, and she did the scrubbing while I directed the water, which I expected to be more sensual but honestly just felt like…scrubbing. After a little while, I had a hunch.
“Um, the fluffy thing. Are you using that specifically so you don’t touch me directly?”
Hina wrung out her hair, looking a little guilty. “Um, yeah. Figured you’d be more comfy that way.”
“Thanks,” I muttered. “I—yeah, I know we’ve already touched each other plenty, but that’s…right now, that’s good.”
“Yay! I’m glad that’s comfy for you. What are you afraid of?”
I frowned at her. “A little direct, that.” Before her expression could collapse into disappointment, I reached out to touch her forearm gently. “It’s okay. Uh—I just don’t want to be a…lecher? A horny weirdo? Feels like that’s kind of my default.”
“Cutie, aside from some totally-within-reason wandering eyes, you’ve been pristine. Between the two of us, I have enough horny weirdo to go around, ‘kay? I’m trying really hard to respect your pace here.”
“Mm.” The affirmation was nice to hear, and at some level, I believed it, enough that I didn’t argue. It emboldened me to try to put my feelings into words. “I think you’re doing a good job, then. I feel…I don’t know, taken care of? Not like an intruder for once.”
“Being in here with you feels like hiding from dealing with Sugawara.”
I stared at her. “Hiding? We all told you that we weren’t going to deal with that tonight.”
“I know! It’s stupid! ‘Cause I feel like I’m doing shitty, like I’m not really taking care of them if I’m letting Sugawara run around out there.”
“You don’t trust Yuuka’s eye?”
“I do, mostly! She’s great, I love her, and she’s so important. But it’s been so off lately, and I’ve had this itch, like I need to cover for if she’s really wrong. Don’t feel comfy putting all our eggs in that basket. You know?”
“Uh.” I glanced at my arm, which I’d been careful to keep dry per Yuuka’s instructions. “Yeah, I guess. My fault, I suppose, since I seem to be the source of the interference.”
“No, cutie, you can’t be blaming yourself, that’s stupid.”
“Right back at you.” I felt very clever after that.
She entirely stopped moving for a second, then giggled. “Damn, you got me. I know it’s stupid, I just…okay, can you hear me out for a second?”
I eyed her, dread rising within me. “Are you about to pitch that we dry off and go out to find him alone, in the middle of the night?”
“No…”
I waved assent, relieved. “Then go on.”
“Can we sleep with the others tonight?”
Now it was my turn to entirely pause, my hand still half-raised from the gesture. “Like. In Alice and Amane’s room? In the same bed? Just making sure we’re on the same page here.”
“Mhm! We used to do it all the time when we got Amane back. Actually, with how tonight has gone, Yuuka’s probably already in there with them.”
“…She is, yeah. I saw her go in when I went to talk to Ebi,” I confirmed. “And I think she’d object rather stringently, even if the others were okay with it, which I’m not sure they would be.”
“She won’t!”
“Which you know how, exactly? Also, um, could you give me that and turn around, please?”
“Huh? Oh, sure.” She passed me the showerhead and dutifully spun around in place as I washed my crotch. It had been theoretically exposed this whole time, but I wanted to do as little as possible to draw attention to it, especially since I needed a second to familiarize myself with the freshly completely hairless state of my body. Hina continued while she was turned around. “Yuuka thinks you’re chill, don’t worry.”
“I’m worrying,” I admitted. “I mean, thinking I’m chill is one thing, but sleeping in the same bed? What if I, like, flail around in my sleep and wind up with a hand on her…” I trailed off.
Hina snorted. “Nah. Also, think about it: if there was a chance that we were gonna wind up in a cuddle pile tonight, and she wasn’t open to the idea, do you think she’d’n’t’ve done anything to make sure that didn’t happen? Like not sleeping in Amane and Alice’s room to begin with?”
It was good logic, a reminder that Hina was more calculating than she sometimes acted—or at least that she could back up her impulses with intelligent reasoning when she cared to. But there was a problem. “Weren’t you just pointing out that her foresight has been unreliable? Oh—you can turn back around now.”
“Hmpf,” she said as she turned back to me, and absolutely blasted me with those damnable puppy eyes at full force, leaning down toward me and doing an incredible impression of a pathetic, sopping wet mutt left desolate and abandoned in the rain. “Please? I promise she won’t get mad, and neither will the others, and it’ll be team bonding after everything we did tonight! And it’ll make me feel better but it won’t if it’s just me there and not you too, so please?”
I sprayed her in the face with the showerhead. Hadn’t Ebi once recommended I keep this girl away with a spray bottle? I now understood why; this upgunned version was very effective in warding off that overwhelmingly cute visage. Hina recovered quickly, wiping off her face and pouting. “Alice is so warm,” she added. “In the winter, with the room heating off and the window cracked, it’s so nice.”
Incredibly, that was what won me over. I sighed. “Sure. That does sound nice. But if they freak out, I’m pinning it on you, yeah?”
“Mhm! I’ll scape your goat, cutie.”
We finished the shower soon after and got dressed; Hina threw on some of my clean nightclothes, claiming she could still mildly smell my scent on them. I have to admit I was a big fan of seeing my garments on her smaller frame. I put my prosthetic back on and let Hina lead me to the other room, feeling quite like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to, like sneaking down into the kitchen past midnight for some leftover pie even though Dad told me that was bad for you.
It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant feeling at first, but each step along the row of doors made me more stressed. This was a far more direct and uninvited intrusion upon a girl’s space—girls, plural, in this case, which was even worse—than anything I’d done so far. I pictured how wrong this could go, all the tentative trust and goodwill I’d built up shattered in a single moment of Hina-induced disrespect of boundaries as Yuuka unloaded a torrent of expletives I’d never even heard of before. I’d gone through multiple life-or-death magical disasters in the past week, and this was engendering a very similar sort of fear in my belly. But I pressed on, sticking to Hina; she’d given me permission to use her as a shield, and I wasn’t above taking that literally if disgruntled magical girls started shooting at me.
We reached the Opal-and-Amethyst-adorned double doors, and Hina cracked the Amethyst one open unceremoniously. It was dark within, the lights already extinguished, and a faint warmth beckoned me inward, the barest caress of Alice’s aura at this distance. But immediately, Yuuka raised her voice, and my heart dropped into my stomach.
“Hina!”
“Oh fuck,” I whispered, more to myself than to Hina. Yuuka knew we were coming and was wasting no time in kicking us out.
“My eye works fine!”
“Does that mean we can come in?” Hina called back, giggling.
“Of course,” Alice said. She was laughing too, and I realized that yes, we’d been foreseen—and the girls in the room had pre-agreed to let us in. Relief washed through me as Hina turned back to face me, a big smile on her face.
“Told you!”
Author’s Note:
(Sunspot will be taking an additional week off! 3.08 will be up on August 1st. Thanks for your patience!)
Everyone is tired and hurt but surely Sugawara is a solved problem that will never return to bite our protagonists in the ass. Never ever. And we have cuddle puddle, so this is arguably the best possible outcome! Especially since Hina finally beat the stinky allegations and took a shower.
You might have noticed that Sunspot has a new cover for Arc 3! It was done by Togekko, who did an absolutely fantastic job with all the little details. If you’re interested in seeing the full art without the logo and text, plus some director’s commentary, it’s available for free members on the Patreon.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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