Hina practically bowled me over when she pounced on me. I didn’t quite fall, thanks to a feat of acrobatics on her part—she hooked her arms over my shoulders and spun me around, flowing to my opposite side in time to steady me from the very wobble she’d caused. In that brief moment of connection, I felt how she shifted her momentum in ways that were unnatural, coming to a stop too quickly and gracefully after she passed me. The azure of her eyes shone in the half-shadows, the rest of her body silhouetted against the glow from the convenience store’s glass facade. My heart fluttered as she reached for my plastic bag of goodies.
“Sweet stuff! And masks, ooh, babe, I see your angle. Little adventure, little exploration.” She grabbed the pack of masks and pulled away from me, holding them up in front of her as if to superimpose them on my face. “Yeah, good idea. Alice think of this?”
“Hey,” I mumbled, mentally lagging a little behind. I was shivering a little from the combination of the cold and elation at her presence. “Um, not Alice’s idea. I—okay, to be clear, I did tell Ebi I’m out here, this isn’t totally unsupervised—”
“Oh my God, cutie, you don’t need a permission slip to go to the konbini across the street, chillax, ‘s all good.”
I stifled a paranoid complaint along the lines of “but the Peacies,” because Hina was clearly happy I’d taken the initiative at all. I looked back toward the light of the convenience store and flinched as I saw several people, including the cashier, looking out at the pair of flamebearers flirting on the sidewalk. “I, um, wanted to…go do…a thing. Anything, I mean, not a specific thing. Er, I guess a specific thing, that being buying these masks, the food was kind of a welcome accident…I got a cornucopia, that was cool. Would have gotten you one of those fried chicken things if they had any. Guess it’s too late at night.”
“Mm.” Hina had been humming along to my ramble, clearly happy just to hear my voice, but she perked up at that last part. “Oh, Famichiki? Gosh, your instincts are good, I was having a craving earlier.” She pulled two steaming-hot paper baggies that smelled of greasy fresh-fried food from nowhere and handed one to me. “Wanna go home and stuff our faces?”
—
There are few things in life more decadent than hot food immediately after coming inside from a cold night. But, sitting on the floor of Hina’s room, I could now confidently say that one of those rare superlatives is to also have your mostly undressed girlfriend snuggled up to you at the same time. I felt spoiled beyond belief, in a nervous, slightly-too-close-to-that-pride-of-lions way, to have such front-row and skin-on-skin seats to Hina’s dismantling of her first cutlet. The novelty didn’t wear off after her second or third, either.
“Are you even chewing?”
“Meh.”
“Let me rephrase,” I sighed, scrunching up her third wrapper and eyeing the distance to the wastebasket, “Are you savoring the flavor at all? Like, you’re very clearly having a good time with the, er, chomping and the juices and all. Just wondering about the rest.”
She leaned back and twisted to look up at me and roll her sapphire eyes. “I am tasting it, cutie. Chicken’s good, salt rules!” She yoinked another cutlet out of her pocketspace. “Trust me, if I was starving and just needed to get this straight into my belly, it wouldn’t go through realspace at all to get there.”
“How’s that work?” I asked with the slightest bit of hesitation, embarrassed at my ignorance. “Er, I know how the food could just go straight into your stomach without passing through anything, but my experiences with the fourth dimension haven’t suggested that it’s, um, super conducive to keeping food warm and edible.”
“Cold and oily,” she agreed. “Just gotta go fast. I have this little warmer box in my pocketspace, and that’s literally within arm’s reach. And yeah, it gets some space-nasties on it, but I don’t mind that much anymore.”
The space-nasties, the ether, the hypercosmic ocean—just some of the countless terms to describe the weirdness of the fourth dimension. It was well-understood that something had gone terribly wrong with its introduction to our reality; any pre-2015 mathematical model of adding a fourth spatial dimension—or at least those where you twisted physics’ arm enough for reality to not immediately fall apart—pretty much just had it as an extension of the world we were familiar with, not the bizarre, dark and icy void more akin to outer space. Even models where Earth and we Earthlings remained three-dimensional in a four-dimensional world didn’t anticipate such an alien locale so close beyond the veil of three-reality; the math said that moving a few meters ana or kata was supposed to merely be deeply weird and disorienting from a spatial perspective, not a jump into an entirely different universe.
But it was still traversable and survivable. The comparison to outer space was an apt one; you could pilot a craft out into the dark, and the Vaetna had compared their armor to a space-suit. The Radiances put their real bodies out there while mantled, stored in pods that were basically anchored bunkers—some of the comments on the diagrams called them cocoons—too distant from realspace for even the most cutting-edge military hardware to reach. You had to be a flamebearer to reach them, and even then, among the most gifted at navigating and surviving and fighting in that space to have a chance at causing real harm.
Like Hina. The 160-something-centimeter Japanese girl, with her soft red hair and outwardly human anatomy, didn’t look obviously adapted for that environment of impossible driftwood and colossal dust bunnies floating through oily spatial medium. But looks could be deceiving—and when it came to her, I was really easy to deceive.
“Space-nasties,” I repeated. “It’s so fucky out there. Can’t believe you just stow your actual flesh-and-blood bodies. I mean, you specifically, maybe, sure, but overall, that feels like it adds a whole new layer of danger to fights you guys are usually going to win anyway.”
“Ah, ye of liffle faif,” she replied through a mouthful of chicken, unashamedly wiping some juices off her chin with her finger. “Yeah, I worry about the others sometimes, too, they’re not built like me. But I know they can handle it, and even if I wasn’t sure, you can only listen to Alice yammer about risk-reward ratios and buoyancy gradients for so long before you just throw up your hands and let ‘em do it, y’know?” She reached out to stroke my formerly scarred, now half-armored, hand. “Lemme guess, cutie, you want to try it too?”
I accepted her fingers’ offer to intertwine with mine. “I was…getting to that? I think. What’s it like?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Well, you’re all floaty, even here on Earth.”
“Sure am! It’s fun to be able to move. Y’see my flight sim over there?” She nodded in the direction of her apartment’s antechamber, where the extremely expensive-looking apparatus sat. I’d only ever seen it disused and inert.
“Yeah?”
“Well, I used to spend a lot of time in the shallows. Exploring, generally swimming around, all that. But that made Ai upset—messed with her tools and bothers Ebi—so this was the compromise for when I got the zoomies, modified a bunch for 4d clickies. Haven’t really felt like using it since I dragged you home, though. You can try it if you want.”
“Clickies?”
“Y’know, the scrunch when you go from the surface to the shallows? It makes a clicky sound.”
“Does it?” I hadn’t noticed, but then, my experiences of moving to or from our three-plane usually were accompanied with other things to worry about.
“Yeah. I can show you.”
“Uh—no,” I decided quickly. “Had enough adventure for one night.”
“Kay. Might just be me anyway. B’yeah, if you want some 4d practice that isn’t just me taking you for a swim, lemme know and I can get the rig dusted off.”
“Is that different from, uh, more general mantle operation training? I seem to remember Alice saying something about sims?”
“I dunno. We never really made a real training system? Me and Alice just learned by experimenting, Ai helped us formalize the tech but she still just kind of figured out how to actually use it from, uh, using it. Amane kinda brute-forced it when she was feeling bad. And I think Yuuka cheated the normal trial-and-error with precog shit. So you’re our first, like, normal onboarding? So like, we’ll just show you how to flail around in the doll, then help build your actual prototype mantle, bespoke style—pretty much how we did it but fast-tracked because we can give you tips.”
“Shoulders of giants, I guess.”
“Mhm.”
We lapsed back into silence. Hina seemed satisfied after her third Famichiki and shifted off of me to splay out on to the blankets that covered her floor. In her position, I would have immediately gone for my phone to idly scroll or watch videos, but she seemed content to just look out the window at the fluorescent twinkling of Tokyo at night. I munched more slowly on my own piece of chicken, crunching through the last few bites while I thought about the fourth dimension, mantles, and the Peacies.
“Hina?”
“Yeah?”
“How does this end?”
She sat up again to peer at me. “Like, with the Peacies?”
“Yeah, I guess. When they ‘show up,’ what will that actually mean? A delegation? The way you all talk about it makes it sound like it’s inevitable it’ll all go to violence eventually—thus the mantles—but I’m just…not really clear on how that’ll start, what happens up until that point.”
Hina grinned. “Wanna know a secret?”
“…Sure?”
“Global politics is mostly emails. And Twitter.”
“Huh.” I supposed that made sense; something had to prelude flamebearers turning cities to glass. “So they’re…sending you emails? Threats? Offers?”
“Yeah. Alice says they’re offering a lotta money for you—which, like, isn’t that basically just emails too, sorta? But they’ll eventually send actual people and demand to talk to our actual people. We’ll say no to that, and then they’ll…dunno. Smear campaign first, then probably start threatening the government? That’s what they did last time.”
“Threatening the government with…what? Full annexation? I don’t know how things…work, on this scale. Before the swords come out.”
“Mostly lasers for us, actually. But neither do I! Ask Alice if you want the deets, but the point is that none of it’ll really work. They can’t control us with emails, and Japan the country can’t really do anything to us as long as there’s no other flamebearers backing them, which is why it’s bad that I fucked things up with Hikanome.” She sounded glum. “But that’s getting better! And as long as everything with Izumi works out okay, I think they’ll be on our side. We’ll find out on…Tuesday. Four days.”
“Tuesday?”
“Yeah, March 1st. That’s when Miyoko wants to chat about Izumi and take a look at your Flame. It’s in the calendar.” She looked proud of herself for knowing that. “But yeah. There’s literally no bite behind the bark without flamebearers of their own showing up in Tokyo, and we’ll know when those show up. Yuuka thinks they’re staging a few in Okinawa this week—I’m not supposed to go check,” she sighed. “But trust me, you’re safe in Tokyo for now, even on your own. It’ll be pretty obvious when that changes. You don’t even have to do much! Yuuka will know, I’ll know, Amane will be lasering people, all before you even have to lift a finger. Go to all the konbini you want, nobody’s gonna grab you. Hell, wanna go on a date tomorrow?”
I blinked. “So is there a time crunch or isn’t there?”
“I mean, you’re only gonna get like three good hours of mantle training per day anyway before you start to feel sick. That leaves plenty of time for extracurricular activities.”
“Still seems kinda…frivolous.”
“Ugh, you sound like Alice. And Jason! Don’t deprive yourself of things that are fun. Didn’t you have fun going out on your own?”
“I mean, yeah, but—fucking war,” was the first thing I could articulate, then I figured out how to say the part that had caused me such grief earlier today. “And just…I don’t want to be irresponsible. There’s a slippery slope there.”
“We’ll keep each other responsible!”
“Will we?” I snapped. “When we were being all handsy last night, in the kitchen, it really spooked Yuuka, and I feel like that’s just a perfect little snapshot of what happens when we fuck around.”
Hina’s shoulders hunched slightly. “Sorry.”
I flinched. “Don’t be. Or, do, but—be sorry at her, not me, I guess. I shoulda—I just got away from myself in the doll. I need to be more careful about that. Was talking to Alice about it earlier.”
It was quiet for a few seconds while Hina thought about this. When she looked back up at me, she was frowning. “That’s not really the same thing, though, right? Like, yeah, be responsible when we’re having fun, but that’s not the same as don’t have fun. And I know having fun at all is kinda new territory for you, but I also know you’re smart enough to know that difference. What’s the real problem, cutie? Why the…I dunno, the focus?”
My heart climbed into my throat. “The stakes are high.”
“Nah. I mean, yeah, but we’ll win! You asked how this ends, right? Well, that’ll be when they give up. They gave up on Amane after the fourth team didn’t come back. Why’d you be any different?”
“Because they want me to be a Vaetna-killing superweapon. I think.”
That brought her up short. Her blue eyes widened as she looked me up and down. Then she stood and paced in a slow circle around me, inspecting me from all directions. She couldn’t literally see my Flame, could she?
“Uh?”
“Mm. Hmmmmm. Mm…cutie, promise not to be mad?”
My hackles rose ever so slightly. This would be a very bad way to find out that Hina had very different opinions of the Vaetna than I did. The worst possible way, even.
“Can’t promise that,” I muttered. “I’ll try.”
“That’s fucking hot.”
I twisted around to glare at her. “It’s—”
She dropped to her knees to interrupt me with a hug. “It’s not good, I know, but—y’know how I am! Power’s hot. Doesn’t mean I want any of that to happen. Are you getting mad?”
I took a deep breath. “A—a little. A little.”
“Sorry. Is it scary? It’s probably scary, right?”
Something in her voice, the earnest and innocent concern for my well-being over any of the ramifications, broke me. The need to cry suddenly manifested as a ball of ache in my throat. I made no attempt to resist it. I twisted into Hina’s hug and returned it, squeezing her tight, seeking comfort in the feeling of her hair draped across my face, a reddish brown blanket to stain with my tears as quiet sobs gently kicked me in the chest.
“Aw, cutie…” Hina muttered, stroking my head. “We won’t let them. We’ll make them fuck off.”
I sniffled. “Can you?” The terror, the weight of what had been thrust upon me, was catching up to me again, only escaped for a scant few weeks that had still been full of danger. I knew in my gut that the Peacies would turn Tokyo to rubble if it meant getting me—and the final fallback I’d kept telling myself I had, the option of going to Tokyo’s Gate and seeking asylum in the Spire, felt impossible now. “If you can’t—then what? Where do we run?”
Hina patted my back. “No. C’mon, cutie, put some faith in us magical girls. We’ll fight and we’ll win,” she growled, a bassy rumble too deep for her chest, before her voice softened again. “Listen—it’s scary as hell to be powerless, but you’re not. You just haven’t seen the limits of what you can do. Neither have I, y’know, but I want to find out. You said superweapon, and that’s a big fuckin’ word, right?”
“Only against the Vaetna,” I mumbled numbly. A second, more horrifying wave of terror was washing over me. “What if they—what if they try to get rid of me before the Peacies can get to me?”
Hina didn’t respond to that immediately, staying quiet for a few seconds too long, kicking my anxieties into nightmare territory. Her giving the prospect actual thought was far scarier than even an uncomfortably hasty and insistent reassurance would have been. Then, when she made up her mind, she leaned back and kissed my forehead.
“Well, I’ve always wanted to fight a Vaetna.”
—
The next morning, I found myself standing about two meters away from Hina in the middle of the dojo, a lattice bound around my hand. I brought my middle finger out and my index forward, twitched my thumb, and the second balloon in Hina’s hands seemed to tear open on its own. The satisfying sound of magic at work echoed through the dojo with a pop.
If you were take a video of what I was doing with a high-speed camera, you’d have found that the balloon had spontaneously developed a hole about three centimeters in diameter, a circle where the mylar had been cut out as though by a little circular punch, before physics took its course and the entire round structure unraveled into ribbons. At regular speed, it just looked like a balloon popping, the exact effect of the magic obfuscated by the limits of the human eye.
I made my next adjustment, staring at the third yellow mylar orb, which she’d taped to her chin. It was one thing to judge the distance and direction between it and my previous target, and another to match it solely with finger-twitch changes to the structure of the glowing thread bound around my hand. It didn’t help that if I was too far off, I could instead hit Hina herself; she seemed to view that as a plus, but it was still absolutely messing with my aim.
Another thumb motion fired off the glyph; this time I got only the small jolt of cold against my skin as feedback, no satisfying pop.
“Close!” she chirped. “That one was all the way inside. Gotta hit the surface, remember.”
I replied with merely a frustrated growl. I hated how fiddly this was. There were dozens of ways to add control structures for targeting, ones which would cleanly pop every balloon in an area or let me pick one simply by eye and trigger it with a thought or specific motion or radio signal—this certainly wasn’t how mantle weaponry was controlled—but Hina was insisting that I at least learn how to do it manually. I twitched my middle finger up and completed the glyph again.
“Nope, about a foot too far right and like six inches ana.”
“Your right or mine?” I huffed.
“Yours.”
If nothing else, I wished I could at least make the lattice project some kind of targeting reticule or visual feedback for where I missed, rather than relying on Hina telling me. Neither of us knew how she could tell where my silent misses were landing when I couldn’t; she’d apparently always been able to do it, which made me very jealous. That didn’t help my aim either. I fired off another cutter that went wide.
“Inside again. Remember the baseball, cutie. Pivot everything together, stop twitching them all in different directions at the same time. If you don’t move your ring finger in sync with the first two then you’re just sliding your target point around some random plane and not through threespace.” She mimed cupping the aforementioned imaginary baseball with her hand, gliding her fingertips smoothly around an invisible axis point. She made it look easy; I didn’t have the same dexterity as I tried to imitate it with my next adjustment. The last twitch of my thumb was met with the silence of failure, and I sighed in frustration, letting the threads of magic dissipate and retreating my hand into my hoodie pocket to warm my frozen fingers with the heat pack.
“Not to go all primary school student,” I groused, “but when am I actually going to use this? Pure, raw, single-glyph offensive snapweaving, no control structures? Shouldn’t I be learning a version of this that incorporates an {ASSIGN} or some other basic targeting?”
Hina shrugged, removing the balloon from her nose and wobbling it around by the stem. “I mean. Yeah, you could. But the baseball thing is more of a general weaving trick, right, works for a lotta stuff that cares about distances and directions and stuff, so you gotta get used to it. We can do something else to practice if this doesn’t feel helpful, though, ‘cause this is about making you feel better about magic as much as it is about making you better at magic, feel me? Don’t want you to be frustrated.”
I squeezed the heat pack, savoring the warmth. “Fair enough. I just—yeah, maybe some other kind of practical snapweaving would be better. A bit redundant to be trying combat stuff that isn’t spear training or mantle fighting, those seem more likely to actually matter.”
“Oh, that’s what’s happening in here,” came a new voice from the doorway. I looked over and saw Ai, who looked like a bear emerging from hibernation, shading her eyes from the dojo’s bright overhead lights, far brighter than the rest of the unlit penthouse or the dark predawn sky outside. Hina had gotten me up and brought me here the moment I’d awoken in her arms, determined to make me feel better with magic and violence.
“We’re being careful!” Hina and I said at the same time. Ai waved away our concerns as she approached.
“I know, it was the pops that brought me here, not a ripple alarm. Thank you. How is your six-in-the-morning snapweaving going?”
“Poorly,” I couldn’t help but grouse. Hina gave me a slightly kicked-puppy look, which made me wince and mouth a sorry.
“Teaching it the baseball trick!”
Ai raised an eyebrow. “Without an actual baseball? To use as a guide? I have one in my room.”
Hina looked like a deer in the headlights. “Oh. Uhh. Shoulda started there.” Her blue eyes flicked to me. “Sorry, cutie.”
I was facepalming. “So it didn’t have to be that hard. Okay, yeah, that’s enough for me for now.”
“Sorry!” Hina whimpered.
“It’s okay. Toss up the balloon, would you?”
Hina tilted her head but obliged, stepping back at the same time, some feral instinct giving her an inkling of what I was going to do. I reached for the trigger end of the lattice in my arm, and in one motion I manifested my spear in both hands and thrust it at the balloon. The charred tip struck true and the balloon screamed a final pop as it died. I lowered my spear, satisfied.
“Okay, revenge taken.” I took a step toward Hina, who was looking amorously at my weapon, and touched her arm. “That did help, really.” I didn’t want to give words to the whole emotional ordeal of the prior night, the sense of looming dread and helplessness, not in the light of day. But I did want her to know that her whispered, soothing promises as we’d cuddled had been entirely correct: this little magical exercise had helped remind me that I was a flamebearer, even a novice one. With practice and training, I would not be helpless when the Peacies came knocking
She brightened immediately and leapt onto me, and I had to stow my spear to catch her hug with both arms. “Yay!”
“Futaritomo,” Ai warned.
“We’re not about to fuck, Ai, relax,” Hina chirped. Then she seemed to second-guess herself, looking at me sidelong. “I mean…”
I separated from her hastily. “I—breakfast,” I diverted, turning to Ai. “Have you even slept?”
She looked guiltily off to the side. “At my desk.”
“For forty-two minutes,” added Ebi’s voice over the PA. Ai heckled back at her in Japanese.
“You do have to sleep sometime,” I sighed.
“Cuddle puddle?” Hina asked.
“Breakfast,” I countered. “Then…hm. Maybe. I want to do a little more in the doll today, but that might knock me right out after, if the first time was any indication. So breakfast, doll, cuddle puddle, if Ai is amenable.”
Holy fuck, what a charmed life I was leading, when it was put like that. Big kitchen, transhuman gender euphoria, and cuddles with beautiful magical girls, all before noon. I really had it made, even by the standards of most flamebearers—if you discounted the imminent arrival of a pseudo-empire at our doorstep, anyway. But I wouldn’t let them destroy this. I’d be ready for anything the Peacies sent our way.
Author’s Note:
Short one, but with lots of Hina and Ez being Hina and Ez! And the Vaetna looming, which is all they seem to ever do. Also some on-screen magic training, which hopefully sheds a little more light on what it’s actually like to freely manipulate glyphs when you’re not just tracing Flame over a drawing on a sheet of paper or through a 3D printed substrate.
I moved again this week! Much less extreme than Japan-America, and it went great, but has played hell with my writing schedule. The new environment is helping, though, and I’m trying to end the year strong writing-wise. Helping me with that are the beta readers: Cass, Chloe, Emma, mirrormatch, Mia, Troll, Zoo, Altrune, Enigma, Penguin, and Zak. I don’t normally thank them all by name here on the site but I figure it can’t hurt once in a while.
Also, we celebrated my half-birthday this week, so merry that to those who celebrate. And Hanukkah or Christmas or any of the others too!
Anyway, we also have new Hina art! This is crossover art with The Drake of Craumont, which is written by a good friend of mine and features many amazing women, including the protagonist (pictured):
Drawn by Mjeow, as is frequently the case. This one was kind of a self-indulgent bonus, but I’m hoping to start more serious commissions by the end of the year! Hopefully including the arc 4 cover!
That’s all for this week. Please consider supporting the story on Patreon; currently we’re only one chapter ahead of public but I’m aiming to start expanding that again as we enter the new year. If you don’t want that financial burden, consider instead joining the Discord! We recently passed 750 members and would love to have you!
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