CONTENT WARNINGS

None

While the three of us were engaging in exploratory lewdity, the other Radiances were dealing with the emerging crisis of Tamamo-no-mae, the demon freed from the stone.

The story went that Tamamo was a shapeshifter fox spirit, a kitsune, who infiltrated the Japanese royal court in the twelfth century before being eventually exposed, banished, hunted down, and killed.

Izumi’s explanation to me as we were recomposing ourselves was longer than that, but it captured the gist. The way she told it, it sounded not unlike the many rumors of flamebearers who lived normal lives in secret, right up until they were inevitably found and taken by the Peacies. Or rather, it sounded like the version of those rumors the Peacies themselves started, fearmongering of how flamebearers could secretly live among you and manipulate the lives of those around them.

Of course, there was one flamebearer in particular my mind went to immediately.

“Don’t you—the Hikanome people in general—call Hina a fox? Any relation?”

“She does remind us of a kitsune, yes.”

“Shapeshifting, cruelty, animal features, deception,” Alice summarized.

“I love our girlfriend,” I decided dreamily, earning a narrow grin from Izumi and a snort from Alice. Whether “our” was really the correct way to put it, we had yet to seriously discuss, but that wasn’t a conversation for right now. “…I wonder if she’s turning into one, the same way you’re turning into a dragon.”

Alice gave this a moment’s serious contemplation, then shrugged. “She’d be happier about it than I am. You’d have to ask her.”

“Missing the tails,” Izumi pointed out. “Unlike this one,” she added with a squeeze that drew a deeper breath from Alice. The tail-burdened hips reflexively rose backward into the touch for a moment, then were arrested by a flare of heat and a sharp snap of fingers as Alice reasserted control.

“Yamete. I’m trying to focus.”

Izumi retracted her hand obediently, though she gave me a questioning look from Alice’s other side. I was, after all, knuckle-deep. “Um. Should I stop too?”

“No,” Alice instructed breezily. “You’re still collecting data.”

I returned Izumi’s look. We all knew that wasn’t really true—any more modeling data my sensors could gather was by now redundant— and I saw a flash of jealousy cross the older girl’s mantled face. But Alice was the boss, so I kept doing what I was doing as Izumi cleared her throat. “Ahem. Eto…that is the story of Tamamo-no-mae.”

“And she’s…real,” I prompted.

“Twitter seems to think so,” Alice shrugged.

Izumi shifted impatiently. “It seems like an ill omen, to me.”

“I don’t disagree. But we’ll see what Amane says, and what Yuuka sees.”

“Hold on. Return? No,” I protested. “Not how that works! Magic is only seven years old. This is one of those cultural ripple residuals, right? She must have been created just now—yesterday, I guess—from the cultural basis of her myth, through ripple. Like the Bigfoot thing last year, or whatever the hell they keep not getting good pictures of in the ocean. She can’t have actually existed eight hundred years ago.”

“I would have agreed a week ago,” Alice said, “But we now know you have a Flame from the future.”

“Which the Vaetna think is the result of exceptional circumstances!” But even as I said that, I remembered what else they had told me in that dream: there is more to magic than glyphs. It already felt like a lifetime ago; I had undertaken a whole second dream dive in between, and that one barely felt real in retrospect, either. But both undeniably had been real in the ways that mattered. I emitted a digital sigh. “Feels like we don’t need more of those.”

“More spirits?”

“More exceptional circumstances. But also more spirits, yes.”

Izumi hesitated. “More spirits may be good for studying your theory. If she is real, then now we have two disembodied spirits in Japan. Her and him.”

“Sugawara hasn’t been found, has he?” Alice asked. “His ghost, I mean. Have I missed that?”

“Amane said she thought he was connected to Tamamo. But she didn’t give a reason, and I haven’t heard more.”

“He has been too quiet for too long,” Izumi added. “I worry.”

Alice thought about this for a moment. “So she really is the better candidate for you to learn about all that body-soul-Flame stuff you were talking about. And she’s not actively causing terror, we think?”

We replied with shrugs. From here in the bedroom, we only knew what the other Radiances told us. Of course, the internet was abuzz, but so much of that was hearsay or too ill-informed about magic to draw any serious conclusions.

“Alright. Well, I’d love to go out and see for myself, but none of us are in a condition to go out and join them. Ezzen, tell them to wrap up for now and come back so we can strategize. Between this and the Peacies, it’s time for a war council.”

“On it.”

“And then turn up the intensity two notches. And Izumi,” she commanded with another snap of her fingers that made my partner-in-submission jerk like a puppet, “Come around to my front and suck my tits like you’ll get milk out of them. I want to be stone cold sober and have the air free of red five minutes from now, and I need at least one more climax to make that happen on schedule.”

I had a chance to do a little reading while Alice cleaned up from the mess we’d made of her.

Tamamo-no-mae’s myth was ancient, descended from mirrors across Asia, tales of a malevolent courtesan fox spirit that had been carried across the Sea of Japan by fishermen in eras gone by. Japan’s addition to the tale was a separate myth from some time later, which claimed that after Tamamo-no-mae had been hunted down, the now-disembodied demon embedded herself in a particular stone, the Sessho-seki, the “Killing Stone” which Amane had mentioned. The stone had eventually been exorcised by a monk, and the demon laid to rest at last, wrapping the tale up neatly. The apocryphal boulder in question was in a town not far north of Tokyo and less than ten kilometers from Sugawara’s hospital-compound-turned-skin-monstrosity-turned-ground-zero, and as far as actual history went, it was inert, unremarkable other than as a culturally significant location that attracted tourists and small offerings. It even looked unremarkable; some exceptionally speedy Wikipedia editor had already added new photos to the article, and both before and after splitting in half it looked largely indistinguishable from the other rocks around it, save for being slightly bigger and the thick rope symbolically tied around it.

Of course it was just a rock. Because, again, magic was only seven years old, and therein lay the paradox.

By now, it was understood by the world at large that ripple could be both emanated and amplified by locations and objects of cultural significance, since at a fundamental level ripple was correlated with things that “matter”—an infuriatingly nebulous concept whose enormity I was only barely beginning to grasp at the time—but in all cases, the cutoff point was the beginning of the firestorms in 2015, the day Dad died, the day ripple and the Flame became things that could affect reality. An object could only have become magical after that point. The Killing Stone, like countless other sites, had become a very minor nexus of ambient ripple in the last seven years, but had not already been magical before then, regardless of what the myths claimed.

Thus, reason dictated the breaking of the Killing Stone had not freed Tamamo-no-mae, because she had not existed in the distant past to be bound in the first place. Rather, I thought that she must have been gestating inside the stone across the last seven years, and then kickstarted by another, external source of ripple—the obvious candidate was the backwash of Alice’s grand display of destruction.

“But I concede the timing makes no sense,” I was clarifying to Izumi in the upper level common area. “Two days between Alice’s blast and the stone breaking. It should have broken immediately.”

“That is my point, yes. Ripple does not last that long, so far from the source,” she agreed. “A third party, then. Which must be Sugawara.”

An overhead thump signaled the return of our away party. Chalkboard footsteps rushed down the stairs from the rooftop landing pad, the sharp and solid impact of gemstones on concrete. Amethyst strode over to us, all three meters of her crossing the space at speed. She stopped in front of us, looked us up and down, and warbled a greeting in her jewel tones. It barely even sounded like Japanese to me, but the way Izumi hunched in embarrassment told me that she understood just fine.

“Yeah, we had a good time,” I replied for both of us, surprised at how even-keeled I felt about acknowledging it. It sort of felt like I was reporting back to the boss, which was ironic after Alice had practically had us on leashes for the last hour. “But, um, we’re trying to focus up. Alice will be out in a minute. Team meeting.”

The language barrier went both ways; I was still a little unsure of whether Amethyst caught 100% of what I was saying in English when we were face-to-face. The translation software was only good in text, as far as I was aware. I spoke with a little more enunciation and separation between my thoughts than I did with everybody else, just in case. Izumi had her own reasons to be shy as she replied directly in Japanese. I gave her a sidelong glance; whatever she said was making Amethyst titter more than I’d have expected if she was merely translating for me.

“What did you tell her?”

“Oh, she asked how much Pretty Cure we saw.”

“Ah. Right. We only made it…what, two episodes, didn’t we.”

“And then we…how do you say it? Abandoned the pretense, yes. Alice-sama is a very powerful force.”

Amethyst spoke carefully in her gemstone timbre. “Is she better?”

“She was very different. I…think we cured her burnout, or something along the lines, but I think the pendulum has swung the other way somewhat, because she was…intense. You may be surprised. Or not, I don’t know, you’ve known her a lot longer than I have. But also, she’s certainly physically different than before.”

“The tail?” Amethyst asked.

“Longer. Thicker. It’s a good tail.” I felt that summed it up well enough for the moment. I was sure she would grill Izumi for the salacious details later, but I did make sure to mention: “Ah, we did make scans. I don’t know how to send them over, though? If there’s some kind of file transfer protocol built into the doll, I don’t have a control panel for it or anything like that.”

Amethyst nodded. “Leave and turn it off.”

“Gotcha. With the external controls. After the meeting, then.” I bit back a sigh, not relishing the notion of returning to my body and all the associated pain from my burns and the hole in my stomach. Escaping had been nice, but reality was rapidly—actually, no, there it was already, heralded by another thump from overhead and another clunk of the door, as well as the highest, faintest edges of the jetbike’s engine spinning down. The pattering of human-scale footsteps descended to bring us Yuuka, hurrying after her friend on her much, much shorter legs.

She did not look like she had dressed for a paranatural investigation, nor for a public appearance. Indeed, the soft pants, lack of particular makeup or ornamentation, and form-occluding jacket told me that she had been called to Tamamo-no-mae’s stone directly from university. She had at some point removed the accompanying eyepatch and opted not to don it again on the way home; the crystalline eye glared at all of us—though her human eye did glance my way with something that might have been relief. Whatever the emotion, it was much less vigilant than I was used to from her. I’d hardly seen her since the hospital, and spoken to her even less, but that was a good sign.

Yuuka did not stop as she approached us and instead brushed right past. “It’s bad,” she said simply, heading for the stairs. “And I’m gonna have a killer headache by the time we’re done. Gonna medicate, then Ezza, I’m gonna need your lamp so I can see how bad. Then I’m gonna pass out.”

Izumi turned from watching her trot downstairs to cast a worried look at Amethyst. “So it is him.”

“Tabun.” The gemstone mecha hesitated, then said something else to Izumi.

“But it may not be. Yuuka has been very paranoid,” the assassin translated for me. “On edge.”

“Not surprising.”

Amane dropped out of her mantle. A flash of purple light hid the swap from LM-woven warform back to bionics-augmented young woman. She looked a little tousled, in terms of her hair and clothing—like bedhead, I thought. There was a stiffness to her stance, like she was braced for something. After a moment, she blinked in surprise. “Aka…nai? Yuuka-chan no yogenshita koto na no ni…?”

“Zenzen,” Izumi replied. “No red. We were careful.”

“Might be some in the bedroom,” I hedged. “But I’m in the doll, Izumi is in her mantle, so it’s just one person’s worth, and I think Alice is taking her time because she’s weaving some ward to drink up whatever’s left.”

“Thank you,” Amane said, stepping over to seat herself in one of the actual chairs of the common area with the tiniest wince. “The weather…is better indoors. Nasu-machi was very bad.” She suddenly looked peeved, an expression I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen on her before. Her delicate features compressed into thin displeasure. “It is not only him,” she added in slow, careful English. “Tamamo-no-mae exists. I saw her in Nasu-machi.”

“Did she look like Sugawara did?” I pictured the sickly yellow, bramble-woven silhouette of Japan’s boogeyman.

“No. Red fox.”

She explained in more detail in Japanese to Izumi, who translated. “Large, and the silhouette was…foggy? Wispy? All the bystanders say they saw the same thing. She’s been circling the town for a week.” Amane added something else that made Izumi cross her arms in concern. “And she spoke to Amane-chan and Yuuka-chan. She told them directly that another spirit had been there yesterday.”

“Sugawara,” Amane spat. If Izumi said the name with loathing, Amane was downright scary. For a moment it felt like the full-size mecha was sitting in the chair in front of us.

“Yes. But it’s stranger,” Izumi continued to explain. “She knew what flamebearers were. As in, although she called him a rei, a ghost, she literally called Radiances fureimube-ra-, flamebearer, from English.” 

That surprised me as well. If she had purely been formed from the gestalt understanding of her myth, I would have expected her to feel very much of the era that story took place in. Knowing about flamebearers, and using the word directly borrowed from English, implied she had also absorbed at least a modicum of knowledge of how the world worked post-magic. “Did she learn it from him?”

Amane shook her head. “She did not like him.”

That was oddly relieving. “So she’s got some sense in her. Might be doing something with pink ripple to siphon information. Sounds like you didn’t see him directly, though?”

“No. We asked her,” Amane said. “She said he is going north.”

“What’s north for him to go to?”

Amane looked like she already knew the answer, but deferred to Izumi, who was frowning. Several long, quiet seconds passed, during which some commotion in the kitchen was faintly audible as Yuuka mugged Ebi’s drone body for some painkillers. I also heard the elevator bell below us. Maybe Ai—I wasn’t sure what was keeping her. Izumi’s frown eventually reached critical mass and transformed into a scowl. “Trickster spirit,” she decided. “We shouldn’t believe her.”

“Meaning…?”

“Hikanome’s grand temple!” Hina’s voice chirped. She pranced around a corner that didn’t exist and beamed a grin at us as she sidled up to her girlfriend. “The question is, why?”

“He learned from Tamamo how myths and ripple can make spirits,” I surmised. “Hey, Hina.”

“Cutie! Ah, wow, Tamamo! Gosh, I wanna meet her. Foxy fox, so many fluffy tails! I bet she fucks like a racehorse, though. She’s all myth-juiced, right? He wants the same thing. The myth-juicing, I mean, not to fuck like a racehorse.” Hina had managed to maneuver both of Izumi’s hands onto her waist, though the mantled woman was making a remarkable effort to avoid her blue, blue eyes. “What’s wrong, Izu?”

Such extremely close contact with Hina could make anybody relent. “I—it would make sense. But I do not want to go to the temple.”

That puzzled me. It was easy to understand why the ex-assassin wanted nothing to do with one of Hikanome’s primary bases of operations anymore, but: “Who said you have to?”

“Outsiders are not allowed,” Amane explained.

“Including us,” Hina finished. “Even though we’re basically saints to them. And it’s not like they could actually stop us from just walking in anyway.”

“DO NOT FUCKING WALK IN,” Yuuka yelled as she raced back up the stairs. “That’s such a bad idea it made my eye actually hurt, Hina.”

“Listen to the prophet,” Alice declared from her door. She’d changed into fresh clothes—a full business suit. “We still need as much of Hikanome’s goodwill as we can get.”

“Damn, Ally!” Hina chirped. “Your tail! And the suit! Where are you off to?”

“Nowhere. I’m just trying to, ah, get back in the zone. Feel like the leader I am, you know?”

“Mmm. That suit isn’t gonna stay on you for long once I—”

“I’m all orgasmed out, thank you very much,” the dragon interrupted.

“Ah,” Yuuka realized. “That’s what that is. Fingerbanging.”

“What?” Izumi asked, turning red.

“You and Ezza. You fucked our dragon, did you.”

Hina emitted a delighted squealing noise, rounding on me with eyes like sapphire dinner plates.

I hesitated, then figured there was no point in hiding it. Funny, I was expecting to be more ashamed than anything. “Sure, whatever, yes. And it worked, I’ll have you know. Alice is back on her feet.”

“They’re very good at it,” Alice added. “With proper direction.”

Hina’s eyes slid to Alice’s enlarged tail. She gasped as though she had just noticed the difference. “Oh, gosh, Ally, we have to do a full check-up on this, pronto! And what misfortune, too, I just ran out of gloves so we’ll have to—”

I reached out to grab the hyena’s shoulder gently before she could fully descend into a feeding frenzy. “Can we stay on track? Hina, Alice’s tail isn’t going anywhere, you can touch it later, I promise.” After extracting a faux-glum resigned whine from her, I turned to our prophet. “Yuuka, what did you mean by ‘it’s bad?’ We were under the impression Tamamo hasn’t really done anything yet.”

“She hasn’t done anything, but she sure was saying shit. But what’s more important is that I was seeing weird things in Nasu that I can’t make sense of. I don’t think she was lying about Sugawara going north, for one, and I want to know where. And my eye keeps telling me she wants to go to the capital.”

“Here?” Alice asked thoughtfully. “To us, or to something else? The palace?”

“Or Kyoto?” Izumi put in.

That confused me. “Isn’t Tokyo the capital?”

“Yes, but Kyoto was the capital before then, back when her story takes place,” Alice supplied. “Do you have a timeline, Yuuka? For either of them?”

“Tomorrow. And wherever she’s gonna be, that fucking Condor is gonna be there too. I need to know exactly where and when.”

The mention of the Peacies’ mobile forward operating base shut everybody up. They’d somewhat fallen into the background since the midnight Vaetna stream—they’d declared they were “kicking the sandcastle,” as Bri had put it, but nothing earth-shattering had come of that in the days since, and at least as far as I was aware, they hadn’t made any moves to grab me. The Condor had been an observer at the hospital inferno and little else.

I had almost hoped that the PCTF had simply abandoned their pursuit of me altogether, deeming it not worth the effort since they reportedly already had another from my cluster in custody and cooperating. That would still be bad news for the Spire, of course, but would have been good for me. That was a poor trade, in my mind, but it was preferable to them going after both me and them simultaneously.

But if Yuuka thought they were going to get active on Todai’s turf, then we had to be there.

“Right, yeah,” I sighed dejectedly. “That is bad. I can swap back to my body. Sure.”

Hina pouted. “Aw, cutie.”

“Hey, why are you upset?” I asked. “It’ll hurt like hell, isn’t that good in your book?”

“Yeah, but you hate it in there.”

“I wouldn’t say I—okay, yeah, well. Maybe I’ll hate it less with the dermis stuff that’s growing all over my burns. Come on, Yuuka, let’s get this over with.”

I practically stomped my mechanical legs toward the elevator.

I couldn’t switch back.

The tunnel between bodies, that infinite non-space, created the harshest possible contrast between its perfect absence of anything and the flashbang cacophony of inhabiting a vessel that could feel pain, even one on a medically inadvisable dosage of morphine. I tried crossing over once, was immediately struck with a hammer-blow of burning sensations, and retreated back to the relative tranquility of the doll’s head in pure, animal terror. I probingly attempted it a second time, hoping it would be less awful now that I knew what to expect, but recoiled just as hard.

Now I sat in a chair beside my hospital bed, with my metaphorical thought-hand hovering over the emergency eject button we had set up in my brain for exactly this purpose. Next to me, Yuuka stood, pinching the bridge of her nose in annoyance. “It’s not that hard.”

Amane and Izumi had joined us after the problem had become apparent. We didn’t want to crowd my hospital room with the entire team of Radiances, and Alice had felt like neither she nor Hina would be much help. Ai was apologizing profusely in the group chat that she wasn’t around for any of this—the 4D CNC manufacturing machine had apparently crashed in the middle of a very complicated project and she was actively weaving the appropriate repairs. She couldn’t be pulled away to come upstairs.

“Don’t look at your body,” Izumi suggested. “It makes the anticipation worse. Just turn away.”

It was true; my body looked like shit. Much of it was covered in bandages, and the parts that weren’t still showed the signs of a body that was investing all its resources into healing. Inflammation and redness reigned, save for the paler parts where I had once had body hair and was now growing more of the plating that already covered my forearm. My Flame was in the process of leaving its mark after what I had done to rescue Yuuka. Frankly, it sort of felt like cheating the system to be able to look at it from the third person perspective, and I was extremely reluctant to let go of that privilege. I turned my head away to look at the wall instead, the boring grey-beige that was the first thing I had ever seen upon waking up at Todai.

Amane nodded sympathetically next to Izumi. She asked the room, “Itamidome wa?”

Ebi’s voice replied from the walls. “Maxed out already. I can’t sanely pump them any more of chemical painkillers than this, and turning on the analgesoid lattices before they’ve already switched over—”

“Would completely fuck the connection in ways that would be way worse than this,” I finished. “Like at the hospital. They all use {NULL}, and that’s the most antipodal glyph to pink.” Izumi flinched; Yuuka scowled. I cursed that my mind had gone directly to the hospital. “Sorry. I mean I just have to knuckle down and do it.”

Yuuka sighed. “Well, if there’s one silver lining, at least now this isn’t gonna be the worst thing you’ve had to experience in a hospital.” She seemed to regret further invoking that morbid thought, and added, “for what it’s worth, I’m not happy about you having to switch either.”

That was her way of saying she liked me better in this body, and I shared the sentiment. I was starting to get a little desperate. “One of you could re-weave the connection for me in situ. Izumi, you can toggle your senses, I could copy that chain and just turn off my pain receptors.”

“Even if you could re-weave it like that—which I think is a very bad idea—that lattice controls from body to mantle, not mantle to body. Reversing it would be like…a second layer of remote control.”

“Like emulating a remote connection locally,” Ebi supplied. “While changing the protocol for that connection in real-time. Stop messing around and just bite the bullet. I can count down, if it’s helpful.”

“I’m aware I’m being a baby,” I groused. “And there’s no avoiding this, I’d have to do it sometime. Just…really, really don’t want to.”

Izumi crossed her arms. “You should not have to.”

Yuuka glanced at her. “Is that some clever magical insight, or just being supportive?”

“Supportive. A mantle should be a…full body, a true self, not separated from your Flame.”

“That separation is why the mantles are such good weapons,” Yuuka countered. “And even then, it’s not like they’re fully separate. Can still fuck up your brain plenty. Got a nasty reminder of that the other day.”

She injected a little bitterness into those words, maybe unintentionally, and it seemed to hit Izumi harder than intended. The memories hung over the room like storm clouds. She and Izumi had both been rendered insensate by the hospital-monster messing with their mantle connections. My digital gaze swept across the uniform wallpaper.

“Those were exceptional circumstances,” I offered, trying to prop up the atmosphere from falling on our heads. “And I never much liked hospitals anyway.”

“Hey.” Ebi protested.

“That one was especially an asshole.” Yuuka agreed. “But if you’re trying to talk about it, I don’t wanna. It’ll fuck up my foresight. I’m trying to be positive now, remember?”

Amane frowned and drew her phone to type something to me.

Amethyst: This is what I was talking about. That girl is anxious.

ezzen: it was a bad time

Amethyst: Yuuka hasn’t talked to me about specifically what happened at the hospital, but I’ve gathered that you saved her

ezzen: i helped her. she mostly saved herself from there

Amethyst: wrong

Amethyst: That’s what they say about me, but it’s not true.

Amethyst: They saved me, and then they had to keep saving me. I could not heal alone.

Amethyst: And she was saved, but I think she still has to heal.

Amethyst: I don’t like hospitals either. Even though they help you heal, if you’re there, you’re sick.

Amethyst: So it’s a place of sickness rather than a place of healing. A place where you expect to hurt.

Amethyst: Every time I had a prosthetic fitting, or underwent surgery, or was prescribed new medicine that makes me feel terrible but prevents my kidneys from melting, I was angry that I had to be there.

ezzen: yeah

ezzen: same with my hand. hated physical therapy the whole time

ezzen: and probably with my foot. haven’t been doing pretty much any physical therapy with it, so i was fucked when the stabilizer broke

“You’ve both gone very quiet.”

I turned away from the wall to see Yuuka attempting to peek over the taller girl’s shoulder to look at her phone. She was gently elbowed away with the bionic arm and relented. “Okay, mou, ii. Just don’t like the feeling I’m being gossiped about when I’m standing right here.”

Amethyst: :\

Amethyst: I always wondered “why can’t I just be healthy? Why does it have to hurt? Why do I have to go through this?”

Amethyst: And those are weak thoughts. They are normal, but they don’t help me.

ezzen: grim but i get it

Amethyst: But I’ve learned that it was never actually as bad as I was afraid it was. The anticipation of pain is always worse than the pain itself.

Amethyst: And that is Yuuka’s problem.

Amethyst: The anticipation is worse because the anticipation is something she can only experience by herself.

ezzen: ah

ezzen: The anticipation is worse because the anticipation is something she can only experience by herself.

Amethyst: Until you. You can see some of what her eye does, can’t you?

ezzen: at the barbecue, yeah, and going into her dream happened in the eye

Amethyst: That is what she needs right now.

Amethyst: If you go back to your body, it will hurt, but you will know you’re healing, and you can help her heal too.

ezzen: …so you’re basically just gonna keep throwing me at your teammates?

Amethyst: wwww

Amethyst: Until they get therapy, yes.

Amethyst: You’re good at it.

Amethyst: She told me the future makes more sense with you in it.

ezzen: i uh

ezzen: i sure hope so

I mentally backed out of the chat conversation before I could lose my nerve. As Amane lowered her phone in kind, Yuuka snorted. “Be honest, how much of that conversation could be summarized as her telling you ‘you’re not made of glass?’” Yuuka asked. “I’m betting around seventy percent.”

I shook my head at her and turned to properly survey my burned, bandaged body.

“Looking is bad,” Izumi reminded me.

“For you,” I replied evenly, lost in thought. “And usually for me. But I’m becoming a Vaetna under all that gauze. There’s something beautiful there. In the future. I want to go see it before I become too scared to look.” I extended a mechanical hand to Yuuka. “But I don’t have eyes to see it, not really. All I can really do is light the way. So get a good look for me, yeah?”

She looked down at my hand, then over at Amane. Radiance Amethyst gave her an encouraging nod. Yuuka reached out and touched my hand.

That was the cue. I slammed the eject button in my head. My hand pushed down until the button stopped, and I felt it actuating the intricate and invisible magical machinery that puppeteered me—

And on impulse, I kept going. My mental limb crashed through the control panel and into the pit of razors beneath. Through the ice and into the dark water.

No amount of eloquence or psychological prep could really brace me for the transfer. Pain flooded into me. Or, more accurately, I flooded into the pain, my selfhood screaming across the interstitial void of the link and splashing down into the electrochemical haystack of needles that was my brain. Burns and bruises and paranatural growth made themselves known with all their procrastinated violence, making to shred me like a shoal of piranhas.

But my imagined hand was sheathed in armor, and could not be cut so easily. I pushed down, reaching into the cutting chaos, past my wrist, up the elbow, burying myself to the shoulder. I grasped my Flame within the razor-pit and, with blood pounding through my skull, heaved the light out from the depths, back out of the pit, into the open air above the ice. It was crystalline and latticed, frozen solid, and it burned like the sun. It shone the future onto me, and I could not stare directly at it. I witnessed it only as fragments, reflections in the shards of ice, seen through a borrowed eye.

It showed me killing shapes, minds and anchors and digestion. Brambles that refused to burn. Lust and sentencing. Bright, purest blue, shadowed by something vast. Prostheses for the body and the soul. Two spears, one that was me and one that was not. A fox, laughing through the storm. A cry for help that would go unanswered.

It showed Yuuka far more. 

Author’s Note:

That’s a wrap! Mostly. There will be a long end-of-arc postmortem author’s note pseudo-chapter in the coming days (including some new art!), as has become tradition for Sunspot, so I don’t have a lot to say down here other than thank you all so so much for supporting the story.

And, as always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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September 1, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Sheets of angry rain drove against the window. Brightly colored anime girls shouted at each other, crystal clear over the dull roar outside, from a TV that had swung down from the ceiling to hang just above the foot of the bed, now the room’s only light source. Alice laid sideways across the spacious mattress, her head resting comfortably on a pillow while her tail extended out behind her, splaying along the sheets sinuously. The scales reflected and refracted the screen’s changing hues, scintillating with opalescent, supernatural shine that splashed my mechanical hands with a pastel rainbow as they worked their way down the biomantic overspill of warm flesh.

I had positioned myself behind Alice’s back for easy access while still being able to turn my head toward the TV every now and again. Izumi sat closer to the head of the bed, behind us both; she had been honored to have Alice’s trust to be present for this little pseudo-date night but clearly didn’t quite know what to do with herself now. She professed she hadn’t seen this one when I’d told her which it was—apparently Splash Star was one of the most niche Pretty Cure installments—and seemed hesitant to provide commentary or ask questions. I was used to her being somewhat confident, even bordering on provocative or brash, but she had clearly been yanked out of her comfort zone and was very quietly swooning over the situation she found herself in. Whenever I looked back to check on her, her attention seemed divided between the posters on the wall, the mound of plushies, the anime itself, and my ministrations on Alice’s tail.

The tail was warm beneath my fingers as I pressed and kneaded the flesh. In the doll, my hands were easily the most sensitive part of my body, and they left me well-suited to feel the subtle swells and rises of muscle that formed the shifting bedrock beneath the scaly surface as I applied the moisturizing cream. I’d started a little beyond the base of her tail, wary of aggravating the red and raw growth zone that was still pumping new inches of length out from where the limb met her spine. The scales in that area were soft and raw, clearly irritated but not in a way that the cream was meant to help. Alice admitted she needed a shower for that part, but the cream should come first to medicate her more fully-formed scales; it was apparently meant to be put on before bathing and then be rinsed off after.

I was using one of the doll’s most handy features—literally—to record what my hands were feeling in minute detail, each micro-detail of pressure and shape; I was no anatomical expert, but Amane had suggested it; Todai had the means to process this sensory data and construct a fairly detailed model of what was going on with the tissues of the limb without the need for any scanning or invasive biopsy procedures.

In reality, scanning would have felt much less invasive than this. I could not help but interpret laying my hands on the tail as akin to other forbidden zones of the body. Amane’s explanation of the procedure hadn’t helped; she had alluded to using this sense-recording feature to help parse out the contours of the rest of Alice’s body for mantle replication purposes in the past, meaning that she had groped her girlfriend’s entire body with exhaustive detail, and that made my thoughts wander.

I hadn’t a clue why Amane had suggested this, nor why Alice had acquiesced so easily to me doing it. I knew that the doll was a key factor. I was grateful for the layer of psychological distance it afforded on my end; that was just about the only thing keeping my head in the game, relatively insulated from my baser instincts. Not that I truly believe I would have done anything untoward, but I certainly would have been much more worked up, and rightfully so. Perhaps in a more medical setting, under bright white lights on an examination table, this process of touching and tracing would have felt more sterile, but in the storm-dark intimacy of Alice’s bed, and with her still bottomless—never mind that the sheer mass of her tail utterly occluded her nethers—it baffled me that she could be so casual and focus on the anime.

To rub and grope the cream-slickened scales felt like a proxy, made all the more alluring and exotic to my particular sensibilities by the magic inherent to the limb. I’d fingered my girlfriend for an hour yesterday and it felt less obscene than this. Yet she seemed unbothered, rarely turning to look back at me and speaking calmly and matter-of-factly when she had commentary about what was happening on the TV. Sometimes I felt muscles in her tail twitch when I touched particular parts, and her breath would tighten or quicken ever-so-slightly, but that seemed more like the inevitable discomfort of aggravating spots that were sore from magically-accelerated growth rather than the sorts of reactions to intimacy I had come to expect from Hina. Maybe Alice was good at forced nonchalance, or maybe it was simple emotional exhaustion and she truly just thought of this groping session as a simple, mechanical task in which I was more of a tool than an opposing party, or maybe she simply didn’t think of the tail as part of her body and thus touching it wasn’t even in the same cognitive time zone as sexualizing her. At the time, I didn’t yet know if any of those theories held water, and wasn’t about to ask.

The anime was a welcome distraction. That was the point, after all. It was in un-subtitled Japanese, so I was expecting to be fully in the hands of the two women in bed with me to follow what was going on. Times like these reminded me of how little effort I had put into learning the language—then again, the girls hadn’t really thrown any resources at me since the week of crash course study leading up to the Barbecue Inferno, and that felt like a lifetime ago.

That being said, the show was not hard to follow, even without being able to understand the dialogue. There was some manner of flashback, two girls from different backgrounds chosen by some primordial force of mascots to defeat an evil plant guy, and they turned into magical girls to defeat one of the evil plant minions.

“Are the mascots turning into their cell phones?” I asked.

“Mhm. That’s the Mix Commune. Flip phones, very 2006, right? There was actually an animation error in this scene, Flappy’s markings were the wrong color.”

“I wonder if Ezzen’s phone will turn into a Commune,” Izumi snorted from behind.

Alice twisted to look at her. “Huh? Why would it?”

“Were you not told? It’s alive.”

“No, I wasn’t. What?”

“Flesh building, flesh phone,” I sighed, hands pausing their cream application. “Ai has it in quarantine. Might be useful to all this magic-flesh-mind stuff we’re doing. I’ve been surviving on just my laptop and the doll in the meantime.”

“You know they’ll get a laptop, too? Huh, maybe I wanted to watch this because I was thinking of you.”

I had no clue what to make of that comment, especially with my hands still resting on her tail. She went on, turning back to the screen.

“Might be safer to just destroy it. Would be fun to dress it up like a Commune, though.”

“It would,” Izumi agreed.

Alice snorted, and I felt the motion ever-so-slightly in the muscles of her tail. In an impulsive spur of mild annoyance, I prodded where I’d felt the movement, and she yelped.

“My phone? Please don’t. I’d prefer destruction, if the alternative is it turning into one of these mascot things. Especially if I’d need to use it to mantle.”

“Bah. Nothing like a good transformation object. Fuck, I think there’s a knot in the muscle there, where you just poked. Careful!”

“Sorry. I don’t really know how to do massage, I’m just trying to put the cream on. Is it working?”

“I think so. Yeah, it’s—I think I was itchy before, and had just kind of tuned it out, but it’s definitely nice and cool now. A shower’s gonna feel great.” A long silence followed. She coughed. “What were we talking about? Right, yeah, not super practical to have your transformation be tied to an item you can be separated from, we had that conversation when we were figuring out how we’d actually trigger the mantles. Getting separated from your transformation trigger—or having it stolen—is a lot more liable to get us killed than it is for them.” She waved at the screen. “They’re protected by the rules of acceptable children’s broadcast, we aren’t.”

On that morbid note, the conversation lapsed back into silence, and my hands resumed their progress down her tail. My sculpted, mechanical palms worked their way down, bit by bit, foot by foot, sensors alight with form data. It was remarkably thick for the first several feet of its length, only taking on a meaningful taper past where it would have reached her calves when hanging down. The girth of the base obfuscated a lot of what must have been going on to connect it to her spine, but it was clear that it was indeed an extension, and not a separate growth splitting off from her lumbar back. If I was careful, I could feel the spine’s presence on the top side of the tail, nestled in firm muscle, whereas the underside had more soft fat. Touching the underside felt like one long, scaly boob, so I mostly avoided any massage-like actions with my fingers there, for fear of impropriety.

Then something odd happened. “Ow.”

“Ow?” Alice and Izumi both asked.

I had felt a twinge in my forearms, like I was getting tired or sore. But that shouldn’t be possible, not in this body—it was all servos and linkages, not muscles or tendons. “Huh. I might be getting some sympathetic red from you.  Does this happen for Amethyst?”

“…No, but there’s a first time for everything. She’s a lot more carefully red-shielded than you.”

I rubbed my forearms. If there was a sensation of soreness, it was right at the edge of my awareness. I could have imagined it. “I can keep going, I think.”

“I mean, we’re over half an hour in. We’d have been done by now if it were my old tail,” Alice sighed. “How long do you think we have left? Five minutes?”

I eyed her girth. “Uh…”

“The rest of this episode,” Izumi broke in. That was an overestimate and I knew it; she just wanted more time to play voyeur to what I was doing.

Alice frowned, glancing at the timestamp of the paused video. “Oh. Yeah, Ez, you can take a break if you’re worried about breaking the doll. Izumi?”

“…Yes?”

Alice’s frown suddenly flipped into a grin. “Your turn. Show me what those mantle hands can do.”

“I—ah? No, I—well—um, Ezzen really should, I mean, she—they—have the—”

“You’re here, aren’t you? And don’t worry about the scan, I imagine we have all the bits we need by now. It grows from the base, after all,” she muttered darkly. “But I’d appreciate the rest of the lotion, if you’re willing.”

“Well—eto—shitaikoto to subeki da to iu koto ni wa—”

I had never seen Izumi so flustered. Not that I could blame her; her bluff had been called, and even for me as a bystander, Alice’s sudden provocative confidence was throwing me for a loop as well. I felt obligated to rescue my compatriot in tail-overwhelmedness. “Alice, hey, I think I’m good, we can—”

“I will,” Izumi declared, shuffling forward on the bed. The expression on her face, which Alice wasn’t even looking at, was caught between fright and an almost manic eagerness.

I nodded and moved aside.

Fifteen minutes later, we had finished the second episode of Pretty Cure Splash Star, and Alice was now in the shower. From halfway across the large room and separated from us by two doors, it was barely audible over the rain outside, and I was certain she couldn’t hear Izumi and I as we each laid spread-eagle on top of the bed, staring vacantly at the ceiling.

It was a truly significant piece of furniture, so spacious that we were able to maintain considerable personal space despite our maximized radii. There might as well have been oceans between us. Nonetheless, we were of one mind.

“It’s so much tail.”

“It is so much tail.”

“It’s got to weigh more than the rest of her by now, doesn’t it?”

Izumi gave this a moment’s thought. “Almost certainly. Her spine.”

“Her spine,” I echoed the lamentation. “It’s so…just so much. And touching it was like—it’s firm, but soft. How?”

“I just want to keep touching it. I want to upgrade my hands so I can touch it better.”

Silence inched across the bedsheets between us, escorted by the roar of the storm.

“You feel it too, right? It’s…I don’t want to say it.” Even the doll’s disinhibition had its limits.

“I do. It’s hot.”

“Well, there it is,” I sighed. “It’s like—hot in the same way boobs are. Which makes no sense. That’s not normal. Pretty sure.”

“It helps that her chest and all of the rest of her is also…well-endowed.”

Copiously, I agreed internally. Subtracting the dragon bits, Alice was indubitably still a handcrafted, one-in-a-billion specimen for proportions. She had redesigned her body to her exact specifications and came out almost frighteningly attractive. And that certainly was an element here, but the tail’s hindbrain appeal felt like its own thing.

“Maybe it’s a flamebearer thing. Our Flames, not us.” I distantly wished I had my laptop to very briefly browse certain websites for “radiance_opal tail” just to get the lay of the land and confirm that a statistically significant number of regular humans felt this way as well. There was decent supporting evidence for it being at least Flame-exacerbated, though: “Doesn’t that Hikanome guy have a thing for her?”

“Hongo. Yes. I understand him now. He feels it is a sign of divinity, and now, touching it is like…it felt like worship.” She raised her head slightly to look at me, seeming slightly alarmed at what had just come out of her mouth. “We cannot say that in front of her. Are we…drugged?”

“We’ve both been mantled up the whole time.”

“Maybe Ebi-sensei injected our flesh bodies with…what is the word? Love drugs?”

“Aphrodisiacs.” I gave the possibility a moment’s serious consideration before dismissing it. Ebi could be a jerk—shockingly so, given her status as the penthouse’s effectively sole care provider—but it just didn’t check out. “Nah. I’ve been feeling this way the whole time, I think, just…there’s a lot more tail now. And that counts for…something.”

“It has more presence,” Izumi agreed.

“Yes! Exactly! Which she’d hate to hear us talking about as a good thing, wouldn’t she.”

“She would…flip her shit, is something I heard Hina say once.” Izumi cringed. “I feel like a pig speaking of her this way.”

“But she wants us to touch it,” I pointed out, feeling the familiar tug of shame but refusing to immediately fold to it. Alice’s behavior had been welcoming, even teasing. “Even though we’re not Amane.”

“We’re convenient,” Izumi groaned, rolling over to plant her face in the sheet. “If Amane-chan were here, we would not be.”

“I…fuck, maybe. They’ve used the doll before,” I said, looking down at my hands. They were still distantly, liminally sore. “In bed, I mean. I’m piloting what Alice considers one of Amane’s sex toys. But I think she actually just likes you.”

“No. She likes you. Me, she pities.”

We lay at that emotional impasse until the sound of the shower cut out. 

“I’m gonna check before she comes back out.”

Izumi frowned. “Check what?”

I tapped my synthetic skull. “Amane and I have been chatting,” I confessed. “I’m sort of here on her behalf.”

ezzen: disclosure: alice is sorta sending signals

ezzen: not sure about exactly what but she’s REALLY letting us touch her

ezzen: uh, “us” being me and izumi, who is also here

ezzen: please clarify monogamy status as her girlfriend before things escalate

Amethyst: I already share her with Hina.

Ah. That was the confirmation I needed. The shape of the Radiances’ relationship web folded over on itself in my head; Amane was with Alice, Izumi and I were with Hina, and Hina and Alice were the bridge. Viewed that way, if Amane didn’t mind…

ezzen: ok um wow

ezzen: its hookup city in here huh

ezzen: so um. this isn’t some weird proxy thing for her?

Amethyst: “Proxy”?

ezzen: like i kinda felt like i’m just doing the things you would with her, including using a body that i know you two have used sexually together, and it’s just kind of weird

ezzen: if im just being treated as a tool between you and her i want you to say it, basically

Amethyst: Ah, I understand, you mean that Alice is only flirting with you because I’m not there?

ezzen: i guess

Before I could explain further, Alice’s voice came from behind the door: “Ah, darn it, this thing takes so many towels now! Izumi, nanmaika mottekite kurenai? In the linen closet on the far side of the common space, the big fluffy blue ones.”

Izumi very slowly got up, looking like a brushmouse trying very hard to not stir up the undergrowth directly beneath some much larger carnivore. Like a dragon, for example. She gave me a downright hunted look and whispered, “What do I do?”

I whispered back. “Why are you asking me? Just go!”

Izumi called back an affirmative and then launched off the bed in a burst of enhanced mantle-motion, footsteps leaving deep imprints in the rug like each had a metric ton of force behind it. The air protested loudly as she forced it out of her path, a blasting noise that briefly overpowered the rain outside. That same desperate kineticism had torn up clods of earth when she’d fought us at Yoyogi Park, and now it was harnessed with just as much motivation toward the goal of getting her erstwhile adversary some linens. She disappeared around the corner on her errand.

“Alright, quick,” Alice said, peeking her head out of the bathroom door. She had yet to towel off her white hair or apply a new bandage, and the dark severed bases of her horns peeked out between the damp strands. “Sanity check, Ezzen: she’s, ah, very into the tail, isn’t she? I’m not reading into it, am I?”

At the same time, I got a reply from Amethyst.

Amethyst: I can’t speak for her heart. But I know that she does not want to be touched when she feels like her body does not belong to her. So, you made her comfortable. Thank you for doing that for me, but also, it was not me who did it. Make sure that she knows that.

The messaging app hooked up to my brain didn’t transmit my thoughts involuntarily any more than a keyboard would. However, I was quite used to playing out my stream of consciousness on a keyboard with much less filter than what came out of my mouth, and that muscle memory, that relaxation of my usual verbal guardrails, did transfer in no small way. On top of the doll’s reduced inhibitions, this emboldened me to say something to Alice that I definitely would not have otherwise:

“Izumi would bounce on it if she could.”

Alice stared at my vulgarity, then turned crimson. “I—what, really?”

Well, shit, I thought to myself. I was in for a penny, and the urge to shower Alice in one-pound notes was strong. Maybe I was about to fuck everything up, but I felt like I was reading the situation right. It would be untenable to not put everything on the table. “Um, yes. The tail is really hot. You are, as a whole, I mean, and the tail just adds to it. It’s kind of shocking, frankly, how nice it is to touch.”

The blush didn’t leave her face, but her expression turned from shock to intrigue. “…Oh. It’s…you’re speaking for both of you, then?”

“I am,” I admitted. “And I’ve been worried that you didn’t notice it from me because you’ve been conceptualizing me as a…a proxy for Amane. ‘Date night,’ you called this.”

“Ah.” Alice’s gaze slid sideways off of me awkwardly. “I…crap. Maybe. I mean, cognitively, I know it’s you in there, and it’s not like—agh. Sorry. I just figured you’d talked to her about what to do for me, because you’ve done a great job and I know the idea for the hand sensor logging didn’t come from you, and…”

“I have been talking to her,” I sighed. “But I do like this, what we were doing. That’s me, as unbelievable as it is to me that I’m allowed to be here and doing any of this. And I would like to do more of it, if…”

I couldn’t quite make it to “if you’d be willing” or any other such direct proposition. I didn’t want my jittery nerves to manifest as trying to pressure her.

Alice shuffled behind the door. “You’re you, not Amane. And you’re with Hina. Neither of those are bad things. But you’re not…with Izumi, too, are you?”

My heart would have been racing if it could. I distantly wondered if the heart rate monitor downstairs was freaking out right now. “We…haven’t been able to connect like that. She’s interested, I just haven’t been able to…yeah. Until now.”

“Yes. Right. And Hina wants you two to hook up, of course. Hell, she wants all of us to hook up. And we’d all be playing right into her hands, if we were to do…more.”

“More tail-touching?” I fretted that I was reacting the way a dog did when it heard the word “walk”.

Alice raised an eyebrow. “How much euphemism is that?”

“I truly have no idea.”

“And, if you would reiterate, you feel that the tail…?”

“Is hot,” I confirmed. “In all senses of the word. Like, to the point that Izumi and I were speculating if we’d been dosed with something to make us this, er, this horny.”

Alice twisted to look back at the limb, hidden from view with the rest of her body behind the door. “I…can’t say I agree. But it…God, this is so embarrassing. It feels good that you like it. Is that hypocritical of me?”

“Maybe? If I said this sort of thing to Yuuka about her chest, she’d castrate me on the spot, I figure. And I’m told you’ve been pretty caustic toward Hongo about it.”

“Yeah, well…” Alice fell silent for a moment. Her head moved as though she had just straightened up. “Neither of you are Hongo. You’re a cute robo-enby with tits, and Izumi is a hot older girl and I just want to make her squeal. Fuck, I’m so gay. Point is, you’ve both had me feeling good. You know how this whole thing was to help me with burnout?”

“…Yeah?”

“I’m feeling like being in charge again. In a small way, to start. Get back to being the…queen dyke around here, or something.” I swore I could see her hair drying in real time from the heat she was emitting. The dragon’s slitted eyes twinkled with avarice as they fixed on me. “That body of yours is more than a convenient sex-bot. It’s the body you’re comfortable in. But it is a really good sex-bot, and I’d very much like to know more about that sensation echo you felt in your arms. Would you like to…investigate that with me?”

Eye contact was easy when I didn’t have any myself. I felt like I was going to faint, but I felt like I hid it well. “That sounds really good. Are we actually about to…?” 

“Well, that depends on our third, doesn’t it.” Her gaze slid past me toward the anteroom. “I know you got back thirty seconds ago, Izumi. How would you like it if I opened this door and you came over here and toweled off every scale on my tail? Got to make sure it’s clean before you sit on it.”

A yelp came from the other room.

Alice’s gaze came back to me. Her tail thumped loud against the bathroom tile, sharp yet deep. “Well, that sounds like enough of an answer, doesn’t it? Ezzen, I’m going to teach you how to turn on the vibrating mode. You’re going to fill me while you fill me in on everything I missed in the past few days.”

Author’s Note:

Whew. Spicy! I’ve been wanting to write this tail scene for many moons, though Izumi didn’t factor into it until recently. Things just kind of shook out that way for the characters. Thanks to the beta readers for really helping me hammer out the directions each of the three characters in this scene should take, I’m really pleased with the results.

Full disclosure: this is a fade to black. The events immediately following the end of this chapter might become a side story in the not-too-distant future, but next chapter will not be a gratuitous threeway scene. It will, however, be the last chapter of arc 4. (I know we still don’t have a cover! I’m working on it!)

This chapter went up a day late, but at this point I’m not stressing too much. Thank you to everybody for your patience about the slightly intermittent updates; I’ll build up some more backlog before arc 5 starts. Tune in next week for the finale!

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July 28, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

“Anime?”

“I’ve been trying to re-center myself. Magical girl shows do that for me. Well, they’re mostly something for me to fall asleep to, if I’m being honest, but it does give me something else to think about, you know?”

“That’s a much more…measured response than those would suggest,” I pointed out, indicating the stumps of her horns hidden beneath the bloodsoaked bandages. “No offense.”

“And you’re having a much more measured response to me being bottomless than experience would suggest,” she countered. “So I’d appreciate it if we could take this conversation out of the hallway, thank you. Or if you would leave me be.” Her fire-orange, slit-pupil eyes scanned across the penthouse’s common area behind me. “But, well, neither the girls nor the leadership will let you take no for an answer, will they? Come in.”

“Um, yes. Right.” She did have a point about nakedness. “Does, um, Amane know about this?”

“Ah, no, she’s out.” Alice pinched the bridge of her nose. “She hasn’t seen what I’ve done yet. I don’t think she’ll be surprised, just—come in and give me that, I’m starving.”

I already knew Amane wasn’t around. She had been out of town since yesterday, unfazed by the natural bad weather in her gemstone form. Apparently some rock that contained a spirit according to folklore—or a god, I wasn’t sure about the distinction—had split open of its own accord yesterday, releasing a spike of ripple, and that warranted investigation. Amane had also thought that it seemed like as good a lead as any for Sugawara’s trail.

But back home, she had a vested interest in what was going on with her girlfriend. I hadn’t told Izumi this, but among my goals for this meeting with Alice was to report to Amane how her girlfriend seemed to be doing. I felt like a spy, even knowing that this was for the sake of Alice’s emotional wellbeing first and foremost. I consoled myself knowing I wasn’t recording anything, just relaying what I saw fit to mention via a new upgrade to the doll’s hardware that let me silently send messages with just a thought like actual mantles could. Ai had offered to put it into my new prosthetic as part of the footphone suite, and with my current lack of an actual phone, we were trial running it directly in the doll.

It wasn’t quite telepathy—in my head I was still typing on a keyboard. So much of mantle usage was mapping physical muscle memory to magitech functions. And they were still messages sent over the internet, using the same secure protocol the chatroom was built from, not pure infomancy. It still made me feel extremely cool, though. 

ezzen: she’s talkative, tired. didn’t just take the food and slam the door in my face. asked me to watch anime, so wants company i think

Amethyst: which anime?

Amane’s reply felt like a thought in my brain, but not in my usual voice, and not one occurring at the same level. Higher level, easier to filter out if necessary, more like remembering something said to me—I could shut it out easily. As with all the Radiances’ mind-mantle interface tech, being able to pull the plug in an emergency was prized over maximally deep integration, as a safety precaution.

ezzen: magical girl, didn’t say which. do you think i should take her up on it?

Amethyst: it will make her happy, and you should learn

I hastily stepped across the threshold, tray of soup in hand. For some reason I expected Alice to back out of the way—she managed rather less than a full stride in her surprise, only a half-shuffle, unused to managing the increased weight of the tail. So my step instead took me quite far into her personal space in my efforts to clear the swing of her inward-facing door, into arm’s reach. We didn’t quite collide, but the tray’s edge did brush her shirt.

My hands’ sensors immediately notified me that the air right around her body was an envelope of heat almost forty degrees Celsius. That would have been uncomfortable in my flesh, but was mostly a medical data point as far as the doll’s chassis was concerned. That was a distinct rise in her baseline temperature…or she was more upset than she was letting on, which was also worryingly plausible. Either way, the heat was having adverse effects on the chilled drink on the tray.

Alice blinked up at me and finished shuffling back to an appropriate distance as she grabbed the tray out of my hands. “Whoa, hello.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, also taken off guard. She looked much smaller than me for a moment, despite the substantial bulk of her tail. I often forgot that I had several inches on her—I thought of myself as roughly the same height as all the girls in abstract, a hierarchical thing, probably. But since the doll matched my flesh body in torso and limb length, I remained quite a bit taller than Alice. That must have been at least a little intimidating, to see a faceless, mechanical drone that was bigger than you step into your arm’s reach like that.

Except no, of course not. Alice was used to it; Amethyst was much bigger and scarier than me and Alice never flinched at her. I was far less intimidating than that. And it probably helped that Alice probably associated the doll with sex or infirmity. Maybe that made it weirder?

“Tch. Fucking tail,” Alice grunted, not even looking at me. “Not your fault. Can’t move right.”

Ah, of course, she wasn’t thinking about any of that, really. She was fully preoccupied with her own bodily dysfunction, which was horrible in a familiar way—the frustration of my movement feeling limited compared to what I “should” be able to do was a near-constant buzz in the back of my mind whenever I was in my meat body, between my amputation and the general feeling of weight and sluggishness that pervaded my senses compared to those moments of empowered glory I kept ever-so-briefly grasping. I didn’t know if commenting something to that effect would come off as properly sympathetic to Alice’s plight or just aggravate her dysphoria.

But I’d learned that being solution-oriented was always welcome. “If weight is the inconvenient part, we can definitely do something about that.”

“Give it a floater, yeah, we’ve talked about it before,” Alice affirmed. She hefted the tray and turned slowly toward the small dining table at the far end of her apartment’s anteroom, which was half-covered in wrappers and takeout boxes and other food containers that had clearly been hastily shoveled to one side. Her toned legs were strong enough that she wasn’t having trouble merely standing, but the tension of her thighs and calves in each step made it clear that walking presented significant strain, and her gait suggested that she wasn’t comfortable with the new center of balance, especially with the admittedly-possibly-slightly-overfilled bowl of soup wobbling precariously.

She was struggling. I impulsively grabbed the tray back out of her hands. “Let me.”

She blinked as I stepped past her hurriedly to place the tray on the free spot on the table. There were two chairs, or more accurately reinforced steel barstools with generously padded seats. One had a back, the other didn’t and I assumed the latter was Alice’s, backless to render questions of tail placement entirely null. I pulled it out for Alice and watched with a little concern as she performed a fairly ungraceful landing in front of the tray. She gave me a grateful and slightly humiliated look.

“Such a gentle…er, gentlethey, I suppose. You’re practically falling over yourself to help me. God, in that body this reminds me too much of Ebi waiting on Amane hand and foot.”

“Sorry, I—”

“No, no, it’s not on you. And I’m not my girlfriend, I know how to accept help. Though if you take food out of my hands again I’m melting you.” A brief silence punctuated the threat before she sighed. “I’m starving. Go make yourself comfortable in the other room, neither of us want you to just stand ominously while I inhale all this.”

“Ah, alright,” I replied, a little embarrassed myself and nervous at being let off leash. Since Alice and Amane shared the room, it felt like a double invasion of privacy. I’d only been in here once before, when I’d rushed into it in a panicky mess out of guilt toward Yuuka and general fear for the Vaetna. I had been a little too scattered to really take in its layout at the time, especially as I’d walked in on Alice in the middle of a workout and thus she’d been very eye-catching to my meat-brain which had still been recovering from the hormone explosion I’d had with Hina the night before.

This time I lacked the biological machinery to be distracted by Alice’s figure as she went apeshit on her soup—the doll’s disinhibition lent itself to conscious attraction but dulled the gravitational pull of bare legs or a fat tail—and there was no pressing emotional crisis giving me tunnel vision. So this time I took Alice’s invitation to explore, going over to the doorway and into the actual bedroom.

It was, in fact, a double-size room versus mine or Hina’s. They had knocked out much of the wall between two adjacent rooms, leaving a space that was somewhat divided but still much larger than the others. To call it the master suite didn’t quite make sense in the penthouse’s overall layout, which had over a dozen rooms in the U-arrangement, but it certainly befitted the team’s power couple, and they used all of the space.

There was a massive bed with its headboard against the floor-to-ceiling windows, nearer to me on my right, which immediately looked quite expensive and quite plush. Larger than king-size for sure. That made sense to me; I couldn’t imagine that the team would spare any expense on Amane’s comfort, and a sufficiently wide area would let her retreat from Alice’s aura of heat if necessary while still sleeping on the same bed. I wasn’t sure what Alice’s sleeping body temperature was like, but I couldn’t imagine it was particularly comfortable to cuddle with all night, no matter how cold Amane’s injuries might make her run. And there was no shortage of alternative cuddle subjects; the bed was absolutely loaded with what must have been at least twenty plushies. A dozen more sat in a row on a shelf overhead, displayed in place of pride. I recognized none of them in the jumble, but the presence of a few stuffed wands in the pile suggested that many or all of them were magical girl anime characters and iconography.

The bed was cordoned on the far side by Alice’s workout area, with its yoga mat and medicine ball and a fairly serious-looking set of weights, as well as a currently-bare hook on the ceiling. There was not a proper bench—they did have an entire weight room directly beneath them—but it was sufficiently furnished for whatever daily routine Alice had to keep her legs strong or physical therapy Amane went through for her everything.

Past the workout area was the wall that had originally divided the rooms. It now only extended from the edge of that set of windows to perhaps a meter short of the foot of the bed, leaving the floor plan open past it. I remembered from last time I’d been in here that on the far side of that separator lay Amane’s sophisticated gaming/streaming rig. The wall was painted the same warm yellow as the other ones in the room, but was mostly covered in posters and framed photos. Some of the posters were quite explicit and featured busty anime women in rather compromising outfits and positions, others were mechas, and there was little rhyme or reason I could discern in which went where. What was certain was that both of these girls were massive anime fans who had seized the opportunity to decorate unconstrained by budget or judgment.

“Alice? Which anime would we be watching?”

The reply took a moment to come; presumably she needed several seconds to swallow.

“Pretty Cure. Splash Star, probably. You’re looking at the posters?”

“Yeah.”

“On the left, middle, with the girls in black and white, above the one with the mecha with the absolutely ridiculous shoulders.”

Several of the mechs had ridiculous shoulders, but one stood out among the rest, a hilariously stocky Gundam thing with pauldrons as big as the rest of it, practically a polar opposite of Amethyst in design sensibilities. Above was the poster in question, with the two girls arranged vertically and inverted like the faces on a playing card.

ezzen: pretty cure splash star

Amethyst: she is thinking about Izumi-chan. 

Amethyst: there is a plush of Saki-chan on the bed. she will want to cuddle with it

ezzen: orange hair?

Amethyst: yes

ezzen: ok i see it

ezzen: also she’s struggling with movement a bit

That didn’t get an immediate response, so I continued surveying the room. 

To my left, opposite the foot of the bed, was a reading nook centered on a nice rug. Tall, heavy bookshelves anchored the space to the corner of the room. Rows of colorful spines almost certainly denoted manga, but I could tell that there were also clusters of more standard literature and textbooks. Series were bookended by anime statuettes, some of which were definitely Todai merch. There was a recliner and extra-large loveseat, the latter likely for Amane to be able to lounge in mech form, though I had no idea how the soft fabric avoided being torn and punctured by the hard planes of her mantle.

Amethyst: If she is moving slowly it is because she needs a bath and stretch

ezzen: i’m not bathing your girlfriend

Amethyst: Not for her whole body, there is a cream for her tail that she is supposed to use

Amethyst: Her scales become itchy and painful without applying it. She does not use her tail to balance if it hurts

ezzen: …i’ll bring it up

The bookshelves bordered a desk that was clearly Alice’s workspace judging by the file organizers and custom office chair. On the wall behind the monitors were plastered maps of Japanese cities, Japan as a whole, and Asia, including an ambient ripple distribution one covered in pushpins indicating ripple events and another with concentric rings radiating from Tokyo that looked like maybe a map of flight times from the launchpad atop Lighthouse Tower.

The pushpin maps were color-coded; I surmised that the main three colors I saw were differentiating flamefalls from infernos from miscellaneous ambient ripple events. The map of Tokyo had a pin on Yoyogi Park and sticky notes. I didn’t see a pin on the map of Japan for the hospital, nor one for where Amane was right now, not too far north of us.

ezzen: Alice hasn’t been keeping up with her pin board map things

ezzen: burnout

ezzen: anything on your end?

Amethyst: I am fighting with the translator app

Amethyst: …

Amethyst: The Killing Stone is broken. “Tamamo-no-mae” is free.

Well, that was terrifying and ominous. My hand reached for my phone to check Wikipedia—I didn’t have it, right. And I didn’t have a general web browser in my android head, which was almost certainly for the best. ADHD would eat me alive. So I had to ask for clarification like some kind of chump.

ezzen: what does that mean?

Amethyst: It means that there is a second demon running amok in Japan. I’m asking Yuuka-chan.

ezzen: and sugawara?

Amethyst: I don’t know yet

Amethyst: Just take care of Alice for me, okay?

It felt crazy to be here in the penthouse when supernatural events were going on. A demon comparable to Sugawara? And one with actual basis in folklore? It boded ill.

But what I was doing here mattered too. I glanced back briefly—Alice was out of sight, but it sounded like she was still eating, maybe slurping up the last dregs of her soup, bowl directly to mouth. It was not a quiet process.

Past the desk, the final corner of the room was dominated by dressers and racks of clothes surrounding a large vanity. The original construction of the rooms on the 20th floor lacked closets, and while Hina and Ai had opted to have closets built, Alice and Amane had deemed it easier to simply put up cabinets and bars on the walls and free-standing hangers, especially when you owned as many outfits as these two Radiances apparently did. I assumed the girls shared the makeup station, or perhaps the bathroom had another one; I suspected it was often moot anyway given the girls got the professional treatment on-site for many appearances and otherwise had the flawless mantles to fall back on.

What I did not see was a TV. Before I could investigate further, I heard Alice’s stool scoot back and I trotted back to her side in case she needed help. By the time I was there, she had already stood up.

“Better. You made all that?”

“I wouldn’t really call it ‘all that,’ it’s just soup. Stick a bunch of shit in a pot and boil.”

“It was good. Hunger is the best spice, sure, but it was good. Take some credit. So, tail lightening,” she prompted, before I could deny her praise.

“Uh…yeah. I could dictate a serviceable one right now if you wanted to weave it.”

Alice thought about this, not responding immediately, walking slowly and heavily past me into her room, toward the bed. She stopped when she reached it and fussed with the bandage around her head. “I’m tired, Ezzen.”

I would have swallowed if I could. “In a need-a-nap-after-eating way, or a want-to-quit-being-a-VNT way?”

“My first impulse is the second one. But, well…I know me. I usually feel that way when I feel gross, and then don’t after I take a little care of myself. And I haven’t taken care of myself in a few days, so. I ought to do that and then see how I feel.”

“Too real.” I followed her toward the bed. “Been there. Am still frequently there.”

“I know. I saw it in you almost immediately. It’s a dysphoria thing. Not exclusively a dysphoria thing, I think, because even in the time after getting my body but before the tail, it still felt that way sometimes. But it gets worse when I don’t feel good about myself to start with. And it’s self-perpetuating, y’know? The more I wallow, the more behind on all the corporate stuff I get, and the more stressed I get.”

“And the more stressed you get, the easier it is for the dragon-ka to manifest,” I finished.

“Yeah. Maybe I need a vacation. I mean, I’ve been thinking about it, and it doesn’t seem so farfetched. Peacies have been on our turf for weeks but barely done anything, haven’t even made real demands for you, unless something’s changed—not like I’ve been checking my email. And we haven’t even got a whiff of Sugawara. Just don’t go traipsing into more abandoned hospitals and keep Hina from kicking off any more infernos for like a week and I want to say nothing will happen. And then maybe I’ll be right as rain.” Her tone was wistful. “I don’t know. Like I said, I get these sorts of thoughts when my body feels all…bleh. And instead of dealing with it by bathing and staying on top of things, I do this,” she groaned, indicating the bloody splotches where she’d severed her horns. “It’s untenable.”

I thought about this. I felt like I had to tell her that something had just happened, according to Amethyst, but I had to be delicate. “Do the others know you want a break?”

“We don’t…talk about it. That doesn’t mean they don’t know, though, I think. I’m not trying to hide it, it’s just hard to say.”

“Mm. Okay,” I decided. “I think you’re right, further discussion of whether you should take a break is hereby postponed until we make you feel slightly less terrible.”

“Doesn’t have to be ‘we,’” Alice sighed. “I don’t want to bother you. Even you coming here is enough of a kick in the ass for me to get out of the funk, you can go if you want.”

“I thought you said you knew how to accept help?”

“You already helped me, I was starving. You shouldn’t over-exert yourself. Need I remind you you’re currently on an IV with a bunch of burns downstairs? You’re doing as bad as I am.”

I would have frowned if I had the face for it. “I’m currently right here, doing fine, thank you.”

“Yeah, but you’re also down there, aren’t you? Just because you can’t feel how messed up you are doesn’t mean you aren’t.”

The gears in my head—metaphorical, unless this body was much more clockwork than I had previously understood—began to turn. Alice didn’t seem to understand that I considered the doll-body a proper and total escape from my flesh. “Oh,” I gasped, realization dawning. “I’ve been thinking how odd it is that your dragon-ka also affects your mantle. It’s because you think of it as your body, too, don’t you?”

“…Yeah?”

“I don’t think it’s like that for the others,” I explained. “For them, the mantles are an…externalized sort of thing. A mask they wear. I saw that with Hina’s interview, that’s not her, it’s a persona. But for you, because you love being a magical girl, you consider it equal to your real body, as part of your identity. And, like, you literally built it to be your primary body at first, didn’t you? Before you changed your flesh body. So your Flame also considers it your ‘real’ body. I think. Doesn’t explain why it’s a dragon, but it explains why it doesn’t seem like you can escape it.”

Alice sat sideways on the bed, hefting the base of her tail up onto the sheets while leaving the rest of it to spill down onto the floor. She looked across the room at her desk. “Huh. Okay. Sure. So it’s because I like being a mahou shoujo where the other’s…don’t?”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I hedged. “Listen. I’ve been putting together…a thing. Too early to call it a theory, but a model of how magic intersects between mind and body and Flame. There’s a system of equations going on here, with your dragon-ka, the digitization method for Izumi’s soul, and the mantles, and probably more. And from what I’ve gathered from that, from what my Flame has done for me and Hina, then your Flame isn’t just doing this because you like being mahou shoujo specifically. For the rest of us—small sample size, I’ll admit—it seems to want us to self-actualize. I mean, that’s the fantasy, isn’t it? The Flame gives you power, it makes you who and what you’re supposed to be. Except for you, yours is doing something else.”

“Don’t I fucking know it.” The temperature in the room went up a degree.

“…Yeah. Sorry.” I wondered if this could all come down to simple miscommunication, if her Flame was trying to actualize something inside Alice that she herself couldn’t recognize. But I suspected that line of questioning would majorly piss her off at the moment. “Point is, I don’t think it would be trying to hurt you by turning you into something you don’t want to be, not badly enough for you to hurt yourself. It’s not fair.”

Alice gave me a genuinely puzzled look. “Yeah, it’s not. Correction, though: I’m not hurting myself.”

“You cut off your horns.”

“That’s…maintenance! It’s an unwanted growth. Like cutting out a tumor. Like you ripping out all the hair from your body!”

“Ah,” I muttered. I could see it that way. I didn’t consider that to be hurting myself, either. I mean, it had hurt like hell, but it had been for the sake of fixing something that had felt fundamentally wrong. “Okay. Yeah. Okay, not hurting yourself, then. I can roll with that.”

“You…can?”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know. I’ve gotten into fights with Hina about this before. How I should just embrace what I’m being turned into.”

“Well, I say you should at least have the choice to refuse it.”

She blinked her fire-orange eyes in surprise. The temperature dropped again. “Oh. Thank you. That’s. Nice to hear.”

My assertiveness faltered slightly. “Yeah, um, you’re welcome. But I need to know more to give you that choice. And it’s not just for you, it’s for Izumi and me, too. So, um.”

Alice tucked her legs to her chest. “What about Amane?”

“Oh, yes, it’s for her, too, of course,” I corrected hurriedly.

“No, no. As in, she lives in her mantle more than any of the rest of us. And she doesn’t have mutations, but she absolutely has ripple residuals. A lot of her condition isn’t from combat injuries. Why don’t those problems follow her, by your theory?”

“Maybe because the two bodies are so different to begin with?” I could feel myself getting into the weeds with the magical theories and consciously pulled myself back. “We can test changing your mantle, if you want. Maybe you just need a vacation from your body, rather than from being Todai’s boss. But I think we should try some lower-hanging fruit first: a shower, a new bandage for your head, a bottle of your tail cream, that plush of Saki-chan, and a few episodes of Pretty Cure while I take a closer look at your tail and horns.”

“Date night,” Alice summarized.

“Um.” It belatedly occurred to me that of course Amane’s suggestions for caring for Alice would be rather girlfriendly, a role I wasn’t actually intending to fill. “I guess? Not that—I’m with Hina, of course, and—”

“No, no, I get it. The girls want me back on my feet, and this is proven to work on me, and you’ve got your academic interest. I’m not gonna read into it, don’t worry.”

That sat wrong with me, and it took me a moment to figure out why. “Yeah, don’t read into it. But also, it’s not about getting you back on your feet. And it’s not just about academic interest for me. We—and I do believe I’m speaking for all of Todai—don’t want you to feel like you’re going through this alone.” I looked around her spacious, gratuitously furnished apartment. There was so much love expressed in the decor, but it was all dormant right now. “I remember what it was like hiding from myself in my room, with all my posters and merch. It was lonely. Unbearably, in hindsight. So let me share the load a little.”

“Share the load? My tail’s not gotten that fat.” Her ire softened after a moment. “But…yes, thank you. I’m tired of being alone. And I really could use some of that cream.”

I silently shared the good news with Amane; she was happy and more than a little relieved. Now for the stretch; I’d promised Izumi I’d ask. “Okay, great, um—it doesn’t have to be just me, either. I think all your teammates are out, but…would it be alright for Izumi to join us? Not for the, er, medically relevant bits, if you don’t want to, but for anime, at least? I don’t know if she’s seen, er, Splash Star, but I imagine she’d very much like to watch it with you either way.”

Alice hesitated. Her eyes scanned across her room, like mine had. Then she gave a small nod. “Oh. Yes, of course she’s welcome. I think I’d like that very much.”

Author’s Note:

The Tamamo-no-mae stone breaking is an actual, real-life event! It just has slightly more implications in Sunspot’s setting. I had plans to include it but totally didn’t realize that the date had already slipped by until a reader pointed it out. Have fun waiting for that Chekov’s gun! In the meantime we are doing some good ol dragon-ka exploration.

Apologies for the delay on this chapter. Life has been hitting me with repeated curveballs! Alice’s feelings on burnout are not fully autobiographical, don’t you worry; it’s purely a matter of time and energy budget on my end, and it’s been a struggle to maintain the update schedule. I’m hesitantly saying that the next chapter will be not this coming Sunday but the one after, July 26. If I get the chapter done before then it’ll be up on Patreon.

Also, did you know that part 2 of the Ez-Hina side story went up two weeks ago? It is extremely smutty and you can read it on the site with the password “hyenis”, same as part 1.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters ahead of public!

July 15, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Self harm (near end of chapter)

For all that Alice had charred and melted an entire mountain valley, Japan was vast, and it was only early March; winter refused to shuffle off the stage so easily from one flamebearer’s meddling. Indeed, weather systems were finicky things, and though that injection of thermal energy did bring a minor nudge to the weather back in Tokyo, it was not for the warmer. The column of heat from the blast eventually cooled, contracted, and sucked in a wall of cold rain from the Pacific. The city lay directly in its path and experienced some of the worst cold rains of the century.

A mat of clouds loomed gray and oppressive over the sky of Tokyo, tracking uniformly from horizon to horizon and draping the penthouse’s lower level in a sunless haze. Rain struck the windows in thick, heavy droplets, and far below they slammed into cars and roads with such force that they exploded into mist. Frigid winds raced through the shivering, naked limbs of the trees lining the roads, carrying the nascent fog into every nook and cranny of the city. Gusts wrestled umbrellas out of the numb fingers of those who had to brave the cold.

These were no conditions to be out and about; this weather encouraged one to stay indoors, stay in your room, stay in bed, and let the day crawl by dreary and unremarked. I’d experienced many such days in England, days where I simply lay in bed, inert and catatonic, waiting to resume my approximation of personhood until the siege ended and the sun came back out.

But the soul-shielding buffer of the doll cut through that burrowing instinct and unearthed something else from the geological strata of my memories; I remembered the sounds of an active kitchen, the dull roar of heavy rain acting as background static against the bright clink of stainless steel utensils and the spirited sizzle of hot oil driving away water. Instead of being dreadful and bleak, being able to stay inside in this weather felt cozy, the perfect opportunity to cook something warm and filling. I think the critical difference is that I wasn’t really doing it for myself; I wanted to give Alice something delicious, so that she didn’t have to confront her dragon-ka while grumpy from subsisting mostly on room-temperature empty carbs. And I was killing two birds with one stone by enlisting the help of a freshly-woven set of taste buds.

“Well?”

“Mm. Mm!” Izumi’s eyes widened in surprise as she took a second, greedier sip from the ladle I’d handed her. “It works! It’s not just salt. There’s…umami. You know umami? Is there an English word?”

“English uses the word too. But—that’s great!”

I pumped a synthetic fist victoriously. Izumi had been weaving around-the-clock to get her body back up and running as quickly as possible; even the most slapdash, ramshackle implementation lacking all of her fancy combat features and customization was better than spending another minute awake in her flesh body. And once she’d had the basic platform working again, we had taken much of last night to realize the improved eating experience I’d promised her.

She really was half-built at the moment, though I could only tell because I knew what to look for. Her movements were very human, lacking both the precision and casual power characteristic to mantles, and it was clear from the way her eyes darted around the penthouse that she felt exposed without her advanced sensory suite. The textures and shapes of her figure were at least rendered to fairly lifelike fidelity, but it was only her figure itself, none of her elaborate built-in outfits, and thus she was wearing actual textile clothing over her LM skin. She must have stocked up or brought over a wardrobe, because I was sure the baggy, low-cut pants she was wearing didn’t belong to any of the other girls. On top she had on a tight, shoulderless item in midnight blue.

Maybe the fabric was playing tricks on me, but I could have sworn she’d made her chest a little more ample than in the last iteration. Solidarity with Yuuka? Or simple envy of her? Or of me, whose false breasts were hidden under my hoodie but still imposed a substantial curve on my silhouette? I respected it regardless.

Even with only two pieces to her outfit, she was making me feel underdressed. Maybe that wasn’t so hard when I was wearing just the hoodie over my shell and an apron atop that, and the former didn’t even reach my hips. Hina had called that slutty; I didn’t disagree but did consider it something of a safety hazard to my exposed joints while making soup, thus the apron. On the other hand—literally—my servo-articulated hands were proof against all manner of liquids and an impressive range of temperatures, and supposedly had antibacterial nano-texturing, so that at least was an upgrade in the kitchen versus my usual body. Supposedly there were other goodies in the box of doll attachments that Hina had dug up from storage, but they wouldn’t be of any use here.

“Can you tell what kind of broth it is?”

I hid the box of chicken stock behind me. Calibration was tricky when she refused to use her flesh body to compare the flavors, but I felt like we were getting close to tuning what I’d put in.

She frowned. “Hm. Koku mo aru. It’s sticking in my mouth a little, not like water. Not dashi or vegetable broth, something with meat.”

“That’d be the natural gelatin, yeah. You can tell that kind of viscosity and such now?” It had been a very strange intimacy to help distribute nerves along the inside of her mouth and tongue, even just in diagram, and made especially interesting by the fact that I currently lacked such features.

“Yes. I can’t tell more than that, though. Too salty for what I think beef tastes like, maybe, but that’s only a guess. And not tonkotsu, maybe, not heavy enough. It could still be pork. Chicken?”

I nodded and showed her the box. “Yeah, it’s chicken. We could probably get some of the specific meat flavors working, enough to tell them apart.”

It wasn’t feasible to implement the vast majority of the thousands of volatile flavor compounds that gave many foods their distinctive tastes, but even adding the other fundamentals to her palate—sour, bitter, and umami—already constituted a quantum leap in her ability to eat and actually enjoy it. Going further would require more specialized biochemistry knowledge that we didn’t have in-house, neither among the Radiances’ local expertise nor Todai’s purview as an institution. We’d have to contact actual food scientists, figure out which groups of volatiles were reasonable to implement and Izumi particularly wanted, and then work backward from their chemical makeup to find reasonably compressed pathways of detection within the mantle’s limited complexity budget.

When I’d been rambling to Hina about this, she had been a little confused. To her, upgrading Izumi’s mantle fundamentally seemed like half-measures compared to implementing the soul-digitization knowledge we’d pried from the net-entity that would let us fully transpose her essence into the mantle. She thought we ought to focus on abandoning the flesh altogether, if that’s what Izumi wanted.

I was quick to point out that if we were aiming to put her soul into the mantle, we would almost certainly have to upgrade its sensorium and quality of life anyway. But I had to admit that I was procrastinating research on that apotheosis, it was true. After the incredible clusterfuck that had been our visit to the hospital, I was a little hesitant to get back to shoveling, for fear we would unearth some fresh horror.

There was a small amount of lingering awkwardness between the three of us; we had all shared in an experience designed to emotionally grind you up, and while that did inspire some camaraderie, we all wanted to reassert normalcy within ourselves and not linger on the vulnerability we’d shared. Thus, me having sex with Hina and mostly reviewing the political ripples of the event rather than research. Yuuka at least hadn’t reverted to being uncomfortable around me—I credited my membership in boobs club for that—but we’d mostly left each other alone after apologizing to Izumi together for dredging up that memory of Sugawara.

Izumi had mumbled forgiveness and asked us to leave her room, which we’d done in a hurry. She had seemed almost completely numb, purely focused on getting back in her mantle, unsurprisingly. But the moment she’d gotten it working, she’d come back to life and requested that I try to explain the nugget of intention-truth-mechanism, the soul digestion. She hadn’t seen it like we had, nor experienced the net with the same amount of lucidity, and craved the insight we’d found.

I’d done my best to explain, to communicate the numinous in words, and we’d assembled some hesitant, highest-level ideas for how the principle might translate to glyphs. The exploratory design process was beckoning us down esoteric paths, the way obscured with brambles that made me worry. The configurations of red and orange that we’d come up with thus far seemed extremely unstable.

“Sorry we’re just working on your mouth instead of the soul-digitization,” I said, hunting through the cabinets for an appropriate bowl.

“If I were upset about that, I would have told you,” Izumi sighed. “That is difficult, this helps now.”

“It’s really difficult. I don’t really know what testing will even look like,” I admitted. “Like, skip to once we have a weavable lattice; how do we demonstrate it works? Because it has to work for you without hiccups—the tolerances are nonexistent, as far as I’m concerned. Are we going to work up to it by digitizing a mouse’s soul first?”

“We should avoid making more flamebearer mice.”

“Neither you nor I nor Ai are dumb enough to repeat the Peacies’ mistakes. We’d actually be making ghost mice, I think.  Hopefully less destructive. If it works on animals at all. We still don’t even know what a human soul is, let alone an animal’s, let alone turning it into a ghost.”

“Ghost,” Izumi repeated. “Indeed. We are making me into a ghost that can possess a body. Like him.”

“Izumi.” My synthetic voice was crisp and commanding. The last thing she needed was to wallow in false equivalences.

“I know it is not the same. It would be my own body, this body. But he is still the successful product of what we need to make. We need to find him.”

“Steal his secrets and then kill him properly,” I agreed. “I wish the net had told us anything about where he’d gone.”

Neither of us wanted to acknowledge aloud that Sugawara’s version of the transfer had not resulted in his complete self. The specter we’d fought off in the sub-basement was a caricature of his most violent and vicious traits—those most clearly engendered in ripple, which was absolutely not a coincidence. I didn’t want that for Izumi if we could avoid it. But even if I personally considered him to be a subpar product, he was still our best lead, if only we could pick up his trail. For all we knew, he had left Japan entirely, or simply dissipated into the background ripple field without a body to anchor him.

“Perhaps the summit,” Izumi mused, looking out across the sitting area, at the rain drumming against the windows.

“Huh? As in, discuss finding him there? Or do you mean…”

“He may manifest there.”

I pictured that in my mind’s eye. The summit, the meeting of all Japan’s flamebearers to discuss Izumi’s fate and likely my own, was to be a private affair on a specific remote island, away from the prying eyes of humanity’s masses. Sugawara himself had hosted the first one during Hikanome’s first rise to power, and thus, as far as we could guess a ghost might behave, it was distantly possible that he might show up. It would certainly be the highest concentration of ripple short of an active inferno in Japan.

“Not to murder your hopes, but that sort of sounds like wishful thinking to me. Why would he do that? He’d have to be stupid as hell to try another bodysnatching with all of Japan’s flamebearers right there. That doesn’t sound like self-preservation. You’re grasping at straws, Izumi. Unless…Miyoko still wants to show me my dad. You think she could also drag Sugawara from wherever he’s hiding?”

“If he is dead. Which I believe he is, though the Flame might disagree. I don’t know what exactly I mean by that. But…I am just trying to hope. Would you allow me a small amount of wishful thinking? That Miyoko may be able to bring him by force, and he could be tried? A proper trial, like the one I will receive.”

“Outside the rule of law,” I sighed. “Would be nice. Has she not already tried to find him?”

“There are conditions that must be met. She cannot summon your father without you, and she cannot…I do not think she would be able to find him without me. And I will not face them before the summit.”

I stared at her back. I understood what she meant in a spiritual sense: Miyoko’s power to contact the dead, whatever it exactly did, pulled on deep connections of loss, and perhaps grief and suffering. At a technical level, I wondered if for me, it was exploiting the fact that I was twice-touched by the Flame, bound to my father across time and death by ripple in some way our glyphcraft lacked the ability to model but Miyoko could. That was a nice thought, one I’d wished for many times over the years. If that was what was happening, Izumi likely thought her now-severed link with Sugawara was similar, which was a much more depressing prospect.

Exploring those painful sentiments wasn’t something either of us felt up to right then, though, nor was it particularly urgent; the summit seemed to be getting pushed back and back by all parties. Half of Todai was still reeling from our last battle, and even if I could get Alice in a condition to be facing her peers, other parties were slippery and difficult to schedule around. The elusive “fisherman” and his wife were not easy to contact. 

“Soup?”

“Soup,” she agreed, turning back to me to receive my offered bowl. “Thank you.” She peered down into it. “Only liquid?”

“I’m a little worried about stress-testing your stomach-stasis-chamber-thing, and your own stomach for that matter.”

“I would like to try it later. What about yours?” she asked pointedly. “You have a hole in your stomach as well. Cooking without being able to eat any of it…”

“Eh. I’ll save some for myself once I’m off IV, but I’m good for now.”

“You like this body more than you like eating,” she surmised.

“I do,” I admitted easily, glancing down at the way my hoodie draped over my chest and feeling a small wave of giddiness. “It feels good. Given me a lot of ideas for the actual mantle—but I’m not gonna let that get stuck in development hell,” I assured her. “I’ll have something before the summit, I know, Ai has been bugging me about working on it. But I’m definitely gonna put all the food stuff we’re building for your mantle into mine as well.”

She grinned. “So it’s not only altruism. Ah—I do not mean to sound ungrateful for what you’re doing for me. Improving this body is already more than I asked for.”

I shrugged my mechanical shoulders. “What else would I do? Until we have our man or another breakthrough, this is what I can do for you, so I’m doing it. Same deal for Alice, I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to tell her, but I have to try and figure out something. I’m sort of hoping that I hit on some transferable insight between you two.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s definitely something weird about the soul-body connection in flamebearers, and it’s like you two are at different ends of that spectrum.” I’d given this a fair amount of thought. I was still light-years away from any sort of unified theory, but I’d begun to assemble data points between the various flamebearers under Todai’s roof. “Everything seems to sort of point to what Ebi told us, the idea that mantles have to contain some notion of the soul.”

“Could you explain, please? The dragon-ka was never explained to me in detail, but I understand at least that it’s a green ripple sickness. Her body, not her mantle. A consequence of the blood magic that gave her her body?” She frowned, looking down at the floor with consternation. “Gave her her. This language…”

Izumi’s mannerisms were very cute sometimes. I assumed that was at least somewhat cultivated and wondered if I should compliment her, but before I knew it, I was already answering the question.

“It’s, uh…when Alice talks about it, she prescribes a rather…a certain willfulness to it. Not quite malice, but she’s convinced that her Flame is doing this to her with a purpose, as part of the price for her transformation. Her transition, I guess, yeah. The messed up part I’m talking about is that it should be purely parabiology, additions to her anatomy, except that those changes also propagate to her mantles, all designs. Her Flame is altering the lattice directly to put the tail on, and probably the horns, though we haven’t confirmed that yet.”

“That is fascinating. Body and Flame and soul. It considers her mantle another real body?” Hope shone in Izumi’s eyes.

“That’s the theory. You can see how that might be relevant to what we’re trying to do with you, somehow. I’m gonna go talk to her and see if we learn anything that can help her or you.”

I ladled a generous second bowl of soup, this one piled with actual pieces of chicken and vegetables and pasta, and placed it on a tray. As a side I included some garlic bread that had been sitting warm in the oven, which would be filling and satiating. Alice’s appetite was even more heightened than normal by the accelerated growth, and she needed to keep her calories up. As powerful as her Flame was, it could not create more true flesh ex nihilo.

Izumi rapped her fingernails on the countertop, deep in thought while she watched me prepare Alice’s meal. As I surveyed my work, she spoke up.

“She would not let me join you for this, would she.” It wasn’t really a question.

“I…could ask after she’s eaten and hopefully less cranky? She’s vulnerable, is the thing. I’m frankly amazed that she’s even trusting me to do this, but this is part of why she hired me. She wanted a cutting-edge magic expert. Which you also are,” I allowed.

Izumi had, after all, developed her own mantle from first principles and pure observation of the Radiances’. She was no researcher with mountains of papers—I’d asked Ebi to cross-reference the literature to confirm she wasn’t another anonymous poster like me—but she was still probably the foremost outside expert in the intersection of technologies and concepts that made the mantles run. She knew more than me, probably, or at least she had at the time I’d arrived at Todai.

And that was only half of it. At a simpler level, Izumi was extremely similar to Alice, another transgender woman who had opted to construct an artificial body with magic. They were of a kind. I knew Alice knew that—that was the whole reason we’d provided refuge for her in the wake of the BBQ Inferno. I just wasn’t sure if the dragon was currently in her right mind and would find solace in Izumi’s presence rather than feel taunted by her unmarred mantle.

“I understand,” Izumi said, replying to the gap of silence I’d left. “I want to help her, if I can. And if I can’t, I would at least want to be there for her, if she will let me. Please tell her that.”

“Of course.”

With all that prelude, and the storm still raging outside, I had expected visiting Alice’s room to feel very much like walking in on Hina after the barbecue disaster. My girlfriend had been a weepy, self-loathing lump of blankets in a dark room, and Alice’s reclusion in the past few days bore a striking resemblance. Too, I was reminded of Kat’s weeks-long absence from the public eye after clearing the inferno in Poland, and how the rumors about magical fallout had circulated.

Alice’s draconic appearance, until now limited to really just the tail and eyes and her aura of heat, was framed in Todai’s marketing as a signifier of power. It made enough sense given that she really was the most powerful in terms of Flame available, and there was a serendipitous cultural connection between western dragons and precious gems that explained her being the leader, as far as the narrative was concerned. The public understood that it wasn’t just a costume and that the tail was biologically real, but Alice had fabricated the idea that it was something she took pride in rather than something that was inflicted on her. She was Todai’s dragon, the commander, the one who would burn anything that her teammates could not bring down; Japan’s shining hero who embodied the Light more than any other. She had made that decision years ago and stood by it until now.

That was the crux, as Hina had explained to me in a surprisingly deft display of understanding of the intricacies of celebrity life. She had assured me that the marketing materials and overall narrative weren’t the issue—they could spin the further dragon-ka as an increase in power and had long since laid plans for an image update for the whole team with new outfits and such, to make Alice’s changes stick out less. That could all be handled and smoothed over. The weak link had always been Alice’s attitude, whether she could stay sunny and confident beneath the mounting weight of dysphoria as the dragon-ka progressed. Standing at the threshold of her room, I wondered if, were I in her shoes, I’d be able to keep that up. I probably couldn’t.

Now we had reached the breaking point. Alice had disappeared from the public eye for three days. Publicly, Todai had called it simple, vaguely-explained magical burnout and thanked everybody for their patience and support, which was an easy sell with the sheer scale of the devastation and miracle she had wrought at ground zero. Anybody would need some time to recover after that. The other Radiances were still involved enough in the news cycle and Todai’s more normal operations that there was no real cause for rumor to circulate that something was wrong with Alice. But she had also fully withdrawn from her usual leadership responsibilities within Todai as an organization, and although that had brought surprisingly little disruption in the well-practiced procedures of disaster response, it could not persist indefinitely. Alice had always kept relatively little bureaucracy between herself and Lighthouse’s operations, meaning many decisions went directly up the tree to her. It was a recipe for burnout in a non-magical sense, much more serious, and we were worried it had come due.

“Alice?” I called, knocking on the door. “It’s Ezzen, in the doll. I’ve got a ton of chicken soup. Can we talk?”

I heard nothing for a moment, then shuffling, then Alice’s voice. “Hm? Say again?”

I repeated the entreaty. There was more shuffling, which drew closer to the door until the handle turned and it swung inward. To my surprise, the lights were on. Then I saw Alice and flinched. A sympathetic twinge jolted across my temples, even in the mechanical body.

Radiance Opal met me with a gauze bandage around her head and a tired smile. Blood seeped through the white cotton on both sides of her head, where she’d sawn off her horns. My gaze frantically dropped to her legs, worried that she’d entirely removed her tail as well—it was accounted for, uncut. Where previously only the tip had rested along the ground when she stood, now nearly half a meter of it met the floor, resting heavily. She was naked except for a loose t-shirt that barely left any of her hips to the imagination, clearly bunched up in the back over the scaly mountain of flesh protruding from her waist. It had definitely grown in girth.

“Hi, Ezzen.” She gestured inward, turning heavily and sluggishly, dragging the ungainly weight of the limb with every movement. “Sorry. I kind of lost it for a little bit. They had to come off. You get it, I don’t need to explain. Want to watch some anime with me?”

Author’s Note:

Cold and rainy days in Tokyo. With the current heatwave in Europe and soon the US, consider this a bit of wish fulfillment!

This wound up being another chapter that’s mostly Ez and Izumi talking about stuff, but they have a lot to talk about! And Alice clearly needs somebody to talk to, yikes, so hopefully she’ll let Izumi in on this, Ez might not be equipped for it alone. Apologies to anybody who was excited to see the horns; they’re currently out of commission. But they will grow back. And the tail is at least looking huge! So huge, in fact, that in the discord we might even need an extra emote to accommodate it…

Apologies that this chapter is a full week late. It really didn’t turn out to be that hard to write; I’m dealing with a pretty severe energy deficit right now, but also, I’ve been working on something extra! There will be a new side story (or rather, part 2 of a previous one!) before the end of pride month (i.e. this Tuesday unless I find it in me to have it up tomorrow). You’ll be able to find it at sunspot.gay/side-stories/ when it’s up and there will be an access password available publicly on the Patreon (you’ll get a notification if you become a free member). Stay tuned! I’m also gonna delay 4.22 a little to account for this, but not by a full week; expect it Tuesday, July 7.

Thank you as always to the beta readers. Their feedback goes a long way.

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!

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June 28, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Alice vanished a hundred meters above the end of her dive, slicing into the fourth dimension. There was a long, long second of anticlimax, then a mote of light where she’d disappeared, then a flash that consumed everything.

I didn’t get a good look at the rest. Supposedly I was awake to witness the aftermath, but I don’t remember it, nor anything else before arriving back at Lighthouse Tower. So, ironically, my knowledge of what exactly resulted from that flash of light wasn’t all that different from that of my friends on other continents, filled in by official—and matching—press releases from Todai and the Peacies both and corroborated by a handful of Twitter videos taken from the nearest towns. The following days would paint a better picture as cleanup efforts progressed and more firsthand video surfaced.

Parts of the official story were not true to life, as I learned from the Radiances’ direct accounts and subsequent strategizing, but let us begin with the initial events and the facts on which everybody agreed:

The flash was visible from space. For us, everything outside the dome simply vanished: the sky, the forest, the hospital, the mountains beyond, the PCTF Condor, all completely swallowed. The magical light lingered for several seconds, the bright glow of annihilation refusing to go before its work was done. When it did fade, it was reluctant and slow, changing colors from white to pale blue to cherry red before finally dimming to a level where anything could be seen. I had intuitively been expecting to see a mushroom cloud climbing out of frame of the videos, toward the heavens above, but this was no such conventional weapon. Alice’s attack was light and heat and ripple, not a shockwave.

The red-hot glow suffused the landscape below us, everything in the lee of the mountains rendered molten and glowing with blackbody heat. The trees and shrubs were gone in every direction, with not even charcoal specimens surviving until well past the radius we’d deemed a safe distance—safe factoring in the specially configured and reinforced bubble, I suppose. I can’t imagine a mantle would have survived fully intact. Maybe even the Vaetna would have flinched. The Condor was certainly singed, its wards gasping for breath in the form of flickering clouds of St. Elmo’s fire, despite the further range where it had been lurking. Later, when debriefing, we would make a note to prioritize heat-based attacks against Peacie vehicles.

It was sufficient to kill the monster. The hospital at the epicenter was gone, unmade entirely. Where it had stood, the earth had turned to glass, then to vapor, then plasma, and took several hours to condense back into liquid and finally solid matter.

The most striking results of what Alice had wrought didn’t become apparent until the following morning. During the night, the crater cooled enough to stop glowing—faster than red-hot rock should have been able from atmospheric convection alone, Ai was quick to note—and the following morning the surface had begun to congeal into strange, lumpy formations that scintillated in the dawn and seemed to almost burn from within, holding embers of the all-consuming light that had made it.

Samples confirmed what was obvious to the eye: the land in the blast radius had been transmuted to opal. Todai fans and Hikanome pilgrims alike began to flock to the site of our battle almost immediately, and Lighthouse’s more corporate elements were on the ball. It was impractical to cordon the entire kilometer-wide burgeoning tourist attraction, so they leaned into it instead and performed their own, arguably greater trick of transmutation: turning chaos into commodity. Thirty-six hours after the flash, you were able to buy a little prospecting kit to recover your very own chunk of magical aftermath, marketed as “the dragon’s wealth”. Bring your friends!

I wasn’t a fan of desecrating and selling off a fresh magical landmark in such a way. It chafed my sensibilities fiercely to see the wondrous, shimmering landscape be gnawed at in order to pad Todai’s profits by some infinitesimal sub-percentage-point margin. Magic was supposed to be magical, and this was a deeply cynical move preying on that wonder. But I wasn’t the one calling the shots there, and as the media cycle churned, I came to see the practicality in the move from a PR perspective, the value in emphasizing the glamour and style we had left in our wake rather than the stark destruction Alice had wrought.

The tourist prospecting scheme cemented us as the heroes of the day and tied the whole event firmly to the Radiances. At a large scale, this had the benefit of pushing the Peacies’ presence out of the narrative almost entirely, but the surge of demand also triggered solicitation from Todai fans worldwide who wanted to get in on the action. I happened to be connected to a few such fans.

starstar97: ezzen how much do i need to pay you

starstar97: pls

ezzen: o.o

starstar97: pls

starstar97: pls

DendriteSpinner: Star, no, your groceries

starstar97: i have so much rice ill live

No matter how much I loved Star, I was not about to hike all the way back out there to pay my own hosting organization a fee so I could get on my hands and knees with a little chisel for her, not for any amount of money, not in my condition. I was, in fact, physically incapable of going anywhere beyond the penthouse even if I wanted to. It was all becoming a familiar story: my immediate injuries plopped me straight into a hospital bed on the eighteenth floor and I’d slept clean through the initial intensive care and the entire following day. This was my lot in life, to injure myself through overuse of magic and end up bedridden in Ebi’s care with new scars. And this was arguably the most comprehensive set of injuries I’d yet sustained.

They’d patched over the horribly burned hole in my stomach and extracted the bits of molten metal from my stabilizer module that had accumulated there, and even through the cocktail of chemical and analgomantic painkillers it was absolute hell to move my torso even the tiniest amount, like a white-hot bullet was lodged beneath my liver and sending whips of pain to the surrounding area. I was told I was lucky it hadn’t gone lower and touched my intestines as well. I was on a strictly intravenous diet for the time being.

The external situation was worse. I had second-degree burns over much of my skin. My armor of Flame had ultimately taken its price everywhere my arms and torso had used to have body hair, turning my upper body into a mess of sickly, off-white, blistered burns. I’d woken up nearly mummified in chemical-soaked bandages meant to head off the worst of the inevitable scarring. I trusted the treatment was effective—the Firestorms had brought both the incentive and technology for massive leaps in burn treatment for those with the means, and from my foot’s recovery process I knew Todai had those means—but that did little for the pain, which was constant and suffocating, as if my wards had failed and the net-entity was grinding me up with a gizzard of rubble. And it was even worse when the bandages had to be changed, which was twice daily.

The sick punchline was that I didn’t even have my meat-phone to keep me company. It was all that remained of the net-entity’s influence on the physical world, a bizarre and fleshy memento that refused to die in the aftermath. Ai had immediately confiscated and quarantined it in her lab for study. A replacement had been procured, but it wasn’t my phone with all of my stuff. This had caused me, pain-addled as I was, to have a minor tantrum when I’d awoken the first time. It was the final stroke of injury and helplessness and it was all too much.

So instead of enduring all that, I’d spent the last four days on vacation from my body. I knew it was inadvisable to retreat into a mantle for pain relief, but it was simply unbearable, and I had better things to do than lie perfectly still in bed, alone with my thoughts and whoever deigned to drop in between all the activity demanded by Todai’s disaster response scramble. I had the opportunity to opt out of that completely, so of course I took it. Escape from pain was the most addictive thing in the world; I couldn’t fathom why or how Amane spent a single minute more than necessary outside of the mecha.

The doll was safe and comfortable and let me roam the penthouse freely. In the wake of my dream dive with Yuuka, I’d felt the need to make a change to the design. A color swap, changing my external panels from the same teal hue as Ebi to the gray-white of Vaetna plate. This had been achieved by stripping me naked and liberally applying a simple spray can of paint and another of varnish. Once the paint on my chest plate was dry, we then applied new duct tape to secure my breasts. A better solution surely had to be forthcoming, but nobody with the know-how had the time to spare for such frivolities.

Right now I was curled up in my bed with Hina, my laptop streaming its output to a TV I’d had put in so we could both comfortably look at the chat and other things. She seemed not at all uncomfortable with her body against the rigid and unyielding planes of mine; if anything, the past few days had seen her introducing me to some of the reasons Yuuka had called it the sex doll. We were idly groping each other’s tits when Star made her solicitation, so naturally I asked her if she could pick up some opal later today, on her next trip to the blasted crater Alice had carved.

“I mean, you’ve been flying back and forth every day, haven’t you?”

“Oh, we’re way ahead of that,” she told me. “We got like two thousand chunks of the nicer stuff, the really pretty ones toward the center. All glowy and fiery, not like the pale glassy stuff they’re letting people dig up. We were gonna sell them as limited editions or bundle them with some other high-tier merch, I think. That’s what Alice would have done.”

“She’s not dead,” I chided with a squeeze.

“True, true. But yeah, if Star wants a souvenir from Alice’s rock garden, we can just send her one of those. Don’t see why we can’t. Heck, we could probably let her pick. Actually…was she the one we were gonna fly out here? We could just leave the rock here and bring her to it.”

“I…don’t feel great about bringing her here in the middle of all this,” I admitted. “Much as she deserves a real fuckin’ all-expenses-paid vacation in Japan with her favorite people ever. Timing’s poor with the, er, trial thing just around the corner, I think.”

“Mm! Yeah, Alice doesn’t need those horns to get any bigger. That’d be fuckin’ hot, though, gosh.” Hina bit her lip. “Handlebars.”

“Shush. I’ll…ask Yuuka, see if she can see anything, I guess. For now I’ll just tell Star we’re sending the opal to her. Where would I find some pics of the ones we have?” 

Hina blinked her big blue eyes. “Uh. Clipboard had the list of the ones Product Development doesn’t expect to be up to snuff for merch. Mm, snuff…fuck, I’m spacey today. It’d be one of those.”

My hands stopped. “…You call him Clipboard too?”

“He’s a human, cutie, cut me some slack. And then, y’know, we could cut…” Her hand guided mine down from her chest and hooked one of my fingers below the bone of her sternum.

“Hina…”

“Sorry. Lotta green around right now, I gotta rub one out with or without you or I’ll explode. Ebi, what’s his actual name?”

“Information, Privileged,” rang a voice from on high. “But the rock pics aren’t. Sent you them, Ez, they were on the fileserver.”

“Thanks.” I dropped them in the chat with a few keystrokes.

starstar97: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

starstar97: youre joking

starstar97: my leg, pulled

ebi-furai: its real and one of them can be yours

starstar97: ok ok ok ok

starstar97: hooooooly shit

ezzen: deep breaths

starstar97: no im gonna hyperventilate tyvm

starstar97: ok i swear im not asking for one but im curious, do you have any from the epicenter

ezzen: No clue.

The exclusion zone, the former footprint of the hospital, was off-limits to the public, because there had remained an obvious and persistent hazard: there had been an invisible aperture in the sky leaking unidentified molten material. Overnight and through the following day, the material had accumulated into a lumpy stalagmite of a pale off-white, and by the time the supply seemed to run dry, a matching stalactite had grown downward beneath the source point and met the rising mound in the middle. The resulting column ended up standing thirty meters tall and nearly four meters across at the base. This was the other obviously magical consequence of the incredible release of energy that had taken place, a self-building monument.

The material had yet to be identified, but Yuuka and I at least knew what it had been before. It was the net, all that dried leather which for some reason had not burned properly but instead been transmuted like the opal landscape surrounding it. The molten material had leaked from the fourth dimension through a hole Alice had blasted or burned at that moment of disappearance before the blast. The monument completed the alien landscape that had replaced the valley, yet another scar that magic had left on the shape of our world. At least this one was pretty.

Everybody had wanted to know what was going on, of course. The dragon herself had not been there to explain it, nor give a full explanation of the circumstances that had caused this inferno. But somebody had to give the answers, tell a story that the public would swallow; news crews had already been arriving on the scene minutes after the light faded, and they were voracious for a Radiance to put in front of the cameras. In Alice’s absence, normally Yuuka would have done it—but she refused to face the cameras after everything we’d just been through. Too close to home. Besides, her clothing was all torn up, and she didn’t have her mantle to fall back on. Amane had the opposite problem, unwilling to drop back into her human form before we knew the threat was absolutely dealt with. And I, of course, had been half-dead and more importantly was not even remotely media trained.

Thus, the role of public liaison had fallen to Radiance Sapphire, mantled up for the camera to hide the abundance of gore caking her body, and now, several days after the fact, I watched her deliver the official story on the TV.

I’d never actually seen Hina wear her work face before. I’d seen the physical mantle, but not the figurative mantle of responsibility, the mask of magical girl professionalism that completed the transformation. It was a different mode from her demeanor when fending off fans on the street in Shibuya; that suited her energy, and the stiffness I beheld watching the interview later did not. If her violent nature was the hyena, and her affections were the puppy, then this aspect was another canine I couldn’t immediately place. A service dog, perhaps. It wasn’t a very good system.

Hina’s mantle was beautiful and immaculate, full of carefully considered detail, the product of a whole team of designers and branding coordinators. Short skirt, fingerless gloves, hair a full twenty centimeters longer, a corset that hugged her slender waist and carried scintillating sapphire brooches which themselves defined lines of gold to drag the eye up her torso; she was the entire show, a supermodel who looked like she had just spent two hours in the green room. The look was pristine, wholly unruffled by the cataclysmic image of the then-molten field of opal behind her. That projected power in itself, cultivating the impression that none of this could even touch her and sully the gorgeous hairdo or glittering fabrics. To the public, that was what it meant to be a magical girl.

I thought she had looked much better clad in blood. Not that she wasn’t pretty—in fact it was dizzying to be enthusiastically invited to touch this woman while we watched the video—but because it didn’t really look like her. I looked back and forth between the cerulean goddess onscreen and my puppy wriggling off her bottoms in bed next to me and knew which one I preferred. It just wasn’t Hina when her eyes were a shade dimmer and her canines couldn’t crunch through my shell. This service dog beauty was born of artifice, a carefully crafted mask designed to appeal to those watching through the cameras. And as much as I loved masks, this one was a lie—the opposite of myself and Izumi, whose artificial bodies were the ones that laid closer to our truths.

It sat poorly with me that she had to do this. I knew it chafed her too, and was happy to let her decompress by guiding my synthetic hand down between her legs. She was very distracting. But I kept most of my attention on the screen, and there, our impulsive, feral Hina hid well. Even the way she spoke in Japanese was different, more carefully paced and articulate, with none of the excitement I was currently hearing in her real voice. She should have been gushing over how cool we all had been and making difficult-to-follow metaphors for the magical process that only her magic-augmented mind understood intuitively. Instead, she was calm and concise in her explanation, which was just as confident a lie as the rest of her.

The official story began two weeks prior with her intervention in the Barbecue Inferno. That had been in response to intel that remnant Sugawara loyalists had been planning to turn it into an unknown but presumably nefarious ritual, justifying the immediate and explosive intervention she’d mounted. Todai had thwarted the threat and at the end publicly detained Izumi Takagiri. With her cooperation and the aid of Kimura’s knowledge of Hikanome’s logistics, we had spent the following week confirming the activity of hardcore pre-schism Hikanome fanatics at undisclosed locations across Japan. We had traced the trail to the hospital where Sugawara was kept and deployed emissaries to investigate. When they didn’t report back, Hina had gone herself and found them in an absolutely mangled state near the hospital grounds, but was legally barred from investigating the hospital itself after recovering them, due to the terms of Sugawara’s imprisonment meant to protect him from reprisal.

Everything until that last part was essentially true, but the last was flaming bullshit that neatly edited out our extremely illegal assassination mission. Fortunately, all the witnesses of the actual combat who might have called our bluff were dead by now—except for those mercenaries we’d let go, who surely knew better than to put themselves back in our crosshairs—and the physical evidence was now gone with the rest of the hospital. This story also sufficiently matched with what the ER staff to whom Hina had handed off our mutilated operative would have known. Bases covered.

Notably, this meant that as far as the public knew, Sugawara had still been alive for the week between that incident and the day the hospital had come to life. Still comatose, but alive.

Radiance Sapphire’s story continued. What had forced Todai to investigate further, she claimed, were the disappearances over that week. Those were real and thus lent us a lot of credit; the bodies we’d found in the gullet had been linked with the disappearances of hikers and police in the area. The only difference as Hina told it was that we’d been aware of them ahead of time as well, and the emergence of a pattern was the stated motivation for Yuuka to go scout the site. Her initial scans—still not trespassing—had raised alarms that necessitated bringing in me and Kimura to piece together what happened here. All non-invasively, of course, thus the concentration of flamebearer expertise required. We had been abiding by the law and staying outside the building. Definitely.

We determined that the prison had festered into a cult compound, possibly over the course of years. What was certain was that by the time we’d shown up, it was too late: the cult had already performed a grisly ritual which we believed to be an attempt to rouse Sugawara from his coma. Our forensics triggered a final trap to animate the building. The rest was history.

In the course of five minutes, Hina either outright stated or implied a robust assembly of alibis. Our cover story removed our assassination from the timeline, sufficiently explained that we’d kept “both” Izumi and Kimura in-house for good reason, absolved us of any legal culpability in coming to the hospital while subtly being able to blame the terms of imprisonment for the fact that we hadn’t been able to investigate sooner, and outright told the truth about our engagement with the possessed hospital once it had turned into a combat situation.

“You came up with all this off the dome?” I asked Hina, who had found a happy rhythm with her hips on my hand.

“Mm? No, Yuuka was—hn!—feeding me my lines. Curl your fingers a little bit, like—nn, yeah, right there.”

“Okay, yeah, that makes more sense. You hid it well.” Thank fuck for the doll’s clarity; I would have absolutely not been able to multitask this otherwise. “Enjoying your reward?”

“Yay,” she yelped. She was so cute.

Screen-Hina then went on to explain the specifics of the aftermath, chief among them the technical details of what Alice had actually done. This part was all true, and began with what Yuuka and I had intuited, that the light that had forever altered this valley was not the main blast, but the overflow from the fourth dimension via a hole in physics itself that Alice had melted. From there, the interview turned to practical questions of ripple residuals and public safety, Sugawara’s current whereabouts—regrettably unknown, possibly at large—and how such a violent cult could have been left to fester like this. Hina fended off those questions with ease, fed the perfect answers by her teammate. Precogs were cheating.

“Are Hikanome gonna buy it?” I asked Hina. “Or, since this was days ago, have they bought it?”

She whined, slowed the rhythm of her hips, and opened her eyes to look at me dizzily. “Hm?”

“…Oh, whatever. We’ll talk strategy after.”

Given that I had more or less come straight off of a jaunt through a demented funhouse of psychosexual trauma, and that the doll had nothing resembling genitalia or pleasure receptors, it was a little surprising that my libido craved activity. I think it was simply the knowledge that I was escaping so much pain. It made me feel alive and want to keep on living. And I was incentivized by the discovery that not being able to feel direct pleasure didn’t at all mean that I couldn’t enjoy when Hina inflicted her brand of love on me, and the doll was durable enough—and when not, repairable enough—to take it.

I knew I would have to reckon with the state of my flesh-body soon enough. It loomed over every moment I spent fooling around in that bed with my girlfriend. My injuries weren’t merely that; ripple scans of my body had picked up significant concentrations of green across my burns, and before I’d transferred into the doll this morning, I’d felt something different about the gauntlet of existing scar tissue covering my right hand. My Flame had plans for me, and I suspected that they involved carapace.

But I was not the only one who was doing their best to avoid what was happening to their body. Alice’s maneuver had taken its own toll. Her dragon-ka was advancing considerably, her tail growing at a rate measured in tens of centimeters per day, and the horns she had denied for weeks had finally sprouted out of her skull. She was taking it extremely poorly, hiding from the press, from her underlings, and even from us. The prospecting event that glittered with her signature gemstone hadn’t been graced with so much as a distant cameo. The dragon had retreated to her lair and refused all aid except a steady and vast supply of food.

Yuuka had known this would happen. In convincing Alice to go all-out, she’d promised that it wouldn’t be so bad, that I would help her manage it and fix it. I felt obligated to make good on that promise.

Even though I had no idea how.

Author’s Note:

They made it! Ez is horny. So is Alice, but not like that. Let’s see if they can do anything about it.

This chapter marks two years of Sunspot, counting from the day I posted 1.01 on Scribblehub on June 16th, 2024. Actually, this chapter is going up on the 17th in my timezone, but I’ll count it. It’s crazy that I’ve been at this for two years and there’s still so much of the story ahead of us. As a thank-you to all you readers and a celebration of the milestone, I have maybe the most exciting piece of commissioned art to date: Ezzen character sheets by Mjeow! Yes, that’s right, sheets, PLURAL.

I’m so in love with this. The doll’s color has actually been in canon limbo until this chapter, having been mentioned as both teal and white before, so this chapter I’ve buried that hatchet by establishing that it was teal, is now white, and we have visuals for both for completion’s sake. I’m so good at this web author thing.

These images will have their own dedicated spots on the gallery soon!

Also, 4.20, nice. Didn’t know where else to say that. My gratitude to the beta readers can also go here–some of them have been on the project for two years running and I’m eternally grateful.

We’re nearing the end of the arc now, but not quite there. Tune in on Sunday to see exactly how Alice is doing!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters ahead of public!

June 17, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Body horror, sexual assault mention

The prevailing truth about warfare in the age of magic is that ripple is very versatile and humans, even flamebearers, are delicate bags of blood and organs. Even without my level of glyphcraft knowledge, one needs no imagination at all to list off five or ten ways to fatally disrupt the machinery of a human body; there’s just so many different things to crush or sever or scramble or oxidize or displace. Heart, brain, spinal column. And unlike firearms, most of these methods don’t care one whit about body armor or even cover, provided they can locate you accurately. That was why the Radiances had me train with a balloon: how to kill a person at ten paces with a flick of my fingers.

Defense was stuck playing catch-up. External wards could convert incoming ripple into much less harmful effects or even actively harness it for a counterattack, but the intricacies of pigeonholing glyph interactions meant you had to hedge your bets for anything small enough to be man-portable. Internal wards could keep your heart from exploding and your blood from turning to coconut water, but did so via a form of stasis that the human organism could not tolerate indefinitely. Dimensional and infomantic measures, orange and pink respectively, could disrupt targeting. Armor significantly helped reduce the strain on direct kinetic wards to turn away physical attacks, since it wasn’t like firearms had gone anywhere, though even with all the advances in military-grade material science there was only so much you could carry before it began to hinder movement.

Combine all of these methods in a way that covers each others’ weaknesses and you will end up with a PCTF exo-suit, the closest thing you could reasonably get to a supersoldier without making the soldier themself any more super: durable enough to survive the ripple munitions of modern warzones and the panicked wild magic of a freshly minted flamebearer alike. Invest more resources and you will refine the idea into smaller form factors, using pocketspaces both to store hardware and provide substantial dimensional interference to stop things from even reaching the wards. These were favored by special forces and VIPs and constituted the low end of what you could expect any well-known flamebearer to be equipped with in public.

Go further still. Allot nearly an entire flamebearer’s worth of Flame per unit to make the suit out of pure lattice-manifest; pull the human out of the suit entirely and cloister them in an even more durable personal fortress in a dimension most weapons couldn’t even reach; control it with direct telemetry featuring the most sophisticated interference countermeasures ever designed. Do all that and you would arrive at a Radiance’s mantle. 

Such technology was far beyond overkill for mere personal protection of the young women of Lighthouse. Officially, those capabilities were for diving into infernos unscathed, and unofficially, they were superweapons meant to intimidate any magitech-equipped force that would threaten Japan—though as far as the government knew, that primarily meant China, not the Peacies. Outside of the truly bizarre and specialized cases of Izumi’s sword or the net-entity’s disruption of the connection, a mantle could be expected to survive anything, and even if it didn’t, the Radiance herself would be unharmed.

The dome Yuuka had deployed around us was much more narrow in its design constraints. It had exactly two jobs: keep physical intrusions out, and withstand half a million degrees Celsius.

Alice’s first pass came and went too quickly for me to separate out in my memory. There was a roar and a flash and when I stopped blinking there was open sky above us again and a dart of distant light was already peeling up and away. A dragon’s tail of glowing vapor followed behind her, reaching back to the line of glowing slag cut across the rooftop. Her skim pass bulldozed concrete out of the way as easily as a finger dragged through frosting. Reality reacted as slowly as I did, the pressure wave taking long seconds to roll in beneath her and snap the limbs off the barren trees on that side of the hospital. If she’d maintained her strafing altitude over the branches in the dry winter air we’d have had a mundane inferno to deal with on top of the magical one.

Yuuka laughed as the dragon arced up and away. It was the same madness-tinged sound as she’d had in the dream. “There it is! Never gets old!”

“Time to go?” I asked, gingerly feeling around my stomach and hastily pulling my hand away from the don’t-do-that reply from my nerves.

“Nah, we’re safer where we are,” she explained. “If I try to pile us all onto the bike and book it out of here right now, we’d have to contend with…”

She pointed meaningfully sunward—west, I supposed—perpendicular to Alice’s rising flight path as she took a long speed-conserving turn back toward us. I squinted through the refraction of the barrier at something silhouetted in the near distance, floating a ways above the rolling not-quite-mountains. It was boxy and had stubby wings in the shape of a shallow V. My heart sank as I identified the craft.

“Peacies. That’s a Condor?” I asked, turning my identification into a hesitant question in the hopes Yuuka would tell me I was wrong and an idiot. If nothing else, it was a distraction from the feeling of hot coals all over my shoulders and chest.

No such luck. “Yeah. The one from the Abe Lincoln. Must have got here in a hurry.”

“And you think they’ll—”

“Only if we do something really really stupid that makes us sitting ducks free to a bad home. Otherwise they’re just here to watch and take notes.”

The Condor-class Forward Logistics Support Vehicle shared many design features with other members of the family of hovering, high-mobility gunships that represented NATO’s long arm and heavy hand. It was fast and freakishly stealthy for its size, carried ripple munitions that the PACT deemed “significant,” and could carry a rapid-deployment squad of exo-suits. Where the Condor differed from its more attack-oriented brethren was that it had a much larger command deck, a launch bay for drones and more esoteric equipment, and onboard facilities that gave it staying power. Instead of attack or interception, the Condor’s role was as a flying hybrid between a nuclear submarine and an aircraft carrier; smaller than either, and indeed small enough to deploy from an actual aircraft carrier as this one had, but nonetheless an advanced mobile base that could post up in hostile territory for an essentially indefinite amount of time and project power until the local authorities worked up the substantial firepower, and more importantly the courage, necessary to shoo it away.

This one was here as a statement. I believed Yuuka’s claims that it wasn’t here to engage us unless we gave them the most flagrant opportunity to do so, but I also understood that we couldn’t openly act against it, either. It was nominally a Japanese ally, here to help deal with the eminently reasonable threat of a developing inferno—backup for us, in theory.

“We don’t need their help.” Yuuka affirmed my line of thought. “Not for killing this thing, or mitigating the ripple. And we’re not gonna let them take the credit, either.” She pointed in a new direction, back toward Tokyo. “News crews want action shots of us, and we’re gonna give them.”

“Controlling the narrative,” I understood. “I thought we agreed that the performative stuff kinda sucks?”

“Not so bad when we’re wrecking shit instead of modeling skin cream.”

That I could get behind. “And we’re showboating? I don’t know if the people who got eaten by this…deserve that. Creates more inferno risk too, won’t it?”

Yuuka waved dismissively. “We’ve got it all in hand. Todai already has helicopters coming out with dampers once we get this clear.”

“They’re ours? Not the government’s?”

“God, you’re full of questions for somebody covered in third-degree burns.”

“Can’t seem to pass out,” I groused. “And isn’t this stuff I should probably already have been told? Unless you want me to stay a larva forever.”

“Yeah, yeah, big sis has you covered. We share. Actually, some of them are on loan from the Peacies to Japan, but the Bureau knows they’re better off in our hands.”

By now, Alice had finished her turn and was coming back toward us for another pass. The building hadn’t responded at all to her initial wave of destruction, no attempt to recontain us on the roof, stunned or simply reeling from an attack it had no concept of. I watched the point of light approach with trepidation; I trusted the shield, but I had to imagine that this was what it felt like to be the wooden dummy in the penthouse’s dojo. That raised its own interesting question: how and where did Alice even practice this scale of grandiose attack?

She was impossible to look at directly, corona eclipsing the faltering sun and leaving dark spots in my vision. Call it Flame, call it Light, her radiance—for that is what it was, most literally—blazed a simple assertion: I am more real than you. Toward us raced power itself, beautiful and blinding. If she had been coming straight for us, I would have simply accepted that I was about to die, shield or no shield.

Of course, we were not the target.

Her second pass struck lower. She punched through the hospital’s main structure this time, rendering those gullet corridors and memories of closed-door violation alike unto so much slag. A concussive thump pulsed through the building and shook everything like an earthquake. The rooftop didn’t drop out beneath our feet—we were actually standing on the flat-cut bottom of the hemispheric dome by now—but the impact still felt absolutely seismic and I was grateful to be lying on the crash pad instead of standing. Not that Yuuka had any problems with her footing as she turned to track Alice’s exit. Another ascending trail of molten debris followed in her wake and I heard the terrible groaning of collapsing masonry below us.

“Fuck,” I said simply. After a few more seconds of listening to the aftermath of Alice’s passing, the sounds of gravity doing its inexorable work on the void she’d just carved, I articulated a more cogent comment. “Did—did that do it? Net shredded? It’s dead?”

Yuuka shook her head. “Tsk. I’d tell you not to tempt fate, but I promise you had no control over this next part.”

The far end of the rooftop burst upward in a torrent of debris. The concrete was crushed and mangled and run through with glowing streaks of heat. Half-molten gravel ascended in a fountain, ten meters, fifteen, twenty—I had the awful sense we were witnessing evolution. Something was happening within, uncomfortably intimate, order emerging within the chaos as I saw more flaps of skin scaffolding their way through the pillar of sedimentary mixture, soon followed by red-hot streaks of slag and rebar. The mass coagulated and seized.

In moments, the violent restructuring was complete. Molten lines became veins. Gravel mocked flesh. It didn’t have enough skin to go around, but that was immaterial; the arm now rising from the building could not be mistaken for anything but what it was, the opening stages of the net-entity’s bid for a new form, inspired by all it had eaten. Yuuka and Alice had inflicted bodily harm on it, and it only understood that through the lens of human mutilation. It would birth itself a new form through the pain. I found myself empathizing with it all too much, right then.

“Just like the bay,” Yuuka observed. Was that a tinge of sadness I heard in her voice as well? Maybe I was imagining it; she was unworried, despite the arm continuing to grow from elbow to shoulder and its fingers coming into stark relief. “Well, not just like. This time we don’t have a rift to shove it back through, but we’ve also got way bigger guns.”

This time I was almost able to guess the play-by-play of Yuuka’s foresight. A line of violet touched the palm of the cyclopean hand from somewhere behind us. I saw a dozen concentric rings, dozens to hundreds of meters across, flare along its length for a fraction of a second, just long enough for me to register first that they were there and then that they were acting as prisms to refract and concentrate the beam. Amethyst was lining up her shot.

In that moment, I expected her artillery to destroy the hand in the same way as it had the Thunder Horse oil rig. That had been terribly, nightmarishly effective, and it was well-suited to this enemy that learned to reform and restructure itself more and more by the minute. In my mind’s eye I saw the limb scooped away by that swallowing, spherical void of annihilation, permanently depriving the building of structural matter and more importantly that suffering-imbued human leather that housed its true power.

It was a good thing I wasn’t the one behind the trigger, then, because that would have been a very bad idea indeed. The Peacies were watching all of this unfold, and no matter how much they may have already suspected that we’d been the intercessors there, handing them proof wasn’t worth the efficacy of such an attack. Instead, the blue ripple produced by Amethyst’s KV-18 Projected Impulse Armament acted upon the towering limb more like how a hydraulic press acts upon a watermelon, except all at once; from where we were standing beneath, it appeared to detonate from the palm outward. Gravel showered across the rooftop as shrapnel, plinking off the dome, some bouncing in strange directions and disappearing entirely as they were caught by the four-dimensional barrier. A cloud of fine-crushed dust immediately rolled across the rooftop after, blocking our visibility, obscuring everything but the violet flashes of a second and then third notes of the barrage arriving above us.

It was loud, painfully so, enough that all three of us instinctively reached to cover our ears, even Izumi, who was still in that twilight zone between waking and unconsciousness. Probably no louder than Alice’s impacts, in hindsight, but to me, those had been glorious, the fiery descent of an angel. I could justify all sorts of sensory discomfort on those grounds, especially knowing that Yuuka’s dome was designed to survive it. This…was not that. Our protective dome wasn’t built for this. I could see it wavering under the strain of the shockwaves.

The thunder flashing through the smokescreen was warfare, plain and brutally kinetic, the type of bombardment that inspired shellshock. And it simply didn’t end. Four impacts became five became six. Even Yuuka was flinching, caught off guard as she held her hands over her ears. She found my eyes and mouthed something frantically, words devoured by the world-consuming pounding of artillery. I was terrible at reading lips, but I thought she said: “She thinks it’s Sugawara!”

Of course. That was the rational thing to think, wasn’t it? We hadn’t had time to explain his profound and conspicuous absence, so for all the other Radiances knew, it was perfectly reasonable that the body manifesting out of the building was his spirit attempting to bootstrap back into the physical world, and Amane was reacting to that with commensurate fury, heedless of us in the blast zone beneath.

With shaking hands I tried to manipulate my meat-phone to implore her to call off the barrage. But the device was bulging from within and I found its surface slick and unwieldy, made all the worse by the assault on my eardrums. I’d long since passed beyond pain-addled fatigue and was hitting the very limits of my ability to function. Frantically, pathetically, I begged my fingers to work the pulsating touchscreen, and they were simply not up to the task. Yuuka was already staggering over to me to slip it from my hand and do it herself—

The rhythm broke. That was worse than if it had continued, because each second of anticipation made me brace harder for the inevitably worse resumption, my entire body coiled with primally fearful tension as the gap since the previous shock of horrible thunder stretched longer and longer. But after an eternity—what might have been ten long seconds—of Yuuka standing equally frozen next to me, both of us feeling so very small, we simultaneously accepted that it had ended. We sagged in relief; she actually flopped down onto the crash pad beside me, rubbing her temples.

“Why’d it stop?” I asked her.

“I’m seeing spots, man, I don’t know,” she groaned, then flinched. “Ah, fuckin—”

A shower of blood burst from nowhere directly in front of us. Within the dome. Several severed scraps of leather fell to the concrete with wet plaps around an absolutely mangled figure.

My heart thudded in my chest. This was the entity’s next attempt to manifest a human body, much smaller than the first, and it was all wrong. It spat and hacked gore out of a too-large mouth. Its head was flanked by a mess of what was supposed to be hair, but mimicking it poorly with the wrong material, more of a mass of bloody inchoate flesh like a crest around its head. One of its legs was shattered, bone jutting out through skin in far too many places. A red mess dominated its midriff beneath a crude approximation of a tank top made of blood. It was vile from faceless head to splintered toe, a corrupted form that almost mocked the doll’s shape I had taken in the dream, grotesquely superior to my current pile of broken meat. Had I taught it how to be this? Had it stolen the secrets of mantle manifestation from one of our minds, using me as a blueprint and flesh as the medium?

It didn’t matter. Amane had cracked the shield and given it a way in. I called for my spear, more for psychological comfort than any hope of actually fighting this thing in my state, as the nightmare creature straightened up, sloughing off more leathery afterbirth, its leg reassembling beneath it, becoming a more capable predator by the second. I crudely hefted my piece of burned wood and placed my speartip between myself and it, feeling like the furthest possible image from Heung’s majestic agility. The entity’s avatar opened its mouth to reveal a row of razor teeth, designed for slicing and shredding, and I knew in my gut that its jaws could snap through my femurs like nothing. I half-sat, half-lay with pure tension, transfixed by horror, holding my spear out in fear.

It reached an arm to its head and grabbed its halo of meat, wringing blood out until it looked more like proper bloodstained hair. Then it wiped its leathery mess of a face, peeling something off, and—

Blue, unmistakable, purer than the deepest sky. Auburn hair, stained and matted but the real thing. Hina, not a mimic, wiped off a little more of the insane quantity of gore she was covered in and smiled at me.

I remember suddenly thinking that she looked absolutely radiant. The gore remained disgusting, and in fact I only resisted retching because I had started to become somewhat desensitized to such wanton bloodshed—but my girlfriend looked so happy, exactly in her element, practically glowing in the detritus of violence. She was a perfect predator, far beyond anything this entity knew how to produce. A mantle would only slow her down, dilute her. I had sensed this within her when we’d met. It had captivated me then, and I loved it now. Her shattered leg warped and bubbled beneath her, already nearing the end of knitting back together.

“Cutie!!!” Hina managed to somehow audibly fit several exclamation points after the word. The breathy strain of exertion rode beneath her voice, but it was all endorphin-enriched energy like she’d just come from a jog. Her energy would have been infectious if it weren’t for the bone-deep exhaustion I was feeling. I was so, so glad to see her. “Babe! Other babe!” She added that for Izumi’s mostly-insensate body, eyes scanning across our open-air bunker. “Holy shit, cutie, you did so good, look at your skin! And your tummy! Whoa, your phone’s gotten all spicy pillow. Juicy pillow? God, I just wanna rip into this thing with you…” she bit her lip at my phone, then nodded to Yuuka, “but I know now’s not the time, Yuu-chan, you don’t have to tell me that, so—”

“Fuckin’ pipe down.” Yuuka sounded incredibly done, which jarred me out of the initial revulsion to my bloodsoaked girlfriend. Hina closed her mouth with the click of snapping jaws and shone a grin at us.

“You’ve been fighting it,” I gathered, unable to resist commenting on her state. “And winning? Is that why Amane stopped shooting?”

“Hm? No, she’s still shooting, just in fourspace now. Way quieter out here, you wouldn’t believe how messy it is over on the other side, I’m having a great time. Realized the mantle was no good, but it’s not like I was really gonna use that anyway. I mean, so much red, I just had to feel what that was like. Can’t get that from a vibrator. And the skin rips so good! Satisfying as hell, you can, like, nyarm,” she snarled, miming ripping out a chunk of the leather with her teeth. “And it’ll just come right back. It’s learning how to fight, too! Smashed my leg and everything.” She indicated her right leg, which looked totally fine now. “Did you know it’s all skinflaps? So weird, like it’s supposed to store something. Sugawara? But I don’t smell him.”

“You got that from just chomping on it?”

“Yep! Smell and taste and shapes!”

My body’s very last dregs of adrenaline, now misplaced, left me flushed with envy of her intuition. “He’s not here. It’s the net from when you were here before. Turned him into a ghost. Now it’s just a…bunch of torture on loop, really.”

“Ooooh. Hot. Do we have to destroy it? I mean, Alice can, but she’s nervous because it’ll totally make her horns sprout, and it’s so juicy, I wouldn’t mind getting up inside—”

She fell silent when I flinched, eyes flickering toward Yuuka, who had frozen, terrified. The way Hina was talking was setting her off; she was totally checked out of the here and now. It was unclear if she was glassy-eyed solely from exhaustion or if she was consulting her foresight, but either way, it was bad.

“Oh, fuck,” Hina swore. “Yuu-chan, did the mess spook you? I didn’t—”

“Quiet,” I told her.

I wasn’t that angry at Hina for not reading the room—she simply hadn’t known what we’d gone through—but I was furious at myself, because I found myself seriously considering her question. It felt like a betrayal, but Hina was indisputably the right kind of creature to negotiate with the net-entity, who could empathize with its sadomasochism and was magically talented enough to show it perspectives beyond that. If such a connection was possible at all, then maybe we could end this without having to destroy it. Being able to study it would be a massive boon. And another part of me, exhausted at the violence, simply wished for mercy.

But I couldn’t and wouldn’t speak for Yuuka. She came back to us after a long silence, blinking and tapping her temple. Her voice was hoarse. “No. No studying it, no giving the Peacies something to point at and go ‘Todai aren’t committed to protecting Japan,’ no giving you something to get your rocks off to like you don’t already have so many toys. Mahou shoujo destroys evil, and this is evil. It didn’t choose to be evil, but it is. I don’t want it redeemed or preserved, I want it gone, because—” she looked up at her teammate and surprised us both. “It—it hurt us, Hina.”

I’d expected more impetus, name-calling fury. This was scarier. I initially feared Hina wouldn’t know what she meant. Of course it had hurt us; that was obvious from our wounds, our exhaustion, the cracked bubble of protection standing around us. But Yuuka wasn’t talking about any of that, and Hina knew it. She shrank. “Yuu-chan, oh no, I didn’t know—”

“It’s not your fucking call to make,” Yuuka choked out, belatedly finding her anger. “Not if you give a fuck about me.”

I watched Hina’s heart shatter into a thousand pieces. Her blue eyes shifted to me, searching for anything. I gave her an encouraging nod, all I could lend from the sidelines of this moment, and she swallowed, then looked down at herself still caked in gore. “Okay. Of course. Sorry. I love you. Sorry,” she repeated, voice going quieter, then sharper. I don’t know if Yuuka saw it right then, but I did: Hina didn’t fall into a spiral of self-loathing this time. No meltdown, no flagellation. “It hurt you, so we’ll kill it. I’ll tear its heart out and eat it.”

I was proud, but I shook my head. So did Yuuka. “Hasn’t got one. We need the biggest guns. Alice’s top end.” Yuuka groped tiredly in Hina’s direction, no longer angry—perhaps that was even mild contrition I caught in her voice—but determined all the same. “Give me your earpiece.”

Yuuka’s had been wrecked at some point before I’d gotten to her. Hina handed hers over without question. Yuuka took a deep breath. “Alice. Hi. It raped me. Kill it. Don’t worry about the horns, Ezzen’s got it covered.”

“I do?” Even if I had known what I was supposed to do to help, I doubted my body or Flame were in any condition to carry it out.

She tossed the earpiece back to Hina. “Not now, you’ve got a hole in your stomach, but she needs the encouragement. She can kill me for it later.” She grimaced awkwardly, then forcibly rebuilt her composure and took Hina’s offered hand to get back on her feet—then Hina yelped as Yuuka pulled her into a hug. “Thanks, kemono. Love…love you too. I’m trying to believe things can be better, and that includes you. It’s gotta.”

She coughed, separating from her teammate and frowning at the gore that had transferred to her front. “Eugh. Get us out of the blast radius, this shield ain’t gonna cut it. Tell Amane to give us covering fire while we back out and then regroup with us, uh, somewhere out of sight of that fucking Condor but where we can still watch, because I want to see it. And we need to make sure we know what to say to the press about Sugawara—make sure the cameras don’t see Izumi. And…”

I mostly checked out at that point. I recall the brief ripping-launching sensation of being transited very swiftly, but very deftly, across the fourspace barrier and out of harm’s way, through what must have been an absolute warzone between Amane and the entity that I don’t remember at all. Hina followed her teammate’s instructions to a T, popping us back out into realspace at the top of one of the nearby mountains maybe half a kilometer away, the PCTF aircraft obscured from sight by the cloud of debris above the inward-collapsing hospital. The vehicle had state-of-the-art sensors, but I’m sure the girls knew that and compensated for it somehow. The great gemstone mecha joined us soon after, air sparking around her from her weapons systems doing their best to safely cool off, and cradled her best friend in a hug. The girls talked media strategy I don’t recall; I’d see the aftermath later. They must have put up another shield, more powerful and complex but roughly the same in function as the previous one.

What I do remember is the incandescent bullet screaming down from the heavens at mach death. To me and probably to all the other flamebearers present, it reminded me of the flamefalls during the firestorms, ragged and overloading with potency. The payload, lost somewhere in the corona, was an extremely angry magical girl, whipping her draconic Flame as bright and hot as it would go, heedless of how the backlash would change her. The hospital contorted and churned beneath her, abandoning all structure, pulling itself into a smaller and smaller footprint, as dense as it could go, cradling its stolen flesh as the forest around it flash-ignited.

Mahou shoujo destroy evil. This one destroyed everything.

Author’s Note:

We’ve reached the end of this sequence! Everybody made it! Up next: aftermath!

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters ahead of public!

May 31, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Brief suicidal ideation

The entity tried to show us what Yuuka wanted. Its limited spread of emotions did include fear, and the bloody-eyed Radiance had instilled more than enough. I wasn’t sure if it could have even refused, plugged into her eye and Flame as it was. It had been co-opted as an extension of the magical organ, parasitized in turn beneath the brunt of Yuuka’s anger. She had access to the whole of its memory.

The problem was that it clearly did not remember Sugawara.

Murky, melty scenes manifested on the handful of screens that remained, signs of a clear struggle to remember. It showed us those strange ceremonies of macabre geometry I’d passed by, but they were incomplete, snippets cutting off randomly after mere seconds and melting into more familiar and blatant depictions of violent excess. The entity wanted to return to its comfort zone and its base nature, the simple recycling of harm for its own sake. We could immediately tell that even if it understood Yuuka’s demands, it could not grasp why it had been made. During the raid, Yuuka had labeled it a trap dangerous to Hina, but that hadn’t bore fruit; from having been in its stolen memories, I now thought it was more likely a horrible stockpiling of power with which to power Sugawara’s resurrection.

It didn’t really matter. The net’s purpose had been ripped out wholesale, leaving critical gaps in its amalgam of memory.

“Maybe that’s what brought it to life,” I muttered, virtual eyes flickering between the screens for anything that might lend a clue. I wondered how closely this resembled Yuuka’s usual stream of data from her eye when she sifted through half-baked echoes of timelines yet to come. “Power without purpose, had to figure out its own priorities.”

“Maybe,” Yuuka replied absently, focusing even harder than I was. “Fuckin’—there it is again, the triangles. You’re not getting anything from those? Weird-ass glyphs, gotta be.”

I shook my smooth-shelled head in frustration. Yuuka was clearly hoping, probably in vain, for a eureka moment where it would suddenly click and I would recognize them as especially esoteric glyph diagrams. She was right, that was the only sensible option, seeing as how the entity clearly thought they were important enough to keep bringing back. But I had a sinking feeling that if they had been glyphs originally, what we were seeing was only vague recollection. The specifics of their shapes were now lost, either by forcible excision or just by being incomprehensible and thus remembered only as shapes.

“The real thing could still be out there, in the actual building,” I suggested. “Maybe we should get out and try to see.”

“No. It knows something, and I will know it in turn,” Yuuka growled. “Sugawara. The Savior. A soul extracted from a body. Doesn’t that mean fucking anything to you?”

It didn’t. When Sugawara had escaped, he had taken everything pertaining to him along with. It made twisted sense that manifesting him had required the harvest of not just raw power but also his truest believers’ impressions and feelings. Theft and possession through and through, even in death and beyond. What remained here did not know what had been taken and only dimly remembered the fact that somebody had once cared.

“This won’t work,” I muttered.

“I’m not leaving here empty-handed! There’s something in this thing. I saw that we’d find what Izumi was looking for. Here. Right here.” Yuuka wasn’t giving in to despair, but I could hear her determination fraying. We were stymied by this virtual lobotomy our subject had undergone. It could not conceptualize that there was a point to all of what it remembered, only that it was being done, from weapon to animal, and even then barely an animal, essentially just a mouth and stomach—

“We’re looking at the wrong thing,” I realized. “We need to be looking at it, not into it. It does have a purpose: eat and digest. That’s what it remembers. That’s what we want. That’s what she’s looking for.”

“Is that what we want?” Yuuka asked. “Because it…”

“Look at it,” I urged.

She frowned in concentration and the handful of surviving screens changed once more, returning to the view of us from the cameras overhead. Then the view zoomed in, past us, at the image of the screens themselves. The view ate itself like a pair of opposing mirrors. And between them, down the infinite tunnel, was a truth, an intention, the magic underpinning this thing.

Yuuka gasped and retched, stumbling slightly; I put an articulated hand out to steady her, though I was also feeling dizzy myself.

We saw it plain as day: it had been made to digest. That wasn’t a byproduct of it having come to life, it was the point, the original purpose. It had eaten Sugawara, turned him from a living soul into a high-fidelity reconstruction of himself and his memories rendered in pure ripple. He had torn out the implementation details, but this entity remained as the process itself, and afterward it had continued its work and its nature. It had just happened to develop a taste for suffering in its consumption, but when you looked past that horror, this thing’s digestive tract was fundamentally the mechanism to digitize souls that Izumi needed to escape her body.

Yuuka pushed off of me to stand under her own power. “Yes. Yes! This is it. Just look at it, damn, it’s all there. But, Ezzen,” she said more haltingly. “It’s also not there. Fuck me, this is weird. Do you…can you do something with this? It’s so…raw. How would you even weave this? Or even write it down?”

“I see it,” I said simply, staring into the truth and knowing that with enough time it was achievable. Not right this second—I’d reached the end of my rope with off-the-cuff glyphcraft and needed to sleep for a week once we got out of here—but it was tractable now. “I can—I’ll figure it out. I know I’ll be able to. I’m smarter than him.”

“Ha! Abso-fuckin’-lutely you are. Lucky you’re around, I don’t know how I’d even explain this to the others.” She coughed awkwardly. “Er. This thing reeks of him, fucker never knew how to make anything but a suffering-in-power-out engine.” Her voice dripped with hate. “He must have told them how to make it, and then they got more help somehow. He—wait, yeah, of course he did. He was in Izumi’s dreams for years, wasn’t he? And she can’t have been the only one. If I can just find some of those memories, some of his other sympathizers, we can grill them and…” She wobbled, cupping a hand over her bleeding eye of jagged crystal.

“There’s more?”

“There has to be.” Her voice deepened and she thundered a command. “Here I see all, even dreams. Show me.”

The view shuddered, trying to change once more, away from its essence. Fog coalesced into a half-seen figure, formless and faceless but gesticulating with blurry arms and clearly speaking into the camera. He was angry and erratic, hardly noble or divine in these vaguely remembered moments, yet something ineffably regal was superimposed over it. The collective memories of his worshippers were filtered by adoration so potent that it leaked out of the screens and oozed over the dream. For the briefest moment I felt a twinge of the unnatural urge to kneel, to abase myself before this higher being and bend myself in service to his glory.

It was not nearly enough to buckle my knees, nor Yuuka’s. The Spire stood. I believed in something higher than him, one which demanded nothing like this. She spat at the image. “Go fuck yourself.”

”Does he…he didn’t have actual mind control, did he? The Vaetna would have destroyed him for that years ago.”

”Yeah, that’s where they draw the line, not all the kidnapping and murder and open intimidation and the soft coup of our entire country,” Yuuka sneered. “But it’s true, he didn’t. But all the rules probably go out the window in dreams, if he’s fuckin’ gotten his hooks into you magically and you’ve already spent years being…ugh. Vile. No wonder Izumi had no choice but to go after you.”

At this new mention of Izumi’s name the image sharpened. Blurred features became a clean-shaven, angular face, and the misty mass below clarified into familiar yet subtly different robes. His expression was stony as he drew a hand back and struck the camera in a slap that shook the world.

”You are mine,” he proclaimed.

The words carried no more of that psychic compulsion, but there was a power behind them all the same. Simpler, more brutal power, the kind that made you comply when somebody pointed a gun at you, that from which all other power descended if you were to trace back far enough. The same power the Vaetna had mastered, but they would never use it for domination like this. He was the very model of the worst kind of flamebearer. From those three words alone I knew that killing him had been the right thing to do—my hands itched for my spear to finish the job.

”N—no longer,” stammered a new voice, heavy with exhausted fear, like that strike had been the twentieth rather than the first and she no longer had much to give. We both jumped; it sounded like it had come right next to us.

I turned to Yuuka. “We have to stop. These are her memories, we’re making it pull her in.”

”Oh, shit. Stop!” She commanded the cameras above us.

The memory on the screen did not dissipate. If I’d had hackles they would have gone up.

“Resisting the truth is the source of pain.” Sugawara’s voice was careful and articulate. “You know this. I helped free you from that pain, built who you are. And that makes you mine, forever. Say thank you.”

But, much to my horror, the entity was fascinated by what it was pulling out of Izumi’s memory. We were losing control. This was so much more personal than the skinnings. It watched as a rapt member of the audience, and I feared we were jogging its memory in the worst way—

The screen imploded from a roundhouse kick delivered to its side. It happened in more of a smear of light than the distinct motions of martial arts; Yuuka had struck it not with human frailty but with the remembered power of a mantle. “I said stop.”

I took her lead. Spear in hand, I moved light as a feather and smashed and skewered the remaining screens as efficiently as I could with moves straight from my daily training routine. Haft strikes and sweeping lunges took the final eyes of the panopticon to bloody pieces.

That was enough to stop this thing from accessing and recreating Izumi’s trauma, but it was also the end of Yuuka’s control over the entity, and now it was injured, afraid, and cornered. The dream around us changed far more violently than anything before. Everything began to melt and shift, blood seeping out of the walls, the ceiling rising as high as an arched cathedral as the blinded cameras retreated. I felt a presence on the medical bed behind us and whirled in alarm—it was empty, but I knew what the dream was trying to do. I turned to Yuuka. “We need to leave.”

“You’re sure we have what we came for?”

I nodded firmly. “Enough. See a way out?”

She looked sharply up at the freshly vaulted ceiling, as if daring the cluster of cameras to come back down. “This thing’s all about memory and ritual.” She pointed down at the medical bed we’d been sitting on. “It lost its lunch last time we killed him. It’ll do it again if we bring everything full circle. Gimme your spear.”

I tossed it over. It was longer than she was tall, but in the dream, that didn’t matter, and she caught it easily and raised it as though preparing to stake a vampire. Every ounce of her conviction drove the tip of the spear into the bed, through Sugawara’s heart.

The lights went out.

When I had woken from my Flame-dream conference call with the Vaetna, I’d been soaked in a high-fever sweat and I had been fundamentally unsettled in my body, disoriented and displaced, until the following morning and then some. It had been awful. Returning from the net-entity’s dream brought back those symptoms—except I had also set myself on fire before going in, and had been burning the whole while. I was groaning in pain before I was even fully awake, my awareness of my surroundings almost completely smothered by the feeling that something was on my skin and it hurt in a primal, get-it-off-me way. The fire was already out and my armor vanished, but all my nerves knew was that terrible harm had been wrought. That sent my dysmorphia and disgust at this meat-body into overdrive, overwhelmed by the experience of even being in my flesh, let alone the alarms blaring throughout my nervous system.

I was a complete sitting duck. I’d displayed incredible ingenuity and determination in getting this far, but I was no Vaetna endowed with limitless capacity for violence and magic. And even if I’d had the faculties to try to start weaving immediately in order to flee the interior of Yuuka’s pod, my willpower had run out and I was spent. Cooked, if you will; a piece of charred, overdone meat in the most literal sense, all potential squandered to the point of insult to the animal that had died to make me, repulsive to all five of the senses.

Fortunately for my sorry ass, Yuuka came out firing on all cylinders. Through bleary vision—were eyes supposed to itch?—I beheld a scintillating constellation of obsidian shards that scattered out of the breach in the pod toward a mass of skin. The shards detonated into blinding ruby and for one brief and blinding moment I saw dozens of meters of the net effortlessly torn apart like a hand through cobwebs before my retinas overloaded and I had to squeeze my eyes shut again.

Things were quiet for one or two more seconds other than the faint shuffling of Yuuka moving beside me. Then I was subjected to a full-body force as though somebody had just floored the accelerator and I had been lying in the backseat. I was thrown in a direction that didn’t exist, pursued by a bone-shaking roar—

I landed on a floor. Cheap, scratchy carpet, to be precise, but it might as well have been silk sheets beneath me, so grateful I was to be back in something resembling reality.

“Oi, Ezza, roll over, quick. To your right, toward me.”

Yuuka’s voice was a little bit away from me, like she was in the same room but facing away. The urgency in it was just barely enough for me to muster what energy I had and heave myself sideways across the carpet. Ow. Scratchy carpet on burned skin. I peeled my eyes open to look at her.

“Good ‘nuff?”

“Yep, stay there. We’ll be out of here in thirty seconds when I get this thing to give us an opening.”

Her clothes were ragged. She’d come straight from class to join this whole adventure, and now her stylish outfit was in tatters, shredded and charred by combat that must have happened moments before I’d woken up. Her heavy overcoat was intact, though, and that gave the short woman a reassuringly solid presence above me.

She was weaving faster than I’d ever seen anybody but the Vaetna or Hina, and with perfect economy. There wasn’t a single wasted movement or lost millisecond of hesitation; her hands danced around each other to bind dark, oily thread in three dimensions. She snapped off the lattice, took two deliberate steps backward, and began to weave something else, staring down at her hands with blazing gemstone in one eye and pure focus in the other.

A twitch of motion from the ceiling above her drew my gaze, in time to see a knurl of twisted rebar emerge and reach down at her like a waterfall. I twitched and reflexively called for my Flame—no chance, even if I’d been fresh and not half dead, it was happening too fast to even take a breath to call out. Yuuka didn’t even flinch as a shadow in the corner of the room expanded impossibly and punched the wave of steel off to the side with an ear-ringing bang, striking so hard it shattered into shrapnel that shredded the far wall of the former waiting room we’d holed up in. Distant rumblings ensued, what must have been more of Yuuka’s traps going off, somehow keeping the entity’s assault at bay even though we were still plainly in the belly of the beast.

I groaned and put my head back down, unwilling to muster fight-or-flight energy any further when my precog companion clearly had things under control. I mostly wanted to sleep to escape the pain; it felt like somebody had used me as a pincushion and then dumped a bucket of especially murderous hot sauce over my head. But blissful unconsciousness just wasn’t happening. In hindsight I probably would have indeed passed out from the pain even a few weeks prior, but my tolerance had gone up just enough for me to remain awake so I could wish I was dead instead. It didn’t particularly feel like an upgrade.

I resigned myself to helping in what ways I could that didn’t involve me leaving the floor, which mostly meant being an ideas guy. Ideas Vaetna-thing-suffering-too-much-to-articulate-a-better-label-right-now. Whatever.

“It’s got Izumi,” I managed to slur.

“Way ahead of you. This room is gonna fold up on us and align the membrane to give us a clear shot right to her pod.”

I was intensely jealous. I’d had to chance it to get my spear across the fourspace barrier; she could just pick the moment ahead of time.

She flicked off one more lattice that fizzled and vanished, then lowered her hands to look at me. “Now we’re just waiting. You’ve done enough, leave it to me.”

The gears were turning in my brain, gummed up by pain but grinding along nonetheless. I was having an important thought, which I located after a few seconds longer than usual. “Whatif…we let it eat her?”

“So it can digest her?” She frowned, her eye sparking with light as she chased down that possibility. “Nope. Pain’s making you stupid, it happens.”

“Buh,” I conceded.

“Neat idea, bad idea, we wouldn’t be able to pull her out when the big guns roll up.”

“Buh?”

“This thing should be setting off ripple alarms all over the country at this point. I give it fifty-fifty whether the girls or the Peacies get to us first. Can’t see that far,” she admitted dourly. “But I’ll take the help. Without mantles we don’t have the firepower to finish this thing ourselves, so we’re just going to play keep-away for a little bit.” She trotted over to me and knelt down. “You’re gonna want to be on your stomach for this—whoa, shit, what the fuck happened to your stomach?”

It took me a moment to recall. It felt like it had happened days ago. “Stabilizer melted.”

“Right, shit, well…” Worry crossed her face and her eye flashed again.

“Hate being meat. ‘zit bad?” What I really meant to ask was how bad it must have been to provoke that reaction when she didn’t seem overly concerned about the more recent and painful burns covering much more of my body.

“You don’t feel it? Ah, fuck, time’s up, we gotta move. Close your eyes and I’ll tell you when you’re good to open them again.”

This time I was able to brace for the fourspace transition. Vertigo flipped my stomach, air turned to oil, light through my eyelids turned to darkness, and the temperature plummeted. There was an awful buzzing noise, like a bandsaw had fucked a swarm of locusts, from directly next to me, some unidentifiable attack from Yuuka directed at either the entity or Izumi’s pod. It was joined by a bassy thrum, then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Got her,” Yuuka confirmed as we accelerated sideways. “One more transit, we’re getting the fuck out. Three, two, one…”

We kicked across the membrane again. Light returned and fresh air hit my nose, telling me we’d made it outdoors. I opened my eyes to see blue sky above me—being rapidly swallowed by a grinding flood of concrete coming up from below us.

I’d shown the building that there was an outside and now it was intent on pursuing us there.

Our trajectory pitched, Yuuka’s hand left my shoulder, and I tumbled onto the rooftop once more, my fall cushioned by some invisible force Yuuka had conjured up in preparation for this moment. Izumi groaned next to me, having landed on the magical cushion as well. She looked physically unharmed but clutched her head in lingering psychic pain from her contact with the entity, unable to help. She and I were just dead weight for Yuuka to defend—and as the latter had said, she lacked the firepower to meaningfully beat this thing.

She did what she could. She stood before us and grimly wove even more, silhouetted against the roiling mass of the building’s shape as it mutated and grew over us to blot out the sun. A shimmering, prismatic forcefield grew from her hand to stretch over us in a protective dome. It closed around us and seemed to create more space than there should have been—probing flaps of skin peeking through the animated rubble touched it and diffracted into smaller shapes that couldn’t reach through. Suddenly Yuuka sagged, defeat in her voice.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

Fear clutched my heart. “Checkmate?”

“Stalemate, as far as us and this thing are concerned. This kind of shit is the problem mantles exist to solve,” she sighed, watching the entity attempt to brute-force its way past her shield, hands idle at her sides for the first time since we’d escaped the dream. “It’d take me about seventy seconds to weave a big gun that could really take a bite out of it, but firing it would collapse this shield from leakage interactions and I can’t get all three of us out in what comes after. A gun that wouldn’t do that would take me six minutes, even with your cleverest ideas, and we only have five until the shield goes down on its own.”

“…Sounds like checkmate to me.”

Suddenly she turned on her heel. A slightly mad grin had spread across her face and she posed like I’d seen in the dream, hand over her eye, her signature look.

“Heh. If it were just us, sure. But the power of friendship—and incredible violence—always prevails. This shield is built for a very particular kind of firepower. Tell her it’s mode three.”

“Huh?”

On cue, my phone buzzed in my pants pocket. Or more accurately, it shivered—ripple exposure had turned its internals to flesh, and it was a viscerally uncomfortable experience to wrap my fingers around it and dig it out of my pocket, like grabbing some wriggling vermin from its hidey-hole. The screen still worked, at least, and the caller ID immediately told me that the day was saved.

I picked up and put it on speaker. Radiance Opal’s voice came through the voicebox, crushed up by static but audible.

“Oh, thank God. We’re just getting visual now. Is it as bad as it looks?”

Words rushed out of me at once. “Alice, it’s bad, I’ve—we’ve—building’s alive, mantles are down, we’re in a bubble inside. Mode three, Yuuka says.” I wished I knew what that meant.

“Ah. Mode three, huh? Knew I was coming, good on her.” There was a smile in her voice. “Peacies are here, by the by, and they’re about to get front-row seats to why they haven’t tried to fuck with us. Beginning attack run, danger close.”

The dragon of Todai struck the possessed building like a cruise missile.

Author’s Note:

At last, the light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s dragonfire. This might actually be the first engagement in the entire story where Yuuka’s eye hasn’t gotten completely punked, I’d say she’s acquitted herself as well as she can under the circumstances. Now her girlfriends can do the rest.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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May 22, 2026

CONTENT WARNING: This is the darkest chapter in the story so far. Lots of bad stuff, full list below. None of it is beyond the pale for themes previously discussed in the story, and I worked hard to balance the tone (no glorifying here!) but much of what’s depicted and implied in this chapter is still severe enough that you have the option to skip this chapter and read a little trigger-free summary instead.

CONTENT WARNING LIST (STRONGLY RECOMMENDED ON THIS CHAPTER)

Body horror, gore, mind control, forced nudity, discussion of sexual assault, unreality, torture, intentional misgendering. No sexual assault is depicted in detail.

TRIGGER-FREE SUMMARY

Ezzen enters the dream of the net-entity, which manifests as a twisted version of the hospital full of all the memories of the evil acts that took place there. Ezzen remains lucid, protected by its Flame and its fury, and searches for Yuuka as the halls become more and more fleshy and organic. It eventually finds her in the room where they killed Sugawara, watching all the scenes at once through a bank of CCTV cameras. Ezzen manifests as the doll to convince Yuuka that she’s safe and that the dream isn’t real. Together, they smash the monitors and Yuuka regains access to her foresight. She turns her eye on the net-entity, demanding that it show them how Sugawara rebirthed himself so she can give the technique to Izumi.

Down and down I went. From a rooftop beneath the setting sun, into the lair-gullet trap of the entity that had formed from the desecrated hospital, across into the abyss beyond its mouthparts, and at last into its dream which had infested the cursed eye of Radiance Heliotrope, I dove through the circles of hell to save my friend, all the way to the bottom. A dive the Heron would have approved of, I’d like to think, armored in fire and blood.

And the armor was necessary. The halls of the dream-hospital looked deceptively normal at first glance, much like how it had when I’d seen it through Alice’s bodycam, but the screams that came from just around every corner and behind every closed door told the truth: this deepest pit was no place for soft things. Each step seemed to put new evils on display, jumbled together in a messy cascade and strung together in looping sequences to be paraded before me by the carousel of dream-logic with only passing regard for the building’s proper layout.

Violence was a constant. Pain was not the only form of red ripple, but it was one that Sugawara’s true believers had clearly prized and at least crudely understood how to harness. I glimpsed bound and gagged figures being stabbed and beaten through doorways purposefully left ajar, carried out with slow and ritualistic care between members of the cult and with sickeningly eager abandon on outsiders. Other times I saw bodies bent over, grasping and humping and grunting. Though everything in the dream was happening at once, I could tell that these were older moments, from the years Sugawara’s comatose body had been imprisoned here and his cult had infiltrated and taken over in his wake. I recognized in them the same consumptive desires I’d felt in him, echoing through the memories of his cult and their victims. 

More recent and vivid were the skinnings. I turned a corner to see rows of flayed carcasses hung from the ceiling, straight down the hallway and in the open as people came and went, human lives reduced to being simply part of the furniture. Men naked to the waist carefully sliced and scraped while others cycled buckets and plastic tarps to catch the blood. One of them turned to me. In the real world I would have braced for him to lunge; I’d like to think I might even have struck first in order to never give him the opportunity. Here in the dream, I simply waited. He did not grapple me but instead simply held out his knife handle-first and smiled warmly. “You have to give it a try,” he urged. “We’re going to make it all right again. They’re fresh and ready, you’ll be forgotten if you don’t.”

The dream wanted me to take the knife. It was a pressure just shy of physical, a strong intrusive thought, the same call of the void that made people jerk the steering wheel into oncoming traffic. The blade he offered promised excitement and novelty, and what he was saying was eminently reasonable; there was no way making it all right could be a bad thing, and they were fresh and ready, it was true. I’d miss my chance if I didn’t join in now.

Those were the net’s thoughts—or more accurately the thoughts it was relaying, the impressions and memories of when this had taken place in the real world. Either way, they were not mine, and it was profoundly horrifying to feel the net crawl across me like that, trying to bind me up and puppeteer me to play the proper role, the inevitable role. The dream and the entity dreaming it wanted my experience and that memory to become indistinguishable. I would take the knife and join them in skinning, reenact the memories of a man weeks or months dead who had done just that. Then I would be shuffled deeper through the exhibits to repeat the experience, force-fed every morsel of disorienting violence and hedonic excess.

This psychic entrainment was the entity’s proper feeding process; to continue the metaphor of carnivorous plants, the dream was the sticky resin loaded up with paralytic and digestive enzymes, where the final immobilization and consumption of the unfortunate souls took place. The prey would experience every act in these halls as both perpetrator and victim. I’d had the briefest taste of that the first time I’d touched the net, and it had almost taken me entirely. Now it was obvious what would have happened had it taken any longer. I would be inevitably drawn to partake in the recollections of twisted hedonics, my need to escape and even my awareness that there was anything to escape to washed away in a crimson tide, my soul paralyzed to witness and become complicit in the carousel of atrocities until my selfhood dissolved into it, digested into the entity. It was the automatic result of contact with the net, as simple and mindless a process as any chemical breakdown of prey.

Mindless or not, it was still horrific. That feeling was a potent seed of resistance inside me, and though it clearly had not been enough for any of the other victims I’d encountered thus far, my Flame gave me an advantage. At a mechanical level I assumed it was mainly scattering the red ripple into other colors, but I suspected the reality of my atemporal Flame’s interaction with this time-flattening bundle of suffering was far more complex and hateful than what glyphs or colors could sum up. Whatever the case, the simple result was that “armor” was acting like a wetsuit, insulating me and making me aware which thoughts and feelings were my own and which ones sounded more like stage directions.

I did take the knife, and for a long moment I weighed the temptation of driving it through the man’s eye in violent, petty vengeance, before tossing it aside. I was Ezzen, paradox heir to the Vaetna, not an actor on their stage. I couldn’t deny that I was disturbed by each tableau of torture or mesmerizingly nauseating fragment of animal pleasure, but instead of eating away at me until I dissolved into the soup, it all turned into further concern for Yuuka. That kept me lucid and pushed me forward. I kept running.

The abattoir hallway ceased to exist behind me as soon as I left the scene; the first few times I’d acted to interfere, I’d naively hoped I had destroyed it by refusing to participate and incapacitating the perpetrators, but those had been dashed when I’d realized I’d passed by the same scenario twice and the surgeon’s jaw was decidedly not shattered the second time around. So now I didn’t bother, bleakly admitting that there was no point in attempting to free the victims, salve their wounds or attempt to reassemble each lost soul. These were not ghosts, I told myself, nothing I could save. This thing was made from people in the same way that a house was made out of trees. The net was made of skin, but it was made of only skin, not enough to reassemble a person.

Perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps, with time and study, I could have unraveled the mechanisms behind this grisly fate and undone them. Perhaps that’s what a Vaetna would have done in my shoes. Too bad. I was here for Yuuka. I’d figure out how to put the skin back on a body if she needed it and not before.

The labyrinth unfurled ahead of me, damp and inviting, bidding me deeper.

—

My search had little direction to it; my grasp of the hospital’s layout was secondhand to begin with, and this version’s broken-neck corners and looping stairs and yonic doorways didn’t subscribe to its shape in life anyway, mere connective tissue between the memories of bliss and murder and things between, none of which I stopped to indulge save to peek my head in and verify that none of the cast were Yuuka Hirai. The horror of this theme park of sadomasochism grew stale quickly for me when I could freely move through it with no regard for its intended pacing or the delirium that was surely meant to take hold. So my primary emotion soon cooled from rage to frustration; it was unclear whether I was making any progress at all.

I looked up at the ceiling, the only direction I hadn’t yet attempted. That’s when I noticed the cameras growing from above like inverted mushrooms.

They were everywhere and watched everything. Some were those bulbous, glossy black domes, obtrusively sticking out of the gray fireproofed ceiling, opaque as to the target of their attention. Others were boxier and had a clear dark glass eye that gave them a sense of direction and purpose, perching in the top corners of waiting rooms to watch the more private depravities unfold. Still others were a hybrid of the two, blurry dream-amalgams that did not need a coherent form to function. Some of them swiveled off of their respective scenes to track me as I ran through the halls.

These artificial eyes were conspicuous. Both the entity and I had entered this place through Yuuka’s cursed gemstone eye, and to me, that made it all too likely that I would find her wherever these cameras fed their vision. I stopped in front of a rack of drying skins and placed myself in front of the camera that had been watching it.

“Yuuka, if you’re watching me, show me the way?”

The camera stared back at me, impassive. After a long moment of waiting, I grumbled to myself and got moving again, continuing down the hall.

From then on, the building’s texture began to change. For all the hospital’s irredeemably violated layout and the atrocities taking place within, it had at least still looked like how one might expect an abandoned hospital might, with broad hallways, plain colors, and simple right-angle geometry. As I progressed deeper it slowly began to lose that cohesion, first with corners blending together where the wall met the ceiling, and soon after the materials themselves became corrupted.

It felt like I had passed from a branching arterial bloodstream into long, digestive bowels. Drywall and paint turned to soft, glistening membrane. The easy-to-clean linoleum tiles took on a hollower and stiffer sound beneath my feet as they turned to bone or cartilage until occasionally my step landed a little too hard and cracked through to sink a little into mucosal linings beneath. The hallways began to constrict and wind, and side rooms became less and less frequent, sometimes crudely blocked off by tumors of unidentifiable flesh. The cameras began to have eyes for lenses. Humidity clung to me as I ran.

The screaming grew more distant and less numerous. The memory ghosts grew fewer, and when I did see them, the acts of carnage had grown more abstract. The skinning rituals and drying racks gave way to ceremonies of geometry, masked men cutting leather into triangles and strips. Where there were still recognizable thresholds between halls and rooms, they were adorned with geometric patterns I didn’t recognize as any sort of glyphs.

I had passed into this thing’s memories of the acts leading up to its birth, I realized. Deeper. Good.

That thought emerged right as I rounded a corner, and of course, that was when I came upon a corridor I did recognize. It was the final redoubt before the Radiances had reached Sugawara, where they’d sent his mercenaries packing with pure intimidation before busting down the door. There was no sign of the hired guns here, which I took to mean that they’d scarpered immediately after that encounter and not gotten caught up in any of this.

The hallway was two places at once. It was lined with doors as I remembered, yet the corner of my eye insisted they were wet and glistening and much narrower, a tighter fit than before, one I’d have to squeeze through. This second version of it was a fleshy tube, another mimicry of potently remembered biology like the creature’s throat in the real world. This did not feel consumptive or digestive in the same way as the previous corridors, nor was it a memory. The threshold I stood at was a vertical slit and the walls were lined with eyeballs. Crude literalism reigned here, inseparably reproductive and voyeuristic at once.

Instead of trying to dissolve my thoughts and selfhood with temptation and sensory assault, this thing had changed tactics and decided it would have my participation in the most basal way it knew. It wanted to watch me penetrate through, fill it, press all the way down to the door at the end. There, in the womb, I knew I would find Yuuka, right where her eye had claimed Izumi would find what she wanted. And now I feared she would not be alone.

That was where Sugawara had died and been reborn. By all rights, I knew it would be the most powerful nexus of red ripple in the real building and the strongest memory. But his ghost, or at least the memory of it, had been absent from this place, conspicuously so, unmentioned even by the rapturous members of his own cult. Against this grotesquely vaginal framing, it now made all too much sense for him to be in that room with Yuuka, in some way enfleshed and empowered and in control.

He had violated her enough already. So I did as the corridor asked, just not how it wanted me to. This thing still did not know me.

I was a spear. Still phallic, but beyond the context of this thing’s memories, the motions and acts of flesh it understood. Of course, I’d plainly seen in a dozen ways that it understood stabbing, but only in depraved eagerness and mortal terror. I was eager, but not for this absurd metaphor of sex. I was afraid, but not for myself.

The memory of my vaet lanced down the tube of flesh, and me with it, and we punched a hole clean through the door. The burning line of violence was hardly the shredding whirlwind I had watched Sani and Bri employ, not enough to destroy the dream or even puncture to the outside, but it got me through. An infinitesimal gap for me to enter while leaving the rest of the hallway untouched. I arrived as an omen of violence, no longer caring if that would play into this thing’s desires, ready to behead Sugawara a second time.

The room was mostly as I remembered it in the last moments I’d seen it, blood and all, save for the absence of the symbolic splatter of gore behind the bed that Sugawara had used. It was hot, sweat-slicking, seeking the memory of fevered delirium or the motion of bodies. A choking atmosphere of red ripple filled this place. The thing orchestrating this carnival of horror was most present here and practically salivating.

Sugawara was not. That was a true relief, but only for a moment, crushed swiftly by Yuuka’s appalling state. My fears about what the dream might do to her had been woefully close.

She was naked, lying unbound in the gore-dampened bed where Sugawara had breathed his last, her legs held up and spread. Both her eyes were human, looking across the room with boredom.  I followed her gaze and saw that she was watching a bank of CCTV monitors—glancing at them made me dizzy, unable to tell if there were dozens or hundreds. This was where the cameras led. This was clearly a metaphor for how the net had infested her mind via her eye. Yet it had also taken that away from her, the relic of blood magic meant to be her greatest weapon, reducing her to a mere damsel in distress, an object for me to pursue.

“Hey,” she greeted me without looking. She made no attempt to get up.

I didn’t want to look at her nude body or the monitors, so I turned, scanning the room for…anything, really. Yuuka’s clothes, signs of sexual violence, anything that the net-entity might see as a fittingly grim punchline for all of this.

“You’re alright?” I asked warily. “That’s—a relief, this place is horrible. We’re getting out of here.”

“Out of…?” I heard a frown cross her voice. “There’s no out. This is it.”

My blood ran cold. When Izumi had said she wasn’t fighting back, I’d feared this might be the case. Yuuka didn’t have her flame buffering between the dream and her consciousness like I did. I had to do so instead. I stepped between her and the monitors and made eye contact. “Yuuka, this is a dream. The net-entity’s dream. All that on the screens? That’s not real, neither is the building. It’s just a hallucination, a bunch of patched-together memories. I came in here to get you out. We have to go.”

“Oh, you don’t really fuckin’ believe that, do you? You came here for these,” she said, rolling her shoulders to shift the twin masses on her chest, then spread her legs further. “And this. ‘S all anybody wants me for anyway, so hurry up and rape me already.”

I was horrified. This thing of memories was playing on her own worst ones, trying to build a scene that would recreate them so it could siphon the potency of her distress and harm, and it was messing with her head to further that end, to make her an actress in the performance. Its lead role, and everything I had seen in the twisted halls had merely been side shows and supporting actors.

But I was sure she had never played this role, not like this, not the jaded, expectant passivity. Alice had implied that Yuuka’s use of sex to bait human traffickers in pursuit of Amane had been entirely more calculated and ruthless than this. I didn’t know for certain—it wasn’t my place to know and Alice had been wrong to share even that much—but if I had to imagine how she had gone about it, there would have been far more cherry-sweetness and dopey innocence before she slit their throats to rifle through their files and manifests. Still horrific, but full of desperate volition. This arranged scene was a false construction of the role she had played and an insult to the woman I knew.

Perhaps it was in part how she remembered it, but even then, that meant that the dream was boiling all the vicious drive out to leave behind only the harm and trauma of what had been done to her. It didn’t even leave her the gemstone eye. Her character was irrelevant to it, only her hurt and the power that lay within it.

It filled me with rage.

“Absolutely the fuck not,” I retorted. “I’m not one of those fucking animals outside. I’m Ezzen, you know me,” I said, hoping she even recognized me.

“Really? You look like them. Spear and a spear, practically walking innuendo. I know you’re itching to stick at least one in me. Look, they’re all waiting, too, so hurry up.”

She pointed up and my stomach dropped. The ceiling was festooned with cameras and eyes staring down at us, watching. I turned jerkily to check the bank of CCTV monitors—so many of the screens were different angles of this room, her leaned back on the medical bed, me standing over her, naked, dick out—

My rage on her behalf was overtaken by resentful proprioception, the damnably concrete awareness that I did have a penis and it did nominally find Yuuka attractive. This was the trap; I had been braced for Sugawara to play the opposing part to her worst traumas, but the dream wanted me, because that was how she was seeing me in this moment.

It struck right at the heart of my insecurities to still be seen as another unknown predatory man, another monster meant to have his way with her. Yuuka had neuroses, but surely she didn’t truly see me as that, not any more, not with all we’d been through and the open attempts to trust me. No matter how far gone and strung along to be an actress on the entity’s insulting porno set, I thought I had earned her trust more deeply than this. It hurt.

With that hurt, as always, came the desire to change.

What was on those screens was a lie. That was not me. No part of me found this attractive, this farce, this flaying humiliation of a woman I’d come to respect. I would not be party to it. I had been invited onto this stage, but I refused to play the matching role. 

With a thought, I morphed, my armor wrapping around me into a smooth, flat, synthetic shell. I lost the pretensions of muscle mass and organs and a face. Two breasts of my own hung duct-taped to my chest, silicone softness atop the shell. I showed her that which was truer and sharper than the dream’s lie.

“I am Ezzen,” I repeated, my voice synthetic, softer in tone but as sharp as any blade. “I am not a man.”

I could have sworn I saw a puppet string sliced asunder as a flash of recognition crossed Yuuka’s expression. “The…sex doll,” she stumbled, the wheels turning in her head.

Nerves bubbled in the stomach I didn’t have. That moniker left little ambiguity indeed; this was hardly a full-throated rejection of sexuality. The form of the doll had been chosen in haste, and no matter how I felt about it, this was still undeniably a sexual object. I banked on the hope that whatever acts she had witnessed or participated in with this drone had been lesbian, within the confines of the penthouse, with people she loved, and was thus not a shape that bore any resemblance to the men in those dark places of her mind.

“Nothing will happen to you,” I promised, silently urging her to fight it, too afraid to say anything more.

A long moment lurched between us. Then it happened—reality, harsh and frigid, intruded on the dream’s dense, sweltering atmosphere. The performance crumbled as I felt the entity recoil, dropping its strings in confusion. Eyes overhead winced shut. In turn, Yuuka’s widened in recognition, then fluttered, blinking away the pacifying glaze of her role. She jerked, then hastily closed her legs. “Ezzen, oh, shit, what the fuck, how did I—no, you’re not like that, I know that, shit!”

I breathed a simulated sigh of relief. “Oh, thank fuck. With me now?”

“I—you didn’t see that. You didn’t see that,” she repeated, voice beginning to shake. Reality was a terribly cold thing. She breathed hard, sitting up and crossing an arm over her boobs.

“You didn’t want it,” I assured her, averting my eyes again and turning away, scanning the floor again in the hopes that her clothes would manifest so I could hand them to her. “It’s this place, the fucking net-entity, these cameras. It’s gotten into you and we have to get out.”

“Just—shut up for a moment. Shut up. I know it’s not real, it’s not, I just need to—” I heard her strangle what might have been a sob. “Fucking cunt. Clever fucking brainless thing,” she cursed up at the nest of cameras. “Got in my head because it’s not wrong.”

“No, Yuuka, of course it’s wrong,” I urged, “It’s—”

“I said shut up. It’s not just a fucking dream! It is, but it’s not!” She took another rattling breath. “This is what real life is, Ezzen, this is how the world works! Just a bunch of—stabbings and skinnings and rape, that’s what actually drives everything. I’ve seen it. I lived it! All this thing is doing is cutting out the middleman.”

We were quiet for a long moment until I found what to say.

“I understand.”

“You don’t. Not like I do. I see it everywhere. That’s how it got me. I couldn’t tell the difference when we were coming in. The building looked—it looked normal. That’s normal to me.”

I wanted to point out that her eye was usually wrong, but that wouldn’t get us anywhere. I emitted a sigh and half-turned back to her, shuffling very slightly toward the bed. “Can I sit down?”

She gave me a wary, hunted look. Her eyes slid down to my boobs and stayed there for a few seconds. Then she nodded, curling her legs toward her so that she was mostly out of arm’s reach. “Yeah.”

I sat. The positioning felt too much like I was a parent about to give their kid a pep talk, and Yuuka deserved better than that. I swung my mechanical legs fully up onto the bed and crossed them beneath me instead.

“Not like you do. True. You’ve been through some horrible stuff, Yuuka.”

She rolled her eyes. The effect was stronger when she could do it with both of them. “And I’m so strong for keeping on with it despite that, is that it? I’m gonna punch you in the tit if that’s where you’re going with it.”

“Nah. I mean, yeah, but not my point. My point is that…world’s fucked, and I should be dead, or worse. But I’m not. I lost a foot, almost got captured by the Peacies and…well, I’d like to think they wouldn’t have turned me into a battery, I’m more useful in other ways. It still woulda been bad, is what I’m trying to say, and instead, I’ve had it pretty good. Pretty bloody good,” I repeated. “Thanks to you. Todai’s power and your…kindness? Tolerance.”

“Your accent’s so weird,” she cut in a little too airily. “Brit, but you talk like an American and the accent kinda slops off, until those words come out and you sound like Alice again.”

I took the needling as a tentatively positive sign for her mood and elected to play into it. “Says the Japanese girl with an Australian accent. Do you want to talk about that instead? We don’t have to—I mean, we do have to get out of here, but if you just need to talk about literally anything else…”

“Well, my accent comes from learning English by flirting with Aussie dockworkers twice my age to promise them a blowie if they could tell me when the next ship from Malaysia was coming in. Y’know, because it was a ship that might have had Amane on it and that’s the only lead I had. This is all I’ve got, Ezza, this has been my entire fucking life from the day the Flame hit us. It all comes back to that. So no, I’d rather not. What were you saying?” she asked sweetly.

“Uh. Fuck.” The admission was one thing, the flippancy with which she’d delivered it was altogether more saddening. I hoped what I said next would help. “I just—you’ve all done a lot for me, is what I wanted to say. Taken on a lot of risk with the Peacies and maybe a bigger one letting me just…be in the penthouse and hang out with you, as an unknown. I’m…grateful, and I feel like I haven’t really shown you all that and it’s just been a lot of shame instead. And you specifically, you’ve given me more grace than I could imagine after how you’ve been hurt. If the world is a big pile of murder and other bad shit, it sure seems to stop at the penthouse’s door. So…thanks,” I trailed off awkwardly, running out of steam.

Yuuka gave this a moment’s consideration, running her hand down her hair. She shook her head sadly. “And I’m still selling my body to keep that sanctuary. Same engine, just more flash. Here’s my tits, money please, don’t ask what happened to that oil rig. Yoyogi Park? Ah, infernos happen, mate, Sapphire actually stopped it from being worse, promise, she’ll go do some meet-and-greets to make up for it, that seems fair, doesn’t it?” She pressed her arms together to scandalously show off her cleavage, then snarled up at the cameras on the ceiling. “Those? Those are real, even if they’re a lie.”

I didn’t know enough about Todai’s celebrity activities to argue that with any nuance. Instead I threw a hoodie across the bed. One of my big, bulky, oversized ones that hid the form well, summoned from my memories. I wordlessly produced a second one and shrugged it on to hide my own breasts. When my head emerged, I was pleased to see Yuuka had done the same and was now staring at the design on mine quizzically.

“Have you even seen Sailor Moon?”

“Hina got it for me.”

She glanced down at her own, brow furrowed. I hadn’t had particular designs in mind, and as she focused on hers, it changed to a different set of magical girls. I knew that was Madoka Magica because Star never shut up about it. Yuuka harrumphed. “Oh, fuck’s sake. I can’t believe you’re actually making me feel better with an anime hoodie.”

“Armor’s important,” I said simply.

“…It is. I hate when the Vaetna are right about shit. They’re right about all that sanctuary stuff, too, fuckin’ damn it all. We made a place for ourselves, a place without all…that.” She indicated the CCTV monitors. “Mostly. Enough. Glad you were here. And it’s good. I know that.”

She hopped off the bed, suddenly full of energy, and stomped across the room to the monitors. The short woman bunched up a fist and drove it straight through one of the screens.

“It’s good!” she repeated, heedless of the blood dripping down her knuckles. “And you don’t get to fucking hide it from me!”

She smashed another, and then another. I would have smiled if I could. I leapt off the bed to join her—she held out her other hand to halt me. “Only the ones with all the kemono shit. Not the ones on us.”

I understood. My plastic fists smashed glass and rent circuitry asunder, following her lead. There was meat within some of the screens, unidentifiable giblets joining the mechanical trash rapidly covering the floor. The entity had exposed its nervous system directly to Yuuka, and now we were tearing it apart. The entity was powerless to stop us as we turned the brutal literalism of its control over her into so much scrap.

It was decidedly un-magical, pure and simple violence, and it took its toll on her especially, slicing up her knuckles and nicking her face with flying glass. I saw her wince and recoil as a piece flew right into her eye; instead of calling for a pause, she just laughed and hurled the next monitor across the room to dash it against the door. It happened again a few moments later. This time Yuuka didn’t even slow down, and neither did I, even as her eye dripped blood down her cheek.

I, on the other hand, was impervious. My knees and elbows and the not-quite-feet at the ends of my legs were capable tools of destruction, and it felt good to finally have something to take all my horror and rage out on. I hoped that each smashed monitor also destroyed the scene it was depicting and laid what remained of these poor souls to rest. In the remaining cameras, the ones showing us, I saw us ruining this thing’s nervous system, and it was good. This was me and her as we were supposed to be. Yuuka saw it too and laughed even harder. Her right eye was swollen shut.

When almost all the screens were destroyed, and it was only us left, Yuuka turned to me. Her eye was ruined, a gory mess of gouges and gashes, taken to shreds by our raucous violence. She kept laughing, properly villainous and mocking, as she reached in and scooped and scraped with her blood-slick fingers and removed the lie the monster had placed over her vision. In her eye socket glimmered red and black, reborn in violence.

“Houseki hikare!” Radiance Bloodstone roared, knee-deep in triumphant gore. Then she turned to face the cameras cowering above us. “Behold the dread prophet,” she intoned, looking the net-entity in its cluster of eyes. “You will burn. But first. Izumi Takagiri needs a future, and I will give her one.”

“Yuuka?” I asked.

She pointed a finger up at the entity.

“I will see the monster that made you! He died here, right here, in this bed, where we killed him. He was here, and now he is not. You were there, and you were a part of it. He remade himself from you. I will have that secret and every other! Show me how he did it. Show me where he has gone. Show me everything.”

Author’s Note:

This chapter was pretty mean to Yuuka (and Ez to a lesser extent), so thanks for bearing with me. I worked hard on getting this chapter as right as I could (three days of delay!) and I hope you can feel what I was going for. Special thanks to the beta readers for helping me at every turn, they helped me realize at the eleventh hour that there was more that could be done, and I’m proud of the execution. I’m a little nervous too, but if you’re reading this you’re four hundred thousand words in, and I had to spend that trust eventually. If you liked the chapter (or if you think I missed a CW), please let me know in a comment!

Next chapter will be brighter. It’s definitely not coming this Sunday; I’m tentatively saying it’ll be next Sunday, May 17, and if I get it done before then it’ll be up for patrons.

That’s all for this week!

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May 6, 2026