CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Yuuka took me to the rooftop.

It was a cold, clear afternoon in Tokyo, the kind I’d become somewhat used to by now, those pale-blue winter days that made the cityscape feel as though it were simultaneously looming straight over me as well as impossibly far away, floating somewhere in the sky, an endless vertical assemblage of glass and steel that presented no hints as to what might lie beyond, neither western mountains nor eastern ocean anywhere to be seen. That sense of isolation was aided by the fact that the usual sounds of the Tokyo streets—the rumble of cars, the blare of obnoxious advertising trucks, the various chimes and dings of convenience stores and crosswalks and all the infrastructure of a city, and of course the ubiquitous sounds of people walking and talking—were completely inaudible from twenty stories up. It was only me, Yuuka, and the wind, which was cold and hostile, grabbing at my ears with icy fingers and sending that familiar, aching chill seeping into my hand. She had donned a long, heavy coat, though it was unzipped. I’d thrown on a hoodie and was sort of wishing I owned a more significant outer layer.

Yuuka’s jetbike, a dark and angular thing closer in scale to a speedboat than a motorcycle, sat redundant in its space near the top of the roof stairwell, available for her use but dwarfed by the magic circle launchpad that dominated the rooftop, standing ready for the Radiances to deploy high above the skyline at a moment’s notice. Painted indicator lines and hazard stripes framed the precise zones and distances of safety that one could stand from a mantle’s explosive takeoff sequence. It was mostly for noise cancellation; only a full-force emergency launch produced enough backblast to harm those standing nearby, and even then, you would have to be standing within arm’s reach. 

In fact, I was standing within arm’s reach of a Radiance, but not for imminent takeoff. Both of Yuuka’s eyes stared at the roiling pulses of too-white Flame emanating from my arm as I held it aloft. Even in the harsh winter sunlight beneath a clear sky, the light of my Flame flung odd, hungry shadows off our bodies.

“It’s still really fucked up,” Yuuka opined.

“How so?”

“Just, y’know. In general.”

“Huh. Not in the sense that it’s damaged, you mean?”

“By fighting Suga-shitfucker? Nah, looks the same as it did before then. Burned the fuck outta him, didn’t ya?”

I cast my eyes down to the border of my burn scars, the spot where they blended against the regular skin of my upper forearm, where the flames cut off abruptly. “Something like that. He kind of ran from it when I touched him.”

Something sharp flitted across Yuuka’s face. “Good. Maybe it’ll be enough to put him down next time.” She turned away from me to cast her gaze across the skyline, craning her neck up at the glittering skyscrapers around us. “Maybe. I don’t like ‘maybes’.”

“That’s what the eye is for, isn’t it? Is, uh, this helping at all?” I asked, gesturing with my normal hand at my makeshift torch. Yuuka had used the word “searchlight,” which felt a little inaccurate to the omnidirectional spray of my Flame’s ripple-light. I had to begrudgingly admit that “lighthouse” fit better in spirit. Mechanically, though, we were more like a radar system, with me casting ripple—or perhaps somehow amplifying that which was already there, which made more sense than me putting off enough “Light” to illuminate all of Tokyo by myself—and Yuuka interpreting the silver echoes on return to see into the future.

“Yeah,” she confirmed. “I’m looking. Stay mad.”

She didn’t mean it as an invective or taunt; I was doing my damnedest to channel the anger I felt that something like Sugawara was running free, feeding it into my Flame to keep it lit. I’d felt the direct, corrosive presence of his thoughts, the threadbare remains of his malice, during those moments of contact, and even the memory was so repulsive that I found it easy to summon up some righteous wrath. Nothing like that should be permitted to exist. The Vaetna would not allow it, and neither would I.

There were some holes in that thinking, of course. The Vaetna had never assisted the Radiances in toppling Sugawara. But this was a rare case where it behooved me to ignore that clever and reasonable voice in my head and instead focus on the fiery and raw emotional drive to make right what had been set wrong. So I held my Flame aloft and illuminated the future for Radiance Heliotrope. I wasn’t sure exactly what her crimson eye saw in the unborn silver echoes, but she definitely saw something as she scanned toward the east, where my shaky knowledge of Tokyo’s geography told me the bay was.

“Yep,” she sighed. “They’re still coming.”

“The PCTF,” I guessed. “How coming do you mean?”

She skewered me with a glare for the accidental innuendo, making me shrink. She let out a little tsk. “Two weeks, call it. Not ready for an open fight, but…” she leaned forward a bit as she stared eastward. I imagined that her gemstone eye would have squinted if it could. “Well, there will be fighting. They want Sugawara’s remains, I think, leading me…oh, fuckin’ hell. They want you, too.”

I crossed my unused arm over my chest to support my raised torch, feeling a little small versus the sheer scale of the PCTF. Todai’s twenty-story building suddenly felt dwarfed in more ways than one. I tried to put on a brave face, remembering the newspaper clipping in their head lawyer’s office that said they’d beaten them and gotten away with it before. “We sort of already knew that, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, but not like how I’m seeing. There’s a guy on his way, who…we’ll kill. Alice will, I think.”

“So it’ll come to blows?” I looked in the same direction she did with trepidation. You could see a little further in this direction, some of the buildings giving way to a park-like strip of green below us that was punctuated with more skyscrapers. “More murder.”

“That’s not the point. Murder’s whatever with these fuckers; we’ll kill as many as we need to.” In the corner of my vision, she crossed her arms in the same way I did. I tried to ignore how her chest rested atop them compared to my own flat front. It was a stupid thing to be thinking about during a conversation like this. “But Alice killing them, over you, means they want you bad. As in, more than I’d expect. Stop looking at my tits.”

“S—sorry.” My face was hot even in the chilly air. “Why? Uh, not why should I stop looking; I get that, promise. Why would they want me?”

“Aside from the fact that you’re some kind of glyph genius?” She almost laughed the last words, not exactly incredulous but certainly irreverent. “Probably because your Flame’s all fucked up. Don’t know how they would know that, though. We don’t have a spy, I don’t think. You had others in your group, right? Two others? Three?”

“Three, but one went inferno, so two. You think their Flames could be all…like mine? Whatever that means,” I added.

“Probably. So if the Peacie shitlords got ‘em…”

“Ah. So in terms of consequences…war?” The word was heavy and thick, too big to be coming out of my mouth. “With Todai?”

“Maybe. I’ll keep an eye out. I come up here every day, but I should start bringing you as the day gets closer. If you can stop staring at my tits.”

“I’m not! I swear!” I stared out at the skyline instead, pointedly removing her from my field of vision.

“Uh huh.”

“I’m just…it’s not sexual,” I babbled. “I’m not coveting your flesh or whatever. I don’t mean to be gross.”

“If you were being gross, I’d’ve pushed you off the roof. A little envy’s fine, I’m used to it, just control your eyes better than your girlfriend.”

“Envy? That’s not—”

A jolt of urgency in her tone wiped the confusing comment off the map. “Hold that. I think I found Sugawara.”

By “found Sugawara,” what Yuuka really meant was that she had found a place where he would be in the future, a single point ahead of us in the timeline where he might appear again. Technically, it was discovery by proxy; the thing she actually foresaw while staring east was a conversation between two people she could only identify as PCTF-related, who would actually be the ones to find Sugawara with their own detection methods and would mention the approximate location to one another while planning to collect him.

That was good information. It did admittedly make my head hurt a little: as I understood the time travel-y implications of Yuuka’s power, it seemed likely to me that us knowing this information would somehow lead to those PCTF people having that conversation in a few weeks, and therefore things would never have come to pass at all if Yuuka hadn’t foreseen them coming to pass. It felt like cheating. Magic was confusing. Yuuka tried to explain that the flow of events wasn’t so set in stone, and that what she’d foreseen was only one version of events that may or may not actually come to pass, so we weren’t entering into some kind of guaranteed time loop. The one thing that was confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt was that Sugawara’s soul had not dissipated into incoherent ripple as we’d been holding out hope for; we’d have to put him down ourselves when the time came. But that was what Yuuka and I wanted anyway.

Getting to the area in question meant taking Yuuka’s jetbike, as it was on the outskirts of metro Tokyo, where the skyscrapers and apartment blocks gave way to rolling hills of densely packed single-family homes. My last experience flying over Tokyo had been one of screaming in Hina’s arms and then almost vomiting when we landed, and I had little desire to repeat the experience, but that was where the bike showed its value; it turned out to be an improvement in every conceivable way. Even though the seats were open to the elements—Yuuka deployed a second one behind the first, backrest and all, saving me from having to hold on to her waist and invite further admonishment vis-a-vis her proportions—the ride was silky-smooth and near-silent, much more like one of the armored limousines we’d taken to Hikanome’s ill-fated barbecue than a flying motorcycle. It was quiet enough that I could ask questions. Magic ones, of course.

“Is this what it’s like flying with a mantle? Like, quiet and smooth?”

“Sort of. You’re building one, right? They haven’t put you in the test rig yet?”

“Test rig?”

“Y’know, right, the thing with the sensors and the brain-plugs. The analog version of the pod where your body goes.”

“The pod…?”

“Oh, c’mon. The space-folder contraption your body goes to when your consciousness is plugged into the mantle?”

I made a quiet, embarrassed sound that can only be described as “???.”

Yuuka twisted in her seat to look at me like I was stupid. It was a powerful expression on her, one that demanded I immediately do whatever it took to make the pretty girl less mad at me. Her voice was caustic and mocking, like when she’d cornered me in the penthouse’s gym. “You made upgrades to all of our mantles, and you don’t know how they work? Dumbass. Boke. You coulda folded us up into little chunks of meat!”

“Look at the road—the sky,” I whimpered, acrophobic panic overriding my embarrassed confusion until Yuuka shrugged and complied. Then I found the wherewithal for some indignation. “I mean—I know how they work: it’s an LM construct shaped like your body with a bunch of combat and sensory tech, and it feeds all that info back to you. And your real body just gets, um, folded up and away into fourspace?” I winced, realizing how unsure I was about that part, and rushed to defend myself. “Listen, all the modifications I’ve made have been to do with the LM and combat capability side. That’s what Alice wants me around for. I haven’t looked at the neural and psychomotive stuff; that’s not my wheelhouse.” To regain a little control of the conversation, I added, “And you’d have known if my changes were dangerous, right? Precog.” 

“Magic genius,” she taunted back. It didn’t sound nearly as hostile, though. Maybe I was speaking her language.

Even without me acting as a future-lamp from the backseat, Yuuka managed to zero in on the exact building where she foretold Sugawara’s reappearance by spotting none other than Izumi down below. Apparently, she was easy to spot with Yuuka’s eye now that her nature was understood; near-identical ripple changing the future in two places at once was a dead giveaway, enough so that Yuuka seemed kind of annoyed at her past self for not putting the pieces together before.

Izumi herself had been perched on a house’s rooftop, her flesh body standing down on the street corner below. She hopped down in one graceful leap while Yuuka put down the jetbike right in the narrow street; I was a little worried about obstructing traffic but was waved off with a cryptic “nobody comes by here.” Izumi greeted Yuuka in Japanese and nodded to me, laughing while Bloodstone grumbled, but grew somber as she led us down residential streets to where she’d correctly guessed Sugawara might go—where Yuuka’s eye claimed he was supposedly destined to appear.

It was a shrine, not much more than a small building nestled behind a foliage-lined pathway. It loomed derelict and untended despite sitting in the middle of a residential neighborhood, half-overgrown into a miniature jungle of vines and ferns. Within, the shrine looked as though it had survived a fire, timbers charred black but still standing. Between that and the foreboding shadow cast by the canopy, it was dark and unwelcoming, a memory of violence smuggled into the otherwise-placid landscape of dense suburbs.

I had a guess about the significance of this place, one I didn’t like. “Is this where…?”

“Where Hikanome began,” Izumi confirmed.

Neither of the flamebearer women dignified the ruin with any more discussion except to plan and lay traps. Yuuka wove quickly and with controlled anger, building something that looked like a net, harkening back to the thing she’d warned Hina to avoid at Sugawara’s hospital-compound, something to detect and trap the rogue spirit of a dead man. Blood-red shimmering fibers of thread spun together and shot into the darkness, anchoring themselves against every surface of the shrine and its patch of overgrowth.

Izumi took a different approach, walking over to the concrete wall that separated the burnt shrine from the neighboring house and slamming her lattice-manifest palm against it. When she removed her hand, the palm-print was scorched into the wall.

“That’s not glyphcraft,” I guessed.

“It is.” Izumi grinned, pointing at the scorch-mark. “That’s an {INDICATE} lattice. I can feel what happens here now. I’m a mantle, you should remember. I wove these when I made this body, but now I can just think and use them. Easy.”

That trivial ease had such appeal. That was how magic should be, easy and intuitive, designed in advance but deployed with just a thought, rather than an adrenaline-tangled mess of gestures and roasted fingers. I was not a Vaetna, not blessed with such deep intuition and talent that weaving was only necessary for the most bleeding-edge magic; for somebody mortal like me who found weaving under pressure deeply impractical, the pre-loaded tricks of a mantle struck me as a much more sensible marriage between clever design and elegant execution.

“I want to do that,” I thought, then realized I had said it out loud. Both of the girls looked at me, Izumi smiling and Yuuka letting out an amused hmpf.

“You can,” Izumi agreed. “Now, I think. Or…” she looked at Yuuka, trailing off.

Yuuka nodded. “We’re pretty much done. We can go back and do your mantle stuff, if you want.”

 I blinked in surprise; we’d only been here for maybe ten minutes. “Wait, that’s it?”

“For now, yeah. We’ll shore it up and refine it if I have useful visions. Problem?”

“I…just not much closure, I guess. I wanted to hunt.” I glanced down at my chest. “My flame’s not much satisfied either, I think.”

Izumi the assassin smiled dangerously, like I’d seen Hina do on occasion but with altogether more malice. It wasn’t directed at me; she turned it toward the handprint she’d left. “We are already hunting. If your Flame isn’t satisfied with that, then maybe it reflects your heart, and actually wants something else. I know how that feels.”

“You do?” This was a little cryptic for me.

“She’s saying getting inside your mantle will probably make you feel better,” Yuuka translated. “Not a fan of how much like the bitch you two are sounding. Let’s go home so I can watch you fumble around in the doll.”

“The doll” was a simple, mannequin-like mechatronic body that acted as the physical counterpart to “the pod” Yuuka had described. It was immediately apparent that it descended from the same lineage of design as Ebi’s body: familiar teal paneling covered its frame, and its back had the same visible spine. It diverged from Ebi by trading much of her four-dimensional complexity for configurability; its limbs could be adjusted in length, since the proportions of the body’s various joints needed to match mine closely if I were to have even the faintest hope of doing anything more than flailing around like a newborn in the synthetic body.

Of course, Izumi and Amane had significant size mismatches between their bodies and their mantles, so there was wiggle room in what I could do for the final product, but they had both taken years to acclimate and accustom to switching. For this very first test run, I would remain exactly at my usual 180-cm-when-not-slouching. That filled me with some small amount of ennui I had yet to properly interrogate.

Aside from that, though, this design suited me fine. Better than fine, even—the doll’s figure was smooth, slender, and faceless, all properties I’d kept returning to in my idle fantasies about my ideal form. I had even gained the self-awareness to admit that I found the androgyny appealing. Plus, it even had its right toes, which Hina was confident—and Amane and Ai more cautiously so—wouldn’t cause any problems for me, because for the most part I’d never quite become used to my 1.5-footed status thanks to the stabilizer module.

By contrast, the pod was something out of an old horror movie’s prop room, somewhere between the exposed-wiring aesthetic of the coffin and an electric chair. A plush seat contrasted nightmarishly with the spiked metal halo mounted above, which was supposed to go over my head to transmit my thoughts and senses into the doll. The transfer logic for that was the one part of this whole thing that I had to actually weave with magic: a red-and-pink data bridge made out of my own Flame. Given that this would be directly interfacing with my mind, I was extremely nervous about the possibility of making a mistake, messing up the tension or crossover in one glyph that would instantaneously render me brain-dead—or worse—when the device was switched on.

Fortunately, I had no shortage of assistance. All five Radiances understood both the delicacy and significance of this and had pulled themselves away from their various work to pack into a lower-level room in the penthouse that apparently existed solely for the purpose of this kind of mantle R&D, around the corner from the gym and firmly out of sight from the common area. There was a certain spirituality in the air, like I was engaging in a coming-of-age ritual. That still wouldn’t make me a magical girl, though.

“I mean, yeah, it was dicey at first. We didn’t have any of this stuff! It’s a miracle Alice didn’t fry her brain,” Hina chirped from my lap. She had her delicate, clawed hand clamped around mine, guiding me through the exact motions of weaving a {REFRACT} glyph without error, showing me how to twist the thread and pull my thumb under for one of the more challenging axis crossovers. Her presence and closeness helped soothe my nerves even more than the hands-on assistance.

“Not very reassuring, Hina,” Alice sighed. She’d also found a lap to sit on, cradled atop one of Amethyst’s massive legs, a surface that didn’t seem terribly comfortable to me but did let her tail drape over and down in a way that relieved some of the perpetual pressure on her lower back.

“But it’s true! We coulda ‘sploded your whole mind. Which makes it even crazier that smoky over there figured all this out by herself!”

She pointed at Izumi, who was standing a little removed from the cluster of magical girls, uncharacteristically shy. Her flesh body was nowhere to be seen; I got the sense that she felt it didn’t deserve to be here for this. Todai’s erstwhile enemy bashfully muttered something in Japanese that drew a scoff from Ai. I couldn’t help but grin; it was kind of satisfying to see that she was as bad at fielding compliments as I had been earlier today.

Hina growled against my neck. “Hey, focus. I’m serious, cutie, this could really fuck you up, and not in a hot way.”

“Sorry, sorry,” I replied, returning to my attempts to visualize the next maneuvers of thread. We’d been at this for half an hour already; it was the exact kind of unglamorous, tedious work that made even the fizzing, eye-searingly glowing thread between my fingers feel distinctly and disappointingly unmagical. “Trying to keep my eyes on the prize, right.”

“It’s a good prize,” she whispered into my ear. “You’ll love it. If you don’t fuck it up.”

“Yeah. I hope so,” I chuckled just as quietly, trying to give this conversation what little privacy I could. “It’s not really, uh, ‘Ezsuka’ or whatever you were calling it, is it?”

She rubbed my head. I’m not sure how; both of her hands were accounted for. “Look at you, admitting you want that!”

“Well, I just meant…I don’t know what I meant,” I admitted. “Maybe. It’s not LM, though, just kind of…robot body. Which is cool, don’t get me wrong, but not, er…”

“Magical transcendence?” Alice put in. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Not all it’s cracked up to be,” she groused, rubbing her forehead.

Yuuka laughed at that. “Aww, danchou, are you pissy about your horns? Now you’re the one not sounding encouraging. I thought you’d be excited to get the number of boys in this place back down to zero.” She slammed her mouth shut as all sets of eyes turned on her at once. Yuuka’s head swiveled around the room, fully deer-in-the-headlights before settling on a target. “You were all thinking it too! You especially, kemono, I know you’re just waiting to jump on whatever new version of Ezza comes out of this.”

“I don’t have a problem with cutie being a boy.” Hina replied flatly, leaning forward off of me. Then she flashed a fanged grin at her shorter teammate. “That’s a you problem, babe. I’m flamebearersexual and cutie-oriented, doesn’t matter to me how any of you identify as long as it makes you happy, don’t pretend you don’t know that. But if you’re waiting for a piece of Ezzen until after…”

Amane added something else in twinkling Japanese that made Yuuka stiffen and drew chuckles from all the other girls.

“This is beneath me,” Yuuka huffed, and stomped toward the door, stopping to twist around for one final verbal jab. “I’m no monsterfucker, and I’m not interested in one, either.” She fled the room, steps retreating down the hallway.

“Anymore,” Alice teased after her.

Izumi raised a hand to cover her mouth daintily, faux-scandalized. “So the rumors are true, the fox and the chuuni…?”

I had been a little lost and had elected to back out of whatever web of drama was going on here to focus on my weaving; Hina’s hand had remained steady the entire time she was trading quips, and I didn’t much care if Yuuka was present or absent as long as her eye wasn’t screaming alarm bells that I was about to turn my brain into spaghetti. But I did look up after skimming my limited japanese vocabulary for that last word. The atmosphere in the room had shifted: Alice had a certain done-with-this-shit expression on her face, and Ai looked peeved. Amethyst’s spike-face was unreadable as ever, but she was shaking her head slightly. I glanced at Hina’s sapphires out of the corner of my eye.

“Wait, what? You and Yuuka? Even though she, uh, hates you?”

“Old stuff,” Hina sighed against me, sounding not at all happy. “Not anymore. Hate, love, one big jumble with her. Don’t wanna talk about it. Focus on the thread, cutie.”

I filed this moment away for later analysis and got back to work.

It took twenty more minutes for me to finish the lattice and thirty after that for all of the remaining Radiances to be satisfied that I’d dotted my “i”s and crossed my “t”s. This was one of those cases where the thread remained visible even once the weaving was done; strands of my Flame extended between the pod’s headpiece and the head of the doll like the puppet-strings they were, magic bridging physical mechanisms so my soul—insofar as such a thing existed—could ride those gossamer highways to animate the shelled form of the doll. With the drudgery of weaving out of the way, my excitement was building once more; that was real magic.

The thumping of my heart overrode my trepidations about the pod’s mild torture-device aesthetic. Hina and Ai helped too, encouraging and explaining as they got me situated, seemingly on the same page and working in sync. For once, their goals aligned, and it made me happy to see them both so energized, especially after that awkward moment when Yuuka had left the room.

“It’ll feel suuuuper weird,” Hina warned. “Like you’re falling. Uh, y’know, like going outta realspace and into the w-axis soup.”

“Like at the barbecue,” I reasoned. “Can’t say I loved that.”

“Sorry for that,” Izumi sighed, bowing slightly in belated contrition. I waved it off hurriedly; I hadn’t actually meant to make her feel bad about it.

“That’s not what will actually happen,” Alice clarified from the sidelines. “But it will feel that way.”

They had sat the doll-body down in the same pose as I was sitting in the pod, facing away from me, since apparently, it was a bad idea for me to see my body from the outside immediately. Ai fiddled with a small handheld LCD readout, connected by a long wire to the back of its head. Hina had quipped that that was called “the leash,” but that was even more unofficial than the names for the other elements of the setup. Ai smiled at me reassuringly. “It’ll only be for a moment, then you should just feel normal. Once the transfer happens, the important thing is to not think about what you can’t do. Act like normal.”

Hina poked my chest seriously. “No blinking, no breathing, no mouth to move if you have to talk, but don’t try to adapt to that. Just act like everything still works as normal and your brain—and the weave—should fill in the rest. We’ll slam the eject button if you start to freak out, okay?”

“Okay,” I nodded. “No face, but act like I still have a face.”

“No face good,” she agreed, dazzling me with a toothy grin and those beautiful eyes. “If everything seems like it’s going good, we can bring in a mirror, that helped for Amanyan. Uh, other risks…we think your hair won’t interfere with this stuff, but we won’t know until it’s turned on. Kind of a first.”

“It won’t turn your brain into scrambled eggs, at least; we know that for sure. If it breaks anything, it’ll be before the transfer even starts, during the handshake process,” Alice reassured.

“Yep!”

“What about Sugawara?” I asked. “He was looking for a host, right? When I’m not, uh, in my body, could he show up and grab it?”

Hina blinked, having apparently not considered this. “I mean, we’d gut him for trying, but…” She twisted to glance at Izumi, who shook her head.

“No. Whatever your Light is, he fears it too much to try that, I think. And…I think he would not want your body anyway. It may be male flesh, but you aren’t a man. Not a woman either,” she was hasty to correct herself, eager to show that she understood, “but I think there is too much…hate in him. He only tried to take my other body as a true last resort, and only because he was already connected.”

“Enbies stay winning,” Hina hummed.

With all possible failure modes addressed and my worries assuaged, the halo was lowered over my head in short order. Once out of sight, it just felt like a weird hat, which was a little undignified for the occasion. Hina squeezed my hand one last time before drawing away to stand with the others.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Ai hit the button, a hum filled the air, and I fell. The stomach-dropping sense of being pulled downward, pulled away, was unmistakable, a tug at the bottom of my chest that made my organs slosh around and my sinew creak with strain. It was no fiery blossom of pain like so many of my other experiences with my Flame, just inexorable motion.

Then the world shut off. It’s wrong to say that the world went dark, or that my ears went quiet, or that the sensation of the halo and chair vanished from beneath my body—the senses were just gone, and the very intuitions that rode upon them vanished along with. It was not darkness, it was emptiness. It was not silence. What even was silence? I reached for the concept and found nothing. There was nothing.

There was only me. And what was I, really, when I was denuded from the meat, from any shape at all? Surely, this was what a soul was, if I could continue to exist like this, boiled down into something abstract rather than the firing of electrical neurons inside a wet lump. Was this liminal nature endowed by my Flame? Was this what the Flame was like before it reached its host? Was I my Flame, and the gap between it and I only imagined through the presence of flesh to call “me?” Was I something at all, or simply another part of the nothing, a fraction of zero?

It wasn’t so bad, in a static and infinite sort of way. Whatever I was, it was simply me and the nothing, and that was…well, it simply was. I simply was, or was not, and the difference didn’t matter much to me. I’d spent so much of my life barely existing that this could even be an improvement. No frustrating, confusing desires of the flesh, no loneliness, no smoldering dreams or imagined legacy or uncertain future. There was nothing to miss out on, nothing to do, nothing to be. Perhaps there had never been anything other than this, just momentary dreams fluttering to life in the nothing and vanishing just as quickly. That made me sad in a way that I was no longer equipped to understand. Perhaps I would stay a while. Why had I cared?

Then everything reminded me it existed. I crashed hard back into reality. Nothing became light as I reached the end of the tunnel. Nothing became sound and touch and shape and an entire world, worlds upon worlds, a reality infinitely broader and deeper than we had ever understood. Fire and blood, the transcendent forms of the Vaetna, Hina’s eyes, a chair under my butt and a wall in front of me and hard teal carapace and motor-actuated ball joints sheltering my fragile soul and its passenger and bright lights—

I remembered what it was to stand and did so as quickly as I could, tearing myself out of the chair, stumbling forward. I had never been so happy to feel the steady weight of gravity pressing the world up against my soles.

“I’m alive,” I said with a mouth I didn’t have. “I’m here. It’s all here.” I looked down at my hands, then up at the wall, then remembered everybody else was here. I turned around, and there they were. “It’s me.”

“It’s you!” Hina giggled, purest cerulean acknowledging that I was, then she launched herself at me. There was a chorus of yelling, people telling her to get off me, but I didn’t care. I was here and she was here and until this moment I felt like I had been dead. I lifted her up, feeling her flesh deform under the surfaces of my body. She laughed and kissed my not-face. “How do you feel?”

Like a rainbow shearing through the clouds. The dull haze that had clung to every thought, every feeling, had been scrubbed away, unable to thread the needle and pass into the new body. Even without rushing blood or a beating heart or skin, I felt life pulsing through me. Perhaps it was actually because I lacked those things, but I felt there was more nuance there. It wasn’t so much that this new body was perfect as that I felt freed from the cage of the old one. I ought to be outside, feeling the sun on my shell.

“I’m alive,” I repeated. “I can—I’m whole. I’ve never felt alive before. I want to—I don’t know what I want, but I want. Holy shit, how was I supposed to…to accept not being?” Through the edges of Hina’s mane of brown hair, I saw Alice’s eyes glimmer with tears. Lacking a face or eyes, I pointed in her direction to acknowledge her. “Alice. Is this what it’s like? Is this what it’s supposed to be?”

“Yeah,” she sniffled. “Yeah, it is.” I heard Izumi agree in chorus. “Are you—Ezzen, you have to understand that you can’t stay in this body. I know you want to, I know what this is like, but you can’t—”

“I know, I know,” I insisted, trying to figure out how to transmit the enormity of what I was experiencing. “It’s not—it’s not only gender euphoria or whatever. This is good, it’s so good, it’s great, it’s more correct than I’ve felt ever, but it’s not just that it feels better, it’s not just this body. It’s having a body, it’s being instead of not being. I want to keep being. I’d never felt that before, I don’t think. I feel high, but it’s not just from the body, I think, I don’t know.”

“It’s good,” Amane warbled.

“It is! I need that mirror.”

Hina brought it out with a flourish, and I stared at myself. This face was less sophisticated than Ebi’s—in fact, it had nothing at all; it was just a smooth plate. It felt like me. I stared at it for several long seconds, taking in the shapes, then angling the mirror to look down my body. “I look good. Cyan’s not for me, but this…yeah.”

I was startled by Ai suddenly entering the frame and hugging me as well. “I’m happy,” was all the explanation she gave. I hugged her back. Ai was arguably the most removed from this experience of all the women in the room, but that made it sweeter.

“Dollthing,” Hina quipped.

I glanced at her and shrugged. “I…yeah. Maybe.” Then I had a thought, something that had whispered at me for years but I’d never been able to crystallize into the volition to ask. But right now I felt like I could do anything. “Um. I’m not a boy. We’ve established that, I think, yeah? But, um, can you try calling me something that isn’t ‘he’? Like ‘they’ or, um, even ‘it’.”

“Trying ‘it’ on for size, hey, cutie?”

I stared at Hina for a moment before I parsed the pun, then laughed hard and loud, without lungs or shame. Everything felt real and not real at the same time.

“They’re happy,” Alice ventured to humor me.

“I am! We need to fuckin’ do something,” I declared. “Soon. Now. Put me back in my old body and let’s go out and…I have no idea. Party? But just…I need to do something before this feeling wears off. I need to feel alive. Or, Hina, we could, y’know…” I filled in the end of the sentence by miming my finger going through a hole. I giggled stupidly at the naughty thing I’d just done.

“Whoa,” she purred. “Okay, you’re definitely high.”

Alice’s expression soured a little. “Being uninhibited is normal for the first time you really feel gender euphoria, Ezzen, but slow down. Let’s get you back in your normal body before we keep talking.”

“Awwww, but—”

The return trip back to my body skipped the sojourn in solipsistic hell. Everything shut off and turned back on, and I was back in the meat, sitting in the pod, and very tired. Returning to my squishy meat-body did bring a certain numbness, but it only blunted the razor edge of my euphoria. Perhaps it would have been far more agonizing if I was still covered in thousands of tiny, horrible hairs, so I was thankful beyond words at my prior stupid, blood-soaked decision to do away with that. Going from smooth carbon-fiber shell to smooth skin wasn’t nearly as bad of an experience as I’d been braced for.

The rest of that evening was characterized by craving. Even as we debriefed, I was practically launching myself into the penthouse’s kitchen. I wanted to make and enjoy food; I was shocked that my time in a synthetic body had imbued me with a refreshed desire for the gurgling processes of biology rather than disgust. I savored the knife’s handle in my grip as I blazed through vegetables; I briefly wondered what it would be like to bring the blade down on my fingers, just out of curiosity. I didn’t, but I was riding the edge.

Hina clung to me practically the whole time as we threw together a huge dinner, and several times, my hands wandered where they probably shouldn’t have. Sanitation-mindedness was the only thing that stopped me from sliding my hands between her legs; I wasn’t going to be that gross when there were mouths to feed. She was receptive, which made it harder to resist. She whispered some absolutely sordid things into my ear, including at one point the words “fuck me open.”

But I think she wasn’t really expecting me to follow through on it; by the time we were done with dinner, my manic energy had begun to crash, and no celebratory sex was had. She simply brought me to my room, deposited me in my chair in front of the computer, and hopped onto my lap.

“I’m so proud of you.” She kissed my neck.

“Thanks. So am I.” I was too glowing to be self-effacing. “But I also…what if I wake up tomorrow and I don’t feel like this anymore? I want to feel like this all the time. I don’t want to go back to…the haze. The emptiness.”

“The other body’s right there, whenever you want it. Now that we know it’s safe, you can indulge.” She drawled the word, clearly relishing the thought almost as much as I did. “But I think you get it now. You’ve seen what you can be. What it’s like to be, at all.” She twisted and pointed at the PC. “Now. We’re gonna work on your actual mantle until you pass out. We’ll make you perfect. And then tomorrow I’ll show you how to live. And the day after that, and after that, and after that. As much time as you need. I want to be there for it.”

And that’s what we did. We designed a future for me until I fell asleep.

Then, once I was freed from my body once more, I dreamt of the Vaetna.

Author’s Note:

And that’s a wrap on Sunspot Arc 3! Well, except for the big end-of-arc author’s note, which will arrive tomorrow, so I’ll keep it brief here: my sincerest gratitude to the beta readers, who kicked my ass repeatedly over the course of this arc to keep me at least a little on-pace. Couldn’t do this without them! Beta reader applications will open during the hiatus — the link will be in the Discord, which you can join below:

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

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September 1, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

“Thank you for saving my life.”

Takagiri’s expression of gratitude was difficult to face directly. She bowed to a perfect ninety-degree angle, arms against her sides, black ponytail hanging over her shoulder, delivering the words with crisp clarity as though she’d been rehearsing them for days, which perhaps she had while in her extended sleep and recovery from driving out Sugawara’s ghoul. She looked down at the cold concrete floor, yet even without eye contact, I struggled not to cringe and shift awkwardly. Expectant silence stretched across the room, paralyzing me until Ai kicked my calf gently from my right.

“You’re welcome,” I managed. “It was the, uh, the right thing to do, yeah. But anybody who was there would’ve…”

Takagiri rose from the bow, mild brown eyes meeting mine. Her mantle’s face was soft and smooth, a far cry from the masculine edges and aging wrinkles of her flesh body. “It’s not something you should take lightly. You stopped him. You stopped him, even if somebody else could have. I don’t think they could. Not with this,” she gestured at the coffin, now powered down, “or with a Light that wasn’t yours. You reminded him that he should be afraid,” she spat, a bitter and wrathful expression twisting her features for a moment, a face I recognized from when we’d traded blows at Hikanome’s doomed barbecue. She took a deep breath, letting the emotion out, then broke into a thin, relieved smile. “So I must thank you. I must. I’m free because of you, and I don’t know how to repay such a debt.”

I swallowed, loathing how I had begun to sweat. “Okay. Uh. You’re welcome,” I said again, glancing at Ai. “Uh, if we’re talking quid pro quo, I’m not really the person to ask, probably? Alice is in charge. But, like, you don’t owe me specifically much of anything, I figure? Cause like I said, it was the right thing to do. And most of the credit for the coffin goes to Ai and Amane, not me.”

Takagiri chuckled, her smile becoming lighter and more amused. She turned to Ai and bowed to her as well, delivering another formal message of thanks, this time in Japanese. Ai bowed in return, which made me wonder if I should have done the same. They exchanged a few words and relieved smiles before Takagiri turned back to me. “And yes, I owe the rest of you my thanks and support as well. But you performed a miracle of magic to save me, something deeper than your expertise. Please allow yourself to believe that.”

I opened my mouth to deflect, to deny, to declare that I’d done no such thing—then realized I couldn’t. My Flame’s violent judgment, its unilateral assertion that the essence of Sugawara’s soul was repugnant, had been as potent as it was mysterious. At first, the temptation was to say that it wasn’t me, merely my singularly weird chunk of the Frozen Flame, but at some level, I knew that wasn’t completely true. I had thought the same and been the first to intervene, after all. My Flame had followed through on my actions to save Takagiri.

I felt the ghost of my own smile tug at my lips. I tried to force it back down, to remain somber and respectful in the face of Takagiri’s earnest thanks. “I’m glad you think so.”

Takagiri spread her hands, shedding more formality and growing more animated. “You did something befitting a Vaetna! You aspire to be like them, from what I understand, but what you did for me wasn’t in their shadow, it was of their level. It was real magic!”

At that comparison, my smile wriggled its way onto my face as I blubbered an obligatory denial I didn’t really mean. Takagiri matched it with an even wider and far more shameless grin. “See? It’s good, isn’t it? You drove away a monster.” She looked down at her hands, turning them over as though inspecting them. “Right now, it doesn’t feel real. I have never been able to be in this body without feeling him there, hand on my neck. But it’s mine now. I’m alive and free from the most horrible monster Japan has known since the Light first fell. That’s thanks to you, Ezzen, and is worthy of the comparison to the Vaetna. Or a mahou shoujo, if you prefer.”

Giddiness hit me like a truck. I realized I’d spent the last few days compartmentalizing exactly the implications of what I’d done, initially too exhausted and then too distracted by my escapades with Ai to fully process it. I’d saved Takagiri’s life, but I’d also set her free and denied a horrible soul-rapist ghoul access to the land of the living. It was as morally clear-cut as it got, with none of the horrible aching guilt that had followed our actions at Thunder Horse. I’d acted in the Vaetna’s image, saved somebody in a way I could have only fantasized about less than a month ago.

“Uh—wow, thanks, um—sorry, I’m just—haha,” I blushed, making an immense fool of myself. “It’s…thanks. Vaetna-like, yeah, thanks for saying that. But I’m not a member of the team—Todai, I mean. I’m kind of…provisionally hanging out indefinitely. I don’t know what the long term plan is, but I’m not a Radiance.”

I had to clear this up with her. Takagiri was as close as it got to a non-Radiance Radiance, having clearly been inspired by them in the construction of her body, so she might have formed some misconceptions about my status as a team member and my own personal aspirations toward magical girlhood. Maybe she’d been too sleep deprived to remember our brief talk about my gender identity, where I’d asserted that my tentative nonbinary status wasn’t just a stopover on the way to full femininity.

Even though I was getting dangerously close to making a mantle. But mine wouldn’t have any of the magical girl bells and whistles, so it really didn’t count. It was just operating on the same technical base, a different make and model using the same chassis.

Takagiri nodded quickly. “I understand. And—ah, I don’t mean to make it about you. I just…I’ve been thinking, while I was asleep. Dreaming of what comes next. And I still need your help.”

Her brow furrowed. She wobbled in place for a moment, and I reflexively stepped forward, worried she’d fall. But she raised a hand to stop me before a zip hissed through the air and her male body, the Kimura body, stood next to her. One mind, two bodies, a trick the Radiances hadn’t cracked—or at least had never had a real reason to explore. She sighed. “I want to be done with this life. Free from this body, free from leading Hikanome. I just want to be a normal girl.”

I stared. “You want to get rid of your Flame?”

She hesitated, her two bodies looking at each other. “I don’t know. I do want this body, my female one, to be my real body, as LM or as flesh, and to get rid of the male one. And after that…maybe I won’t need my Light anymore. I must be held accountable, and it would be a fitting punishment.”

I didn’t need to ask why. Over the years, under Sugawara’s orders, she’d hurt a lot of people. Exactly how many and how badly, I didn’t know, but she hadn’t been pulling her punches against me and Yuuka. The Radiances had called her an assassin, too, which was damning. And that was to say nothing of her involvement in the human trafficking that had taken Amane and probably others. That part was all quite hush-hush among the Radiances, so I was still light on details, but Kimura’s role as a key organizational and logistical head in Hikanome during that era implied at least awareness and facilitation.

My gut said Takagiri was not a monster, nothing near the scale of Sugawara’s rapacious, egoist malice. And maybe she had already personally suffered enough to atone; I didn’t know how to begin thinking about that. I glanced at Ai uncertainly, hoping she’d take the lead as the conversation turned toward more official Flamebearer-y stuff.

She took my cue, looking up and down both of Takagiri’s bodies. “I’m not comfortable being the judge of what you deserve,” she said, carefully enunciating the word. “Not on my own. I believe that that is a discussion we should probably all have together, all of Japan’s flamebearers, Todai and Hikanome and the others.”

“The others?” I asked. Per my initial Wikipedia trawl when I’d first arrived, Japan did have other flamebearers, but I’d completely skimmed over their sections, having been motivated to orient myself within Lighthouse first and foremost by my initial encounter with Hina. But it had been weeks since then, and I felt stupid for abdicating my responsibility to research my situation more deeply in that time.

Evidently, Ai also seemed annoyed at herself for the oversight. “Oh. We never mentioned it, did we? Sorry: Japan has two flamebearers who are affiliated with neither of our groups. One in the north, in Hokkaido, and one in Shikoku. They’re…” she looked to Takagiri for assistance.

“Strange,” the possibly-ex-Hikanome-leader filled in. “But you’re right; my fate should be held to my peers, including them.”

“Yeah, we’re obviously not turning you over to the cops,” I said. Ai blinked at me, genuinely surprised. I returned the look. “What? Aren’t we agreeing? Isn’t Todai already basically telling the government to fuck off about what we did the other night?”

“Yes…I don’t know why I’m surprised. Vaetna philosophy.”

“Pretty much.” I shrugged, feeling oddly put-upon. “Flamebearers gotta hold each other accountable, right? I don’t know about Japan specifically, but your average government will always opt to just siphon a flamebearer’s power for military shit if you submit to the courts, yeah? We saw tons of that in the first couple years before the Peacies cut out the middleman and went straight to abductions. So if they arrest you or whatever, then that’s not a fair trial no matter what you’ve done, cause the incentives are all fucked up.”

Ai’s surprise morphed into an approving nod that set my heart aflutter with pride. “That’s exactly how it is. Takagiri-san—Izumi?”

“Izumi,” she confirmed. “Yoroshiku.”

Ai looked between her counterpart’s two bodies, adjusting to the given name—or rather self-given, as the case was. I wondered what was so special about “Izumi Takagiri” in meaning for her to have chosen it. The request to use her first name was an indication of trust, as I understood it, one which Ai seemed to accept without objection. “Yoroshiku wa ne, Izumi-san. Yes, we were going to arrange a meeting anyway. The PCTF are coming soon, for Ezzen, and we were already going to seek Hikanome’s support to drive them away.”

“For Ezzen.” Izumi repeated, seeming unsurprised. “This makes it even more important that we kill Sugawara. If they can find him, they will bottle him and use him against us.”

She delivered the statement flatly, all business, and Ai shifted uncomfortably. So did I; neither of us had invested our technical abilities in the hunt for Sugawara’s ghost. Hina had been doing laps of the city with Yuuka in tow, trusting their innate abilities to pick up his scent, but that hadn’t turned up a trail; he’d vanished into the wind that night. We should have been helping. Until now, I hadn’t realized we were on a timer to find him.

“Shit. We’ll keep looking,” I hedged, glancing at Ai. “How long until we get my mantle running, you think?”

Ai’s voice was tinged with worried disagreement. “Ezzen, no. I know you want to be the hero, be the Vaetna, but you’ve done enough. Don’t give in to bloodlust. Let us finish him off.”

“Why not?” I asked, annoyed. Takagiri’s praise of my efficacy spurred me on. “I want to do this. Let me hunt an actual monster. With backup and in my mantle, I mean, let’s not be stupid about it, but I want to be there for it.”

Ai grimaced, reaching up to rub her neck, kneading the scar tracing down her chin with the heel of her hand. “I don’t want to argue about this when I’m hungry. Let’s talk about it over lunch. Izumi, would you like to join us?”

“No. I’m going to go search for him.”

“Now? Has Ebi-tan cleared you for—”

Before Ai could finish interrogating her, both of Izumi’s bodies dissolved into smoke and streamed out the door, taking a left down the hall toward the garage. We both flinched as the ripple siren blared in a violent shriek—for all of half a second before it clicked off. Ebi’s voice crackled through the intercom.

“Let her go.”

As my blood pressure settled back down, I gestured at the open door. “See? I’m specifically trying to not just run off like that.”

Despite my quip, I had to admit that letting Takagiri run off on her own when Todai was under police scrutiny seemed like a bad idea, and I couldn’t blame Ai for fretting over it as we went back up to the penthouse. The topic of what to do was raised to the other Radiances via group chat, which I was quickly added to despite the fact that most of the messages were in Japanese. Messages flurried up the screen for two hectic minutes before it was settled in person by Yuuka, who leaned over the upper-level staircase banister and delivered a casual prophecy.

“She’s fine, Ai. Not gonna get caught.”

Apparently, this was all the reassurance necessary, because Ai dropped the subject as she made a beeline for the fridge, hunting for an energy drink or one of those weird calorie jelly foil pouches. I wasn’t fast enough to intercept her on my mutilated foot, still a little bit unsteady despite weeks of acclimation and the stabilizer module, so I called her off with an assurance that I’d make some real food, waving her over to the sitting area. As she crashed on one of the sofas, Yuuka came downstairs to join us for lunch.

I was a little surprised to see the Heliotrope Radiance around the house; she was a university student, and it was Friday according to my phone, so I would have expected her to be in class. But I’d never attended university—indeed I was a secondary school dropout—so I had been surprised to find that the Radiances’ shared calendar listed only two full days of classes for her, plus one half-day. That was enviable until I remembered that I didn’t really have a schedule at all and hadn’t for years.

I found her presence cautiously welcome as I threw together a low-effort lunch for the three of us. By my assessment of the historical trend, the risk that she’d start being needlessly cruel toward me had steadily declined ever since the mess last Saturday and seemed lowered further to effectively nil by Ai’s presence; Radiance Bloodstone respected her Emerald teammate quite a lot. I could agree with her on that. And when Yuuka wasn’t being an ass, she was even fairly pleasant to be around. With her help, I assembled some basic toasted sandwiches for the three of us within only a few minutes.

“Good bread,” I noted, inspecting the remainder of the loaf as I bagged it back up. It was perfectly golden, with an open crumb and pleasant yeasty aroma. “Doesn’t really come to mind when you think ‘Japan’, does it? Rice country and all. At best I’d’ve been expecting that fluffy white stuff you see on YouTube, not, er, real bread. Is this an expensive, celebrity-exclusive import? Should I be honored for the privilege?”

Yuuka squinted at me with her real eye. The crimson gemstone in the other socket continued its baleful, lidless stare. “Don’t talk shit about shokupan where Alice can hear you. And nah, Tokyo has plenty of really good bakeries.” Yuuka tapped at the toasted exterior of her sandwich with a long fingernail. “Why’re you good at this?”

“Your stove’s easy to use,” I deflected. I was proud of my handiwork, having nailed the browning on all three of the sandwiches, but I still didn’t know how to accept compliments. “And Hina stocks good cookware. These pans distribute heat pretty well, no hot spots.”

“Hmm,” Yuuka replied slowly, as though searching for an imperfection on the surface of her sandwich that she could twist into a barb to prod my self-confidence with. “Yeah, nah. I mean, that’s all true, but you’re also a good cook.”

“Cause of my dad.” I was getting some deja vu; Alice, Hina and I had had a similar conversation last week when we’d made gnocchi. “Was a chef. Taught me stuff.”

“Accept the compliment, shitass.”

I flinched. “I. Uh. Thanks? It’s just toasting bread. What kind of, uh, power play is this, exactly?”

Yuuka turned her head away from me in a petulant flick of her twintails. “Hmpf. Just testing something.”

Ai called out to us, what sounded like a reprimand, and Yuuka faltered slightly.

“Ugh, fine. I wanted to see how my eye reacts to you. You’re still kind of slippery and it bugs me. It’s all weird. Your Light’s weird and you’re weird.” She did the twintail flick again.

I wasn’t sure if that was actually supposed to be an insult; not only had there been at least two attempts at a genuine compliment in there, I was also still riding high on what Takagiri—Izumi—had said about me, and any comments calling my Flame unusual just wound up stroking my ego. It was weird, yes, but in ways that seemed distinctly positive so far.

A gear clicked in my brain. My Flame was weird in a good way—could I not also be weird in a good way?

That thought came just a little too close to genuine self-reflection, and she’d also just dangled a very interesting magical tidbit, so I filed it away for later. “Uh, about that. Does that mean you can normally foresee…most stuff? Including, like, sentence-by-sentence conversations?”

She looked at me like I was stupid. “Depends. I’m seeing ripple, remember, so it all depends on how much the shit in question matters.”

“…Meaning you expected a conversation about my culinary abilities to matter? Like, capital M, big-picture ‘matter’ ripple-wise in the way an inferno does?”

“That’s why I was checking.”

“Your testing system needs work.”

Ai sighed. “Stop arguing and let’s eat. The sandwiches are getting cold.”

After lunch, the conversation turned to Izumi. When we explained that she wanted the flamebearers of Japan to collectively pass judgment on her, Yuuka scoffed.

“She doesn’t have anything to ‘atone’ for.”

I raised a hand tentatively. “Um, what exactly has she done? Aside from, uh, hitting you at the inferno and trying to…kidnap me, or whatever she was actually doing there. There’s more history than that, right? You all keep using the word ‘assassin’, and if we’re going to be judging her crimes or something…”

Yuuka nodded. “Takagiri was the muscle. Good at it, too.”

“Izumi,” Ai corrected. Yuuka raised her eyebrows but nodded.

“So not murder?” I asked, hopeful.

Ai took a swig of the water I’d given her in lieu of energy drink. “Sometimes murder. When Sugawara actually wanted people dead, sometimes that was her.” she explained. “Because she was the perfect killer. No history, no identity, disappeared—” she snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

“Oh.” My heart sank. “As in taking out his political enemies, you mean. That’s why you call her an assassin.”

“Yes. It wasn’t all…terrible. Sugawara was a large presence when he was the leader, and he made enemies of everybody, not just Hongo and Miyoko or the Japanese government. Yakuza, other organized crime in Asia, they were his enemies too, especially if they had their own flamebearers. Izumi-san killed human leaders in organized crime, made it too dangerous to work in Japan if you didn’t respect Hikanome. Which was good for Japan, overall, I think.”

“Damn right,” Yuuka added.

“But she also hurt police and people in the media who tried to interfere with Hikanome. Politicians, too. She sent the message that you couldn’t oppose them.”

“She killed reporters?” I squawked. Political assassinations I could understand—if not condone—and regular criminals who decided to face down Flame-wielding groups sort of deserved what they got. Power had gotten bloodier in the age of magic. But going after the media felt beyond the pale to me, at least in a civilized country that was still nominally ruled by regular humans and not flamebearer god-kings. Maybe that was what Sugawara would have eventually gone for if he hadn’t been deposed.

Yuuka chuckled. “She tried. We stopped her. She didn’t try again after that.”

“That’s still fucked up.”

“Mm. I mean, we don’t exactly love the paparazzi, but the investigative journalism folks? Those are my people. We didn’t let Sugawara touch them. That’s mahou shoujo.”

“Absolutely,” Ai agreed. “Izumi was…dou ittakke…” She said a word to Yuuka, who nodded sagely.

“Acting under duress,” the goth explained in her still-weird-to-me Australian accent. “Like, knowing what we do now, it’s tough to really be mad about much of what she did. And I think she was already going rogue sometimes, avoiding carrying out hits or really giving it her all where she could, especially near the end. When we really got close to getting Amane back…” I swore I saw some of the crystals in her eye glow for a moment, perhaps looking into the future—or an emotional tell like when the air heated around Alice. Hard to say. “Well, she stepped out of my way when she didn’t have to. Dunno if we’d’a found Amane if she’d fought me there.”

“Oh,” I recalled. “Yeah, that, you said something about that at the barbecue after we took her down. Or Alice did, or somebody,” I hedged.

“Yeah. On the other hand…fuck, it’s still weird for me. That’s all only half of it, because she’s Kimura. And he, well…”

“She?” Ai interrupted. “Sorry. English grammar. Is that how it works if we’re talking about past gender? She wanted to be Izumi already from then?”

Yuuka flinched. “Ah, shit, I think so, that’s how it works with Alice…yeah. Okay, she knew about Amane’s abduction and other trafficking like that. Aided and abetted, even, since she was, y’know, kind of the logistics person for Hikanome.”

My blood ran cold. Something about Yuuka’s nonchalance sat wrong with me; of all of us, she was by far the most devoted to Amane, and I’d come to understand that she had also sacrificed the most in finding and rescuing her, though not the details thereof. This was just as heinous as the murders, but the Radiances somehow didn’t seem overly concerned with either. “That’s fucked up, it is.”

Yuuka snorted. “It is? You’re so British when you’re not being weirdly American. Listen—I don’t know how much she was actually involved in that. It’s possible she didn’t know until after the fact, and…part of me’s still mad at her. But even before all this shit came out, she did turn on him. We’re the ones who put him in that coma, but she’s the one who sent some of his other lieutenants out of Tokyo before the coup. Flame-imbued fuckers, scary stuff. It made a difference. And she helped steer the whole cult out of the schism intact, and they’re pretty cool now. So it’s sort of water under the bridge, we think.”

I wondered: who did “we” entail? Sure, Yuuka might not hold a grudge—remarkable for her disposition—but she said it as though she was speaking for the whole team. And she wasn’t the one who had been most wronged, that was Amane…who, it occurred to me, had come right down to the basement to help me with the coffin, and then stood beside me against Sugawara. With only one functional arm, in the middle of a vicious storm of ripple, she had helped literally drag Izumi’s body to the coffin.

The stiff plates of my mutated forearm were rough under my fingers as I thought this through. “And even though Amane runs on anger, she’s just brushed it off too? Total unconditional forgiveness?”

Yuuka looked at me carefully, then glanced at Ai. “You told him?”

“She told him,” Ai explained. Then she sounded alarmed. “Ezzen. You said you wanted to feed your Flame with…the feeling of justice?”

“Yeah?”

“Whoa,” Yuuka said.

“What?”

“Your hand.”

I looked down at where my hands met on the table. A white glimmer was running up and down the crevasses between my burn scars. Not full ignition of my Flame, but a clear indicator that it was riled up, stimulated by my anger.

“Pretty active,” Yuuka observed. “You’re pissed?”

“I—yeah, a little.” I was surprised by that; intellectually, I agreed with Yuuka’s reasoning, and moreover, it was a little shameful for me to be mad on Amane’s behalf when the woman herself had chosen forgiveness. I searched for an explanation. “Not…not at Amane or you,” I clarified. “But…a little at Taka—Izumi, I guess?” My eyes traced the shine in my right hand. “Even though I think I nominally agree with your reasoning that she was acting under duress. And besides, I wasn’t even there, right…but I’m still sort of mad, like there’s a loose end.”

Ai looked at me sympathetically; Yuuka looked a little exasperated.

“Feedback loop, I’d bet. You prolly get that from Hina, total lack of control she’s got. Take a breath and let me talk you around.”

I took the requested breath. “Feel a little manipulated when I’m being told what to do by a precog,” I admitted, surprised that I was running hot enough to voice that kind of thought.

“Ezzen,” Ai chided.

I winced. “Sorry.”

Yuuka sighed. “I’m about to express some vulnerability, you cunt. Shut up and listen, because you’re not gonna get much more out of me.”

“Oh.” That did indeed shut me up.

Yuuka took a breath. “After…the other night, when I was hanging out with Alice and Amane in their room, our great leader asked if I was gonna have any more issues with Izumi, after I said that shitty thing at dinner. And we talked a little, whether it was all evened out and we wanted to keep protecting her now that she was out from under the evil, rotting thumb of that fucker. And I voted yes, we stay on her side. The slate is clean enough, and she deserves our help. Amane agreed, Alice agreed, she agreed,” she nodded at Ai, “and your bitch turned around on her before we had even cleared the field at the barbie anyway. As far as we’re concerned, by first helping depose Sugawara and then, uh, half-killing him, it’s all good now.”

Ai put her hands on the table, gently touching mine. “Izumi-san has done bad things and good things, but we’re not going to judge it as just a balance; it’s not that simple. I think she’s still basically a good person, or trying to be. What matters is whether she’ll hurt more people from now, and I don’t think she wants to.”

“As far as I can tell, she won’t,” Yuuka added. “And I can tell pretty far, trust me.” She looked down at my hand, voice dropping to a mutter. “Maybe even further.” Her eyes came back up to mine. “That make you feel better? I still can’t fuckin’ tell,” she complained, bopping her temple in mild annoyance.

I tried to reason it out. The vague sense of injustice was much more external than internal, buoyed along by the emotional link with my Flame even past where it should have been sunk by Yuuka’s excellent points. My Flame demanded justice, almost growling for it in my subconscious as a thrum below my throat and down into my arm as an aimless desire. It was primal and emotional, not a specific list of grievances and punishments. If anything, it felt far closer to the animal desire for revenge, albeit on another’s behalf rather than my own. And that was sort of unsettling in a stupid way. I sighed. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, you’re totally right. But I’m still mad, and I think it is from my Flame, you’re right. So, uh, what do I do about that?”

I felt like Hina would tell me to work it off in a cathartic release of undirected violence—probably involving her—but Yuuka simply stood, drawing up to her full 150-something centimeters and peering down at me with that baleful gemstone eye. “Wasting it would be stupid. Point it at a more useful target.”

“I’m already gonna go after Sugawara once I can,” I clarified.

“Yeah, and that means we have to find him.” She beckoned toward the stairs, gemstone eye glinting. “Come on. I’m putting you to work as a searchlight.”

Author’s Note:

This chapter is very, very late for patrons, but it’s out nonetheless! And to a pretty high level of polish, I think. Thank you to the beta readers for that! Next chapter will be the end of the arc.

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August 18, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

None of the prosthesis prototypes were ideal. That wasn’t really the fault of the students who had made them; it was legitimately hard to come up with useful features to cram into the space of the front half of a person’s foot, and they’d put a truly admirable amount of effort into coming up with novel solutions and a wide range of features that I might have liked.

Ai and I took our time working through the remaining feet. I couldn’t think of use cases for the combination taser-lighter when I had access to actual magic, a spear for self-defense, and no interest in smoking, but Team 4’s deliverable redeemed itself by having a USB charger and ripple battery with enough capacity to fully recharge my phone several times over. That was the kind of thing that could legitimately be useful, albeit only in scenarios that took a lot of discussion and hypothesizing to torture into even distant plausibility. Perhaps if I were for some reason camping out in reality’s fourth-dimensional backstage and needed my phone to photograph the novel and mind-bending sights out there? But that was certainly a stretch.

Meanwhile, Team 5 had initially conceived an active camouflage system, then quickly ran into a number of issues that meant the effect in this prototype only reached halfway up my shin. They’d adapted admirably, though, and flickering through the various illusions of different types of boot they’d come up with to cover my foot was mildly entertaining, but there was simply no way this feature could prove useful for my needs. It didn’t even get points back for being especially funny, not compared to the howling laughter of the foot-phone. We had briefly descended into another fit of giggles when I’d posed the image of facing down some Peacie exo-suit and then balancing on one foot to take off my shoe and take a call right in the middle of the standoff.

Team 6 was Kyle’s, making it the other team to include a matching sock for mobility. They’d kept the features remarkably less overboard than the others, opting to focus on extracting as much extra utility from the booster’s kinetics-focused lattice as they could. The fruit of their labor was a remarkably easy-to-use and high-power telekinesis module; I didn’t dare fling too much stuff around the expensive lab, but I could definitely appreciate the multipurpose nature of the device, putting it through its paces with carrying simple objects and jacking furniture off the ground. It certainly wasn’t a match for the extreme precision Amane had demonstrated with her far more advanced bionic limbs, but Ai nonetheless opted to award them high points for mirroring her own design decisions in focusing on a feature that could actually help a person with disabilities do common tasks.

The fun took us from mid-morning past noon, and by the time Ai had finished assigning grades to each team and I’d assembled a tentative list of features I’d most like to see, it was verging on one in the afternoon. I had tentatively pinpointed the booster sock, the translation module, the telekinesis apparatus, and of course, the phone as viable features for further prototyping, in descending order of preference. My reasoning was that those all had practical applications and were difficult to match with snapweaving at my current skill level. Ai wasn’t particularly happy that I was insisting upon the translation module, warning of dependency, but in my opinion, it had already shown its value in that brief discussion with Amane, and having the option was certainly better than not when shit really hit the fan. To appease her, I promised not to rely on it when I didn’t need to.

I wouldn’t even have access to it for the time being; for now, all the prototypes had to go back to the workshop so the students could iterate on the designs. Ai stacked them all in, appropriately, a shoebox, and left briefly to store them somewhere. When she returned, though, she had a frown on her face, which was a little disappointing after how much fun we’d been having since that first burst of relieved, long-overdue laughter.

“What’s up?”

“Alice wants us for a moment before lunch. I can’t quite remember, have you met Otaki-san?” Upon seeing my brow furrow as I tried to consult my fragile database of Japanese names, she waved her hands quickly. “It’s fine if you haven’t. Good, even. He’s in charge of Todai’s legal things,” she explained.

“Ah. He’s probably been pretty busy since I showed up.” I swallowed, suddenly feeling self-conscious as I looked down at myself, adorned in sweatpants and a hoodie. I was in no condition to meet with a big-shot lawyer about anything, especially not being accomplice to murder or any of the smaller crimes I’d probably abetted in the Radiances’ night operation. “Um. Dress code?”

Ai grinned reassuringly, though it was tinged with stress. “Don’t worry. We’ve all had very serious conversations with him dressed worse than that.”

Thus I was taken to a new part of Lighthouse Tower: the 10th floor, home of Todai’s in-house legal counsel. As Ai explained it, the department was broken into two key components that could roughly be summarized as dealing with the “celebrity” and “VNT” sides of Japan’s magical girl squad. The former team did things like licensing and took up two thirds of the floor’s space. The latter helped the Radiances navigate—and exploit—the many, many grey areas of Japanese and international law that had suddenly popped into existence along with the fourth dimension, the Spire, and people who had no true checks on their power except for one another.

Ai brought me directly into Otaki-san’s office without so much as knocking; I immediately noticed how the general noise and bustle of the wider office space outside quieted to nothing. This room was aggressively soundproofed and probably had many other measures for confidentiality besides. Ebi had once told me that the Radiances’ personal documents had some terrifying infomantic seals on them, and it was easy to imagine that their chief lawyer’s office was equipped similarly.

Otaki-san was old enough to have significant gray streaks in his hair, had a heavily lined and textured face, and all in all looked exactly what I would have expected for a Japanese high-power corporate lawyer—deeply intimidating as he pored over the thick binder on his desk. But the frightening impression only lasted as far as his person and his heavy walnut desk, because the rest of the office was cozy and heavily decorated, with pictures of his wife and kids on one bookshelf and a framed baseball jersey—absolutely covered in signatures—hanging on the same wall as his various degrees and certifications.

What really gave him away as somebody the Radiances trusted, though, was a much smaller framed set of newspaper clippings next to the jersey. Most of them were in Japanese, but the one I could read said it all: PCTF Drops Case Against Japan’s ‘Magical Girls’.

Alice was in here too, waiting for us in a big, plush chair with a gap between the seat and back that had clearly been procured specifically to accommodate her tail. She stood when we entered the room and made swift introductions between me and Otaki-san—or “Mr. Otaki,” he claimed to not have a preference—which on my end consisted mostly of nodding and half-bowing a lot, trying not to hunch my shoulders too much as she spoke, and remembering Dad’s advice about a firm handshake when he reached across the table.

The meeting turned out to be little more than an introduction. I was now deep enough in the Radiances’ shit that it seemed prudent for me to at least meet my main legal representative—and because apparently, I had been mentioned by name when the authorities had come knocking just this morning.

“They wanted to know your whereabouts and intimated that you might be staying here under duress,” Alice explained. “They didn’t quite threaten us directly, but I think the Peacies are after a face-to-face meeting with you.”

“Which we’re not doing,” I guessed.

“Not until we’ve solidified where we stand with Hikanome and can trust we have their backing, no,” she agreed. “And just to be safe, in case the monsters make an actual abduction attempt or something, we don’t want you leaving the building without one of us escorting you. I don’t know why you’d do that in the first place, since you’re not exactly the type to go out for solo tourism, but that’s the policy.”

“Sounds good,” I agreed. “Yeah, not too interested in wandering around Tokyo by myself. You really think they’d try to scoop me right off the street in basically your backyard?”

“They shouldn’t,” Otaki-san put in. “Todai will object in the strongest possible terms if something happens to you.” His wide face broke into a grin that reminded me of the one I’d seen on Amane’s face when she’d opened fire on Sugawara’s ghost. “And a large part of our relationship with the PCTF hinges on the fact that if things come to violence, we cannot guarantee we can keep Ms. Suzuki from retaliating.”

“So you’re threatening them with…death by Hina if they do anything, uh, untoward,” I surmised. “Not unlike the barbecue, feels like.”

“More or less,” Alice confirmed. “Hina’s good at playing the heel when she needs to, the bad cop to Amane’s or my good cop. You aside, the government knows they can’t reasonably bring a murder case against us, and we’re in a holding pattern of playing dumb about everything but our rescue of Kiriya-san—she’s doing fine, by the by, stable and they’re going to transfer her to a more local hospital soon. It’s admittedly kind of a delicate dance, since, well, it’s always sort of wild west between us and the government, but I think things are firmly in our control for now. That might change depending on how far they escalate when Yuuka’s prophecy comes true.” She rubbed her forehead, more due to definitely-not-horns than stress, it seemed. “I recognize that’s a lot of information at once, but for the most part it’s not really your problem. For now, just don’t talk to the cops and you’ll be fine, yeah?”

It was a relief to know that we’d apparently gotten away with what we’d done last night, if only because the Japanese government didn’t have the teeth to even level charges against Todai. That was the power of flamebearers; when enough of them—us—managed to band together, the only real leverage a government had over us was in bringing flamebearers of their own and making it a nuclear standoff. That went double for the Radiances, who also wielded significant cultural cachet in their own right. Of course, with the PCTF foretold to be on their way, that escalation would come in time—just not that day.

In fact, the rest of that day was rather relaxed once that meeting concluded. Ai, Alice, and I went back to the penthouse for lunch; my cerulean-eyed girlfriend had prepared a big vat of thick curry in the morning, which Alice flash-reheated with magic and we eagerly helped ourselves to, gorging on cubed carrots and potatoes and chunks of chicken thigh. It was the same curry formulation that I’d now had a few times here, only slightly modified from the package-recommended recipe on the packet of curry roux; variations on this were a staple in the penthouse. It wasn’t necessarily something Dad had ever served while catering, even the cheaper events, but it was definitely in the same vein, something easy to make in huge quantities and reheat in individual servings as people came and went. That made it comforting, though my recently reemerged culinary sensibilities were suggesting a number of further modifications that might make it tastier. Galangal, maybe, to bring it closer to a Thai red curry.

We had a good time filling Alice in on what we’d been up to with the prosthesis prototypes; she didn’t quite see the absurd humor in the foot-phone. You had to be there, I supposed. In turn, she talked about work, giving me a rare window into what she actually did all day outside of the special circumstances brought on by my arrival. In this case, she regaled us with the difficulties of negotiating her own and Yuuka’s appearances as guest hosts on talk shows next month. The network had really wanted a segment focusing on the inconveniences of living with Alice’s thick tail, playing it for slapstick comedy, and then something similar for Yuuka’s breasts. As Alice explained it, she had practically breathed fire at them until they’d walked those suggestions way, way back.

It was sometimes insane what regular humans tried to get flamebearers to do, given the inherent power disparity—of course, such things would be completely unacceptable even if they were human celebrities, but you needed some serious lack of basic self-preservation to pitch it to somebody who could unmake you. This was also a valuable insight into how the Radiances operated as celebrities; my prior understanding of showbiz had been that there were supposed to be agents acting as intermediaries for this sort of thing, and Todai did have those, but Alice was a bit of a control freak about vetting the team’s public appearances. And in the context of that specific anecdote, I couldn’t blame her.

Ai and I shared a few nervous glances across the table as Alice kept periodically rubbing her forehead, but ultimately, neither of us dared bring up the dragon in the room, even with the topic of her tail already having come up. The closest we got was Ai trying to pivot the conversation away from work and toward the topic of my budding mutations, but by that point, Alice was already getting up to clear her spot and return to work. Once she was gone and we had washed the dishes, Ai yawned.

“I might take a nap.”

“Alice could learn something about that,” I ribbed, before yawning reflexively as well. “Oh, damn.”

Ai grinned, stretching in a way that pulled up her shirt to show her abs, then letting out a breathy little grunt. “Want to join me?”

The view plus the proposition made me freeze up. “Uh—I kind of wanted to keep poking at my mantle,” I stammered. “Or do some weaving practice, or something, or—”

“You don’t have to,” she interrupted with a chuckle. “I just think it would be healthy for you to have more exposure to us as…the piles of meat and bone that we are, rather than pretty girls who you’re scared of. Last night was nice.”

“I just—you won’t be uncomfortable? It’s kind of different when it’s just two people instead of one big group. More…culpable?” I wasn’t sure if that was the right word, so I tried again. “Like, er, isn’t it sort of cheating on Hina to…”

“Ezzen. I’m comfortable with you. Do you really think she would be upset that two of her favorite people took a nap together? We could have sex and she’d probably celebrate instead of being mad.”

I flushed at that. “Uh.”

Ai flinched, then shook her head hurriedly, turning red herself and suddenly seeming as embarrassed as me. “Oh, no, I wasn’t—no, we’re not going to do that. It was an intentionally absurd example, because I don’t, etto, do…sex,” she explained bashfully. “Or, ah, I can do it, but I don’t feel the desire to do it with people, and…” she trailed off helplessly, having massively derailed from her original point into too intimate of a topic, from trying to be clinical and helpful to oversharing some very intimate details. She buried her face in her hands. I was similarly paralyzed, having no idea how to respond. She’d technically just come out to me as some kind of asexual, I thought, but I didn’t know what to do with that information that wouldn’t lead to me shoving my foot deep into my mouth. After what felt like forever, but was probably more like twenty seconds, she squeaked. “Just nap. Normal nap?”

“Okay,” I agreed. That really seemed like the only reasonable course of action at this point. “Normal nap. Yeah.”

Despite all the awkward nonsense the two of us were capable of injecting into an interaction, it turned out that having a normal nap together was quite pleasant. Ai’s room was, predictably, as much of a secondary workshop as it was a living space, but it was laid out such that the bed was separated from the work space by a heavy curtain, as a way of enforcing some work-life balance. She also had a speaker system that played some ambient rainfall sounds that added to the sense of cozy seclusion and helped put me to sleep shockingly quickly despite my overwound nerves and my habitual checking of my phone to keep up with the chatroom.

By the time I woke up, darkness had fallen outside. To my credit, I had once again managed to not grope anything inappropriate in my sleep; it seemed my body knew that Ai was not for limb-entangling the way Hina was. When I groggily reached for my phone, which had wound up half-wedged under Ai’s insensate body next to me, I was slightly shocked to see the time.

“Oh, shit.”

It was four in the morning; our afternoon nap had knocked us out cold for over twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. Apparently, we had both needed more rest than we’d gotten in the Todai Cuddle Puddle, and it had come at the price of a sane sleep schedule. I felt gross, too—thankfully not in the moralizing way like I’d done something wrong by spending the night with a girl who wasn’t my girlfriend, rather the physical and musculoskeletal results of a nap that had gone on way too long. In the dim light of my phone, I could see where the folds of the bedsheets had impressed themselves on my skin, and overall, I felt rather oily and unwashed. I sat up groggily to locate Ai’s bathroom and quietly scrub my face of the worst gunk.

By the time I returned, she was also awake, lying on her side with her phone shining directly into her face from three inches away. I’d never seen how that looked from the outside—not good.

“Mm,” I grunted by way of acknowledgement.

She paused her video and rolled over halfway to grunt back at me. She looked as groggy and disheveled as I did, perhaps more so; in that regard, she had succeeded in making me less intimidated by her. In this pre-dawn darkness, we were two cave creatures freshly emerged from hibernation, no pretense of being illicit paramours or any other nonsense my anxiety could brew up.

It bears mentioning that I wasn’t completely immune to Ai’s physical charms, and I couldn’t help but sneak a few respectful-as-possible glances. Her extensive back tattoo tantalizingly peeked out from where one of her T-shirt’s sleeves had gotten rolled up, and an animal part of me did still respond to the strip of exposed skin above the waistband of her shorts, less slender than Hina’s and instead bolstered by sculpted muscle. And her hair, though neither as long nor glossy as Amane’s and messily splayed out over her pillow, did inspire envy in me. I wanted to brush it, or her to brush mine, or some combination. That seemed nice. I wasn’t going to ask.

Still, the closeness was very different from my mornings with Hina, which were always about grasping and rubbing and nibbling, gratuitous contact for contact’s sake. She thrived on that, and it had wound up being sort of the only love language I knew. With Ai, by contrast, it was just nice to exist near one another. I turned over what she had shared about her own proclivities, or rather lack thereof, in my head; knowing she wasn’t interested in sexual relations with anybody somehow made it easier for me to discard my own fears of coming off as thirsty in this intimate situation. There was probably something to unpack there.

At this point, there was no chance I was getting back to sleep. Normally, I would have pulled out my phone for an hour of watching videos before actually getting out of bed, but that wasn’t really an option when Ai was also watching videos of her own; we’d naturally irritate each other with the audio, even with the insulating ambience of the artificial rainfall, and I didn’t want to be a nuisance. So instead, I just sat on the bed and looked out the window, gazing down at the lights of central Tokyo, ranks of cars trundling along the roads even at this ungodly hour. Eventually, Ai paused her watching, and I heard her sit up and shimmy closer to me.

“It’s nice in the dark.” Her voice was soft; a little raspier and deeper from overnight disuse, which I didn’t mind at all. If anything, it made her sound a little more like Hina, though maybe that was just my only point of comparison for girls sounding like that in the dark.

“The city?”

“Yeah.” She shifted until she was sitting next to me. “What Alice said yesterday, about you not going out alone. Is there anywhere you want to go?”

“In Tokyo? Uh…honestly, I don’t really know what’s out here. Star keeps pestering me to go out and do stuff, but she hasn’t really given me specifics. Tokyo’s like…I know there’s fashion stuff, but Hina already took me clothes shopping.” I thought for a moment, then realized I was being silly. “Oh, uh, food, obviously.”

“We could do food,” she agreed, letting her legs dangle over the edge of the bed as she looked down on the city with me. “Very easy for us to get reservations at any of the big restaurants. I mean, I don’t go much, but Hina-san would like to go with you, I think. She really wants to take you around.”

She pressed her shoulder against mine, and I stiffened before forcing myself to relax. “I…guess we could? Other than her job, is anything stopping that?”

“No.” She gathered her hair loosely over one shoulder, running her hands through it. “I’m glad you like her so much.”

“Uh. So am I?” I shifted a little bit. This felt surreal, and I vaguely wondered if this was a dream. “Ai, I don’t want to be reading into anything, so I, um. Directness.” I took a deep breath. “Is this a really weird and roundabout…confession? You’re not, um, jealous of Hina?”

She pulled away from me slightly and leveled with me, eyes glinting in the dark. “No. I’m not trying to kiss you, if that’s what you mean. I’m just happy I like you as much as I hoped I would when you first arrived. And I want to be friends who can do this kind of thing together. Without—not romance,” she clarified. “No kissing, no sex, not lovers. I don’t want what Hina-san wants with you—well, touching you is nice, but I don’t want anything that has…fluids,” she stammered. “I just like that you’re here. I don’t know if there are words in English for it, but there aren’t really any in Japanese, so…”

“Oh. I like it too,” I replied, not needing to deliberate on it at all and a little embarrassed about that. “Um, yeah, I think that’s just…close friends? Not friends-with-benefits, certainly, that would have implications specifically against what you mean.”

“Then can we be friends?”

“I’ll…try.” I looked over at her. “That’s what I’m supposed to say, right?”

“Yes,” she chuckled. “Thank you. You’re more restrained than Hina-san. She tries to be this kind of friend, too, but she can sometimes…forget that’s where it ends with me. I don’t want more than this.”

The conversation trickled down to comfortable silence as I chewed on this. It was nice to be liked. And it was nice to officially be friends with Ai—of course, we’d already been friends, but now it was official, the terms spoken aloud and verified between all parties. That was helpful for people like us. In-person friendship was very novel to me, and I was finding that I liked it, if this was what it entailed.

There was only so much city one could watch from our vantage point. Lighthouse Tower, for all it housed some of the most important people in the country, was still only twenty stories tall, and many of the buildings out the window towered above us, blocking sight lines to the wider city. This also wasn’t an especially interesting part of town this late at night; sure, there were still plenty of cars and trucks moving down the street, but Todai’s corner of Tokyo, Akasaka, was more business-oriented than a place where youths gathered to party into the wee hours of the morning. I had no practical experience with that lifestyle, but I wondered if the Radiances ever did that, shed their literal and metaphorical mantles of power to just be young women for a night. Hina did seem to go out quite a bit on her own, and I could somewhat picture Amane or even Yuuka partying, but Alice and Ai seemed far too married to their jobs. Ai in particular was enough like me that I could scarcely imagine her at a bar or club.

“Recreation,” I blurted. “How do you…have fun? As a team?”

Ai grabbed her phone, scrolling what looked like a news site. “We do…movies, sometimes. Here, in that middle area. Amane and Hina play games. Hina cooks, of course.”

“You don’t…go out? I’m not sure what I’m asking,” I admitted.

“For fun? Ah…” she put the phone down, thinking and counting it out on her fingers. “Alice and Hina go shopping. Sometimes they bring Amane. Amane and Yuuka go to bars and comedy shows. Yuuka has other friends at school, too. Alice and Amane go on dates, obviously. Yuuka and Hina do, mm, mahou shoujo things. Like what we did last night, but smaller or further away. We all do it sometimes, but never all together.”

That sounded more or less like what I expected. They’d seemed not only practiced, but quite at ease with last night’s strike, aside from the relatively high stakes in the rescue portion. Mr. Otaki had seemed quite unworried that any of this would reflect on them, and naturally, that meant they had done things before. “Against who?”

“Traffickers. PCTF-related people. Yakuza, sometimes. We don’t kill them, just break things and be a little scary. So not as extreme as the Vaetna’s…” she searched for a word for a moment. “Ultimatums. And we stay mostly within Japan. Only Yuuka and Hina try to enter other countries’ airspace.”

“And, to be clear, you’re still talking about recreation? Fighting isn’t work?”

Ai shrugged, taking a sip of a massive water bottle on her nightstand. “For me, I don’t think it’s fun, but I think the others do. It makes things better for people.”

“Makes sense. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t like it.”

“Do you?”

“Uh.” I thought about the chaos of last night, and the Barbecue Inferno before that. “Not really? Er, fighting is kind of fun, when it’s friendly and sparring and stuff. I want to do more of that. But VNT stuff? Not all it’s cracked up to be, at least when you’re not a Vaetna, I’m finding.” I flexed my scarred and newly plated hand for emphasis. “This won’t cut it.”

“But a mantle might,” Ai pointed out. “We can work on it now, if you want.”

“It is four in the morning,” I pointed out, but a smile was spreading across my face. “But I don’t really have a bedtime.”

“Me neither.”

And, predictably, neither did Hina. As we entered the kitchen in search of brain-fuel, she was already there, happily chopping away at various vegetables and nurturing a large stock pot on the stove. She waved at us as we descended the stairs. Her work was illuminated by only the trio of overhead lights over the kitchen island, which cast stark shadows all around the rest of the penthouse’s first floor and set her vivid sapphire eyes pleasingly near-aglow. She blinked over to us, gave us a snuggly hug, and then returned to her work as we set about procuring our own breakfasts; I thought she would have insisted on sitting us down and letting her cook for us, but she must have read the goblin energy we were putting off and simply waved us toward the fridge. For Ai, her idea of minimum-effort nutrition was a reheated deli container of leftover bulgogi, and for me, after some deliberation, it was…another deli container of leftover bulgogi, as we both thanked Hina for her foresight in making a truly frightening quantity.

After we gobbled down meat and peppers and rice under the kitchen’s spotlights, it was time to get to work. I’d been expecting Ai to take me back down to the basement, but instead, we just went right back to her room, where she had another glyphcraft-oriented workstation ready to go. She booted up GWalk, loaded in my files, and we started getting the most barebones version of the mantle up and running. This v0.1 prototype would have none of the aesthetic features I’d discussed with Hina; it was very close in appearance to a mannequin, or perhaps the most streamlined and human-baseline-shaped versions of a suit of Vaetna plate. Either interpretation served me fine.

By the time the lazy winter sun had fully come up, we’d finalized the design, and I was excited to get the substrates printed and woven so I could hop in and get a feel for what it was like to pilot an entirely artificial body. But just as we sent the design’s central lattice substrates off to Ai’s trio of personal 3D printers, she got a notification in the bottom right of her screen. She turned to me, looking relieved, additional stress unwinding out of her expression and posture beyond what I had thought was the minimum, finally free of a burden she’d been carrying for almost a week now, in some form or another.

“Takagiri is awake!”

Author’s Note:

We continue to slice some lives with Ai! From prostheses to meals to grievously miscalculated naps, she and Ez are catching up on becoming Official Friends at last. I wonder how Takagiri’s doing in the meantime… that much sleep deprivation directly into a fight for your soul can’t be great for you, even when you win.

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

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July 18, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Ai’s students had been divided into six teams for the purposes of working on my prosthetic. Each team was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, four to seven people, and had come up with their own prototype. She arrayed the prototypes before me on an open space of her desk; the first thing I noticed was that two of the designs consisted of more than just the half-foot prosthesis.

“Are these…socks?”

“Yes. Kyle Muller mentioned you asked him for those, and his team quickly learned that it just wasn’t feasible to put one on only one foot. So the sock goes on the other foot; it has the same direct impulse unit as the prosthetic does, for even movement. Jumping, hovering, and impact reduction on landing. No actual flight.” Ai paged through the project documentation. “Then there was some espionage, which is why Team 1 also wound up doing the same thing, though the other features are pretty different between the two. Obviously, the substrates are just prototypes and would need to be miniaturized in the final version.”

Kyle Muller…it took me a moment to locate the name, and when I did, I put my face in my hands in embarrassment. He’d stopped me in the hall on the way to get my current prosthetic and pressed me for any features I was interested in; I’d blurted “boosters” almost at random, regretted it immediately, and then promptly erased all memory of the incident until now. That request had come from a desire to move unchained by gravity, like the Vaetna and my then-brief exposure to Hina; since then, I’d also learned about Ai’s tattoo, briefly supercharged my own body in combat, and begun to work on my mantle, so having boosters now seemed somewhat redundant.

“Cool,” I hedged. “Uh, any other stand-out…Hina, what are you doing?”

My girlfriend had squatted in front of the lineup of magitech tools and was carefully inspecting them one by one. She peered across the table’s surface, leaned forward to sniff them, and even tilted her head and put her ear right up to each prosthetic in hopes of…I wasn’t quite sure. She turned back to me.

“Just checking!”

“For…what, exactly?”

“I dunno. I’ll know it if I see it.”

I shot a confused glance at Ai and Amane and saw that they were both facepalming. Evidently, this was a familiar behavior. Ai caught my glance and did her best to explain. “She’s…sometimes she notices things in prototypes that wind up being major issues when we investigate. We were making some batteries, she licked one, and said they would explode. And then they did.”

Hina looked proud. “I don’t know how I do it either. Sometimes stuff just feels wrong!”

“Huh,” was all I could really say to that. I looked down the row again. “And all of these are passing?”

“Think so. Might be different when you put them on.”

I looked over at Ai. “Any recommendations? You called some of them ‘overboard;’ what exactly does that mean?”

Ai pointed to the second-leftmost one, which looked fairly unassuming, lacking a paired sock or other auxiliary equipment.

“Team 2. Kasegawa Ryo, Chen Junjie, Amala Redi, Solomon Saikal. This is…it started very normal and simple.”

“Huh.” I pulled off my shoe and sock and detached my current foot prosthetic, placing it on the desk next to it for comparison. All of the prototypes were clear upgrades from my current prosthetic in resembling an actual human foot; they didn’t all have five individually articulated toes, but this one at least separated the big toe from the others, and the overall sculpting seemed a little more in line with the shape of my remaining foot than the relatively low-resolution planes of the one Ai had put together for me.

I also put the cat-food-can stabilizer module next to my old foot and raised it questioningly toward Ai. She nodded. “Yes, these all have integrated stabilizers.” She tilted her head in Hina’s direction. “Thanks to her, again. The effect should feel the same as your current one.”

“Wait, it’s your Flame?” I asked Hina.

“For these, yeah. It should be yours in the final version. Now hurry up and put it on, I wanna see this one in action!”

“Why?” I asked as I slid it into place. “Oh, and, uh, still thread-tug {AFFIX}?”

“Yes.”

I gingerly touched the prosthetic to my foot’s stump and reached out with my mind, or my Flame, or whatever sixth sense we flamebearers developed to interface with the bound magical energies of glyph-based technology. It helped to run my thumb along the top of the prosthetic until I found a place that just…felt right, which was a rather imprecise way of going about it considering the precision with which both the physical prosthetic and the glyphs themselves had been crafted. Nonetheless, it was the right spot, and I tugged on the edge of the Flame that I felt there to {AFFIX} the prosthetic to my foot.

Ai nodded. “How does that feel? Can you move your toes?”

I was surprised to find that I could, which was a very weird sensation after leaving the muscles in the sole of my foot somewhat unused for the past few weeks. Indeed, it wasn’t even really my muscles actuating the toes; that part was just detecting my intent to move it, the most surface-level sort of bionic control upon which any more complex system could be built, like the far more integrated and invasive controls of the mantles.

Physically, the fit was slightly different from my old one, which was to be expected, and the pressure of the {AFFIX} against my stump also reminded me of something she had said weeks ago. “Fine, I think? A little different, maybe. Wasn’t there supposed to be an, uh, elastic sleeve or something for the seam? Though, uh,” I looked at Amane’s exposed shoulder, where the mounting point for her arm was fused into her flesh, “I guess not in all cases.”

Amane grinned back at me, flexing her repaired arm in a bicep curl as she tested its range of motion.

“It’ll be easy to add,” Ai assured me. “Stand up? Is the stabilizer working? It’s very important for this one especially.”

I obligingly got to my feet and was pleased to find that the integrated stabilizer felt like my old one; I’d grown accustomed to its compensation. I shifted my weight from leg to leg. “Yeah, that works. Isn’t it bad for me to become dependent on that?”

“You’ll grow out of it!” Hina purred. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but the enticing way she said it promised some kind of superhuman mobility that transcended the need to walk entirely. She blinked her big blue eyes at the new prosthetic. “Okay, now bring out the spear!”

“What? Like, er…” I took a few careful steps away from the desk, toward the open middle of the room, and summoned my spear from my arm. “This? Is something supposed to happen?”

Hina shook her head, and Ai facepalmed. Amane said something to them, which made Ai’s fingers clench harder around her face. “I’m realizing how stupid this is. Not you, Ezzen, the…” she gave up and huffed. “This prosthetic is one of the silly ones. It has its own spear in it.” She groaned something in Japanese after that, which made Hina frown at her.

“Hey, babe, this is still important!”

“Uh?” I prompted.

Hina patted Ai’s shoulder while she answered me. “She feels like this is a waste of resources. Bad use of her students’ time. But she also doesn’t want to be mean about their effort, because she’s a good teacher.” She prodded the back of Ai’s hand covering her eyes. “Hey, stoppit, it’s okay that these are goofy.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I mean, at a glance, these don’t seem like anything to be ashamed of, unless I’m missing something.”

Ai sighed and crossed her arms instead, looking at me apologetically. “Never mind. Sorry.” She looked down at my foot. “For this one, they know you’re a fan of the Heron, and even though they were there to see that you already had your own spear, they thought they could do it better.”

“That’s…fine?” I decided, feeling like I wouldn’t have done any better with ideas for features had I been in their position. I hefted my own spear, looking at it with a little amusement. “I mean, this one was carved from a two-by-four. It’s not a real weapon, and there’s room for improvement. If this team wanted to use the prosthetic as a pretext for making me a better one, I think that’s fine.”

Ai’s expression looked a little bleak. Hina tilted her head. “Wait, carved?”

“Yeah? Took a whole summer with a whittling knife,” I explained. “Before that, I used a broom handle, but it just wasn’t the same.” I loosened my grip to let gravity slide the haft through my hands until I reached the now-burnt tip. “Upgraded-ish now, maybe, but still just a piece of wood.” I stowed it in a flickering twist of space, distinctly pleased with how easy and natural that had become. Was that near what it was like for Hina to move through fourspace? “How do I get the foot one out?”

“Cutie, hold on, back up, you carved an entire spear out of a plank of wood?”

“Yeah?” I wasn’t sure why that was a big deal. “Can we get on with the actual prosthetics, if Ai feels time is being wasted?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, it’s just—you’re such a veeb, jeez. Commitment is attractive, I guess. Spear should come out if you curl your toes and stomp. They thought a blue trigger would make more sense than needing to tug the weave in the middle of combat.”

I supposed that made sense. I followed the directions, commanding the toes and softly stomping with a clack of plastic on tiled flooring, and suddenly, my foot got much heavier. The second and third toes had disappeared in a moment, and in their place was maybe…one foot of spear, made of what looked like orange LM. I frowned and stomped again, wondering if I’d done it wrong, but no more spear emerged from my foot. I’d envisioned a fully separate weapon like my wooden spear, not…this. “Wait, that’s it?”

Ai slumped in her chair. “Yes.”

“More of a dagger than a spear, isn’t it. Much more like Reggie’s blades,” I judged against my nearest point of comparison within the Vaetna. Reggie had vaet that could extend from his feet and a very acrobatic fighting style, which I’d always felt clashed somewhat with his image as the Vaetna’s Plants Guy.

“Yes. Sorry. They realized they couldn’t do a full-length spear, and they thought that since you were a fan of the Vaetna anyway, you wouldn’t mind this instead.”

I experimentally raised the foot and turned my ankle a bit, getting a feel for the extra weight, holding onto the edge of the desk behind me for support. “And I just…kick with it?”

“You really don’t have to.”

“Do it!” said Hina.

I didn’t dare try to imitate Reggie’s style; I’d never been one for kicking-based martial arts; the legs were mostly for stability and generating force to drive the spear. For a slightly more mortal reference frame, I thought back to when I’d watched Ai absolutely annihilate that training dummy. She’d included kicks, knees, and sweeps. I tried to picture a basic roundhouse kick, drew my leg back, and swung my foot through the open middle space of the room. For an instant, I was worried that the centrifugal force might overwhelm the force attaching the prosthetic to my foot, but to Team 2’s credit, they’d calibrated the force accurately, and it stayed firmly attached.

That didn’t make my kick graceful. It was embarrassingly amateurish and disjointed, forces failing to properly transmit through the kick well enough to deliver motion. I didn’t even manage to keep the mini-spear’s tip facing the right direction as my foot twisted. The one point in my favor was that I had inadvertently raised my leg much higher than I’d been intending; I’d have struck somebody in the face, at least. I hurriedly lowered my leg, blushing.

“Whoa,” said Hina, making me redden further. “Flexy!”

“Thanks,” I muttered, looking firmly down at the floor. “This, uh, won’t work.”

“I agree.” Ai sounded relieved.

I detached the foot with the mini-spear still deployed, turning it over in my hands once and inspecting its features as though to soften my rejection. “Sorry—” I immediately covered my mouth. I’d resolved not to speak to objects with the girls around.

Ai nodded as she took the foot from me. “It’s alright. This is what I meant by overboard, too much—just bad ideas. I hope you’ll like some of the others more.” She scrolled down her digital dossier of designs, typing some notes.

“Should I, um, give feedback?”

“I have plenty,” Ai sighed. “This one was never going to work, but I’m glad that at least the foot part is working, since that part is pretty similar between them all. Try…Team 1.” She pointed to the first prosthetic in the row, one of the two that had a matching sock. “It would be good to know if you like having the mobility options. That’s probably the most important feature.”

“This one also has a translator!” Hina added. “So you wouldn’t have to learn Japanese!”

“No, he would,” Ai countered, looking away from her teammate in annoyance. “This was Hina being uniquely clever, and it has big limitations: No text, not your own speech. And it’s not engineered and tested for durability. That’s not a substitute for learning.” She sounded a little snappy.

“So it’s not a universal translation thing like the Vaetna have got,” I reasoned, wondering why she sounded so hostile. “But still an improvement without Ebi around, though. Would have been nice to have this back at the barbecue.”

Hina rubbed her neck nervously. “That’s actually why I came up with it, when I was thinking about how much of a chaos situation I put you in without being able to talk to most of the people there. So I just put it into one of the feet while I was working on it, kind of as proof of concept? It’s not super fancy like a Vaetna one, but it was still a lot of work! These things aren’t universal, it only works because you’re a flamebearer, and I’ve never made one before—I only figured out how to key it to you after the inferno, once I got a better read on your Flame from sniffing around while I was cleaning up my pocketspace, and then it was still really hard to actually do. I kind of just stapled shit together until it worked. Sorry if that bothers you, I know you really like to have diagrams and graphs and stuff.”

Her rambling was kind of cute, but she didn’t need to be apologetic. Was I supposed to be mad that she’d done something incredibly impressive for me? Did I have such a reputation? “What, because you were winging it instead of planning it all out first? That’s fine by me; you don’t need to apologize. Cool magic is cool magic, and it’s actually kind of cooler that you were just doing what felt right until it worked. I want to be able to do that,” I admitted. “Just tell me—how does it work? Like, big picture. It’s definitely pink, but is it actually changing the words you’re speaking in the air or is it operating on my brain? Or something else?”

“Something else. It’s more like it’s getting your Flame to do the translation…I think that’s what the {ASSIGN} and {IDENTIFY} are trying to do, anyway, they kind of go through and in and crisscross to re-squish the concepts…ugh. If I knew how to explain it better I would, sorry. I just know it works.” She looked genuinely disappointed.

I was admittedly fiending for more details, but if she had none to give, that was fine—a magical puzzle to unravel together at a later date, if anything. “Hey, no, it’s still…incredible. Thanks for doing it for me.” I looked over to Ai, who still looked sort of frustrated. Maybe she was jealous that Hina had solved a famously difficult problem on intuition alone, and in turn, that was why Hina was being apologetic about not being able to explain. I wasn’t sure I wanted to poke that bear. “Uh—Ai, you said the mobility stuff was jumping and hovering?”

“Yes.”

“Cool,” I replied, focusing on that instead, feeling excitement build. The idea that I could once again experience some of the freedom I’d felt while fighting Takagiri, purely on demand, was enticing. I removed the sock from my complete foot and put on the one that came with the prosthetic. It felt like a normal, short cotton sock and fit pretty well. The only difference I could feel was the presence of a thin pad under the ball of my foot. “How’d they make this?”

“Our 3D printers are really nice,” Hina chirped. “And the jumpy bits are all in the pad.”

“Small work space.”

“I’m good at what I do,” replied my prodigal girlfriend. As the words left her mouth, a flicker of a cringe passed over her face, and a scowl over Ai’s. Definitely some history there about natural ability.

I put on the prosthetic as well and wiggled the toes again. “Seems to work at a basic level.” I glanced up toward the ceiling, which was concrete and not especially high. This room was big enough for Amane’s mantle to stand comfortably, but we were still in the basement, and this certainly wasn’t the cavernous space of the main workshop. “Uh, what are the odds I slam right into the ceiling and break my neck by accident? Or if not part of my body, at least one of the extremely expensive bits of equipment in here? I assume there’s dampening, so I don’t have to worry about the impact on my legs themselves just from the impulse?”

“No worries,” Hina said confidently. “Just do a little jump like this!” She bounced on the balls of her feet, then hopped a few inches into the air…and didn’t come down, just hovered there. “I mean, you’d come back down, but I’m just showing the height you’re aiming for. It should send you about twice that much. And if something goes wrong, I’ll catch you.” She stepped forward off of nothing toward me, offering a hand. I took it, unable to help myself from also taking the opportunity to admire her sapphire eyes at the same level as mine.

“Okay,” I said. I did a little hop and got way more spring than I ought to, like jumping from a trampoline at just the right moment. I went visibly higher than Hina’s hover-height, maybe a full foot off the ground, far enough that I was instinctively worried about the shock to my legs on landing—but it felt like landing on a pillow. Something giddy raced through me, the joy of freedom of motion. “Oh. Wow.” I did it again before I realized how stupid that must look.

Hina squeezed my hand. “Hey, no shaming yourself. Revel in it!”

Ai barked an objection. “No, quit that, don’t go off the damn rails!”

I frowned at how harsh her language was—then I realized she sounded different from normal. “Wait, was that Japanese?”

Ai’s eyes widened, and she hunched her shoulders in a mildly ashamed manner that I found very familiar.

“She can be a bit of a pottymouth,” Hina said. “Hey, Ameowne, say something! You’ve been pretty quiet.”

“Ameowne?” I asked.

Amane snorted. “Oh, is that how the module translates it? That’s hilarious!” Her voice sounded almost exactly like Ebi’s interpretive imitation of her. “Hi, Ezzen.”

“Uh, hi. Wow, this is weird, just talking straight to you without our phones or having Ebi around,” I admitted. I looked down at my prosthetic foot. “Wait, why don’t your prosthetics do this too? If it needs a Flame, I mean, you’ve got one, and I imagine Hina’s got a good enough read on you for whatever mystery magic she did with mine.”

“I can understand spoken English just fine! Translating outgoing speech is a real doozy by comparison, and I don’t usually need to do that as a Japanese celebrity in Japan, you know? If I really need it when we’re away from home and Ebi, that’s why we have interpreters. But I’m glad we can talk like this.” She smiled. “Hina, thanks for bringing me into the conversation, but I was actually about to check out. You don’t need me here for this, and Sugawara won’t kill himself, you know.”

“C’moooon!” Hina pouted. “Alice has the Ministry breathing down her neck, we can’t scour the entire city or country for a ghost like that!”

“Breathing down our necks,” Amane corrected her. “And that’s exactly what I’m going to go help with. I’m not stupid enough to go out looking for Sugawara alone when my mantle isn’t even fully repaired. Ai is within her rights to help Ezzen with this, it’s important, but we have actual duties to carry out too.”

“Maybe you should go too,” Ai put in, looking in Hina’s direction but not straight at her. Her tone felt a little harsh, like maybe she just wanted Hina gone rather than the more practically minded allocation of Radiances Amane had proposed.

Amane came over to us, putting her bionic hand on Hina’s arm gently. “See? She’s stressed out because we’re all in here. Let’s help Ai relax by giving her the space to nerd out with Ezzen and dealing with the mess we made last night, okay? And I’m sure Alice would appreciate the help. Please?”

“But—” Hina’s blue eyes drifted from Amane’s to mine, then down to look at our clasped hands. “Mmmm,” she groaned, sounding very unhappy.

I didn’t like seeing her torn like this, but on a practical level I agreed with the others. I hadn’t exactly been checking the news, but it felt wrong for Alice to be the only one dealing with the consequences of last night. Was this the right moment to pull on my girlfriend’s leash a bit, like she’d asked me to? I decided to make her a little offer. “Hina, the sooner you can clear things up with the government about the, uh, extrajudicial killing…” I faltered, realizing how insane that sounded, “the sooner we can go hunting for Sugawara.”

The sapphires flashed briefly in recognition of what I was doing, and she took a deep breath, nodding resolutely with only a little bit of a pout. “…Okay.” She squeezed my hand. “Damn, you’re right, I gotta go. Take care of Ai for us, okay? Don’t let her bury herself in work.”

“Um, sure.”

Hina’s hand slipped out of mine as Amane practically escorted her to the door. As it shut behind them, Ai sighed.

“Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” I replied, a little too harshly. “I mean, um…I don’t know. Is this a waste of your time?”

“No! I’m just…still tired, and…you know what, maybe. I just—it feels like everything’s been sort of disjointed and rushed and busy since Hina brought you here. I never feel like there’s enough time for anything. I haven’t had time to sing once since you showed up. None of that is your fault, but it’s…I need a break.”

“I think this is supposed to be the break, from what Amane said.” I looked her up and down. She wasn’t bone-deep exhausted, but she also didn’t seem to be having fun. “But if this feels like work, we can…do something else? God, I really don’t know what you all do in your free time. I’m seeing your point,” I admitted.

Ai brought her hands to her face and patted her cheeks solidly, as if the motion would kickstart a better mood. “I’m good. I envisioned this more like us just sitting around and talking more in depth about features, not trying to decipher Hina’s intuition-based nonsense and entertain her at the same time. Let’s continue.” She managed a smile.

“Nonsense? That’s not very fair,” I blurted reflexively, then felt the need to justify it. “She’s unbelievably clever. Just because her intuition takes her places we can’t follow doesn’t mean it’s not intelligent.”

Her smile turned to a confused frown. “I didn’t say ‘nonsense,’ I said something that means more like ‘not systematic.’ Take off the foot for a second.”

“Huh? Wait, have you been speaking Japanese this whole time?” I belatedly realized that a lot of her word choice had been different, a little more casual; I felt stupid for not picking up on it sooner. I sat down to pull off the prosthetic, and its matching sock, and put them back in the row. “What did you say?”

“Detarame. You can look it up, I didn’t mean to insult her intelligence.”

“I believe you! Just surprised me, was all.”

The conversation fell to a lull for a moment. Ai leaned back in her chair, looking at the ceiling, maybe as embarrassed about the gaffe as I was, despite it being neither of our faults. After a few long seconds, her eyes came back down to me.

“I know how smart she is, in her own way.” She pointed at the foot that had provided the awkward translation. “But that’s a good example of how the technology she makes can be unreliable, and why I really think you should take the time to learn the language. You don’t want to rely on ripple tech to communicate in an inferno when you can’t predict what it’ll actually say even when it’s working.”

“…Like Ebi,” I couldn’t help but point out.

Ai looked like a deer in the headlights for just a moment, then rolled her eyes in what really felt like an imitation of the android—or perhaps the origin of the behavior. “That is a conversation for later,” she declared. “But even if I didn’t mean to be that harsh, Hina-san is frustrating to work with when it comes to magic, yes. I can admit that. And it…makes me annoyed that you get along so well with her, despite that. I thought I would be more similar to you than she is.”

I gave this a moment’s consideration, then shrugged helplessly. “I mean…we’re similar, yeah. We’re nerds. But you have to remember that, uh, a lot of my obsession with magic is because I wish I was able to do it on instinct, like she can. Like the Vaetna can.” I winced a little, having not meant to go that personal. I looked over to the row of prostheses. “Um. Feet.”

This brilliant demonstration of elegant locution proved my nerd status, both with my choice of topical refuge and the crippling lack of tact.

Ai smirked. “Feet, yes.” She pointed at another prosthetic and read off her report: “Team 3. Hideki Kasegumi, Touko Oda, Richard Bailey, Camila Muñoz. Features: Anchor unit, a ward setup they were calling the ‘Achilles Ward,’ and VoIP phone.”

The anchor unit I understood; if there was only room for one mobility function, that honestly made more sense than the booster, fun as it was. A ward also seemed sensible, given how frequently I was getting into situations where I’d needed to defend myself, and it beat wearing those awful sleeves and patches, plus the naming was intriguing. However, my attention was stolen by the last part. “Sorry, a phone? Like, a cell phone?”

Ai was back to looking defeated. “Overboard, like I said. Overdesigned.”

I picked up the half-foot and turned it over in my hands, looking for anything that might resemble a speaker, microphone, buttons, or screen, and saw none.

“It only takes incoming calls right now. It’s more like a proof of concept. They have some sketches about a projected UI, but didn’t make it that far in prototyping.”

I nodded, {AFFIXING} the foot like all the others. “Uh, cool. What’s an ‘Achilles Ward’?”

“Bailey-san and Touko-san are ward…” she snapped her fingers for a moment, looking for a word, then pointed at the translator-foot I’d just discarded. “Hold that.” Once I picked it up, she said: “Enthusiasts.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to use it?”

“I’m fine with it as a language learning tool. What did it translate it to?”

“Enthusiast. What did you say?”

“Aikouka. Enthusiast, hm. Now we’ve both learned a word.”

“Aikouka,” I repeated, trying to be a good student.

“Yes. Good pronunciation.” She looked genuinely pleased with me before turning back to the project report. “Back to the Achilles Ward, it’s really quite impressive for two students, especially because it all comes from those two, not Hina’s implementation. They’re my two cleverest students when it comes to wards and other kinemancy, and I’m really glad they’ve found a way to use their strengths here. As for the name, it comes from the myth…”

As Ai settled into a familiar and comfortable ramble, my mind wandered to the idiosyncrasies of the translation module. It was definitely imperfect, and that probably warranted investigation, because Hina had said that really it was my Flame doing the translation. I wanted to bring this up with Ai, and talk more about all the weird things about my Flame, especially its behavior last night—I wasn’t sure if she knew that Hina might have predicated this technology on my Flame’s ability to talk to me in the first place—but that sounded like more of the mysterious and hard-to-quantify intuitive side of magic, which we were specifically trying to avoid, especially since she seemed to have finally found a groove.

“—which is a trade-off you get from any directional ward, but realistically, the heel is a great place to pick as the weak spot. Who would aim for the heel? And including a ward is much more practical than most of these other designs, so I think they get extra credit for that, especially with how well they documented it.” She glanced at me. “You weren’t listening.”

“Not enough,” I admitted, embarrassed at being caught out.

“That’s fine. I didn’t notice, so it’s my fault too.” The conversation died for a moment, then she added, “I talk too much sometimes.”

“Talking’s good. My fault for not paying attention.” I searched for something that showed I’d at least kind of been listening. “Sounds like you’re a fan of your students’ work?”

“Mm. You kind of have to be.” We shared a weird moment of eye contact, then both hurriedly looked away, me down at my prosthetic and her at the project report. “Those two are both on the forums, by the way. Bailey-san is ‘3punch’, Touko-san is ‘glassy’. If we’re talking about being fans, my students love you. Daifan. That means ‘big fan’, if it’s not obvious.”

“I’ll make a mental note of that,” I promised, hoping it wouldn’t fall through the sieve that was my brain when it came to non-magic information. “Big fans. Daifan. Real fans. That’s still so weird,” I admitted, thinking back to when they’d clustered around me while using the workshop’s computers. “Uh, whenever things get more…normal, will I be expected to give guest lectures or something?”

She grinned with actual excitement. “Not expected, but I’d like that a lot. They would, too. If things ever do get more normal, which they will. Eventually.” It seemed like she was mostly trying to convince herself of that. “What would you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. I guess ripple propagation and pigeonholing are the closest I come to having specializations? Those are mostly theory, though. And LM, I guess, but honestly, I feel behind the curve on that compared to all of you.”

“You’re still very qualified. It’s why you’re even here,” she pointed out. “And you will definitely get experience with your mantle. Have a little more confidence.”

“I’ll…try. Uh, should we be testing the ward or something?” I looked around the room. “I assume that would happen somewhere you’ve got actual equipment for that. It’d be easier for me to be more confident if I actually knew all the magitech stuff you’ve got down here in the basement. I mean, how many random rooms have stuff like the coffin in them?”

“More than you think, though most of it is junk. You’ll be seeing more of the testing equipment as you work on your mantle, I think. But let’s do the things we can do right here first. Shall we try the phone?”

“Sure?”

She pulled out her phone, scrolled through the contacts, pressed one, and then raised it to her ear.

My foot began to buzz, which felt intensely weird and sort of unpleasant—though not painful, more like a too-invasive tickling of my bones. It was certainly an effective way of notifying me I was receiving a call. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I propped myself against the desk, raised my right leg, grabbed it, turned it in a way a human leg probably shouldn’t be turned, and brought my toes to my ear to pick up the phone. The buzzing stopped.

“Hello?”

Ai stared at my ridiculous contortion for a long moment, then burst out laughing, clutching her phone to her chest. It began as a strong snort, which blossomed into a guffaw, then a howling cackle that wracked her body and sent her into a fully bent-over fit of wheezing laughter. The whole affair bore a strong resemblance in both sound and appearance to a violently deflating balloon, and it was beautiful. She covered her mouth as the giggle fit continued, but that did nothing to halt it.

I hurriedly put my foot down and sat in my chair as her hysterical mirth spread to me as well and I began to chortle. We sat there together, laughing. It almost bounced between us; Ai would settle down somewhat, then meet my eyes, and despite me not doing anything ridiculous she’d immediately burst into laughter again, which would set me off once more. It wasn’t even all that funny, really, but it was needed—something was needed after all the constant stress we’d been under over the past few weeks. So we laughed, and things were better.

Eventually, we collected ourselves.

“Fuck,” I wheezed. “That was so stupid.”

There were tears in the corners of her eyes as she nodded repeatedly before she could gather her voice. “Yeah. Thank you, Ezzen. I needed that.”“Me too. Very stupid,” I repeated. “But I’m a fan. A daifan, if you will.” That earned an adorably grinning double thumbs-up from her. “And with that, I have my decision: we’ve got to put that in the final prosthetic.”

Author’s Note:

Some quality slice of life (to Amane’s chagrin, it seems!) and at last some catharsis for Ai in the stupidest way possible. We’ll get back to the plot soon, I promise!

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

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July 7, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

The nature of the Todai “cuddle puddle,” as Hina affectionately referred to it later, was that most of its participants would leave in stages throughout the early morning, so I didn’t wake up in as much of a tangle of limbs as I had been expecting.

Alice, workaholic that she was, got up bright and early at 6:30 AM; her phone alarm pulled us all out of hibernation for less than three seconds before she silenced it and crawled out of bed, which was an extra complex task when her tail had been completely ensnared by Hina, who had wound up wrapping her entire body around the thick limb and was apparently unbothered by sleeping in direct contact with its uncomfortably warm scales. Hina had made some disgruntled murmurs before Alice managed to extract herself and set about washing up and dressing as quietly as she reasonably could.

The next alarm went off at 8:00—or it would have, had Yuuka not lurched upright and grabbed her phone with prescient precision. I was vaguely relieved that I hadn’t somehow instinctually slithered my way to a position touching her, and that instead, she had taken a position near the edge of the pile, at the foot of the massive bed, near Amane’s ankles and on the opposite side from me. She did have to extract herself from Hina, though, like Alice had; in her draconic teammate’s absence and lacking my own inhibitions, the puppy had wound up spooning her instead, which caused quite a lot of grumbling and shoving in the moments after waking until Yuuka fled the room.

At that point, Hina switched to cuddling me, squirming against my front until she was comfortably ensconced, giving Amane some space of her own—if not for the fact that Ai had somehow wound up in the bed as well, and was holding her gently, completely passed out and drooling onto a plushie of a character I didn’t recognize. Alice and Amane had at least a dozen stuffed animals and plushes on the bed, who had wound up distributed all across the cuddle puddle in various girls’ arms by morning. There was a seal—which might have been Hina’s—a giraffe, a hedgehog, a shark, and a bunch of mascots, none of which were recognizably Todai-themed.

The remaining four of us got up more naturally. At maybe a quarter past nine, Hina got out of bed in a way I can only describe as slithering over me, planting a kiss on the back of my neck, and whispering that she was going to get a start on breakfast before a puff of air signaled that she had exited the room via the fourth dimension rather than the door. I fell back asleep for a while until she reappeared and began to shake each of us in turn, cajoling us to partake in breakfast. It was only once we were all sat around the low table with waffles in front of us that I fully woke up.

“Um. Ai. Bed?” A strong showing of linguistic mastery from me, to be sure.

“Ebi did that,” she explained. She looked a lot better than she had the previous night; maybe not 100% re-energized, but she had certainly recovered both her energy and her mood well enough that she met my inquiry with a grin.

“Ebi okay?” Hina asked. “She’s been a little, uh, fuzzy, face-wise. What’s with that? Is she gonna be okay? Where is she, anyway? Oh, no, when you guys were fighting shitfucker did she somehow get hurt?”

Hina’s observation mirrored my own worries; the robot was nowhere to be seen, despite her usually being stationed over Amane’s shoulder at meals. Her condition last night hadn’t seemed too awful, and I’d expected her to have been fully repaired by this morning—maybe that was a bad assumption. Either way, her absence was a little unnerving.

“She’s taking a day off.”

“She can do that?” I asked, before realizing how insane I sounded. Sure, she was an android, but I’d always thought of her as omnipresent and unsleeping. I looked over to Hina to gauge her reaction, trying to intuit how normal this was, and was worried to see her brow furrowed with concern, a mighty frown scrunching her face toward the center.

“That’s new. I mean, I can’t blame her, I guess, but…is that fine, though?” she asked, exposing her concerns far more bluntly than I ever would. “Like, things were bad yesterday, and cutie and Amanyan both got hurt, and let’s face it, Alice too! She might not be showing it but she’s been having these killer headaches, and—”

Amane smoothly interrupted her with what I could reasonably infer was something like “we’re fine, let her rest.” She’d put the backup arm back on after taking it and her leg off in the night, though she still wasn’t wearing her eyepatch, and seemed unworried or at least unbothered by her caretaker’s absence. I decided to take my cues from her, rather than Hina’s perpetual state of worry over her various teammates’ well-beings.

“Hina,” I started, trying to sound reasonable. “If you care about their wellbeing, you should care about hers too, yeah? I know she’s not a flamebearer per se, but if anything, I’d sort of expect you to treat her with the same dignity as you do your Flame.”

Hina’s worry melted away and was replaced by something I didn’t quite recognize as she turned to me. “I do respect her, cutie…and wow, I like it when you call me out like that. Keep doing it.”

“Uh.” I hadn’t quite anticipated this reaction, which was now resolving toward something like attraction. The gears in my brain slipped; she seemed genuinely willing to drop the topic just like that. Did she trust me that much? “Noted? Wait, did you call her Amanyan?”

Hina nodded happily, then shrank slightly from Ai, who had pinched the bridge of her nose in record time from this exchange. She sighed. “Souda, Alice no zutsuu no koto. Ezzen, do you think she’s growing horns?”

“Oh, um, yeah. Seemed kind of obvious to me yesterday, what with all the magic at the barbecue, and I imagine what happened last night only aggravated it further. Did we reach the same conclusion independently?”

“I think so,” she muttered, looking unhappy. “If this is anything like the other dragon-ka, she will be annoying and irritable about it, right up until they actually come out and she can’t deny it any longer. Then expect a lot of crying.”

“Wait, horns?” Hina’s voice went shrill with excitement. “That’s so fuckin’ cool! Like, right on her forehead, Fatalis style, or more like some giant Nergigante ones on the sides, real big and beefy?”

Her references were lost on me—and Ai, apparently, who shared my look of befuddlement. Amane was the one to bail us out, reaching up to her forehead with both hands and miming horns coming up and a little forward. “Fatalis-fuu.” She then frowned, reorienting her hands a few different ways as she tried to solve the logistical challenges brought on by the differences between Alice’s currently human skull anatomy and that of a fantasy dragon. She gave up and shrugged.

“Gotcha,” Hina nodded, mirroring the miming. “Yeah, she’s gonna be kind of pissy about it.”

I glanced at her. “Wait, Ai was down in her workshop for the past four days and she still noticed enough to guess. How did you not notice how much she’s been touching her forehead?”

“I’ve been busy too!”

“Not with work, apparently, or you would have noticed.” Ai sniped, which made Hina pout, stuff an entire waffle quarter into her mouth, and lean against me forehead-first as if silently asking me to back her up.

“She did do a televised apology.”

Ai’s eyebrows went up. “Ah. Good job, Hina-san. Though I wonder how much that will matter once the public learns about what you all were doing last night. Which you should probably go help Alice with.” The Emerald Radiance looked to me as Hina’s pout intensified and her chewing accelerated. “As for you, Ezzen, Alice-chan isn’t the only one who has been having mutations.” She directed her gaze down to my arm. “You’re overdue for a scan. Also, my teams have prototypes for you to test.”

“…Of what?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Your foot prosthetic. It’s been two weeks!”

The first thing we looked at in my long-overdue medical check-up was my right hand, which had been rendered somewhat gruesome by my intervention against Sugawara. When Ebi had wrapped it, the skin had been raw and seemed like it was going to blister, giving me serious reservations about how gross it might become overnight, soiling Alice and Amane’s enormous bed even if I kept it away from the girls. But by the time I took off the gauze to check before clambering into bed with everyone, we’d all been a little surprised to see that, in one short hour, the skin had begun to look much better.

Come this morning, my arm had mostly healed overnight, which confirmed some manner of enhanced regeneration, but the skin was coming back different than before. The rough surfaces of my seven-year-old burn scar tissue were turning smoother and thicker, with distinct seams and crags forming between the old spiderwebbed patterns across the surface of my hand and forearm. Ai watched me twirl a pen between my fingers experimentally.

“Your mobility seems good.”

“Yeah. I mean, same as it used to be, which was already worse than my other hand. It feels sort of weird, since everything is like a millimeter or two off, but…” I grasped the pen in my fist, then scribbled a few glyph symbols on a piece of scrap paper Ai had provided. “Yeah, no new issues with mobility at all. What do you think about the…plating?”

Ai looked at one of the monitors on her desk, where she’d pulled up the results of the scans we’d just done. “Do you want me to say it looks like Vaetna armor?”

I shifted. “I guess, yeah. I know that’s really hard to say for certain, but…” Excitement buzzed in my chest as I trailed off. It was absolutely an unwarranted jump of the gun to assert that my Flame was turning me into a Vaetna, making my dream come true, but I was only a little ashamed to admit I wanted to hear it anyway.

She nodded. “I don’t know. It does look like armor, but dermis has too many unknowns; it’s not like we have a scan of it. But you are definitely mutating somehow.”

Hina would have started gnawing on something with excitement, had she been here for that diagnosis. But she’d guiltily gone off to support Alice with…whatever the Radiances did to run their company day-to-day. I was honestly still very hazy on the details; maybe if we stopped getting into catastrophic crises every few days, I’d eventually learn.

At any rate, Hina hadn’t come with, but Amane had. The three of us were down in the basement prosthetics lab. Today, the tentacles hanging above the surgical-grade spell circle were not the star of the show; that honor went to an unassuming-looking box on the wall, which Ai had revealed was the main antenna of a high-resolution main-spectrum ripple scanner. Once I was told about them, I could also spot several smaller boxes mounted on the walls and ceiling elsewhere in the room, secondary nodes that created a set of triangles through the space of the room that all intersected at a particular point on the floor a few meters to the right of the spell circle, marked with a little red square. I’d stood in it, Ai had hit a button, and just like that, we had detailed information about the ripple distribution in my body.

The eighteenth floor usually had some ripple-scanning equipment that was in some ways superior to this, able to do silver and white ripple in addition to the main five colors. That would have been Ai’s first choice of workspace, since we also wanted more insight into why my Flame interfered with Yuuka’s eye, but all of Todai’s units were on loan to hospitals around the city for the victims of the Barbecue Inferno—God, that name sucked. So those secrets would remain secret for some time yet. Still, this scanner was of very, very good quality otherwise, and we had all the data we could ask for when it came to the main spectra of ripple.

My results were mostly unsurprising, and they told the story of my tumultuous and often violent relationship with magic in short form. Red and green tinged most of my skin, the lingering proof of my near-full-body epilation with blood magic. There was a bright orange and softer red line on my left forearm where my spear was stowed, and a big cluster of green all along my right hand and forearm, where the new, carapace-like skin was forming and where my Flame liked to manifest. There was also some green in the tricep and shoulder muscles from when I’d caved in Hina’s chest with a punch.

My last remaining hair follicles, the ones now home to a shock of bright orange hair, lit up with fittingly orange ripple and the more expected green. Ai wasn’t a hundred percent sure that the LM wig had turned into real, naturally growing hair, but the scalp seemed like my real skin, with all the nerve endings and sensitivity from gently poking my scalp and tugging the hair as one would expect. That kind of contact felt weird and uncomfortable, as though I were breaking some kind of rule.

I tried to confront that feeling; I wanted to work on that sense of shame, and this particular thought was so patently ridiculous and juvenile that it invited challenge. Yes, I found Ai attractive, with her pretty face and toned arms and razor-sharp intellect, but that didn’t make it inherently wrong for her to touch me for something so simple. Yes, the pretty engineer lady could touch me; that was okay. Grow up, I told myself, we literally slept in the same bed together, platonically, and neither of these girls seemed bothered by that, so it would only be weird if I made it weird. I just had to not make it weird.

How to not make it weird? My usual: talk about magic. “So if this is now my real scalp, what happened to my old hair under the wig?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted, rubbing a few strands between her finger and thumb. “Somewhere in space-folding limbo, maybe. Hina-san might be able to find it.”

“Could she? It’s not out, uh, outside, backstage, however you want to call it. The wig’s lattice was compression, like my tattoo.” I raised my arm for emphasis, tapping the inked spear. “Can she…get in there?”

“Not directly, but she can weave a spell to look inside much more easily than the rest of us. Ask her about it later. As for the hair itself, we should take some samples for Ebi. Your skin, too, I think, both the hand and some of the places where you removed body hair. I can’t do that kind of analysis myself.”

The idea of a skin sample sounded a little grisly at first, calling to mind a hole-puncher to fully remove some of my erstwhile follicles, but all Ai really meant was a little scraping of the epidermis. I wondered if that was to minimize the pain for my sake or Amane’s. As for my hair, rather than plucking a few strands from my head directly, she pulled a hairbrush from her pocketspace and handed it to me. I eyed it, feeling suddenly guilty.

“I know I need to brush it more.”

“You do,” she agreed, no sugarcoating. “A little effort would make it look quite nice. I’ve been told your last time with our hairdresser was terrible, and I’m really sorry for that, but we should take you back sometime to get it very thoroughly washed, and maybe try out a few styles—without cutting it this time,” she clarified in response to my visible panic.

I took a deep breath. “Yeah. Okay.” I dutifully raised the brush to my head and pulled it through the sheet of orange hair, extracting many of the loose and stray strands that last night’s shower hadn’t gotten out; Hina hadn’t really helped with the hair washing, and I’d been a little hastier than I maybe ought to have been. Ai put the various samples into little baggies for future analysis.

Blue and pink ripple were entirely absent from my body beyond the universal baseline—which was good, since the former usually meant catastrophic injury and the latter tended to cause cancer or more esoteric ripple illnesses.

The one surprise we found was only a surprise to Ai and Amane, not to me: my trick to lunge at Takagiri in Hina’s pocketspace hadn’t imbued me with enhanced musculature other than that already present in my arm, and instead, its only result was my newfound flexibility, indicated by traces of green ripple appearing in most of my joints. I pushed the fingers of my non-burnt hand almost completely backward to demonstrate to the girls; Amane made a grumbly, queasy sound from her desk in the far corner of the room, and I stopped.

Ai looked between me, the table of data, and the color-coded diagram of my body we’d generated. She rested her mouth in her palm, thinking, then shrugged. “I was prepared to be more upset than I am. Aside from the muscles, all of your mutations came from necessity, not very Hina-like at all.”

“Yokarou,” Amane agreed. She was dissecting her burned-out primary bionic arm, extracting the parts her quadruple laser attack had ruined with a tiny screwdriver and occasional flashes of magic for telekinesis. AI’s eyes kept flicking over to her in concern, but she hadn’t commented or offered to help.

“Um, you’re making it sound like you are at least somewhat upset, though?”

“I think you could have probably dealt with the body hair without sanguimancy,” Ai sighed. “But you already know that, so I won’t say more.”

By this point, I’d done enough blood magic that I was starting to become unsure what Ai’s big problem with it was. Before being flametouched, my main bias against it had been about its imprecision and a vague moral argument about its more sinister applications, but in the contexts I’d been finding myself using it, those were usually non-factors. As long as nobody was too nearby for the burst of red ripple, especially Amane, the only person being harmed was me, not even my Flame like when contorted to weave. I was starting to entertain the idea that it had something to do with Ebi or Amane.

Regardless of her reasoning, she was right that blood magic was imprecise and wasteful of perfectly good body parts when regular weaving would do the trick. Plus, it was often incapable of truly complex tasks and constructs, like all the manifestation and control circuitry of a mantle. So I definitely needed to get better at weaving. I rubbed the new, stiff plates of my hand nervously, feeling the ridges.

“Less sanguimancy, yeah. Could really use some lessons on the actual mechanics of weaving, actually. I don’t think winging it is a good idea. How do I learn, like, techniques?”

Ai smiled, delighted that I was finally showing interest in actually leveraging my magical knowledge directly. “By weaving a lot. You already know everything about glyphcraft, so you’ll learn fast, I think.”

I frowned. “But there’s no, like, tricks or techniques to make sure you’ve got the right tension and twist and to keep everything neat?”

“We normally use substrates anyway, when we’re not in the middle of a fight,” she pointed out. “For snapweaving, there are tricks, but there’s not a reason to learn those instead of just practicing the most useful fighting glyphs themselves.”

I didn’t love that answer. Substrates made most things easy, to be sure, at least in the context of working on my mantle; just print the design and follow the grooves, like I had done to make my wig. All hail the 3D printer. But weaving without a substrate seemed like an inevitability given how frequently I’d been getting into dangerous situations since getting flametouched, to say nothing of all the little things in life that minor telekinesis and other simple magic made easier, as Amane frequently showed. And beyond the practical, snapweaving just seemed so much more magical than the engineering of GWalk, as much as I loved that; the Vaetna didn’t need substrates.

“Okay,” I agreed. “So just practice. Sure. But, like…it’s all just by feel?” I held up my newly-armored hand. “What if these get thicker and I lose dexterity? Wouldn’t that throw off all my muscle memory?”

Amane immediately made me feel stupid without saying a word: she smirked, lifted up her fancy prosthetic with the lower-quality one and engulfed both in a brief puff of purple flame.

“Oh. Fair.” I lowered my head, conceding the point. Amane used slightly different arms all the time, sometimes on very short notice, and was able to weave fine with all of them. “Okay, yeah, I’ll learn.”

“Do you have a project you want to learn with?” Ai asked.

I realized I hadn’t actually told them about my mantle yet. “Oh—um, yeah, I do. A mantle, or the start of one. Er—” I rapidly began to backpedal. “Not, like, a real serious full thing, and not with all the Radiance bells and whistles, I just felt like, um, I could use a kind of blank-slate template to try different looks. Gender, you see,” I added lamely, as though that one word could communicate everything about my face and body I didn’t like.

She looked amused. “Gender. I see.”

Amane pierced me with a calculating look. She asked me in halting English: “Vaetna body? Girl body? Mecha body?”

I should have anticipated a question like that. “Uh. Well, most of your mantles are based on your own bodies, right? Using them as templates, so I figured I’d start there and kind of jiggle settings and proportions around. Face specifically, since I…I don’t want this to be my face on TV,” I admitted. It came out all on its own. “Uh. Gender, again, but also, like, the transhumanist side too. You get that, right? Since you don’t use your real face or body at all in your mantle. Would it be okay to just…do a version of my body without the face, or with some kind of static mask?” I felt the need to justify further with practical reasons rather than just my own whims about appearance. “And if we’re going to be getting in more fights—since Sugawara’s still out there, and the Peacies are going to show up soon according to Yuuka and honestly at this point I’m under no illusions about that resolving in a totally diplomatic way—I guess giving it some weapons and stuff would be a good idea. Maybe I’m not turning into a Vaetna, but an LM construct would be the next best thing, yeah? Sounds a little like scope creep, I know. Is that too hard for a beginner?”

Ai shook her head. “It’s an ambitious first project, but you would make it work. And of course we’d be able to help you. I think doing one without a face would be a fine place to start. It simplifies things.”

Amane nodded in agreement. “No face, no problem.”

Their support was incredibly exciting, but some anxious part of me was held back by the fear that this was too big of a leap. Being on camera with my own face was horrible, but being on camera with no face at all would send an impression of its own. “Um, are you sure?”

Ai smiled at me. “Yes, I’m sure. This is a whole body for you, Ezzen, you’re allowed to make it look however it makes you happy. And there are many options. Think of Ebi; she has a face, and we could have given her a properly sculpted and articulated physical one, but she didn’t want that. The screen one she has is a good middle ground to give her options, but she’d still clearly be herself without it.”

“Huh.” I hadn’t thought of that either. The idea of emoting with things other than facial expressions, like Ebi did, seemed very natural to me; that was the fault of years spent talking almost exclusively in the chatroom and on the forums. “Okay, yeah. A screen-type face would be kind of interesting.”

“Share the designs with us and we’d be happy to help,” Ai added. “Any of us. It would be so interesting to see what you do for a mantle from no basis. You already have the schematics for all of our mantles in their current forms, but let me see if I can find any older designs that might be helpful.”

“Yeah, thanks, that’d be awesome.”

Silence fell for a little while as she did that. Amane seemed to have fixed the issues in her defunct arm and was now starting to put it back together, placing tiny screws back in their original spots and clicking external panels back into place. She summoned a thread of her Flame and began to weave. That reminded me of something else I had wanted to ask.

“Um, Ai?”

“Yes?”

“How do I manifest and manipulate my Flame without pain? Doesn’t contorting it to make the glyphs hurt it automatically? How do you two do it?”

“Ah.” Ai sat back in her chair. She summoned a spark of viridian fire from her forefinger, twirling it around the digit. “We didn’t talk about this since…your first day here, I think? And I told you that pain is powerful.”

“Mhm?” I grew slightly suspicious. “Were you oversimplifying?”

“Sort of. For most flamebearers, pain—physical and emotional—is easy because it’s naturally so intense, and so many of us experience a lot of it in our first few minutes and hours after being flametouched, so it becomes familiar to use very quickly. And it comes included when you use sanguimancy, even though the blood price is its own, separate fuel. But there’s nothing making pain the default. The Flame is interested in all strong emotions, and will get used to whatever you feed it.”

I nodded. That much made sense to me; I remembered lunging at Takagiri with desperation as she went to finish off Yuuka. It seemed like so long ago now, even though it had been less than a week. And Sugawara’s Flame-ghost had been animated by his desires to control and dominate, as I’d felt when I’d touched it. “Okay. So what do you use? Because I remember, back when we first talked about this, Ebi made some sort of intimation that you, um, weren’t necessarily using all good emotions.”

“Me? I like to help people,” Ai asserted. “And that’s a stronger emotion than it might sound. It’s a kind of love, in my opinion. And…duty. I think that’s the word in English. But…” she sighed, leaning forward as though she were about to confess a crime, suddenly looking very tired. “It’s two-sided, and there is a kind of pain in it. Grief, frustration, guilt. That’s what keeps me up at night, as you’ve seen.”

“You do your best work when you’re guilty,” I quoted Hina.

“Yes.”

The conversation lulled again. Ai didn’t seem willing to offer any more on the matter, and I was busy chewing on this revelation. It was obvious, in a sense, that you could use anything. What could I use? I liked to think I had a surplus of belief in helping people, the same as Ai, though mine was more rooted in the Vaetna’s own philosophy and ethos rather than her mix of philanthropy and self-flagellation. Would that work?

Amane popped off her temporary arm and put the new one back on. The indicator lights flashed on as she tested the digits. Then she looked at me. “I use ikari.”

I didn’t know that word, though something in my memories of my brief, Hina-enforced foray into Evangelion was pinging it as familiar. I looked to Ai for a translation, whose expression had soured a bit. “I don’t want to translate that,” she sighed. “But I will. Anger.”

I looked at Amane, somehow unsurprised. “Anger? Rage, fury, all that?”

“Hai,” Amane replied. 

“That…tracks,” I admitted, remembering how she had looked last night. Granted, fighting Sugawara was probably about as personal as it got for her, and anybody would be angry under those circumstances, but this also contextualized the massive explosion she’d performed against the Peacies on the Thunder Horse oil rig from the other side of the world. Amane was beautiful and sweet and I absolutely believed she was capable of the kind of rage necessary for that, at least against the people who had kidnapped and mutilated and probably tortured her. But for everything else? “Even for regular weaving, not just fighting? Like, I definitely powered my Flame with what I’d call desperation or anger when I was fighting Takagiri in the inferno, but that was the emotions of that singular moment, not…”

Then I remembered the single word my Flame had said during the fighting last night. Repugnant. It had encountered Sugawara and surged in…righteous disgust? That was definitely an emotion I’d occasionally felt when thinking about the worst kinds of flamebearers, the self-made god-kings and cult leaders, and it had resonated with my Flame strongly enough to incinerate the briars of his concentrated id. Suddenly I understood where Amane was coming from.

“Hai,” she repeated, this time as an affirmation to my question about her using it all the time. She went for her phone to type something into the translator app, unwilling to make Ai interpret for her further. She held up the translated message.

Amane: Do you think it’s inherently evil?

“Um, no, no, of course not,” I clarified. “I think I get it, actually. Just…you were using it just now, yeah? That means it’s always there for you to call upon it. You don’t show it.”

She shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for. Thanks for telling me. I think…I think I’ve got something similar that might work. Maybe not for all the time, but when it really matters, and for the mantle. I don’t really know how to describe it. Like, um. The desire to destroy evil. Wait, shit,” I realized, “the moral imperative to destroy evil is both a Vaetna and Radiance thing, isn’t it.”

“Mahou shoujo desu ne,” Amane chuckled, grinning at Ai, who was looking at me judgmentally. I winced.

“Sorry?”

Ai caught herself and waved her hands hurriedly. “I’m sorry. That’s good, if it will work for you. I was just thinking about what you told Amane. You don’t show it either.”

“Um, it’s sort of new. And it might not even work, I’ll have to see.”

“Try love!” said Hina’s voice behind me. I swiveled my chair, this time ready for her customary greeting as I was pounced on. For once, it was a relatively chaste hug and nuzzle, and Hina made no attempt to squeeze herself into the chair with me, possibly out of respect for Ai’s apparent dislike for even her non-masochistic displays of affection.

“For powering my Flame?”

“Huh? No, it was general advice. Try love!” She repeated it, this time with a wink that made me suspect it was innuendo.

“I meant for magic,” I explained, blushing despite myself. “For my mantle. Uh, please don’t start arguing with Ai or Amane about pain.”

“Wasn’t gonna! Hi, Ai, Amane!”

“Hina-san,” Ai replied. Amane waved with her mechanical arm and asked a question.

“Oh, it’s lame, so I ditched. Bureau fucks are being all ‘we know you were connected to last night’ and we’re all ‘we’ll pay for their hospital bills and also it was self defense’ and I’m not sure they’re buying it. Alice doesn’t need me there for that part, so I came here to see you guys! Ai, you mentioned toys, I wanna see toys.”

“Toys?” I asked. “Oh, the new prostheses for my foot?”

Ai brightened at that and lurched out of her chair, so much more human and weighed down than Hina despite being more muscular. “Oh, yes, toys. And for once that’s accurate, I think, because some of my students overdid it a little.”

Author’s Note:

Cuddle puddle resolved without incident! Ez finally gets a physical (though not an exhaustive one)! Important talks about the magic system!

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

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June 27, 2025