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?”
“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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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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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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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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“An actual fucking ghost. Made of his Flame.” My head was buzzing with adrenaline from the last two minutes as I stared at the point in space where Sugawara had disappeared.
“Sure looks like it,” Ebi agreed. “Right back from the dead, a Flame facsimile of who they used to be. Who’d’ve thunk?”
“And he—and he went through the camera, like my Flamefall, and—holy fuck, my nose is bleeding,” I remembered. I wiped the back of my hand against my nose and was relieved to see less blood than there could have been. “This is just capillary blood, right? I’m not about to keel over from frying my frontal lobe and it’s just taking a while to catch up? Ebi?”
“You’re doing better than anybody else in the room, Ezzen.”
She was right: our shit was rocked.
Takagiri’s very soul had been put through the crucible, and though she was now finally getting some well-deserved sleep, it was impossible to say what kinds of effects the experience would have when paired with the extreme sleep deprivation she’d endured. I shuddered to think of the nightmares she might have been having; I expected that my own would feature twisting brambles and that hateful, incinerating desire to consume. I’d only made surface-level contact with what remained of Hikanome’s former cult leader compared to what Takagiri had gone through.
Amane had burned out and discarded her arm in the fighting, and now that we had a moment to breathe, the concentrated ripple we’d endured was leaving its mark on her. She had started coughing in the wet, phlegmy way that meant something was definitely wrong inside and had hurriedly sat down. Ebi immediately moved in to interface with her charge’s bionics.
As for me, the mania of combat and survival had me too jittery to focus on speculation as to the magical mechanics of what Sugawara had wrought; my senses were consumed by the real and present environment around me, still a little in fight-or-flight mode. In an effort to calm down, I sat down awkwardly next to the Radiance and her android doctor, far enough that I wouldn’t crowd them but close enough that I could feel like I was providing moral support with my presence, for whatever little that counted. I took a few deep, slow breaths in an effort to convince my body that the danger had passed—though I couldn’t prove it really had.
“She okay?”
“I’m fine,” Amane confirmed in thickly accented English, trying to sit up. She only made it halfway before she was consumed by another coughing fit. Ebi tutted at her and made her lie back down on the concrete floor.
“I’m keeping her stable,” Ebi answered for me.
I peeked shamefully at Amane’s exposed midriff, the area that had a bunch of silver ports and black plastic embedded in it, the bionics that were probably more important to her survival than her replacement limbs or eye. All five of Ebi’s fingers had found interfacing points, plunging into her abdomen. It wasn’t gory, but the edges of the implant were oozing blood, and even outside of that, it was distinctly skin-crawling for me to watch the maximally invasive medical hardware at work. I shifted my gaze to Ebi’s face instead; it was still scrambled into static.
“Are you good?” I asked.
“Hear that?”
“What? No? What am I listening for?” Then I realized I was hearing something distant, the very edge of a rising and falling wail. “Oh, shit. Sirens? Ripple alarms?”
“Yep. None in here, but they’re on every aboveground floor of the building. And I can’t turn them off.”
“And normally you can?” I inferred. Being so integrated into the systems of Lighthouse Tower, Ebi should have had seamless access to those systems, like how I’d been able to call for her earlier today. “Fuck. Shit. Should we clear out? Is it safe down here for…” I darted my eyes meaningfully in the direction of the not-quite-surgery she was performing.
“We’re already through the worst of it, and you’re all flamebearers. So it’s…fiiiiiiine, probably.” The vowel dragged out at a perfectly even pitch, like a program that had momentarily frozen, which was worrying.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“It’s a symptom of the bigger issue. I’m a little scrambled right now, pretty much stuck within this body until…well, until things settle down and/or Ai gets a chance to pop me open and fix me up. Also means I can’t turn off the sirens—remotely, anyway, and as you can see, I’m kinda occupied—or pull in some of my bigger tools, and, most importantly, I can’t get back in touch with the girls. Call them.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. Our own battle had been so intense I’d temporarily forgotten that the last we’d seen of them had been them springing a trap of unknown magic in the middle of hostile territory. And he’d jumped through Alice’s eye, or at least that of her mantle, to get here. I had an awful image of Alice writhing on the ground, being assaulted by the remnant briars of Sugawara’s malice while Hina and Yuuka were beset by secret assassins of Takagiri’s caliber, Yuuka’s eye failing her and Hina immobilized by the “net” they’d been talking about.
I rushed to pull my phone out of my pocket—my right pocket, which was a challenge when my right hand was in even worse condition than usual. The fingers were sluggish to respond, and my sense of touch was muted, the nerves’ limited capacity taken over by throbbing pain that came from the remaining red ripple floating around—and having absolutely roasted the skin of my arm with an extreme-intensity manifestation of my Flame. I’d kind of tuned that part out. It really should have been hurting more, and I silently thanked Ebi for the shot of painkillers she’d given me. I also suspected that my arm’s healing would involve some level of mutations; the pile of medical checkups that we’d already been meaning to do had grown to a rather ridiculous scale. I needed to stop getting into fights.
I gave up on using that arm to grab my phone and reached awkwardly across with my left, hurriedly scrolling through my phone. Suzuki Hina came up before Takehara Alice in alphabetical order, so she was the first one I called. The dial tone lasted only a tenth of a second before my girlfriend picked up.
“Cutie, holy shit, you’re okay?” Her voice was raspy, like she was winded from fighting hard. “When the call went dead after that fucker went through, we thought—oh, shit, are those the ripple sirens?”
“It’s—yeah, but we’re fine—how can you hear those through the phone? I can barely hear them here!” Next to me, Ebi made a little “get to the point”swatting motion with her free hand, the one not interfacing with Amane’s midsection. I coughed awkwardly. “Um, okay, no, we’re not completely fine. Sugawara came here when he went through the camera, but we got rid of him. Things are stable,” I assured them with confidence I didn’t quite feel. “Are you okay?”
“Chillin’! I was scared when he jumped through Alice but she’s fine, we’re fine, and we’re cleaning up now, lots of fun, everybody left is just humans so it’s—yeah, okay, Alice, fine.”
A few clicking noises heralded that the phone had been handed over, and Alice’s voice came through. “Ezzen, he came into the tower? Alive?”
“As—a Flame spirit or something, I don’t know what to call it. Does that mean we don’t have to have our, um, ‘honest debate about the existence of the soul,’ or…?”
“Is that a joke? A Flame spirit?”
“Um, yeah? I was sort of hoping you knew what that was, because I don’t.”
“Well—you’re burying the lede, Ezzen. Are you saying you killed him?”
I bit my lip, knowing they wouldn’t be happy about this part. “He got away. Blinked out.”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a few moments. Then I flinched as a yell came through the speaker. It was too muffled to make out the words, but from the tone, I could tell that it was a roar of frustration from…I presumed Yuuka. Alice spoke over her teammate’s rage, softly but urgently.
“Can you track him?”
“No! Things are a mess here, and we’re all too roughed up. Sorry,” I added, feeling genuinely ashamed.
Hina shouted out. “But you beat him! Yuuka, calm down, they still beat him. Babe, should I go back and look around?”
“He’s…I think he’s long gone,” I sighed. “Sorry, again.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Alice assured me, “This is way outside anything I could have imagined from this. Splitting himself out of his whole body…insane, but we can figure out what exactly he did and how to find him later. Let’s declare mission success for the night, in terms of getting our people back and eliminating the old Hikanome’s last stronghold. Ezzen, how bad is it over there, other than the sirens?”
“Uh…Takagiri’s safe, asleep in the coffin, and I don’t think he’ll be coming back to haunt her. No bomb, it turns out. He…tried to take control of her, but I did some stuff with my Flame and burned him out, and then he ran away when we tried to capture him in the coffin.”
There was a pregnant pause before Alice replied. “And by ‘stuff with your Flame,’ you mean…”
“No blood magic! I think. I mean, there’s blood, but I didn’t sacrifice anything, and, um—”
“Awww,” Hina interrupted, sounding terribly disappointed. “But you’re okay?”
“I think so. Um—I don’t want to take all the credit, it was a team effort between me and Takagiri. Ebi and Amane helped too, and, uh…fuck,” I blurted, realizing the mistake I made even as the other end of the call got very noisy. Amane wasn’t supposed to be down here. Yuuka and Alice, at least, had made it quite clear they wanted her as far as possible away from Takagiri, and that had been under circumstances far more mild than the combat I’d just described. I heard some scattered, staticky muttering from the other end, and then a new voice came on the line: Yuuka. Hina’s phone must have been on speaker. “What do you mean Amane helped?”
I cast a panicked glance over at Amane, who was squeezing her eyes shut as Ebi performed what seemed an awful lot like internal surgery. It briefly crossed my mind to lie, to tell them that she had been helping in some indirect way and any injury was because she’d been rocked by the ambient ripple that had set off the wailing sirens even way up in the penthouse—but realistically, that jig would be up as soon as they got back anyway. Honesty was the best policy.
“She was—she came down here to help with the coffin. And got caught up in the fighting. But she’s fine, really, I swear.” I briefly lowered the phone and hit mute to talk to Ebi. “She is fine, right?”
“Tell them she’s at a five.”
“Out of ten?” That honestly didn’t sound as bad as I had expected.
“Her scale is lower on both ends than yours.”
“…Oh.” I unmuted the phone. “Ebi says she’s at a five.”
Alice’s response was instant. “We’re coming back right now.”
“Fuck fuck fuck, I knew there had to be a catch.” Hina whined, a response that worried me more about the severity of the situation than the actual state of the room around me.
Yuuka growled. “You put her face to face with him and didn’t even fucking kill him?”
“Yuuka, no,” Alice cut in. “That’s not fair and you know it. Ezzen, we’re on our way back. Sit tight for a few minutes, yeah?”
“Um, yeah.” Then I noticed that Amane was making a grabbing gesture in my direction with her good arm. “Wait, hold on, I’m giving the phone to Amane.”
I passed it over. Amane raised the phone to her ear, hissed something at her teammates, and then jabbed the “End Call” button with her thumb, glaring at the phone. She handed it to Ebi, who gave it back to me.
I accepted the phone with a skeptical look at the grumpy Radiance. “…Not made of glass, I take it?”
She snorted and looked up at the ceiling, seeming more exasperated and exhausted than in pain. Ebi interpreted as she began to speak. “I wasn’t going to get into an argument over the phone. You saw upstairs how hard it is to get them to listen when the weather is good, and when it’s bad? I’d rather just do what has to be done and ask for forgiveness after.”
“Mm,” I replied sympathetically. My good hand picked at the singed skin on my other wrist. I realized what I was doing and stopped. “Yeah. That sounds…tedious.”
Amane nodded, tensed up for a moment as Ebi wriggled a finger in her midsection, then shifted a bit, raising her remaining hand to use it as a pillow against the concrete. “They’ll forgive me. It wasn’t even that bad.”
“This isn’t that bad?” I waved my burned hand in the general direction of the coffin.
“Building’s still standing,” Ebi pointed out in her own voice. “And not only did I not have to open either of you up, I think you’ll even get to sleep in your own beds tonight instead of in the medical ward. Compared to the barbie, I’d say that’s a solid success, even if we didn’t kill the fucker.” She had inserted “the barbie” as a soundbite of Yuuka’s voice.
Amane tilted her head to look at her kneeling caretaker with her one vivid green eye and said something Ebi didn’t translate. It sounded like a joke, but that would be sort of weird given what I understood of Amane’s history with Sugawara. I looked between the two of them. “Uh?”
Ebi replied to her in Japanese, then turned her head to look at me, which was a little unsettling when she didn’t have a face. “Nothing.” She retracted her fingers from the ports in Amane’s belly, the pinky and ring fingers telescoping back down to reasonable lengths while the others, far more wicked and invasive-looking, folded out of our plane to be replaced by regular digits. She patted her hands together with a soft clack. “Okay, let’s see if I can’t get you two cleaned up by the time the girls get home.”
We spent the next few minutes doing just that. Amane’s discarded arm would need repairs, but for now, her one-armed status was easily resolved by Ebi, who disappeared Hina-style and reappeared a moment later holding what looked like a slightly older version of the bionic limb and helped her fit it on. This version had an audible whirring to its movements as she tested its range of motion. Satisfied, she stood with Ebi’s help and went over to a panel on the wall. She hit a button, and her voice began to echo over the PA system, speaking surprisingly crisply and evenly, and soon, the sirens finally stopped wailing.
That was a mask all the Radiances were experienced in putting on in crisis situations, I imagined, and I felt some envy at their ability to enter that mode. I had fantasies of being able to entirely take command of a situation, like the Vaetna could, but in reality, I knew that I’d become a fumbling mess the moment I had to actually start giving orders.
“Is that the all-clear?”
“To use the weather metaphor, she’s saying it’s still overcast, but not actively raining anymore.”
“…You can use technical terminology with me.”
“I can,” she agreed. “Arm.”
By now, my face-holes had stopped bleeding, which was great, so my freezerburnt arm represented the bulk of the external damage I’d endured. I held it out dutifully, and she sprayed it with some kind of gel before wrapping it in gauze.
“All self-inflicted again,” she noted. “Could have probably made it work with the spear instead of frying your hand.”
I was too tired to contend that I hadn’t immediately passed out like the last few times, making this an improvement. “How long til it heals? Same recovery timeline as my foot?”
The android shrugged. “Hard to say. That was your own Flame doing that, so all bets are off. I’d give it 80-20 odds it heals way faster than it should.”
“You can’t tell how much green there is?”
“My gauges are fried, dawg, and you’ll probably get a full physical tomorrow anyway. Just take off the gauze before you go to bed, and we’ll see how it is in the morning.”
Before I could interrogate the fact that an android had just called me “dawg,” I heard a sticky buzzing sound to my right, like a zipper coated in fresh glue, and reflexively turned to face the sound, fearing it was somehow Sugawara returning. Instead, my sapphire-eyed girlfriend stepped out from behind nonexistent curtains.
“Cutie! Ebi! Amane! Uh, Izumi too, I guess!” Her nose crinkled. “Oh, fuck, yeah, I can smell him.”
A pump of adrenaline shot through my system. “Fuck, where—”
Hina waved her hands hurriedly. “No, I didn’t mean it like he’s still here. But he definitely was. Let me get his nastiness out of my nose real quick.”
She bounded over to us, kneeling behind me to hug me across the shoulders and bury her nose in my hair. Animal relief at her return spread through me; I felt her smile infect my face as well. Her joy was transmissible by touch, and it was so very welcome after the brief but harrowing experience I’d just been through. “Hey.”
Hina purred into my back by way of reply, then stood as quick as an arrow to move over and hug Ebi as well before darting across the room to greet Amane in a flurry of cheerful Japanese. She was back by my side a moment later, peering at my freshly wrapped arm.
“Barbecued,” she observed.
“Hey, no,” I snapped. Ebi’s reference earlier had already been in poor taste, but I had come to expect that sort of thing from her—especially with the soundboard she had for a mouth. I drew the line when it was coming from the person who’d been directly responsible for the disaster; I really felt Hina should know better.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t drool,” Ebi chided.
Hina wiped her mouth theatrically. “I’m so happy you guys are okay! The others are coming back the slow way, so they’re a couple of minutes behind.”
“You’re just leaving the cult?” I couldn’t help but wonder. “I mean, I know you didn’t go in intending to make arrests or something, but there’s still got to be a bunch of his loyalists there, yeah? You’re not gonna…clean them up?”
“Meh, I think they’re done for, cops were starting to come in when we left. The nice thing about cults that form around us is that they don’t do so good once they’re headless. Heh, headless. We got rid of the body just in case, but I’m pretty sure that was their one shot.” She looked over to the coffin. “And that one shot was…possession? Talk me through how it happened.”
“Tried to hijack her through their connection, I think. But we forced him out.” At that, Hina’s expression turned a little hungry; I sensed she wanted the gory details of flamebearer-on-flamebearer combat. I hated to disappoint. “I, um, don’t really feel up to recounting exactly how that went down right now, sorry. It was rough.”
The barest flicker of disappointment raced across Hina’s face, gone as quickly as it had arrived. I was relieved that she recognized the boundary I had set with that statement. She took my good hand in hers. “Okay. You okay? You have to at least tell me if you’re not okay, okay?”
“I’m okay, just…just tired.” That was true enough; I was very ready to wrap this up, go to bed, and deal with all of this tomorrow, and was starting to consider ways that I could turn the conversation toward what we had to do to reach that goal. “Um, how much of this can we leave for the morning?” I asked, gesturing at the room around us.
“Depends on whether he’s gone,” Hina sighed. “How badly did you beat him?”
“We did win…I think. It felt like he was beaten, not retreating and planning to counterattack.”
We’d driven him off, certainly, but for all we knew, he might loop back on us at any moment, diving right back into Takagiri’s body. Whatever sort of ghost, spirit, phantasm, or ghoul he had become, it was all outside the realm of scientific knowledge, and we had no idea what he was capable of. We had to confirm he wasn’t waiting in the wings for us to let our guard down.
Ebi tilted her head and attacked my confidence directly. “You don’t have the experience to say he’s gone.”
“Listen—it’s a vibe, alright? I was…okay, yeah, if I’m wrong and he does come back tonight, the coffin won’t protect her,” I admitted. “All those wards face inward, and the top ones are fried anyway.”
Hina thought about this for a moment; I could practically see the gears turning behind those beautiful blue eyes. “Hm. Sounds like I gotta go hunting. Know where he went?”
“No,” I sighed. I followed her gaze to the laptop acting as the coffin’s brains, feeling guilty. “I could have been looking at the activity graphs when he blinked out, tried to at least triangulate his direction from the relative ward pressures, but things were happening fast, and—”
Amane limped back over toward us, favoring her bionic leg, and said something curt to Hina, who frowned and began to bicker back. “Hey, we have to do something about him, I’m not letting him just float around out there—no, it’s not about you specifically, babe, iraira shinaide yo!” I glanced at Ebi in a wordless plea for translation and explanation; Hina caught the look and switched fully into English. “Just, uh, I don’t get why Amane doesn’t want me to go after Sugawara.”
Ebi cut to the chase. “Because he’s not coming back. Not tonight, at least.”
Amane wordlessly gestured at her caretaker in a “See? She gets it!” kind of way.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “I mean, I want to believe it, but I feel like I’m missing context. He seemed incredibly desperate to me.”
Ebi crossed her arms. “Yeah, he’s desperate, starving animal style, and desperation is hella dangerous, but he’s also a coward. Amane and I weren’t in his head like you, Ezzie, but we knew him, and he’s probably even more distilled down to his worst qualities now that he’s a Force ghost or whatever, and that means survival at any cost. Do you really think he’s stupid enough to think he could slink back here in the dead of night, hijack Takagiri again—if he even can anymore—and then make his escape without us catching up to him? What he cares about right now is survival, and he’s smart enough to know that his best odds of surviving involve staying far as hell away from us.”
This seemed sensible to me. I didn’t particularly want to replay everything I’d felt in his head; the corrosive touch of his soul was all thorns and sharp edges that I really didn’t feel like cutting myself on with detailed recollection. But looking at what I remembered of him at the most broad level, Ebi’s analysis did seem to track: survival was his primary concern, and while rage and consumptive greed were what animated him, he did seem the type who’d prefer to live to fight another day—insofar as “live” applied to his new state of existence.
“We still can’t just leave him out there!” Hina protested.
“We can for tonight,” said a new voice from the doorway. Alice stood there, looking rather windswept; her hair, usually carefully styled, was in complete disarray, with parts sticking in every direction like the spines of an indecisive silver hedgehog. She’d probably flown back here unmantled. Yuuka was with her, still in the even-darker variant of her mantle.
“Babe!” Hina pouted. “I thought we were gonna fuckin’ end this tonight, though? How am I the voice of reason here?”
Alice pinched the bridge of her nose and paced toward us, the tip of her tail scraping on the floor behind her with a hiss that made me hope her scales were harder than the concrete. Her movements didn’t suggest injury; whatever effects Sugawara’s imitation of my flamefall had had on her seemed limited entirely to her mantle. “Having heard the arguments—well put, Ebi, by the way—I think we’re good for tonight, and we could all use a full night’s rest. And besides, we’ve got Yuuka.”
“Who’s been unreliable as shit recently,” Hina pointed out, doing something with her body that looked like shifting her weight between her legs impatiently but which I suspected was closer to a cat’s butt-wiggles as it wound up for a pounce.
“Hey, kemono, I’m fine for this,” Yuuka riposted, scanning the room with her crystalline eye. “He’s not coming back tonight, and I’ll sign that in blood once we get Ezza out of here and I can take a better look.”
Hina brightened. “Hey, if your eye’s up to it, then we can do a classic Sapphire-and-Heliotrope murder date! We could probably find and kill him by morning!”
Alice drove the heels of her hands against her temples in frustration—and probably to alleviate the ache of budding horns, if I was being honest. “Hina. The last thing we need is another clusterfuck right now. We have no idea what he’s capable of, and the one thing we do know is that he does not have to be tonight’s problem.”
Hina looked around her team for support, seemingly at a loss.
“Hey,” I interrupted softly, tugging on my girlfriend’s shirt. “Listen to them. Can we be done for tonight?”
Hina turned and looked at me, then threw her hands up. “Fine, sure, yeah. Okay. Yeah! Sure. No hunting, just letting our worst enemy wander around Tokyo. Awesome. I’m cool with that. Cutie, we need a shower.”
“We?”
We did not make half as snappy of an exit as that line implied; no simply being whisked through fourspace directly to my bedroom. In fact, not only did Hina and I walk out of the coffin’s wrecked lab and down the hall to the elevator like normal people, we were actually accompanied by the rest of the team as we piled into the elevator, sans Yuuka, who stayed behind to see if she could glean any foresight from the tides of ripple our battle had wrought or might yet wreak. Awkward silence loomed throughout our ride to the top of the building; any collective desire to debrief the night’s events was overruled by exhaustion and simply being done with this shit. Alice had an arm wrapped around Amane, who neither reciprocated nor protested. Even Ebi didn’t seem in the mood to quip.
We dispersed on the 20th floor. Alice and Amane went to their shared room, Ebi to Ai’s with its digital readout that confirmed that she was in there and had slept through it all, and Hina followed me into my suite, through the still-mostly-unfurnished anteroom and into my bedroom.
“So…‘shower’, you said?” I hadn’t had the nerve to ask whether that was innuendo until it was just the two of us alone together, but now I was trying to rally the last dregs of courage from my depleted supply. “Because, um, not to turn you down or disappoint, but if you mean, er, copulation, I really don’t have the wherewithal tonight for—”
“Cutie. Babe. You’re limping, sweaty, and still have some dried blood on your face.”
“I thought pain was, like, your whole thing?” I twirled a finger in front of my face. “This isn’t doing it for you?”
“Oh, no, it totally is, but if we’re gonna fuck, we’re gonna fuck hard when you’re feeling your best. And that’s not you tonight. Shower means shower, let’s clean up and go to bed, for reals.”
And we did just that. Even in my exhausted state, it was still a little titillating to see Hina casually strip down, but she did it quickly and without ceremony, nary a shake of her hips nor sultry look as her underwear came off. She did smile at me, but it was just one of encouragement.
“Hey, it’s just me.”
“It is,” I agreed. “Sorry, just—not used to you being naked.” I looked down at myself, still yet to undress at all. “And, um, normally I want you to look at me when I’m naked, but right now…”
“No worries!” She hopped toward the bathroom. “Gonna get the shower warmed up. Come in when you’re ready.”
The white noise of the shower’s spray brought a welcome layer of insulation from everything.
Now given some measure of privacy, I set about undressing, pulling off my shirt—Hina was right about the sweat. The garment was positively soaked through, and I hadn’t even noticed. I sniffed my armpit hesitantly and crinkled my nose at the stench, suddenly very embarrassed that I had shared an elevator with three women who had absolutely been able to smell that. And Ebi, but she didn’t have a nose. Or maybe she did, but she regularly encountered far grosser stuff than my body odor anyway.
As I pulled the shirt’s sleeve over my gauze-ensnared hand, I realized I wasn’t sure what to do about the bandages. Ebi had seemed confident the skin on my arm would heal fast, and had told me to take off the gauze before bed; was I supposed to take it off now, hardly ten minutes after it had been applied? I reached for my phone and messaged her. Then waited. My concern deepened as five seconds dragged to ten. The android usually always replied instantly.
“Hey, Hina?”
“Yeah?” Her voice was muffled by the shower door as she called over the shower’s noise.
“I’m not sure what to do about my hand’s bandages, and Ebi’s a little weird after the fight, so I can’t text her. Gonna go ask her in person what to do really quick…if that’s okay,” I added awkwardly.
“No prob!”
I grabbed a fresh shirt and set off toward Ai’s room, but as I closed my room’s door behind me and looked down the row of the team’s rooms, I saw Yuuka standing there—and not in front of her own door, instead in front of Alice and Amane’s room, hand on the doorknob. She was looking in my direction, not surprised in the slightest. I nodded briefly at her, averted my eyes, and began to route around her through the central common space, hoping to avoid a conversation when I was just trying to get past.
“Don’t get it wet, scrub it, or pick at it,” she told me.
I paused, looking at her. “Are you relaying that for Ebi?”
“Don’t need to. It’ll get nasty if you take off the gauze and try to wash it, so just try to keep it dry and then take off the gauze when you get in bed.”
“…Thanks for the prophecy. Cool. Right.” I turned around to go back to my room; the chances that Yuuka was intentionally trying to sabotage my recovery for some reason were very low, and if I didn’t have to bother Ebi, awesome.
As I turned to go back to my room, Yuuka continued, “And as for this, yeah, I’m sleeping with them tonight. Amane’s safer that way. So what?”
I furrowed my brow, wondering why she’d bothered to bring it up. Surely, she could foresee that I didn’t really care, or at least had no interest in judging her for it. “Um—good for you? Not my business, your prerogative, et cetera. Good night?”
“Night,” she said, pushing her way into Amane and Alice’s room.
Confused by that interaction, I went back into my own room and got back to undressing. I took off my foot prosthetic and was relieved to see that, despite how my foot had hurt while fighting Sugawara, it didn’t seem visibly injured, no blood or other gross biomatter. I also realized that we were probably due to look at the prototype prosthetics Ai had ordered from her underlings the day I had woken up at Todai. Would any of them be waterproof?
Those sorts of thoughts kept my mind occupied enough to not think about how I was now fully naked and about to present myself to my girlfriend, who was still waiting in the shower. I resisted the urge to wrap a towel around my waist, given that it would be discarded immediately, and limped to the closed glass door separating the toilet and basin from the unit shower.
“Okay, um,” I called out. “Ready?”
“Yeah, yeah, just come in! Don’t gotta make an event out of it.”
I pulled open the door and saw Hina lying directly in the middle of the shower floor, spread-eagle and face up, the shower’s spray aimed directly at her chest. She raised her head and an arm to wave at me. I was at a loss for words for a moment; she had somehow managed to pick one of the only possible poses that would make someone as attractive as her seem unsexy in this situation. As that minor amazement passed, I was instead filled with mild disgust at the hygienics of the arrangement. “Hey, no. That cannot be clean; it’s a shower floor.”
Hina begrudgingly got up, reddish-brown hair matting against her shoulders like a rag under the water. Then she grinned at me. “You look great! So smooth!”
“Um.”
“Aw, no good?”
I tried to put the burst of discomfort into words. “Just—no, it’s good, but…I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just don’t know what to say to that. You…look good too, I guess? Am I allowed to say that?”
She put her hands on her hips, still grinning. “Hey, thanks! It’s fine if you don’t want to talk, we’re just getting cleaned up. Like I said, this doesn’t have to be an event.” Her arm snapped outward to pluck the showerhead from its mount and brandished it upward like a firearm. She stepped toward me in one graceful step and extended her other arm invitingly as support for my clumsy, disabled self. “Shall we?”
I took the hand, blushing hard despite my valiant attempts to be unembarrassed and not think of it as “an event.” Hina sat me down on the little fold-out seat and began to gently hose me down with hot water. She’d procured a very large, blue loofah from her own bathroom, which I used to scrub myself down, trying not to look directly at her nubile form. At some point, we traded loofah and showerhead, and she did the scrubbing while I directed the water, which I expected to be more sensual but honestly just felt like…scrubbing. After a little while, I had a hunch.
“Um, the fluffy thing. Are you using that specifically so you don’t touch me directly?”
Hina wrung out her hair, looking a little guilty. “Um, yeah. Figured you’d be more comfy that way.”
“Thanks,” I muttered. “I—yeah, I know we’ve already touched each other plenty, but that’s…right now, that’s good.”
“Yay! I’m glad that’s comfy for you. What are you afraid of?”
I frowned at her. “A little direct, that.” Before her expression could collapse into disappointment, I reached out to touch her forearm gently. “It’s okay. Uh—I just don’t want to be a…lecher? A horny weirdo? Feels like that’s kind of my default.”
“Cutie, aside from some totally-within-reason wandering eyes, you’ve been pristine. Between the two of us, I have enough horny weirdo to go around, ‘kay? I’m trying really hard to respect your pace here.”
“Mm.” The affirmation was nice to hear, and at some level, I believed it, enough that I didn’t argue. It emboldened me to try to put my feelings into words. “I think you’re doing a good job, then. I feel…I don’t know, taken care of? Not like an intruder for once.”
“Being in here with you feels like hiding from dealing with Sugawara.”
I stared at her. “Hiding? We all told you that we weren’t going to deal with that tonight.”
“I know! It’s stupid! ‘Cause I feel like I’m doing shitty, like I’m not really taking care of them if I’m letting Sugawara run around out there.”
“You don’t trust Yuuka’s eye?”
“I do, mostly! She’s great, I love her, and she’s so important. But it’s been so off lately, and I’ve had this itch, like I need to cover for if she’s really wrong. Don’t feel comfy putting all our eggs in that basket. You know?”
“Uh.” I glanced at my arm, which I’d been careful to keep dry per Yuuka’s instructions. “Yeah, I guess. My fault, I suppose, since I seem to be the source of the interference.”
“No, cutie, you can’t be blaming yourself, that’s stupid.”
“Right back at you.” I felt very clever after that.
She entirely stopped moving for a second, then giggled. “Damn, you got me. I know it’s stupid, I just…okay, can you hear me out for a second?”
I eyed her, dread rising within me. “Are you about to pitch that we dry off and go out to find him alone, in the middle of the night?”
“No…”
I waved assent, relieved. “Then go on.”
“Can we sleep with the others tonight?”
Now it was my turn to entirely pause, my hand still half-raised from the gesture. “Like. In Alice and Amane’s room? In the same bed? Just making sure we’re on the same page here.”
“Mhm! We used to do it all the time when we got Amane back. Actually, with how tonight has gone, Yuuka’s probably already in there with them.”
“…She is, yeah. I saw her go in when I went to talk to Ebi,” I confirmed. “And I think she’d object rather stringently, even if the others were okay with it, which I’m not sure they would be.”
“She won’t!”
“Which you know how, exactly? Also, um, could you give me that and turn around, please?”
“Huh? Oh, sure.” She passed me the showerhead and dutifully spun around in place as I washed my crotch. It had been theoretically exposed this whole time, but I wanted to do as little as possible to draw attention to it, especially since I needed a second to familiarize myself with the freshly completely hairless state of my body. Hina continued while she was turned around. “Yuuka thinks you’re chill, don’t worry.”
“I’m worrying,” I admitted. “I mean, thinking I’m chill is one thing, but sleeping in the same bed? What if I, like, flail around in my sleep and wind up with a hand on her…” I trailed off.
Hina snorted. “Nah. Also, think about it: if there was a chance that we were gonna wind up in a cuddle pile tonight, and she wasn’t open to the idea, do you think she’d’n’t’ve done anything to make sure that didn’t happen? Like not sleeping in Amane and Alice’s room to begin with?”
It was good logic, a reminder that Hina was more calculating than she sometimes acted—or at least that she could back up her impulses with intelligent reasoning when she cared to. But there was a problem. “Weren’t you just pointing out that her foresight has been unreliable? Oh—you can turn back around now.”
“Hmpf,” she said as she turned back to me, and absolutely blasted me with those damnable puppy eyes at full force, leaning down toward me and doing an incredible impression of a pathetic, sopping wet mutt left desolate and abandoned in the rain. “Please? I promise she won’t get mad, and neither will the others, and it’ll be team bonding after everything we did tonight! And it’ll make me feel better but it won’t if it’s just me there and not you too, so please?”
I sprayed her in the face with the showerhead. Hadn’t Ebi once recommended I keep this girl away with a spray bottle? I now understood why; this upgunned version was very effective in warding off that overwhelmingly cute visage. Hina recovered quickly, wiping off her face and pouting. “Alice is so warm,” she added. “In the winter, with the room heating off and the window cracked, it’s so nice.”
Incredibly, that was what won me over. I sighed. “Sure. That does sound nice. But if they freak out, I’m pinning it on you, yeah?”
“Mhm! I’ll scape your goat, cutie.”
We finished the shower soon after and got dressed; Hina threw on some of my clean nightclothes, claiming she could still mildly smell my scent on them. I have to admit I was a big fan of seeing my garments on her smaller frame. I put my prosthetic back on and let Hina lead me to the other room, feeling quite like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to, like sneaking down into the kitchen past midnight for some leftover pie even though Dad told me that was bad for you.
It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant feeling at first, but each step along the row of doors made me more stressed. This was a far more direct and uninvited intrusion upon a girl’s space—girls, plural, in this case, which was even worse—than anything I’d done so far. I pictured how wrong this could go, all the tentative trust and goodwill I’d built up shattered in a single moment of Hina-induced disrespect of boundaries as Yuuka unloaded a torrent of expletives I’d never even heard of before. I’d gone through multiple life-or-death magical disasters in the past week, and this was engendering a very similar sort of fear in my belly. But I pressed on, sticking to Hina; she’d given me permission to use her as a shield, and I wasn’t above taking that literally if disgruntled magical girls started shooting at me.
We reached the Opal-and-Amethyst-adorned double doors, and Hina cracked the Amethyst one open unceremoniously. It was dark within, the lights already extinguished, and a faint warmth beckoned me inward, the barest caress of Alice’s aura at this distance. But immediately, Yuuka raised her voice, and my heart dropped into my stomach.
“Hina!”
“Oh fuck,” I whispered, more to myself than to Hina. Yuuka knew we were coming and was wasting no time in kicking us out.
“My eye works fine!”
“Does that mean we can come in?” Hina called back, giggling.
“Of course,” Alice said. She was laughing too, and I realized that yes, we’d been foreseen—and the girls in the room had pre-agreed to let us in. Relief washed through me as Hina turned back to face me, a big smile on her face.
“Told you!”
Author’s Note:
(Sunspot will be taking an additional week off! 3.08 will be up on August 1st. Thanks for your patience!)
Everyone is tired and hurt but surely Sugawara is a solved problem that will never return to bite our protagonists in the ass. Never ever. And we have cuddle puddle, so this is arguably the best possible outcome! Especially since Hina finally beat the stinky allegations and took a shower.
You might have noticed that Sunspot has a new cover for Arc 3! It was done by Togekko, who did an absolutely fantastic job with all the little details. If you’re interested in seeing the full art without the logo and text, plus some director’s commentary, it’s available for free members on the Patreon.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
Possession/mental violation (Takagiri has a rough one)
I’d repeatedly heard Sugawara referred to as “comatose.” This was true, but what everybody had left out was that he was also mangled. His body was a patchwork of burn scars, and there was no hair left on his head. His nose was destroyed. He was surrounded by beeping and humming medical equipment: a forest of IVs and intubation surrounding the central megalith of a heart bypass machine. He was effectively already dead, even though the vitals signs insisted he was alive.
“No boss at the end of the dungeon,” Hina quipped, leaning over the bed. “Looks like him, smells like him.”
A buzzing sound pulled my attention away from the screen. I looked over at the source: Amane, clenching her bionic fist so hard the tiny actuating motors in its joints were crying out in protest. Her delicate features were twisted by an emotion I couldn’t name and had never known, something in that bitter space between terror and profound loathing.
On-screen, Yuuka made a similar face for just a moment before her mantle’s mask dropped to neutral impassivity. A spike of jealousy crawled through me at her ability to simply choose not to emote within her mantle. Alice caught the expression.
“Yuuka? I need you to give us an honest answer, disregarding your own feelings. Is it safe for us to kill him right now?”
“Yes.”
Hina frowned, squatting at the side of the bed to look at Sugawara’s ruined visage in profile. “You absolutely sure, babe?”
“The sooner the better for Takagiri,” Ebi pointed out.
“Barring the bomb,” I couldn’t help but insert. I knew the Radiances onscreen couldn’t hear me, but I felt like I had to bring it up to the others in the room with me. “We still don’t know if—”
“Ezzen,” Ebi interrupted. “C’mon.” She said something in Japanese to Amane, who replied curtly and instantly. Ebi made an ‘OK’ symbol with a robotic hand. “If there is a bomb, Amane will handle it. We’re out of time.”
I was in no position to argue that. We were out of time, and there was absolutely no chance I was going to be able to convince any of the Radiances to delay. I took a deep breath and decided to trust Amane on this one. “Fine. Can we at least put her in first?”
“No,” Takagiri broke in, the first English words she’d said in what felt like hours. “I—I want to…” she blinked too slowly. “See him die.”
“…Fair enough,” I conceded, feeling rather overruled. Everybody else here had much more investment in this moment than I did; for them, this was the killing of one of their old monsters.
“You don’t have to watch it yourself,” Ebi pointed out. “You didn’t do so good with the last murder.”
I found I agreed with that and tried to focus on the coffin’s final checks. Some indicator lights had come on and were holding steady, which said we were as close as possible to turning it all the way on short of engaging the main wards. The coffin might have wound up being redundant, but it was something to do instead of bearing witness to Todai’s latest crime. I didn’t even want to know which of the three girls present would be the ones to do the deed.
“All good on our end,” I heard Ebi say.
As my hands traced along the coffin’s ward emitter mounts one last time in a final sanity check that everything was installed where it ought to be, I heard some shuffling and quiet discussion from the Radiances on the screen, which fell into silence as final deliberations concluded and the moment of execution came. I heard a hiss like a valve releasing air, then a wet noise that suggested a horribly manual and mundane killing, blade through flesh and sinew rather than any sort of magical annihilation. Then Amane exhaled, and I knew it was over.
The next few things happened very quickly.
The first is that Yuuka shrieked. “Ami ga—”
The second is that her voice was muffled, drowned out by a sound not unlike the sensation of one’s ears being waterlogged. At the same time, there was a flash of light on the screen, and in the moment that my eyes were reflexively drawn to the commotion, I saw that she had drawn her cloud of crimson glitter around herself and was in the middle of frantically weaving silver thread.
The third was that Sugawara’s freshly beheaded corpse sat up.
Faster than a blink, Hina punched it in the chest with such force that her fist went clean through. Gore splattered onto the bed and medical equipment behind the exit hole into a shape that was too perfect—a glyph, one I knew intuitively.
{TRANSPOSE} ignited into harsh yellow Flame, and burning brambles blasted out from the corpse, a sickly yellow slithering and whipping out through the room, attacking the girls, attacking everything. A part of it came directly at the camera—directly at Alice—
Directly at us. The video feed cut out from Alice’s end; the static dripped out of the projected screen like sap, taking on a branching, thorny aspect as it traveled and pooled on the floor. Then something rose up from the malformed transmission, there in the room with us, having made the same impossible leap as my flamefall.
The thing that entered our basement room of Lighthouse Tower was a nest of brambles in the shape of a man, blazing with the same sick yellow fire that had illuminated the glyph, and it stood wide and hunched, arms dangling beneath it. It had no hands and no face, but as it raised its head, I felt it see me, inspect me. Agony lanced up from the stump of my foot, freezing like icicles were spearing through my veins. The pain made me stumble for a moment before the stabilizing unit in my foot caught me. My spear was in my hand.
To my right, Amane blubbered an awful noise of pain that indicated she was feeling the same or worse, but she didn’t stagger. Instead, something glimmered around her bionic arm, shapes crystallizing from nowhere as the indicator lights along its shell flickered from their usual purple to a violent red. Her mantle was still in a state of ruin—but evidently, she still had contingencies, magical firepower spooling into existence around her arm even as she raised her clenched fist in the apparition’s direction and squared her stance.
Takagiri’s mantle was similarly ruined, and she made no attempt to weave any magic as she stared at her tormentor. But her eyes were full of hate—and fear. This entity was no glowing specter or bedsheet-covered figure, but it was unmistakably Sugawara’s ghost. He stepped toward her unnaturally quickly, as though on fast-forward—
Ebi reacted before any of us. In the same moment that her physical body stepped forward to stand between Takagiri and Sugawara, something deployed from pocketspace over her shoulder and launched itself forward. It unfolded from nowhere into the vague impression of a polyhedron before it flashed outward into an emerald-green bubble, surrounding the spirit.
I raised my spear, finding that I wasn’t feeling so squeamish about murder at this particular moment.
Amane barked something, which Ebi interpreted with a seamless shift of her synthesized voice: “We’re killing him here and now.”
The bramble figure turned his head to look at Amane and reached a burning arm out to the bubble, pressing his twisted fingers against the barrier. He began to push on the barrier, extending an arm against it, straining the barrier and stretching it like taffy, his unsettling yellow Flame angrily scattering along the surface. The way he was reaching out, the strain of the bubble—why did that look familiar?
“Ez, get your Flame out,” Ebi said, shaking me from the odd moment of deja vu. “Amane, you ready?”
Amane grunted confirmation as her gun finished manifesting. It wasn’t the same weapon as the one typically embedded in her mantle’s arm; instead, it was a surprisingly familiar shape, a gemstone version of the enormous energy beam weapons that came on a Peacie AC-130-R heavy gunship, absolutely comical against the regular size of her human frame as its four barrels bristled above her shoulders, hovering as though fixed to an invisible armature.
Without any further indication from Ebi, the bubble vanished. In the same moment, four lines of purple energy ignited the air between Amane and Sugawara. The weapon emitted an awful, teeth-aching whine as she held the searing beam for several seconds, trying to burn through his chest and head. She was yelling invectives at Sugawara, voice breaking in what could not have been anything but rage—was she literally powering the attack with her fury?
Maybe, but that wasn’t an option for me. While Amane unloaded on her kidnapper, I called on my Flame the only way I knew how, biting my lip and attempting to will it forth. It sputtered for a moment before a sensation like heartburn splashed through my lungs and my Flame ignited within me. Frigid energy lanced through my arm and bubbled to the surface of the scars on my right hand, which I clenched into a fist as the pure white of my shard of the Frozen Flame made its presence known. I didn’t know what exactly to do with it yet, but that was answered for me by observing Amane’s own attack.
For all her weapon’s power, its impact on Sugawara was underwhelming. The weapon’s effect was blue ripple, and Sugawara’s spirit, whatever it was, was certainly not a physical thing, some amalgam of raw Flame. For the most part, the beam passed straight through him and ate away at the wall behind him, blasting through the drywall and sending sputtering globs of magmatic concrete onto the floor but failing to meaningfully interact with the thorns. The yellow of his Flame shone through the purple as if to taunt us. It did slow him down some, resisting his movements like the barrier from before—still damnably familiar—but that was all.
He shuffled forward through the beam until it flickered and then failed, the barrels of the weapon fracturing and decohering above Amane’s shoulders. The indicator lights on her arm died, and the limb flopped uselessly downward as some operating limit was overwhelmed by the surge of magic she’d summoned, her contingency expended for naught. Sugawara’s spirit was not a complete person, lacking a face and speech, but as the last dregs of purple energy faded, the vomit-yellow fire pulsed a few times, and I saw his ‘shoulders’ shake as he laughed at us. Then he blazed toward us, far too quick to make sense, an impossible burst of speed just as one of his cultists had performed dozens of kilometers away and hardly a minute earlier. He covered five meters in a step—panic found me in a critical moment of indecision, unsure whether to brandish my Flame itself or to grip the haft of my spear and bring its warped and heat-blackened tip around to face him.
That moment of hesitation had a terrible cost. The brambles twisted and writhed past me before I could act, tongues of yellow fire passing so close to my skin that some of it tried to cling to me, grasping and stabbing in a blind desire to possess, to control, to grasp and devour everything. But the moment a tendril of thorny flame actually touched my skin, it recoiled, jumping back as though startled, and Sugawara avoided me as he passed me by—
But I was not Sugawara’s prize. The brambles lunged at Ebi, who was shielding Takagiri with her body. The spirit of malevolent Flame would rush straight through Ebi and fry the fragile magical circuitry that made up her being as a simple side effect of seeking his true target, and she stood poised to accept that fate if it meant buying her patient another moment of time—
Takagiri shoved her aside. It was a sleepwalker’s motion, half intentional and half inevitable, impossible to tell whether it was defiance or acceptance. The mass of twisting thorns loosened and spun into a torrent of grasping Flame that blasted directly into her chest as she met her tormentor head-on.
The way Sugawara entered Takagiri’s body could only be described as violation. The brambles wrapped around her limbs and dug into her flesh, rising up around her head and forcefully trying to infest her mouth and nose and ears and eyes, clawing and digging, demanding access to her body and soul as they tightened around her. She remained standing, but not under her own power, instead animated to plank-stiffness by the constricting force of Sugawara’s will.
I tore my eyes away from the sight as I scanned the room, trying to understand what to do. Time slowed to a crawl. My gaze alighted upon the whiteboard; if I could only intuit the sick processes animating Sugawara, allowing him to cling to the realm of the living, then I could formally describe them and crack the code; obliterate him utterly through glyphcraft where Amane’s brute firepower had failed. But that was an absurd notion, desperation asking me to reduce the work of hours down to minutes or seconds, however long Takagiri’s already-failing mind could resist before it collapsed, and he slithered in to claim lordship over the ruins.
There was no time for all that; there was only one reasonable option. I found myself stepping toward the effigy of nightmare and pushing my hand to ignite some more.
“He avoided touching me just now,” I explained to the room as I moved—mostly trying to psych myself up for what I was about to do. “Because of my Flame!”
“Christ almighty, Ezzen—” Ebi began.
I ignored her, reaching toward Takagiri with my blazing hand and searching for a relatively non-spiny segment of the brambles that were constricting her arm. My fingers, or at least the Flame wreathing them, found purchase on the magical emanation of Sugawara’s twisted desires, and I tried to tug.
I felt an emotion that was not my own. Something wicked and covetous flowed through me, a vile and potent desire. I wanted—Sugawara wanted—to have his way with Takagiri in a far more sickening way than even that phrase would suggest. He sought to devour her, to supplant her, to dominate her Flame and puppeteer her body as his own, the final parasitic effort of raw malice attempting to claim a new mind and body before it dissipated forever. He already had a doorway into her soul, the same one we’d been holding shut by forcibly keeping her awake and had been hoping to bar by using the coffin. And he craved to pry that doorway larger, to flay away her already-tattered defenses and scoop out all that was her to replace it with him.
Sugawara’s raw, unbound emotions surged into me and made to seep deep, infest and control me just as it was doing to Takagiri, because that was all he was now—blind want, not only to keep existing but to continue exerting the power over her that he’d had for years, first in the abstract binds of a poisoned friendship and then in a more literal sense as he’d dug his thorns of Flame into her and made her his slave. That avaricious, solipsistic egotism was all that remained of him, what passed for thought in this remnant shadow of the man he’d been. Somewhere beneath the weight of his basal ego, I could feel Takagiri fighting back, but it was a losing battle. Her mind was like layers upon layers of kindling for his rapacious Flame, unable to truly resist the overwhelming desire to dominate, half-ruined as she already was by the extreme exhaustion. She couldn’t even muster her own magic in any meaningful sense.
For a teetering moment, I felt that I might also be ensnared and devoured, paralyzed and reduced to so much soul-meat for the carnivorous beast Sugawara had become by simple contact with its consumptive nature. He had become a singularity of such concentrated malice that it seemed impossible for the delicate, fractal complexity of any wholly formed human soul to persist under the conditions of his presence.
But I was more than just a human soul. A knife-flash of clarity pierced through me, a frigid cold from the backstage of the universe that cut deep into the brambles and drowned the sickly yellow Flame in blinding white. Something rang in my head, a voice I’d only heard a handful of times until now.
Repugnant, declared my shard of the Frozen Flame.
Sugawara may have lost almost everything that he once was, but he still had a capacity for pain. I felt him hurt as the brambles under my grip wilted and then withered, dissipating away. I sensed something buried within the nest of brambles move where it had previously been restrained. Emboldened, I thought to reach toward Takagiri’s chest, where Sugawara’s thorny presence had tightened most thickly, hoping to break his hold on her there. I reasoned that her mind may have been ostensibly in her head, but if my experiences with my own Flame were any indication, the chest was what housed a Flamebearer’s soul, their final redoubt of selfhood alongside their Flame.
All this happened in the time it took the nerves in my arm to reach my brain and report an explosion of pain. It was from many sources—both Takagiri and Sugawara were radiating their own kinds of agony from their struggle, my own Flame was scorching my hand with frostbite, and the whole storm of magic we were creating was only amplifying the soup of red ripple. My mouth was filling with the tang of iron, and my face was wet. Nonetheless, I tried to move my arm further in, but some part of my subconscious simply wasn’t having it and said no more, overruling my conscious desires. I instinctively jerked my hand back, then shuddered and collapsed to the ground.
I felt arms on my shoulders as someone—Ebi—pulled me back, away from my goal.
“That’s enough.”
“It’s—not,” I blubbered, realizing the wetness on my face was a mixture of tears and blood. Had I been bleeding from my tear ducts? Certainly from my nose, at least. My Flame sputtered in my hand—the pain was keeping it fed as embers, but my concentration and willpower had reached their limits.
“It is,” Ebi insisted, wiping off my face with a rag she’d produced from somewhere. “She’s fighting it now. Don’t gotta explode yourself any further.”
I blinked away the remaining residue of bodily fluids and squinted through my wobbling vision at Takagiri. Bright white dots of my Flame still smoldered on the brambles, and she was now visibly struggling against the brambles with her limbs—and more importantly, something was flickering in the air around her. Her mantle had been destroyed in our battle, but something remained, and that she was calling on it was all the proof I needed that I’d helped weaken her attacker, or empowered her, or both. Either way, what had been a one-sided ravaging now seemed to be more of a struggle of wills.
And Amane was walking—limping, really—closer to the struggle. I only had a view of her left side, so it took a moment for me to figure out that she’d entirely removed her fried right arm, which made it all the more insane that she clearly intended to mimic what I’d just done.
“What’s she doing? Amane! What are you doing?” I looked up at Ebi. “Why aren’t you stopping her?”
“Because she’s not doing what you’re doing.”
“Ezzen,” I heard Amane say. “The coffin.”
“What?”
She held up her remaining fist, the flesh one, and clenched it. “Hold the…tamashii ga…” she faltered, glancing at Ebi, and started rapidly spouting Japanese. Ebi listened for a moment, then picked up.
“She’ll beat him, push him out. But she can’t destroy him, and he’ll just try again, and he’ll never stop. But if we put them in the coffin, once she kicks him out the first time, we can pull her out while keeping him trapped. Then we find a way to kill him.” She mimicked Amane’s pointing at the coffin. “Help us get them in there.”
“By…what, lifting her? Neither of us are at what I’d call—” I coughed, and the taste of iron in my mouth thickened, “carrying capacity.”
I glanced down at my own right arm, which neither looked nor felt great after being the contactor for a terrible collision of arcane wills. My fingers only weakly responded to my attempts to close them into a fist, and it hurt like hell to do so, cracking the abused skin. It felt like the scar tissue might flake right off. That was still a degree more useful than Amane’s now-removed arm, but it meant we effectively only had two and a half arms between the two of us to try to lug Takagiri’s still-mostly-bound-or-otherwise-unresponsive body into the coffin. And that was before considering the psychic onslaught I’d endured.
“I thought you couldn’t let him touch you or…bad stuff.”
“Before, probably. But he’s reeling now, and he’ll have to split it four ways. Besides, I’m built for bad weather.” She reached out a hand. “Up!”
She delivered that last part with such authority I found myself using my good hand to reach out and take hers. She pulled me to my feet with almost contemptuous ease. As she helped me find my footing, something pinched my neck.
“Ow!” My yelp only lasted a moment before relief washed through me. “Oh, that’s nice. Morphine?”
“And other stuff.”
We went over to stand an arm’s length from Takagiri. Ebi released me to join Amane on Takagiri’s other side. For a moment, I felt the absurdity of how we were solving this problem—three flamebearers and a cutting-edge AI in the room and we were reduced to literally dragging a person with our bare hands, a far cry from anybody’s image of magical warfare. It was ridiculous. But as I prepared to grab hold and Amane held up three fingers to count us in, I figured that it maybe wasn’t that much more brutal or inelegant than the blood magic I’d recently been so fond of. The last of Amane’s fingers lowered, and we all reached out to Takagiri.
Without the direct protection of my Flame, I’d been bracing myself for another helping of the crushing weight of Sugawara’s desperate desire, but Ebi had been right—he was weakened, and now his attention was split four ways, unable to smother any one of us individually. Where previously he had been an overwhelming force of concentrated, avaricious desire to dominate, now the pulse of emotion I got was tinged with the animal need to survive. Still not fear, per se, but he was recognizing the danger he was in.
That wasn’t to say this close contact was safe. Hopped up on morphine, I arguably fared better than either of the women helping me; Ebi’s motions didn’t falter, but the moment she touched Sugawara’s brambles, her digital face scrambled into static, which was mildly terrifying, and Amane would have probably been screaming if her teeth weren’t gritted in a mask of focus as she did her best to help with her single arm. I hooked my arm under Takagiri’s armpit and we started to drag her stiff, twitching body toward the coffin, step by heavy step.
Our goal was the bench-like cot that was set on rails to allow the coffin’s occupant to be slid in and out easily, and it was only two or three meters in total to carry her there, but it was a struggle all the same. The soul-combat taking place in our arms was a miniature inferno, and the random bits of orange ripple distorted the space of our steps, making a step forward turn more diagonal before we readjusted. Some kind of fungus was growing in the wake of where Takagiri’s feet dragged along the concrete floor. I was too focused on the physical exertion at the time to worry about the long-term ripple effects on my own body.
We managed to lay her down on the bench, Amane and I grunting with the effort. Takagiri’s eyes were open, staring upward, but not focused on anything, instead flickering left and right in something akin to REM sleep; she was presumably battling Sugawara in her dreams now. The flickers of her mantle were intensifying, too, never quite coalescing into recognizable portions of the woman we’d battled but undeniably becoming more present, more real. Ebi pushed the cart into the center of the coffin’s main body, that mangled and haphazard nest of metal and wiring, as Amane and I limped over to the laptop that controlled the whole thing.
“This better work,” I muttered, glancing over the machine, trying to ascertain if there were any last-minute changes we could make in order for this plan to happen as Amane had described. By way of answer, she hit the ‘Start’ button on the program that was supposed to run this whole thing. I crossed my fingers.
Indicator lights flickered on, and power relays hummed. I saw the ward emitters within the cage of scrap metal shimmer, then glow—then go dark, which terrified me for a moment before I remembered that they weren’t supposed to emit light at their operating levels. At the same time, the overall level of aching in my body, and especially the sharper pains in my hand and foot, began to ebb and reduce. It seemed the coffin was containing the red ripple—and presumably all the other colors we’d intended with our modifications.
As if to put that notion to the test, there was suddenly a flash of light in the heart of the machine as the struggle reached its conclusion. Takagiri vomited out a cluster of brambles, the ones that had infested deep into her body. They were rotting and blackening, the shadowy aspect of her own Flame finally asserting its dominance in the struggle for control. Something shimmered over the gaunt, sickly mask of pain—a narrow, feminine aspect, teeth set in defiance. Her own face, her true face.
She screamed something, and the brambles tore off of her body as though scoured by a pressure washer. I didn’t need translation to get the message.
I reflexively braced for another surge of red ripple to come at us…but there was nothing, no more pain. The yellow energy of Sugawara’s soul was ripped off of her body and slammed into an invisible, bumpy barrier at the perimeter of the coffin’s interior, looking like the world’s most repulsive corncob as he attempted to flee from Takagiri in all directions and found he could not. I watched the ward emitters’ readouts on the laptop screen as the strain steadily but evenly rose among all nine nodes. Once it stopped growing, the moment Sugawara was fully expelled, Ebi would yank Takagiri out.
But then all the pressure began to concentrate on one emitter, the one mounted directly above her head and held in place by the clamps we’d used. I was helpless to do anything but watch as the yellow Flame bundled around it and pressed outward. I looked frantically at Amane, who returned the gaze with fear, at a loss for what to do. I opened my mouth to call to Ebi to just pull Takagiri out now as I tried to muster my Flame once more—
The ward exploded upward with the tremendous screech of violated metal into a spray of molten aluminum that splattered against the ceiling. The yellow Flame shot out after it in a stream of brambles, but stopped midair, collecting itself in a flash. Before any of us could do anything, the space around Sugawara’s spirit tore, flattened, and shrank to a dot of nothingness, taking every scrap of that bile-yellow with it. Whatever remained of his intellect had calculated—or even overheard—our plan, decided it didn’t like its odds, and fled the premises of Todai’s domain.
Sugawara had escaped.
But Takagiri was free.
Author’s Note:
Whew, a lot of action! This will be the first ever time that we end an action beat and stay in the scene without Ez passing out for a day (well, there’s 1.14, but he wasn’t physically there and injured). Surely Sugawara is gone for good, right? Right?
Important: Sunspot is on its usual one week break! The next chapter will be July 18.
No newly commissioned art this week, but somebody in the Discord (Karidyas) took it upon themself to touch up last week’s Alice+Amane art with lighting, and holy crap did they do a good job:
I’m so ridiculously jazzed about this; it may well become some kind of banner art or find some other home here on the site.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
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Unlike what I’d seen of Ai’s premier magitech—Amane’s bionics and Ebi’s chassis—the coffin was not a pretty thing: a mess of plywood, sheet metal, 3D-printed parts, and exposed wiring. It did resemble a coffin in shape and size, large enough only for a user to lay down inside it, but more like the skeleton of one, affording no privacy to the occupant if there were somebody else in the room. You’d have to rest in full view of all the mess Ai had made—not that that would pose an obstacle for Takagiri, I suspected.
Ai had first thrown it together four years ago as a temporary solution for Amane’s ripple sensitivity, which at the time had been even more severe, and temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent. Amane had stopped needing it at some point, so the Radiances had banished the ugly reminder of pain to one of the multipurpose storage-slash-workshop rooms in the second sub-level basement. Now its day had come round once more, but it was in no condition for use. It was surrounded by spools of wiring of various types and thicknesses, wood and metal structural pieces, and various power tools that had been discarded in Ai’s haste.
The upside of this mess of innards was that nothing was hidden, which made it easy to visually identify which parts went where. The main functionality came from the set of inward-facing ward projectors, of which six were already installed and three were not; they were supposed to be arranged radially in three rows surrounding the occupant, not unlike the spikes of an iron maiden, but the third row seemed to have been abandoned before the mounting bar could be installed, presumably because Ai had been sidetracked by various other problems arising from integration hell.
My job was simple enough: get it working. But I was way out of my depth.
“…I’m not seeing a hole for the screw,” I admitted, gingerly comparing one of the fifty thousand-dollar ward emitters to the bar it was supposed to mount to. “There’s one on this bracket here, but there’s not another on the bar.”
“If you’re thinking of {AFFIXING} it, don’t,” Ebi warned from the sidelines.
“I wasn’t gonna!” I lied.
“Just clamp it.” She pointed at a pile of wood glue clamps on one of the fold-out tables. That did make more sense given the time pressure; I’d successfully woven {AFFIX} under duress before, but now was not a time to fumble with magic when mundane tools would do the trick, ugly as they were. I reluctantly grabbed a clamp that looked big enough. It took me a moment to figure out how to even open the jaws, then I slid it over where I was pressing the mounting bracket against the wood post. I squeezed the tightening trigger a few times, and then jiggled the expensive equipment experimentally to see if it was bound securely against the bar. To my relief, it didn’t budge.
The clamp was precisely the sort of ugly and awkward solution that characterized everything about this ramshackle project. Proper fasteners or magic would be far more elegant, but this didn’t have to look pretty; it just had to work. With the help of two more clamps, I at least had the ward emitters all on the same bar and facing the same direction.
That was the easy part. The real issue was that each of the three emitters had a bundle of unlabeled cables emerging from the back like a synthetic ponytail, and I had no idea what to attach them to, let alone how to make sure they were getting the right power and signals. At a ripple theory level, I understood that these wards were supposed to generate a fully enclosed field that absorbed and dissipated red and pink ripple, but the hardware was far beyond my ken.
“Uh…”
“Table to your right. See those three breadboards? You do know what a breadboard is?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped, “But I’m not really a…hardware person. Don’t know where to plug any of this in.”
“Use the schematics!” She pointed at my laptop, which was sitting in a cleared region of the nearest of the fold-out tables. The android had sent me all the necessary diagrams and schematics for each individual magical and electrical component, but there was no grand plan for how to put all of it together into a working machine; the closest it came was an absurdly messy whiteboard next to the laptop that bore a mixture of magical notation I understood and electronics diagrams I didn’t. Worst of all, the scribbled notes were all in Japanese, making it all even more impenetrable.
“Sure,” I muttered. “It’s—why aren’t you the one doing this, with your five degrees? Weren’t you here while Ai was working on it?”
In response, Ebi tilted her head meaningfully at the third person in the room.
“It might not look like it to you, but I have my hands full trying to keep her alive.”
Takagiri was looking really quite bad. Her flesh looked even more sickly than before, and she’d developed a distinct set of tremors. Her face was drooping in a way that made me concerned she was having a stroke; I guessed that sleep deprivation this extreme was probably having similar effects. She was having serious issues stringing words together, too, and I’d mostly given up on trying to communicate with her, even for encouragement.
She still insisted on pacing to and fro as a way to keep herself awake and was accompanied in stride by Ebi, who’d already caught her from hitting the floor twice. Those moments of lapsed consciousness were becoming more frequent, which only worried me more as I tried to wrap my head around the mess Ai had made. Supposedly, these moments of micro-sleep weren’t enough for Sugawara to invade her mind; this was a good thing, since it meant that he wouldn’t know that the Radiances were coming for him nor have a chance to set off the still-hypothetical bomb attached to her soul, but I was starting to wonder if that was a worthwhile tradeoff.
The Radiances were supposed to set out in a few minutes, and from there, it was a few minutes’ flight to the hospital-cum-prison where Sugawara hopefully was; even if he were warned right now—which itself made assumptions about how swift and easy his access to Takagiri’s recollections was—could he, as a comatose body in a hospital bed, even do anything? Aside from the bomb, again. And if he wasn’t there, moved by whatever remnants of his faction still clung to him, then maybe the advance warning would cause more of a problem for us. Maybe.
That was to say it really just seemed like a lot of ‘ifs’ and speculation between Takagiri and the sleep she absolutely needed. And given how infuriatingly slowly I was making progress on the coffin, I had half a mind to just make the call to let her sleep and deal with the consequences after the fact. Especially if Ebi wasn’t going to help me.
“Seriously? There’s nothing else you can do to help out?”
Ebi’s voice modulated down to a serious, dire tone. “You do not want me any nearer to this thing if you accidentally turn it on.”
I remembered something from earlier today, how Ai had mentioned offhandedly that the walls had pink and red in them. That’s just Ebi, she’d said.
“Fine,” I shrugged, annoyance building. “But it’s—it’s not going well, if you can’t tell,” I admitted as I hobbled over to the laptop to inspect the ward emitters’ pinout schematics. “If there’s anything you can do, then do it.”
“Overpromised and underdelivered, did ya?”
“If you’re not going to do it, somebody has to,” I snapped, picking up the laptop. My frustration was spilling over toward my low mobility; I was losing precious time ambling back and forth between the coffin and the laptop, with my foot still a little ginger.
At that moment, I heard the room’s doorknob click. I whirled to face it on reflex, tattoo itching with a surge of anticipation. There was no reason for anybody to be down here; it wasn’t that late at night, but Ai’s students and machinists had all cleared out for the day, and the Radiances were all up top, due to head out any minute now. The memory of creepy happenings elsewhere in this basement earlier today caused my tattoo to stir; what if Takagiri hadn’t been hallucinating? What if something was here? What if Sugawara had somehow gotten enough information in those moments of microsleep, and now he was making—
Ebi emitted a digital imitation of a snort. “Ha! The way you jumped!”
I glared at her. “You’re fucking pranking me now? Fuck off!”
“No,” she chuckled. “Somebody more qualified has arrived.”
The door swung open, and there stood Amane, wearing her soft nightclothes and a determined expression. I made it halfway through the first phoneme of objecting to her participation before realizing that she’d most certainly had enough of that. She walked into the room, head held high. A small hitch in her gait betrayed that she was most definitely feeling Takagiri’s radiated pain, but it didn’t slow her down, nor reach her face.
“Um,” I stammered, “I’m guessing the others don’t know you’re here?”
She replied in Japanese, which Ebi was happy to interpret in real time for me. “They’re up on the roof. Fuck knows I’m not going to stay all alone up in the penthouse when somebody needs help down here. I know these systems better than anyone, even Ai-chan.”
I raised an eyebrow in Ebi’s direction about the insertion of “fuck knows,” which didn’t sound very mahou shoujo at all. She met it with a virtual raised eyebrow of her own. Then the relief hit, and I decided I didn’t care about that. I looked back to Amane.
“Okay—um—alright—yes,” I landed. “Please.”
A few minutes later, Ebi displayed a video on the wall via the room’s overhead projector. It was a live feed of Alice’s perspective—essentially bodycam footage, which when combined with the cover of night blanketing this mission, left me feeling a little like we were doing something illegal. Which we were.
Alice, Hina and Yuuka were gathered on the rooftop as we were in the basement, making their final checks before setting out. All three were mantled, but they’d changed their costumes to something much less flashy and decorated; instead of whites and vibrant, saturated colors matching their gemstones, dark greys and blues predominated, and where there had previously been decorative brooches and tassels, now there was nothing. These versions of the mantles were lower-profile, stealthy, not for the public’s eyes. If the mantles could generally be thought of as fighter jets, these configurations were more like stealth bombers, complete with radar invisibility and currently inactive camouflage. The girls’ eyes still glimmered in the dark, though, Hina’s impossible blue and the angry crimson crags of Yuuka’s gemstone sharply visible through what we saw of Alice’s gaze.
They launched off the rooftop platform as one, a violent jerk of motion that sent my stomach spinning so badly that I had to avert my eyes from the wall and instead focus on the nest of electronics in my hands. My glimpse of their takeoff was still long enough to glean something of note: in this stripped-down mode, much of the usual artifice was gone, which meant that their flight produced no actual streams of energy in their wake, at least not at these speeds; it was more like rapid Superman-style floating than rocket-powered acceleration.
“Is this two-way?”
“Not in, like, a video call sense,” Ebi explained, reaching out to flick Takagiri’s nose, the latest in an increasingly-dubious set of tricks to help keep her awake for just a bit longer. “They’d freak out if they knew Amane was down here with us.”
I only snuck occasional glances at the screen as they flew; they were low enough that you could still somewhat make out the terrain below, which wasn’t nearly as high as—to pick a random example—a high-altitude Spire maintenance stream where it seemed like they were just floating in a misty void, and that was too low for my acrophobic sensibilities.
Amane’s assistance with the coffin had been transformative. Not only did she know exactly how all the little components fit together, the telekinetic modules in her arm were fantastically suited to the subtle dexterity required to fit the electronics together, just like the screws in my computer case last week. She inserted pins into breadboards and {AFFIXED} together electronics too delicate for clamps with a swiftness and precision that told me she knew exactly what she was doing, which was a huge relief—enough to paper over the envy I felt. Occasionally, my hand and foot would throb and her face would flicker into a mask of pain, but it didn’t slow her down.
The other Radiances were going fast too. The video stream of Alice’s vision included small diagnostic readouts, among which was a speed gauge currently registering well above the speed of sound as the trio of magical girls shot across the sky; an icon on the readout had flickered for a moment as her mantle suppressed the sonic boom to keep a low profile. There was a frankly dizzying amount of information crammed into the corners of what we were seeing, too much to reasonably keep track of; I had to remind myself that this was a sort of debug and diagnostic view, and that Alice herself was receiving much of this information more intuitively through the mantle’s pink ripple channels. She didn’t have to look to know her airspeed or orientation or position relative to her teammates or the ground. I was envious of that quasi-omniscience, the lack of a clunky interface, the data direct to the mind through infomancy. I’d have that with a mantle of my own.
“Ezzen,” Amane prodded me with a bionic finger. “Ugoite.”
I blinked, then flinched, then cringed at my own moment of distraction.
As I clumsily laid the bar of ward emitters into place on Amane’s direction, the away team began to slow and descend, the blob of light that made up Yokohama crystallized into a nighttime skyline twinkling in thousands of distinct lights from the buildings and cars. They descended further, far too rapidly for me to stomach, going away from the densest lights and toward the edge of the city.
They didn’t land all the way, instead slowing to a hover at what the readout said was two hundred meters above the ground. Below them lay Sugawara’s prison, semi-isolated from the rest of its neighborhood by a copse of trees. Acrophobia made my stomach jump a little bit as Alice’s view of the building zoomed in. Like Lighthouse Tower, it had once been a hospital and now served to house a flamebearer—but instead of a home base, it had become a prison. Nominally.
“Not liking this,” Alice muttered. “No guards.”
In reality, the Radiances were going in expecting it to be the final redoubt of Sugawara’s sect, a fortress inhabited by his most fanatic followers and fortified with whatever scraps of magitech they still had from before he had been deposed, like more weapons in the style of Takagiri’s swords or potentially more esoteric weaponry. The layout was also a dark mirror of Lighthouse Tower—where the Radiances’ base was vertical, the prison was no more than five or six floors and distributed much more horizontally, with distinct north and west wings.
Something like envy briefly stole my attention when I noticed Alice’s bust at the bottom of her vision, an entirely unwarranted emotion for this moment. I was spared from having to shove aside the feeling myself when Alice raised her head to look at her teammate.
“Yuuka? Close enough?”
The team’s precog nodded. She would have been hard to make out in the dark if not for the various sensors of Alice’s mantle amplifying the visibility and highlighting Yuuka in the heads-up display. She looked even more goth in this darker version of her outfit, with previously metal-looking fixtures retextured to dark plastics and much of her smooth, pale skin now covered by a dark, skintight bodysuit. My mind wandered somewhere it ought not have for a moment until Yuuka replied to her teammate’s prompt. She stared down at the hospital below.
“Yep. He’s—yeah, he’s down there. And still…konsui,” she muttered, switching back into Japanese for lack of vocabulary.
“Comatose,” Ebi supplied for me. I glared at her, having already figured it out myself from context.
Yuuka’s expression darkened. “But we’re in for a brawl. And…we’re not rescuing Ogawa-san or…oh. We’ll find Kiriya-san.”
“Alive?” Alice’s tone was pessimistic.
Yuuka was quiet for a beat too long. “…Yes.”
“They’re torturing her?” asked Hina, straight to the point. There was a note of contained, anticipatory energy in her voice.
Yuuka replied with only a hollow nod as she tore her eyes away from the prison, too rattled by whatever she was seeing to make a jab at Hina about sadomasochism. That made Hina’s shockingly blue eyes narrow, her fingerless gloves bunching into fists—what I’d interpreted as sadistic anticipation may have actually been rage.
Next to me, Amane’s hands paused on my laptop keyboard. My heart dropped into my stomach, idle fantasies of feminine bodies immediately banished by horror.
“Um,” I asked the room, “Kiriya-san isn’t a flamebearer, right? So there’s no…”
“No reason to do it,” Ebi confirmed. “Maybe blood magic, but more likely just to provoke us.”
Amane raised her wrist to her mouth and whispered something into it, voice tight. Her prosthetic was apparently linked into the mantle comms network, judging by how the Radiances on-screen visibly flinched.
“Go loud,” Ebi translated for my benefit. “Get her back.”
“What if it’s bait?” I asked. It felt awfully convenient for them to leave just one of the two Todai operatives alive.
“Could be. Won’t matter.”
On the screen, Hina nodded as though she’d heard me, though she was probably responding to Amane. “Well, it’s not like we were just gonna walk through the front door.”
“Do you know where exactly she is? Or Sugawara?” Alice asked Yuuka.
“He’s where we left him. She’s…up top, I think; I see a window. North side, I think.” She pointed at the appropriate spot, and a marker appeared in Alice’s HUD. “Start there?”
“Yes,” Alice confirmed, waving to Hina.
The Sapphire Radiance grinned. I recognized that as bloodlust, at least. “Right through the roof?”
“No, they have a hostage; if they have time to react, things could get messy. Blink in, find her, free her. I’ll get her to safety while you two go after him. Then you can go loud.”
“We killing?”
Surprisingly—or maybe not surprisingly at all—that came from Yuuka. Alice sighed.
“Aside from him? Try not to, alright?”
“No promises,” Yuuka muttered. She looked over to Hina. “Well, kemono. Fetch.”
Hina nodded and flipped midair so she was facing downward. Her legs tensed into a crouch, compressing against nothing—then she launched earthward, receding to a speck in an instant with a dull whoosh. I had just enough time for my breath to catch and to be confused, since it looked like she was about to crash straight through the building, the exact opposite of what Alice had said. But instead of a thunderous impact, she just…vanished, shifting into the fourth dimension.
Imagine a box drawn on a piece of paper. From the two-dimensional perspective of a flatlander living in the paper’s world, the box would be closed, the interior inaccessible from any of the possible directions they can move in their two dimensions. But if you, a human, were to put your finger right in the middle of the box from your lofty, transcendent position in the third dimension, you’d find those walls utterly irrelevant. You wouldn’t be phasing through them per se; you’d simply be approaching them from a direction in which they don’t exist.
This is what Hina did, only raised one dimension up, a four-dimensional intruder into the three-dimensional box that was the prison’s interior. She went around the roof of the prison, intersecting our slice of reality again once she was inside. We in the basement of Lighthouse Tower didn’t have a camera feed from her, only Alice, but it was easy to imagine her blinking and dashing through the halls in search of Ms. Kiriya.
Four long, quiet seconds passed, and then the north wall of the prison exploded outward in a sapphire flash. From our lofty perspective, it looked almost comical, a demolition in miniature. But the spark of blue that shot outward and upward back toward us was very real; she had left destruction in her wake and carried in her arms a limp, red body. Bile rose into my throat as I saw in closer detail what had been done to Kiriya; she didn’t have much skin left.
“She’s alive,” Hina confirmed as she flew up to her teammates. “Back home? Ebi?”
“No,” Ebi said, taking in the Todai operative’s grisly, defiled state in a flash and making the executive call. “Too far, and I’ve got my hands full here. I’m calling the next nearest hospital now. On your HUD…now. They’ll take care of her.”
“Agreed,” Alice confirmed urgently. “You take her there, Hina—”
Hina rocketed away before Alice could even finish her sentence, leaving just the team’s leader and precog. It had hardly been ten seconds since Alice had authorized Hina to go in, and that was already one mission objective done: rescue whoever had survived. One Radiance had taken seconds to storm through and rescue a captive and get out untouched.
“They’re not well-equipped,” observed Alice, putting my thoughts to words.
“They can’t stop us,” Yuuka agreed. Something glittered through the air around her as she looked down at the hospital, some sort of half-summoned weapon or preparation for further magic.
Down below, the flicker of flashlights was visible as a handful of cultists began to spill into the area surrounding the hole Hina had blown.
“Yuuka,” Alice said.
“Alice.”
“I know you’re angry. Don’t get stupid.”
Hina’s voice came through the comms. “But give ‘em the what-for anyway!”
“Damare,” Yuuka growled.
“Also, touching down at the hospital now, looks like they’ve already got a stretcher, and—hai, Radiance Sapphire desu—”
As Hina became embroiled in handing over Kiriya, the remaining two Radiances began to plan their own entry, and I forced myself to stop looking at the screen. I glanced at Amane, who seemed transfixed by what we had just seen.
“Amane?” I reached out to poke her, as she had done to me—she almost shrieked when my finger made contact, scrambling away, eyes wild. I retracted my hand hurriedly, cursing my stupidity. This was clearly a reprise of old trauma for Amane, and startling her was woefully insensitive of me. “Uh, shit, sorry. You okay?”
Amane took a deep breath, then glanced at Ebi and Takagiri. Ebi nodded reassuringly at her and said something in Japanese, which convinced Amane to take a deep breath, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Daijoubu.” She strode back over toward the coffin, a slight hitch in her step. We were getting close to being able to turn it on; the wiring was mostly in place, and now, we just had to double check that everything had been hooked up correctly before we turned it on for calibration; if we’d made a mistake, we risked frying Ebi.
I limped over to the whiteboard where we’d assorted the most relevant hardware connections, glancing again at Takagiri. At this point, she’d given up on pacing, and was standing slumped against Ebi, who had replaced one hand with a mechanism I couldn’t identify other than that it had a little electrical arc on the end. She was gently zapping Takagiri awake every ten or fifteen seconds.
“Just—just a few more minutes,” I assured her.
She didn’t respond verbally, but her eyes did flick to me briefly before unfocusing back to staring into empty space. Ebi gave me an encouraging thumbs up with her free hand. “I think you’ll make it at this rate.”
“Great,” I muttered, looking between one of the breadboards and the whiteboard’s notes. I wasn’t quite sure what this part did, to be perfectly honest, but I could at least make sure that everything connected how it was supposed to. “Looks good here,” I called to Amane.
She raised a prosthetic thumbs-up from where she was crouched next to the coffin’s head. It was looking slightly more coffin-like now; one of the big modifications Ai had wanted to make was the addition of some damping panels near the head, which she hadn’t gotten around to installing but Amane and I had managed to finagle into place. In theory, those would help distribute the load to the various wards lower down the body, and they filled out the skeletal structure somewhat, at least near the head.
As Amane rose back to her feet, motion in the corner of my eye made me turn; some part of me was still braced to see a ghost in the corner, but of course, it was just the stream on the wall. Alice and Yuuka were descending, down and down, until they were hovering just above the prison’s center. Alice touched down all the way, dark, slim boots making contact with the prison’s rooftop. She manifested her staff in her hand—again, with no flash or other decorative animation—and pressed the tip to the rooftop. Next to her, Yuuka held up four fingers, then three, then two, then one, then—
A thunderclap came from the stream’s audio, and the roof was no more. Without ceremony, the girls dropped into the last lair of Sugawara’s cult. A man in a sweater and slacks was the unfortunate first contact; he skidded to a stop in front of the sudden cloud of debris, then turned and began to run the other way, shouting furiously. Yuuka shot down the hall and collided with him in a flying kick, sending him to the floor and probably breaking at least a few bones. She was already moving past him, and Alice sprinted after her.
They moved through the corridors at a lightning pace. Nobody could stand in their way at first; all the cultists they encountered were unarmed and unaugmented humans and were either completely ignored or shoved to the side. The Radiances said nothing, moving in easy sync as they advanced.
The first real bit of resistance was when Yuuka held an arm out to signal a halt as they came to an intersection. A moment later, an orange beam of energy shot across the space they’d have run into. Yuuka strode around the corner, and then there was a scream. Alice followed a moment later, revealing that Yuuka had kicked the cultist in the groin and pried the ‘gun’ from his hand.
“Duct tape and hardware store parts,” Alice observed. “But they’ve got a Flame benefactor, at least.”
“Not a very good one,” Yuuka opined. “That wouldn’t have done anything anyway.”
“Still.”
Alice tossed the doohickey into her pocketspace, and they resumed their advance. They ducked into a random, vacant hospital room not unlike the ones on Lighthouse Tower’s eighteenth floor; Yuuka counted them in once again; Alice obliterated the floor, and they dropped down another level. It wasn’t entirely clear to me why they were taking this route, but it seemed like they were encountering relatively few cultists. Or maybe there just weren’t that many to begin with.
Another floor down, resistance became fiercer, and the cultists…weirder. More and more of them were in states of undress, dim mirrors to how so many people at the festival had been topless—some of Hikanome’s practices remained consistent between its iterations, it seemed. These members were more fanatic; one tried to charge Alice, which felt almost like he was underwater compared to how swift the Radiances moved. We viewers got a disgusting up-close shot of open wounds on his chest before she slammed him into a wall. He tried to scramble to his feet, so she hit him again. He tried to get up a third time, and she sighed and shot him in the knee with her staff.
“Yuuka. Sanguimancy.”
“Yep. Not for anything big, I think.”
The next person they encountered made Amane gasp. He was gangly, with close-shaved hair, and was bleeding openly from the stump of his left elbow. I thought her reaction was just because of the gore—but I put the pieces together when Yuuka roared. There was a blur of light and motion, and suddenly, the man was right in front of the Radiances, moving far too fast, laughing at us. The space where his arm should have been shimmered unnaturally as he reared back to swing—
Alice shot him in the head. We saw it so clearly through the stream that I jumped back involuntarily in shock. The beam removed the center of his cranium and he slumped over, dead. She prodded the corpse with the tip of her boot.
“What the fuck,” said Yuuka. “That’s Kazuha.”
I glanced at Amane, then Ebi. Clearly this was somebody from their history with the cult, but I had no idea who. “Who?”
“One of Sugawara’s old lieutenants,” Ebi supplied. “Trust me, he deserved that.”
Amane looked—not shaken. She was actually grinning at the image of the corpse, which was a little disturbing. Then she caught the look I was giving her and turned away from it hastily to keep testing the coffin; we were a handful more checks away from being able to power it on.
“So this is the last of them,” Alice said onscreen. “And they’re not attempting to run.”
At this point, Hina blinked into existence next to them. “Hey! Oh, hey, dead Kazuha!”
“Kiriya is stable?”
“They’re taking care of her! Also, there’s some funky netting in the out-space around here. I think it’s for me. Smells bloody.”
“I’m liking this less and less,” Alice said. “Yuuka, you’re sure this isn’t a trap?”
“Things are getting fuzzier,” she admitted, looking down the hall. “But it’s not a trap. He’s there. Hina, don’t jump any more. The ‘net’ is—”
She fell silent a second before a sword blade came through the wall. It would have struck Hina, but Yuuka shoved her to the side and grabbed the blade in a way that would have definitely cut her hand open if this were her real body. She snapped it off and yelled something at the wall. While Hina strolled through the adjacent doorway to put paid to whoever had just been stupid enough to ambush the precog, Yuuka and Alice inspected the broken-off blade.
“Was phenomenally stupid to grab it like that,” Alice chided.
“It’s like Takagiri’s,” Yuuka defended. “Which we’re specifically proofed against now. I knew it was fine.” She looked directly at the ‘camera,’ addressing me. “Nice one, Ezza.”
“Uh, thanks,” I replied, before remembering that I was the only one here who couldn’t directly speak back to them.
“As I was saying,” Yuuka resumed, “the net isn’t to catch you. I think breaking it will trigger something red or pink, so just don’t touch it, kemono.”
“Whatever you say, babe!”
The Radiances arrived at Sugawara’s room less than a minute after. There were four guards outside, big and burly and carrying what were definitely smuggled ripple rifles; Hina dispatched all four with trivial ease and blinding speed, literally throwing the first into the rest and disarming them in the chaos. These ones didn’t seem like fanatical cult members, more like hired guns, and they didn’t seem keen on spending their lives fighting flamebearers, electing to stay down.
After a quick nod of approval from Yuuka, Hina kicked in the door as well, and the Radiances came face to face with arguably their oldest nemesis.
At least what remained of him.
Author’s Note:
Finally back into the action. The Radiances sure do make quick work of regular humans, even ones using sanguimancy and ramshackle magitech. I wonder what Sugawara’s been up to!
As a reminder, you can read the next three chapters by supporting me on Patreon, as well as see art commissions before they become public. Thank you to everyone who’s supporting the story already!
This week’s art is a break from the posters, because I commissioned some art that I wanted to share before the end of pride month:
Art by Cloudya. I’m working on making a nice photo gallery for all the commissioned art now that we’ve started to accumulate a bunch. Also, the arc 3 cover is almost done, so hopefully you’ll see that replace the placeholder by next week.
That’s it for this week. I’m gonna get very busy soon, but I’m hoping to be able to maintain regular updates at least until the end of the arc.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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Ai initially seemed confused that everybody was yelling. She opened her mouth, said a few syllables in Japanese, saw me, hesitated, then switched to English.
“I just didn’t want to leave her alone.”
“So you brought her here?” Yuuka almost yelled. She jabbed a finger at Amane. “Red ripple, Ai, fuck!”
My hand throbbed in agreement, like daggers being drawn across the lines of my burn scars. And if it was this bad for me, I could scarcely imagine how badly this must have been affecting Amane—but the Amethyst Radiance seemed more concerned with her friend’s reaction. She reached up to her teammate with her bionic hand and tugged at her wrist. Yuuka frowned, looking down at her, then slowly sat back down.
“Setsumei shinasai,” Amane asked Ai. “No bullshit,” she added in English. Yuuka’s expression flickered slightly at the vulgarity, which had probably been learned from her to begin with. I gathered that Amane was asking for an explanation.
Ai hesitated. “I—we need to keep working. Izumi-san needs help, and I thought—I can’t stop working. If I stop, I’ll be too tired to keep going until tomorrow, and we don’t have that much time, so I thought if she was here, it would help me focus, and…”
Alice’s face was in her hands. “Oh my God, is that how I sound?”
“No, you’re not half this bad,” Hina sighed, bouncing to her feet and padding toward the two flamebearers standing awkwardly outside the elevator. “Ai-chan, you know the rules. No overtime at the dinner table.”
“Rules?” Ai spluttered, uncharacteristically upset. “Jikan ga kireruyo! Her mind is about to…unravel and instead of helping her you care about rules? You?”
Hina crossed her arms, resolute. “Yeah, rules. Listen, Ai: you’re overhungry and overtired. You can’t keep working tonight, there’s no point in it. You need food and rest. You know that.”
Ai made a frustrated noise, jabbing a finger at Takagiri. “She needs help, not me.” Her voice broke a little at the end; I might have seen the glimmer of tears welling in her eyes. She was at the end of her rope. “The co—the device isn’t done yet! I just need a few more hours, Hina, we can’t waste any more time.”
A single glance at Takagiri underscored her point—the effects of sleep deprivation had progressed from being purely psychological to an outright physical illness. Her skin had taken on a sickly yellow hue, and she looked a little puffy and bloated, like all the smaller systems of her body were beginning to fail from the lack of proper downtime. I’d never seen somebody standing under their own power and uninjured look so close to death’s door.
Guilt surged through me. I’d spent much of the afternoon chatting with my friends and messing about with the low-priority goal of covering up my face for whenever I might plausibly appear on camera next, when I should have gone straight to the basement to help Ai once I’d finished the mantle patches—the magical equivalent of opting for cosmetic surgery when there was somebody opened up on the operating table. I spoke up. “I can finish it.”
Hina spun and frowned at me. “Not until after dinner.”
“Are you kidding? Look at her! She’s—”
“Listen, it’ll all be fine,” Alice assured, gentler than Hina. “We’ll kill Sugawara tonight, and then Izumi-san will be okay. Ezzen, you’re sure you can pick up where Ai is leaving off?”
“Definitely,” I lied. I had little confidence I could match Ai’s prowess and dive down to the technical depths to which she’d long since acclimated—but I had to try. If worst came to worst, I was sure I could hack together something with blood magic that would at least give Takagiri a precious few hours of safe sleep, a single REM cycle to flush the worst of her deterioration and buy a few more days in the event that this didn’t all end tonight. “Actually, um, I think I’ll just eat downstairs, and—”
“No,” Hina barked. “You’re staying and so is Izumi.”
Takagiri shook her head sleepily. “Iyada. Iku—I’ll go.” She jerkily turned back toward the elevator.
Hina reached out to stop her. “Matte, matte!”
“Hina!” Alice called. “Izumi can’t stay up here, because of Amane. And Ezzen,” she added, treating me as more of an afterthought.
“Sure she can,” Hina replied. “I’ll be a sponge!”
We at the table shared a nervous glance. “Would that…work?” I asked Amane.
She shrugged and made a face that clearly meant yeah, I guess? Then she winced; another splash of pain coming from Takagiri, too subtle to register for me but clearly enough to aggravate her sensitivity.
“No, it won’t,” Yuuka hissed to Hina, tapping her temple meaningfully.
The Sapphire Radiance shrugged and shimmied over to stand right in front of Takagiri, bodily blocking her off from the rest of us, pressing her back right against our presently male-enfleshed guest to test the theory for herself. The throbbing in my hand lessened considerably—but was replaced by an ache in my chest of an entirely different nature, a juvenile desire to not see Hina sharing such close contact with another person, a patently ridiculous, unfounded, and unfair objection to have under the circumstances.
“How’s that?”
I expressed my opinion by wiggling my hand between a thumbs-up and a thumbs-sideways, trying to keep my emotions off my face and stay objective to the problem that was being addressed.
Alice and Yuuka exchanged another look, then simultaneously leaned toward Amane from both sides to confer with her in whispers. After a few seconds of very rapid-fire discussion, they broke the huddle and Alice shook her head. “No dice.” She followed that up with a longer, apologetic-sounding explanation directed toward Takagiri, who was nodding—or perhaps nodding off. Hina nudged her, which didn’t elicit a reaction, and then poked her hard in the gut, which made her jerk back to wakefulness. Ebi released a digital sigh.
“If you guys aren’t going to actually help her, I’ll just take her back downstairs. Ezzen, be a dear and come help me keep her from dying once you’ve eaten something.”
She patted Amane’s head once and then strode toward the growing cluster of women at the elevator before anybody could object. The android willed open the elevator’s maw, grabbed the wrist of her barely conscious charge, and led her inside. She waved a hand theatrically and the doors slid shut.
Hina sighed, somehow not seeming too put out by Takagiri’s ultimate rejection. She turned to Ai, taking her hand gently. “Hey, listen, come eat, okay? You’ll feel better, I promise.”
Ai sagged into Hina’s arms and began to cry.
The food had cooled during this drama, but it was still good. More importantly, it provided an excuse for our mouths, an acceptable silence of chewing that dispelled the lingering awkwardness, making the lack of conversation instead a sign of satisfaction and mutual enjoyment. Full credit to Hina for that; time and again she was proving just how good of a cook she was, and it was difficult to resist the urge to shove mouthful after mouthful of thin, tender beef into my mouth as fast as the mechanics of chewing and swallowing would allow.
Alice made no such attempt to deny her stomach this bounty, which made me wonder again if her dragon-ka was progressing. Yuuka ate slower, but seemed just as satisfied with her shredded tofu as the rest of us were with our meat. More power to her, I supposed. And thankfully, it seemed like the physiological effects of Amane’s ripple sensitivity hadn’t harmed her appetite or digestion. This was the first I’d seen her up and about since we’d passed out in the middle of the battlefield, and any indication that she was doing well was a relief.
For once, Hina was also eating her own cooking—though she hadn’t served herself, instead simply squeezing herself in between me and Ai to pick at my bowl and the communal dish of kimchi, blue eyes wandering the table and narrowing in satisfaction as she watched her friends—perhaps more like family in her mind—partake of her efforts. She was purring faintly enough that only Ai and I could hear it.
It took Ai a little bit of time to really dig in even once she stopped sniffling; she initially seemed too sick with worry and guilt, and only brought food to her mouth out of mechanical habit rather than actual hunger. However, once the first few meager bites had vanished from her bowl, she set upon the beef and peppers with gusto, which visibly lifted her mood from so-drained-as-to-be-barely-functional to merely exhausted. As soon as she indicated she’d had her fill, Hina hugged her around the torso and asked her something in Japanese; Ai responded with a sleepy nod and stumbled to her feet, allowing my girlfriend to take her to bed like a child following her mother, a weird inversion of how I had come to regard their dynamic.
I wasn’t about to be the one to break the collective quiet that had fallen on us, but I did try to catch Ai’s eye one more time to reaffirm my resolve to pick up her work where she left off. She managed a small, sad grin as Hina led her up the stairs and out of view.
Alice cleared her throat, looking across the table as she took a napkin to the post-devouring debris that had accumulated around her mouth.
“Well.”
“That was stupid—ow!” Yuuka yelped as Amane instantly jabbed her in the side with a carbon-fiber elbow, which was good; I would have done it myself if I weren’t sitting too far away. I just tried to make my displeasure known on my face. Heliotrope gave Amethyst an affronted look, then glanced at me and sighed.
“That’s Ai,” Alice sighed. “At least she listened this time.”
“This…happens a lot, I take it?” I guessed.
“Too much,” Yuuka groused. “Fuckin’ insane of her to—oof,” she grunted as Amane elbowed her again and scolded her in angry stacatto. “Fine, yeah, it was a mistake, her heart’s in the right place, all that. But still, she should’ve known better than to bring her up here.”
Something about Yuuka’s tone rubbed me the wrong way. I agreed with the basic assertion, that Ai shouldn’t have brought Takagiri up here, but the way she said it almost felt like a clique of popular girls rejecting the outcast in a teen movie—not that I’d seen any teen movies, but I knew the trope.
“Hey,” I objected, not feeling very confident in myself at all but nonetheless feeling the need to say something. “Chill out.”
Alice raised her eyebrows at me, then nodded. “I feel we could have handled that better. Less exclusionary.”
Yuuka made it halfway through a derisive snort before Amane added something of her own. I didn’t understand the Japanese, but from both Yuuka and Alice’s put-upon reactions, it was incendiary. She punctuated it by slapping the table with her prosthetic hand, sending a clack echoing through the penthouse.
“Uh?” I ventured.
Alice stared nervously at her girlfriend for a long moment, then pursed her lips. “I’m—Amane is insinuating that Yuuka was lying that Hina’s solution wouldn’t have worked.”
“Would it?”
Yuuka looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “…I never said I foresaw that.”
“You tapped your eye!” Alice exclaimed. “Why lie?”
Amane added something else that made both of the other girls stiffen. Alice looked unhappy, Yuuka guilty.
“Um,” I prompted, a little afraid of the ire growing on Alice’s face even without it being directed at me.
“Normally she dodges the elbowing,” Alice explained. “She didn’t just now, which indicates that her foresight’s still a little off. Which, in turn, means that Yuuka must have had another reason to want Takagiri gone. Amane suspects that that’s because our guest is in a male body. Which I’d very much hope is not the case.” The air temperature at the table was rising, betraying Alice’s emotions even though her voice was precise and enunciated. “What do you think, Ezzen?”
“Oh. That sounds…bad,” I ventured lamely. “Though—I mean…I’m here in a male body,” I pointed out awkwardly. I immediately cringed at myself—whether because of stating the obvious or because of discomfort about the fact itself, I couldn’t say. Probably both.
Yuuka harrumphed. “Yeah, but you’re…Ezza. You’re fine.”
“But I’m…not a girl,” I clarified. The image of Asuka that Star had sent floated across my mind, which I tried to banish. “I thought we established that. Something nonbinary. But Takagiri’s an actual girl, body or no. And you were fine with her yesterday!”
“I was—I was…” she scrambled for an explanation. “I didn’t fuckin’ mean it like that! It was a real problem for Amane!”
Amane slapped the table again, which made Yuuka yelp. It was followed immediately by the very unhappy-sounding thump of Alice’s tail on the rug. The temperature at the table had risen noticeably; the common spaces of the penthouse weren’t chilly, but the air had gone from distinctly warm to now being like sitting next to an open oven.
“Yuuka, that’s completely unacceptable,” hissed Radiance Opal. “Takagiri might have been our enemy up until a few days ago, but she is suffering more than any of us right now, and the last thing she needs is you being a misandrist shit at her. That is absolutely not conduct befitting a mahou shoujo.”
I expected Yuuka to snap back at that, for this to explode into an argument that would derail the entire evening. Instead, that last part of Alice’s scolding made Radiance Heliotrope physically flinch as though struck.
“Gomen nasai,” she muttered, voice full of contrition. “I didn’t—that’s not what I meant. It’s different when she’s here with us. Fuck, that sounds—not good, yeah. Why the fuck did I do that?”
“We’re going to talk about this more later,” Alice decreed. “I expect you to apologize to her, once she’s in a mental state to accept it and once we’ve delivered justice to the person tormenting her.”
That was the moment Hina returned from upstairs, leaping over the upper-level railing and landing without so much as a crouch to absorb the impact before bounding over to us.
“Yikes,” she said as she felt Alice’s aura of wrath. Then she seemed to lock onto Yuuka’s contrite turmoil. “Hey, babe, you okay?”
“Don’t call me babe,” Yuuka snapped back, some of her usual animosity reigniting. “Fuckin’—shit, yeah, I’ll apologize. Once we kill Sugawara. It’s all his fault anyway.”
“Kill!” Hina crooned, looking at me affectionately. I gave her a hesitant thumbs up, a little jarred by the topic change but relieved to be moving away from whatever the hell that had been. Yuuka clearly had some stuff she needed to work through.
Alice nodded, the mom-voice melting out of her tone as the room cooled back to its normal temperature. “Yeah. Yeah. Let’s—let’s get ready to go for that instead. I didn’t want to set out until at least 10PM, and it’s only 7 now, but with how Takagiri looked to be doing…time is of the essence. Let’s get the mantle changes set up. Ezzen?”
“Was that food supposed to re-energize us?” Yuuka groaned as she double checked the silvery thread of her weaving. “I mean, I’m not hungry anymore, but fuck, I don’t feel awake enough to go raid a Hikanome base. If that’s even what we’ll find there.”
“The sleepiness goes away when you’re mantled up,” Alice reminded her. That was news to me at the time.
“Oh, really?” I asked, then felt stupid for opening my mouth. I’d spent hours poring over those very psychomotive systems today; it was pretty important that they limited sensations from the main body. That was the whole reason Amane spent so much time in her mantle, after all. I changed the topic to the other, and arguably more interesting, part of what Yuuka had said. “Uh, never mind. Wait, Yuuka, your eye’s not giving you anything?”
“It’s not so good at long range. Once we’re there I’ll know.”
Amane muttered something that I would have bet money translated to something like “and also not so good at close range.”
Hina shot me a carnivorous, heart-fluttering grin. She’d been the first to finish weaving the update into her mantle, though she hadn’t tested it just yet. “Who knows what we’ll find?”
She sounded outright excited for that.
“Hopefully nothing out of the ordinary,” Alice said from her spot on the couch, twining thread between her fingers. “Just the prison, with the usual rotation of guards and absolutely no festering remains of the cult.”
But we all knew things wouldn’t be so simple. Two of Todai’s men had gone missing when they’d been sent to investigate, which was why the Radiances were prepared to show up carrying the biggest sticks in Japan, now freshly proofed against the weapons that had posed a problem last time.
The upgrades I’d made could be thought of as a patch in both the software and sartorial senses, functionally for the former and haptically for the latter; the motion of Alice’s hands wasn’t unlike that of a seamstress mending a torn garment. Beyond that, though, physical description became difficult, since not all of the lattice that projected the mantle was in our slice of three-dimensional space. From where I was sitting, it just looked like Alice had a bunched-up tangle of glowing thread in her lap, though in reality, it was a carefully designed and tuned piece of technology, a war machine of sleek power and complexity to rival a fighter jet. For all that power, though, watching the four Radiances at work was a great reminder of how all glyph-based magitech was fundamentally bottlenecked by flamebearers performing the manual and bespoke process of weaving Flame, no true—or at least Turing-complete—automation to be had.
Pontifications on industry aside, the girls were making quick work of the upgrade—including Amane, who wasn’t participating in the mission because she required far more involved repairs to her mantle before she’d be combat ready again. She seemed content to work in parallel to her teammates nonetheless…though “content” was maybe a strong word. It mostly seemed like something to distract her from glaring at Yuuka. The argument hadn’t reignited once Hina had returned, but things felt like they were simmering, and honestly, I was sort of hoping the girls would get out of here soon and take the awkwardness with them.
As for why I was still up in the penthouse with them instead of booking it straight to the basement to keep working on the coffin, I wasn’t entirely sure. In theory, I was in a supervisory role, since these were my designs, but there was honestly nothing to it; surely the girls would be able to work out any kinks on their own. My antsiness to go help a certain snarky android with Takagiri gave me the courage to speak up.
“Um. Can I go? For Takagiri.”
Hina hopped to her feet. “We gotta test!”
“Do I need to be here for that?”
“I want you to see it!”
“See…your mantle?”
“Yep! It’ll only take a minute,” she assured me. “You haven’t seen it yet, right? Somehow.”
She was right: I still hadn’t seen Hina’s mantle up close. My only opportunity had been when she’d been the cerulean meteor that destroyed Hikanome’s festival, and that ruined her mantle along with it. The impact had been so explosive that it had ablated away the LM, leaving her exposed by the time we’d had face-to-face contact.
Alice had told me this morning that it was still in need of repairs, but apparently Hina had made quick work of that once I’d kicked her out of my room. Unlike the way Amethyst’s mantle had been destroyed, apparently Hina’s case had been a much cleaner breakaway. And Hina was unrivaled among the girls when it came to weaving, which probably helped as well.
I didn’t even really know what her mantle looked like, beyond the broadest strokes. When I’d first arrived at Todai and skimmed the girls’ Wikipedia pages, her mantle had been her featured image, but I’d scrolled past it hurriedly, embarrassed to be looking at something so girly. But now I’d get to see it up close and personal, watch as her T-shirt-and-booty-shorts-clad regular body was swapped out for its lattice-manifest warmachine copy.
“Sure.”
Hina’s face split into a huge smile. She pirouetted theatrically, then shouted, “Houseki hikare!”
A flash of blue light washed over everything for a moment, a shadow of how she’d dyed the entire world at the festival. I blinked away the dazzle as her whole body glowed, squinting, trying to see if I could pinpoint the exact moment the swap happened. A swirl of white-and-blue sparkles wrapped around her, settling over her clothes as she stretched her arms out and winked at me. The swirl coalesced into arcing shapes of gemstone that bound themselves around her, seeming to erase the clothes, then they settled into glowing silhouettes of tassels and a short skirt, ridged fingerless gloves that went all the way up her forearms, gemstone brooches on her chest and hips—and when the light faded, there stood Radiance Sapphire.
Honestly, the girly aesthetic wasn’t for me. I didn’t like the frills on the skirt or the ribbon in her hair. But I couldn’t deny that this artificial version of Hina was ludicrously good-looking; the extra twenty-odd centimeters her hair had gained contributed greatly to that, as did the makeup and the more abstract knowledge that this was a form made of pure magic. She put her hands on her hips.
“Well?”
“Um.” It took a moment to get my mouth working again. “Well—uh—when the bands of crystal moved past where your clothes had been.”
“What?”
“Oh my God,” Yuuka sighed. “You were looking for where the swap happened? Live in the fuckin’ moment, cunt.”
I shrugged helplessly. “What do you want me to say?”
“Am I pretty?” Hina asked. She flirtatiously posed and blew me a kiss. “Look aaaaall you like.”
“Fuck’s sake, bitch,” Yuuka grumbled, though it sounded more like it came from obligation than any really strenuous animosity—and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her glance up toward us.
I tried to ignore that and gave Hina another hesitant up-down, feeling wrong for doing so even with an explicit invitation. “I think…I mean, yeah, you look good,” I admitted. To be fair, it was very hard for Hina to look bad in anything, and this brightly colored display did highlight so many of her best parts, hips and lips and bouncy energy and—I noticed something. Two things, actually, and not meaning her chest for once. “Hold on. Your eyes got less blue.”
It was subtle, and you’d probably not be able to tell the difference at a distance, but I’d spent quite a lot of time sneaking glances at those sapphires up close, and I could tell that the supernaturally rich hue had been ever-so-slightly washed out.
“Yeah,” she confirmed, sounding annoyed. “The meat-eyeballs are real special magic. Real Flame, raw. I told Alice that we could totally get them looking closer, but—”
“No, Hina,” Alice sighed in a way that told me they’d had this argument a hundred times before. “Too much overhead.”
“See!”
“Fair enough,” I reasoned; maybe it was something for us to tinker with later. At least she still had her fangs, which were much easier to imitate. She also had an option for regular human teeth, which I was grateful she wasn’t using here. It was vaguely alarming how much I had come to like my girlfriend’s once-terrifying bestial mouthparts. “Um—testing, right? Everything as it should be?”
Hina broke the pose, flapping her forearms experimentally. “Seems good.” Then she startled me by launching into a cartwheel and vanishing. Before I could worriedly ask the other girls whether that was supposed to happen, she popped back into existence. “Yep! All good!”
I gave Alice a probing glance, wondering if that passed her standards. She shrugged. “If Hina says it’s good, it’s good. Good job, Ezzen.”
“Me?”
Hina snorted. “Yeah, cutie. It’s your work! You made this happen! Be proud!”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. My usual coping mechanism kicked in. “…Thanks? What about testing against the pink disruptors in the actual swords?”
“Got it right here!”
Hina announced that far too casually for somebody who had just pulled a katana out of thin air. She proffered the handle in my direction, and I took a cautious half-step backward. “Um. I’m not much one for swords.”
“C’mon, cutie, this is great! You get to hit me and prove your designs are solid, all in one swing! That’s, like, perfect! Have at me!”
I gave a vaguely panicked look to Alice, who snorted and made to get up. “Hina, if he doesn’t want to, I’ll do it.”
Hina responded to that with a whine and puppy eyes, which were damnably effective even in their slightly off-brand hue. “Fine,” I sighed, hesitantly reaching out and gingerly grabbing the sword’s hilt. It was surprisingly light. “Am I just to…poke you with it?”
“Right in the titty,” Hina purred, which elicited an unhappy noise from Yuuka. Hina rolled her eyes. “Fine, just, like, in the hand. Not like the place should matter, right?”
“Right.” I hefted the sword, bringing the blade close to her outstretched hand. Surely, Hina wasn’t actually going to get off on this, I told myself, not with how the mantles worked. Or maybe she will, argued a treacherous part of my mind. The invitation did feel sort of ritualistic.
I told the voice to shut up, steeled myself, and brought the edge of the blade to Hina’s palm. That should have been enough to activate it, but nothing happened—neither catastrophic damage to the construct nor any kind of breathy moan from my pain-loving girlfriend.
“Yay!” She cheered. “Works for me. Hey, babes,” she shouted over her shoulder unnecessarily, “it works for me!”
“Heard you the first time,” Alice acknowledged, a grin in her voice. Yuuka shook her head. Amane, who had been quiet thus far, gave us a bionic thumbs-up.
I sighed in relief, lowering the sword. Despite myself, I was finally starting to feel a little pride in my work; it was distinctly satisfying to see that not only had my edits not broken anything, they’d also solved the problem, and for once, that included practical proof. I immediately knew how I should ride that wave.
“Well, if it works, then can I be done here? Don’t want to delay on the coffin any more. I, um—okay, not that I don’t want to be helpful, and I do want to see how the mission goes, but I really think I should just—”
“Sure, sure, go ahead,” said Alice. “We can take it from here. Go help Takagiri; Ebi can set you up with a video call to watch us downstairs if you want, yeah?”
“Sounds good.” I gave Hina a shy double thumbs-up of my own. “Stay safe? What am I supposed to say here?”
“That works, but no promises,” she teased, leaning toward me affectionately. I wondered if she was about to kiss me, but instead she just reached out and pried the sword from my hand, simulacral fingers pressing under mine in a way that was almost as intimate. “We’ll be back soon. Gotta go kill a monster.”
Author’s Note:
Takagiri rejected from the lunch table. At least we finally saw Hina’s mantle, huh? Complete with transformation sequence, because a girl’s gotta go to war.
Speaking of mantles, it’s Amane’s turn for a poster! (By Grimmjeow, as usual)
Isn’t she pretty! Obviously her mantle isn’t this big by default, but concessions can be made for the camera. Patrons over in the Discord said this is their favorite one so far, and I think I agree. If you’d like to see the alt version, get early access to future commissioned art, help support me, and get straight into the action with 3 early chapters, check out the Patreon!
Next week’s art won’t be Yuuka’s poster as you might expect; it won’t quite be done by then. Sorry to anybody who’s been eagerly awaiting a canon depiction of her Yuukas. Instead, I’ll have some nice pride month ship art to share!
Thanks, as usual, to the beta readers: Cass, Zoo, mirrormatch, Altrune, Maria, Enigma, Penguin, & Zak. This and the next few chapters were pretty difficult, and their input has been super valuable in making them come out clean.
That’s all for this week. See you next week!
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Making a mantle was a lot more involved than the instinctive immediacy of blood magic. I needed a full infomantic scan of my body, custom substrates, a lot of integration testing, and likely days’ worth of weaving once every other step was completed. I certainly wasn’t getting it done today, and I doubted I would get anywhere beyond the basic skeleton of the diagram before I needed the Radiances’ help.
They’d be involved anyway, of course; Alice had stipulated that a mantle would be necessary if I were to eventually go hunting with Hina, presumably for combat capability. But that was secondary to the true appeal: an alternate version of my body, one that I could fully customize to look however I wished, a face I could show the world that wasn’t this.
While I was pondering this, the chatroom exploded
starstar97: thana what the FUCK
DendriteSpinner: Hey maybe don’t be posting that?
starstar97: not cool
moth30: yo
The image vanished from the chat a moment later.
skychicken: @thanasen don’t post irl photos of chat members
starstar97: ^
thanasen: oh sorry
Sky to the rescue.
ezzen: Thanks, Sky.
ezzen: Yeah, please don’t do that.
My curt reply hid the fact I was so rattled that my hands were shaking. My response to seeing my own face—or more pertinently, to the fact that my face was now public knowledge—was psychosomatic, sending my blood pressure through the roof and making me physically nauseous and a little dizzy. I could see sympathetic DMs from Star piling up in the corner of my screen, but I had to turn my chair away from the keyboard for a moment and just squeeze my eyes shut as the revulsion worked its way through my system.
“Cutie? You okay?”
I opened my eyes to see Hina sitting on the edge of my bed. She was in what had been a full black-and-white skirt suit, appropriate formal wear for a TV apology, but she’d shed the jacket, undone the buttons on her shirt, and ditched the skirt. Her cerulean eyes were full of concern and immediately soothed me.
“Uh. I think so. Now that you’re here,” I added lamely. It was sappy and romantic but true. “How long have you been there?”
“Just got here.” She hopped to her feet and over to me while pulling her socks off, never seeming in danger of falling over. She tossed them aside and bent over to nuzzle my face.
I felt my heart slow and reached up to touch her neck in return; it just felt right. “Okay, yeah, definitely better now. I was just—” I separated from her and pointed at the screen, where the chatroom was angrily buzzing along. “Dealing with stuff.”
“Mm.” The blue eyes traced over to my main monitor. “Mantle patch?”
I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Mostly done now, just routed the pink leak into a water splitter offgas, based on what Takagiri did in her own mantle. Should mean the swords have minimal impact now, if we—uh, you, I apparently can’t come, sorry—run into more on the hunt. Which is tonight, apparently,” I rambled, mouth running on autopilot while my eyes wandered around my girlfriend’s front. God, she was hot, half-undressed like this; a welcome distraction, arrived at just the right moment.
Hina rewarded my gaze with a teasing little wiggle and a grin, her arms reaching past me to rest on the chair’s backrest, trapping me. “Tonight, hm?”
“Uh, yeah,” I stammered, blushing, “so I really need to get it done. It’s most of the way there, I think.”
Her expression softened a little. “You weren’t working on it when I came in.”
“I was…dealing with stuff, like I said. Um. I don’t know, just people being idiots and not respecting privacy.” I tried to swallow down the residue of the panic attack. “There’s been some yelling about your apology, too, but I think that hasn’t got much bearing on how it actually went?”
She shrugged. “Went okay. Hate the fucking suit, hate the cameras. Missed you the whole time. Scooch over.”
I complied, making some room in the chair, and Hina happily tossed herself into the gap next to me, cuddling against me. The chair definitely wasn’t meant for two people, but she made it work. A different kind of shudder passed through me. “Um, yeah, I missed you too.”
A purr passed through her body. “Tell me I did a good job. With the apology.”
“I didn’t watch it,” I admitted.
“Doesn’t matter!”
“Okay. Good job? Well done, Hina?”
The purr intensified, which made it easy to dismiss the habitual discomfort at letting somebody else see what was on my computer. I’d been discussing gender stuff with Star, and it was fine by me if Hina saw that. I swung our chair back toward the keyboard.
ezzen: Yeah, I’m okay.
Hina snorted. I rolled my eyes.
ezzen: But that reminded me that my face is out there in public, and I wanna do something about that.
ezzen: Test out bodies and faces with a mantle until I find one that fits me.
starstar97: ooooooo
Hina echoed Star’s intrigue, shifting against me. “Mm?”
“…I don’t like my face,” I admitted aloud to her. “Which is something we can deal with magically, right?”
“Masks,” Hina confirmed. “Always masks.” She sounded a little sad, and I brought a hand off the keyboard to awkwardly pat her knee. She shifted against me. “You shouldn’t have to care about what they think.”
“Hina,” I warned. We were trying to work on her habit of othering normal humans.
“I—sorry,” she whined, “not trying to be all us-versus-them about it, but it’s just fuckin’ dumb! I don’t want to wear their fuckin’ costumes, their uniforms, and that’s bad enough when it’s just clothes. Stupid suits and big conferences with cameras.”
I nodded sympathetically while I waited for Star to reply. When she did, it floored both of us.
starstar97: ok, gender exploration hypothetical, stop me if this feels unproductive or like its putting you in a box: if you had to look like one of the radiances, which would you pick?
I gaped at the screen, then glanced at my shoulder, where Hina was firmly pressed up against me. The blue eyes darted up from the screen to meet mine, and we shared a long moment of awkward silence.
“Do I tell her I literally have one of them pressed up against me? She’d die of jealousy.”
“I’m actually curious, cutie.”
Oh no. Hina was taking this seriously—I was being tag teamed by my girlfriend and best friend. “Um. None?”
“Bullshit. I see the way you look at all of us. How about Yuuka? Big ol’ titties strike your fancy?”
I leaned away from my girlfriend in what little space I had to do so. “Whether it ‘strikes my fancy’ is beside the point, isn’t it?”
“Lotta overlap between what you’re attracted to and what you want to be.”
“Fine, but—I don’t want big ol’tit—” I cut myself off before I could finish the vulgar word; it felt horribly offensive to use for somebody I knew. “Fine, no, not Yuuka. Too short, anyway.”
“Hmm. Tell her that,” Hina commanded.
“What, tell Yuuka?”
“No, cutie, tell your internet friend.”
“Oh.”
ezzen: Not Heliotrope. Don’t want to be short.
starstar97: so no big fuckin titties for ez… hm
starstar97: go on (☆ω☆)
I sighed, exasperated. Hina snorted.
“Alice?”
“Are we counting the tail?”
Hina shrugged, which I felt more than I saw. “Ask.”
ezzen: Does Opal include the tail?
starstar97: is there a reason it shouldnt
ezzen: Academic rigor?
starstar97: opal includes tail
“Then no. Huge inconvenience.”
“But she’s massively pretty.”
“She…is,” I conceded. Even saying that out loud, and even when specifically prompted to do so, felt like an overstep. “But that’s not—I don’t look at her face and go ‘God, I wish that were me.’ Which is what Star is after, I think.”
Hina nodded against my chest, which I took as my cue to report these findings.
ezzen: No Opal then, either. Nor Sapphire.
“Hey! Grr.”
“I mean, I want your physicality, but I don’t want to look like you.”
And I definitely didn’t want Star to start talking about my girlfriend’s body in too much depth when she was right here. Even though Hina would probably like that, because it was sure to get me flustered.
starstar97: damn so no boobs AND no hips?
starstar97: really leaning away from the feminine figure then huh
That brought me up short, surprisingly. Yes, I wasn’t particularly enamored with femininity, but I hadn’t considered my dismissal of Alice and Hina to be dismissing the two most…be-hipped…of the Radiances, at least in terms of the proportion to their waists, and now that I was thinking of it in those terms…
Hina watched the gears turn in my head, tantalizing cerulean in the corner of my eye.
“Hips are good,” she prompted.
“Hips…are good,” I realized. Would I feel less inclined to hide my body under layer upon layer of heavy, form-obscuring clothing if I had more of a figure to show off? I wasn’t sure—but that wasn’t an immediate and obvious ‘no’ in the way I had responded to having a chest like Yuuka’s. “Huh.”
ezzen: Raincheck on the hips specifically.
Hitting enter on the message, admitting it to somebody who wasn’t literally pressed up against me, made it suddenly feel real, so strongly that it was an actual sensation, an odd but not entirely unwelcome pressure in my core.
starstar97: OOH
starstar97: that sounds like progress!
ezzen: I guess it is? It’s definitely something. But I still don’t want to BE a girl.
Hina shifted to nuzzle my neck as I typed that out. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but it felt nice.
starstar97: ofc ofc
starstar97: does that make sapphire your pick?
“Uh.” I didn’t particularly want it to be.
“Hmmm,” Hina hummed against me. “No love for Ai? Muscles good,” she pointed out.
“Muscles good,” I conceded, “and there’s…nothing wrong with how she looks. She’s quite…quite pretty, actually. Strong and toned, but not too bulky.” I reflexively rubbed my bicep in a futile attempt to dispel the awkwardness of rating somebody I lived with. “But if I’m headed in the direction you are, mutations-wise, then that’s not really a factor, is it? I’ll hardly have any muscle mass at all and still be ludicrously strong, right?”
Hina giggled. “Yep! Sounds like that’s what you want, so that’s what the Flame will give you.”
That gave me something more abstract to latch on to, bigger yet safer to discuss.
“Why’s it such wish fulfillment for you and not the others?” I realized a moment later that that was a slightly stupid question. It had fulfilled Alice’s wish and put a twist on it, and in a way, it had done the same with Hina—her emotional extremes were hardly an unalloyed blessing. I revised the thought before Hina could explain what I’d already figured out. “Is Todai an outlier, or does the Flame select for people who want to change? I mean, you, me, Alice, Sky, Takagiri…”
Could that have something to do with why I was twice-touched? Was my desire to be something else part of why the Flame had chosen me? The first time, I’d been a kid. Now I was…not quite an adult, but in that intermediary phase, right at the cusp, at the boundary of change. That felt significant, based on what I now understood of the Flame’s relationship with emotion and desire.
“Maybe! What about Amane?”
“Oh—yeah, of course she’d want to change too, Christ. Sorry for leaving her out.”
“No, I meant would you want to look like her.”
“Oh. Uh—” I was aware Hina had dodged the question, but I figured we might as well address the last Radiance. “Her hair’s really nice.”
“Mm,” Hina agreed, reaching up to run her fingers through my hair. “You jealous?”
“Uh. A little, now that you say it. Hers is so…well-maintained.”
“You can do that too, y’know. Everything she uses is off the shelf.”
“Yeah, but—” I floundered for a moment, trying to find a less plaintive way to express my objection, then gave up. “It’s work.”
“But you’ll look so good.”
I didn’t have a rebuttal to that. I reached for the keyboard again.
ezzen: Okay, uh, maybe Amethyst too? Human form, not mantle. So something between her and Hina? Specifically hips and hair, if I had to name specific features?
starstar97: hmmmmm
starstar97: fem bone structure, long hair (in your bizarre anime orange), not much in the way of boobs
starstar97: and of course carapace right
ezzen: I thought this was about the Radiances?
starstar97: only as a baseline
starstar97: one sec
“Heh,” Hina chuckled. “She’s got your number.”
“She’s known me a lot longer than you have,” I pointed out.
“Sure, yeah, true. But I love you more!” She wriggled upward to plant a kiss on my jaw. “Glad you got rid of the stubble, BTW, you look better without it. More kissable, too. A little sad I wasn’t the one to burn it away, though.”
“Sorry?”
“Make it up to me in bed.”
I’d had a good streak of staying calm-faced despite our proximity so far, but that’s what finally broke me. I reddened. “Uh?”
“Later, later. You’re busy, right?”
I blinked, realizing I had been supposed to resume work on mantle stuff at least twenty minutes ago. “Oh, shit, I gotta get back to work.”
Before I could make good on that, Star sent an image. It was of an anime girl, with orange hair in twintails like Yuuka’s, but with no such voluptuous chest—a milder figure, closer to Amane’s, clearly delineated by the skintight red suit she wore. Spandex, maybe, and clearly high tech. I found the word after a moment—a plugsuit, hugging her hips and waist and leaving nothing yet everything to the imagination. On those hips her hands rested, and she bore a smug expression.
I didn’t recognize the character, being relatively unplugged from anime culture despite the company I kept, but my anime-inspired girlfriend did. She cackled.
“Oh my god, she’s right, you wanna be Asuka Evangelion. Ha!”
I squinted at the anime girl, then frowned. “No I don’t. I never specified I wanted to keep the neon hair!”
“Neon Hair Ezvangelion,” she whispered.
“And a plugsuit is not armor!”
—
I kicked Hina out because she couldn’t stop laughing and I had to get back to work. She accepted the ejection easily, telling me through her giggle fit that she’d come back later to retrieve me for dinner and to “get in the fucking mantle,” which was a reference I had to look up once she left the room. Apparently, she planned to gather the whole team for a pre-mission dinner, which would also save me the trouble of hunting down all of the participating Radiances to individually work with them on patch implementations.
As I proceeded through the integration work on the mantle patch, accounting for the subtle differences in tuning between the control circuitry of each girl’s lattice-manifest body, I got a better picture of how my own mantle might come together. Star’s thought experiment was useful for defining the aesthetics I wanted, which were admittedly the main point of wanting a mantle at all. We kept chatting as I worked.
starstar97: idk i think i was on the money
ezzen: With her figure? Sure. But twintails are girly.
I was slightly less cross with Star for bringing the anime character up in the first place than I was with Hina. In the privacy of the one-on-one direct message, I could admit that “Asuka” was a useful metric for honing in on the look I wanted.
starstar97: amethysts hairstyle then?
ezzen: Or something like that. That was pretty much how my new hair looked when I got it, anyway
starstar97: what changed
ezzen: Uh
ezzen: Haven’t really been brushing it so it’s kind of tangly now
starstar97: !!!!
starstar97: SHAME
starstar97: will be a little moot either way though if the mantle becomes your default i guess
ezzen: That’s probably a while away even if I had the exact design ready right now .-.
starstar97: yeah but its a GOAL
starstar97: and like
starstar97: one you can actually make progress toward
This was a touchy subject for Star.
ezzen: Sorry
ezzen: Your situation fucking sucks.
starstar97: IT DOESSSS
starstar97: airlift me to tokyo /j
starstar97: /hj actually. pls
starstar97: then at least id be able to grow my fucking hair out
starstar97: fuck this fucking country
Star was living as a man, because the alternative was at minimum being fired from her job and likely actual danger to her life. She loathed it, but lacked the means to escape, and it was frustrating beyond belief.
But that was only half of the unfairness. Even if we could rescue her, bring her to a place where she had the safety and resources to transition to the greatest extent possible, she was still bound by the limits of science and medicine. No mantle for her, no magical full-body replacement like what Alice had undergone. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
It didn’t have to be this way, I realized.
ezzen: I’ll see what I can do.
ezzen: That’s a promise.
starstar97: wut
starstar97: send sapphire to kidnap me too pls??
ezzen: Uhh well I can’t quite promise that, but I also want to like…ACTUALLY follow through on magical transition stuff for regular people. Not fair that it’s an option for me and not for you.
starstar97: oh
starstar97: holy shit yeah thatd be rad if you can find the time and.. permission or whatever you need
starstar97: can todai, like, actually back that
ezzen: I hope so.
Privately, I thought they likely would, at least if we could collectively find the time for research once everything cooled down. It wasn’t a problem of resources, at least—the challenge was mostly one of magical theory.
starstar97: your transition comes first though
starstar97: let me know if you want to brainstorm more stuff for the mantle, asuka
ezzen: argh
I sent that message with a smile, though, and a weird sense of power, a feeling I could do some good beyond what lay in my immediate surroundings.
Star was right, though: mantle work did come first. I minimized the chatroom and set about the fresh challenge of integrating the changes I had designed. I had to get this done by tonight.
—
Dinner went awry.
The Radiances trickled into the penthouse’s common area one by one. Hina was already there, of course, surrounded by a growing pile of used dishes and intermediate ingredients as she concocted a meal to nourish all of us for the long night ahead, even though only three would actually be heading out. I made to join in with the preparation, but she waved me off and insisted I just go sit down and wait; for this dish, apparently, two cooks was too many for the kitchen.
Honestly, that was frustrating; the looming deadline of tonight’s mission made me antsy to do something and help out. I’d gotten the mantle patches done, at least as far as I could within the purely abstract realm of a GWalk file. The next step was for the Radiances to make the changes themselves, and that had been designated as an after-dinner activity, and that couldn’t happen until dinner was done, so I wanted to help with dinner. But Hina had a process, and I wasn’t to interfere.
I instead took a seat at the low table, in the position facing the windows that was apparently becoming my designated spot, and filled the time by continuing to work on my own tentative mantle designs on my phone, purely at the brainstorming and planning level. It was beginning to dawn on me just how complex of a project this was; all I’d managed to do so far was just lay out the most basic skeleton, the framework that said “this is a body made of LM;” the control circuitry was a placeholder, and all the physical details of appearance were locked behind making a scan of my body to use as a starting point.
I put my phone down at the elevator’s characteristic ding, too embarrassed to share or even risk exposing what I was working on. Alice trudged out the elevator, headed straight for one of the sofas, and made it about halfway through opening her laptop to continue working before Hina appeared next to her and snatched the device from her lap.
“No overtime!”
Alice silently accepted the intervention, rubbing her forehead where her not-horns definitely weren’t growing, and splayed herself out face-down on the sofa instead, her tail rising up from her butt like a pale mound and draping off the furniture’s edge in a way that didn’t seem great for her back.
I glanced at Hina with some concern, who shrugged, unworried.
“She’ll be recharged by the time we eat, just let her rest.”
“If you say so.”
Yuuka was next, heralded first by a dull, thrumming roar coming from outside the window, then by a soft thump overhead as her jetbike touched down on the rooftop landing pad, then by the footsteps of her trotting down the stairs to the upper level to take off her shoes, jacket, and accessories. By the time she came into view, she’d stripped down to just a long, high-waisted skirt and an undershirt, much less adorned than other outfits I’d seen her in. She was pulling off her adhesive eyepatch as she sniffed the air.
“Gyuniku?”
“Bulgogi, yeah, but not beef for you,” Hina clarified. “You’re getting those shredded soy-meat things. How were classes?”
Yuuka ignored the question except for a mild grumble as she descended the last flight of stairs to our level and crossed the room to the loveseat next to Alice’s couch, apparently unwilling to make small talk with her teammate. She had words for me when she sat down, though.
“Something about mantle upgrades?”
“Uh, yeah, just making sure Takagiri’s swords don’t mess with your—”
“I don’t want ya fucking around with my body,” she interrupted. She said it with a growl, but a halfhearted one, like it was coming from a place of obligation more than real hostility. “But it’s not like you can slip anything in there without me knowing, I guess.”
“I mean…yeah, you’re the one who has to implement it,” I managed, a little unsure what kind of tone this conversation was supposed to have. Was I supposed to be offended? “Hina said we’d get to that after dinner.”
“No, you stupid cunt, I’d know because of the…” she began to point at her eye, then just gave up and groaned. “Whatever.”
Alice grunted from the sofa. “Yuuka, you don’t actually hate him. Save your energy.”
The Heliotrope Radiance physically recoiled from the mild rebuke, but didn’t argue against it. Alice hadn’t even deigned to raise her head.
Silence stretched onward for a time, growing more oppressive and cloying the longer it sat, like once-fresh mayonnaise left for too long in the fridge. Yuuka and I both retreated to our respective phones until the elevator announced its return with another ding. Amane stepped out, Ebi right by her side.
She looked good, all things considered. She’d clearly not just rolled out of her medical bed to meet us; her long hair was damp, and she seemed in good spirits as she joined the rest of us with a steady stride and plopped herself down in the loveseat next to Yuuka in much the same way Hina had sat with me in my room, though the plush chair had a little more space to share between them. Yuuka visibly brightened with her friend so close by, and the two girls tittered at each other quietly in Japanese, saving me from the awkward distance. Ebi took up her post over her charge’s shoulder.
[Direct Message] ebi-furai: hows your hand?
I gave her a questioning look, though I wasn’t really one to complain if she’d rather talk via text.
ezzen: Fine? Takagiri’s thing was just localized. Is she doing alright?
ebi-furai: no.
I winced.
I spent the next few minutes idly working on my prospective mantle’s diagram on my phone while we waited for the last Radiance to arrive and for dinner to be ready. As the minutes dragged by, it became harder to ignore how hungry I was; I’d mostly forgotten to eat today, and bulgogi was one of those foods that announced its presence loud and clear, filling the air with garlic, ginger, sesame, and everything good in the world. My stomach rumbled as I shifted in my seat—and Hina must have heard it despite being surrounded by sizzling pans, because she half-turned her head to fix me with a sapphire side-eye of concern.
“Dinner’s ready!” she called with a wink. The announcement drew the others to take their usual spots around the table as she started plating up piles of grilled meat and veggies over rice. Alice rose from her not-quite slumber, rubbing her forehead and eyes as she folded her legs under herself. Yuuka and Amane extricated themselves from the chair. But as Hina began to distribute our meals, one of us was still missing.
“Somebody needs to go get her,” Yuuka opined.
“Might have lost track of the time,” I agreed. “Especially if Takagiri isn’t doing great.”
Alice, slightly zombie-like after her power nap, glanced at Ebi. “Well?”
The android shrugged, the interlocking teal plates of her shell shifting hypnotically with the motion. “Am I my mother’s keeper?”
“Yes,” chorused Alice, Hina, and Yuuka.
“Fair enough. She’s already in the elevator.”
Satisfied with that answer, everyone finished settling in at their spots at the table. There seemed to be a silent agreement that nobody was to begin eating until all had arrived, which overrode the growling of Alice’s stomach and my own, despite the tempting, alluringly steaming dish placed right in front of me. We waited a few more seconds in silent anticipation.
Right before the elevator dinged, Yuuka scrambled to her feet. “Aw, cunt.”
The elevator announced one last arrival. A grinding ache crept into my hand, and for a moment, I shared Yuuka’s prescience. Amane’s sharp intake of breath told me she did as well. The elevator doors slid open, and there was Ai—with Takagiri in tow.
Overlapping voices broke into a cacophony, with Yuuka’s rising above all the others.“What the fuck are you thinking?”
Author’s Note:
Beneath the combined gender onslaught of Hina and Star, it was practically inevitable that Ez would end up at Evangelion. Perhaps with a little more time, he may pick an actual magical girl instead! But the gender exploration must go on hold for now; there’s always some new bullshit in the penthouse. As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
Another week means another poster of the Radiances by Mjeow! This time it’s Hina my belina. This was actually the first commission in the series, but it made more sense to put it on this chapter where she’s actually onscreen.
Also, it’s pride month, so I’m trying to get some art done of some of our lesbians. Based on a poll in the Discord, that looks like it’ll be Alice and Amane, so we’ll finally have some couple art for them.
If you have a RoyalRoad account, please consider taking thirty seconds to leave a five-star rating on the story over there.
Sunspot is taking its first regular break of the arc! I’ll be working on my submission for the RR contest, which involves a whole lot of dragons; an unreasonable amount, frankly. Sunspot will return on Friday, June 20.
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
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